A Desert Reckoning

by Deanne Stillman

  In fact, on Day Three, someone reported that a man bearing a rifle and matching his description—six feet two, 180 pounds, brown hair—was running across the railroad tracks nearby and heading for one of the hangars. A couple of black-and-whites raced to the location, but no one was there; perhaps they had missed him by seconds. From the airport on Black Butte Basin, he would have kept running south while possibly tracking east, into the Theodore Payne Wildlife Sanctuary, a 320-acre preserve at 235th Street East between Avenues U and V, a little-known and neglected county preserve where the wildlife has mostly vanished. There, on the side of Rock Creek Wash, he might have employed his years of studying desert creatures, quickly digging out or appropriating a burrow belonging to another animal and crawling inside it coyote-style until the passing aircraft finished their latest sweep of that lonely quadrant. At that point, he would have been close to escape. All he had to do was cross Highway 138, the one that runs right past the old ruins at Llano and then make his way to the aqueduct, just yards away. Slide down an embankment, and you’re gone.

  Yet if he hadn’t done so already, he would not be able to do it now. Cops knew that Kueck was probably thirsty and at some point might head for the aqueduct—not just an escape route but a drinking fountain, the very thing that the engineer William Mulholland, a man whom Kueck admired, had designed it for. Just like in the old West, when lawmen waited at a water source for outlaws to come in, along with other predators waiting for prey, cops had staked out positions along certain embankments. In addition, self-appointed vigilantes were listening to police scanners and mobilizing on foot and horseback at the slightest hint of suspicious activity. Everyone knew that not only was Kueck desperate, but he needed water. For the seven days of the manhunt, during daylight hours and especially at midday and throughout the afternoon, the temperature was over 100 degrees. It hadn’t rained in weeks. There was little shade on the floor of the Antelope Valley and few easily accessible sources of water. Quite literally, the place was baking, and so was everything and everyone in it. Even when a man is walking under such conditions—and not fleeing the full force of one of the world’s largest law enforcement agencies—staying alive is difficult. “Of all the survival environments,” writes Rory Storm in his essential work, Desert Survivor’s Guide, “the desert is the most demanding in terms of requiring speedy decisions and quick reactions. You don’t have the luxury of pondering the best course of action. Without water, you will last at best five days—and that’s resting in the shade! If you try to walk out, you’ll last one day.”

  We do not know at what point Don began to dehydrate. It had to happen at some point. He might have been able to refill his jugs at one of his water caches once or twice after filling up on the first night at his buddy’s house, but it would have been difficult to continue accessing them without attracting attention, and it would have been hard as well to keep running with large water jugs. Perhaps at some point, Don had even jettisoned the bottles. There are many ways to get water in the desert and Don knew them. If he could get to the buttes, there was water in the hollows of certain rocks—natural tanks that had been in use for thousands of years. Inside a junked or abandoned car, there might be water in the windshield reservoir or radiator, provided that the vehicle had been recently left there and the water hadn’t evaporated or been consumed by others. We can imagine our hermit, coming across such a fountain, ripping it open with a nearby crowbar, swilling down the liquid, slathering his face with grease from the engine to protect it from the sun, then instantly realizing that the water was filled with deadly additives—and knowing that the desert had thrown him another black queen.

  On the other hand, perhaps there was no such succor available. There were still other methods of water extraction. For instance, with a wide temperature range between day and night, condensation forms on things like metal sheeting. The desert is a metal graveyard, littered with engine parts and the dregs of glider wrecks, dismembered trucks, camper shells—a treasure trove of spare parts. On the run, Don may have availed himself of the condensed moisture, drinking it on the spot or mopping it up with a rag or his own T-shirt, wringing it into a container and saving it for later, when—as he well knew—he would be going mad from thirst.

  An average man—say 165 pounds and five feet ten—needs about three liters of water per day. Don, at six feet two inches, was a bit taller than average and weighed 180 pounds. Recall that at his friend’s house on Day One, he had filled a couple of water jugs before he fled into the night. We do not know what size the jugs were, but whatever he consumed at the time and until the bottles were empty was probably enough to keep him running and on the run for another twenty-four hours or so. Additionally, he would have tolerated some water loss, according to the Army Study Guide’s chapter “Water Use in Desert Operations”—a book that pertains to the task at hand. The body has a small reserve of water and can lose some of its high water content—about 60 percent for the average man—without any adverse effects. However, “after a loss of two quarts, which is about 2.5 to 3 percent of body weight,” the book explains, “effectiveness is impaired. Soldiers/Marines may begin to stumble, become fatigued and unable to concentrate clearly, and develop headaches. Thirst will be present, though not overpowering. . . . But as dehydration continues, the effects will become more pronounced.” Heat cramps, heat exhaustion, or heatstroke can set in. Cramps would be the first sign of a problem. While on the run, the first place Don would have felt them would have been in his legs, arms, and abdomen—the muscles doing the most work. The symptoms would be shallow breaths, dizziness, slurred speech, stumbling, and vomiting.

