A Thousand Steps

54

He’s up with the sun, heading for a boulder with two fresh-made peanut butter and jelly burritos in his backpack. The canyon smells lightly of sage and the ocean. The prickly pear cactus spines glow white in the sunlight. Some have blossoms, which mean fruit. Prickly pears are good to eat but hard to clean, even with a sharp knife. If the spines don’t get you, the fine little bristles will.

He sits on the boulder, eats, and considers. God has not answered his prayer. What he’d hoped to wake up with is some new way to find Jazz. Something faster than Mahajad Om’s new way of seeing. Something surer than hoping to find more Little Wings. Something bold and clever, like James West and Artemus Gordon would come up with on The Wild, Wild West.

But nothing. Nada. Only a feeling of time running out, and no way to stop it. Only the unfillable hole in his stomach.

Something out in the prickly pear catches his eye, a bloom likely. It’s moving, like a big white butterfly warming in the sun. Julie always liked butterflies and he did a watercolor of one for her birthday once. Framed it with popsicle sticks.

He starts in on the second burrito, weighing his poor-to-terrible options and watches the big pale prickly pear blossom flutter with the breeze.

It’s starting to piss him off, this particular bloom. The others are pink. The others are smaller. The others do not open and close like a large, prehistoric butterfly.

He finishes the second burrito and heaves off the boulder to check it out.

The cactus swale is a sea of green pads, pink flowers, red fruit, and spines illuminated white by the morning sun. Some of the cactus is taller than he is.

Matt carefully picks his way toward the lilting, annoyingly wrong-colored blossom. From twenty feet away he sees it’s not a blossom after all, just a piece of paper caught on spines of prickly pear.

Matt high-steps through the thorny patches. He gets as close as he can and leans in and — cactus spines touching his T-shirt — unhooks the paper and lifts it out.

Sees the printed song lyrics. The graphic ukulele chords.

This Little Wing is tattered and faded, but her elevators are still in position, her folds straight.

Pulse fast, Matt picks his way along the game trail, going deeper and higher into the canyon.

All around him, the cactus spines are studded with vulture and hawk feathers because Windy Rise is where the big birds circle and hunt. Thanks to his biology teacher, Matt knows that on sunny days the heat rising from the dark green cactus forms thermal currents. He feels it now, that uplift of warm air, rippling the cactus blossoms as it rises hundreds of feet into the sky.

Matt climbs steadily, leaving Windy Rise below and following the cactus along the canyon side.

He has to circle a thicket of prickly pear but the detour brings him to another Little Wing, crucified at eye level. His fingers tremble as he works it off the spines.

With a paper airplane in each hand, he heads up the trail and rounds a tall outcropping of sandstone that brings him to a meadow west of Windy Rise, and gives him a view of the city.

Breathing deeply and sweating hard, Matt looks out at the houses on the flank of Laguna Canyon. Sees some of his paper-route homes, just barely identifiable at this distance, and the curves of Skyview Drive and Falling Star, and the steep switchbacks of Thermal Ridge Drive cutting up the canyon side like zigzagging scars.

He presses on, the dense prickly pear retreating into scattered patches, the game trail climbing more sharply through slippery sandstone and rough coast scrub.

Twenty minutes later he comes to what he can only interpret as a direct answer from God, finally, to his desperate questions of the night before.

A third Little Wing sits in the middle of the trail, much as if it has just landed. It’s facing him at a slight angle, rocking in the breeze. Matt traces the angle of flight, which leads his eyes high and far, up the canyon side, to the Vortex of Purity.

Half an hour later he’s at the Vortex’s fenced eastern perimeter, looking through a chain-link fence at the chancellor’s residence. The handsome Spanish Revival home sits on a hillock overlooking the campus, its adjacent blue-domed bell tower stately and tall. The central commons are spacious, studded with sycamores and oaks. He can see the lap pool and the gym in the middle distance. The generators hum dully. The fence in front of him is eight feet tall and topped with three strands of back-slanted barbed wire.

He takes a sip from the canteen and settles into the shade of a big sycamore. There’s a fallen branch to sit on, big and soft with age.

On campus, followers traverse the wide gravel walkways, a few wearing Mahajad’s crimson, others in yellow, white, orange, or street clothes ranging from flower child to golf shirts and plaid shorts. Mostly young. The girls are mostly pretty and the boys are handsome. They seem representative to Matt but he’s not sure of what. Purity? He sees two of the sharp-faced men in the white suits he’s seen here before. They’re walking past the library, silent and watchful as always. He wishes he had binoculars.

At two o’clock a late model white-on-green Volkswagen van pulls into a parking space outside the chancellor’s residence. Then another. A tickle in his gut. They have Vortex of Purity emblems on the drivers’ doors — big Hamsas with writing above and below.

They have curtains too — airbrushed rainbows — not the peace signs that Matt had seen on the kidnap van. And that Myron Kandell had seen on the white-on-green van the night before Bonnie Stratmeyer was found on the beach at Thalia.

Matt hadn’t seen a Vortex logo that night, though he’d gotten a decent look at the driver’s side of the van. Myron Kandell hadn’t mentioned a logo. But Matt knows you can get magnetic signs like that for your car, put them on and take them off whenever you want. Tommy Amici has them for his Chevy because the Register logo makes him feel important.

Two older men climb out of the first van, dressed in slacks and long-sleeved dress shirts.

Two younger others — one white and one black, both sporting white suits and black T-shirts — get out of the second vehicle, the white one stretching his torso as if it’s been a long trip.

Moments later the huge, military-gray Mercedes Interpol van arrives. Bayott emerges from the driver’s door and pulls open the big sliding door for Marlon and Neldra Sungaard. Marlon wears a trim dark suit and a white shirt. Neldra is all suntanned legs and arms in a snug, sleeveless green dress, her white-blond hair bright in the afternoon sun. Just behind her is Danielle, the sleepy girl from Neldra’s house on Sun Valley Drive, now in an orange dress that shows her good shape. She laughs at something with Bayott.

A whoosh of bewilderment goes through Matt. He knows what he’s seeing but he doesn’t understand it. He recognizes the players but their roles are not clear.

They gather on the portico of the chancellor’s residence. To Matt they look like a tour group. The bell tower casts a shadow on the front lawn.

Mahajad Om emerges from the big double doors, his arms spread in greeting. Then steps aside and motions them in.

Matt remains on his log, speechless and alone. Eats the last of his tortillas, peanut butter and jam.

He gazes at the Vortex of Purity and knows that Jazz is there.

Wonders what Darnell would do.

Wonders what his father would do.

And what he should do.

It’s a long hike back to the van and by the time he gets there he knows, exactly.