Wonder Valley

by Ivy Pochoda

  He tugged on the zipper. It caught and shook the tent. He worked it free just enough to peek inside. Someone was sleeping curled on Laila’s pad, a pillow over her head, the sleeping bag unzipped and tossed over like a blanket. A skinny arm, flesh loose and gray, protruded. Ren could see a lean cheekbone.

  “Laila?” he whispered.

  The sleeper didn’t move.

  “Laila? Mom?”

  The woman—at least Ren thought it was a woman—under the bag rolled to the side and groaned. “Don’t Laila me,” she said. The pillow slipped off her face, revealing the harsh, sharp line of her jaw, the thin cracks of her lips. “Don’t come into a woman’s tent. Don’t wake a woman up.”

  Her voice was dry, like she was near choking on her words.

  “It’s Renton.”

  “I know who it is. And I still want to sleep.”

  Ren couldn’t take his eyes off his mother’s ravaged face.

  “I can feel you watching me, Renton. I know you’re about to start with your questions.”

  Ren tried tugging up the zipper, but it snagged.

  “And now you’re shaking the place on top of all else.” Laila sat up and drew the sleeping bag up to her chin. Ren almost had the zipper up. “I’m awake now, so don’t bother. And stop rattling my tent.”

  “Where’ve you been?”

  “Me?” Laila said. “I went to check out the ocean. Got a front-row seat and couldn’t take my eyes off it.”

  “For real?”

  “What do you mean for real? Yeah, for real, for real. It’s big and blue and makes all sorts of noise.”

  “You spent a month at the ocean?”

  “And you spent a month living on the street,” Laila said. “You tell me which sounds crazier. Now let me put myself in order.”

  REN SAT OUTSIDE HIS TENT LISTENING TO LAILA GET DRESSED. MUSIC WAS coming from down the street—old soul from crappy speakers. He watched a woman who camped on the far side of Darrell begin to jive to the beat in her motorized wheelchair, zipping to the curb, then doing a one eighty back to her tent, over and over again. She was white, midfifties, and wore purple fleece pajamas patterned with comets. She’d been living in assisted housing for a year but had lost the rights to her place. Had them stolen from her is what she said to anyone who asked. That was three years ago.

  She was a talker—a mile a minute, all day and all night. She gave Ren her story. Mental health issues, addiction issues, anxiety issues, and an eating disorder. Overeating, not under.

  She said her name was Nancy and before she’d become disabled, folks had called her All-Night Nancy because she was the queen of these streets. Things were different now.

  She turned her wheelchair and headed in Ren’s direction, stopping in front of his tent.

  “I am an artist,” she said. “You know that, don’t you? A local artist. They got my work at the community center up the street. You been there yet? You better go. And when you do, you can see my stuff, right in the window. They gave me my own show. Photos, paintings, sculptures, collages. Some I make for myself. Some I sell. You got a piece of graph paper in your tent? I don’t like ruled paper. You got graph?”

  “I—” Ren said.

  “Gimme me a piece of graph. I’ll make you a drawing. But you better hold on to it when I’m done. One day I’m gonna be a big, famous artist. Already am around here. But one day they’re gonna have my stuff over in the museum. The for-real museum.”

  “I don’t have graph.”

  Nancy reached into the wire basket at the front of her chair and pulled out a few paintings on thick paper. Most of them were crude images of trees and houses. But there was something to Nancy’s work, Ren had to admit, something in the way the colors came together, how you could see her individual brushstrokes, the way the simplicity of her art gave it life.

  “Rad,” he said, flipping through the stack of paintings.

  “Lemme take your photo,” Nancy said. “It’s for my class. I’m doing portraiture.” The long word took its time coming out of her mouth. “Normally I take pictures of my friends from back in the day. But lots of them are drug dealers. They don’t want their picture taken for a show. They don’t want to be hung on the wall. Lemme take yours?” Nancy wheeled the chair right up to Ren and tugged on his sleeve. He stumbled after her, trying to avoid crashing into the chair.