  Yet with all the odds against him, there was something big in Don’s favor. It wasn’t just his deep knowledge of the desert but the fact that he was used to it. “It takes about two weeks for the body to fully acclimatize itself to the temperatures of the desert,” Storm writes. “This is why troops are inserted into the arena of war well ahead of any planned battles in order to get accustomed to the heat before they engage with the enemy.” Given this information, you could say that Don had a two-week edge on the men who were chasing him, except for the fact that they were there in numbers that increased almost hourly, tightening the ring of fire that was now encircling Don.

  As Day Three wore on with still no sightings, sergeants Purcell and Guzman received a tip. There was a strange guy in the aqueduct at 170th Street and Highway 138. Dozens of tips had been pouring in, and they were trying to follow up on the ones that sounded credible. This one did. From their command post inside a large LASD bus on Palmdale Boulevard, they sent out a call to SWAT at the convent. Two deputies were dispatched immediately, jumping into a black-and-white, racing south on 180th street, turning onto the highway, and heading for the aqueduct. At 170th Street, they fanned down the embankment, coming face-to-face with three local cops who were already there, waiting for the fugitive. But he was not there, and as far as they knew, he had not been there earlier; the tip was an error or maybe a prank, phoned in by a local, maybe a friend of Kueck’s, who had been watching the manhunt on television and rooting for Kueck’s escape. Or possibly it was just an error—there was somebody in the aqueduct at that location, but not the wanted man. Or perhaps, once again, Donald Kueck was right there, withering away in the heat, his brain starting to sizzle, desperately needing a drink, just yards away from freedom.

  Even as he fought to fend off dementia, he knew that sooner or later the searchers would leave and all he would have to do is wait. Stay quiet and wait, just like the creatures who lived there—all of the four-legged and scaly and winged ones who were his friends, teachers, and allies. As afternoon faded away and the ever-so-diminishing temperature began to coax animals from the lairs that protected them from the heat of day, so too did our hermit emerge from wherever it was that he was hiding, perhaps popping his head out like one of his beloved ground squirrels, testing the atmosphere for threats, or even realizing that the coast was clear for a split second in the scheme of
things and fully standing up—safe to do from the lower elevation of a wash—so that his head was just a bit over its edge, and he could see and hear things, like a jackrabbit with its big antennae-like ears, listening for the distant whirr of chopper blades or something closer, like the breath of another man or men, for that is how attuned the longtime dweller of the desert becomes, particularly one that has become preternatural. Detecting no threat, our hermit retrieved his cell phone from a pocket. It was 6 PM, dinner time, and across the countryside families were gathering around the table. Some would issue a prayer of thanks for the bounty before them. Others would dig right in. Yet others would have a fight, and somewhere someone would get killed. As the horses of the sky pulled sun’s chariot ever westward, the urge for evening contact and succor—whatever was driving it and however it played out—affected all living things, and Donald Kueck placed another call. Once again it was to his daughter. “I’m in the desert,” he said. “My phone is losing power, but don’t worry, the sheriffs will never find me.”

  Rebecca asked him if he had killed Steve Sorensen. “No,” he said. “A couple of tweakers broke in while I was out shooting snakes. They stole my car.” He suggested that they were the ones who killed the deputy. Rebecca was concerned for his safety and asked if he was planning to give himself up and explain what happened. “No,” he said. “They’ll blame me.” “What are you going to do?” she said. Her father told her that he was planning to leave the country—and there the phone call ended.

  The desert continued to cool, and as darkness fell across the Mojave, all manner of night hunters were traversing the sands and the skies—hawks on the prowl for lizards or mice, ravens looking for rabbits or young tortoise, bobcats and coyotes on the hunt for small animals, and then of course there were members of law enforcement, who had listened in on Kueck’s latest phone call with the device they had installed in Rebecca’s phone the day Don had killed Steve. The announcement that he was leaving the country was strange. Was Kueck serious? To do that, he’d have to change his looks and have a lot of money stashed somewhere. Moreover, he’d have to get it. Did he have it? Were friends helping him? Was he taunting cops, knowing that they were recording his phone calls to his daughter and realizing in his bones that there was no way he was getting out of the Antelope Valley? Did he secretly want to be caught in a showdown? No one knew the answer, but cops were taking the threat seriously. Now news choppers were circling the desert, breaking into network programs with live coverage of the manhunt. As Don’s friends watched the saga unfold on television, they figured if anyone could outfox a desert posse, it would be the man they had visited many times in his far-flung, makeshift abode.

