“What are your politics, Mr. Morrison?”
“I have none in a partisan sense. It’s liberating. It frees one up to begin at the beginning.”
“Of what?”
“Everything.”
Another long moment of air-conditioned quiet. Morrison was still, hands on his knees, a black-clad apparition with a voice. Then he slowly reached up and took the sunglasses off. Dark eyes in a face that looked like a heated thing, still melting.
“What did you bring home from the war, Mr. Bear?”
“I left as much as I could over there.”
“Oh, but there’s always something that follows you back. Like a dog that will do anything to remain with you. It doesn’t have to be a ruined face like mine, or a blown-off leg like Todd’s.”
I nodded and thought back to Queens. Hot and crowded and beginning to boil with hate. The door-to-door searches. All of us hot to find the Blackwater killers, and Fallujah turning against us like a rising tide. I remembered a small home, one of hundreds, the smell of lamb and coriander and cumin. Dark inside. Always dark inside. Then sudden movement, face-close fire, muzzle flash and the air thick with lead and gunpowder and screams. Jordan down behind me. Medina in the doorway. By the time I got back to him Medina was still where he had fallen, floating in blood. It seemed to take us forever to shoot those people. Another forever to drag Medina back inside, out of sniper sight. Forever again to get off his helmet and pack the hole in his chest with a roll of QuikClot. Him staring straight at me as his eyes fogged over and his body seized and went still.
“I lost Medina,” I said. “A good man. We entered a dwelling and met heavy fire.”
“You lost him?”
“He was lost,” I said, picking my words carefully so as not to adjust in any way the memory that I had built for myself. My accounting. My truth. “And I was there. I replay those minutes sometimes. Often.”
Medina. Could I have done more?
“You replay them, the minutes, looking for what you did wrong,” said Morrison.
“Correct.”
“And if you don’t find anything at first, you keep replaying them again and again. Looking for something new. The smallest thing you could have done that would have changed the fate of Medina.”
I nodded.
“You torture yourself with a changeable truth.”
I took a deep breath and shifted in my chair. “I would like for there to be an answer. As to whether or not I was at fault.” “And why it took you so long to do things, while Medina bled out?”
I felt my chest hitting my shirt. I listened to the air conditioner in the half-light of the bungalow. Saw through the blinds fractured images of children jumping into a swimming pool.
“Which leads us to the curse of the living,” said Morrison.
“Yes. Why him but not me?”
“Which should be embossed on our motto right beside Semper Fi.”
“I thank him in my dreams,” I said. “Medina. He always accepts.”
“We were the lucky ones,” said Morrison. “We have managed to move forward.”
I nodded again.
“Please give Todd my best wishes,” he said. “Tell him I bear no grudge for what he did or didn’t do.”
I took a stool in a bar called the Roost, just off Christmas Circle in Borrego Springs. Ordered a double vodka on ice and knew there could easily be more before the sun had set on this day. Who knew? I might even spend the night.
I looked at that drink for a long time before taking the first sip. When I did, the promise was all there for me, as it always had been: strength, confidence, luck. And the wilds, never far away in my Luiseno blood. A mirror behind the bar aimed my face back at me. The TV volume was off as the newspeople discussed the virus. I appreciated their silence.
Especially appreciated it when the screen went to Todd Spencer’s somber image from his press conference the day before. There he was, waving a fistful of papers at the press and media. I couldn’t help but read the caption on the TV screen: Republican congressman Todd Spencer refused to answer questions yesterday about his missing wife, Julie … Later he renewed the attack on his Democratic opponent, Najat Amir, whom without evidence Spencer has accused of being terrorist-sponsored …
I wasn’t sure if I wanted Spencer to be lying about Amir or telling the truth. More to the point, after my talk with Dan Morrison, what could I possibly make of Todd Spencer?
As the vodka took me back to that day in Queens again, I smelled the woodsmoke and the lamb and the cumin wafting through that crowded labyrinth of a street. I thought of Spencer and Morrison and Medina, and how the net of that war had snagged us. And hundreds of thousands more. I tried hard to put all of us into some kind of historical and spiritual perspective, to see us all as just blips of life in a vast universe. But I couldn’t. We are not blips. I will not be a blip. Vodka.
