Wonder Valley

by Ivy Pochoda

  When Owen brought the sledgehammer down, it was with little force. He didn’t strike. He just let it fall.

  He missed. The sledgehammer knocked the ax, sending it sideways into the chicken’s neck, pinning it but not killing it. The bird thrashed. Owen staggered backward.

  “Jesus Christ,” Patrick said. “Finish her.”

  Owen dropped the sledgehammer.

  “Finish her!”

  Owen backed toward the edge of the chicken barn.

  Britt picked up the hammer and raised it over her head. In one swift blow she severed the chicken’s neck. Then she grabbed the flapping body and plunged it into the bucket.

  “Perfect,” Patrick said, touching her shoulder. His hand lingered and when he removed it, bloody fingerprints stained her white shirt.

  Owen ran from the coop in the direction of the oasis. Patrick didn’t call him back. James watched his brother go. Up above him a hawk was circling. The bird began to dive, a controlled downward descent. For a moment, its rippling feathers were the only sound. Then it rose back to the sky with a field mouse in its talons, its wings beating the air like a bass drum.

  AS ALWAYS AFTER A SLAUGHTER, PATRICK AND GRACE THREW A PARTY. They filled an oil drum with coals and grilled a few of the chickens, the sweet scent of caramelizing meat hiding the stench of death.

  The sun dawdled over the Pinto Mountains. Bruised purple shadows stretched into the sand, creeping from the mountain range to the foot of the property.

  Sometimes slaughter days passed without incident and sometimes they got into everyone’s bones where they lodged for a week—the sounds and smells of the dead birds lurking everywhere.

  Owen hadn’t reappeared and James had been too busy picking up his slack, hosing blood from the bird pen and packing the chickens in the freezer, to look for him. In his brother’s place, he would have swung the hammer. He would have hit his mark. Patrick would have been proud.

  The sun began to set like an explosion—a smoky, red-and-orange violence that erupted across the sky, so beautiful it seemed unnatural. Grace opened bottles of wine. The crackle of the fire, the spit and sizzle of the grill, and the twang of someone’s guitar masked the hush and rustle of the desert and made it almost possible for James to love it on Howling Tree Ranch.

  The interns danced and drummed and sang as if the noise they made could erase the events of the day. Or maybe the slaughter had excited them, made them raucous and wild.

  Grace worked the grill, flipping spatchcocked birds. Patrick stood up from the campfire. All the interns’ eyes were on him. He took a few steps in time to the music. Then he held out his hand to Britt. James watched them step away from the circle. His father placed a hand on Britt’s waist and the other on her shoulder. Then their bodies merged into a single silhouette as they twirled away.

  James joined his mother at the grill, picking sweet, crisp skin from the grate. She looped her arm around his shoulders as they watched Britt and Patrick spin across the sand.

  “They always think they’re special,” she said, “and one day they aren’t.” She kissed the top of James’s head. She craned her neck, but Patrick and Britt were lost in the darkness. “They’re just silly kids who will wake up soon and want a hot shower and a three-course meal. Then they’ll leave.”

  “I want to leave,” James said.

  Grace ran her fingers through his hair and squeezed gently. “But I’m here,” she said.

  THE SUN LINGERED, CREATING SHARP SHADOWS AND DEFINING THE shapes of birds gliding through the sky. A stubborn ribbon of blue remained overhead, twisted into the evening colors. A hawk hovered and dipped, hunting something behind the coop.

  Britt returned and one of the male interns made room for her around the fire. Patrick snuck up to Grace and wrapped his arms around her waist. She stiffened as he pressed his lips to her cheek, then twisted free and refilled their wineglasses.

  The gunshot ripped the night apart—a hard crack, like a stone split in two. The Pinto Mountains returned its echo. James looked up at the pink sky as the black outline of the hawk folded its wings and plummeted earthward.

  It bucked and tumbled. Then it collided with a rock and bounced once before merging with the dark desert floor.

