Palm Springs Noir

Specters by T. Jefferson Parker

Anza-Borrego

Borrego Springs is a tidy, low-slung desert town surrounded by Anza-Borrego State Park, the largest in California. The town has over three thousand people. The park is one of California’s wild places — mountain lions, bighorn sheep, abundant reptiles, birds, and wildflowers spread for miles.

Driving in, I looked out at the pale mountains rising in the west and east, a green splash of distant palms, and a wash of orange wildflowers on white sand. It was already ninety-one degrees on this May morning.

My name is Harold Bear and I’m the sole proprietor of Bear Investigations, an LLC. I’m half Luiseno Indian, which puts me in good standing with my tribe and band, though we — the Bear Valley band — are considered “unrecognized” by the United States. I have four employees.

I’d been hired to find Julie Spencer, who went missing four days prior, her abandoned Porsche Cayenne found on Pala Indian land not far from here. Julie was the wife of Congressman Todd Spencer (R), who represented my district in north San Diego County. I first met Spencer just three days ago — when he hired me — though we had both fought in Fallujah back in 2005. We never crossed paths in that bloody battle.

I found the Desert Springs Motel and pulled into the lot. The motel was owned and operated by Dan Morrison, a platoonmate of then Private First Class Spencer. Spencer had earned himself a Silver Star for pulling Morrison from a burning Humvee. Thus making him able to campaign for Congress as a war hero. Todd and Dan had been part of a convoy attacked in what we Americans called East Manhattan — Iraq being shaped roughly like New York City. I had fought in Queens.

The Desert Springs Motel was classic midcentury modern. Which meant a three-sided horseshoe of freestanding bungalows built around a swimming pool and parking. The aqua neon sign sun-blanched and eaten by rust.

When I got out of the car, the hum of air conditioners greeted me in the heat. The wildflower bloom was over for the year, but the motel still looked busy. Young parents and kids in the pool. Desert all around. House windows shimmering in the hills.

The office was a stucco block with a canvas awning. There were blinds behind the glass front door and an intercom built into the wall. A slot for mail. A camera was recessed just above the doorframe, taking aim at my face from close range.

I tried the door and it was locked. I pushed the talk button on the intercom, said my name, and asked to see Mr. Morrison.

“He’s not available at this time.” The woman’s voice was muffled and soft, sounded like it was a hundred yards away.

“I’d like to come in.”

“Why?”

“There’s something important I need to discuss with Mr. Morrison.”

“But he’s not available.”

“We fought in Fallujah at the same time.”

“Put a business card in the mail slot. It’s the way we do it here.”

“I don’t do it that way. This is important. Please open the door.”

I held my PI card toward the camera. The card itself gives me no powers at all, legally, but it is an assuring or sometimes intimidating thing to certain people.

Then I heard a man’s voice in the background. I couldn’t make out what he said. A beat of silence.

“I suppose you can come in,” she said.

The dead bolt clanged open and in I went. The lobby was very small and poorly lit. Nowhere to sit. I’m a big man and unhappy in tight spaces. There was a counter on which brochures stood tilted up in a box — desert activities.

The young woman behind the counter looked late thirties, with tired brown eyes and thinning tan hair. Her smock was tan also and a mini mic was clipped to one shoulder strap. Her name plate said Abigail. She looked like people I’d known who were undergoing chemotherapy — pale, braced, and accepting. Making the best of it. She said that Mr. Morrison wasn’t in, and they had no vacant rooms.

When Abigail receded into an inner shadow, the man’s voice came through a speaker above the closed door behind her. Above the speaker was another camera, aimed again right at me.

“Can I help you, Mr. Bear?” he asked. His voice was thin and unhurried.

“I’m a private investigator working for Representative Todd Spencer. I need just a few minutes of your time.”

“Are you part of any media or news organizations?”

“I am not.”

“Please give me a few minutes to get ready,” said the presumed Dan Morrison. “Abigail, you may offer Mr. Bear some water.”

She handed me a cold bottle from a small refrigerator behind the counter.

“Thanks, Abigail. I see the motel is full, or almost.”

“For the heat and pool. Excuse me.”

She turned away and went through the door behind her. Before that door closed, I glimpsed the room beyond, sunlit through the shades, a plaid stuffed chair, a coffee table, an IV drip station waiting in the corner.

I sipped the water and looked at the brochures. Stared into the camera over Abigail’s door. I don’t like being maybe watched, but maybe not. The camera lens was about the diameter of a .45-caliber bullet.

