Wonder Valley

by Ivy Pochoda

  In late May the summer people returned to the cabin in Lake Havasu where Blake and Sam had been hiding and the men had to be on their way. They caught a ride down to the Parker Dam then started west on California 62, the Twentynine Palms Highway. Now they needed a new hideout.

  Sam had heard about a half-abandoned homestead community just east of Twentynine Palms called Wonder Valley where he promised Blake they could live off the grid and out of sight. Hell, he said, they could probably reclaim one of the old cabins without anyone noticing. A home for free just sitting there for the taking. Now this didn’t sound half bad to Blake, but the problem was in getting there.

  Blake was desert born, desert bred, and he had spent half his life sleeping in Phoenix’s parks and alleys or wherever the night left him. But that didn’t mean he enjoyed walking under the full-force assault of the summer sun. No man should be out in the open when the temperature hits 112. But that’s where he found himself. He’d been cursing Sam for miles.

  They had walked out of Parker with a couple of cans of food and little water. After a day on the road they came to Vidal Junction, which they discovered was more of an intersection than a town. There was a diner that had closed, a café with a fiberglass chicken on the roof, an agricultural inspection station, and a minimart with a couple of gas pumps.

  They bought two six-packs and drank them by the side of the road. Next to the gas station an old man was selling American flags from a handcart. Sam plucked one without paying and tucked it into his pack. That night they slept in an empty RV park under the awning of an abandoned trailer.

  When they headed out the next morning, Blake was stunned by the isolation of the highway—no houses, no gas stations, no stores, just the Granite Mountains to their north, the Mojave Desert stretching out on all sides, and the endless blacktop. After fourteen hours of walking, they’d passed nothing except mile markers and a few highway signs.

  “Not even a fucking house,” Blake said.

  Sam had been singing the chorus from the same country song for two days straight—a four-line refrain with the words jumbled and some missing. It was one of Sam’s lifelong habits that drove Blake nuts, made him want to punch the feeble fiberglass walls of their trailer or strangle the big man as he sang. From what Blake could make out this song went something like: In the dark morning silence I placed the gun to her head. She wore red dresses but now she lay dead. Blake hummed under his breath to block the sound.

  Late in the day they met a man coming the opposite direction. His face was shriveled like a fruit pit. His lanky gray hair brushed his shoulders. He pushed a shopping cart with patriotic junk tied to it—flags, yellow ribbons, a photo of the Twin Towers, a picture of Saddam Hussein in crosshairs. The man wore an olive army vest and a boonie hat stuck with military pins.

  Sam stepped in his path, but Blake held up his hand in greeting.

  “You boys got a long way to go,” the man said.

  “How do you know where we’re going?” Sam asked.

  “It’s at least sixty miles to anywhere with nothing in between so I figure you’re going that far at least.”

  “What kind of nothing?” Blake wanted to know.

  Sam had always been a storyteller, and Blake had begun to worry that Wonder Valley was one of his stories, a fantasy grounded in some lost version of the truth.

  “What you see, boys, is what you get,” the man said, gesturing at the mountain ranges in the distance and the desert in between.

  “For how long?” Blake asked.

  “First sign of life, if you can call it that, is Wonder Valley. Then comes the Twentynine Palms airport. But if it’s food you’re after, you’ll be seven miles past the airport at the Circle K. So you’re looking at some eighty odd miles or so.”

  “So, where’re you headed?” Sam said.

  The man pointed to a laminated card on the front of his shopping cart. “‘Veterans Walking Across America,’” Blake read. “Why’s that?”

  “I want to know what I fought for,” the man said.

  “You got food in there?” Sam lifted the tarp covering the contents of the cart.

  “Leave him,” Blake said.

  “He’s closer to food than we are.” Sam combed through the man’s belongings.

  “Leave him,” Blake said.

  “You can leave him if you want,” Sam said. “I’m taking these.” He pulled three cans of franks ’n’ beans from the man’s cart. The vet didn’t try to stop him.

  “Get going,” Blake said.

  The man continued east. Blake watched him until he could no longer hear the creak and jangle of his cart. Then he crossed the highway to get away from Sam.