  Owen stood just beyond the oil drum holding their father’s shotgun. His arms trembled. He lowered the gun, retrieved the bird, and carried it toward the fire. Its wings were spread across his arms, its body dangling. Blood ran down his forearms. He laid it at his father’s feet. The music stopped.

  “You wanted me to kill something,” Owen said. “So I killed this.”

  The light was gone.

  “How could you be so foolish,” Patrick said.

  Some of the interns muttered in agreement. Grace silenced them with a glance.

  “You won’t waste this life.” Patrick lifted the bird from the ground.

  Grace topped off her glass and returned to the house. She sat on the porch and looked away from the campfire to the road that led to the highway.

  The interns packed up their drums and guitars and moved to their cabins.

  “You’ll eat it,” Patrick said. “We eat what we kill.”

  Owen looked at James.

  “He’s not going to help you,” their father said.

  JAMES SLIPPED OFF. HE PLUNGED INTO THE POND WHERE HE COULD SEE Owen. His brother was crouched at the edge of the fire. Their father stood over him as he plucked the hawk’s feathers. The quills were stubborn, forcing Owen to yank hard, stretching the bird’s tough skin. Every so often Patrick would hold the bird up, examining its half-naked flesh. It took Owen nearly an hour to denude the hawk’s body. He left its head intact. When he was done, Patrick handed Owen a knife.

  James watched as his brother severed the hawk’s plumed head, which Patrick held up in the fire’s glow. Then Owen removed its legs and cut off its feet. He followed their father to the oil drum where he placed the legs over the coals.

  James ducked under so he wouldn’t have to smell the hawk’s muscled flesh roasting over the fire. He swam to the far end of the pond, for once not worrying about the coyotes that came to drink after dark. When he returned, Owen was back at the fire, eating one of the charred legs. Their father waited until he was finished, the bones polished white, before handing him a second helping. Owen held up his hand, clutched his stomach, put a hand over his mouth. But Patrick insisted, shoving the roasted bird into Owen’s hand and taking the bones and throwing them into the fire. Owen ate slowly, his jaw laboring each bite. When he was finished, Patrick handed him one of the wings.

  James closed his eyes, unwilling to assign a taste to the hawk’s roasted body. But he could sense it anyway—a bitter, angry taste; a dark, violent flavor.

  5

  TONY, LOS ANGELES, 2010

  It takes Tony a moment to realize what happened. Grit from the asphalt is pressed into his face, and his cheekbone is sore from where he hit the ground. He’s hauled to his feet. Someone presses a hand to the top of his head, forcing him to stoop as he’s pushed into the back of a police cruiser.

  His lungs are sore from the run. His calves are already starting to tighten. Tomorrow he will have shin splints from running in his loafers. But the adrenaline is still coursing in his blood—that postsprint feeling at the end of his usual run when his body has stopped moving but his mind is still racing forward.

  He is handcuffed. The bracelets hold him tight, pinching his wrists and digging into the base of his spine as the cruiser drives off.

  Tony’s heart rate slows as the car crosses the 110 and slides through downtown. His chest loosens. His breath grows easy. He stinks of his own cologne mixed with sweat. He’s missing a cuff link.

  He’s never been this deep downtown before, away from the familiar office buildings crowned with their reassuring corporate logos that line the freeway. He wouldn’t recognize this place as Los Angeles, at least his Los Angeles with its palm-tree-lined streets and houses covered in bougainvillea. This is urban—a New
ark, a Detroit, a decades-old New York—somewhere between decay and rebirth, a city where life is lived on the streets instead of inside fenced yards and climate-controlled living rooms.

  The police car is driving through a sprawling homeless community, the sidewalks filled with tents and other makeshift shelters. The name Skid Row always sounded mythical to Tony, something from a black-and-white movie, a novel, or someone else’s city altogether.

  The cruiser stops in back of a windowless 1960s-era precinct. The smell when they open the car is unreal—urine and sour sheets and rotting food. The cops don’t have to tell Tony to hustle inside.

