The Feral Detective

by Jonathan Lethem

  The land was the baseline here, the only reality principle. Any scatterings that humans placed upon it were provisional, and mostly in decline. Many structures were mere tatters, abandoned and even half-collapsed buildings that offered themselves back to the dust in real time, rusted hulks of cars, cyclone fencing marking irrelevant limits between unclaimed lots. Elsewhere came eruptions of slick new gas stations and chain restaurants, big box stores, the same new crap going up everywhere. More often the local reality reasserted itself, shabby pocket malls filled by outlets featuring massage and tattoo, vape and reptiles, as if the only way to make yourself right for this place was to be wreathed in lizards, smoke, and body ink.

  In the last ten minutes or so we’d left most of even those marginal stabs at civilization behind us. Now, before I could interrogate Heist about his funny time with the Bears, he swung into a gas station, maybe the last outpost before we drove off the edge of the known. There he gassed up while I replenished with a truly abysmal cup of coffee.

  My phone had a bar of signal, and while Heist went inside for his own pit stop I harvested the e-mails that had been stacking up since I’d climbed the mountain. My former reality was in a frenzy, bracing itself for the idiot’s inauguration. I supposed if I were back there I’d be hand-painting a sign, organizing for the scheduled protest march. From this distance it seemed impossible to believe. It was still barely eight in the morning. We got back in the Jeep and Heist ran us up off Twentynine Palms Highway, northward, if I trusted the sun.

  The cyclone fencing gave way to scribbles of barbed wire, then nothing at all. The road itself was the last human thing etched in this barrenness; the rest was behind us.

  “You were saying about the Bears.”

  “I’m tired of talking.”

  I handed him the shitty coffee and arched my eyebrow. He resumed his story.

  25

  THE BEARS HAD A THING FOR THE FIRSTBORN. THE MANCHILD, HE WHO’D been dubbed first Baby, then Boy, then, for the color of his eyes, Brown. Little as they wanted to change diapers, forage edible cacti, stir stewpots, defecate in designated holes, or sit fireside for hours in pursuit of consensus decisions, they took an interest in the kid’s progress. The Bears had begun to range farther, those days, to Cleghorn Lakes and Death Valley and the Salton Sea, some on motorcycles and some in trailers. This was also the beginning of their Mount Baldy pilgrimages, their annual ascent to the snows, to that summit of lapis lazuli and secret rituals. But Mojave government lands were still the axis of their wanderings, and they had their eye on the boy. If nobody knew who his father was, it might be all the Bears collectively, why not?

  The Bears still dropped in on the Rabbits too, a ritual occurrence somewhere between a jubilee and a raid. By the time Brown was nine, he was leader of a band of Rabbit younglings that kept their own company, rock climbing and mud-bathing and killing snakes and taking secret occupancy of their own caves and shacks. It was then the Bears put their claim on him. The time had come, they informed the Rabbits by fiat. So it was that Brown went among the Bears—Charles Heist, though not yet under that name, at nine years old.

  The Bears had a kind of king. I’d heard of him already, Burkhardt, Bear-Killer. A onetime Digger, and a onetime Hells Angel, Burkhardt was the strongest and most charismatic among them. He was also the oldest, and talked constantly of his impending death, claiming he was riven with cancer, though he showed no signs of this. Burkhardt promised that any day now, with little warning, he’d walk off to some high point and let himself die blazing in the sun, to be picked at by birds. In the man-cult the Bears had been cultivating among themselves, at Burkhardt’s encouragement—an unsystematic muddle of equal parts Henry Miller and Edgar Rice Burroughs, of scraps of Sun Tzu, Castaneda, and John Wayne—the boy had been projected as their totemic progeny. A pure product of the desert, Brown not only ought to live among them, he was to be raised to succeed Bear-Killer as their tribal king.

  In that first year Brown ran back from the Bears to find the Rabbits. One of his favorite of the mothers (he’d never been sure which was his birth mother, or whether she even still lived with the Rabbits) taught him to read then, using an old paperback of David Copperfield. Less than a year after this escape he was found, during one of his wanderings, by Bears, and was retrieved to their camp; three years later, at thirteen, he crossed to the Rabbits again.