I looked at the mirror again, at the reflected snout of one Harold Bear—Luiseno Indian, husband, father, son, and brother. Private investigator. Ex-marine. And I thought: You are okay. As okay as you are ever going to be.
I sat another hour. I’m always surprised how far a mind can wander and still find its way back, how many thoughts and memories can race through you in one slender hour of life. Fallujah. My son and daughter. First touching the girl who would become my wife in the San Luis Rey Mission when I was fourteen.
Dan Morrison sent me a text saying he’d let me know if he thought of anything that might help me regarding ex-Pfc Todd Spencer and his missing wife.
The bartender gave me a look. I shook my head, brought out my wallet on its belt chain. Paid up, left a nice tip and the rest of the vodka.
OCTAGON GIRL
BY CHRIS J. BAHNSEN
Desert Hot Springs
Wearing a camo bikini, Blythe stepped onto the octagonal platform and began her stride around the cage perimeter. Above her head, she held a white card with the number three on both sides. The upper rows were mostly empty, but there was still a decent crowd of a few thousand. This was her first gig at the new sports arena. Just opened in Desert Hot Springs, it was already becoming the venue for MMA fights in the Coachella Valley.
God, we needed this place.
Many in the crowd looked as if they’d climbed out of a fissure in the crusty ground, skin clay-colored, eyes deeply crow-footed from squinting against the sun glare and the sand pelting in off Banning Pass. Blythe knew them as hard cores of the low desert, who would not leave DHS, damn the crime, the druggies, the hell temps now topping 120 most every summer.
Catcalls and whistles, the heat of many eyes, affirmed that for the one minute between rounds, Blythe was the center of this raucous beer-soured universe. She let each platform heel come down in time with the hip-hop loop bumped on the PA, just firm enough to shake her goods without being herky-jerky—a flaw she’d noticed in other girls from the agency.
She raised the card higher, felt a slight pinch from one of her nipple covers. The only action her body had seen in weeks because her man Sandro practiced celibacy before a fight. Inside the cage, he sat taking instructions from Franco, his trainer. On the opposite side, Musaff Ali panted on his stool, coal-skinned, face goose-egged from Sandro’s accuracy of hand and foot.
Blythe finished her lap and stepped down to the floor where a director’s chair waited. She smiled at her son Logan, who sat a few yards away in a reserved section, rivers of yellow gold hair over blue eyes. They’d grown bluer with each of his eleven years, about all his father had left behind before drifting on during her third trimester. Logan grinned back at her while sucking soda through a straw.
As she took her seat a buzzer sounded round three.
The two fighters knocked gloves in the center of the cage and began stalking one another. Sandro, carved yet lithe in tight green shorts and fingerless fight gloves, was a fan favorite. Undefeated at 14–0, he wanted to turn pro soon and move to LA, the three of them. Besides his smooth Latin looks and winning record, his gro
wing fan base would also help gain the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s notice.
Blythe could see herself moving up with him. The week before, she’d driven to North Hollywood to a casting call for Octagon Girls with the UFC. Invited there based on head and body shots she’d sent in. Her audition went well, she thought. But it would be two weeks before she heard anything. Either way, after popping out a baby at eighteen, waitressing, and co-caring for her father until last year, her time had finally arrived.
Ali tried a takedown on Sandro, who slipped out of the hold and threw a spinning backfist. It struck the right side of Ali’s head: he wobbled but kept on his feet.
Watching Sandro’s predatory intensity, Blythe smiled to herself. All she could think of was how the sexual tension would boil over tonight in his bedroom. Actually, it was their bedroom now, as of five weeks ago when she and Logan moved in.
After a faked front kick, Sandro torpedoed a straight right hand, dead on Ali’s glass jaw. The big man bounced off the cage and went down, a felled tree with a canopy of dreads. Sandro charged in, but the ref blocked his attack. Ali lay twitching in his dreams.
