The Feral Detective

by Jonathan Lethem

  A wind was rising.

  “It’s rented in my name,” I said.

  “I won’t fink,” Laird said. “It’s easier me driving than telling you where to go in the dark.”

  “Involves too many words, huh?”

  “That’s a thing, yeah. Maybe Mr. Heist mentioned to you, I have a few extra voices in my head.”

  “I might have overheard something about that.” He’d done well enough mingling voices with the men at the off-highway campsite, but maybe those were nearer to the variety he heard in his head. I wasn’t going to quibble. I handed him the keys. With this wind picking up, I wanted to be inside the Jeep. “Do you have a license?”

  He gave me a look I suppose I deserved. “You know there’s no police out here, right, Mary Poppins?”

  “I know.”

  “We’re going to drive into the Twentynine Palms base. Marine land, where they train for all their desert shit. If the MPs spot us inside their perimeter, they aren’t going to be worrying about our driver’s licenses. Apart from that it’s no-man’s-land.”

  “I’m just thinking about the insurance.”

  “Close your eyes and drive in any direction, you’d go an hour before you hit anything. That’s exactly what these people are doing out here.”

  “Aren’t we likely to be rock climbing at some point?”

  “The Bears you want pretty much swore off rock climbing when they got old. It’s a lot of work welding car parts back together. They’re more in the market for things like lumbar support. We’ll find them on the flats.”

  “So you learned something back there?”

  “Let’s say I eliminated some variables.”

  “They know where the elders are?”

  “It’s more about knowing where the marines are conducting their fake-Fallujah deal these days. Where they aren’t, that’s where we’ll go. I have an idea or two.”

  “Let’s go, then.”

  “Uh-uh. I don’t know what you might have heard, but I’m not a nocturnal animal.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning I know a place we can shelter for the night, a natural windbreak, not far. You don’t want to drive in the dark if you’re concerned about the insurance, anyway. And there’s the kid.” He turned his head to indicate Melinda, still ministering to the dogs, out of earshot.

  “I thought you could drive with your eyes closed.”

  “Maybe I overstated. There’s abandoned mines, you’d hate to run into one in the dark. Plus, once we’re on military acreage, you could blunder up on unexploded ordnance.”

  “I want the cover of night.”

  My stubbornness had an undertow of despair. Our approach to the encircled RVs had already trashed my expectations, which were based on the earlier Jeep jaunt with Heist, searching for Rabbits. I’d wanted to engage with the Bears on intricate terrain, where they might not see me coming, where Spark-style stealth and swiftness could win the day. The Bears disappointed me in having abandoned the hills. It seemed sad. It also left me without even a pretend plan. To brazenly waltz in across the playa in the company of a schizoid Marfan-syndrome case wasn’t appealing; now Laird suggested we’d do so in broad daylight.

  “This actually isn’t a discussion,” he said. “Because I need to sleep. Unless you want to slip me one of whatever mother’s little helper’s keeping you jacked up all night.”

  “I’m not jacked up on anything.”

  “Well, maybe not something you can share. Too bad, I’d love a taste. I’d like to slow you down, or speed me up. Either way you’d come out less annoying.”

  “I’m just a New Yorker,” I said.

  “You’re a lady on a mission, that’s for sure.”

  “So, we ride at dawn?”

  “We ride at dawn, Mary Poppins.”

  56

  LAIRD SKIRTED US PAST A FEW MORE OF THE RV ENCAMPMENTS, EIGHT OR ten miles into the night. I tried, semi-surreptitiously, to track the mileage, though with no road markers of any kind it wasn’t as if I could have retraced the route. Laird’s destination, his windbreak, was a convenient arroyo notched between two spills of boulders, a Jeep’s-width rut below the horizon. Tread marks said others had employed it not long before.

  Laird killed the lights, and the sky filled in. Melinda and the dogs were already slumberish in the rear. I didn’t know what Laird had in mind but he took himself out and made a dugout in the sand beneath the Jeep’s chassis, ceding me the front seats. Not that stretching out across the gearshift was a temptation. I cracked the window—the surplus of bodies generated a lot of steam and stink, even minus the giant—and tried to close my eyes.

