Wonder Valley

by Ivy Pochoda

  But running down the 110 in his button-down, twill pants, and loafers he is lithe. His limbs are loose. He’s not lost inside the music from his headphones but buoyed by the sounds of the city. Even the hard slap of the asphalt underneath his flat-soled shoes is an inspiration.

  You too, motherfucker?

  You can’t leave your damn car like that. You can’t leave your damn car.

  You running after your boyfriend?

  The hecklers urge him on. He cuts up the embankment at Seventh and heads west. At the intersection of Lucas Avenue he catches sight of the naked jogger a block ahead and continues his pursuit.

  The jogger enters the outskirts of Pico-Union, a tangle of Salvadoran and Honduran shops, indoor swap meets, and calling centers. He jogs north for one block before cutting into MacArthur Park where homeless and those who didn’t make it home are stretched out on the grass like body bags.

  Back on the shoulder of the 10 the tattooed dude in the old Mercedes is sweating. He tries to count the hours between now and his last drink, desperate to estimate his BAC, trying to guess the cost of this accident. His phone’s been going mad in his pocket, buzzing and buzzing, making his leg itch. It’s his mother. He holds it to his ear.

  “It’s your brother.”

  “What?”

  “The man on the news? Are you even listening to the news? It’s all over the radio and the television. He’s running. On the 110. Or he was. Now he’s downtown somewhere.” His mother exhales into the phone. “There’s something else,” she says.

  The man clenches the steering wheel and sits up a little in his seat, craning his neck toward downtown as if he might be able to see his brother running through those streets.

  “He’s naked.”

  REN’S SWEATING HARD AS THE POLICE CHOPPER CIRCLES ABOVE AND TWO cruisers honk and bleat their way through the stalled cars. He recites the directions in his head—110 to the 10 all the way to the end. He checks on his mom in the backseat, making sure she’s covered, comfortable. He hopes the cruisers pass by quick. But he’s getting antsy, anxious to get out of this jam. He tells himself to chill. He can’t afford to drive aggressive, draw attention to himself, even in this nondescript car.

  “It’s cool, Mama,” he says. “It’s cool.”

  TONY’S HEART LUNGES IN HIS CHEST. HE SEES THE NAKED RUNNER CUT into the park. He watches him make a circle of the pond. Tony crosses to the west side of the street. He’s about to run onto the sidewalk when a cop car squeals at his back and another jumps the curb, blocking him from the front.

  Tony stutter-steps. Then the police bring him down.

  “I almost got him,” he says, as his cheek hits the asphalt.

  The cops are cuffing him, but he manages to lift his torso and look into MacArthur Park.

  “Where is he?” he says.

  Because the runner is gone. He’d been there, at the eastern edge of the pond, making a counterclockwise circle. Tony could swear it. “Where—” he says again as the cuffs pinch his wrists.

  He watches a few of the cops fan out into the park, split into two groups, circling the pond in opposite directions. He hears the news come over the crackle of walkie-talkies—the jogger has vanished.

  The city was watching and then it wasn’t. A seam of wildfire began to threaten Malibu State Park. A singer was found dead in the Peninsula Hotel. And everyone’s attention turned west away from the naked man running down the 110. But he was there—Tony and Ren know. And he’s still somewhere, running, naked. He will be found. He has to be. Because no one can vanish for good. Not in Los Angeles. Not with so many people watching.

  1

  BRITT, TWENTYNINE PALMS, 2006

  She should have considered herself lucky that so far the trucker had limited himself to glancing at the shadowed triangle just below the hem of her miniskirt, the dark V where her thighs parted and sweat pooled. Now his hand was fiddling with the radio, more often than was necessary. Soon it would be on the glove box. Soon on her knee.

  Britt knew. She knew the way men’s hands moved incrementally, making staggered inroads their owners thought would go unremarked. Always the same routine—tennis camp, frat party, team bus, lecture hall. Their hands crept over her like she might be too dumb to notice.

  They passed a Circle K market. Then a sign that warned NEXT SERVICES: 100 MILES. The sun had set behind them and they drove into nightfall on the two-lane highway. Britt craned her neck trying to distinguish anything from anything in the darkening desert.

