Wonder Valley

by Ivy Pochoda

  A few more cars passed—Laila checking each one. Then another bus.

  Laila was craning her neck, straining to see something down the street. Then she put her hands on her hips, nearly pulling down her sweatpants from her bony waist.

  A white guy had turned up at the corner. He was dressed kind of like a rocker, kind of like a bum—black hair, black jeans, black leather vest. Laila was sassing him for something. Ren could tell without hearing her, giving him lip about being late or even being there at all. The man didn’t seem too interested or troubled by her attitude. It looked like he’d weathered this particular storm before.

  Eventually Laila reached into her oversized purse and handed over a bunch of bottles that, from where Ren was watching, looked like prescription medicines. The man slipped her some money, which Laila made a big show of counting right out there in the open. She held out her hand for more, which the man immediately forked over like this was all part of their little dance.

  Laila tucked the cash in her bag and returned to the camp.

  “What’s all that?” Ren asked.

  For a split second Laila looked at him like she’d forgotten he’d turned up in the night. Then she wagged her head side to side like he was too foolish to bother with. “Since you are here I might as well get you fed.”

  They headed to Seventh, retracing Ren’s walk from the station two days earlier. On the corner a shirtless man was sprawled half on, half off the curb, a scar clear-cut across his belly. On the far side of the street, Laila had to pause to catch her breath.

  “You sick, Ma?”

  “I haven’t seen you in four years and you come at me with the questions.”

  Now whose fault it that? Ren thought. Who left who in a juvie facility upstate and then stopped visiting? Who moved away without a forwarding address?

  Laila led them to an outdoor taco spot with a covered seating area filled with scratched orange benches and dirty tables bolted to the ground. A sign taped to the bulletproof window told Ren the place accepted WIC and food stamps. After Laila ordered for them, she pulled out a crisp five-spot from a small roll in her purse. She caught Ren clocking the cash. “See something you want?”

  “You got cash but you sleep on the street.”

  “I sleep where I choose.”

  They took their burritos to a table close to the sidewalk. Laila jabbed at her food with her fork. “You ever had Mexican?”

  “There was some sort of taco night.”

  “That doesn’t sound too bad,” Laila said.

  Ren ate fast, a bad habit he picked up in juvie, where lingering over your food led to trouble. But Laila was eating slow, tiny birdlike bites that she struggled to get down. Eventually she slid her burrito over to Ren, only a fraction of it missing.

  “How come you don’t want it?” he asked.

  “I can’t give my son some food without a bunch of questions? Eat it or don’t, but just know that I’m not in the business of buying a lot of meals.”

  Ren took the plate and went to work, eating so fast that by the time his stomach caught up it was too late and he felt his gut might bust.

  “So,” Laila said. “I guess you’re going to keep bugging me until I tell you how I wound up here.”

  “I’m not here to bug you, Ma. I’m here to get you home.”

  Laila threw back her head and laughed. And for a split second Ren could see how she looked in the early evening when the booze made her light before it brought her down. How she looked when she sang in their apartment when she thought no one was looking. Laila’s laughter was cut short by a coughing fit that doubled her over at the waist. “Get me home? How’s that now? You only just got here and you got yourself beat up.” She wiped her mouth. “You probably rolled into town with grand aspirations, but now you’re regulation-grade homeless.”

  Ren bit his lip to stop himself from spitting out the same kind of childish retort that fueled Laila’s anger. He felt blood spring once more from the cut on his lip. “I’m gonna figure shit out, then I’m gonna get you home,” he said.

  “Who says I want to go anywhere? And what the fuck is home anyway?” Laila crossed her arms over her chest and gave him the look she usually saved for his father when Winston said something she called dumb as fucking shit.

  “It’s not here,” Ren said.

  “What do you even know about home? Home is where I say it is.”

  “But—” Ren glanced out along Seventh Street. A woman wearing no pants was using the curb as a balance beam. Two men on the corner were playing a hand game.

  “You were out of the house at twelve so you don’t know from home.”

  Out of the house—like he had a choice in the matter.