Blythe mentally adjusted Sandro’s record to 15–0. If he reached 16–0, a fightwear company had offered him sponsorship, mas dinero. Good things for him meant good things for her, and Logan. Just one more win.
As Sandro eased his dusty pickup away from the arena, he kept asking, “Who’s the greatest?” and from the backseat, Logan chanted, “San-dro! … San-dro!” until they all joined in.
Here they were, already becoming a family, and Blythe wished her big sister could see them now. Jackie had been against her moving out. Wanted her to stay put at the Sky Valley house they inherited after their father passed. Logan needed stability, a real home, Jackie said.
“What he needs is a male role model,” Blythe had snapped back. “Not my hard-ass sister trying to be one.” She still felt bad for saying it.
The night winds of March gushed through the half-open windows. Blythe zipped up her hoodie. On Dillon Road, the pickup had to slow down behind a hulking motor home.
Sandro gestured through windshield. “Fucking snowbirders.”
“Snowbirds,” Blythe gently corrected. “Hey, they tip good, mister.”
Sandro grinned at her, and his right hand took her left. She ran a thumb over his stony knuckles. Such deadly hands, yet nothing but adoring when they touched her body.
* * *
By the time the truck scooped into a dirt-tracked mobile home park, Logan was dozing. Mature palm trees danced to a gust. They passed an empty trailer space, now a community trash depot, heaped with broken pallets, a car seat, stained mattresses. Two scrap dogs sniffed at the spilled guts of a garbage bag. At least it wasn’t gang turf, Blythe thought.
In the carport, Sandro draped an arm across the boy’s shoulders and steered him inside a dingy double-wide. It was the first time Blythe had seen him in such a fatherly role with her son—more often he acted like an older brother with Logan, playing combat video games with him, or teaching him grappling moves.
After Logan flumped onto the living room couch, Sandro unfolded a sheet over him. The boy would have to sleep there until Sandro cleared the spare room of training gear.
Warped wood paneling covered the walls, bare except for a Bruce Lee poster. Okay, so what if he didn’t seem in a rush to make the house family friendly. Why bother, with LA coming? Anyway, this was a big step for him, asking her to move in, and she didn’t want to push it. He grew up an orphan in Mexico City. A loner his whole life.
“I remember only my mother take me down an alley and leave me there,” he told her. Blythe could relate. When she and Jackie were in junior high, their own mother ran off with their older cousin. It seemed too easy, how people could erase you from their life, as if wiping a soiled shoe on the grass and walking on. But she would show Sandro not all women would bail on him.
Already fast asleep, Logan held his Conor “Notorious” McGregor action figure in one hand. “Why don’t they have one of Sandro?” he’d asked her the other day.
The fighter turned to her now.
Blythe stood near the front window in a porch lamp glow and unzipped the hoodie to show him, by the play of shadow and light on her bared form, that the evening had just begun.
When Blythe awoke and brushed her long umber hair aside, she read 9:16 a.m. on the nightstand clock. She panicked, used to waking up way earlier for the breakfast shift at the diner, then remembered she’d traded for the day off.
Sandro stood motionless in the doorframe wearing only boxer briefs. He faced down the hall listening—to what? She said his name. He raised a palm to her for quiet.
Then she heard it too, a thwick … ting …
Sandro’s leg muscles flexed, and he stalked down the hall. His hunter’s posture unnerved her.
She sprang out of bed.
In the living room, the couch was empty. From the spare bedroom Sandro shouted: “Little fucker!”
She ran to the end of the hall and cut left into the spare room. Sandro stood a few steps inside the doorway. His face burned with anger. Ten feet away, Logan stood rigid beside a wooden training dummy that once belonged to Bruce Lee. His hand was in midgrab of a small, star-shaped throwing weapon lodged in its chest. The dummy had a cylindrical head with two spindles extending from the torso to simulate arms. Sandro had purchased it through an eBay auction for a small fortune. Many times Blythe had seen him bow to it at the start of a workout.
The razor points of the throwing star had made other fresh holes and chips in the wood. Did her boy have any idea how dangerous these things were?
“Where did you get that, Logan?” she asked.