  The radio was on AM talk, a rattle of static and barrel-voiced anger. The road curved and the truck banked right. The trucker reached out his hand to keep Britt from hitting the window. And there it rested on her hip. Like nothing. She glanced over at the driver—a watermelon stomach resting on his thighs, red and gray stubble, and eyes shrunken from too many nights behind the wheel. His gaze didn’t leave the road, like his hand had a mind of its own. Like maybe he didn’t even know what it was up to over there on her hip.

  Britt pressed against the window, staring down from the cab as the sturdy adobes and flat ranch houses of Joshua Tree and Twentynine Palms gave way to makeshift homes cobbled together from tumbledown cabins, corrugated iron, shipping containers, and trailers. They passed yards littered with the refuse of desert living—heaps of scrap metal, shells of cars, rusted-out water tanks—signs of all the things that could go wrong out here.

  “You’re out here now, ain’tcha,” the driver said.

  “That’s the plan,” Britt said.

  “A girl with a plan.” He tightened his grip on her hip.

  They passed a tiny airport with winking purple lights. And then nothing.

  The road curved again and again one more time, a dramatic right-hand turn.

  “Stop,” Britt said. “This is it.”

  The truck hurtled on.

  “Stop.”

  The driver hit the brakes. The truck squealed, shuddered, then skidded off the road, rumbling to a rest on the soft sand shoulder. Britt screamed.

  “Jesus, girl,” the driver said. “You sound like we got hit head-on.”

  Britt grabbed her duffel and swung the cab’s door open. She tumbled out, landing on her knees.

  The driver leaned out of his seat. “You’re not gonna thank me for the ride?” He slammed her door. His wheels spat sand and gravel and the truck lumbered off.

  There was only a thin seam of light back west, pinking the distant mountain ridge. Britt backtracked to where the road had curved. If she hadn’t guessed right about the turnoff she didn’t want to think about the next driver who’d come along.

  BRITT HAD MET CASSIDY AND GIDEON THAT MORNING AT THE JOSHUA Tree farmers’ market where they were selling chickens inexpertly sealed in plastic. While they rambled on about the beauty of the soul and the health of the spirit to their customers, the birds’ blood leaked over their forearms, running down their lariats and beads.

  They were both the sort of dirty tan that comes from too much time in the desert, like the sand had worked its way into their skin. Their hair was long, dreaded in places with beads that often vanished in the tangled mess. Cassidy wore two necklaces—one with a large feather, the other with a tooth. Gideon had a bird claw on a leather braid. Life is beautiful even in death, he’d said when he caught Britt looking at it.

  Gideon and Cassidy moved like they were dragging their limbs through soft butter, slow, heavy, and deliberate as they reached into their blue cooler, bagged the birds, and made change. Their math wasn’t very good.

  Britt had been waiting for a ride—a guy she’d known from a tennis club in Palm Springs who’d promised he’d be passing through Joshua Tree on his way to Arizona. But the sun had crept east to west and he hadn’t shown.

  She was checking the highway one more time when she’d felt Cassidy’s fingers in her hair. “Are you on a trip or are you just going from point A to point B?”

  “I’m waiting for someone,” Britt had said.

  “The world turns wh
ile we wait,” Cassidy had replied. Then she invited Britt to come smoke a joint with her and Gideon. They’d driven into the Joshua Tree National Park to a site called Jumbo Rocks, which Cassidy explained was her and Gideon’s power place. The weed had made the landscape of red rocks and rows of spindly Joshua trees seem like a hallucination.

  Cassidy had picked up a small stone and placed it in Britt’s palm. “Do you feel that? The universe is a heartbeat in the palm of your hand.”

  “If you join us up on the farm, you will learn how the warrior spirit can be found in a grain of sand,” Gideon had said.

  That’s when Cassidy had told Britt about Howling Tree Ranch, the chicken farm where she and Gideon lived with a bunch of other people she’d called interns. But it hadn’t sounded like a farm, not really. And the owner, Patrick, didn’t sound like a farmer. More like a swami or a cult freak, one of those guys they make documentaries about when someone escapes and tells everyone about the magic mushroom omelets, the daily naked baptisms, and the tantric chanting.

