Wonder Valley

by Ivy Pochoda

  Now they turned away from the cabins and main house and headed for a large stand of palms Britt hadn’t noticed before. Between the palms a slick pond was handing back the moonlight. “Normally I’d expect to find a few of you in the pond, but Patrick insists on a quiet night before the slaughter,” Grace said.

  Grace led Britt to her cabin, a small adobe between two prefab sheds. “It’s one of the nice ones,” she said. And without another word she left.

  Britt dropped her bag and flopped on the narrow bed. The springs complained and bowed toward the floor. Next to the bed was a large window that gaped out at wilderness that stretched to the national park.

  The air in the cabin clung to her skin, crawled down her throat. There was a bedside fan that did little beyond spin the heat in different directions. She didn’t want to crack the window, and certainly didn’t want to open the door even though that might have created a cross-breeze. She didn’t want to know what might come calling in the night, what she might hear passing her cabin.

  In fifteen minutes she could be back on the highway. In three and a half hours Vegas, four and a half hours Phoenix—places where the desert was defeated by light and climate controlling. But she had to admit, at least to herself, that she couldn’t brave the walk down from the farm and she didn’t want to know who might be willing to stop for her once she made it to the blacktop.

  She closed her eyes, pressed the skimpy pillow over her face to black out the blackness beyond, and tried to focus on the uneven whip-whir of the fan. She wasn’t stupid—she knew Grace was trying to scare her with her talk of the chicken blood and all the things that could kill her. Anywhere else, she would have stuck around to prove Grace wrong. But tomorrow Britt would be gone.

  2

  REN, LOS ANGELES, 2010

  Nine days he’d been on the Greyhound breathing the cold canned air, banging his chin on the metal window ledge. Passengers came and went. Some talked for hours. Some slept deeply, spilling their drinks and food and making the floor stickier than when they’d rolled out of Port Authority.

  Ren had booked an indirect route from coast to coast, a meandering path that cut south for a while before it turned west. He had some bank in his pocket, about seven hundred or so from his various hustles. He figured he could afford the detour.

  Eight years in juvie and he’d lost perspective on the outside world. All the kids ever talked about was space, of getting out into the wide-ass world, seeing the things they were missing on the inside. Problem was, when you’re incarcerated at twelve, outside becomes abstract. Proportion gets screwed. Big becomes the common room instead of your cell. Wide open is the rec pen.

  The outside world was shrunk to fit on the communal television where the sky was perfect, the weather weather-free. Being inside made it hard enough to remember the hush of snow and the skin-splatter of rain. Anyway, all the other boys ever wanted to watch were shows set in police stations or the ones that made criminals into kings. Up to Ren, that communal TV would have been tuned to the nature channel or something else that would revive an actual sense memory of what freedom felt like. Because inside everything smelled the same, tasted the same, felt the same—none of it remarkable. None of it good.

  Which is why he got off the bus frequently, sleeping under the sky in fields or in campgrounds. Sometimes he didn’t know what state he was in. He passed swamps and bayous. He learned their names from fellow passengers. He saw land so dusty it looked like desert. Then he arrived in the desert proper with its flattop mesas and rock formations so extreme and intricate Ren imagined God had built them.

  Last stop on the Greyhound—downtown Los Angeles, a place so abstract to Ren that he only thought of it as the city on the TV in the common room: palm trees and beaches, stucco houses and all that contourless sky. And of course, the sparkling ocean where surfers grabbed the waves like they were riding the subway.

  But there was no sign of that city when he got off the bus. The terminal was small and nondescript, no different from those in no-name towns in the middle of the country. Ren had imagined some sort of gateway to the west, a place watched over by a tangerine sun where an archway of palms led to shapely blue waves. But what he got was a drop-panel ceiling and the same vending machines that had been feeding him for weeks.

  Another bus pulled into the bay alongside Ren’s. He watched the passengers disembark, each dressed in jeans and carrying a cardboard box or large envelope with their name and number on it. Even without these markers he’d have known that ex-con swagger, the way the men looked up at the sky like it was going to bite. How they checked over their shoulders as if they expected to be jumped.