  They book him—take his fingerprints and his mug shot. He allows them to give him a drug test and a breathalyzer even though he knows it should have been done on the scene. They offer a phone call. Tony tries to imagine Stephanie answering in their cream-colored living room, her heels tapping on the pressed wood floor as she listens to him tell her he’s been booked for interfering with a police investigation, vehicular endangerment, evading arrest, to name a few. He will have to explain that, best-case scenario, their car has been towed, probably impounded if it wasn’t vandalized or damaged where he left it. And that naked guy running through traffic that she’d been concerned about, that psycho—well, Tony can only imagine her reaction when she hears he chased the stranger and added himself to the spectacle.

  No, that wouldn’t fly in their circle where they have a tenuous grip on the city’s glamour, where Stephanie works overtime to keep their children in the best private schools, where her butterscotch cookie balls are the toast of the annual holiday bake sale. She’s worked too hard for their birthday parties that spare no expense and a hot-ticket holiday party that takes a bite out of their Christmas spending.

  Tony is in the business, that’s all that matters. He works at a studio and has his own office, his own team. Stephanie doesn’t explain to friends that he’s a legal counsel responsible for overseeing a host of crappy kids’ products that are stocked at big-box stores and handed out at fast-food chains. She glosses over that and the fact that her dad got him the job at the studio—a favor they are unlikely to be able to repay. She also glosses over the fact that he was once a snazzy corporate lawyer in Chicago on track to make partner before he let a summer intern walk home drunk after a stupid night out at a stupid club with stupid bottle service. The girl had fallen onto the el tracks. Her parents had sued Tony. They didn’t win. But he didn’t make partner. His new employers know his history and they keep their eye on him.

  Tony can’t call his wife. So he calls a friend from law school who has to drive up from Orange County which could take up to two hours during the morning rush.

  They put him in a cell. His dress shirt is torn. Somewhere between being shoved to the pavement and hustled into the back of the police car, he has lost one of his Italian leather loafers. Stephanie is going to be furious about the cuff link.

  The cell smells like beer and piss and bad breath. There are two other occupants, both slumped in opposite corners. He prays they don’t wake up.

  He doesn’t want to sit, doesn’t want to feel the first cramps sneak into his legs. He places one foot on the bench, stretches his Achilles and his calves. He angles his knee outward, letting the stretch reach into his hip flexor.

  He walks to the door of the cell and looks out, trying to see if they’ve caught the other guy, the naked runner who’d created this mess. Even in the stink of the jail, Tony can still summon the tingling sense of freedom the man inspired in him—his unburdened stride, his serene expression that made him seem immune to it all—petty grievances of the nine-to-five, real estate taxes, homeowner’s insurance, playgroups, contract negotiations, secretarial gifts. He hopes the man got away. He doesn’t want his run to have to end here, in this dismal precinct.

  A uniformed officer opens the cell door and calls Tony’s name. He takes him to an interrogation room where a heavyset detective is waiting. The man’s eyes are puffy. He waits for Tony to be seated before introducing himself as Detective Addison.

  “So tell me,” Addison says, “what kind of game were you two playing?” His voice sounds like his mind is elsewhere or that this is a routine he’s tired of.

  Tony fingers the rip in his shirt. “I don’t even know the guy.”

  The detective flips through a manila folder on the table. Tony can just make out what look like grainy aerial shots of the chase through the downtown streets.

  “I’ve seen a lot of shit in my day, but two grown men chasing each other through rush-hour traffic on the 110 is new to me.”

  “I wasn’t really chasing him.”

  Detective Addison closes the folder and rubs his eyes. He leans back in his chair. “What then?”

  “I don’t know,” Tony says. “I was watching him coming through the jam. And then . . .”

  “Hold on,” the detective says, looking straight at Tony for the first time. “You didn’t know the guy?”

  Tony’s right calf is cramping hard. He flexes his foot, trying to release the muscle. “No, sir.”

  “What is it that you do?”

  “I’m a lawyer.”

