Wonder Valley

by Ivy Pochoda

  Bus stop. 6th Street. Ten minutes.

  Well, what was the harm in one more transaction? He’d restock, he’d move his product, then he’d split a little bit richer.

  The meet was only a few blocks away but Blake snagged the bus. His legs were wobbly and his brain too liquor lazy to walk. He got off on Sixth and Crocker.

  Laila had beaten him to the stop. She always did, then acted as if he were standing her up when he showed. She looked like hell and for a split second, just one, Blake thought about telling her to keep her meds. But then it passed. She had the good shit—the ’zpams—and the more cash he made, the longer he could travel, the farther he could get out of town.

  There was a skinny black kid with her, nearly blocking her path. He didn’t look too pleased to see Blake. But Laila shoved him aside like he didn’t matter, then dragged Blake around the corner.

  Her hands shook and she pulled bottles out of her purse—everything his customers craved from anti-psychs to tranqs.

  He checked a few of the labels. They were all current and they all had her name—Laila Davis. They had been filled by the pharmacy at the hospital over in Boyle Heights. “How’d you get all this shit?”

  “I’m anxious and I’m hallucinating and I can’t sleep.” Laila laughed. It sounded like she was gargling pebbles. “Truth is I’m only dying, but I let the docs keep on scribbling.” She held out her hand, and Blake began to peel bills off his roll.

  There were too many bottles to stash in his pockets. He had to hold some in his hands.

  “I did good by you,” Laila said. “There may not be a next time.”

  Blake fished out another twenty, like that would make a difference. At least she knew time was up. At least she could contemplate the road coming to an end. Sam hadn’t had that opportunity. In fact, the big man had spent his last days convinced that the wacko doc out in the desert was going to heal him. Then he goes and gets himself stabbed to death.

  “Life’s a bitch,” Blake said.

  Laila stashed the cash in her purse. “Not really.”

  The skinny black kid was standing at the corner, tapping his foot and looking at Laila and Blake so hard and anxious that there was a chance he’d snag the cops’ attention. Laila clocked him and scowled. Blake left first, the pills rattling in his pockets.

  He crossed to the corner where Laila and her friends made their camp, trying to decide how he felt—whether the booze was inspiring him or dragging him down, whether he needed another drink or to get home quick so he could crash. Reason told him to grab a coffee at the free spot on Fifth, sober himself up then start moving the meds.

  SAM HAD A STORY ABOUT COINCIDENCE. IT WASN’T HAPPY. TWO DISTANT cousins of his grandfather’s had a falling-out after the older brother slept with his little brother’s wife. They were both bad men—sometimes Blake wondered if there were any good men in Sam’s bloodline—and their argument quickly turned violent. The older brother escaped with a stab wound in his chest. The younger brother swore that he would finish the job one day. Several decades passed and the older brother didn’t reappear. The younger brother grew rich. His wife died. Their children left for Texas. He remarried a beautiful young woman. Lucky bastard, Sam called him.

  One summer he decided to take a bus up to the States to visit his children. (If he was so rich, why did he take a bus? Blake had asked.) In the middle of the night, in a remote section of road that cut through the Sonoran Desert, the bus ran off the highway and overturned in a ditch. The younger brother was the only survivor of the crash. He had a concussion and, instead of staying with the wreckage, he set out on foot through the desert. It was the hottest month of the year, and it wasn’t long before he was suffering from sunstroke. He needed food and shade, but there was nothing in sight.

  He walked for three days with the sun beating down on him. (Sounds familiar, Blake said the last time Sam had told the story.) When he was just this side of dead, he stumbled across a cabin—the only human dwelling for miles and miles. The cabin was inhabited but no one was home. The younger brother crawled inside. He found a small cup of water, drank it quickly, and fell asleep.

  An hour later, he woke to the sound of footsteps. He opened his eyes and saw his older brother standing in the door to the cabin. The older brother had been living in the desert for twenty years, surviving like the hares and foxes. The younger brother stood up. Without thinking, he grabbed a cast-iron pot off the table and swung it into his brother’s head, killing him.