  He stood to the side and let the freed prisoners pass. A few of them caught his eye, gave him a nod that said, I know you, brother, even if I don’t. He reached into his pocket for his bankroll, cupped it in his palm, and when no one was looking, slipped it down his sock so it rested against the sole of his foot.

  A couple of churchy ladies were standing at the door to the station. They looked like the social workers who bugged him during his last months in juvie about signing up for job placement and a lot of services he wanted nothing to do with. These women pressed pamphlets into the hands of the ex-cons, talking a mile a minute about the dangers of the street, the ease of cycling back in, the importance of staying straight, being proud but not foolish. A few of the guys took the literature. Some paused to read it, but most let it flutter to the ground a few steps from the door.

  Ren unzipped his backpack and pulled out a scrap of paper, faded and sweat worn. He’d read the words so many times that they were burned into his mind, the writing, too. He held the paper out to one of the women. “Excuse me,” he said. “You know this place?”

  The woman bent over the paper, squinting at the faded script. “The Cecil Hotel? You just head up Seventh right here to Main. And you can’t miss it.” She pointed at the street in front of the station. Then she pressed a pamphlet into Ren’s hand. “Come to my ministry,” she said. “When you’re low, lost, or lonely.”

  WHEN REN WAS RELEASED FROM JUVIE, THERE WAS NO ONE TO PICK HIM up. There was no home to go to. He’d returned to his old neighborhood in Brooklyn and found his parents had split for Troy, New York. He’d stuck around for a while, living in an outdoor community by the river, watching his old haunts change before his eyes, trying to figure out where in the hell he belonged. Then one day he’d run across a distant cousin of his mother’s. She’d given him the stink eye at first, as if what he’d done was going to rub off on her, as if she’d walk away from this encounter reeking of criminal.

  But she did tell him one thing. “It didn’t work out for your mama up in Troy. So she split on her lonesome. Turned up in Los Angeles. And from what-all I hear, it didn’t work out for her there, neither.”

  Ren didn’t want to beg for intel, but he wanted to know an address so he could find his mother should it come to that. It took a day of hanging outside the cousin’s apartment before she coughed up the name of the hotel where Laila was living—the Cecil. Anything, Ren guessed, to get rid of him.

  He had no way of knowing whether the info was correct. The hotel didn’t have phones in the rooms and when he called, they refused to give out the names of their residents. He didn’t leave a message.

  During his first couple of years in juvie, his parents visited him three or four times. Then twice a year—for his birthday and near the holidays. During his sixth year they came once. And in his last two years, they didn’t come at all.

  Just because they abandoned him didn’t mean Ren had to return the favor. Because isn’t that what all that time inside is supposed to teach you, give you time to reflect on and repent? Not that that’s what the other kids were doing. Most of them were planning to be kingpins on the outside and Ren pretty much figured there were only a few ways of doing that.

  But he was different even if his parents didn’t see that once he got locked up. They forgot all about the little kid he had been and focused
instead on the criminal they imagined him to be. So if he had the chance to prove to his mom otherwise and see the whole damn country in the process, it seemed like an adventure worth having.

  THE NEIGHBORHOOD OUTSIDE THE BUS STATION WAS INDUSTRIAL—loading bays, wholesalers, and warehouses. It was impossible to tell whether the place was on its way up or down.

  Ren headed up Seventh. The streets were bleak, lined with businesses that were either closed for the day or shut permanent—Famous 99 Cent Diner, Hollywood Banquet Hall (available for film shoots). There were tents along the sidewalks, people pushing shopping trolleys piled with belongings that looked scavenged from Dumpsters. The farther he walked, the more crowded the streets became, overflowing with an untamed community, white, black, Latino.

  A man in a baggy red sweatshirt and black jeans stood on the street corner cooking up some sort of hustle. He nodded at Ren. “S’up, brother? What you need? You need anything?”