  On this second return, he found the Rabbits had undergone certain convulsions, become more righteously resistant—they now defined the Bears as hardly better than rapists, and had armed themselves against them. Brown was treated in part as a spy from their camp (and, Heist couldn’t deny, some of his curiosity to rejoin the Rabbits at that time was certainly sexual). Some mothers drew him in, others reviled his influence on the younger ones. Most of the kids he’d led no longer recalled him. He lived in a measured distance from the Rabbits, then—lived as a semi-predator, a creature of mixed purposes, yet one accepting scraps of nurture. And yes, he’d spent some nights cuddling with packs of dogs, scrambling after them on all fours, trying out their society.

  Feral? Sure, that might be the word for it.

  Brown had spent his coming of age this way, shuttling between the groups and the spaces between, fundamentally unhomed anywhere but in his own skin. Finally, at fourteen, he’d hitchhiked into the town of Palm Desert, a metropolis by his standards, one he’d known only in a handful of wondering visits. There, he’d turned himself in to the police for referral to Child Protective Services. His belief in the Bears’ reach, their eyes on him from the dunes and pinnacles, extended to the certainty they’d drag him back unless he placed himself inside some citadel of civilization.

  Arthur and Mary Heist were an elderly couple in Redlands. The Heists had raised seven foster children before Brown, who’d be their last. He lived with them for just four years, time enough to gain a name, a social security number, a GED, and a reluctant dose of Christian Scientism. From there, he’d entered basic training. Through six years in the reserves and a flop out of San Bernardino Community College, Heist endured a spell of manual labor at the Long Beach shipyards. Only then did he feel his way into what might have been an inevitable calling: dragging strays of every species out of distressing circumstances. In this, his stay with Arthur and Mary had served as a kind of apprenticeship. His foster parents’ long and mutually trusting relationship with CPS provided Charles Heist a route to retrace back into the Inland Empire’s infrastructure of rescue for runaways and abused children, and for teenagers snared in cults or networks of trafficking.

  Only after his unique practice in Upland had been established did Heist, after ten years, return to the desert, to find what had become of the Rabbits. He went there to pay his respects to the mothers but also to spirit away any of their children or teens who told him they wanted to go. He informed the adults, as gently as possible, that the decision wasn’t theirs, but that of the child—the person—in question. Charles “Brown” Heist had his provenance to make this indisputable. He could quote their own principles back to the Rabbits. He was also the product of them.

  All this I had to drag from Heist, the proverbial pulling teeth. He wouldn’t talk of what life among the Bears had been like for him, at nine or ten, or later. He was ashamed of having been groomed into this yin-yang halfling. It was both the mystery of his Bear self and his shame at it that drew me to him. I wanted him then again, with a tiny seizure of desire that startled me, that didn’t seem fit for daylight or our mission into the sands. I was getting overly identified with my cage, the Jeep, as if by driving it, Heist drove me too. I wanted to cover the dog’s eyes and do something to Heist while he shifted gears. I also felt jealous.

  “Did you ever have a girlfriend?”

  “Depends what you mean.”

  “Did you do—Bear things?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “After the Rabbits, they just lived without women? I find that hard to believe, Charles.”

  “There ar
e always women. The desert’s more full of people than you’d think. The Bears had a lot of groupies in the trailer population. As I said, they ranged wide.”

  That word, groupies, blew an ugly little fuse in my imagination’s engine. I thought of Arabella, of all I wished to be true for her about how the world was changing, and how it wasn’t, really. “You were a teenage boy.”

  He said nothing.

  “I get it,” I said. “It’s a Bears, Bears, Bears world, but it wouldn’t be nothin’ without a woman or a girl.”

  “Phoebe.”

  “Never mind, don’t tell me. I don’t need it in my head.” The Bears might be no more than a rustic enactment of Donald Trump and Anthony Weiner and Bill Cosby, the usual shitty reality I’d fled but that no one left behind on any road, on any inhabited planet.