“Mr. Bear,” the man’s voice said through the speaker, “exit the lobby and go right, to bungalow six at the end of the first row. The door is open.”

I considered Abigail’s closed door, then pushed back outside. The blinds banged on the glass. When I got to bungalow six, the door was cracked.

“Come in.”

It was dark inside at first, even with the sunlight following me in. A man sat on a retro orange vinyl sofa.

“Please sit in front of me.”

The folding chair was small and wooden, and I wondered if it would agree with my 240 or so pounds. I sat. The chair so far, so good.

My eyes adjusting to the dark, I looked directly at Dan Morrison, his face shaded by a black ball cap, bill tugged down low. Aviator sunglasses. A long-sleeved black shirt buttoned all the way, black pants, black canvas sneakers, black socks. White tufts of hair below the cap.

“I have no refreshment to offer you,” he said.

“The water is good.”

“Do not look at me with pity.”

“I promise not to.”

The room focused around me: bookshelves, an old-style TV — possibly black-and-white — in one corner facing a recliner. Blinds on the windows, which faced the parking lot and pool. Framed photographs on the walls, California’s natural wonders, mostly.

“How is Todd?” he asked. As through the intercom, his voice was thin and faint, as if coming from a longer distance.

“He would tell you he’s running for reelection against some big money,” I said. “And campaigning hard. I can tell you he’s anxious and worried. His wife Julie went missing four days ago. They found her car abandoned out by Harrah’s in Valley Center. There are signs of foul play.”

Morrison seemed to think about this. His expression was impossible to read behind the sunglasses and steep black bill of the ball cap. In the shuttered light I could see the flesh coiled on his cheeks, evidence of fire and surgery. His nose and lips looked incomplete, like features that had never matured. Features made for a life in darkness.

“Do you think Todd is responsible for her disappearance?” he asked.

“Should I?”

“I’m not qualified to say. I know little of Todd except what happened in Iraq. I know nothing of his wife. I can’t help but think you’ve wasted your time coming all the way out here.”

“Go to the man’s character,” I said. “I want to know how he behaved that day in Fallujah.”

A long, air-conditioned pause. He was considering.

“I was in that city the day your Humvee went up,” I said. “Over in Queens, going door-to-door.”

“Do you think about it a lot?” he asked.

“Not anymore.”

Morrison grunted softly. Maybe a dry chuckle. “I think about it every day,” he said. “I admire people like you, who forget.”

“Almost forget.”

“Do you use alcohol or drugs?”

“Not drugs.”

“Being a Native, you must have your issues with the drink. I used to drink oceans of bourbon and eat pills by the handful. Finally overdosed but the skies cleared. A good doctor. She got me through, and I haven’t self-medicated for four years. I take aspirin when my skin heats up.”

“I admire that.”

“No pity, Mr. Bear. I asked you once.”

I considered explaining I felt no pity in my admiration, but that would have been a small truth within a larger lie: I did pity him, and the world did too. But why should Dan Morrison have to endure that? Why shouldn’t he be able to live in a remote desert motel, unavailable?

“We had to make a run to the palace,” he said. “Uday’s old place in Volturno.”

“I remember it,” I said.

“We were on a humanitarian mission that day.” I heard the controlled emotion in his thin voice. Forced calm. “We had a transport truck full of food and medical supplies for the friendlies. Not one Iraqi showed up to claim a handout. Not even kids. The imams would have them arrested or worse. You must remember the saying, If you deal with Americans, you die.”

“Certainly,” I said.

“Spencer and I were part of security. It was a terrible road. The insurgents were thick in Fallujah by then — twenty-four different groups we considered ‘hard core.’ And even Saddam’s enemies were starting to hate us. We’d been making lightning raids every day and there was always collateral damage. Or so the Iraqis claimed.

“No trouble on the way in. We sat in that Humvee like a couple of nervous rats while the rations and first aid kits were loaded out. Todd acted a little above things. Cocky. Like he wasn’t born to die or get blown up in this dirty little war. He talked about running for office when he got home. Looking back now, I think he was terrified. I know I was. Our Humvee had just been up-armored with an add-on kit and some improvised stuff. Hillbilly armor. Which made it more prone to roll over. At any speed, a Humvee is a rollover waiting to happen. As you know.”

“I saw one do that,” I said.

