High Desert High

by Steven Schindler

  “No worries,” Paul added, “You’re the master of your domain.”

  “Shouldn’t that be mistress?” Jasmine said, not smiling.

  “Sure mistress works.” Paul looked over to Kate, who gave him a wink, letting him know she was with him.

  Jasmine was sucking on the pipe like an asthmatic sucking on an inhaler. Having been around druggies his whole life, whether on the job undercover, or just kicking back with friends, he knew she was smoking some strong stuff and was getting intensely wasted.

  “That’s some interesting-smelling weed,” Paul said, at the risk of alerting Kate that his career instincts could be kicking in. “What is it?”

  “Oh, are you familiar with marijuana strains?” Jasmine asked between drags.

  “You could say that.”

  “This is Indica. You know, the one for a body buzz. Couch lock.”

  “Couch lock?” Paul giggled.

  Jasmine gave him a wry smile. “Locked into the couch. You’re not going anywhere.”

  “You got that right,” Paul mumbled to himself. “Um, I love this place. Do you rent or own?” he said, trying to change the subject.

  Jasmine put down her pipe in the oversized ashtray. “I would never have a mortgage. It’s all part of the globalist banking, Vatican, Rothschild control of the world’s economy.”

  “Well, it’s nice to see the Jews and the Catholics agreeing on something,” said Paul.

  “What do you mean?” Jasmine asked stonily.

  “Well the Rotchschilds, the Jews, are supposed to control world banking and the Federal Reserve, and the Vatican are Catholics. The Pope is still Catholic, isn’t he?”

  “Very funny, Paul,” Kate said, trying to lighten up the atmosphere.

  “Chem trails,” Jasmine said, glaring at Paul.

  “Chem trails?” Paul asked, clueless.

  “You’ve probably been under too many chem trails. It’s working. They’re getting away with it.”

  “What are chem trails?”

  “Those streaks of what look like cloud vapors across the sky. Those are chem trails. Chemical trails. The government is releasing them into the atmosphere to control the minds of the masses, and in some cases poison us outright.”

  “Aren’t those just water vapor and condensation, trailing behind commercial airliners, forming in the atmosphere?” Paul asked, perplexed.

  “Aha! That’s what they want you to think!” Jasmine said, her index finger pointing to the sky.

  Jasmine stood up, and patted Paul on the shoulder. “I think we should be going.” She bent down and gave Jasmine a peck on the cheek. “I’ll call you tomorrow.” They left as Jasmine waved goodbye in slow motion.

  Outside, Kate and Paul stood next to her car, and discussed whether or not it was all right to leave her in that condition. They both agreed it was.

  “Let’s get my car, then I’ll follow you back to the main road that goes to the motel,” Paul said, inching closer to Kate and wondering if it would lead to a kiss. It didn’t.

  Paul laid in his bed, staring at the ceiling, listening to the giggles and music from nearby rooms, and the crunch of people walking on the gravel through the parking lot. I think it’s time to get a place of my own, he thought to himself as he went over in his mind what he would need to do to make this strange locale his home. But as eager as he was to start anew, he knew that subconsciously it could be his mind playing tricks on him. Maybe it was merely his need to be near his daughter. Or perhaps, this place was trying to tell him something.

  High Desert High

  Chapter Six

  While having breakfast at an outside table at the Frontier Café, Paul listed pros and cons on his yellow legal pad. The pro column was leading: no winter, start new life, leave city living, be near Tracy. The con column only had one entry: fear. Paul looked around, surveying the clientele at the café: students doing homework, extreme elderly biscotti dunkers, bikers, artsy hipsters, immigrants, all either standing in line or sitting, all minding their own business peaceably. It reminded him of the coffee houses in the Village back home, back in the day. Written under TO DO: Call Tracy. Find a place to live.