  We were quiet for some time after that. Heist hung a right at a dirt road leading off toward the distant topography, then stopped the Jeep after putting the last of the paved roadway a few hundred yards behind us. He and the dog jumped out, Jessie for a pee against a rusted steel post, Heist to fiddle with the wheels. At first I thought he was checking the pressure, but he held the tool too long against one hissing tire, meanwhile squinting into the long-shadowed hills.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. I’m letting some air out.” Now he circled the Jeep, venting from each tire in turn.

  “What’s the big idea?”

  “Soft tires grapple better. We’re going to do some rock hopping.”

  The next hours were spent climbing on the softened tires out of the flats, into the articulated rockscape, using creek beds of tumbled boulders as our street. The Jeep lumbered side to side like a searching spider, needing every inch of its clearance to keep the chassis from ruin on the points of the rock. Then, abruptly, the clearance wasn’t enough. We’d crunch sickeningly into place, settling backward in a granite crevasse.

  Each time I imagined the Jeep was wrecked, speared like a crab on an impassable stone. But Heist never flinched. He’d get out to puzzle an approach. Usually he backed us off the obstacle, then wrenched the wheels to some implausible steering radius to scale it from another angle. Other times he’d shift a few stones beneath the tires, giving us something to climb. At these delays, Jessie leaped out to study the stones with Heist, while I sat in the shade of some rock or a twisted tree or cactus, trying, frankly, not to whine. Then Heist would beckon me back into the car. Revving like the engine might explode, he’d thrust us up and over some boulder, the mushy rubber squealing along some diagonal wall, the chassis shrieking clear of its prison. More than once I praised my nonexistent Lord for the roll bars, so certain was I that we’d vaulted sideways to ruin.

  We lurched this way at speeds maybe totaling five miles an hour, maybe fewer, but soon enough it felt unimaginable that there had been a road, that anyone could follow or could want to even try to follow where we’d gotten. We shared water, the three of us. The desert smelled of seeping heat, which the sun had trapped in the rocks cumulatively, over eons. The wide vistas disappeared. We were always at the bottom of some arroyo or maze of stone, never at the top, where the views presumably were. This actually eased my sky anxiety. The Jeep was stuck time and again in a rut inside a rut inside a rut. Our sole object the next few yards in front of us.

  My mind was like that as well. Life narrows at transition points, the wardrobe between England and Narnia, the cloistered space capsule launching to another world. I began to try to assist Heist in shifting rocks to put under our wheels, so I wouldn’t feel useless. He accepted my help uncritically, but ungratefully too. We were in whatever we were in together, and since we barely knew each other, we were alone too. Yet the Jeep needed to get out of the next trap, and the next—there was work to do.

  Be vewwy vewwy quiet, I told myself. We’we hunting wabbits.

  26

  THE FIRST RABBIT ENCAMPMENT WASN’T MUCH MORE IMPRESSIVE THAN what I’d seen on entering the San Antonio Wash, when the giant Laird had emerged from his hidey-hole in the rain. Like that site, this was a refugee village, made of salvage, with buckets set out for rainwater, ringed by abject evidence of homesteading projects taken up and abandoned. There weren’t teepees but two low adobe huts, roofed with sheet metal. The first Rabbit popped out of one of these and stood before us warily. The sun made her an outline, a flat silhouette, and I couldn’t read her expression, or tell if she recognized Heist. The scene was like that in the Wash, but it was different too, because of the price of distance we’d paid to enter it. The barefoot woman who stood before us, now putting out a hand to let Jessie sniff and lick it, represented the first encounter of two humans on the surface of a distant planet, or the moon at least. Her presence was improbable as that.

  We’d driven free of the last of the rocky traps, off-roading through pylons of tangled Joshua limbs, to a high point now behind us. There Heist had surveyed the landscape, located some clue I couldn’t discern, and the three of us had set out on foot. We left the Jeep and its contents—including our spare water—high on the rise as we scrambled down along a grade. If my purse hadn’t contained my phone I’d have left it behind too. I was grateful it stayed looped around my shoulder, as I felt the likelihood I’d land on my hands at any instant.