Morrison studied me for a moment, then stood and walked into the kitchen. I heard a refrigerator open and close. He was a wiry man of average height. He moved slowly, with a hint of the spectral in his sunglasses, tufts of white hair and the all-black clothing. He carried himself with heavy deliberation, like an older man, or a warrior who had been wounded once and forever. I knew from my investigation that Morrison was forty-five — three years older than me.

He set another bottled water on the table in front of me. Sat again and picked up a remote to open the blinds on one of the front windows, allowing in slightly more light.

“When we started back, Todd and I were on point, not the rear guard. It’s all about seeing, as you know. You’re looking for those roadside bombs in anything that looks harmless and common — a ruined tire, a dead dog, a pile of trash, a blown-out vehicle that wasn’t there last time. The insurgent bomb makers were crafty. The bombs that worry you most are the ones you never see, the ones set off by phone. And that’s what we hit. One of the big boys. Made by Rocket Man himself. Remember him?”

“It was big news when we nailed him.”

“Caught him at home, with a bomb schematic up on his computer screen. Anyway, the hajis had dug in after we’d passed through, somehow dodging our patrols and helos and surveillance drones. In broad daylight. I used to think their Allah was a better god than ours, the way they could get away with things like that.

“Then the world blew up and I was upside down. Saw the road through the windshield, smelled the gas. Todd had been blown out of the vehicle. His door was gone, armor and metal blown off at the hinges. A blessing, because the Humvee doors liked to lock up in a blast, could trap you inside, where you’d cook. I couldn’t get my restraint off. It was stuck and I had one shoulder dislocated and the other wrist fractured. My limbs would not answer my will. I thought my back was broken. I struggled in place, felt the gas spilling onto my legs. Prayed and screamed. Screamed and prayed. The world went whump and the Humvee shivered, then Todd was back inside but he couldn’t get the damned strap off either because the latch had melted. He started sawing away at it with his utility knife. The vehicle was almost fully engaged by then. A pyre. Todd kept crawling outside for air, then back in to help me. Face black and his hair scorched. I remember that. He finally collapsed my bad shoulder and pulled me outside into the dirt. I rolled around like a dog to put the flames out. Heard the sniper fire but I couldn’t get my legs under me. Figured my spinal cord was ruined. Todd ran to some K-rails for cover. I felt abandoned. I knew it was just a matter of time until the snipers got me.”

I imagined big, confident, above-it-all Todd Spencer proned out behind the K-rails. He’d gotten Morrison out of the frying pan but into the fire. Then barreled away through the sniper rounds to safety. Did that make him half hero and half coward?

“Air support finally showed up and the snipers got blown to kibble and bits,” said Morrison. “The convoy circled back to us, got Todd and me into a truck. The pain was not of this world. Nothing compares to being burned. Nothing. It changed my life far beyond the booze and narcotics. I remember the corpsman shooting me with morphine and he couldn’t figure out why I was still awake and wailing. He hit me with another pen and the next thing I knew I was in Germany. I wake up in Germany often.”

He held up the remote again and opened the blinds a little more, and I saw Morrison’s violently cabled flesh. He looked monstrous but somehow undefeated.

“How did the pain change your life?” I asked. “Beyond the bourbon and the pills?”

“It made me realize that character is not fate and fate is not character. I had a high school English teacher who taught us the exact opposite.”

I thought about that for a beat. “Spencer got the Silver Star for saving your life.”

“I wanted him to have it. I was learning to embrace the life he’d given me, while detesting the man I’d been changed into. This thing you see...” He set down the remote on the coffee table and opened his empty hands as if presenting himself to me.

In that moment I wondered if war-hero Congressman Todd Spencer hated himself.

“Todd could have been anyone,” said Morrison, reading my speculation. “The least of my concerns was who pulled me from the fire, and if he could have done better. Could I have done better? A burning man cannot always defeat a military-grade body harness that’s been soldered shut by an explosion.”

“So, your fate was not your character? And Todd’s fate was not his?”

“Far from it. And that is a central truth of life. Clearly proven by war.”

I thought of Todd Spencer’s eventual fate in Fallujah, the IED that blew his foot and lower leg off not three weeks after his act of alleged heroism.

“What do you know about the missing wife?” he asked.

I told him of Julie Spencer’s gambling and shopping enthusiasms, the psychotic breakdown she’d suffered two years past, her drinking. I noted the stress of Julie being her husband’s reelection campaign manager, and the concerted Democratic efforts to unseat him in the coming election.

