A Stranger Lies There

by Stephen Santogrossi

  “Hey, Bernie,” Cat said. “Where is everybody?”

  “The cave, I guess. Kris got some gas.” She gestured over to the table we’d walked by earlier. “See anything you like?”

  “I was thinking about those headphones. But the plug thing is too big.”

  “You read, mister? I got books.”

  “No thank you,” I said, looking at Cat. She asked Bernie if she knew of any strangers passing through recently.

  Bernie shook her head no. Picked up the kid and brushed his hair back with her hand. It fell right back down on his forehead. He was staring hungrily at Cat’s jar of peanut butter. “But you know how I keep to myself. So don’t go by me.”

  Cat told her to take it easy, and we moved on.

  “What’s the cave?” I asked, following her out of the circle.

  “I’ll show you,” she replied, wiping smears of peanut butter on her shirt. “But first I gotta get this stuff off my hands.”

  We came to small ravine just outside the settlement. Below, some hygiene-minded resident had placed an ancient claw-footed bathtub next to a small hot spring bubbling up from the ground. A man sat in the bathtub, poured water over his head from an old cooking pot.

  “There she is,” he said happily when he saw Cat, and stood up without a trace of embarrassment. “You coming with me tonight, honey? I’ll introduce you to Mr. Bob Hope. Play your cards right, maybe I can get you an autograph.”

  Cat laughed, stepped down and dipped her hands into a small puddle. “No thanks,” she said, wringing them dry. “Got a date with Leonard.” The man couldn’t help us with Turret, but asked me how much I’d pay for that autograph.

  We went on, trudging from campsite to campsite. Slab City was a post-apocalyptic vision to me. Something out of a Mel Gibson movie in which all the players were forced to scrape and scramble for every bit of sustenance, but did so gladly in return for the freedom it offered. People like my new friend Cat, who’d drifted from place to place when the money ran out and the landlord called. Addicts and alkies who’d met kindred spirits and weren’t looked down upon for their afflictions. A few had been kicked out of mental hospitals during the Reagan years for not being quite far gone enough. Others had woken up and found themselves here by accident, like sediment that ends up in the lowest place, far below sea level in a forgotten land. A land though, with crystal clear air and no restrictions, bright days and star-filled nights. I could appreciate how one could get used to this. Out here, you could breathe deep, let the vastness and serenity of the desert fill up the empty spaces inside.

  Late morning, we met two teenagers who used the slabs as a base of operations for running illegals up from the border near Calexico. They offered us cold Coronas they’d swiped off one of the freight trains going through Niland. Cat was tired, and thirsty from all that peanut butter, so we followed them to their trailer. The bottles were swimming in a cooler of melted ice.

  “They call us coyotes,” the taller one said proudly, twisting the top off his beer and shaking his long hair back as he drank. Both kids were thin and wiry, with ropelike muscles showing on their arms. They wore dusty jeans low on their hips, and tennis shoes with the laces untied. Neither could have been more than fifteen. “Mikey here got interviewed by some magazine. Took his picture and everything.”

  I sipped my beer. It was surprisingly cold. Cat was nursing hers, making it last.

  “Got a meal out of it too,” Mikey said.

  I said nothing, not wanting to stay too long; they hadn’t seen any newcomers either. Above their heads were several small cupboards. No door fronts on them. Boxes of cereal, canned food, and Sterno. A condom wrapper sat next to the pillow on the bed.

  “You guys had lunch yet?” Cat asked hopefully.

  “I ain’t hungry,” Mikey said, not getting the hint. His friend gulped Corona.

  “See,” the friend said after wiping his lips, “most people don’t know what’s involved in our work. Border Patrol has all kind of high-tech stuff. Magnetic motion sensors. Night vision scopes. Shit, I got buzzed by a prop plane the other day, and I wasn’t doing nothing. And those four-wheelers they got prowl all the way up to the interstate. Never know where they’re gonna be.”

  “Gotta know the territory,” Mikey agreed. “Lotta things can happen when you’re out there. If the van breaks down, or throws an axle or something, you’re screwed. Take your chances in the open desert. Lost one guy that way. Or they get picked up and hauled back across.” He shook his head. “Ain’t no picnic, lemme tell you.”

