Or maybe that’s why she wanted to fall for him in the first place. Compared with all the cynical, moneygrubbing, Lambo-coveting man-children around her, Bronson had true conviction and felt like fresh air, like a real man. If she had to choose between Bronson and Malouf, she’d choose those serious cowboy-stuntman forearms every time. Forearms like those are made from hard work, not polo or the gym, and make for strong hands as well, hands that are grasping, and can hold fast and make love, also hands that can restrain and kill. Was she one step away from being one of those sad women you see on 20/20 who fall in love with killers on Death Row? She viewed with guilty fascination those women differently now. She saw it was her own ego that was blind to the impossibility of unmixing a man’s character, that something like the intense certainty needed for a man to believe in blood atonement was part of the very fabric of Bronson’s charisma for her; she just hadn’t known what to call it till now. You could no more separate out that fanaticism than you could take meat off the menu for a lion and put him on a leash in the city.
She noticed that she had the Tesla up over 100 m.p.h. on her way back to LA. It was so easy to speed, the engine made no noise. She eased off the accelerator, snapped out of her own self-recriminations, and focused on the kids, on Hyrum. Forty-five minutes later, she pulled into the Shutters hotel roundabout with the Tesla near empty of charge. Before walking in and subjecting herself to Sammy Greenbaum part deux, she smelled the sea air and glanced out at the ocean, a few yards away. This is why people live in LA, she thought. Hypnotized, she walked toward the water. Proximity to this big blue was worth billions of dollars in the real estate game. She got it. She inhaled the salt air deeply and tried to slow down all that was racing inside her. Sammy could wait another minute.
She took off her high heels where the asphalt ended, slipped barefoot onto the sand, and felt an inkling of clarity. She would call that park ranger. She dialed up Park Ranger Dirk—he wasn’t a cop, not officially anyway, but he had a uniform and a gun and, she assumed, some training with it. He had pulled it once before, and he seemed invested in her, wanted to impress her, maybe.
Dirk was off duty, but that was good, he said, ’cause he could more easily do a favor for her off the clock than he could on. She explained the situation to him, told him that a young, innocent boy’s life might be at stake.
“That’s an awful way to feel—that some are beyond hope and forgiveness. Would seem to belittle Christ’s very mission: his sacrifice is not complete, they seem to be saying. I don’t like that,” Dirk said, dropping his usual know-it-all bravado and getting very quiet on the other end of the line. “I haven’t told you this about myself,” he continued, as she pondered that he hadn’t told her much of anything at all, “but I lost a brother to murder when I was young. It’s why I went into the Park Service, I wanted to protect the earth the way my brother hadn’t been protected.”
Well, that didn’t make a whole hell of a lot of sense, but he was sharing and seemed receptive to the idea of stepping in to help. “Oh, I’m sorry,” Maya said.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I’m gonna get a couple buddies together right away, real tough hombres that like to flex their Second Amendment rights, if you know what I’m sayin’—these are the good guys—civilians who patrolled the park with me for free during the Trump shutdown in December 2018. Badass do-gooders, I call ’em. I’m gonna get my posse together pronto, and we are gonna pay a call on Mr. Mormon Cowboy, and we are gonna bring that kid back to you safe and sound by sundown today no problemo.”
“Please don’t hurt anyone.”
“Ma’am, the gun is an instrument of peace; it’s there so no one gets hurt. When words aren’t persuasive enough, the gun is a strong persuader. That’s how it works.”
“Please, Dirk, I don’t know. I don’t want them hurt. I don’t want you hurt. He has a gun, too.”
“Ah, you’re a sweetie, ain’t you? I’ve never fired at a human being in my life, and I don’t intend to change that today. He will be outnumbered and he will see reason. Comprende?”
“He may not see reason.”
“Staring down a gun tends to make a man very reasonable, even the unreasonable ones. I promise you, I will not fire. No bloodshed. I got this.”
“Promise me you’ll check in with me every hour on the hour?”
“Yes, Mom, every hour on the hour.” He was laughing.
“I’ll pay you,” Maya said. “What can I pay you?”
“Don’t insult me, ma’am, this is a labor of love. I am a Christian man, a real Christian, not that Mormon nonsense, and this is about love and mercy, and a child.”