  “And let me tell you a few more things you don’t know. I bet you didn’t know your daddy skipped up to Troy with his new piece leaving me to pick up his half of the rent should I want to keep on living in my own damn home. And then when he got tired of her he sent for me. And I packed my shit and moved to some gray-ass town upstate because I didn’t feel like pulling double shifts to live in that shitty apartment all on my lonesome.”

  “I didn’t know because you didn’t visit,” Ren said.

  “I guess you’re not hearing me. I had my own shit going on.”

  Ren crumpled his paper plates together. “Sounds like it.”

  “And Troy was no picnic neither. Your daddy said we had a townhome, which sounded fancy as fuck. Turns out it was just another project. Only difference was, we had two floors of shitty living. So I split after four months. Figured I’d see the ocean for once.”

  “There’s an ocean back east,” Ren said. “And from what I remember you weren’t too interested in that one.” Coney Island—only a subway ride away, no need even to transfer, and Laila had never taken him, had told him if he wanted to see the water, he could go look at the damn bay from the docks at the edge of their hood.

  “Yeah, well. Truth is I never made it to the one out here, neither. I got waylaid.”

  Now this was the Laila Ren remembered, using strange words to distract from her own culpability. Like everything happened to her but she did nothing. Because it wasn’t her fault was it that her girlfriends had kept her out till three in the morning, that she’d overslept and missed Winston’s parents when they visited. She’d been waylaid. Because how could she be the first one to leave her little cousin’s twenty-first birthday when she was the one who organized it, how could she leave all those girls dancing in a club with a bunch of guys all over them. She’d had to stay, had to chaperone them back to someone’s home, had to make sure those guys kept their hands to themselves, had to stay up all night doing it, had to miss work the next day. So it wasn’t her fault that she was fired, course, wasn’t her fault that she’d been waylaid again.

  Ren could see it now—Laila arriving in downtown L.A., planning to get out to the beach, planning to start over without Winston, but getting sidetracked by some action on the street, someone promising her the moon but only delivering some booze or drugs, which had been just fine when it came down to it.

  Laila took a sip of water, trying to clear the crackle from her throat. “And when I tried to rent an apartment, I learned your daddy hadn’t been paying the rent on our Troy shithole in months. Add to that he’d gotten himself evicted after I left. He treated me like a fool and killed my credit permanent. No one’s going to rent to me. Three months of hotel living cleaned me out.”

  “And?”

  “And what? And here I am.”

  “This is no place,” Ren said.

  “Says who? You? This is a place. My place.” She gave him a look, like end-of-subject-or-else, like he was eight years old, a nuisance who didn’t know what from what. “Damn,” Laila said. “Keep sitting around like this and we’re going to be late.”

  “We’re going somewhere?”

  “It’s Sunday, Renton. A godly day. Or didn’t they teach you anything when you were in that juvenile hall?”

  “And
?”

  “And we’re going to church.”

  “For real?” Because when Ren was a boy, he’d listened to his mother and her friends mock the ladies who paraded across the grim courtyards on Sunday mornings, proud in their jewel-toned satin skirt suits, wide-brimmed hats, patent leather heels on their way to one of the storefront churches or local tabernacles. Ren liked their colors, the neatness, the formality. But Laila called them crazy ladybugs, too stupid to see that God, if he existed, didn’t give a damn if their shoes matched their purses or their hats, their dresses. “You’re going to church?” he said.

  “We,” Laila said standing up. “We did food, now we do God.”

  CHURCH WASN’T REALLY CHURCH, BUT A ROW OF METAL FOLDING CHAIRS two wide and twelve deep in a narrow alley. The corridor smelled like the zoo Ren visited back when his memories weren’t so hard. Someone had thrown up a few crude religious murals on the walls—a sickly Christ drooping from a frail-looking cross and a cartoonish approximation of what Ren figured was supposed to be the Virgin. If things were up to him, those walls would be blazing with all sorts of heavenly glory—dramatic colors and graphics that damn well made you believe that there really was a better place.

