by Peter Craig
Lydia said, “Come upon my body? Nasty.”
Past a makeshift commercial district at the entrance, where trailers sold handmade windmills and flags, they drove among huge wooden signs criticizing the government with misspellings and tortured syntax. Link waited for a few dogs to leave the middle of the road, then continued on to where the pavement fractured and the dirt roads began. There were dozens of families living in the sunken campsites around greasewood trees and creosote bushes. All along the road people sat motionless in their cars, moored to nettle bushes by flapping laundry lines, looking as if they had stalled and decided to stay. Link told her that the place was still “free,” built on unwanted and unnoticed government land, using slabs left behind when a military base pulled up stakes decades ago. Now it was a seasonal town without any official services, a new frontier of squatters, libertarians and dropouts. A painted sign beside a wall of stacked tires indicated that a library existed somewhere up a sandy hill of cholla; another sign pointed the way to a mechanic, hidden somewhere in an assemblage of rusted station wagons.
They passed a silver trailer covered with bullet holes, graffiti painted onto the side: “By by, no more drugs, go somerls.”
“Some kind of dyslexic vigilantes,” said Lydia.
Finally Link pulled up to a clearing of bushes and mesquite, where dozens of Harleys stood in varying stages of reassembly. The trailer was more kept up than its neighbors, with a bright sunset painted onto its side and a majestic desert more colorful than the grim real one beyond it. An American flag stretched out in the wind.
Lydia stayed in the passenger seat while her father shambled out and stretched his legs. Her eyes and teeth hurt; her bones were sore; her neck itched. This was that zombielike hour she hated, when, though all the last chemical charge was gone from her system, she was still too fueled and nervous to crash.
Link knocked on the trailer door, shouting “Dagget,” and there emerged a man so emblazoned with tattoos that it took Lydia a moment to realize that he was naked. In fact, with the man’s intersecting murals of skulls and chain mail, a mixture of unfurling vines, blades, and flames (as if his legs were a jungle in the midst of deforestation), the menagerie of different pictures crammed beside tribal designs, he didn’t seem capable of being naked—rather, a small crooked penis looked stranded on an island of red pubic hair. Lydia broke into laughter. The man pointed at some untouched spot on his back and Link squinted and nodded with the detached expression of a doctor.
Link was waving for her to join them. As the man climbed into a pair of shorts that had been drying on the spikes of a yucca tree, she approached barefoot, her toenails just dry. The man stood still, facing away, as Link gave her a tour of the colored-in landscape of his body. Most of it seemed to be the usual agglomeration of heavy metal imagery, bones and battle-axes, as if the man were composed of Silly Putty that had been raked for twenty years across concert posters. But in a clearing beside his shoulder blade there sat a silhouette of an old man on a spindly horse—an elaborate stick figure, with a spear and shield, and beyond him, on a scribbled donkey, there was the thick shadow of his companion, riding along in a desert covered with small, stylized windmills.
Lydia said, “Don Quixote?”
“Kid’s got an education under all that mess,” said Link. “Yeah—Picasso.”
“That’s awesome, Dad. You did that?”
“I had some people want to put that in a magazine. But they couldn’t find this motherfucker for the photo shoot.”
“That ain’t my job,” said Dagget, staring off in the other direction. “I ain’t some kind of male model.”
“Damn right you’re not,” said Link.
The two men moved away from her across the plot, discussing another installment of the money he owed, and Lydia deduced that he was a veteran waiting for a check. She stood still, feeling a residue of sadness from the picture. Maybe her father wouldn’t blame her for the damage to his equipment, but she nevertheless was crippled with guilt. She needed a drink or a joint. She called ahead, “Dad—I need to go for a little walk.”
“What kind of walk?” he yelled back across the bikes.
“A morning walk.”
“Lydia—I can’t watch you twenty-four hours a day.”
“You want me to squat down and piss right here?”
“No, no—go find a bush. I’m just saying, don’t wander off. There’s snakes.”