  WHEN BLAKE FIRST STARTED SKIPPING SCHOOL, HIS MOTHER CAUTIONED him, There’s a blackness in you. Chances were, she didn’t mean it literally, but Blake wondered how long it would take before his outside matched his insides. By now he guessed it did.

  Even after it was too late—after he’d dropped out of high school and taken up with a rough crowd at the bike shop—Blake’s mother liked to remind him she gave him his name because it was soft. She chose it because it was a name without violence, like snow falling. (Like snow ever fell in Phoenix, Blake told her.) Snow or not, his mother believed his name would keep him good.

  Not long after Blake quit school, his mother was also gone, scuttled east after a software salesman and his two young sons. It seemed like everyone knew how to run from the future except him. But you make family out of whoever’s available, Blake figured. Which left Sam.

  The men met in jail—both of them pulled in for D&D. Blake was underage. Sam bailed him out, then invited him back to the ratty trailer he called home. Eleven years later they were still bunking together. Sam was fearless. Blake worked hard to be.

  Sam’s real name wasn’t Sam. It was something too difficult to pronounce, a name that caught in your throat and made you spit. But the man claimed to have Samoan blood—or at any rate he looked Samoan. (Blake wasn’t sure what a Samoan looked like. Kind of like an Indian or a Mexican but rounder, he guessed.) So the Samoan became Sam for short, not exactly a tough name but a whole lot better than Blake.

  Blake was tall and lanky with barely enough skin to cover his bones. At times he felt hollow. His joints and ribs jutted through his T-shirts. His hands and feet were hardened into bark or horn like he was growing a shell. His ID said thirty, but he felt older, worn and brittle like a desert scrub pine.

  Sam lived on the same diet as Blake—too few meals, too much beer, and too many drugs—but he had a considerable stomach that rolled over his jeans, and doughy skin that hid his well-muscled shoulders and biceps. Blake marveled at how the Samoan could emerge from a weeklong speed bender looking like he’d just stood up from Thanksgiving dinner.

  Blake liked that Sam called them partners like they were outlaws or businessmen on the up-and-up. But as he saw it, partnership should come with a goal greater than random havoc, something more productive than grabbing whatever money they needed for the week or month. A life of crime should be just that—a life—not a frantic hand-to-mouth existence. Hell, that sort of living is what turned people bad in the first place. But try telling Sam that. The man craved the chaos, the spontaneity, and the thrill of fear in his victims’ eyes. Blake, well, he didn’t tell his partner this, but for the last year he’d been haunted by the people he and Sam had harmed—a sickening slideshow that kept him up at night and made his dreams bad when he managed to sleep.

  THAT NIGHT THE MEN SLEPT IN A BONE-DRY WASHOUT. SAM PULLED OUT his portable chessboard and his battered copy of The Chess Puzzle Book. The set was made of expensive wood and the pieces looked Chinese. Although he pretended he’d inherited it from a grand master, Blake knew the big man had stolen it from a pawnshop. Using his lighter, Sam set up the pieces and played by feel and memory in the dark. Blake smoked and stared at the sky where the moon hung like a school clock. He pulled out his pocketknife and tried cleaning the dirt from under his fingernails but only suc
ceeded in driving it deeper.

  Sam drank two beers and fell asleep over his game. Blake slipped the board out of his hand and tucked away the pieces, counting each one. Somewhere deep in the desert a coyote howled. The moon grinned stupid overhead. Blake rested his head on his pack and waited for sleep.

  They hadn’t spoken since they passed the veteran. Blake was used to these long silences and the quick bouts of explosive anger. Before they found themselves in Lake Havasu, they’d spent a couple of years in a foreclosed double-wide in an RV park outside Henderson, Nevada. During the summers, without power to run the air conditioner or even a fan, the place was an oven. It got so hot that the men turned on each other to ease the pain—Sam’s knife to Blake’s throat, Blake’s fist in the Samoan’s eye. Before they could do any real harm, they’d burst into the night, directing their violence on others, people in the liquor store parking lot, at the shitty dive bar, coming out of one of the pawnshops on the highways.