  He had driven past High Desert Realty every day since staying at the Joshua Tree Inn, as it was directly across the street. So he decided on the way back to his room to switch the order on his To Do list and visit them first. He opened the door and there were six desks in one large room. Two of the desks had phones, pamphlets, papers, and calendars on them. One had somebody’s half-eaten burrito in a Styrofoam clamshell box. Paul stood there for about 30 seconds listening for a sign of life. Then he heard a toilet flush.

  A man entered the room from a doorway in the corner. “Well, hello, friend! Excuse me, I was visiting the library for a moment. How can I help you on this delightful desert day? I’m Dwayne!”

  Dwayne wore a cowboy-cut shirt with mother-of-pearl snaps and a bolo tie. He looked around 70 with his hair dyed too dark black, as were his mustache and eyebrows. He had a neat part on the side and it was slicked back with a slight pompadour touch in the front. He seemed quite fit and trim and his blue jeans had a sharp crease. He wore thick black glasses, and Paul thought this might have been what Buddy Holly would have looked like if he’d made it to seventy.

  “Hello Dwayne,” Paul said, reaching out to shake hands. Paul hated shaking hands with people after they had just come out of the bathroom. How could you be 100 percent certain their hands were moist from having just been washed? “I’m Paul. I’m just starting out in the process, but I’m looking for a place to live in Joshua Tree or Yucca Valley, and I’m not sure if I want to rent or buy. Can you help me out?”

  Dwayne’s nostrils and eyes opened a little bit wider. “Why absotively, posilutely! You have come to the right place! Let’s go!”

  “Go?”

  “Let’s go look at some properties!”

  “You don’t want to go over anything with me first, or go through some listings or something?”

  “Why bother? You got to see something in person, don’t you think? Why waste time?”

  “Okay. Lead the way.”

  Paul wasn’t in the passenger seat of the older, but well-kept, Jeep Cherokee five minutes when it began.

  “Yes, I’m a recovering alcoholic. Been clean and sober for 18 years, and still go to meetings every day. I don’t like to proselytize, and come off as holier than thou, but a greater power has turned my life around and it all began with the Twelve Steps of AA.”

  “Where do we go first?” Paul replied, totally ignoring the bait.

  “Are you interested in renting, buying, looking at foreclosures?” Dwayne said, not at all phased by Paul’s ignoring his born-again pitch.

  Paul figured he was used to being ignored, and continued. “You know, I’ve been renting my whole life. Why don’t we start with some foreclosures? I’m on a fixed income, but maybe I can swing it.”

  “You look too young to be retired!”

  “I’ll bet you say that to all the boys.”

  “No really. You do look young to be retired. Military?”

  “No. Law enforcement.” Paul never knew what to expect when he revealed that he was a cop. And of all things, a narc.

  “My son’s in the military. And up here, you know with the Marine base so close, we have a lot of military. In fact, when they do their artillery training in Twentynine Palms you can hear it all the way in Joshua Tree, nearly 50 miles away. And the jets, choppers, military convoys, guys in uniforms, it just gets to me after a while. Gives me the heebie-jeebies. I’m an old hippie. Peace and love. Make love not war. War is not the answer. Coexist….”

  “You have some foreclosures in mind?”

  “Now, you know foreclosures are like speed dating. You take a look and sometimes you know right away whether it’s yes or no. You just walk away and move on to the next one. No hard feelings.”

  The Jeep made a sharp left by a FOR SALE sign with an arrow pointing onto a bumpy dirt road. Ev
ery few hundred feet there was a “house.” Sometimes the house was just a cinder block square surrounded by junk. Other times the house was a spotless pre-fabricated mini estate with a chain-link fence topped by barbed wire. And sometimes the house was just a leaning box of lumber and boards that may have been a home many decades ago.

  “There’s one just up here a bit. Been on the market a few months. It’s a little bit trashed, as some foreclosures are, but mostly cosmetic. It just takes a keen eye to see the potential,” Dwayne said as he turned into what could be called a long dirt driveway. They went over a small hill and on the other side was a lot with a double-wide mobile home on it. “You know, double-wides can be very, very nice,” Dwayne said earnestly.