  I might not be on any mother’s little helpers, but I couldn’t deny I was wired. I wished I hadn’t surrendered half my In-N-Out burger to Vacuum, or that I’d said yes to a pulled pork sandwich at the RV encampment. Well, a Trump November and a Heist January had been good for my thighs, at least.

  I rolled up the window when I realized I could hear Laird snoring from underneath the Jeep, even over the steady squalling wind.

  57

  MY FATHER HATED WESTERNS, BUT THERE WAS ONE HE LIKED. HE WATCHED it every few years. It was in color, and starred a strange and embarrassing mixture of aging movie stars and ’60s television celebrities. At one point, they all sang together, in a jail. My father would have said he liked the film because of its director, but I think he liked it because the characters, a bunch of misfits, came together to form a kind of family, a better family than we had. As if to underline this, my mother would always storm from the room when the Western was on. I remember her calling it “unspeakably dumb.”

  Maybe my mother had made the mistake of identifying with the movie’s female lead, unable to execute the reversal that Arabella had performed on Leonard Cohen’s “Chelsea Hotel #2.” The female lead spent a lot of the movie stuck in an upstairs room, in a corset. She made a small contribution, if I recalled right, by dropping a flowerpot from her second-story window, onto the head of one of the bad guys. But she wasn’t involved in the finish, in which the motley family of men destroyed the villains using rifles and sticks of dynamite. Along with a pulled pork sandwich, I could wish I’d liberated something from a gun rack in one of those pickup trucks, back at the RV compound. My feral family was all I had. It wouldn’t be much, if my sense of chaos failed to rise to the coming occasion.

  58

  LAIRD KEPT HIS PROMISE. IT WAS DAWN WHEN HE CLIMBED BACK IN AND started the Jeep. Melinda and the dogs and I crawled out for a pee, then hurried back inside, while he kept the motor running. The sun was just up but the wind hadn’t slacked off, and it was colder than it had been at any time during the night, it seemed to me. The windshield wore a thin yellow layer of the finest desert grit, the same stuff that had trailed the off-highway vehicles into the RV camp. I would have spritzed the windshield and run the wipers—I would have tried the radio too—but it wasn’t me at the wheel. Melinda and I shared a water bottle with the dogs, nearly the last. Laird just drove.

  Despite Laird’s suggestion that they represented the elders’ livelihood, the carnival items looked shored in ruin, conveying a definite “Ozymandias” vibe. Look On My Works, Ye, and Despair. The bouncy house was folded in on itself, half covered with a green tarp pinned in eight or ten places with desert rocks yet flapping madly in the wind. The rest was still, seeming long abandoned. The Tilt-A-Whirl devices resembled hermit crabs retracted into their shells, their limbs drawn down to endure the wind’s assault. Two of the chipped and rusted single-seater spaceships in which a child would ride had been unbolted from their mounts. They sat half-dug in sand, akimbo and forlorn, as if awaiting a wave that would never come to set them bobbing away. Two of the flatbed trucks that might have moved the stuff were parked to one side, looking as inert and distressed as the rocket ships.

  The Ferris wheel, at least, stood at a right angle to the earth. It was a little farther off, uphill, beside a windowless storage shed. Like the rest, it appeared abandoned,
but in contrast to the rest, it towered over the scene, conveyed a certain weary grandeur. Maybe the wheel was the last moneymaker in the Bears’ arsenal, though it was hard to imagine making adequate return on the gasoline for towing it back and forth through the wastes.

  We’d arrived after maybe half an hour’s driving, along what just barely resembled an established trail, scantly littered with human signs—tipped road markers, a rusted gas canister, a cold fire pit ringed with beer cans. The carnival materials sat at the mouth of a ledge of tumbled rocks, beyond which lay an ancient roadbed: asphalt split by time and weeds and gated with a scribble of barbed wire and a POSTED sign. The road vanished off among irregular boulders and out of sight. It was the most variegated landscape for miles. A puff of gray rose from beyond the outcroppings, maybe half a mile off. It looked like steady exhalation from a chimney, or at least a morning fire.