  “Pretty dangerous, huh?” Cat said.

  “So’s a lotta things,” longhair said, turning to Mikey. “Remember that hitchhiker the other day?”

  “What hitchhiker?” I asked, leaning forward.

  Mikey’s beer stopped midway. “You’re right,” he told me. “Coulda been the guy you said.”

  “Where? Near the prison?”

  “Down that way.”

  “You pick him up?”

  “No,” Mikey’s friend answered. “That’s what I was saying. Felt some bad mojo at the last second.”

  “Enrique woulda killed us if we got his van jacked,” Mikey explained.

  “How old was this guy?” I asked.

  Longhair shrugged. “I don’t know. At least your age. Couple years older maybe.”

  “What else you remember about him?”

  “Not much. He was carrying a toolbox—”

  “It wasn’t a toolbox,” Mikey interrupted. “It was a tackle box. You know. For fishing. And he had a rod with him. One of those telescoping ones. Woulda been nice to have, but we didn’t stop.”

  Something hit me then, and I knew exactly what my next destination would be if nothing panned out here. They couldn’t tell us anything else, so I cut things short and spent the next hour with Cat hunting for more information, without result.

  The last place we visited, the “cave” I’d heard about earlier, was actually a concrete bunker. A collection of desert-modified vehicles sat outside. Three-wheelers with big tires. A ’70s-era Land Rover that had its roof cut off. A few motorbikes and what looked like an old mail truck missing the sliding door. Next to us, a souped up, tricked-out dune buggy rested in the sun like a coiled beast. A pair of legs stuck out from underneath, a set of wrenches and screwdrivers spread in the dirt.

  “Hey, Kris,” Cat said over the noise of a gas-powered generator rattling a few feet away. A frayed, heavy duty extension cord ran from it into the bunker. “Whatcha doin’?”

  “Shock needs adjusting,” he called out.

  “Can we talk to you for a sec?”

  Kris poked his head out and looked at me. “Who are you?”

  “That’s my friend Jim,” Cat answered. I didn’t correct her.

  “Soon as I’m done,” the man said, and continued working.

  “Kris’s been here a long time,” Cat told me.

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” Kris asked from his place on the ground. “Got everything I need here—shit,” he reached for another tool, “—and nothing I don’t.” He tossed the wrench out and stood up, dusting himself off. “No government, no rules, no taxes, no fees. Just this wide-open desert and anything I can scrounge from it,” Kris explained, wiping his hands on a greasy rag. “See that line over there?” he said, pointing over my shoulder. “Up against the mountains?” I nodded, spotting a concrete wash cutting through the desert. “That’s the Coachella Canal. On the other side? Well, that’s the promised land. There’s gold in them hills, falling from the skies,” he said, Cat laughing merrily. “And right behind me is my living room. I’ll show you.”

  We followed the cables inside. The size of the place surprised me. Some sort of underground storage area much larger than a bunker. The first thing I saw was a TV, which ten or so people were watching, some lying back on a stained sectional sofa, several others in chairs and on the floor. A refrigerator hummed in the corner. It must have been twenty degrees cooler than outside. Dim and comfortable. A
window air conditioner sat on a table near the entrance, blowing cold air. I wondered if Turret had ever been down here.

  “What do you think?” Kris asked.

  “I’m looking for somebody,” I said. “Maybe you’ve seen him.”

  Kris glanced at Cat, then addressed me with a grin. “Everybody’s looking for something. We all found it by accident.”

  But only when you let it all go, Deirdre said in my memory. “His name’s Glenn Turret. Late fifties. If he was here, it would have been sometime in the last couple of weeks.”

  Kris shook his head. “Can’t help you. Only strangers I run acrosst lately are you and all those retired folks.”

  I nodded, disappointed once again. The TV was playing some old mystery on a beat-up VCR. I walked over to it and hit “stop.” “Anybody here know a Glenn Turret?” I asked over the protests and the snow on the screen.

  “Who do you think you are?”