  That’s a terrible story, Blake said.

  Depends on your perspective, Sam said. The younger brother got everything he ever wanted.

  What happened to him? Blake asked.

  Died, Sam said. Dehydration.

  BLAKE STARTED UP CROCKER, PASSING LAILA’S CREW AND THEIR TENTS and tarps. The middle-aged black dude who seemed to run the corner was sitting in a camp chair, some old soul squeezing out of a handheld radio. Next to him was a white kid, head bowed over a joint he was rolling. He looked up and lifted the rolling paper to his lips to seal it.

  Motherfucker. This time Blake was careful to keep his voice inside his head. One of the fucking Flynn twins. Right here. Right in my own backyard.

  He kept moving, but stopped halfway up the block, checking over his shoulder. The boy sparked the joint. He hit it and passed it. Blake crossed the street and doubled back, playing it cool behind a minivan, checking to see if the boy had a scar on his arm or not.

  It had to be James. This kid had the same vague quality as the boy Blake had watched getting stoned from his bedroom window on his failed and final visit to the ranch. And since James hadn’t had the sense to split from the desert with his mother and brother, it didn’t seem to be much of a stretch to imagine he’d wind up here.

  The beer was catching up to Blake and fast. His vision was blurry. His head felt heavy. He swayed forward and leaned on the van. Folks on the street probably figured him for another junkie nodding out.

  He was sure it was James—or possibly Owen—but after last night, he was suspicious of his instincts. And he wasn’t making any more mistakes. He headed up Crocker to Fifth. He needed that free coffee like it was a fix. It would be bitter to the point of undrinkable and strong enough to make his veins dance. But it was just the thing to bring his head back down to this shoulders.

  He took the coffee down in one gulp and held the cup out for more. Then he hustled back down the street.

  The things you find when you stop looking. The things that happen when you give up.

  Sam would have called it a sign, an omen. Sam would have told Blake that seeing the Flynn kid was all the proof he needed that it wasn’t in the cards for him to split town without doing the big man’s bidding.

  Shit, Blake thought. Shit.

  He shouldn’t have met up with Laila. He should have stuck to his original plan—headed to the station, grabbed the train, then walked to TJ.

  He approached the camp. A few of the tents had come down. Soul music was still oozing out of the radio. A white woman in a motorized wheelchair was jerking along to the beat.

  The Flynn kid was gone. His chair was folded and stashed against one of the carts.

  Figures, Blake thought.

  He waited. The coffee and beer were doing a dance in his stomach. He was starting to sweat. He needed another drink or to dip into one of Laila’s bottles.

  Flynn had looked pretty comfortable with Laila’s crew, like Blake would have no trouble finding him again when he sobered up. And he would sober up, later that night or tomorrow. And he’d find the kid and he’d force him to tell him what happened to the redhead. And then he’d find her. And Sam would be happy. Then Blake could go.

  24

  JAMES, TWENTYNINE PALMS, 2006

  Cassidy left in the night. No one heard her go. In the morning, her cabin was empty except for a tie-dyed scarf, a sandal, and some joss sticks. James watched Britt and Gideon clean out her cabin, throwing her stuff onto the junk pile behind the house.

>   Patrick slept by the fire pit where he’d passed out. The interns skirted him as they went about their morning routines, letting the sun launch a full-force attack on his skin.

  There were no chores that day. There was no sharing session. The following night, two more interns slipped away in the dark, as if they were ashamed.

  The ranch felt dead. The chickens languished in their coop. The coyotes came at night. James saw four of them drinking from the pond and another two pressing their noses through the chicken wire of the birds’ enclosure.

  Sand crept into the abandoned buildings. Wind blew open their doors in the night. Three days without water and Grace’s plants died.