  “Dad . . . Dad . . . are you there?” Rebecca had said as her father’s phone crackled and then faded out, and then she too turned to the news to see if anything had happened. She had grown close to her father in the past few years; after the death of her brother—Don’s son—Kueck had clung to her tightly, trying to maintain the connection, even as he was spiraling down. She had begun to count on him for protection and safety—the kind of things that fathers provide—and she felt that he had done so, albeit in a nonconventional, erratic way. He sometimes showed up with toys for his grandchildren that he had scrounged from the desert—playthings discarded by desert families living off the grid and possibly on the run themselves—but also arriving on occasion with guns, tweaked on various visits, once offering to kill an abusive boyfriend and take the body into the desert, and other times just wanting to hang out, talk, eat, and sleep. The phone calls from Don—three so far—were beginning to make Rebecca feel weird. She was used to his unpredictable behavior; there was even a routine to it. A month before he killed Sorensen, he had visited Rebecca for the last time. “He almost ran over some guys who were working on the driveway,” she says months later. “I knew he was doing speed. He slept for a couple of days, and then he was all right.” Before he left, he took a few hits of speed from his nasal inhaler. “He was like Charlie Chaplin,” she says, recalling her final image of her father. “He was running around and breaking things.” But Rebecca figured she’d see him again soon. He needed her, and she needed him; it was a connection between two people who were trying to hold on. And now it was all disappearing. On Day One, when Don called, she didn’t know what had happened to Steve Sorensen. On Day Two, she had seen the news and wasn’t sure if her father had killed him. She wanted to believe him when he said he didn’t because what daughter wants to believe otherwise? By Day Three, she knew he did it—and she knew why. He was never going back to jail, he had told her and others many times, joining a macabre and frightening chorus of graduates of the California prison system, one of the most notorious incarceration operations in the world.

  “It was all very weird,” she would later say about her communications with her fugitive father. “One day I’m talking to my dad, who’s supposed to protect you, and the next day I’m talking to a killer.” It would be three days before he called again, and that would begin a series of calls that became Don’s final statements.

  TENDER GOODNESS

  Sit in the mud, my friend, and aspire to the skies!

  —Ivan Turgenev, “Enough”

  FOR TEN YEARS OR SO, DON’S FAMILY HAD NO CONTACT WITH him. There were occasional letters but that was it and they grew concerned, especially as word of his son’s plight began to reach them and they enlisted the aid of a cop to try to track him down. Finally they were able to find him in his tent in the Mojave, and from then on they were back in his life. As much as they tried to keep Don afloat, there was not much anyone seemed to be able to do for his son, Jello. It was clear to all concerned that the teenage boy was in big trouble, sinking deeper into his drug use, enduring a violent household, and finding refuge either on the streets or in the homes of others, such as it was. There was a summer during which Lynne and Peggy had brought Jello to Mobile, Alabama, their hometown, so he could get away from everything, spend time with his grandparents, and possibly learn that things didn’t have to be so hard. Of course such knowledge is not acquired easily, and during the period he was visiting his family, it became clear that there was only one way to fix this boy—his father.

  But could two broken people save each other? It had happened before, just as prison inmates are coupled up with abandoned dogs or wild horses and then remake each other and form a new kind of union. It would take some coaxing on the part of Don’s sisters; he had not seen his kids in ages. Told to stay away by his ex-wife, figuring that they were being taken care of by her new husband, and quite possibly okay with not having the responsibility of being a parent, he had not really tried to make contact. At some point, with his daughter Rebecca’s help, the idea of a reunion was broached. It happened at Bob’s Big Boy in Riverside, the town where the kids were living; considering that Don was on a budget and that kids love burgers, it was a natural choice.

  But it wasn’t just the burgers that made the place a favorite for kids; there was the Big Boy himself, a giant-sized icon with big blue eyes and tousled hair, wearing red-and-white checked overalls and carrying a cheese-topped double-decker on a platter, presiding over the entrance to every Big Boy in the chain, Bob’s or otherwise, ever since 1936, when the enterprise had been dreamed up, reportedly in response to a hefty six-year-old who would sweep the floor at what was then called Bob’s Pantry in exchange for giant burgers. Goofy and embarrassing or ironic and collectible by today’s standards, the cheerful sentinel served an era well, welcoming all the hungry souls who dined under its shadow and providing giant platters of burgers and fries that led to a moment of satisfaction. And too, there were other delights, such as the Scrammy Hammy, which appealed to families on a budget, and items such as ice cream sundaes and shakes were favored by children, and it wasn’t unusual for families across America, during a certain time in our history, if they were within range of a franchise, to have a weekly outing to Bob’s Big Boy, or a Big Boy restaurant attached to another name, an event that was a
gift from parents to kids and one that is remembered by children who once went there—now grown-up with children of their own—with a certain amount of yearning, and who sometimes post their memories in chat rooms and other forums, lamenting the lack of a Big Boy in their communities, planning reunions at ones that still exist, trying to return to a warp in which the tender goodness listed on Big Boy menus conjured not just desirable food but a state yearned for by all, perhaps defining what went on in certain families or at their own dinner tables, wherever and however those happened to coalesce—and always they return and happily they dine, if only for a moment, under the big eyes of the ever-smiling and contented child who stands guard at the entrance.