Bullhead City, Arizona, appears in the book through Linda May’s early-1990s efforts to help homeless men and keep herself afloat. Behind her carpet and tile shop, Cherokee Interiors, an open spigot became a place where men could wash and fill water jugs after business hours. When some began sleeping on the porch, Linda let them stay and gave them a practical role: they could tell police they were serving as night watchmen. The episode presents the shop not only as a business but as an improvised refuge, where access to water and shelter came with a measure of trust and responsibility.

The Shop and Its Informal Refuge

Linda’s response grew out of her own experience of financial hardship and of being raised by a mother who stretched a small amount of food to feed a family. In Bullhead City, she extended that resourcefulness to people living on the street. Her welcome was neither a formal program nor an open-ended promise: men could use the spigot, and those sleeping at the shop were asked to watch over the property. The arrangement made a vulnerable group briefly useful and safer in a place where they otherwise had little security.

From Assistance to City Contracts

One man, a former tree trimmer, told Linda he wanted to get off the street and earn money clearing weed-choked properties for the city. She helped him gather rakes, a mower, and a little fuel money, then drove with him to inspect parcels put up for bid. Her business license enabled him to secure contracts. When the flooring store later failed because her business partner had kept two sets of books and withheld profits, the former tree trimmer also abandoned the work Linda had arranged, leaving the lots uncleared after taking another painting job in Las Vegas.

Work in the Desert Heat

Linda took on the contracts herself rather than let them disappear. Each earned about $150. On arid summer days, with temperatures sometimes reaching 120 degrees, she learned to watch for heatstroke; she often began at dawn, stopped around noon, and returned later to finish raking and bagging the debris. The work turned her effort to help another person into a physically punishing livelihood of her own, sustained by small payments and long days. One early job also left her without enough money to take the weeds to the dump. At Lake Mead, she and her companions burned the dried debris; wind carried it along the shore, and a ranger came down to stop them. Linda was already throwing dirt on the fire. The incident captures the improvised conditions surrounding the work: even disposing of what the contracts produced required a solution she could not afford to do conventionally.

Place in the Book

Bullhead City is significant less as a comprehensive portrait of the city than as the setting for a compact sequence of reversals. Linda first provides a place to wash and sleep, then helps a former tree trimmer find paid work, and finally inherits that work when both her shop and his commitment fail. Her later realization that she could not keep raking weeds in 120-degree heat led toward other employment, including a job at the Riverside Casino in Laughlin. The Bullhead episode shows how quickly mutual aid, small business, and personal survival could become entangled—and how little protection a handful of contracts offered when circumstances changed.