  “I’ve heard about them, but have never actually been in one.”

  “This one could be a thing of beauty.”

  Upon first glance, Paul seriously doubted it. And as they pulled up alongside it, he was certain. It wasn’t level, the front steps were a foot away from the trailer, the skirt was missing around the home, exposing a haphazard and probably hazardous array of pipes, wires, and animal burrow-entry holes.

  “Just be careful going up the steps….”

  “If this is more than $500 I’m not interested.”

  “Well, not much more. It’s $19,900 with five acres.”

  “Five acres? Really? $19,900?” Paul said, wheels spinning. Dwayne liked to see that look, which usually gave him insight into the mind of a potential bottom-feeder buyer. “You could probably get it for half that! And you could spend a little more, and turn this into something to be proud of.”

  Paul got out of the Jeep and walked around the double wide.

  “The property is fenced in. That alone is worth five grand. And you have electricity. You can always have water trucked in or spend a little and have city water.”

  “There’s no water?”

  “Nope. Not here.”

  “You’re kidding me? How can you have a home with no running water?”

  “People have had water trucked in for decades around here.”

  “Okay, I guess I need to set some guidelines. I want to look at houses that have walls, roofs, floors, electricity, and water. Can we just start there?”

  “Absotively, posolutely! Let me ask you this: can you live well outside the town?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If really want to get away from it all, I can show you some properties next to the BLM.”

  “BLM? What are you talking about?”

  Dwayne laughed in a silly high-pitched way. “Near the Bureau of Land Management land. It’s kind of like parkland, but not quite. It’s federally owned.”

  “You mean like there are properties that are adjacent to the park?”

  “Yes, but it’s not exactly a park.”

  “How big is it?”

  “Well the BLM I’m thinking of is around 60,000 acres.”

  “60,000? That sounds big.”

  “Almost 100 square miles,” Dwayne said, smiling broadly, knowing he’s got Paul hooked.

  “Yes! That’s what I’m talking about. Away. From. It. All.”

  They drove a good half hour on dirt roads, paved roads, no roads, and onto a two-lane blacktop highway. Paul thought this looked a lot like the pictures he remembered seeing from Mars. Red dirt, boulders, mountains of rubble. With the only difference being the preponderance of Joshua trees.

  “Let me ask you something, Dwayne.”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  “Why are they called Joshua trees?”

  “Legend goes that the first white settlers here, Mormons, who came through these parts to get away from the evils of the cities, saw these unusual trees and thought they looked like the Old Testament prophet, Joshua, with his arms outstretched leading them in prayer to the Promised Land.”

  “Interesting. What’s with all the abandoned garages around here? We’ve been seeing them for miles,” Paul asked, astounded by the scope, vastness, and emptiness of the landscape.

  “Those aren’t garages. They’re homestead shacks. Starting in the Forties, they parceled out these lands and homesteaded them. All you had to do was build a shack, 200 square feet minimum, take a picture of it, and send it to the county. Then in five years send another picture of the shack in decent shape, and the property was yours, scot-free!”

  “So some were developed over the years and some were just left to rot.”

  “Yup. Just like we humans,” Dwayne said, not joking.

  They made some turns, passed some decent double-wides, more dumpy shacks, some horse ranches, properties with big rigs on them, some cows in corrals, then went down a washboard dirt road several hundred feet and stopped in front of a gate that looked like it might have been from an apocalyptic cowboy movie. They saw two huge telephone pole-type posts at cockeyed angles with cables dangling from them and a sign swinging in the wind that read THE HOBNOBBIN RANCH.

  “We’re getting a little further out, but the lots are big, the wild life aplenty, and we’re getting closer to the enormous expanse of the wide-open high desert,” Dwayne said enthusiastically.

  “But what’s that over there?” Paul said, pointing to a next-door neighbor’s property that looked like the aftermath of a tornado in a junkyard.

  “Let’s look at this first, and then we’ll look at the adjacent community.”

  “All right,” Paul said reluctantly.