  Anushna and Gideon drove Patrick’s pickup into town and returned with bags of potato chips, frozen pizzas, and cut-rate cola. Britt found an old boom box and took it out to her cabin. A Top 40 station poured into the night. From his bedroom, James watched the interns dance. He watched them pass joints, polish off the wine his mother had left behind, then move on to Patrick’s booze, and finally their own. His father joined them—no longer their leader, just another person in the disorder.

  James knew it had been foolish to stay. He tried not to think about Owen in their grandmother’s Spanish-style home in Los Angeles, of the clean sheets, central air-conditioning, cable television, and of Grace somewhere else in the house cooking him meals, signing him up for a new school.

  His mother called every day. But James didn’t answer. He didn’t know how to tell her he’d make a mistake, ask her to come back. He didn’t want to see Owen’s face if he rolled into L.A., following in his twin’s footsteps, finishing in second place as always.

  He tried to avoid the ranch as much as possible. He rode his bike into Twentynine Palms, swam in the inn’s pool until a guest reported him to the management. He explored the empty cabins in Wonder Valley. And he hung on the edge of an empty lot on Baseline Road, watching shirtless kids take aim at beer bottles.

  EARLIER THAT DAY, THE SKY HAD GROWN STEELY AND THE WIND HAD kicked up, threatening a rainstorm that wouldn’t come. Now in the darkness the palm trees in the oasis were bending together. It seemed to James like they were telling one another stories, laughing at the people on the ranch.

  A new sound joined the rustling farm, the crunch and swish of tires coming up the sand road. James looked down toward the highway and saw headlights bumping and dipping, dancing over the palms and sparse cacti. For a second before the car came into view, James let himself think that it was his mother’s station wagon, but when the vehicle crested the small hill, he recognized the truck—a vintage Chevy Silverado with chrome and orange trim. It belonged to the father of a kid in the class above him who lived in Wonder Valley. A few times, the truck had slowed for him and Owen as they were riding their bikes to school. The kid’s father invited them to climb in the flatbed before roaring off down the Twentynine Palms Highway.

  The truck scattered the gravel then came to a stop. The headlights stayed on, illuminating the porch, the house, a few of the cabins, and the edge of the fire pit. The driver’s-side door swung open and the man who’d danced with Grace at the inn stepped out. He still wore his Ranger’s hat and clunky white sneakers.

  He looked at James like he knew him but couldn’t quite place him. “So?” The man shaded his eyes. He seemed to be staring at James’s arm.

  “Are you looking for my mom?”

  “Is she around? Or is she off dancing with the marines?”

  “She’s gone,” James said.

  “Permanent?”

  “She took my brother back to L.A.”

  The man cracked a small smile, like he was relieved. “And left you here.”

  “I stayed,” James said.

  “You told me your daddy wasn’t a marine; you didn’t tell me he was a healer.”

  James glanced at the fire pit. His father hadn’t moved from where he reclined against the split log bench, but he was looking over his shoulder at the truck in the driveway.

  “I need his help,” the man said.

  James waved at his dad, beckoning him away from the campfire. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “You know I can’t tell you that,” the man said with a wink. “Doctors and patients and all that.” He swiped his hat off his head and tucked it into his back pocket. “Anyway, it’s not me; it’s my friend.”

  Patrick joined them in the driveway. “What’s wrong with your friend?”

  The man gave Patrick the once-over. “So you’re the great and powerful Oz?”

  “Excuse me?” James watched his father try to widen his eyes, straighten his posture.

  “You can heal people just by touching them?”

  “Who told you that?” Patrick said.

  “A little bird,” the man said. “All that matters now is that my friend is real sick. And he’s got a bee in his bonnet that you’re going to be the one to help him. He thinks his spirit’s infected.”

  Patrick rocked back on his heels. “And what do you think?”

  “What happened is, he broke his ankle clear through the skin a couple weeks back. We were in a flash flood to the east. I tried resetting it myself.”

  “So you’re a doctor?”

  “Amateur pharmacologist. I treated him with some painkillers and antibiotics. But now his fevers don’t break anymore.”