  All around him people were raving and muttering, challenging invisible enemies. There were folks passed out on the sidewalks and slumped against walls. And between them were others who were just getting on with their lives between the junkies and the insane—people reading books or gossiping with a neighbor like they were sitting in a coffee shop or in someone’s living room, not outside on the dirty sidewalks of downtown L.A.

  He passed a woman braiding hair in an impromptu outdoor salon. Two men were huddled over a crossword. A short, balding preacher shouted gospel through a bullhorn in Spanish to a congregation of six. He wore a sandwich board around his neck proclaiming JESUS ES EL BUEN PASTOR. A man prepped a needle next to a woman eating a bruised banana and reading a decade-old magazine. Two guys in dirty tracksuits sold drugs across from the entrance to the Nazarene Christian Mission. A woman belted out “Backlash Blues,” a song Ren’s mother used to sing in the shower when he was little.

  In lockup, the other boys used to bang on about the cribs they’d have one day, about how they were going to do them up the minute they got flush, articulate them with a lot of nonsense they didn’t need. They were always tricking out these imaginary pads with showy flatscreens and preposterous sound systems, a whole lot of business to lock the real world out. They wanted king beds and swimming pool–sized hot tubs. They wanted every excuse never to go outdoors.

  Ren had no time for that. The minute he got out, he wanted to stay out, not just out of juvie, but outside entirely. He didn’t want a roof over his head. He didn’t want to reincarcerate himself in any apartment, phat, dope, or otherwise. He wanted his air to be fresh, not climate controlled. He wanted sky not ceiling. But this was another sort of outdoor living and nothing he wanted part of.

  NO ONE GAVE HIM A SECOND THOUGHT, A STRAY GLANCE. SOME PARTS OF the neighborhood looked postapocalyptic—smelled it too—as if they were surviving in the wake of a catastrophe, a bombing, or an earthquake. One street seemed to belong to transsexuals, another to junkies. As the sun began to disappear, folks lined up at a mission for a hot and a cot. A church group set up dinner service on the sidewalk dishing macaroni onto paper plates.

  He passed a community center where an open mic night was under way with all sorts of people lining up to sing. Out on the street, folks were dancing to the music that slid out the open door, shuffle-stepping to a cracked and hopeful voice singing Stevie Wonder.

  Eventually Ren found his way onto Main Street where the desperation gave way to a derelict business district with cut-rate jewelry stores and half-empty loft buildings—like a bombed-out Midtown Manhattan. He was self-conscious stepping into the cavernous lobby of the Cecil Hotel, like he didn’t goddamn belong and everyone knew it. He wasn’t sure whether the place was really grand or just faking it. The room was tricked out with marble and ornate wood, but still smelled like the industrial cleaner they used in juvie.

  He stepped up to the desk where a short Hispanic man with a heavy mustache was watching soccer on a portable television. The man didn’t look up. “You want a room.”

  “I’m looking for a woman who lives here.”

  “No information on guests,” the clerk said.

  “Listen,” Ren said. “You told me that on the phone. But I came all the way from New York.”

  “She’s expecting you?”

  “No.”

  “Well,” the clerk said. “There’s another problem.”

  “Maybe I’m planning to surprise her.”

  “I’m not going to let you hang around in the lobby and I’m not going to tell you if she’s here.”

  “So?”

  “So you can leave a note or your number. Or you can get a room. Then I can’t tell you what to do.”

  “How much?” Ren said.

  “Seventy if you don’t mind sharing a bathroom.”

  It was more money than Ren had spent on anything in his life except for the Greyhound ticket. And he hadn’t counted on paying for a roof over his head at all. After all, the Los Angeles on the television had taunted him with ample opportunities for crashing outdoors—on the sand, near the beach, under a palm tree. But that scene outside the hotel? That shit was a different story.

  The clerk pretended to ignore what Ren was doing when he fished some cash from his sock. He handed over four sweaty twenties, then filled out a form. He palmed the key the clerk slid across the desk.

  “So,” he said. “The woman I’m looking for is called Laila Davis.”

  The clerk shook his head.

  “What’s that mean?” Ren asked. “You don’t know her or you’re not telling?”