  Laird halted the Jeep at the barbed wire gate. I read the fine print on the posting. It was a mining claim. Then Laird began to crank the steering wheel, to move us beyond the wire.

  “Could we stop and talk a minute?” I asked.

  “What now?”

  “Let’s stretch our legs.”

  Taking a cue, Melinda climbed out and wandered off with the dogs. Laird switched off the engine. The tank was half-full, but I felt further along than that. It’s too late to stop now. The air was suddenly full of insects, a weird cloud that surrounded us but didn’t sting. I slapped them away anyhow.

  “Flying ants,” said Laird. “They don’t usually look for a new home in the winter.” It was another reminder that everyone knew this desert better than I did. “Must have been flooded out.”

  “Floods seem to follow you around.”

  He glared. I flicked an ant off my cheek.

  “So, what’s up ahead?” I nodded at the entrance to the boulders.

  “Mining camp. Old wrecked shacks, a couple of them. It’s a pretty good bet they’ve got Charles in there, especially if he’s hurt like you say. I’m also hoping they’ve got breakfast. I can’t subsist on pure anxiety, like you.”

  “I don’t want to go straight in like that.”

  “Unless you mean to fly over with your umbrella, straight in’s the only way.”

  “I just can’t.”

  “Maybe you should tell me what you’re not telling me.”

  “Do you know the name Solitary Love?”

  “New king, right? Scary dude? I never met him. Guess this is my chance.”

  I shook my head. “He got killed. I’m involved. The Bears only saw me at night, but . . .”

  “Well, hell, Mary Poppins.” He turned his head to several points on the compass, like a big bald owl. “You were, what, just thinking of trading me for Charles? Like one big ugly problem is as good as the next?”

  “I never thought that.”

  “Right, now say what you did think.”

  “They’re paranoid, right?”

  “In what sense?”

  “They believe in contrails, black helicopters, I don’t know what else—you tell me.”

  “I’m paranoid too.”

  “We can use that against them,” I said, desperately trying to ignore his remark. “I just have to figure out how.”

  “You can bring black helicopters? Are you a police person, Mary Poppins?”

  “No.”

  “Did you call the police?”

  “Only a little. Not to the desert. I sent them to the mountain.”

  “You’re making me confused. I’m going to go in and see if Charles needs my help, okay? You can wait here if you want.”

  I looked for Melinda. I couldn’t see her. Miller and Vacuum trotted uphill, toward the Ferris wheel. The new sun glinted violently through the wheel’s spokes and struts, nearly blinding me. I looked straight up instead, into the sky, searching for a sign, for a contrail I could use to intimidate a nest of Bears, claiming some high power of interpretation. The sky was empty. Wind and shame chafed my face. Here I’d be again, as with Heist. The woman sidelined, waiting for results while a man plunged into action on my behalf. I might as well be in a corset, looking for a chance to drop a flowerpot.

  “You’ll come back?”

  “There’s no other way out. I won’t ding up your ride.”

  “Ding it all you want. Just—bring Charles out.”

  “If he’s even in there.”

  “If he’s even in there.”

  “Anyhow, maybe I’ll bring back some breakfast.”

  Laird gunned the Jeep back into life, then curved it around the ineffectual wire barrier. I watched him go. Before he rose up and into the confluence of boulders he was shrouded in a flume of the yellow dust.

  59

  I WANTED TO FIND MELINDA. I CIRCLED BACK TO THE FLATBEDS AND THE hibernating Tilt-A-Whirls and the flapping decompressed bouncy house, but she wasn’t there. The dogs were the clue. I should follow them. I looked uphill again, at the Ferris wheel. A residual image of its form was still blazed onto my retina from my earlier glance, and it printed false wheels on the screen of the blue sky. I wanted to be where that sun was. It was too cold down in this rocky hollow full of moribund rusted machines. Laird’s departure was still traced in a funnel of silt, and the wind wouldn’t quit blowing it back in my teeth.

  As I climbed the hill, I caught a better angle. They made a silhouette scene in the glare: Melinda stood with the dogs at the base of the Ferris wheel, talking to a fat man in a chair.

