Fatal Journeys

by Lucy Taylor

  “Joe Fitch,” I say, extending a hand, which he shakes with a prissy distaste suggesting he thinks I may have recently used it for wiping my ass. I shrug off the attitude and go on. “If you’re hellbent on going out there by yourself, at least know what you’re getting into. You break down, you get stuck, or your G.P.S. lies to you—and let me tell you, a G.P.S. will lie like a ten dollar whore—any of that happens and, in this heat, you are goddamn dead.”

  Maybe still worrying about our handshake, he taps a squirt of hand sanitizer from a tube on the counter into his palm, which is thick and red as a slab of raw liver. “Otis Hanks. And, no offense, but I’d prefer you not curse.”

  “I won’t,” I tell him, “except to say if you go off half-cocked in the desert without the right experience and equipment, then you are well-fucked and royally so.”

  Hanks scowls and I figure I’m about to get chastised for the cussing, but what he says is, “Your name’s familiar. Do we know each other?”

  I assure him we don’t. I wonder if we might’ve done time together, but I’m not about to bring up the nickel I did in Lompoc for a bar fight that ended up with a manslaughter charge or the lesser run-ins I’ve had with the law on various occasions. My past is what I moved to the Mojave to forget.

  His comment about my name rankles, but still, in the interest of fairness, I try to put some fear into Hanks, pointing out that the sun’s barely up and the giant thermometer already reads over a hundred degrees, and if he has any sense at all, he’ll rethink his plan for an off-road adventure in the middle of goddamn July.

  But I doubt that he will, because guys like him never listen. They’re like my old man, railing about sin and salvation from the pulpit of the Wrath of God Methodist Church back in California; they already got all the answers. To hear folks like that tell it, God Himself comes to them for advice.

  So I tell Hanks about just a couple of the tragedies that have taken place here over the past few years; about the skeleton that was found in a desert wash by a group of kids looking for arrowheads, just west of Newberry Springs along Interstate 40 and how it turned out to be the remains of a tourist from Munich, who must’ve thought the Mojave was some kind of Disney World, but without the A.C., and then proceeded to stroll off into the fiery furnace with just a half gallon of water, wearing thong sandals, a tee shirt, and shorts. When they found him, his mouth and nostrils and every other orifice was stoppered with sand and the vultures had pillaged his insides like conventioneers at the Golden Nugget’s buffet.

  And I tell him about the woman from Huntsville, Alabama, who got the terrific idea to take her eight-year- old son camping in the Mojave a couple of summers back and how, when the road ran out and her G.P.S. cheerfully instructed her to turn right and continue another eighteen miles into a waterless hellhole, she followed directions. A ranger found the car and the kid dead nearby a few days later. The mother’s body wasn’t found for months, not much more than a pile of bones, hair, and vulture scat, or so I heard.

  Margo swings by with the coffeepot then and refills my mug, saying, “You setting him straight, Reverend Joe?”

  This makes Hanks’ squinty eyes in their nests of wrinkly, sun-cured skin flicker with curiosity. “Don’t tell me you’re a man of the cloth, Mr. Fitch?”

  Margo grins as she pours a steaming black stream. “Old Joe here’s a reverend like I’m a pole dancer, but folks here gave him that name ‘cause he lives out in the nowhere by hisself like one of them—monasticians?”

  “Monastics,” I say, “and I’m far from that. But my father was a minister with an interest in such things. I grew up listening to him preach about the religious tradition of men who turned their backs on civilization and went out into the deserts of Egypt and the Sinai. Men like Abba Macarius and Anthony the Great who were looking to deepen their spiritual life through isolation and physical hardship. Guess I got inspired by that.” I shrug. “In hindsight, it seems naive to me now, but finding God was my aim when I moved out here years back and I guess what started out as a bit of a joke at my expense…”

  “…is still a joke,” chuckles Margo, “but we like you now. You’re one of us.”

  Hanks raises a brow so pale that it’s almost translucent. “And did you? Find God?”

  The question pokes me like a sharp stick as I fork up my eggs. “Of course not. There was nothing to find.”

