Death Valley

by Perly, Susan;

  One had long grey-blond hair and a beard, the other had close-cropped medium brown hair. The beard spoke extra slowly about how he couldn’t remember what used to be there in the store across the street from way back when they were growing up. Did the other one know? The short brown-haired one put his arm around the long-haired beard and helped him with his soup. They both looked about fifty. The beard was saying he thought there had been a flower shop there. Short brown hair said, “No, Pauly, that was the old art gallery.”

  A quiet night on Main Street, early dark on New Year’s Eve. Andy looked at Vivienne with such desire, throughout the nosh. He did not seem to understand that he had a skin over his heart.

  They paid the bill for the food in the town restaurant and rode out into darkness, which used to be dark waters. When worlds swam and rocks protruded into water and soft things waved their antennae and glitter fish swam on by.

  Andy steered through the darkness, looking straight ahead. Night was the pharaoh of winter. Night owned December, night owned January. They were unguided explorers on the road without corners, with only a light beaming ahead from their voyaging wagon to guide them through the new mysteries. The clock on the dash was an ornament, a thing with scratches or dials or Mayan numericals. Time had been infinite and time was infinite and it was a lie to say it had been between Christmas and New Year’s, for that made their connection terrestrial, and the feeling they had between them was that it was extraterrestrial, not of this Earth. They were aliens to each other, and beloved. They might have come down from dawn clouds, or they might have risen with magma cools from the ocean. They did not know if the blowing dust was moonlight off the reflected fallen stars in an egress of birds and Eden, or the residual evidence of chemicals at the water acreage of the moonlit crime scene, or a kind of thickness of your heart expanding in a loneliness with someone else in a car at night alone on a backcountry highway, with the night cadavers above your only light, your only lumen.

  Vivienne looked at Andy, radiant at the wheel. He was humming an old blues tune, something all melded in shotgun events, public pain, breathing acoustics dragged by rope behind the devil’s pickup, through the dank scenes of men in pinewoods and the hope for retribution from the pine coffins. The camera was the third passenger, sitting between them. Andy drove with his left hand, picked up the camera with his right hand and shot a shot of Vivienne looking at him. She was framed by the window and the flying dark.

  She felt the dark joy of looking.

  Night rode towards them, pulling them forward.

  Vivienne Toronto and Andy San Diego drove in solitary grandeur through the Eastern Sierra night crossing back into Death Valley. They had never imagined it would be so regal, this crossing. Even Charon arrived in brine, taking your coin across that thin black line.

  They passed along the northern edge of Owens Lake. Only a small shack with a small gold pin of light shone, and night and the lake passed on by, seamless. Just one more night in the great capsule through the velveteen.

  They travelled for a long lie of dark until they rose in elevation three more times, and travelled back down to the level of the sea.

  They kept moving east from the night called California into the night called Nevada, and under a waxing gibbous moon, Andy stopped at the Death Valley Sand Dunes.

  Andy had a plan. He took Vivienne in by foot to a high dune. He set the camera up on a dune seam. The wind was merciful, and stayed low for them. “Vivienne Pink, will you marry me?” he asked. “Baby Pink, would you do me the honour of becoming my wife?”

  “Yes,” she said. Though she was already married.

  The camera on a timer under the moon between new and full, clicked as Andy bent on a dune, and Vivienne took his hands, yes.

  She had gone rogue in her heart, and it felt good. Andy was the cure for peace. He pleasured her by his existence. This could last a long time, especially if you’d lived two-thirds of it already. The past was frozen, the future ephemeral. Andy was pure now. Vivienne felt elevated, just to see his face, in available dash light. They came onto the big night highway, and still there were no lights on the highway and there were no signs at all. It was a nowhere land, paved in many grey lanes. They came to a cliff looking down into yet another high mountain valley. And there, twinkling in its red gas streams, was the hidden city. Area 24. They drove down into the metropolis with dry desert all around and high planes mixing with ancient starlight. They came low into the bright lights, gold with the red, blueshifting like heart-shaped Doppler effects all down Las Vegas Boulevard. They had known each other five days.

  34

  BIGHORN

  JOHNNY COMA RETRACED the path he had taken west as part of a threesome. Now he was one.