  “Turn the damn TV back on.”

  “I need to find him,” I continued. Kris got a beer from the refrigerator, shaking his head, while Cat went over and stood in front of the air conditioner, billowing her shirt to cool off. “White guy. Middle-aged, alone. I’ll turn the movie right back on.”

  Nothing but a few hostile, impatient looks. I hit “play,” apologizing as I did so. Outside, I heard Kris speak to Cat. “Your friend could be a little more—”

  A fighter jet streaked overhead, cutting the silence of the desert with a thunderous scream. Seconds later, a rapid series of explosions echoed within the gunnery range as the plane strafed the area. Kris dropped his beer, scrambled to his dune buggy and fired it up. The others rushed outside in a mad dash to their own range-runners, and sped for the hills. They’d fight over the smoking rubble, looking for the diamonds in the rough before the next tracers came whistling in. Cat and I were left with nothing but smoke and dust in our faces as they all roared off.

  It was close to noon by that time, and the sun was at its apex. Overheated and talked out, Cat and I returned to her trailer, where I thanked her for her help.

  “You should let those whiskers grow out,” she suggested as we shook hands. “I always liked a man with a beard.”

  For just a second, I saw the young woman she used to be. Almost gave her a hug before I left, but I didn’t.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Minutes later I was on the main highway back in Niland. From there, I took one of the two-lane access roads cutting through the farmland that spread outward from the southern shores of the Salton Sea. I tried not to be discouraged about not finding Turret in Slab City. After all, the visit was based on nothing more than Terry’s hunch. I was still playing hunches.

  As I headed for the water, the landscape suddenly changed from a lifeless brown-gray to a verdant, agricultural green. It seemed much cooler now, an illusion provided by the sprinkler systems spraying water into the air and the blue irrigation canals crossing under the road every few miles. The road looked freshly laid. A shiny black strip bisecting the green on either side, on which trucks laden with produce rolled by. The pungent scent of onions hovered in the air, but as I approached the shoreline, the sulfurous, rotten-egg odor of the geothermal plants took over. Thick white steam billowed from stout smokestacks. A profusion of massive, rusty pipes led to and from inert pools of brackish water in dirt pits. The entire area was a study in contrasts: clouds of pillowy cotton floating tranquilly above rusting metal buildings; foul, muddied soil surrounded by fertile green cropland on one side and a blue mirror on the other. And if you looked beyond that, the blistered brown desert spread far and wide.

  After passing the polluted New River, which emptied into the Salton Sea, I made a few turns to get around its southern tip, then proceeded north along the western shore. The town I was looking for was about two-thirds of the way up, a place Turret had described to me many years before.

  It was just after noon. I took out the sandwich I’d packed for the day. To my left the Superstition Hills, scene of yet more military training activity as well as recreational off-road vehicle use, rose from the desert in stunted humps, a few shades darker than the surrounding flatlands. More irrigated farmland stretched away to my right, much of it going right up to the water. A few miles farther, I was waved uninterestedly through a Border Patrol check station. The people in the lane next to me weren’t so lucky. A couple of brown-skinned men wearing cowboy hats in an old Buick sedan. As I watched in the rearview mirror, they got out of the car with their wallets out. Moments later the trunk flipped up, and was surrounded by two or three inquisitive Border Patrol officers.

  Eventually the farmland gave way to flat, graded desert. This area had once been known as the Salton Riviera, with hundreds of subdivided lots squared off from the shoreline. Now it was a checkerboard pattern of desolation and abandonment. Cracked, weed-infested roads being rubbed from existence by drifting, windblown sand. Landscaped palm trees succumbing to the heat and neglect, their fronds collapsed and down-turned like rotting haystacks. Street signs that pointed nowhere, with designations such as Seabreeze Drive and Pelican Way—resort names that evoked sparkling waters, cool breezes and fresh air but now only emphasized all that had been lost. Or truthfully, had never been here in the first place.