  “Jesus.” Detective Addison closes his eyes. “You know how much shit comes through this precinct on a daily basis? So much shit. Over the phone for starters. Some guy calls, says there’s someone lurking outside his house. Says he’s afraid to go outside. Says the man has a gun. Sounds okay, right? So what happens? I take his information, try to keep him calm. The routine. Then next thing he’s saying it’s not a man with a gun, it’s five men with sniper rifles. Says that the president’s sent this team to kill him. Says there was a Blackhawk over his house last night. Tells me he’s got secrets. Says something about the G8. And that’s just what comes in over the phone.”

  “I get it,” Tony says.

  “You see that neighborhood out there?” The detective jabs his pen toward the wall. “It’s ground zero for chaos. It’s not crime like you get in Hollywood or Brentwood—carjackings, B&Es, your run-of-the-mill homicide. There are no rules out here. Hell, people don’t even have addresses. Try finding a perp who’s got no home and nothing to lose.” Addison scratches his stubbled chin. “And now the dealers have started dressing like the homeless to fuck us even harder. Used to be easier. Used to be certain tents were certain colors and sold certain types of drugs. But now they don’t even abide by their own order. So you understand what I’m telling you?”

  “I’m not sure,” Tony says.

  “So you saw the naked man and you got out of your car to follow him? You wanted to help him?”

  Tony realizes the detective is giving him an out. “No,” he says. “I wanted to be him.”

  “Jesus.” Addison pushes back his chair and, with a groan, gets to his feet. “Like I was telling you, we have enough of our own shit down here that we don’t need folks like you adding to it. I probably should ship you out for a psych eval.” He taps the folder on the short end.

  Tony’s heart plunges. This is how it will end. This is how he’ll lose his job, lose his wife, lose his kids.

  He is alone for half an hour. He’s missed his midmorning meeting—a conference call about a fast-food animation tie-in. He wonders if his secretary has called his house and what Stephanie has told her if she has. He wonders what his wife is thinking.

  If it comes up, she will tell her friends that he had a small breakdown. She will blame the stress of work—the importance of his job. In public she will put on a strong face. At home she’ll rake him over the coals for jeopardizing his second chance, for risking their tidy life for his stupidity.

  Detective Addison returns. He sets a Styrofoam cup of coffee down in front of Tony. The liquid looks like sludge and smells like tar.

  “So let’s go over this thing one more time.” The detective sits in his chair. He sounds like he needs to be oiled. “Okay, so you’re driving in your car and then what? You see this guy running down the 110 and you get out of your vehicle to follow?”


  That’s it, Tony thinks, that’s exactly how it happened. But he knows this isn’t enough of an explanation, not to himself, not to the cop, not to his wife. “It was like he knew something that I didn’t.”

  “Yeah,” Detective Addison says, “and what was that?”

  Tony knows that any further explanation will only bury him deeper. He can’t explain to this guy, or to anyone else, that a couple of hours ago, he’d wanted to be that naked man reverse commuting against the bumper to bumper, that it had seemed easier to leave his car, run against the flow, rewind to something simpler. “I don’t know anymore,” Tony says. “You know, that commute. It can melt your mind.” He runs his finger over a red welt left by the handcuffs.

  The detective inflates his cheeks and exhales loudly. “You don’t need to tell me. I come in from Santa Clarita.” He drums his fingers on the manila folder. “We got a bunch of charges here. ‘Willfully obstructing or delaying a sworn officer in the performance of his duty. Fleeing the police on the freeway.’ You know it’s against the law to abandon your car on the highway? It’s going to cost you some dough and maybe even your license. Then there’s the question of public endangerment. You could have caused an accident running through traffic like that. You could have been up for involuntary manslaughter.” The detective rubs his eyes again. “So let me ask you one more time. You were trying to help your friend out or what?”

  “I told you, I don’t know the guy.”

  The detective makes a few notes on the file. “Your buddy’s here,” he says. “They’re going to give you a pile of paper—citations, summonses, the works. Don’t miss your court date.”

  “What about the other guy?”

  “In a couple of hours he’ll be yesterday’s news. You will too, if you’re lucky.”

  IT’S MIDAFTERNOON BY THE TIME TONY GETS OUT OF THE STATION. They’ve lost the paperwork on his car. They tell him to call in tomorrow.