  Ren allowed himself to be posed in the middle of Crocker facing north, the street running off behind his back. He tried not to laugh when Nancy pulled out a small disposable Kodak and squinted through the tiny viewfinder.

  “Light’s wrong,” she said. “You got to get the light. That’s the most important thing. Light, light, light.”

  Nancy reached into a basket at the back of her chair and pulled out a piece of cardboard covered in tinfoil. She zipped over to Ren and held the thing under his chin. The board was floppy, the tinfoil dull.

  “That’s the light,” she said. Still holding the cardboard she lifted the camera to her eye. Ren pulled back, dodging the proximity of the lens. The shutter clicked. “Gotcha! I’m gonna make you a star. You ever think of drawing anything yourself? Bet there’s an artist in you somewhere. Take my marker. I got a pencil, too. If you ever get yourself some paper, maybe you could draw something.”

  Ren waved her off, but she pressed the Crayola marker into his hand.

  “I have a show next week. But I’ll get your photo up before then.”

  He didn’t tell her he expected that by then he and Laila would be gone. One look at his mom’s face told him the streets were going to kill her if he didn’t make his move.

  After Nancy drove off, Ren rolled the marker over in his palm, then gripped it, scribbling in the air, making the shape of his old tag—RunDown. In juvie he’d spent hours practicing his tags, his graffiti skills, his throwups, and burners, so he could color the world when he got out. He’d studied the oriental writers, the Wild Style masters, and the blockbusters, crafting his own aesthetic from others’ work.

  He found a week-old LA Times in Darrell’s camp and scrawled his tag across the front page. He stared at the name he’d chosen for himself, running his finger over the crisscross letters. RunDown—it was meant to let folks know he had the drop on them, that he knew the score. That even though life had tried to run him down, he was still in charge. But on these streets, his tag had a different meaning. Run-down, run aground, grounded, brought low.

  He flipped the paper over and tagged the weather page. Then he pulled out the business section, hitting the stocks on one side and the article below the fold on the other. He hit the calendar section and California. Ren was still tagging the paper, covering the news with his name when Laila finally made it out of her tent. “You still messing around with those drawings?” she asked.

  Ren stuffed the paper away.

  “And still ashamed of it too,” Laila said. “Never could quite figure out what’s good for you.”

  Ren was shocked at his mother’s transformation. She was now just an ounce or two above skeletal—her parchment skin doing a shit-poor job of protecting the bones underneath.

  She’d tried her best to distract from her condition with another bright sweatsuit, all sparkles and sequins, loud makeup that made her gaunt face look clownish, and a psychedelic headscarf over her hair.

  Ren stared at her sunken eyes gone spooky beneath bright yellow eye shadow. “What are you staring at?” she asked.

  “Where you really been, Mom?”

  “Didn’t I tell you, the ocean. Camped right on the beach. Got the sand in my toes, the wind in my hair.” Laila put her hand on her bony hip. “These streets aren’t the only place in town you can sleep out in the open.”

  Laughter came from Darrell’s quarters. Laila turned. “What?” she asked the tarps. “He’s my boy, so I have to school him.”

  Darrell poked his head out. “Tell him where you really been, Lay.”

  “Who told you where I’ve really been? I’ll tell you all where I really be
en, and that’s the beach.”

  The exertion of sassing Darrell made Laila double over, coughing out the bad air and searching for something fresh.

  “Mom?” Ren asked. “Let me take you somewhere. Let me get you some help.”

  She waved him away.

  “I’ll take you up to the clinic,” he said.

  Laila stopped coughing and fixed her stare on Ren, her yellowed eyes hard and cold. “You even think of taking me to that clinic or any sort of clinic, I’ll beat you on the spot.”

  Ren had to bite down hard to avoid talking back. “You need help.”

  Laila looked from Ren to the street corner. “There’s the only help I need.”

  Ren followed her gaze and saw Flynn coming down the block, his string bag slung across his chest, Ren’s backpack on his shoulders. He bumped fists with Darrell, then nodded at Laila. If he was shocked by her transformation, he didn’t let it show.

  “You always know when to show,” Laila said. “Like magic.”

  “It’s a wavelength thing,” Flynn said.