“Snakes. Okay, if I see one, I’ll scream.”
She scaled a sandy hill, and, once on top, her clothes and hair came briefly alive with wind. On the other side, she found a secluded spot among brush and ocotillo, looking like plants at the sandy bottom of a fish tank. The air smelled like sage and cooking earth. She was squatting and peeing in the bushes when she saw dust devils swarming up in the distance, two dirt bikes spinning doughnuts on the flats. As the riders saw her in the undergrowth and began approaching, she reeled up her panties and jeans and rapidly kicked dirt over the evidence.
They rode all the way to her and sat on their growling dirt bikes, two teenage boys with sunburned faces and dirty nails. One had teeth that seemed too large for his mouth, like some kind of prehistoric fish; the other was shy and stared at her from behind strands of his long hair.
She played along with their questions. What was her name? What was she doing here? Did she want to go for a ride? And she answered as she drew figures in the dust with her toes. They were full of boasts, but they also began an immediate defense of their neighborhood. People from the towns, down in Calipatria, they may have looked down on them, but they didn’t understand. They could ride their bikes wherever they wanted; there weren’t any laws; no curfews; no living for somebody else. It struck Lydia as a paranoid, home-school pledge of allegiance.
She asked if they partied.
They moved a few feet away and deliberated, hissing at each other, until they wheeled their bikes back up to her and announced that they did, and that they could get some good weed from a kid named Trent, but that they needed to be quiet about it, since most people around the slabs were old and just did “Viagra and shit like that.”
The one with the funny teeth offered her a ride on the back of his bike, and she slipped on behind him. Ten minutes later, it seemed that all of them had forgotten their goal to get high. The two boys were emboldened by how loud and enthusiastic Lydia became on the back of the bike, whooping and cheering and screaming at each jolt and dash between trailers and under laundry lines. Lydia felt reenergized by the gritty wind. They stormed through the desert village on a rutted dirt trail. She laughed at his wheelies, and she waved to people in their cars, and she squealed as they leapt over ridges and splashed through flocks of sand grouses.
As they cut toward the mountains and approached the Nova, she saw her father standing in the middle of the road like a matador. They swerved past him, and she thought for a moment that he might try to grab her off the bike. She shouted, “I’ll be right back! Don’t woooo-rrrrr-yyyy.”
Both boys raced along the dirt road to a plot at the farthest edge of the settlement, where the mountains loomed just ahead and the desert unrolled for miles toward the wind-streaked sea. There, a few other boys lived in a cluster of camouflage tents and canopies between two pickup trucks. In a perimeter around them, shattered bottles sat on the rocks and rusted gas cans dangled from cottonwoods. Every tree trunk was punctured heavily, as if attacked by woodpeckers, and the chassis of one truck was filled with rusted holes. Even the rocks looked chipped and scuffed by months of itinerant target practice. Three shirtless kids roamed around in loose jeans.
At the entrance of one tent there hung a Nazi flag, and the sight of it froze Lydia as if it were a snake. The boys talked in clusters, angling their heads in a way that was too conspiratorial, and soon one kid was digging through his duffel in a truck. He came up with a baggie of green buds and a beer, which he opened against the door handle. He gave it to Lydia. The hanging tin cans clanked together in the wind.
>
This wasn’t a very good scene, but while Lydia stood with a chilled beer in her hand, warming in the mid-morning air, she marveled at her ability to find drugs, like a bushman could find water. She asked if they had speed, and one boy, becoming aggressive, told her that crank was all over the place. There were probably fifty meth labs down there by the waterfront. The whole place was a meth lab, practically. “Not in the slabs, but down there. Yeah, I can get speed—why didn’t you fucking say so?”
She told him the bag of chronic would be fine. She had some money, but the mere act of reaching for her pockets caused halting noises from all of them. “Whoa, whoa—you don’t need to worry about the money, baby. Just hang out.”
“No—I think I’d rather pay. It’s just more—” She started to laugh, stooping over and standing up straight: She had almost said kosher. “What do you think? A twenty sack?”