Logan’s eyes traveled over her body. Realizing her nakedness, Blythe stepped farther behind Sandro.
“I found it in the truck, under the seat.”
Sandro moved to the dummy. At first, he ignored Logan. His finger probed the fresh pockmarks in the wood.
“I … just wanted to make it stick, like Naruto,” Logan said.
Sandro pulled out the star and flicked it aside. He snatched Logan by the wrist, yanking him away from the dummy. A wet pop came from Logan’s shoulder. He yelped and fell to his knees. Sandro stayed on him and raised a hand over the boy, but Blythe flew onto his muscle-sloped back before it could come down.
“I look that bad?” Blythe asked her sister, who had broken down upon entering the hospital room. Jackie never balled. But then she’d never seen Blythe in a hospital bed, Logan asleep against her with his left arm in a sling. Tenderly, Jackie laid the back of her hand on Blythe’s forehead, the only part of her face not bandaged or contused.
After she established that Blythe and her nephew were basically okay, Jackie said, “You can’t keep dragging Logan with you every time you shack up with a creep.”
Blythe wanted to remind her sister she only lived with one other person, Logan’s father. But her nose hurt and her patience was gone. “Jackie, just put a sock in it, okay?” Bad enough she had to deal with questions from the police, and a social worker who tried to bully her into a safe house in Thousand Palms. Bad enough her voice now had a strange bagpipe timbre.
“Did you get my car?” Blythe said.
She had reluctantly called Jackie earlier from the hospital and asked her to retrieve her Jeep from Sandro’s place. Everything else of hers and Logan’s would have to be sacrificed. She would not go near him again.
Sporting a butch haircut, both arms sleeved in tats, Jackie nodded. “Where’re you going? Can you even drive like that?” She had agreed to trade cars, her nondescript white Toyota Camry for Blythe’s burnt-red Cherokee Sport, so Sandro couldn’t trace her whereabouts. Since Blythe hadn’t pressed charges, he might not be held long. But getting hooked into the system, social workers knocking on her door, no, that was not an option. Neither was going back home like Jackie wanted. Sandro would come looking for her sooner or later.
“What about that special item?” Bly
the asked.
“Check way under the front seat.”
Earlier that morning, when she awakened in the ER, Sandro had already left her a voice mail. After weepy incoherencies, he actually had the balls to ask if she could bring bail money. She deleted the message.
Jackie moved to her nephew’s side of the bed. Softly, so as not to wake him, she ran a finger over his twitching eyebrow. “At least let me take Logan.”
Blythe extended her hand. “Keys.” The doctor wanted to keep her and Logan another night, but she had her own plans for their recovery.
Dangling the keys out of her sister’s reach, Jackie said, “Tell me where you’re going first.”
“We need the waters.”
Chuckwalla Palms was a boutique lodging with only nine units. A bit pricey, but so were most other spa-tels that exploited the natural springs running beneath town. These mini resorts, dotted all over DHS, walled off guests from a city gone to seed.
At the front desk, the gap-toothed man in an aloha shirt didn’t so much as blink at Blythe’s face, Logan’s arm sling, when he handed over the room key. Locals had seen it all in this town, now more of a desert asylum for misfits, swingers, drifters, career criminals, and lately, migrating millennials.
Blythe had booked a suite that came with a private whirlpool, so they wouldn’t have to use the public pool. Such a room would drain her savings, but she needed time to think and heal, to keep out of Sandro’s reach.
The back room of the suite was a small clay cabana, whirlpool tub sunk below a wooden deck. A tinted sunroof overhead. Logan, wearing blue jammers, a cold gel pack strapped to his shoulder, stepped down into the tub. A sunray lit his hair. Halfway submerged, he stopped.
“Keep going, Logan,” Blythe said, standing near twin timer dials mounted on the wall. “But leave your shoulder out.”
The scent of cannabis touched her nose, wafting in from god knew where. So-called entrepreneurs, hipster types, were converging on the city to open grow facilities. Maybe it would help bring things up, she thought. Or else invite more dopers.
Palm Springs Noir Page 21