by Weston Ochse
Then again, Natasha didn't believe in God.
God wouldn't have let the economy turn to shit. God wouldn't have let her grandfather die. More importantly, God wouldn't have let her mother die of breast cancer last year.
No. Natasha didn't believe in God and she'd continue to deny His existence until He gave her mother back and admitted that it had all been one big, tremendously cruel joke.
Until then, she had to leave all of her friends and travel, hat in hand, to a place she'd never heard of and meet people she'd never met so that she and her family could actually afford to eat and have a home. It was hard for her not to feel as if her life had been ripped off.
"Stop feeling sorry for yourself," Aunt Lin said from the middle seat. She sat wedged against the passenger side door, rope and bungee cords controlling an impending avalanche of suitcases and a giant bag of cheese balls that Derrick had begged her dad to buy at a truck stop in the middle of New Mexico. "It makes you look ugly and your mother never wanted you to be ugly."
At the mention of her mother, Natasha closed her eyes.
Aunt Lin wasn't really their aunt. She'd been her mother's Chinese nanny when she was little, had stayed after she got married, and become nanny to both Derrick and Natasha.
Derrick mimicked Auntie Lin's accent in a bad parody of a Charlie Chan movie. "Yes Auntie. Natasha no rike ugry."
Natasha flipped him off, then quickly hid her finger in her other hand. Thankfully her father hadn't seen, couldn't see, what she'd done. He hated "the bird" and would punish her if he'd seen her do it. She sighed, and let the weight of her woes bring her down.
Her father said that they were going to live in a resort, or what used to be a resort. Natasha supposed that something had happened for the place to lose its status. Whatever the case, Bombay Beach was in California. And it was a beach. And there was water. This was her mantra whenever thoughts about Willow Grove and her previously-perfect-then-turned-to-shit life intruded upon the reality of the Rolling Avocado and a life with no mother.
California.
Beach.
Water.
The sun was setting as she stared out the window at the scenery rolling away behind them. Where Eastern Pennsylvania was filled with lush trees, grasses and bushes, the desert of Western Arizona was empty except for the occasional cactus. Some were multi-armed giants, some small and white-furred. She didn't know what any of them were called, but they all looked alien and deadly.
One of the things she liked to do in the woods by herself was track down sassafras trees. Usually only tiny saplings, no bigger around than her thumb, they stood only a few feet high. Their three-pronged leaves let off a citrus smell, reminiscent of lime when squeezed. Sometimes she'd pull them out of the ground so she could get to their roots, which had been used for tea or as a sweetener by the Native Americans long ago. Once she'd been brave enough to wash the root free of dirt, and then sucked on it for several hours. The taste had been pleasant, like gum but without the necessity of chewing. Even so, she'd probably looked ridiculous, like some wild frontier woman.
But like everything else in her life, those days were gone.
The old Natasha would have found the cacti intriguing. She would have wanted to know everything about them. She would have wanted to touch them, maybe even smell their bark. Now all she thought about was how ugly and disconcerting they were. The best she could do was squint her eyes and imagine them as people standing beside the road and waving at them. As if they were herding the Rolling Avocado and the people within it along to a certain destiny.
She wondered what her father was thinking about this whole change of life. She'd never really met her grandfather. He'd left her dad when he was very young, and never returned. There had always been a vacuum in her life when talking about grandparents. Everyone else seemed to have two sets of them, but Natasha only had one set - her mother's parents - who they'd left in Eastern Pennsylvania.
Grandpa Lazlo had represented an entire side of her family she knew nothing about. And now he was dead. They'd already had the funeral, the will had been processed through probate, and notification had gone out to Natasha's dad. According to the letter, her grandfather had been found washed up on the beach, missing a head and an arm. She shuddered. The letter her father had read said wildlife had probably been responsible for the missing body parts, even though he'd only been in the water for twenty-four hours. It didn't matter how many times Natasha thought about it, the idea of a missing head creeped her out.