  THEY STARTED WALKING BEFORE SUNUP—WHEN THE FIRST TICKLE OF pink grazed the mountains to the east. After two hours the temperature was already unreasonable. Even the birds were sheltering until dusk. Blake looked up at the sky. The sun hadn’t even reached the top of its path. The mountains in the distance were an inhospitable Martian red. By noon it would be well into triple digits. If nothing else, thirty years living around Phoenix and Vegas had taught Blake to tell the difference between 105 and 112. When he looked back at the road, bright circles had burned into his corneas—sunspots that danced and exploded in the corners of his eyes even when he shut them.

  The heat made time drip slow. The blacktop ran on and never got anywhere. Even the insides of Blake’s eyes and the back of his throat were hot. His lungs felt like they were pumping steam. His mouth was dry. His thighs chafed, and the straps from his pack had lifted welts on his shoulders. The tops of his boots rubbed the skin raw on his calves. Rivulets of sweat ran down the dust plastered onto his neck. And by his count they were still at least fifty miles to nowhere.

  In the early afternoon Blake noticed something glinting in the distance, metal or glass that caught the sun and shot it back in his direction in sharp, blinding fragments. His entire body wanted to give in, collapse and roll off the highway, sleep in whatever shade he could find until sunset. But he kept his gaze fixed on the thing that was shimmering up ahead. It was a beacon that pulled him forward, something man-made in all this bald and barren nature.

  The Samoan was lagging behind. Blake pushed on. He fought off discomfort and focused on that shiny object.

  After a few minutes, the shiny object was obscured by a curve in the highway. Blake hooked his thumbs under his straps to stop their rubbing. He picked up his pace to round the bend quick.

  The road straightened. There were a few hills just off the shoulder and when these flattened, the object reappeared, closer now and brighter. It was moving, spinning, shooting more stars of light in Blake’s direction. He pressed on. Two cars passed spraying dust and gravel. One honked at the men, a wail of encouragement or a warning of danger. From back behind him, he heard the Samoan shout something at the driver.

  It was a tree or something hanging in a tree. That’s what Blake could make out from less than a quarter of a mile away. It wasn’t much, but it kept him moving. He shaded his eyes and squinted. The object, or rather objects, got brighter so he lowered his gaze to the road in case the sunspots reappeared.

  Five minutes later Blake could make out what he was heading for—a gnarled mesquite tree hung with dozens of sneakers, their reflective stripes and decals catching the sun. He pulled up in front of the tree and stared at the shoes. After the monotonous desert landscape, the primary colors and artificial dyes were a shock. And the evidence of all the other people who had come this way, well, that was just a damn tease, wasn’t it?

  The tree was dead. Its dried branches reached out in a leafless tangle. It stood in a long, flat stretch of sand, the only tree visible in either direction. Blake shook one of the branches. The sneakers spun and knocked against one another.

  “Well, ain’t that a bitch.” Sam had caught up. He slung his pack off his shoulders and let it hit the asphalt. “Walk all this way for a shoe tree.”

  The big man stooped, doubling his considerable bulk, and crawled under the lowest branches. He leaned against the trunk, facing away from the sun, looking back down the road they’d traveled. The sun threw a shadowed copy of the sneaker tree into the sand in front of him.

  “What’s going on?” Blake said.

  “Resting,” Sam said. “I figure we can knock out another ten miles tonight, then we can get there day after tomorrow.”

  Blake lowered his pack and joined Sam. He faced north, away from the highway, where the desert ended in the Granite Mountains.

  “Ain’t this a whole lot of nowhere,” Sam said. “A whole lot of fucking nowhere.”

  “You picked it.”

  “Well, we aren’t where I picked yet are we?” Sam rolled them each a cigarette from his off-brand tobacco. They smoked as if it could ward off the heat.

  The sun lingered before it began to fall, plunging back behind the seam where the highway met the horizon. A crow circled just in case. Blake let his head drop to the Samoan’s shoulder.