  There was a sweet MGB roadster, in ebony green, which had been sitting down the slope at the Panamint Springs gas station all day and into the morning. Hey, dibs. Johnny came down to examine it. The keys were in the ignition. Hey, double-dibs. Johnny Coma in his sweet two-seater all shiny took off at a nice curve-hugging speed back east on the 190.

  He drove in a blind fugue. He was racing the sunset.

  He left the higher green and gained warmth, dropping down to the salt playa as it shimmered in his rear-view mirror. Vivienne had worn coyote skin there.

  Johnny climbed to Towne Peak – the sparkling black-green car close to his body, nice handling – and down at sea level Stovepipe Wells appeared, glints of roof in the sunshine. He stopped at the general store, a ghost in his own life. A day or so ago, he had walked over a couple times a day to the store, the way you do, making a base of a remote location, making a little nest of a couple wayfarer’s buildings. A little stage set.

  Now he was passing through, with no roots or room. He was the anonymous man who used to be a two-day local. He got gas and Clif bars, hot coffee and cold water.

  He drank water passing the Death Valley Sand Dunes, where he and Vivienne had climbed tall towers of sand. She was his North Star. What do you do when your North Star is gone from your eyes?

  He ate the cold and the hot, driving past the masses of rusty green arrowweed of the Devil’s Cornfield. He’d come past here with Vivienne and Val, and Danny, on the day they turned left to Scotty’s and Ubehebe Crater and dumped his brother out of their lives.

  Johnny took the opposite turn this time, curving with the 190 down into the land below the sea. The sea was salt and he sailed with elbow room for giants in his tiny ebony green skin past the road into Salt Creek where the fingerling-sized prehistoric fish, the pupfish, here for twenty thousand years, still swam in their salty pockets. A vehicle in the distance threw up a dust cloud. There must be a road there. Down past Harmony Borax Works on his right, whose name seemed to Johnny like lovely miners’ found poetry. Up on his left, set in the purple mountains, was the Furnace Creek Inn, all Spanish pale yellow stucco and red roof tiles. Johnny kept going, aiming to circle back for a drink at the inn.

  He decided to take a look at Artist’s Palette, a favourite spot of Vivienne’s. He drove up Artist’s Drive, a one-way road, one car wide. He drove through the powdery alluvial fans of the Black Mountains.

  He walked into the washes of this most beautiful of Death Valley sites, Artist’s Palette, variously Artists Palette and Artists’ Palette on road signs, where the shades and hues had been a palette formed long before cave art beetle red or charcoal black. This was the palette of seven million years ago, this was the palette of fourteen million years ago, this was the palette that had sourced and survived all things. Red from iron oxide, the manganese purple, the pale white-pink ash, the mica green.

  Johnny walked out of the wash to the parking. A biker had a radio on: ETA terrorists had broken their truce, bombing the Madrid airport last night. The biker asked Johnny to take his picture with his phone, so he took one of Johnny.

  He drove back up to the Furnace Creek Inn, the luxe digs on the hill, built in the Spanish style, in the first big tourist boom to Death Valley, in 1927. He ordered afternoon te
a and ate homemade scones, mini pizzas and smoked salmon, and sipped Earl Grey tea, brought in a proper pot, with a pot of extra hot water on the side. He and Vivienne had loved this spot, had eaten those things. The sun cut out early behind those mountains. He realized he wanted to be inside the scene he was watching from the window.

  He was out the inn door and down to the MGB; he zoomed down the road to Badwater, just as the bright blue sky was beginning a thick purpling. Badwater was a couple hundred feet below sea level; the thick salt crust saturated the air as the blue lowered down in a curve. The salt playa was as enormous as a salt planet. Wet indigo seeped into the dark purple sky and into the indigo Johnny Coma walked. The word beautiful returned to him. And then he saw the creature: it was a ram. A ram with its legs stuck in the salt.