Suddenly the car hit a pothole and bottomed out at seventy miles an hour. Her father swerved violently to the right, then managed to correct to the left.
Natasha held her breath and grabbed hold of the armrest on her seat as she watched the fish-tailing view through the rear window.
Then an immense pop filled the inside of the car.
The tire?
The air was suddenly filled with a fine orange blizzard. The top of Derrick's black hair was almost entirely covered, as was her own, in a dusting of orange. Her father coughed and opened all the windows in the car.
"Cheeseballs!" Auntie Lin hacked and shuddered. "Ack!"
Natasha couldn't help herself. She released the breath she'd been holding and burst out laughing. Maybe everything was going to work out fine after all.
They arrived at a rest area north of Bombay Beach just after midnight. The four of them were far too tired to unpack or even get out of the car. They'd collapsed in place, postponing their new resort life on the edge of a sea until the next morning, when they could see it and appreciate it more in the light of day.
As the next day dawned, they awoke to the screams of a thousand birds.
Patrick Oliver jerked awake. The cacophony was amazing; he couldn't hear anything else, including Auntie Lin's snores. He peered through the windshield, but saw nothing but a Vaseline-smeared sunrise, which is what he normally saw without his glasses. He sat up and groaned. His back felt as if he'd strapped a board to it and rode down a mountain. Worse. He'd driven across country in a car with a 30 year old suspension. Frankly, he thanked his lucky stars he was alive.
He pawed around on the dashboard for his glasses and found them about the same time that Auntie Lin woke in the seat behind him.
"What? Are the children okay?" she asked, with her hands blocking the light of the dawn from her eyes as she licked her dry lips.
Patrick slid his glasses into place and dug around on the floor beneath his seat for his flask. His mouth felt like eight miles of desert. He'd rationed himself as they'd crossed the breadth of America. He was proud of himself for managing the craving for so long. From the heft of the flask, there was still a quarter left.
"What's that noise?" Aintie Lin asked.
"Birds, I think." He grabbed a water bottle from the empty passenger seat, took a long swig, then handed it to her. "Here. You might need this."
"What? I can't hear you over the birds. Jesus. Where did they come from?"
Patrick turned to gaze through the windshield and for the first time saw the conflagration. He couldn't identify a single bird. Their wings, beaks and talons created a single, frenetic, ravenous beast, undulating along the edge of the sea, as it at once dove and rose, fighting against itself in a violent collage of motion.
"What the hell?"
He went to open his door, but Auntie Lin grabbed the back of the seat.
"Are you sure it's safe?"
Patrick grinned. "Come on. They're just birds."
Despite her protests, he opened the door and climbed out, allowing his back to stretch for the first time since 7 PM yesterday when they'd stopped to clean the residue of giant cheese balls from everyone's hair. He brought the flask to his mouth and took a deep refreshing drink.
And then the stench hit him.
"Oh my God!"
The alcohol burned acrid as he covered his nose and mouth with both hands. His eyes watered.
"Oh my God," Auntie Lin echoed from inside the car. "Mr. Oliver, fo
r God's sake, please close the door. You're killing us."
He slammed the door, but remained outside, his desire to drink overruling his desire to get out of the stench. He leaned against the car, wondering how he was going to survive the reek, and swallowed the vodka he'd been holding in his mouth. If he took shallow breaths, he could breathe.
He took another drink, keeping his eyes on the birds, lest they turn and think he was Tipi Hedron. There had to be thousands of seagulls fighting to get to the shoreline of what appeared to be a beer-colored inland sea. The noise was as deafening as the smell was rotten.
Then, by some miracle, the wind shifted to an offshore breeze and the air was clean once more. Patrick stood straight and watched the sun rising over the far edge of the sea, its golden rays illuminating the water and the edges of the birds' wings in a glistening nimbus of light. Everything had gone from hellish to heavenly in a moment.