  They approached the front door, which had a screen door in front of it. “Stand back a little bit,” Dwayne said as he pushed Paul a little farther away and leaned in to open the door. He pulled the screen door open, and a small snake scurried away. “Just a little garter snake. They’re your best little friend out here! Keep the bugs and rodents under control!”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not so crazy about new little friends. Or big ones.”

  Dwayne retrieved the key from the realty agent’s box and opened the door. It hit Paul right away: something was dead in there. He smelled that odor many times when he was a cop, and he had hoped he’d seen the last of those stench-filled days. “I just hope that’s a four-legged animal I smell and not a two-legged.”

  “You smell something?”

  “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “Oh, yeah, I smell it now,” Dwayne said looking around a corner.

  The place looked like squatters had been living there: two filthy sleeping bags were in the middle of the floor, empty tuna and sardine tins were strewn about. And Paul noticed two spikes, aka needles, next to an empty bottle of grape soda.

  “Let me just look around a bit,” Dwayne said, nodding.

  “Good luck.”

  “Oh yeah. A dead possum on the bathroom floor. Must have gotten in through an open window or door.”

  “Or maybe it was going to be somebody’s dinner. Let’s get out of there,” Paul said, disgusted. He paused next to the Jeep. “Look, Dwayne, I know we’re out here looking for bargains. But don’t show me anything that requires a hazmat team and a bulldozer to begin my remodel, okay?”

  “You are exactly right! We started at the bottom and we’re working our way up! Don’t you worry, it just takes some time. And seeing these, you’ll know a peach when you see it!”

  They spent the rest of the day going from dilapidation to disaster, with promises of finding that special property. But Paul was getting tired, hungry, and losing hope fast. “Dwayne, I’ve had enough for today. We’ve seen like a dozen locations from Breaking Bad, and I’m thinking more like Little House on the Prairie. You know what I mean?”

  “I agree. Now that I know what you’re looking for, I’ll go through some listings and we’ll get back at it first thing in the morning!”

  “Really? You’ll have more tomorrow morning?”

  “You betcha!”

  “Okay, let’s call it day and try it again tomorrow.”

  Later that evening as Paul was returning to his room with some take-out Chinese food, he noticed Kate was at the fr
ont desk. “Delivery boy!” Paul said holding up his bags, just inside the door.

  “Hi! Come on in! I just ate, but dig in. I just have some paperwork to do. I hope you weren’t freaked out last night.”

  “Believe me. If you knew what it took to freak me out, you’d think I was from another planet. Like your friend.”

  “Funny you should say that.”

  “Is it funny or strange?”

  “Strange.”

  After we left last night, Jasmine said she thinks she had a visitation.”

  “Visitation? That’s the name of my Catholic grammar school back in my old Bronx neighborhood. Did a pack of nuns get out of a flying saucer and start hitting her with rulers across the knuckles?”

  “Very funny. No, but she remembers seeing a figure in the house, and then she remembers nothing, but woke up with a strange felling in herself … down there.”

  “Yeah, well, I wouldn’t be surprised if Ash came back with some roofies and visited her down there with his tinfoil hat on.”

  “Don’t even say that! Did you get bad vibes from Ash?”

  “Let’s just say, if I was renting a house to him, I’d want more than a credit report from free credit report dot com.”

  “Jasmine says he’s a good guy.”

  “Maybe just a good drug connection.”

  “Don’t get all cop heavy on me. I’m worried about Jasmine. I don’t give a darn about Ash.”

  “I’m sorry. I’d tell Jasmine to keep away from him. I’ll just leave it at that.”

  “Would you go with me tonight? We’re going to an event in Joshua Tree. Starts at eight. Meet me here at seven-thirty?”

  “Sure. I’d love to. By the way, I’m looking at properties.”

  “Really? Going to flip a house and make some bread before heading back to New York?”

  Paul walked to the door and held the doorknob. “Nope. I’m done with New York. When one door closes, another one opens,” Paul said opening the door, smiling and heading back to his room.