  In fact, I might have been more comfortable on all fours. I felt I’d entered a hallucinatory compact with Heist and the dog, to find a place to shed our clothes, and then our human skins. After Heist’s story, I was ready to crawl into some shady dell, there to suck rocks for moisture. It was then, before I lost my mind, that we came into the Rabbit compound.

  “I’m Charles Heist,” the Feral Detective said now. Jessie nosed past the woman, into the hut. The woman didn’t try to stop him, or turn from us at all. My eyes began to adjust to the contrast that had first made her look like a flat cutout against the glare. She might have been twenty or twenty-five—younger than me. But she seemed to gaze out of a WPA photograph, shorn of any vestige of the present, her gray dress practically sackcloth, her hands twisted together at her waist. I wondered if I showed her my iPhone whether she’d worship or bite it.

  “I’m looking for Anita,” Heist said, as gently as if talking to a child or an animal. “She can tell you who I am.”

  “I know who you are,” said the woman. “I know all about you.” She spoke in a dead monotone, giving nothing away. Her eyes were dry as the landscape.

  Heist nodded at me, as if inviting her to examine me for restraints or fresh bruises. “I’m not a Bear.” I chose not to point out that he’d just spent the past hour explaining to me that he was one, at least in part. Instead I nodded encouragement, raised my hand to show I wasn’t sporting rope burns. She just stared.

  “Can you tell us your name?” Heist said to her.

  “Sure, man. I’m Spark.”

  First Sage, now Spark; probably Sunrise and Saffron were out there somewhere if we persisted. I checked the urge to introduce myself as Sluice or Snivel. But I was baffled by Heist’s eggshell-tiptoe approach. Was this part of his feminist superman act? It was at that instant I saw the gunmetal glint in her hands, which weren’t being wrung together in the manner of a stereotypical ninny, as I’d imagined. Rather, her fingers steadied, and slightly twitched, around a pistol she trained on us from the center of her body.

  The opening in the barrel formed a tiny black eye, like the pupil of an animal. I’d never stood at the point of a gun before, never known how it could shrink a whole universe, or seem to swallow my sight. The Bears had had to dig a giant catastrophic mud-and-blood pit on a snowy mountaintop to achieve the same vertiginous result in my mind that this woman had gained with one casual glance of the gun’s eye. Score one for the Rabbits.

  “This is Phoebe,” Heist said. I suspected he’d spoken my name as much to steady me as anything else. “She’s looking for her friend. Do you have a way to contact Anita? Do you have a walkie-talkie?”

  “I don’t know where Anita is right now. Neither do you.”


  “Of course that’s true.”

  “Anita says she doesn’t have time to fuck around anymore.” The woman with the gun spoke to Heist but stared at me.

  “If you’d tell her I was here, she could decide. We’re old friends.”

  “Yeah, but you and I aren’t. And here is where you are right now, not with blah blah blah Anita.”

  “Why blah blah blah?” said Heist.

  “I might know as many things as Anita. I might know more things.”

  “Would you tell them to me?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Okay,” said Heist. “Listen, you could put the gun down.”

  “No, I can’t,” said Spark. “It’s my job.” I’d read the situation inside out. It wasn’t just the gun. Spark was a sentry, not a scatterling. Her mud hut a well-placed post, a kind of border crossing. Or she was a semi-outcast, like Heist had been. The two weren’t exclusive. She might be one of those you pushed to the periphery to face their violence outward, where it served purposes.

  “You did your job already,” Heist suggested to her. “You can see us for what we are.”

  “Nothing’s that easy.”

  “Okay,” said Heist.

  “Take your dog,” said Spark. “I don’t care where you go now.”

  Heist gave a low whistle, something I’d not heard before. Jessie returned from the hut, to our feet. With that, we took Spark’s go-ahead and set off around her, to the right. The pistol stared us over the ridge as we went.

  27

  I HAVE SOME KIND OF ONLY-CHILD-OF-CRAZY-THERAPISTS CHATTER switch that flips on under certain circumstances. It did now, as if the whole desert were one of those rooms drained of oxygen by my parents’ fighting, and which I tried to reanimate by sheer childish will. I began monologuing, telling Heist about Renee Lambert, with whom I’d shared a triple at Thayer Hall, right in the middle of the Yard, freshman year.