Suddenly a man appeared, stick held high, screaming in barbaric rage as he ran, all elbows and knees, towards the birds. They ignored him until the last second, then rose heavily out of his way. He swung madly, screaming over the shrieks of the birds with an edge of madness in his voice. His fifth swing sent him twisting in the air, his legs entangling as they failed to keep up. He fell face first into what the birds had been feeding on and lay there for a moment.
The back door of the station wagon opened and Natasha and Derrick rolled out.
"I gotta pee," Derrick murmured, looking around, then running to where a trashcan stood overflowing beneath a "Do Not Litter" sign.
"Is this it?" Natasha's hair was tangled into a brown-tentacled nightmarish mess that sought to go in every direction at once. Her narrow face still held the imprint of the seat. "This can't be it."
"Do you see what I see?" Patrick asked.
The man by the water pushed himself to his knees, retched mightily into the surf, then stood. Twin rivulets of yellow drool fell to the ground. The man ambled off the way he came, his gait uncertain.
"A drunk puking in the surf?" Natasha asked.
"Hey, we have those at home," Derrick said, having finished his business and rejoined his family.
"No. What's on the shore. What the birds were after." Even as he said the words, the first of many birds began to return. Within moments, the sky darkened and those that had fled returned to their interrupted meal of rotting fish.
"How many are there?" Derrick asked.
"What? Fish or birds?" Patrick asked in return.
"Dunno. Both?"
"Hundreds. Thousands."
"Is this really the Salton Sea?" Natasha asked.
Before anyone could answer, the wind shifted once more, drawing the stench back over them like a heavy oil cloth. Everyone groaned as they covered their noses and mouths. They rushed to the car, jumped inside and slammed the doors behind them. Then they sat in stunned silence watching the rotting fish, the birds and the barbaric drunk who had once again found a stick and was ready to resume his Don Quixote stand.
Gerald Duphrene sat behind the wheel of his golf cart, glaring in morose fascination at the remains of the coyote lying in the middle of Highway 111. The crushed body was perfectly perpendicular to the double yellow line, crossing it like a "T". It wasn't just the positioning of the body that had transfixed him, but also the juxtaposition of the absolutely flattened body with the perfectly undisturbed head. The long snout, the lolling tongue, and the wide bright eyes seemed alive on the dead creature. They stared back at Gerald in surprise, as if to ask, how did I get here?
The sight reminded him of Private Abner Johnson back in '53. Old Ab had perished in a similar way on the hills north of Seoul when the Chinese were pushing them back and back to Pusan, though Abner never did see Pusan. They were lying on the side of a hill, trying to sleep amidst the cold rain and the constant shelling when it happened. No one could have foreseen it. Nothing could have stopped it. An American Sherman tank had crested the top of the hill, maneuvering backwards as it fired 76.2 mm shells at the ocean of Chinese soldiers. The tracks slid on the mud, sending the 32 ton machine skating down the backside of the hill. It crushed Ab's entire body flat, blood and guts shooting from the sides like a jelly sandwich that had just been hand slammed. One minute Ab had been talking about life on his daddy's tobacco farm in North Carolina, the next he was Korean War road kill... all except for his head. His head, like the coyote's, was perfectly undisturbed and seemed to be caught in mid-sentence.
Gerald remembered staring at old Ab for what seemed like a whole minute before he got up and ran. And it was a good thing he did, too, because the rest of the tank battalion followed the first, backing blindly down the hill as they scrambled to escape the tidal wave of slant-eyed yellow murder. Maybe Old Ab's death had saved him. Gerald nodded to himself. Good thing he was paying attention.
A cargo truck carrying cucumbers towards Tucson roared by, finishing the job on the dead animal. As the truck disappeared down the road to Niland, Gerald turned the golf car around, and drove back into Bombay Beach, reflecting - not for the first time - how cut off from the world they were. As he passed the Welcome to Bombay Beach sign he noticed that weeds were hugging the wooden supports. He made a mental note to return with clippers. They might not have many tourists, but that wasn't a reason for them not to look their best.