“I’ve donated to Spencer’s campaigns over the years,” said Morrison, his thin voice shivering in the air conditioner’s hum like a stalk of wheat in a breeze. “Modestly. He doesn’t stand for my politics, but he’s a brother and a marine and he saved what’s left of me.”

“No contact with him since Fallujah?”

“None. Some memories you don’t want to see, face to face.” Another dry sound that might have been a chuckle.

“What are your politics, Mr. Morrison?”

“I have none in a partisan sense. It’s liberating. It frees one up to begin at the beginning.”

“Of what?”

“Everything.”

Another long moment of air-conditioned quiet. Morrison was still, hands on his knees, a black-clad apparition with a voice. Then he slowly reached up and took the sunglasses off. Dark eyes in a face that looked like a heated thing, still melting.

“What did you bring home from the war, Mr. Bear?”

“I left as much as I could over there.”

“Oh, but there’s always something that follows you back. Like a dog that will do anything to remain with you. It doesn’t have to be a ruined face like mine, or a blown-off leg like Todd’s.”

I nodded and thought back to Queens. Hot and crowded and beginning to boil with hate. The door-to-door searches. All of us hot to find the Blackwater killers, and Fallujah turning against us like a rising tide. I remembered a small home, one of hundreds, the smell of lamb and coriander and cumin. Dark inside. Always dark inside. Then sudden movement, face-close fire, muzzle flash and the air thick with lead and gunpowder and screams. Jordan down behind me. Medina in the doorway. By the time I got back to him Medina was still where he had fallen, floating in blood. It seemed to take us forever to shoot those people. Another forever to drag Medina back inside, out of sniper sight. Forever again to get off his helmet and pack the hole in his chest with a roll of QuikClot. Him staring straight at me as his eyes fogged over and his body seized and went still.

“I lost Medina,” I said. “A good man. We entered a dwelling and met heavy fire.”

“You lost him?”

“He was lost,” I said, picking my words carefully so as not to adjust in any way the memory that I had built for myself. My accounting. My truth. “And I was there. I replay those minutes sometimes. Often.”

Medina. Could I have done more?

“You replay them, the minutes, looking for what you did wrong,” said Morrison.

“Correct.”

“And if you don’t find anything at first, you keep replaying them again and again. Looking for something new. The smallest thing you could have done that would have changed the fate of Medina.”

I nodded.

“You torture yourself with a changeable truth.”

I took a deep breath and shifted in my chair. “I would like for there to be an answer. As to whether or not I was at fault.”

“And why it took you so long to do things, while Medina bled out?”

I felt my chest hitting my shirt. I listened to the air conditioner in the half-light of the bungalow. Saw through the blinds fractured images of children jumping into a swimming pool.

“Which leads us to the curse of the living,” said Morrison.

“Yes. Why him but not me?”

“Which should be embossed on our motto right beside Semper Fi.”

“I thank him in my dreams,” I said. “Medina. He always accepts.”

“We were the lucky ones,” said Morrison. “We have managed to move forward.”

I nodded again.

“Please give Todd my best wishes,” he said. “Tell him I bear no grudge for what he did or didn’t do.”

I took a stool in a bar called the Roost, just off Christmas Circle in Borrego Springs. Ordered a double vodka on ice and knew there could easily be more before the sun had set on this day. Who knew? I might even spend the night.

I looked at that drink for a long time before taking the first sip. When I did, the promise was all there for me, as it always had been: strength, confidence, luck. And the wilds, never far away in my Luiseno blood. A mirror behind the bar aimed my face back at me. The TV volume was off as the newspeople discussed the virus. I appreciated their silence.

Especially appreciated it when the screen went to Todd Spencer’s somber image from his press conference the day before. There he was, waving a fistful of papers at the press and media. I couldn’t help but read the caption on the TV screen: Republican congressman Todd Spencer refused to answer questions yesterday about his missing wife, Julie... Later he renewed the attack on his Democratic opponent, Najat Amir, whom without evidence Spencer has accused of being terrorist-sponsored...

I wasn’t sure if I wanted Spencer to be lying about Amir or telling the truth. More to the point, after my talk with Dan Morrison, what could I possibly make of Todd Spencer?

As the vodka took me back to that day in Queens again, I smelled the woodsmoke and the lamb and the cumin wafting through that crowded labyrinth of a street. I thought of Spencer and Morrison and Medina, and how the net of that war had snagged us. And hundreds of thousands more. I tried hard to put all of us into some kind of historical and spiritual perspective, to see us all as just blips of life in a vast universe. But I couldn’t. We are not blips. I will not be a blip. Vodka.

