There’s an old narrow-gage railroad that runs south from the town to the open-pit copper mines near the Mexican border. Since then Gila Bend has been just another hot place.īo Hopkins, Burt Reynolds, Sarah Miles and Jack Warden on location, 1973. In 1965, the Weather Bureau did some checking and put a stop to the matter. Someone in Gila Bend had been doing some fooling around with the thermometer readings to make Gila Bend look a few degrees hotter than it was. It was hot in Gila Bend, but not that hot, the Mayor of Gila Bend confided to me one evening at the Elks Club bar. Occasionally Gila Bend was referred to as the hottest place in America. One hundred twenty in the shade was not unusual. Up until 1965, Gila Bend showed up frequently in National Weather Summaries as having registered the highest daily temperature in America. There was a dead body in room 127, it was reported, an overdose of something. She had just taken a call from a man at the Travelodge Motel. Seel, the station-house dispatcher, on the line. He was drinking black coffee at Birchfield’s Café at six minutes past noon when the phone rang. He took statements until six-thirty in the morning, then returned to the station house to check in for his regular Sunday tour of duty. Sergeant Hinderliter had the body tagged and carted off to Phoenix for an autopsy.

An accident, the other man, the one who owned the. A shot went off, the first visitor died.Īn accident, the woman told Sergeant Hinderliter, the gun had gone off by accident. A minute later the other man came through the door. A car pulled up outside and flashed its lights.

She told him to get off and get out she warned him she was expecting another man. She woke up after midnight to find a man on top of her, making love to her. He’d also found a woman there, and this was her story: He’d found the body-a black man with a bullet hole in his back-lying on the floor in Apartment 44 of the North Euclid Avenue project at the western edge of town. Sergeant Forrest Hinderliter of the Gila Bend (Arizona) Police had been up since two in the morning with a dead body and a shaky story. Get access to every Esquire story ever published at Esquire Classic.

This article originally appeared in the August 1973 issue of Esquire.

Burt reynolds and then there was light