“That’s a dime.”
“That’s not a dime. It’s not even a nickel.”
“It’s a dime. I just weighed it.”
“Hang out and party with us,” said another. “What’s the matter—you think we’re scary? Trent, man, tell her we’re not scary. We’re just having a good time, dog.”
She continued to say no, and she could feel how some of the others, lingering in the background, were growing frustrated. She tried first to say she was buying the bag for someone else; then she claimed she was an epileptic, and that she couldn’t smoke without her medication nearby. She sometimes went into seizures. Standing on a rock behind her, a kid said, “Fine with me. Just jump on and take a ride.”
“Shut the fuck up, Wigs!”
From far down the road there came the sound of crackling tires on gravel. Lydia pocketed the bag as the boys moved out of the light, and when the Nova pulled up to the campsite, she was standing by herself with a beer.
When Link stepped out, he was so angry that he failed to notice her relief at seeing him. Approaching, he said, “What am I going to do with you?” He grabbed her by the arm and shook her like a sapling, spilling the beer everywhere as he dragged her back to the car. Through his teeth he said, “You stand right there.” She licked the foam out of the light hairs on her forearm.
He walked back uphill; her father seemed to grow angrier with each step, as if insulted by the defiant postures and sarcastic faces of the boys.
“Dad! Can we just go, please?” She hung against the car and swigged the remaining froth of beer. “They didn’t do anything. We were just talking.” Link was pointing vehemently into the chest of a young man when suddenly a skinny kid pointed a gun at him, which seemed only to aggravate him further. Link wrested the gun away from him and then, as the boy fled, kicked him in the seat of his pants.
Soon he was hunting down these slender kids like calves in a rodeo. He threw another boy into the dirt, and, when he grabbed the kid with the funny teeth, he gave him a violent wedgie. Lydia started to laugh and covered her mouth. Moving in and out of the shadows, her father made the remaining kids sit down in the dirt, and he paced among them, giving threats like a drill sergeant. He knew how to handle boys so much better than a daughter. Lydia reached through the open window of the car and honked the horn repeatedly.
Her father paced over, stepping between her and the sun. He became an imposing shadow, thick arms cocked at his side as if for a duel. He said, “Twice now, two times, you lied to me. Get in the car.”
He stood for a while, then, suddenly, he kicked a dent into the driver-side door. “Get in the car,” he snapped.
“No.”
He stalked to the back end, and with his steel-toed boot stomped the taillight into red fragments in the dirt.
“See if I fucking care,” said Lydia. “It’s your car, not mine. Stupid caveman.”
Link seemed to forget her, becoming distracted by a deep-seated bitterness toward the car itself, and in a bloodlust he kicked off the back fender, broke the other taillight, elbowed through the window, and began butting his shoulder into the rocking Nova as if he wanted to overturn it.
Horrified at the thought that he might strand them in this right-wing libertarian outpost, Lydia climbed into the passenger seat and folded her arms over her chest. “You’re very adult, very mature—I’m so glad I found you so you could help me through this. You have so much perspective, Dad! And that’s what I really needed right now.”
An hour later, she took a break from criticizing him to fill an ice bucket for his swelling foot and elbow. She returned to their shared motel room and sat on her separate queen-sized bed. The blinds were drawn and the room was colored by stripes of hot afternoon daylight and the faint television, playing a live broadcast of a freeway pursuit in Los Angeles. Link was lounging on the bed in all of his clothes, only his boots off, a ripe, musty smell coming from his socks. She handed him the bucket of ice and said, “It would serve you right if you broke your foot. I was just about to get into the car—and do you listen? No. You’re just like every other idiot—just wanting to break shit. Stomp on people’s sandcastles. You never fucking, like, communicate. Never. All those letters I wrote you, and you would never answer—you would just send a drawing, like a pony or a rainbow. Like I’m a girl, and all I can understand are ponies and fucking rainbows.”
He tilted the bucket and nestled his big dirty toes into the ice. “What do I have to do to get you to shut up?”