  We sit in silence then, shoveling food into our pie holes, but I keep dwelling on his comment about my name. After a while, I get up and amble out to my truck, noting with some amusement that the Camry belonging to this guy who only requires his cane for warding off rattlesnakes is parked in a handicapped spot. I get a map from the glove compartment and come back inside.

  Hanks’s mouth twists in annoyance when I unfold the map, like he’s worried I’m going to dip the northeast corner of Nevada into his biscuits and gravy, but I take out a pen and draw him a route through the back country to a remote, beautiful area I call the Cauldron. “It’s a straight shot from the paved road. No need to even get out of your car. Other side of the salt pan, there’s a Joshua tree forest and beyond that, a dune field that’ll make you think you’re on Mars.” I pause before adding, “Probably best not to try climbing them, though.”

  Hanks studies the map the way a prude eyes pornography, with distaste and a thinly veiled craving, then folds it up.

  “I appreciate your concern, Mr. Fitch, but as I was explaining to our waitress here while you were outside, I’m a bit of an amateur eremologist—” he sees of my puzzled expression, “—one who studies the deserts. Since my retirement, I’ve visited quite a few, the Gobi, the Sahara, the Atacama. I’ve hiked some of the world’s most desolate regions and come back none the worse for it.” He glances down at his right boot, which is built up higher than the left one, and yanks up a pant leg, offering a glimpse of an off-white prosthesis. “Well, except for the incident with the leg, but that was due to a sin of lust, not a hiking mishap.”

  Right about then Margo notices some people across the room need more water and goes hurrying over with a pitcher while I try to dispel some unpleasant images about what kind of kinky sexual shenanigans—an amputee fetish perhaps?—might result in the loss of a limb.

  Hanks notes our reactions and has the grace to redden a bit. After some awkward silence, he allows as how, since he has what he calls “a flexible itinerary,” he just may hang onto the map anyway. “Wouldn’t mind seeing that Joshua tree forest,” he says, and there’s a wistful note in his voice that I haven’t detected before, as though he’s longing—maybe not so much to see Joshua trees—but to be somewhere, anywhere else, besides here.

  When Hanks dons his safari hat and gets up to pay his tab, I throw down some bills and walk with him outside. Even with the cane, which is a striking piece of handiwork—mahogany with an intricately carved ivory handle—he creaks laboriously along, huffing like one burdened by more than just a physical disability.

  My tow truck, parked a few spaces down from his Camry, catches his eye.

  “Fitch’s Towing. Now I recall how I know you.”

  I look at him quizzically.

  “Two nice people I met on a trip recently said you towed their car when it stalled in the desert.

  Maisie and Claude from Modesto. Said if I saw you to send their regards.”

  I turn away and gaze up at the eyesore thermometer, which now measures a hundred and four, as ice crystals clink in my chest. “Names don’t ring a bell.”

  Hanks sighs, as though my failure to remember the couple confirms for him some basic belief about human nature. We shake hands again and I watch him drive off, then hightail it back into the Bun Boy and make it to the can just in time to puke up a thick slop of greasy coffee, potatoes, and eggs.

  What Hanks said isn’t possible. No fucking way.

  The last time I saw the people from Modesto, they were stone fucking dead and I was towing their Mazda 280z with their bodies in the back seat.

  ««—»�
�

  Part of me, the impulsive, hotheaded ruffian whose misdeeds inspired some of my old man’s more graphic sermons wants to go after Hanks right then and there, but I choke down the urge. That was the old me. Now I know how to hang back and be patient, bide my time. That’s a skill the desert has taught me.

  So I climb into my truck and roar out toward Barstow, knowing I’ll catch up with Hanks in due time. Right now, I need to spend time with my girl.

  Opal isn’t her real name, of course. I call her that, because her blue-gray eyes remind me of opals, flecked with tiny motes of cobalt and daffodil gold. She was found by a sheepherder, wandering up near Red Mountain, half naked and near death with deep, infected gashes on her shoulders and neck, like at some point she’d collapsed, and the vultures had done a little taste testing before she fought them off and got moving again. Far as anyone knows, she hasn’t spoken to anyone since. The heat and the trauma of her ordeal, including whatever led to her being in that situation in the first place, has parboiled her brain. Now she occupies a room at the Rohr Convalescent Center in Barstow, a Jane Doe waiting for somebody to come forward and give her a name.