  Ren recognized the preacher as one of the women who had been handing out pamphlets down by the bus stop the day he rolled into town. She was light skinned with dozens of moles scattered across her nose and cheeks like three-dimensional freckles. She wore a long purple skirt, dirty at the hem, and a short-sleeved white blouse. Her braids were wound in a scarf. She held a battered-looking microphone plugged in to a single speaker that made her voice crack and boom as it echoed in the narrow alley.

  “Sister Cora Dufrane,” Laila said, sitting in a chair near the back.

  They’d arrived late. The sermon was in full swing. Sister Cora closed her eyes when she preached, her chin tilted toward the slip of sky above the alley. Her voice came like a crashing wave. It took Ren a moment to orient himself in the speech, tune in to the sister’s words instead of looking at the group gathered to hear her. Laila broke into a coughing fit and spat. The preacher waited for it to pass.

  Most of the seats were taken by people well past Ren’s age. A few congregants had pulled up in motorized wheelchairs that whirred and beeped when their drivers jibed the sister’s meaning. Ren sat behind Laila at the farthest edge of the congregation, ready to escape should this alleyway god look to confine him.

  He only half listened to the sermon. Instead he focused on the graffiti murals. Cup his hand the right way and he could feel the weight and size of a cylinder of Krylon. He could hear the rattle and hiss and get the contact high from the fumes. In juvie he’d practiced his style using printer paper in place of the blank walls he planned to search out when he was released. He painted the world he wanted to step into, and when he got out, he painted a better version of the place he found. He exaggerated his surroundings, made them jump off the walls, hoping he could paint his way into them and find his home. He couldn’t imagine exercising his skills on these streets. There was no amount of Krylon that could make them home.

  Two women from the front row got up and joined Sister Cora for a hymn. Laila closed her eyes and tilted her head back as she listened. “I always wanted to sing at the tabernacle,” she said.

  “No shit,” Ren whispered.

  Laila turned in her chair so she faced him. “Yeah, no shit. Let’s just say, I became disaffected.”

  “The fuck does that mean?” Ren said.

  Laila slapped his hand.

  The hymn finished. Sister Cora was coming down the aisle, holding out the microphone. “Whose word is going to lift us up? Whose word is going to be the light that shines into our hearts?”

  “Me.” Laila was on her feet. The microphone was in her hand. And before Ren had a chance to figure that his mother was about to preach to the tattered crowd gathered in the alleyway, she was up front, her mouth open, the few rhinestones on her sweat suit catching a sliver of sun that found its way down between the narrow buildings.

  “Someday an old man is going to be knocking at your door and you’re not going to recognize him. Maybe it’s because he’s withered and worn like shoe leather—cracked like a suitcase. And you’re going to cover your face, shut your eyes. You won’t see the skin gone gray, the bone turned brittle, the pupils shrunk, the tempest that surged up and died out leaving destruction. You’ll try to shut the door, but you can’t. For this man, he’s going to keep coming. This man is you.

  “I know, because he’s come for me. It was my own damn ghost that grabbed me. Stared back at me from the broken bathroom mirror in my housing project in Brooklyn when I’d been up all night boozing. Looked up at me from the bottom of the bottle I was fixing to throw at my husband. Tapped on my window where I was lying naked with a man I didn’t know. Showed me the pain that was permanent. Showed me this skin I can’t escape.

  “I left home to run away from him. Thought I could leave him behind back on the East Coast. That I could outstrip him.

  “I told myself that if I came out here, lived by the ocean, drank in all the light and sunshine, this man wouldn’t find me, wouldn’t be in me, wouldn’t be me.

  “You know what? I never did see the ocean. I came thousands of miles only to encounter my own Holy Ghost a continent away, waiting for me the minute I stepped off the bus. He’d beaten me cross-country. He’d been on the express. You know why? Because he knew me better than I knew myself, knew that I’d have to get through him before I’d get to any damn ocean.

  “He knew that I was foolish enough to try to run from him when I should have been running to him.