  He did a quick handoff to Darrell, then gave Ren his backpack. “You must have been in some heavy shit to have run out and left your stuff,” he said.

  “I slept,” Ren said.

  “Groovy.” Flynn sat down on one of Darrell’s camp chairs and began to roll a joint, pausing now and then to whip his lanky hair from his eyes. His nails were dirty, and he smelled of burned herbs.

  He held the joint out to Laila. “Ladies first.”

  “You sure that’s a good idea,” Ren said.

  But Laila was already lighting it. Ren watched her smoke, cough, smoke, cough, until she’d finished half the joint. Then she passed it to Ren.

  “I’m cool,” he said. Maybe tonight. Maybe when he wanted to sleep. But for now he needed to keep his head in the game, start putting two and two together, and take the first step to getting Laila out of downtown.

  He knew that there was trade in selling beer after the last late-night deli closed down. He’d seen dudes wheeling carts filled with cheap tallboys, offering them for a tidy profit. He closed his eyes and did the math—figuring what the buy-in needed to be.

  In his juvie math class it had gone something like this. If Paul buys ten apples for three dollars and sells them for five dollars, how much money would Paul make if he bought sixty-five apples? The answer was always the same, or similar. Paul be a fool with those apples. Paul do better to be slinging rock. That shit turn a profit at least ten to the dollar.

  No one was going to take him seriously if he started out selling a single six-pack, so he needed a case, which meant fifteen bucks—nothing crazy. If he banked fifteen bucks a night, selling those beers for double what he paid, it would take him nearly a month to get enough cash to get him and Laila back east on the Greyhound. He didn’t have to be a fortune-teller to know that a month was too goddamn long.

  “The fuck you thinking about?” Laila had her voice back.

  “Just running some numbers,” Ren said.

  “If you can do two things at once, come with me to get some food. I can’t remember the last time I had an appetite proper. What time is it?”

  Someone told her, although Ren couldn’t see how it mattered to her hunger.

  “Shit,” she said. “We have to hustle.”

  Ren took her arm and helped her to her feet. Her bones felt like twigs beneath her sweatshirt. “Hold up,” Laila said, doubling back for her large white purse.

  Flynn stood up, gave her a quick hug. “Just breathe,” he said.

  “My number one medicine man,” Laila said. “Better than a million and one doctors in a million and one clinics.” She gave Ren a look that told him for his foolishness—like only someone with no brain at all might suggest a sick lady see a doctor. Then she shook her arm, letting Ren know it was time to move.

  They rounded Sixth just in time to see a bus pull up on the opposite side of the street. Laila tugged and Ren helped her across.

  “We’re taking the bus?”

  She was about to give him another look when the doors opened and a white guy dressed in all black stepped out—the same quasi-biker dude Laila had met up with before. She broke out of Ren’s grip. “Gimme a moment to do my business.”

  The man looked startled to see Laila looking like she did. Laila pointed around the corner on Crocker, and the two of them stepped away, leaving Ren at the bus stop like he had nowhere in the world to be. In a few minutes Laila returned. Ren watched the white guy cross Sixth, his pants pockets bulging and a prescription bottle in one hand.

  “What was that all about?”

  “The fuck I’m going to tell you,” Laila said. “I thought we were going to eat.”

  The weed had put some spring in her step. At the taco stand on Seventh, Laila ordered for them both—quesadilla plates with rice and beans. She paid from a large wad of sweaty-looking cash that she tucked away before Ren could ask any questions.

  By the time the food came, her energy had begun to flag. While Ren wolfed down the melting, cheesy mess, Laila had only managed the edge of one of her triangles of quesadilla. “I prefer to eat on my own time,” she said.

  Ren boxed up her food. He dangled the plastic bag from one hand and used the other to support Laila as they made their way back to Crocker. Laila didn’t talk. He could feel her breath shaking her rib cage. When they got to her camp, Ren lifted her. Laila’s body felt like a bag of sticks, brittle, light, and easily snapped. He settled her on her thin camping mattress and covered her with her sleeping bag.

  “Lemme tell you about the beach,” she said.