  “Let’s take a look,” Patrick said.

  They went to the truck and opened the passenger door. The cab’s light came on, illuminating a slumped figure with a long black braid. He looked Mexican or Native American. His dark skin had an unhealthy sallow tone. He was much bigger than his friend—broad shouldered and overweight. Despite his girth, his face was gaunt.

  Patrick threw one of the sick man’s arms over his shoulder. The man from the inn took the other, and together they half carried, half dragged the big guy past the fire pit and into Cassidy’s old adobe.

  James followed his father into the cabin. The interns watched through the window as Patrick laid the big man on the bed and rolled up his pant leg to look at the break. “Best case you’re going to have to lose this leg.”

  “What’s a better case?” the man from the inn asked.

  Patrick bent over the sick man. He sniffed his breath and his forehead, then placed a hand on his heart. James couldn’t understand how he could get so close. The entire adobe smelled like rot. “I’ll see what I can do,” Patrick said and headed back to the main house.

  James tried not to look at the sick man’s blackened leg and the scab of flesh that hid the place where the bone had broken through the skin. He stood near the door, where the air was better. The sick man groaned.

  The man from the inn pulled a crumpled cigarette from his jeans and struck a match against his teeth. “Is your daddy a miracle worker?”

  “That’s what people say.”

  “How about you? What do you say?”

  “I guess,” James said.

  “Is that why you stayed behind? You want to learn his tricks?”

  They stepped out of the cabin. The interns had returned to the campfire. Gideon pulled out his guitar. Anushna was spinning in a circle, the flames nipping at her dress.

  The man from the inn exhaled in the direction of the campfire. “Who are they?”

  “Interns,” James said.

  “What do they do?”

  “Not much.” The Silverado’s headlights were still on. “I like your truck,” James said. He wondered if the man had noticed the sticker on the gate from the local high school.

  “Do you now? I think she’s a bitch. These antique vehicles are all show and very little rock and roll.”

  “Where’d you get it?” James asked.

  The man ran his thumb over his lips. “You sure ask a lot of questions.” He exhaled in the direction of the truck. “I don’t need you or any of these kids making any noise about my truck or anything to do with me or my friend. Believe me, trouble can find you even all the way out here. Especially all the way out here. A
nd I don’t want to cause you any trouble, do I?”

  “I guess not,” James said. He looked over his shoulder into the cabin. The sick man had passed out, his long braid hanging over the edge of the bed. “Can I ask you something?”

  “What did I just tell you about the questions?”

  “Do you know my brother?”

  The man crushed his cigarette with the toe of his sneaker. “Why? Does he know me?”

  “It’s just something he said.”

  “And what was that?”

  “Nothing,” James said.

  A stick in the fire cracked and split, showering sparks onto Anushna’s dress. She screamed and batted the fabric.

  “You ever see a meth trailer explode?” the man from the inn asked. “Out in Arizona they light up the desert.” He spread his fingers wide against the sky. “Pop, just like that. Pop. If it wasn’t for the smell, they’d be a thing of beauty. I used to climb on top of my own trailer and watch them go off. Better than television. I even lit one on fire myself just to see the show.”

  He raised his eyebrows and widened his eyes, like he was watching the trailer burn all over again.

  “Why are you telling me this?” James asked.

  “Because you need to know the world ain’t pretty and there’s not much you can do about it. You still got my pawn?”

  “Yes,” James said.

  “You might give my friend Sam a game sometime. He doesn’t take to boredom too well.” Then he offered James his hand. “I’m Blake,” he said.

  25

  BRITT, TWENTYNINE PALMS, 2006

  With Owen back (and then gone) there was no reason for her to stay. The sheriff had no reason to come around to pay attention to the woman named Britt who now looked like the rest of the group at the farm, just another lost kid pretending to find herself in the middle of nowhere. And when she left—if she left—her departure would be camouflaged by the general intern exodus, someone else twisting away on an aimless voyage.