  Today when I slip into her room, she’s propped up in bed, a little fuller in the face than the last time I saw her, but still stiff as a scarecrow, with that tiny mummified smile on her lips that never twitches or flags, that seems to hint at a cache of secrets she’s hoarding. The only part of her that moves are her half-closed, feral eyes, which scan back and forth, tock-tick-tock, as though she’s mesmerizing herself by following the path of an interior metronome.

  After chitchatting with one of the nurses, who stops in to say hi, I take a comb and brush from the night stand by the bed and set about braiding her hair, which has gone white over the months that I’ve known her. To pass the time, I talk to her like I always do, just random stuff that she’s heard before, about how it was when I first moved to the desert, how that ocean of emptiness both fascinated and horrified me. Something about that burnt, hostile terrain, so purged of anything conducive to sustaining life, gave me a strange kind of solace born of pain and familiarity. I realized that my addled, punitive parents had given me something valuable after all—the ability to survive in a place so barren that few people even come here and those that do, generally don’t stay very long.

  And although I didn’t find God in the way most people know Him, I found deities of my own understanding—hundreds of them, winged carrion-eaters reigning over a savage landscape. I recognized them from my father’s sermons, these vulture-gods, and I named them after the archangels: Moloch and Charon, Metatron and Uriel and Gabriel. I recognized them at once for what they were, creatures old as the rocks and the salt pans, ancient as the bones of the finned creatures that once lived here sixty-five million years ago when the Mojave was a vast, inland sea.

  I knew they must see us as we really are—wingless beasts lumbering across a destroyed landscape, while they soar on the updrafts, patient and cunning, knowing that we’re here for only an eye blink in their eternity.

  The great birds appalled me at first—with their plucked, scarlet heads and seething black eyes—and their habits struck me as ghastly. After startling one outside my trailer one day, I watched it take clumsy running hops, flapping furiously to get airborne, then regurgitate a gut full of stinking carrion all over the hood of my truck in an effort to lighten the load. That one, the Leaver of Offerings, was the first, and soon others came. They’d soar on the thermals for hours within sight of my home, silent and watchful, until I’d come outside and let them lead me to whatever they’d found that was dying or injured: a burrowing owl, a tortoise, a chuckwalla….a vagabond from Munich or a mother desperate to find help for her boy.

  Opal shivers then and exhales a sound, not much more than a thin hiccough of dread. I wonder if she’s been hearing me. Doesn’t much matter, she knows who I am.

  Her hair looks good when I finish it, the long braids sliding over her shoulders in smooth, ghostly ropes that stand out against her dark, ruddy skin. But when I hold the mirror up so she can admire herself, her eyes ignite like a cornered bobcat’s and a snarl corkscrews between her bared teeth.

  I lean close, stroke a wisp of hair back off her face and whisper the same thing I always do, “Next time I come here, I’m going to kill you.”

  ««—»»

  Now it’s Hanks’s turn.

  On the way back toward Baker, I take a seldom-used exit and follow an unmarked dirt road until I come to the edge of the Cauldron. Here the remnant of road peters out at the edge of a cracked lake bed and I blaze across it, raising a rooster tail of white sand sparkling with tiny grains of feldspar and quartz. For miles around, there’s no pavement, no signs, and no help if you need it. No indication that Hanks has passed this way, either, so I head south, where the desert floor splits into a snake’s nest of arroyos and the earth is so dry that sections lurch up, overlapping each other like a shelf of ceramic tiles. When my tires crunch over the baked clay, the noise is an escalation of tiny explosions and the air turns the color of cinders and chalk.

  I’m following the approximate route that I mapped out for Hanks, but when I see the outline of Joshua trees in the distance, a sudden sense of unease washes over me. I’ve always found the trees spooky—the way the branches claw and arch in grotesque, twisted shapes, like the broken limbs of men who’ve been crucified. But now, when I get out of my truck to survey the terrain through binoculars, I spot the outline of a vulture amid the tree’s deformed limbs. At the sight of me, the bird hisses softly. Its neck swivels around and a beak so red it might have been dipped in a wound lifts into the yellow-white glare.