People need their reasons, Maya thought. Love and mercy and a child were as good as any she could think of. “Okay,” she said, “thank you so much.”
There was a pause on the line. Then Dirk said, “Just let me take you out to dinner when this is over.” Oh, Jesus. Small toll to pay; she’d cross that bridge when she came to it.
“I would love that, Dirk,” she said.
40.
BRONSON LOOKED THROUGH his peep stones and tried to read the sky. The more decisive actions he took, the more he could see things clearly. There were four clouds above him today, and as he stared through the rocks at them, they changed shape into four men and then merged into one huge cloud and became smoke, the smoke of a fire, a conflagration so all-encompassing, Bronson for a moment doubted himself and wanted to pull back from his course. But that was fleeting. He was cold this early morning, a fire might be nice. He sniffed the air and thought of that old Dylan lyric he used to know, “you don’t need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows.” He couldn’t remember the name of the song now, but trouble was blowing in from the west. He knew where to lay the traps.
After that was done, he went to the back of the horse shed. The back stalls had functioned like a basement for him all these years, where he kept some of his old stuntman gear and various FX stuff he liked to amuse the kids with when they wanted a fireworks show. It was the only show he ever gave them. Every year on December 23, Joseph Smith’s birthday. Two days after the winter solstice, the darkest day of the year. The fireworks were to signify light coming back to the world, light in the form of Joseph Smith, light in the form of Bronson Powers. He still had a ton of the stuff left, the tricks of his former trade. He grabbed what he thought he might need and went back to the house, and waited, eyes and ears to the west. Sound travels cleanly in the desert. He scanned, turning his head like a coyote, ears a better tool than his eyes. And he heard them in the distance.
And here they came, right on time, as foretold to him by his peep stones, the four clouds coming to him as one, four men on ATVs, like the four horsemen of the suburban Apocalypse. Bronson grabbed his gear and went out to a spot he had chosen to meet them by a distinctive cluster of Joshua trees. He had to get there first. He jumped on his horse. The race was on. He handed Hyrum a gun. “Grab your bow and arrow, too. Get on your horse, Hyrum, come with me,” he said. “Looks like we got company.”
They saddled up in the barn, and met the men on the ATVs in front of the house. Bronson held up his hand, exposing his classic six-shooter, and asked them to stop. “You boys are trespassing,” he said. Dirk smiled; that was like an opening exchange from a Western, he thought, pleased. The other three men got out of their ATVs and stood menacingly.
“Name’s Dirk. We don’t want any trouble, Bronson Powers,” Dirk said, thinking, Damn, it’s like these lines were written for me—this is going to be easy, four against two, “but we need you to give us the boy, Hyrum.”
“My boy? You want to take my boy from me?” They were afraid, he knew that from the way they stayed clumped together, like prey animals. Apex predators stalk alone, like Bronson.
“Where you goin’ on that horse?” Dirk asked. “Come back here.”
“You sound scared,” Bronson said. “Is that gunpowder you painted your face with?”
“What?” Dirk dabbed at his face;
the excess sunscreen he always lathered on came off whitish on his fingers. “No, dude,” he said, “it’s sunscreen. You should wear it, too. You’ll get the skin cancer. Enough flirting, give us your gun.” The three backup men moved as one behind Dirk, their guns drawn as well, their faces nervously dripping the white sunscreen.
“This pistola?” Bronson slowly pulled his jacket aside again, resting his hand on his gun, and all four men pulled theirs with varying degrees of smoothness and facility. “Oh my goodness,” Bronson said, “it looks like we’re outnumbered. Hyrum…” Hyrum pulled an arrow from his quiver, smoothly loaded it into the groove with the speed it would take any of these men to aim their gun, and let the arrow fly. The badass do-gooders in the ATVs flinched and yelped in defense. The arrow stuck the front tire, air hissed.
“Shit, son,” Dirk cursed. “Don’t do that. We’re on your side.”
“We don’t want trouble,” Bronson said evenly. “We are just asking you to leave us alone. Hyrum doesn’t like wasting arrows on tires, do you, Hyrum?”
“No, sir. I got nothing against tires.”
“Just turn around and leave me to my land and my business.”