  60

  IT SEEMED TO TAKE FOREVER, CLIMBING THAT HILL. THE BEATING OF blood in my ears and behind my eyes made the sun seem to pulse between the wheel’s spokes. The ride was bigger than I’d realized, once I was under it. The whole thing was made of rusted steel, the armature raw, the gondolas painted in chipped pink, yellow, purple, and pea green. The entire device was portable, with eight double sets of wheels attached to a truck-bed frame, but it also featured eight stabilizing feet, extended on all sides to find spiderlike purchase on the desert hill. I supposed at an actual carnival the truck bed and the feet would be concealed with colorful panels, bunting, sideshow advertisements for the Two-Headed Baby or the Moon Girl. Nevertheless, unlike the disabled Tilt-A-Whirls, the wheel was set up and ready to go.

  The man was up out of his chair by the time I reached them there. He’d unlatched the metal grate door of the two-seater cage that dangled nearest the ground, swinging squeakily on its ancient axle. Melinda climbed in.

  “Wait—” I panted.

  “You too?” In contrast to the wheel, the man wasn’t so much bigger up close, or taller standing than he’d been sitting. He wasn’t a giant of a Bear, if he was one. Not built on the scale of Solitary Love, not close, even if he’d been decades younger. Nor a Shockley looming monstrous on his deathbed. Instead, he had a droll nimble quality, for a fat man. He made me think of Nolan, which should have told me something, but didn’t quite. His smile was disarmingly warm. In short, a Yogi Bear.

  “Melinda—” I began. I instantly regretted supplying the man with her name. “Honey, we don’t have a ticket—”

  “Gratis, today,” said the man. He exuded mildness and tolerance to a nearly embarrassing degree. “You can even ride in your own cab, if you prefer. She’s a big girl, doesn’t seem scared in the least.”

  “No.” I moved toward Melinda, who’d situated herself at one corner of the love seat and begun to buckle in.

  “I want a ride,” said Melinda.

  Was it so much to ask? For a feral girl, a Ferris ride? Between her glum wish and the grinning man, I felt bewildered into compliance. I’d still had no coffee. The rented Jeep that had departed with Laird had borne off with it the better part of my sense and intention. The wind continued to bruise us, though it carried less of the earth with it. But its voice, a steady low whine, made it difficult to think. I went in reaching for Melinda’s seat belt, even as I felt only half-decided that I’d forbid her the Bear’s likely harmless offer. I had to sit to get hold of her safety buckle. T
he man latched the cage door shut behind me and moved to the wheel’s operating lever. I leaped up and tried to budge the grate that had closed over us. I couldn’t.

  “Why is this locked?”

  “Standard specs,” the man said. His voice shed its tone of curdled ingratiation. “Liability concerns, litigious American society, you know the score. Take a seat now.” He squeezed the handle and wrenched the lever backward. A grinding, whirring, wheezing sound emerged, as if the gigantic device was seizing, inoperative. There was no masking backdrop of calliope music, just the whistling wind, seeming to originate with the sun itself, and my screaming at the man to switch it off, which he ignored. I couldn’t imagine the wheel turning. It turned. I grabbed Melinda’s hand and we rode it up backward, in our swinging cell, to the top of the arc. Then he jammed the lever forward. The machine grumbled to a halt and we dangled like a teardrop, at perihelion.

  61

  THE WIND, swinging our cage. Miller and Vacuum, snouts up, barking like machines, like angry tape loops.

  62

  THE CREAKING of our cage on its grease-black hinge.

  63

  VISIBLE NOW THROUGH THE GRID OF SHADOW: THE SUN-BRIGHT CORRUGATED tin roof of the storage shed and, behind it, a drab green Econoline van with swollen tires and wooden bumpers. Beside it, Heist’s Jeep, the first, which we’d abandoned to hike into the Rabbit camp. The vehicles were tucked in a hollow, deliberately hidden from the trail by which we’d approached. The Jeep felt like a piece of my body that had been stolen. The souped-up van looked like a black sun, a piece of darkness blazing with the same fever as the white sun now fully cut loose from the horizon.