  “You don’t believe me? You think I’m tripping? Let me ask you this. Who is the Holy Ghost after all? Some man sent down from heaven? No, he’s what walks between you, stalking these street corners, slipping in between the whites of your eyes. He’s in you already. But you didn’t even know. I found him. I saw him in me. I embraced him and he let me go. Which is why I’m standing here talking at you.

  “I only have one question for you.”

  Laila opened her eyes and fixed her stare right on Ren.

  “I only have one question for you.”

  The congregation followed her gaze, everyone turning to look at him at once.

  “Who is your Holy Ghost?”

  Ren glanced at Sister Cora who was hovering nearby, nodding at him as if his own mother’s attention was its own sort of honor.

  “I said, who is your Holy Ghost? ’Cause he’s in you now and he won’t let you be.”

  Ren shook his head, trying to break free of her stare.

  “Oh, I see him in you. I see him in all of you. He’s in there. He won’t set you free, so don’t ask. You need to make room for him in your heart. So I ask you one more time: Who is he?”

  Ren was on his feet. He took down two folding chairs in his hurry. He rushed from the sound of Laila’s voice, the closeness of the alley and its animal odor. But back on the street the brutality of the high noon sun and the mad noise of everybody else’s problems gave no relief.

  His mother didn’t need to ask and she damn well knew it. Ren was too aware of who his Holy Ghost was—the person who sat heavy on his heart. He took a deep breath, inhaling the strange smell of Skid Row—something beastly but equally antiseptic. He moved as quick as the heat would allow, hoping to outrun the memory summoned by Laila. He passed the Midnight Mission. He passed a group of teenagers wearing matching purple polo shirts advertising their Christian outreach. He passed a woman herding six children into a decrepit hotel.

  He crossed from the heart of Skid Row into downtown. He wanted the festering streets at his back. He’d buried his own demons, his Holy Ghost. But a few more nights out here and the man would be as real as if he were still breathing.

  Laila knew what she was doing, reminding him of the sin that she would never forgive, letting him know that she knew he was bad. No amount of time inside, no amount of rehabilitation could change that in his
mother’s eyes.

  Ren kept moving, trying to outrun his ghost. He paced the streets, watching downtown get going—a young crowd venturing outside to walk their dogs, take a jog, gather for brunch. The day was theirs, loose and malleable. They’d stay around for drinks, and then start thinking about dinner.

  On every corner he could feel his ghost getting closer, growing solid. He could hear the man starting to breathe, his footsteps starting to fall as he began to keep pace with Ren.

  Ren walked until the sun slipped over the few skyscrapers at the far edge of downtown. As he predicted, people were filling the few bars and restaurants. Lights were coming on in the loft buildings. The homeless who’d migrated this far west were heading back toward the missions.

  He reached his hands into his empty pockets. He was used to having little but never having nothing. At dusk, he joined the shadow march back to Skid Row.

  People were already lined up at the Midnight Mission on Sixth. A few tents were handing out food. Ren grabbed a plate and worked his way back to Crocker. He found his discarded box from the night before and dragged it into the spot next to his mother’s, which he guessed was what he now called home.

  11

  BRITT, TWENTYNINE PALMS, 2006

  There are things you get used to: the heat, the dirt, the ammonia smell of the chickens. The weird grains and sandy greens. The crappy wine. The cheap weed. The sweet tang of burning sage coming off everyone and everything. Then there are things you don’t: the goat-eyed stares of the other interns, the way they are all around you, suffocating you in this wide open space. Grace’s eyes watching from a distance. Patrick’s watching up close.

  Nearly a week on the farm and Britt’s skin had already turned nut brown, not quite the terra-cotta hue of Cassidy and the twins, but close. The sand and silty pond water matted her hair, forming textured tangles that she couldn’t comb out. There was a layer of dirt on her skin that lingered no matter how hard she scrubbed it away.

  At first Britt resisted the desert’s insistent takeover. But when she caught her reflection thrown back at her in the large window of her cabin by the night sky, she felt relief, as if the sand and sun and smells would soon hide her self from herself, building a new person on top of the one she’d been trying to escape.