  There were awakened by a rustling. At first it sounded as if an animal was circling their camp, snuffling and shuffling in the sand. The sun was gone. The sky was a dull, muted color. The stars were hiding.

  The sound was coming from the tree. The sneakers were swaying together—their dried leather and rubber rustling. The wind ran through the arrowwood bushes and sent a spray of sand into the men’s faces. They stood up and uncrooked their backs.

  “Now this is walking weather,” Sam said. He reached into his pack for a can of beans. He popped the ring tab, gulped down half, and offered the rest to Blake. “Don’t bother where it came from.”

  Blake finished the beans and tucked the can into a sneaker that was hanging at eye level. Next to the sneaker was a pair of white leather high-tops, not too worn judging by their soles.

  Blake kicked off his own boots and tied the laces together. He dusted the sand from his socks, unhooked the high-tops from the tree, and put them on.

  “The fuck you think you’re doing?” Sam said.

  “Changing my shoes.”

  “Put them back.”

  Blake stooped down and felt the toe box. A little roomy, but better than his boots. “How’s this bothering anyone?” he said. “Seems a waste just to have them hanging there.”

  “Put them back,” Sam said. “It’s like stealing from the dead.”

  “I’m not sure the dead come all the way out here to hang their shoes on a tree.”

  “Dead or alive, it’s bad luck.”

  “Since when do you know so much about luck? If you did, you might have noticed ours ran out a few years ago.” He finished lacing up the sneakers, then took a few steps to test them out.

  “Just put the goddamn shoes back.”

  “The hell I will.”

  The Samoan reached into his belt. Blake sprang back before Sam could put his knife to his throat. “It’s bad luck, stealing from a spirit tree. I told you the story of my uncle and the coyote grave.”

  Blake had heard all of Sam’s stories, his strange fabricated folktales, too many times to count. And he didn’t have patience for one now. “Looks like a sneaker tree to me. Just some dumb shit people do because there’s nothing between here and nowhere.”

  “It’s a spirit tree,” Sam said.

  Blake spat on the ground. The things he had seen the Samoan do—the terrorized families, the men left bloodied and crumpled. There were women all over Phoenix who couldn’t sleep at night, haunted by Sam’s face. “Since when did you go all spiritual? I don’t see any Samoan burial grounds around here.” He looped his boot laces over the tree. “I’m calling this a fair trade.”

  Sam polished his knife on his T-shirt before returning it to its sheath. “It’s your
blood, brother.”

  They shouldered their packs in silence. The only sound was the wind running around the sand and scratching through the scrub. Then there was the knock-knock of the sneakers colliding with one another again.

  Even though it was dark, the breeze made for easy traveling. The men walked side by side, following the glow of the Samoan’s flashlight. The moon was a smudge. The sky hung close and heavy. After several hours, the wind began to whip harder, lifting small pebbles and handfuls of sand. Blake tightened the strap on his Ranger’s hat.

  To the north, lightning tiptoed along a mountain range, briefly illuminating ragged peaks and tinting the clouds. Sam cast his light off the road. They were in a flat stretch with nothing but a few stunted Joshua trees.

  The lightning struck faster, dancing a quickstep. The men hunched their shoulders, lowering their faces from the wind.

  The rain started suddenly—an onslaught. They trudged on, struggling through the walls of water. Sam’s flashlight was useless. They slipped and stumbled on loosened rock. Finally they were forced off the road.

  They huddled in a culvert as the water descended in torrents so strong they had to close their eyes against the storm. When the rain let up, they continued until it began again and they were once more forced off onto the shoulder. The Samoan cast his light into the desert and found a collection of small boulders.

  They slipped and slid over the soft sand tearing their clothes. They wedged themselves between the rocks and Sam pulled a blanket over their heads to stave off the worst of the rain.

  Beneath the blanket it was warm and close. Blake could smell Sam’s rotten herbal scent. It was a smell he was used to after years of sleeping in close quarters—on single mattresses in airless rooms, in jail cells, in cars. He’d gotten so used to it he missed it when Sam wasn’t around.

  “It was the shoes,” Sam said. “They brought the storm.” He squeezed rainwater from his braid.