  “Go on, Mom.” Ren cushioned her head on a folded sweatshirt.

  “Lemme—” she said. And then she was asleep.

  On the ground next to her bed was an old newspaper. Ren unfolded it and found a fairly empty page. He dug in his pocket for the marker Nancy had given him, and while Laila slept, he began to draw the ocean.

  23

  BLAKE, LOS ANGELES, 2010

  Nine A.M. and Blake was already three drinks in at the King Eddy on Los Angeles. A few smokers were hot-boxing the plexiglass cigarette cave and the Filipino bartender was half asleep over a small Styrofoam cup of coffee. Blake knew the bartender, not that she acknowledged him. She had a line of stars tattooed beneath one eye that had once been tears. One night, she’d quit her shift right in the middle and demanded that someone take her to an all-night tattoo spot to fix her ink. That someone was Blake. He had to look away while a bald dude with black tats crawling down his forehead and creeping up his neck transformed the teardrops into tiny stars. The bartender hadn’t flinched.

  Blake crackled his plastic glass. He’d really screwed the pooch on this one and he knew it—verbally assaulting, then attempting to attack a woman at a party where he did reliable business so near his camper. Sooner or later they’d be coming for him. His guess was sooner.

  Across the bar were two rich kids—a couple it seemed—on the tail end of what looked like a pretty rough night. They’d either staggered over from one of the refurbished lofts nearby or cabbed it crosstown knowing the King Eddy was the only place they could get a drink this early. Despite their glazed, jittery eyes, there was something smug about them—a story to tell on Monday—you won’t believe where we wound up.

  Blake cased the newcomers. They didn’t look like they needed his business. They probably had Westside doctors to write them legitimate scrips for illegitimate ailments. He watched them pound ill-advised shots then start making out halfheartedly.

  There’d been women in the years after Sam’s death. Mostly one-night stands or a weekend, tops. One had even stuck around for a couple of months, moving a bag of clothes into the camper. But then she had to go ahead and get drunker than Blake thought a woman should and asked him if he and Sam had been lovers. It was a struggle not to slap her senseless. He settled for shoving her out the camper door and hurling her clothes after her.

  But mostly Blake was alone and he didn’t n
eed to be reminded of that fact first thing in the morning, in a dive bar where all he wanted to do was have a few drinks in peace and figure out his next move. Because he was going to have to move on, clear out of that camper. The smart bet would be to quit the city altogether—the state even—before the kids up the hill crawled out from under their hangovers and brought the cops down on him. But leaving the city meant giving up on setting things right for Sam.

  He finished his beer, hoping the swill would bring him some inspiration. But the booze was only making him sad. Drinking was never as much fun without the big man. But he kept at it, sipping away the thought of the redhead holding Sam’s knife, his friend’s blood on a stranger’s body.

  Blake crushed the plastic cup on the table and ordered another, telling the bartender to drop a shot in it for good measure. It tasted foul. He drank quickly, each sip making him wonder how the most despondent folks can pair up in a pinch. Except for him. The seat next to Blake was always empty.

  Blake patted his pockets. He had made some good cash from the party last night. He had enough to split town, keep him afloat for a while until he reconfigured his hustle. He was just over a mile from Union Station. If he’d been thinking clearly, he’d have brought his bag so he could grab the next train to San Diego, then cross on foot in TJ, then, when he got to Mexico he’d do his best to trick himself into believing Sam’s tales, believe them so hard that he’d make them true. But he didn’t have his bag. He didn’t have shit besides the cash in his pocket.

  Then again, what was to stop him from leaving now, abandoning his sorry possessions in the camper? He didn’t need that crap. He didn’t need Sam’s chess set, his chess puzzle book. He didn’t need to wait around for a snowball’s chance encounter with the redhead who’d killed the big man.

  Sam’s voice was just a voice. So what if the Samoan nagged him till kingdom come. He’d finish this drink. Then he’d go.

  Blake’s phone buzzed. He flipped it open, squinting through the beer and low light at the small blue screen. He didn’t recognize the number—his Skid Row hookups often borrowed phones—but knew the message.