  “It’s not like that,” Gideon had said. “He can reach deep inside of you and pull out things that you hadn’t even known you’d buried.”

  “He can heal you without touching you,” Cassidy had promised. “He can see inside you, figure out what’s broken, and then fix it.”

  Britt thought this sounded more painful than helpful. She didn’t say that there was no way that “the earth laughed in flowers,” as Cassidy had proclaimed, because that didn’t make any fucking sense. Nor did she point out that the garden of her soul was probably beyond tending. Instead, when the joint was done, she’d asked for a lift back to town so she could wait for her ride. “Maybe we are your ride,” Gideon had said as he pulled her into a long hug in order to exchange energy.

  Cassidy had tugged on his arm. But he’d waved her off. “Chill, Cassidy. I’m just vibing off my high.”

  Britt watched them climb into a Volvo station wagon.

  Her ride never showed. And now here she was, twenty miles east of Joshua Tree looking for the fallen sign to Howling Tree Ranch Cassidy told her was just after the sharp curve in the road.

  She almost missed it—a pile of trampled boards and a spray of paint on which the last strike of the sun showed the word Ranch.

  The farm was a mile up from the road—too far to see from the highway. The sun had slipped away leaving the desert purple-dark. Without her duffel and in her running shoes, Britt could have made the walk in fifteen minutes give or take. But at night, in her sandals and miniskirt and lugging her bag, it was going to be rough.

  The sand kicked up over her toes, wedging between the straps of her sandals. She carried her phone in front of her, its weak blue glow showing her the road or what she hoped was the road, a sunken depression of vague tire tracks lost beneath the gravelly sand.

  She had played a few tournaments on the opposite side of the national park, where the harsh landscape was tamed by golf courses, midcentury architecture, cocktail hour, and spa hotels. She thought she knew desert. But a few steps off the Twentynine Palms Highway was all it took to prove her wrong.

  Something was scuttling through the brush, a scraping, scratching sound that tracked Britt’s progress. She tightened her grip on her bag and tried to pick up her pace. Then the dogs began to howl, volleying their lonesome call-and-response across the thick night.

  It was pitch dark, darker than she imagined possible. The silhouettes of the distant mountains and the nearby bushes were absorbed into one impenetrable black that the light from her phone could barely puncture. She could feel her heart beat in her hand as her bag’s strap cut into her palm.

  The sun hadn’t taken the heat with it. Sweat slipped down her back. It beaded down her legs, running over her ankles. She could tell she was going uphill, a slight incline that stretched the back of her calves and made her feet lose traction. She could hear the rustle of palm trees somewhere off the road.

  Since she’d wandered away from college she prided herself on winding up places where she couldn’t be found or, rather, where no one, especially not her parents, would think to look. Until now she’d never felt lost.

  When you hitch in a truck with a stranger, when you let a group of guys drunk-drive you up the coast, when you knock on the door of a house deep in South Central because some kids on campus told you that’s where the real party’s at, you don’t show fear. But Britt didn’t think she could hide the way this nighttime desert was making her heart race and her breath come quick.

  The road leveled. And she saw the farm—a modest ranch house to the right and a smattering of cabins straight ahead. The whole way out from Joshua Tree, she had been fooling herself into imagining some sort of midwestern dairy operation, all red barns and green fields. Hoping, really. But the light coming from the various windows of Howling Tree Ranch brought up a place not much different from the forbidding compounds she’d passed on the highway—mismatched buildings, jury-rigged electricity, and moats of junk.

  From somewhere on the property came the rhythmic creak of metal, a constant one-two beat and the chug-chug of an air conditioner or swamp cooler. Behind her were the chickens, their frantic scratching making their desperation even deeper. She smelled their hay and ammonia tang. She couldn’t imagine that scent in the full force of the midday sun. The birds noticed the intruder in the yard and they flapped their wings, crying out, and crashing into their wire enclosure.

  Across the driveway the porch light came on, then a flashlight beam cast in the direction of the coop, catching Britt.