  It takes off, flying out toward a formation of orange sandstone that juts to the east. I follow its flight through the binoculars and zoom in on a dust-caked red fender—Hanks’s Camry, left at the base of the rocks in a puddle of dwindling shade.

  Towing a car so you don’t damage the transmission requires care and the right implements, but not ruining Hanks’s ride isn’t high on my list of concerns. I hook it up to the back of my truck, tow it a half mile away and offload it behind a low rise bristling with pinon and creosote. On the passenger seat I find a modest supply of water and energy bars; a key is hidden under the floor mat. I stuff my backpack with bottles of water and granola bars, lock up the car and pitch the key into the scrub.

  What I’ve found is that people whose vehicles disappear in the middle of nowhere generally do one of three things: they assume they’ve screwed up and returned to the wrong place and commence a futile and increasingly frantic search. Or they stay calm, keep their wits about them and try to hike out. Either dehydration and heat stroke fell them or I do the job with the crowbar I keep in my truck next to the phony maps, but either way, the birds feed. A third, smaller group, those with a naive belief in the goodness of humanity huddle in whatever shade they can find, presumably praying for help to come, and thank God when they see me approaching—at least until they realize I’m not there on a mission of mercy.

  The Modesto couple Hanks mentioned fell into that last category.

  Hanks, though, does none of these things. When I hike back to the sandstone formation, there’s nothing to indicate he’s returned to the place where his car ought to be, no helter-skelter footprints of the kind a panicked person generally leaves, no indication he’s attempted to follow my tire tracks. I clamber onto the highest ridge of sandstone and do a sweep with the binoculars. I don’t see him at first—his khaki clothing and tan safari hat blend in with the dun-colored sand—but the lazy swoops of vultures mark his place on the desert floor like a giant red X. He’s about a mile away, heading toward the dune field, puttering along like a geezer perusing his garden. Everything catches his fancy: a thorny cactus pad, a stretch of orange dogweed, the green, tapering shafts of a cluster of desert candles.

  As I watch, he looks up abruptly. Although I know at this distance, he can’t possibly see me, our eyes seem to lock, and his flaccid lips smack wit
h what an over-imaginative mind might interpret as relish. Real or not, the gaze is unsettling and I turn away. A few seconds later, when I focus the binoculars again, he’s no longer there. All I see are the bristly contours of a cluster of teddy bear cholla and the slow rotation of obsidian wings against a searing hot sky.

  Has he stumbled into an arroyo or collapsed in the meager shade of some creosote bushes? I press on, expecting to him catch up to him quickly, but the desert seems to have licked up his life like spilled water. It’s not until mid-afternoon that I spot him again, when the temperature in this part of the Cauldron must be approaching a hundred and twenty and the heat waves the vultures are riding look like curtains of shimmering gauze.

  To my astonishment, the distance between us hasn’t narrowed at all. If anything, Hanks has pulled farther away.

  The heat’s pummeling him, though, exposing his decrepitude. His head’s bowed, shoulders sagging, and the hand clutching the cane by turns stiffens and then undergoes bouts of violent trembling. He no longer stops to investigate this flower or that sparkly mineral. Nor does he seem to notice the grim entourage that spirals above him like smoke rings expelled from the simmering earth. A check of my compass tells me what I already suspect, that his meandering course has begun to veer north. The straight line he undoubtedly thinks he’s walking has begun to curve drastically, taking him not to the place where he left his car, but toward the Joshua tree forest.

  For the next hour, I’m able to keep him in view, expecting him to drop any minute, but he soldiers on and the distance between us barely shrinks. Finally, frustrated, I break into a furious run and briefly enjoy the satisfaction all killers must feel when closing in on their prey. Yet just when I’m almost upon him, something shifts as though a key’s clicked in a door of the universe, and his outline flickers and fades. What just moments ago seemed so obviously flesh and bone blurs away into shadows and sand. The vultures disperse, and a deathly stillness ensues. Suddenly I’m the only thing left alive on the earth and the single sound is the rasp of my breathing.