That sentiment went to the heart of his problems. What had once been a proud little community on the shore of a thriving inland sea had turned into a scene of all-out Armageddon. He'd seen Korean villages in better shape after UN Forces and the Chinese had steamrolled over them.
Now parked at the corner of Avenue A and Fifth Street, he glared at his community. He remembered in 1958, when he'd first moved here, how pristine and beautiful everything had looked. The trailers were rectangular pastel homes arrayed in perfect rows. The developer had sprung for fake grass for everyone, which provided impossibly green plots in front of every porch that only needed to be occasionally swept and cleaned with a hose. A service provided fresh flowers in pots set at the base of everyone's mailbox. The roads were new, nary a piece of litter in sight. The water of the Salton Sea was a Sultan's paradise of crystal blue water. And bikini-clad water skiers crazed the horizon.
He adjusted the brim of his baseball cap with his right hook, put the cart in gear with his left, and headed off down First Street at a slow roll. Things never stayed the same. Change was the nature of the universe. He'd had a drill sergeant in basic training who'd told him once that the measure of a man was not how he dealt with success, but rather how he responded to adversity... and life had sure given Gerald Duphrene his share of that.
The stainless steel hooks that were his hands and the Salton Sea were both examples of what could have been. They were if onlys and if he spent his days dwelling on if onlys he'd never get anything done. If only frost bite hadn't murdered his fingers. If only the land hadn't conspired to murder the dream of the Salton Sea. Nothing more than if onlys.
As he drove down the street, he managed to see past the ruin and degradation of the trailers, ticking off, instead, those which were still occupied. Now nearly half of them were empty with more and more emptying every day.
Some left by land, moving their worldly goods - or sometimes leaving them - and heading off on Highway 111 to better times.
And some left by other means.
A chill ran from his shoulders to his elbows where the prosthetics started. These were what bothered him most. He'd seen the monsters coming out of the water. He'd watched them creep into a house and ravage the occupant, sitting on the sofa watching television. He'd seen far worse in Korea, so one person eating another hadn't been what scared him.
He had scared himself.
Not because he was willing to do anything to stop the creatures.
Not because he wanted to protect the people of his town.
Not because he knew the price of war.
No. He scared himself because sometime between being a twenty-something badass in Korea and being
a seventy-something cyborg in California, he'd turned into a wimp. Every time he saw the damned things he'd start shaking. He'd find himself frozen in place. He couldn't even speak.
And he hated himself for it.
After each occasion he vowed that the next time would be different. He promised himself that he'd do something, save someone, be that hero he'd once been.
But every time he failed himself.
Gerald turned down Avenue C, eyeing the dark and broken windows of the abandoned trailers. But this time would be different. He'd face his fear if it killed him.
He pulled to a stop in front of the old yellow and white trailer where George and Paula Silva had lived. That Porta-Wop and his wife had been good friends while Gerald's wife had been alive. But soon after his dear Jane died of lung cancer, the Portuguese-Italian ex-Army sergeant and his wife moved back to Kentucky where her family was from. The trailer had remained abandoned ever since and year by year it fell into more and more disrepair. Now, it was little more than a ruin.
Staring at the doorway, he felt the old fear return. He had to fight it. He had to conquer the feeling. Nothing bad would happen. Nothing could happen.
He'd captured one of the creatures using a bear trap and it was still inside. What better way to conquer his fear than with a real live - or in this case, real dead - test dummy?
All that bravado evaporated, however, as he stared into the dark maw of the doorway. He regarded the blackness inside. A niggling thought made him wonder which one of them was the real dummy.
Gerald set his jaw.
He'd find out soon enough.
But not this time.
He backed the golf cart out of the yard and into the street, and resumed his patrol. For now, there were other things that needed his attention.