I looked at the mirror again, at the reflected snout of one Harold Bear — Luiseno Indian, husband, father, son, and brother. Private investigator. Ex-marine. And I thought: You are okay. As okay as you are ever going to be.

I sat another hour. I’m always surprised how far a mind can wander and still find its way back, how many thoughts and memories can race through you in one slender hour of life. Fallujah. My son and daughter. First touching the girl who would become my wife in the San Luis Rey Mission when I was fourteen.

Dan Morrison sent me a text saying he’d let me know if he thought of anything that might help me regarding ex-Pfc Todd Spencer and his missing wife.

The bartender gave me a look. I shook my head, brought out my wallet on its belt chain. Paid up, left a nice tip and the rest of the vodka.

Octagon Girl by Chris J. Bahnsen

Desert Hot Springs

Wearing a camo bikini, Blythe stepped onto the octagonal platform and began her stride around the cage perimeter. Above her head, she held a white card with the number three on both sides. The upper rows were mostly empty, but there was still a decent crowd of a few thousand. This was her first gig at the new sports arena. Just opened in Desert Hot Springs, it was already becoming the venue for MMA fights in the Coachella Valley.

God, we needed this place.

Many in the crowd looked as if they’d climbed out of a fissure in the crusty ground, skin clay-colored, eyes deeply crow-footed from squinting against the sun glare and the sand pelting in off Banning Pass. Blythe knew them as hard cores of the low desert, who would not leave DHS, damn the crime, the druggies, the hell temps now topping 120 most every summer.

Catcalls and whistles, the heat of many eyes, affirmed that for the one minute between rounds, Blythe was the center of this raucous beer-soured universe. She let each platform heel come down in time with the hip-hop loop bumped on the PA, just firm enough to shake her goods without being herky-jerky — a flaw she’d noticed in other girls from the agency.

She raised the card higher, felt a slight pinch from one of her nipple covers. The only action her body had seen in weeks because her man Sandro practiced celibacy before a fight. Inside the cage, he sat taking instructions from Franco, his trainer. On the opposite side, Musaff Ali panted on his stool, coal-skinned, face goose-egged from Sandro’s accuracy of hand and foot.

Blythe finished her lap and stepped down to the floor where a director’s chair waited. She smiled at her son Logan, who sat a few yards away in a reserved section, rivers of yellow gold hair over blue eyes. They’d grown bluer with each of his eleven years, about all his father had left behind before drifting on during her third trimester. Logan grinned back at her while sucking soda through a straw.

As she took her seat a buzzer sounded round three.

The two fighters knocked gloves in the center of the cage and began stalking one another. Sandro, carved yet lithe in tight green shorts and fingerless fight gloves, was a fan favorite. Undefeated at 14–0, he wanted to turn pro soon and move to LA, the three of them. Besides his smooth Latin looks and winning record, his growing fan base would also help gain the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s notice.

Blythe could see herself moving up with him. The week before, she’d driven to North Hollywood to a casting call for Octagon Girls with the UFC. Invited there based on head and body shots she’d sent in. Her audition went well, she thought. But it would be two weeks before she heard anything. Either way, after popping out a baby at eighteen, waitressing, and co-caring for her father until last year, her time had finally arrived.

Ali tried a takedown on Sandro, who slipped out of the hold and threw a spinning backfist. It struck the right side of Ali’s head: he wobbled but kept on his feet.

Watching Sandro’s predatory intensity, Blythe smiled to herself. All she could think of was how the sexual tension would boil over tonight in his bedroom. Actually, it was their bedroom now, as of five weeks ago when she and Logan moved in.

After a faked front kick, Sandro torpedoed a straight right hand, dead on Ali’s glass jaw. The big man bounced off the cage and went down, a felled tree with a canopy of dreads. Sandro charged in, but the ref blocked his attack. Ali lay twitching in his dreams.

Blythe mentally adjusted Sandro’s record to 15–0. If he reached 16–0, a fightwear company had offered him sponsorship, mas dinero. Good things for him meant good things for her, and Logan. Just one more win.

As Sandro eased his dusty pickup away from the arena, he kept asking, “Who’s the greatest?” and from the backseat, Logan chanted, “San-dro!... San-dro!” until they all joined in.