  In the 1950s, the start of the post-war California land boom, optimistic developers had envisioned the Salton Sea as the ultimate desert resort. A haven for water-skiing, yachting and fishing, blessed by ever-present sunshine and fresh sea breezes. They saw it as a natural extension of the playground for the rich and famous that Palm Springs fifty miles away was becoming. Developers bought huge, ultra-cheap tracts of desert land, subdivided it into lake front property, built a yacht club and golf course, and expected people to come in droves. If they’d looked a little closer they would have seen that it was little more than a mirage built on shifting desert sands. The few buyers that did succumb to the high-pressure sales pitches were somehow able to ignore the hellacious heat and the remoteness and harshness of the region. Their houses stood out few and far between as I approached Salton City. Tiny homesteads defiantly resisting the surrounding emptiness, connected by thin lifelines of utility and telephone wires strung limply over acres of vacant lots and along destitute, pot-holed streets.

  The main road into town, Marina Drive, crept from the highway like a brittle snakeskin, looking all the more pitiful for its former glory. The majestic palm trees that used to line the broad four-lane boulevard were now spindly skeletons against the blown-out sky, the once flower-filled median lifeless and colorless and crumbling into dust. The pavement I drove over was fissured and broken, with tumbleweeds parked on its surface and weeds sprouting from the cracks. A peeling, weatherbeaten sign that hadn’t seen paint for years rose from the median and whispered “Welcome to Salton City” on the sighing desert winds.

  A few hundred yards further up, the defunct Salton Bay Yacht Club hunkered next to the water behind a jagged chain-link fence with a pockmarked notice reading “No Trespassing.” The remains of the yacht club sign oversaw it all, still advertising “Cocktails” to the deserted parking lot.

  I stopped and got out of the car for a closer look at the place. Off to the right a small two-story inn was falling into ruin, its foundation choked off by weeds and the trash and tumbleweeds that had blown up against it. In front of me, the yacht club and restaurant fared no better. Its big bay windows were broken, with knife-like shards still extending from the frames in various places. The shadowed interior had wires and conduit dangling from the ceiling as if it had been disemboweled. Broken glass littered the floor inside. Patches of rotted carpet clung to it like fungus. The exterior paint was faded and peeling and covered by graffiti, and the broad, curving roofline, once suggesting a seabird in flight, now resembled a broken wing.

  I imagined the place in its heyday forty years ago as Turret had described it: the best fishing spot in Southern California, where tilapia and plump corvina were just waiting to be reeled in. He’d come here wi
th his parents to boat and fish, and they’d end the day at the restaurant with a gourmet meal served on cloth-covered tables while seagulls drifted lazily over the water.

  It was his vivid description of those trips, on one of which Turret witnessed a near-drowning, that came back to me a few nights ago on the ride down to the Blue Bird. And again when those two coyotes mentioned the hitchhiker with the fishing gear. I wondered if that memory had been trying to get out in the New York warehouse, when I’d referred to my blind trip to the city as a “fishing expedition.” I only hoped that Turret and the hitchhiker were one and the same. The age range was right. And if Turret were fishing, that he’d return to a familiar place.

  I noticed a girl holding a rod at the water’s edge on the other side of the property. She’d probably climbed the chain-link fence to get there. Between us the resort’s plaza was scored and broken, a jumble of concrete chunks and dried-out palm fronds. I took a short walk to the left, careful of my footing on the uneven sidewalk, for a view around the side of the building. There the water met a tiny beach. A line of massive boulders had been piled up on the right to prevent erosion of the club’s property line. The chain-link fence proved to be only a half-hearted measure against trespassing. It stopped short of the boulders, allowing access over them to the yacht club grounds—they hadn’t bothered to put up a barrier at the shoreline.

  I crawled over the big rocks slowly, using my hands often, ignoring the stink of the dirty bathwater a few feet below. Very little moss on the warm, dry stone, though I did slip once and had to pull my ankle from a narrow gap.

  After making it around the restaurant building, which looked no better from this perspective, I climbed up to the patio area. I found a bone dry swimming pool with more dead palm fronds and trash at the bottom, its bleached walls cracked like an egg shell. The girl with the fishing pole noticed me approaching and gave me a quick wave before turning back to the water. Friendly people here, I thought, probably not used to visitors.