  Johnny saw the rump of the ram, shining white to match the ram’s white muzzle, as the air glinted a last light but only slightly. Johnny already had his Moleskine sketchbook in his hand, sketching the ram, not ten feet away. The ram stood in its characteristic frozen position. This was a desert bighorn sheep, come down from the rocky cliffs and escape paths away from predators and bothersome beings. The ram had come down to the source of water. It was deep in the absence of it. Johnny had seen the creature in books and paintings, but never so close in person. Johnny sketched the ram, making arrows to the outline for its colour, a pale chocolate, almost a chocolate-grey, as if arisen from the more dusty outgrowths of the desert. Majestic was a true word for the bighorn. Its horns looked like two majestic dominating curved bone parentheses. Its eyes had brains, Johnny could see that, even in the gloaming. Each horn was massive and turned back in a curve coming out the bighorn’s skull. This was a cliff dweller, and they said that it had bodily susceptibilities similar to human susceptibilities, that the bighorn sheep is a thing we should know, a creature we should save, because it is a horned litmus test for the state of our human environment.

  The sky inked Johnny, the salt basin, the ram. How little he had known this intimate planet. Winter lowered its cold skin. It was December 31st. How little he had known the wild ones. The horned ones, wearing trumpets on their heads, shofars we could blow to sound our regret and our joy, on the Jewish New Year. How little he had known his Vivienne. She had spoken to him, but he was too busy with words to hear her.

  Johnny inched out on the salt, which cracked under his feet as he walked. The salt playa had the ram’s tracks in it. Johnny sketched the tracks in his notebook. The classic track of the bighorn sheep: the side parts straight, three and half inches by two and half inches, the footprint looking like a double teardrop. In the buff and grey of the original palette times, the old Pleistocene times, these Russian bighorn sheep had walked over the Bering Strait land bridge from Siberia, they had been in the country for at least 350,000 years. Johnny closed his notebook and just looked. The ram stood alone, an isolate in the vast salt fjord, its feet sunk in salt.

  The ram must have set out when the mountains were pale yellow in earlier hours of the day, and come down from the mountains to walk uncommonly in search of the water places, and now the granite night had returned. He was a vision of glorious pelt in ruin; atonement was in the air for all things in nature, and man had reckoning with the beasts. Lightning struck Johnny’s heart for the things he had done to the beasts and how he did not atone, and how content he had been to be apart and how he had so rarely seen the beasts. And the desert was the first surveillance. The desert watched Adam and Eve, the desert watched Abram and Abraham, the desert watched Isaac be born to a man one hundred years old, the desert saw it all. Humans left far too many traces. Johnny was at Badwater, the lowest place in the United States of America. He looked up to the far snow peak of Mount Whitney, the highest spot. The ram stepped out of the gloaming salt. The ram came close to Johnny with its shofar horn. This ram might be the ram of the Book of Leviticus.

  But the goat, on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall be presented alive before the LORD, to make an atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness.

  The land is lonely for its emptiness. The land is sick with the noise of people. The land does not know what it looks like anymore. The land has forgotten it is so beautiful.

  And we have brutalized it, and we have not shown remorse yet.

  Earth, soil, ram, salt, reconsider me. The ram butted Johnny’s hand, pushing its horn through Johnny’s hand, severing the fingers in one clump. Johnny backed up, slipping. The ram pushed him into the sharp-edged salt. Johnny Coma’s arms were bleeding from the salt that cut him with horizontal stabs as the ram stabbed him right where Val had stabbed him, up under his breastbone, this time absolutely exposing his liver, impaling it as it sat exposed. The ram kept impaling Johnny Coma with its atonement horn. Johnny longed for the voice of his wife. He said, “Vivienne,” longingly, regretfully, lonely, in ending, until Johnny Coma, novelist, was dead at sundown on New Year’s Eve, at Badwater. Johnny Coma, writer, bled out into the blue. His body imprinted its presence on the salt, like a creature leaving its outline, its meuse, as it departs. On high promontories and in low holes, the aching angels wanted back on level Earth, to feel purpose again, as humans. The ram picked up Johnny Coma’s Moleskine notebook in its mouth.

  And the nuclear mountains kept on buzzing.

  And so shall our atonement be drawn to them, as magnets to the inland sea.

  And the night fell in its granite enclosure, and the old ram was the colour of granite and returned to its mountain high to watch over the desert.