Here they were, already becoming a family, and Blythe wished her big sister could see them now. Jackie had been against her moving out. Wanted her to stay put at the Sky Valley house they inherited after their father passed. Logan needed stability, a real home, Jackie said.

“What he needs is a male role model,” Blythe had snapped back. “Not my hard-ass sister trying to be one.” She still felt bad for saying it.

The night winds of March gushed through the half-open windows. Blythe zipped up her hoodie. On Dillon Road, the pickup had to slow down behind a hulking motor home.

Sandro gestured through windshield. “Fucking snowbirders.”

“Snowbirds,” Blythe gently corrected. “Hey, they tip good, mister.”

Sandro grinned at her, and his right hand took her left. She ran a thumb over his stony knuckles. Such deadly hands, yet nothing but adoring when they touched her body.

By the time the truck scooped into a dirt-tracked mobile home park, Logan was dozing. Mature palm trees danced to a gust. They passed an empty trailer space, now a community trash depot, heaped with broken pallets, a car seat, stained mattresses. Two scrap dogs sniffed at the spilled guts of a garbage bag. At least it wasn’t gang turf, Blythe thought.

In the carport, Sandro draped an arm across the boy’s shoulders and steered him inside a dingy double-wide. It was the first time Blythe had seen him in such a fatherly role with her son — more often he acted like an older brother with Logan, playing combat video games with him, or teaching him grappling moves.

After Logan flumped onto the living room couch, Sandro unfolded a sheet over him. The boy would have to sleep there until Sandro cleared the spare room of training gear.

Warped wood paneling covered the walls, bare except for a Bruce Lee poster. Okay, so what if he didn’t seem in a rush to make the house family friendly. Why bother, with LA coming? Anyway, this was a big step for him, asking her to move in, and she didn’t want to push it. He grew up an orphan in Mexico City. A loner his whole life.

“I remember only my mother take me down an alley and leave me there,” he told her. Blythe could relate. When she and Jackie were in junior high, their own mother ran off with their older cousin. It seemed too easy, how people could erase you from their life, as if wiping a soiled shoe on the grass and walking on. But she would show Sandro not all women would bail on him.

Already fast asleep, Logan held his Conor “Notorious” McGregor action figure in one hand. “Why don’t they have one of Sandro?” he’d asked her the other day.

The fighter turned to her now.

Blythe stood near the front window in a porch lamp glow and unzipped the hoodie to show him, by the play of shadow and light on her bared form, that the evening had just begun.

When Blythe awoke and brushed her long umber hair aside, she read 9:16 a.m. on the nightstand clock. She panicked, used to waking up way earlier for the breakfast shift at the diner, then remembered she’d traded for the day off.

Sandro stood motionless in the doorframe wearing only boxer briefs. He faced down the hall listening — to what? She said his name. He raised a palm to her for quiet.

Then she heard it too, a thwick... ting...

Sandro’s leg muscles flexed, and he stalked down the hall. His hunter’s posture unnerved her.

She sprang out of bed.

In the living room, the couch was empty. From the spare bedroom Sandro shouted: “Little fucker!”

She ran to the end of the hall and cut left into the spare room. Sandro stood a few steps inside the doorway. His face burned with anger. Ten feet away, Logan stood rigid beside a wooden training dummy that once belonged to Bruce Lee. His hand was in midgrab of a small, star-shaped throwing weapon lodged in its chest. The dummy had a cylindrical head with two spindles extending from the torso to simulate arms. Sandro had purchased it through an eBay auction for a small fortune. Many times Blythe had seen him bow to it at the start of a workout.

The razor points of the throwing star had made other fresh holes and chips in the wood. Did her boy have any idea how dangerous these things were?

“Where did you get that, Logan?” she asked.

Logan’s eyes traveled over her body. Realizing her nakedness, Blythe stepped farther behind Sandro.

“I found it in the truck, under the seat.”

Sandro moved to the dummy. At first, he ignored Logan. His finger probed the fresh pockmarks in the wood.

“I... just wanted to make it stick, like Naruto,” Logan said.

Sandro pulled out the star and flicked it aside. He snatched Logan by the wrist, yanking him away from the dummy. A wet pop came from Logan’s shoulder. He yelped and fell to his knees. Sandro stayed on him and raised a hand over the boy, but Blythe flew onto his muscle-sloped back before it could come down.