  The clerk turned back to his TV.

  “How about this? How about I tell you that she’s my mom and I haven’t seen her in years.”

  The clerk messed with the tip of his mustache. “I don’t know her,” he said. He pointed across the lobby. “Elevator’s over there.”

  Ren shouldered his backpack and crossed to the brass doors the clerk had indicated. A white kid about his age had just pressed the button. He had lanky blond hair and wore a short-sleeved T-shirt over a long-sleeved one. His nails were ringed with dirt.

  “Smoke?” He pulled a scrappy joint from his jeans.

  “I’m cool,” Ren said.

  The elevator came. The small car filled with the white boy’s funky weed smell.

  “Maybe on the flipside,” the kid said, as the doors opened on Ren’s floor.

  The hallway was dim, the carpet burned and pocked with old gum. It took Ren several loops to find his room. The key stuck in the lock. It felt like he was going to have to rip the whole handle off just to get the damn thing open.

  A greenish curtain was half pulled over a window, and the light coming in had to fight through the gray-smudged glass. The carpet was red industrial grade with sharp-looking fibers. At the foot of the bed an old metal radiator was attached to the wall, above it a faded poster of a painting of a pond in a metal frame.

  Ren was sure there were better hotels out there, with better-looking beds, and walls not stained with other people’s living. But when he shut the door behind him, it was like something he hadn’t known he was carrying flew from his shoulders. He locked the door and flipped the deadbolt, then flopped face-first on the bed.

  He was going to sleep hard. He could already tell. He wasn’t going to have to keep one eye open in case one of the other boys in his hall planned to mess with him while he slept, or one of the other inhabitants of the Brooklyn waterfront community got it in mind to poke around his shipping container, or another bus passenger planned to steal his shit while he was out cold. For once he could sleep on his own terms, undisturbed and alone. Sleep now and tomorrow he’d figure out where Laila had gone to.

  3

  BLAKE, WONDER VALLEY, 2006

  On the highway there were two men and little else. The road was two-lane blacktop. Sometimes the men walked together, other times they kept the highway between them. Except for the occasional car or truck they were the only things moving in the landscape. From a distance it would have been ea
sy to mistake them for a mirage. But they were there.

  They were both tanned, their faces the color of rusted pipe with dark furrows that ran away from their eyes and down their cheekbones. Their nails and knuckles were ringed with black. They each carried a ragged pack. Blake knew if a driver passed them on this desolate stretch, he wouldn’t slow. So he didn’t bother to flag the few cars headed in their direction.

  They’d been walking for so long Blake began to imagine their journey from a crow’s-eye view, as if he was up above it instead of pounding the asphalt. He wore his Ranger’s hat over his greasy black hair. The hat made him sweat but kept out some of the sun. For the last four miles he’d been staring at Sam’s back, watching the big man’s dark braid bounce between his shoulder blades with each step. That braid was making him nuts. How anyone could have so much hair in this heat was beyond him.

  They’d started their trip in Lake Havasu where they’d been holed up in a cabin since September hiding from a Nevada warrant out on Sam for a murder he hadn’t meant to commit, or so he said. The men had been smoking in an alley behind a roadside dive outside of Vegas when a jumpy little tweaker bumped into Sam. In no time Sam had his knife out and that knife had found the wrong spot in the tweaker’s neck, right at the jugular. Go figure—when Sam wasn’t even trying. There was blood everywhere, a goddamn trail that the cops could chase right back to Blake and Sam’s trailer.

  Sam swore to Blake up and down that he’d acted in self-defense. But with a rap sheet like his, no jury was going to accept that plea. So the men split that night. After Sam had taken him in eleven years earlier, there was no chance that Blake was going to let Sam run without him. He owed the big man that much.

  They crossed the state line. The warrant would follow, but at least the Arizona cops might not be so keen on their trail. It didn’t help that Sam’s face made the papers—a brutal black-and-white sketch that captured his deep-set eyes, his full lips, the hang of his cheeks, and his hollow, violent stare.