  35

  THE DEAD BIRD

  VAL GOLD HAD been wearing his Kevlar-lined leather jacket at Panamint Springs when Andy shot him. Val was taking no chances. He did not trust Vivienne. Val did not see that his mistrust of Vivienne came through to her, and since she did not have his confidence, she mistrusted him as a result. When the bullet came, it tore the leather but not the lining. He watched Vivienne drive away with Andy. He went into room 15 and slept in the sheets where she had played with her new man. Her musk was embedded in the pillow slips. He woke in pale light the next afternoon, near sundown. Val knew it was time: he went out to the highway, waiting to go wherever the first car was going. It was going east. A grey-blue low-cut Austin-Healey, early days of Vietnam vintage, 1963, Val was guessing. The guy was putting on some speed, like the old kamikaze grounded pilots who wanted to fly their wheels on the pavement, after the war was over. The guy was planning to make Vegas in a hurry. Val said that was fine with him, drop him at the airport. He figured there might be a spare seat on a red-eye to DC.

  THE DRIVER DROPPED Val at McCarran. In the airport washroom, Val sponged the dust off his pants and sweater, poured the sand out of his shoes into the trash can, cleaned up the slash on his forehead, wet his hands and pushed them through his thick silver hair. One more bruised holiday man making an exit from the desert.

  Val knew Vivienne was not in love with him. She had never been. He had signed up, he had enlisted, not for war, but to be the other man. Nobody made him do it. She did not lead him on (except with her smile, except with her smell, her laugh, her thighs, her lips, her wit, her bravery, her refusal to say the word brave). On the plane, he sat at the window, in homage to his Vivienne and how she did not want him. When he met her she was not yet married to Johnny, and Val asked her many times, “How come no one ever asked a fine woman like you to marry him,” and Vivienne always said, “Ask me,” and he never asked her, and then Johnny one day said to Vivienne, “Will you marry me?” and Vivienne said, “Yes.” And Val never knew for sure if she might have loved him like a wife, but he saw marriage as an option, and Canada as an option, and he liked to keep his options open, and the man who keeps all his options open and believes there is always time can end up sitting on a plane alone, married to work. Val Gold, American citizen, single, counterterrorism expert, watched the lights of the gaming valley coalesce into an amber clot, a resin for the ages, the lost city, the last city. They banked up over the mountains, and
flew over desert darkness, where only occasional glitters told there was secret activity but mostly it was darkness. The plutonium Buddhas sent off their secret flames.

  At Reagan National, he got a cab to the New Hampshire Inn on 21st Street where he routinely stayed in Foggy Bottom, so as to be low key and not posh, have a kitchen and be easy-walking distance to the Phillips Collection. When Val Gold was low, and he was low now, he found solace and a rebuke to the noose by going to sit with paintings. Right here in DC, right up 21st Street, between Q and R, was the Phillips Collection, the first modern art museum in the US, and one of the best still. It was a secret haunt of artists themselves. Artists and writers came here, keeping it to themselves, finding the small rooms in the personal mansion of Duncan Phillips to be a place for quiet, for sight, for thought, for reflection, for meditation, for examination, a rest for eyes and heart. There was the Rothko Room, the Klee Room, but first off, Val wanted to see Dead Bird painted by Albert Ryder.

  Off in a corner on the main floor, off anonymous, off entrained, enchained to the death moment, off on a piece of wood, off modest, off humble, off as death on a sidewalk, lay the painted bird in a small frame. Painted on wood in 1890 approximately. The bird like an old man, the bird not human but how humans in age become like old birds. The bird, simple in his grey feathers. The bird with his clawed feet curled. The bird as an adored wonder. The bird as a silent thing, a found wonder. Death as the freak. Death as the freak show. Death the unpretty. Death with no dignity, or with dignity. Death does not know the word. Death the oasis. Death in your feathered unglory, on a simple piece of board. The adoration without frills or advertising. This is what Val wanted, this is what he had achieved. He did not, as the saying goes, need or even want someone to share this moment with him. He wanted Vivienne Pink, and she did not want him the way he wanted her to want him, with no strings, and this was known the very first day. On the first day, there was darkness and then came the terrestrial life, and the firmament was her, and the light came from her eyes.