“I look that bad?” Blythe asked her sister, who had broken down upon entering the hospital room. Jackie never balled. But then she’d never seen Blythe in a hospital bed, Logan asleep against her with his left arm in a sling. Tenderly, Jackie laid the back of her hand on Blythe’s forehead, the only part of her face not bandaged or contused.

After she established that Blythe and her nephew were basically okay, Jackie said, “You can’t keep dragging Logan with you every time you shack up with a creep.”

Blythe wanted to remind her sister she only lived with one other person, Logan’s father. But her nose hurt and her patience was gone. “Jackie, just put a sock in it, okay?” Bad enough she had to deal with questions from the police, and a social worker who tried to bully her into a safe house in Thousand Palms. Bad enough her voice now had a strange bagpipe timbre.

“Did you get my car?” Blythe said.

She had reluctantly called Jackie earlier from the hospital and asked her to retrieve her Jeep from Sandro’s place. Everything else of hers and Logan’s would have to be sacrificed. She would not go near him again.

Sporting a butch haircut, both arms sleeved in tats, Jackie nodded. “Where’re you going? Can you even drive like that?” She had agreed to trade cars, her nondescript white Toyota Camry for Blythe’s burnt-red Cherokee Sport, so Sandro couldn’t trace her whereabouts. Since Blythe hadn’t pressed charges, he might not be held long. But getting hooked into the system, social workers knocking on her door, no, that was not an option. Neither was going back home like Jackie wanted. Sandro would come looking for her sooner or later.

“What about that special item?” Blythe asked.

“Check way under the front seat.”

Earlier that morning, when she awakened in the ER, Sandro had already left her a voice mail. After weepy incoherencies, he actually had the balls to ask if she could bring bail money. She deleted the message.

Jackie moved to her nephew’s side of the bed. Softly, so as not to wake him, she ran a finger over his twitching eyebrow. “At least let me take Logan.”

Blythe extended her hand. “Keys.” The doctor wanted to keep her and Logan another night, but she had her own plans for their recovery.

Dangling the keys out of her sister’s reach, Jackie said, “Tell me where you’re going first.”

“We need the waters.”

Chuckwalla Palms was a boutique lodging with only nine units. A bit pricey, but so were most other spa-tels that exploited the natural springs running beneath town. These mini resorts, dotted all over DHS, walled off guests from a city gone to seed.

At the front desk, the gap-toothed man in an aloha shirt didn’t so much as blink at Blythe’s face, Logan’s arm sling, when he handed over the room key. Locals had seen it all in this town, now more of a desert asylum for misfits, swingers, drifters, career criminals, and lately, migrating millennials.

Blythe had booked a suite that came with a private whirlpool, so they wouldn’t have to use the public pool. Such a room would drain her savings, but she needed time to think and heal, to keep out of Sandro’s reach.

The back room of the suite was a small clay cabana, whirlpool tub sunk below a wooden deck. A tinted sunroof overhead. Logan, wearing blue jammers, a cold gel pack strapped to his shoulder, stepped down into the tub. A sunray lit his hair. Halfway submerged, he stopped.

“Keep going, Logan,” Blythe said, standing near twin timer dials mounted on the wall. “But leave your shoulder out.”

The scent of cannabis touched her nose, wafting in from god knew where. So-called entrepreneurs, hipster types, were converging on the city to open grow facilities. Maybe it would help bring things up, she thought. Or else invite more dopers.

Tentatively, Logan sat on the higher step. Only his head and shoulders above water.

Blythe turned the dials. The calm pool upwelled into a churning froth.

“Hot,” he said.

“Uh-huh, so your pores can swallow those magic minerals.” Her words conjured her mother. For every scrape, patch of eczema, or bonfire burn she and Jackie endured as children, their mother would bring them to the waters, and it did seem miraculous, how the natural minerals soothed their wounds, rejuvenated their spirits. She remembered the fun of breath-holding contests with her sister in the warm shallows of a public pool, no eye sting when you went under. Like swimming in holy water. At the deep end, Mama sunbathed like a starlet, sweeps of blond hair pushed back by her shades. Blythe could see her there, propped up on her elbows, pretending not to notice stares from men, or her daughters calling for her attention.

Blythe pointed a stern finger at her boy. “Twenty minutes, young man.”

In the suite, she finished unpacking the suitcases Jackie had put in the car for them, then placed calls to her booking agent, her boss at the diner, and Logan’s school. Told them the same lie: they’d been in a bad car accident, suffering injuries that would keep them home for a couple of weeks.