“You’d have to understand who I am, as a human being.”
“Oh,” he said. “Is that all?”
“And relate to me on some other level than do this, do that.” She moved into the bathroom and began washing her face. “Senseless fucking violence,” she said. “I hate that. I hate people who think fear is the same thing as respect. I’m afraid of roaches, that doesn’t mean I respect them.”
“I sure as shit do,” said her father.
She scrubbed her face, then, staring at herself in the mirror, realized how exhausted she was. She took a deep breath that relaxed her shoulders, and when she returned to the room, her father looked to be drowsing in the heat. He said, “Are you still yelling at me, or can I go to sleep now?”
“I’m not yelling at you. I’m yelling at the situation.”
“You got the worst instincts for people,” he said. His voice sounded low and soft, as if he were on the cusp of sleep. Trucks and cars were washing past outside, and a housekeeper was knocking on distant doors. “You remind me of those chicks that get hitched to assholes on death row.”
“You’re the one who brought me there. I just got on for a ride.”
“You know, I broke parole,” he said, closing his eyes. “The second I didn’t report a crime.”
“I know that.”
“And my trailer. My shop. All my shit. That was my sandcastle, kid.”
“I know, Dad. And I don’t know how to make that up to you.”
“Must not seem like much to a kid from your neck of the woods.”
“I didn’t ask to stay with you, Dad. This was your plan. If you think I’m responsible for all of that, then that’s fine. I’ll go, and I’ll send you a check to reimburse you.”
“Go to sleep, Lydia.”
She sat Indian-legged on her bed and took out the clarinet, and readied herself to play it as if facing a cobra in a basket. Then her father began to snore loudly, and she put it down on the bed, and watched him, his mouth open and his face stunned, as if sleep had sneaked up from behind and sucker punched him.
She knew she should try to rest also, but she needed something to help her out of the jittery restlessness. So she bought a soda from a vending machine and drained it into the sink, then made a pipe by poking holes into the dented aluminum with a nail file. Then she tried to come down by smoking a bud while sitting in the bathtub under the open transom. She ran the fan and brushed her teeth, then she lay down on her bed across from her sonorous father. But still she couldn’t sleep.
She felt so guilty about him losing his shop and his equipment that she began whispering a hypothe
tical response. He was the one who wanted her to submit to a week in some kind of monitored custody, like a mystical transition period he had learned in twelve-step programs. She couldn’t overlook his clumsy efforts at authority. He seemed to be trying to enforce someone else’s ideas of right and wrong, as if he were now working for an inflexible new boss. Maybe it was his newfound god, the god of AA meetings. The same god that prisoners found at the last possible moment and football players always pointed to from the end zone: that chintzy, unyielding deity honored with roadside crosses and adobe monuments and crucifixes hanging from rearview mirrors. There was nothing more depressing to Lydia than this kind of last-ditch religion, because it made her imagine a heaven that was filled with drifters and dogmatic lunatics. The afterlife would look something like a giant Greyhound terminal, flocked with prisoners and panhandlers. If there truly was a heaven, she didn’t imagine a man like her father could be much more than an undocumented worker there. There were probably whole droves of penitent murderers who just cleaned the pearly gates with toothbrushes.
She was ashamed of how she’d disrupted his life, but also disappointed: The man seemed devoid of philosophy. She feared that it was the same disillusionment Jonah had once described: He was no rebel, he was simply a tired and slow-witted old man. She had expected him to know something. But if it weren’t for the tattoo he had shown her that morning, she might have figured that he had no internal life at all. Even still, pictures aren’t thoughts. She had heard about rhesus monkeys that, in tightly monitored experiments, had learned to draw portraits with alarming skill. She couldn’t assume that the replication of a Picasso in any way signified intelligence. Rather it seemed that the man had faced death, violence, darkness, and evil, and survived it all by doodling. Maybe this was why he seemed so childlike at times. This sort of escapist behavior must have been the opposite of wisdom.