“See, I can’t do that, Bronson.” Dirk knew from movies with hostage negotiations to keep saying Bronson’s name, that it would make a human connection. “’Cause I know what your business is today, Bronson, and I can’t let you harm Hyrum.”
“What’s he talking about, Dad?”
“He’s talking out of his ass, son. He’s about to step into a world he is ill-equipped for.”
“He’s meaning to hurt you, son. Your own father. Put your gun down,” Dirk commanded, though his voice was not steady.
“No, thank you, sir.” Bronson smiled. “Listen, what’s your name again?”
“Dirk. Dirk Johnson.”
“Listen, Dirk Dirk Johnson, you’re a park ranger, right? I’ve seen you.”
“That’s right, Bronson.”
“Right. So when you see something happening in the desert in the course of your job that’s sad, but natural—you see a hawk take a cute jackrabbit, or you see a coyote male kill his pups in a drought or famine and eat them—do you step in ’cause you think you know better? Do you play God ’cause you think you know the happy ending? Or do you let the desert be the desert?”
“That’s different, Bronson.”
“It’s no different, Dirk Dirk. I’m asking you to let the desert be.” All the men were nonplussed and silent, and not a little weirded out by the man’s preachy tone and imperviousness to their macho pressure.
“You’re gonna wind up in prison, Bronson,” Dirk said, as neutrally as he could. “How you gonna take care of your boy then?”
“I’m willing to go to prison for him,” Bronson replied. “Fuck, I’m willing to go to hell for him. But I ain’t willing to go to heaven without him.”
Hyrum looked at his father, squinted, and cocked his head to almost 45 degrees, like an animal trying to figure out the exact location of a sound. But one of the badass do-gooders stepped forward suddenly, so Hyrum turned and raised his bow.
“What the fuck are you going on about?” the man yelled, gesturing with his weapon. “Just shut the fuck up and drop your fucking gun, you nutbag!”
“Hey, Sam, cool it, okay. Everybody, be cool. Chiggedy check yourselves.” Dirk forced a smile and raised a calming hand to his men. “Bronson, unholster your gun—slowly—drop it on the sand, and back off. Same for you, son, drop that bow. This ain’t The Last of the fucking Mohicans.”
Bronson turned to Hyrum and sighed. “We tried, son. Let’s go.”
Bronson pulled back the reins and yanked his horse away from the men. Hyrum followed, as closely as a shadow. They got a decent lead because the two men in the flat-tire ATV had to load themselves and their gear into the other ATV to give chase. These were Bronson’s two best horses, and he had the advantage of knowing this terrain. Every time the overloaded ATV got close, Bronson would detour into a ravine or rock bed where they couldn’t directly follow, but only shadow from above or to the side. This tantalizing game went on for about thirty minutes.
The horses were lathered and thirsty by the time Bronson had led them to the sacred place where Maya had first discovered them. The place where his babies had been buried once. The terrain was thick with “No Trespassing” signs and weird, brown, worn scarecrows that looked like unholy half-human gargoyles. There was a sheer rock face behind Bronson and Hyrum that blocked their way, with the steep, rocky terrain and the cactus too thick on either side for a horse to run through. It looked to the men in the ATV as if Bronson had stupidly trapped himself and ridden right into a natural dead end.
Bronson turned his horse back to face the men; Hyrum shadowed his father’s every move. Dirk looked to the other three men. They exchanged some nods, and then they came forward, en masse, like the prey animals, like the weak modern humans, they were.
“Keep your hands up! You, too, boy!” Dirk shouted, forgetting, in his excitement, Hyrum’s name.
Bronson put his arms up in surrender, like a Joshua tree itself. So did Hyrum. While Dirk hung back a few steps, keeping his gun trained on Bronson from about fifteen yards away, the three other men crept forward together.
“Put your gun on the ground! Put the bow and arrow on the ground! Now!”
“How can I do that with my hands up?” Bronson said, feeling like maybe he’d remembered that gag from a movie in which he once doubled the cowboy lead.
“Yeah, punk-ass bitch,” Hyrum added.
“Don’t do that,” Bronson reprimanded his son. “I don’t like that stuff.”
“Sorry, Pops.”
“Don’t call me a ‘punk-ass bitch,’ son, I’m trying to help you,” Dirk complained.
“He’s sorry. He’s been in the city too much lately,” Bronson explained.