  “You new?”

  Britt shaded her eyes and squinted into the light.

  There were two boys sitting on the porch, each in a metal glider. Britt crossed a hard-packed driveway. The one holding the flashlight never took it off her face.

  “Are you new?” he repeated when she was closer.

  “At what?”

  They were twins, fourteen or fifteen years old, their skin the same dirty desert tan as Gideon’s and Cassidy’s. They were both barefoot. The one holding the flashlight was bare chested. His brother wore a tank top a size too small.

  “Are you the new intern?” the boy with the flashlight said. He drew tight, fast circles with the light over Britt’s face. “One of the others said we were getting a new intern.”

  “When were you talking to the interns?” his brother said.

  “Shut up.” The kid switched off the flashlight. “Mom,” he called, “there’s someone in the driveway.” He turned on the light again. “It sucks here, by the way. We don’t know why you guys come.”

  “I’m not planning on staying,” Britt said.

  “So why are you here?” He switched off the light again, then he punched his brother on the shoulder. “James, let’s go.”

  James rocked a beat in the glider until his brother hit him again. Then they went in the house, letting the screen door bang shut. The porch light went off.

  Britt waited in the driveway, listening to the chickens resettle in their coop. Only one dog still howled in the distance—its call more desperate each time it went unanswered.

  Finally, the screen door opened and the porch light came on. A woman in denim cutoffs and a large T-shirt with a picture of a jackrabbit stepped out and stared down at Britt. Britt guessed her hair had once been blond and wavy, but the sun had dried it to a pale frizz. There was a chance she had been beautiful before she let the harsh climate have its way, creasing her skin, drawing lines around her full lips and light eyes. Now she looked like the other creatures Britt had noticed out here—devoid of softness, whittled down to the brute essentials necessary for survival.

  The woman held out her hand. Her grip was strong, her palm dry and calloused. Ropy veins popped on her forearm. “Grace,” she said. “You’re a new intern?” Wine had soured on her breath.

  “Maybe,” Britt said.

  “Or are you just here for Patrick?”

  “I’m Britt.”

  Grace let go and Britt caught sight o
f a doorknocker ring swinging loose on her finger. “You’re the one Cassidy met in town. She’ll be surprised.”

  “She thought I wouldn’t come?”

  “She thought she wanted you to come. She’ll learn her mistake. As Patrick says—reap the intention you sow in the world.”

  “But she didn’t want me to come?”

  Grace laughed. “Isn’t that why you’re all here? So that my husband can tell you what you really want?”

  “I don’t even know why I’m here.”

  “You’ll figure it out. They all do. Or they hang around and keep trying.”

  “We’ll see.” But Britt was pretty sure she wouldn’t.

  “My husband will tell you that the soul is a flower you have to water daily or else it will wither and dry.”

  “For real?”

  Grace put a hand on Britt’s arm. “You think you’re different from the rest. But you’re not.” In the distance a dog howled. Britt flinched. “You’re lucky it’s not a wolf,” Grace said. “Come on, I’ll show you around.” She switched on the flashlight the twins had left on the porch and cast the beam around the yard. “This is Howling Tree Ranch. The main house is off-limits to anyone but Patrick, the boys, and me. Our property runs from here for two miles toward the park.” The light danced south over the outbuildings toward a vast, black expanse. “There’s nothing I’m going to say that will prevent you from running around out there. But we get coyotes, bobcats, and even wolves. My husband might be a healer, but there are some things he can’t fix.”

  Most of the lights in the cabins had gone out. “You got here on a special night,” Grace said. “Tomorrow is our biggest chicken slaughter of the year. You saw the birds?”

  Britt followed as Grace showed her the enormous wooden coop with its chicken wire fortress. Grace pointed out the separate enclosure for the meat birds and the stump where they would slaughter the broilers tomorrow. “After the first twenty, you get used to the blood. After fifty, the smell,” Grace said.

  They left the coop and processing area and headed for the cabins. They passed a large fire pit and a dead Joshua tree where a plastic bag filled with water and a makeshift nozzle stood in for a shower. “Most of you just rinse off in the oasis.”