“I’m sorry,” Hyrum called out, “my bad.”
“Thank you,” Dirk said, feeling his the upper hand. “Looks like you rode yourself right into a ‘box canyon.’ Woulda thought a desert man like you would know better.”
Bronson looked up the rock face behind him, and to the impossible terrain on either side, nodded, spat, and dropped his head. Dirk imagined the man was chastened, ashamed to have made such a novice move in front of his own son and to have been bested by another man with greater knowledge of the desert.
“Now drop your weapons and get off the horses, the both of you. I’m done playin’ with y’all,” Dirk ordered. The long chase had given him time to find his breath and nerve again. His Western cowboy accent was getting stronger, the more confident he got. Bronson and Hyrum did almost as commanded, dutifully dismounting and tossing their weapons, the guns, bow, and arrows about six feet away. “I said drop them, goddammit, don’t throw them,” Dirk complained. “For pete’s sake.” He motioned to his three men to retrieve the weapons. They coasted a bit off Dirk’s recovered command and strode aggressively toward where Bronson and Hyrum had tossed their weapons.
The three men, side by side by side, got to within a few feet of the guns and Hyrum’s bow, and one of them pulled up his foot, like he’d stepped on something, his eyes searching the sand at his feet curiously. “What the fuck is—?” he wondered, falling forward before he could finish the sentence, as the sand receded from him. He seemed mystified by the sudden subsidence, reaching back for balance to the other two men, but instead, latching on and pulling all of them forward as a group. Before he could finish his thought process, all three of them disappeared below the sand, like the earth itself had tired of them and had swallowed them up.
Before Dirk could figure out what was happening, before he could move from curiosity to self-preservation, Bronson had pounced and retrieved both guns, and Hyrum his bow. Dirk, a firing-range hero, panicked and took a shot at Bronson, squeezing the trigger on the way up, like the overeager Jeopardy! fan he was. He missed badly. The sand kicked up a good five feet in front of his target. Bronson shot an ironically sympath
etic look at Dirk, as if to say, “Don’t worry, kiddo, try again.”
Extending a calming hand toward Hyrum, Bronson said, “Hold, son.” Hyrum held. Dirk aimed this time and shot again, overcorrecting, and missed by more, shattering some debris off the rock face above and behind Bronson.
“Sonuvabitch…” Dirk muttered, and he lowered his sight for another shot. He wouldn’t miss a third time.
Bronson unhurriedly raised his gun with neither malice nor joy and shot Dirk right through his wide-brimmed park ranger hat, in the middle of his forehead. Dirk inhaled sharply and his eyebrows arched, looking not unlike a man in mid-conversation who had finally remembered the name of someone he’d been unable to recall. The big hat flew off behind him with a good piece of the top of his skull, and in the last act of his life, Dirk made a motion to retrieve it with his left hand, like that was the most pressing issue of the moment, like he’d be able to get his brains back in his head if he could just get his hat back on. Then his eyes rolled and he fell backward on his side, arm outstretched, his brain blood pumping, pooling, and clumping in the thirsty sand.
Bronson could hear the men screaming from down in the hole. He’d made that trap years ago with Deuce when he was a young boy, for coyotes and other bigger intruders, such as men. It was a Vietnamese Army punji-stick-type trap. Bronson had dug a number of them around the sacred site that the kids knew to stay away from. He had booby-trapped it long ago so that if anyone discovered his buried children, they would not make it out to tell. There’d never been anything that triggered the traps, till now.
He’d learned how to make those types of traps when researching and working on Vietnam-period films. Rambo, Born on the 4th of July, Platoon. He’d fallen into a few himself, for money. There was always a pad down there to break his fall. These men didn’t get a pad, though; they got rusty spikes to run them through. Bronson hadn’t smeared the spikes with sepsis-causing feces and urine like the Vietnamese had, but he’d thrown a couple of cold sleepy rattlers down there this morning, for good measure. It was a hellhole, for sure, and the sounds of the tortured and the damned were ascending to deaf heaven. He didn’t get close or look down into the fifteen-foot-deep pit because he knew they still had their guns. They were yelling about broken arms and legs, and blood and snakes and mercy. Begging for help in one breath, and threatening retribution in the next. He heard them desperately trying to make contact on their cell phones.
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