Twenty minutes later, while Logan leaned against the foot of the queen bed, eyes drooped, Blythe unstrapped his gel pack and finished drying him with a towel.

“I miss Aunt Jackie,” he yawned, lying back in bed.

Blythe said, “Me too.” But the boy was already asleep. She slid a cool sheet over him until she got to his hurt arm, the blue sling. Quiet tears overtook her. Yes, she had moved in with a creep, just like Jackie said. Stupid. A stupid, bad mother — that’s what she was.

In the kitchenette, she made herself a cup of coffee and leaned against the counter. The late March afternoon had risen to eighty-one degrees. Through the wall glass, in the distance above a windbreak, she found the snowy peak of San Jacinto, a steady companion her whole life. Logan’s sun-bleached hair was almost as white as the mountaintop. Looking at his resting face, she feared there would be no father figure for him ever again, no happy family.

She checked e-mails with her phone. Nothing from the UFC yet. Most of the women at the audition had been in their early twenties. How many more years could her body, pushing thirty, compete? Not many, but what a way to go, right? Traveling the country to strut the best fight venues, streamed internationally. Even if they didn’t take her, Blythe resolved right then to save every penny and move herself and her boy to LA anyway. Grab some casting calls for movies.

Digging out the prescription bottle in her purse, she took a Vicodin and dropped it into the steaming mug to melt it. Her broken nose throbbed. Breathing deeply brought a twinge of pain, a chronic reminder that, once Sandro had released his choke hold, she’d fallen to the floor, her ribs hitting a metal leg of the dummy on the way down, then a face-plant into an iron dumbbell plate. Out cold, like Musaff Ali.

Her phone vibrated on the counter. There were three texts from Sandro:

So, he had his cell phone now, which meant he was back on the street already. Sure enough, a new post on his Instagram page promoted his upcoming fight, in ten days, at the sports arena again. He was out there, free as a tumbleweed. She wondered if she should have pressed charges. No. Somehow she would handle things her own way. For starters, she blocked his cell number.

While Logan slept, Blythe went out to the Camry, hoodie pulled down around her face, and retrieved the weighted beach towel folded up under the driver’s seat. Locking her self in the bathroom, she placed the towel on the counter. Her hands undid the folds from a snub-nosed Diamondback .38 Special, the handgun her father had given her when she turned sixteen. And a box of shells. After loading the weapon, she shoved it into the waistband of her jeans and dropped the tail of her blouse over it. The gun’s stability felt good against the small of her back.

First gun she ever fired was her father’s Sterlingworth shotgun, in the open desert. She was nine. Got thrown to the ground after an ugly explosion. She didn’t want any part of the shotgun after that. But he made her stop crying and put the shotgun in her hands again. Told her to say I am not afraid then fire the other barrel. The kick wasn’t so bad that time because he showed her how to be ready for it. And she felt proud by his smile, one coffee can blown off its hook.

The gun gave her courage. Since leaving the hospital, she’d been avoiding her own reflection. Now, taking a deep breath, Blythe looked into the cabinet mirror. An apparition stared back. A face with gauze cross-taped over the swollen nose, ruined by the macabre colors of Sandro’s rage. She experienced again the incredible pressure of his arm around her neck, a steel bar compressing her carotid, his feral growl in her ear. She had quick-tapped his forearm like she saw them do in the octagon. The gesture meant you’d had enough. But there was no ref to jump in.

When she came out of the bathroom, Logan was awake, sitting on the edge of the bed.

“How’s the shoulder, my little man?”

“Aches.”

His sling was askew, so she had him stand still while she adjusted it. A bolt of pain made him suck in air. She pulled a Vicodin from her jeans pocket and held it up for him. “After I get you some water, I want you to take half of this, to make it hurt less.”

Logan shook his head. “I don’t need it. Pain is good.”

The back of Blythe’s neck tingled.

Whenever he and Sandro had roughhoused, and Logan inevitably got bonked somehow, Sandro coached him to tough it out, pulled him back from tears, and said, Pain is good... pain makes you stronger... She had loved the way Sandro taught him to be strong.

“Please don’t ever say those words again,” she said.

“Why? What did I say?”

“I’m sorry. Your mama is just in a strange way right now. Never mind, give me a hug.” She pulled him close, careful of his sling arm.

Stepping back, Logan held it up for her, the .38, gripped in his hand. “Is this a real gun?”

Blythe eased it from his grasp, but he still held it with his eyes. Her son deserved a straight answer, she decided. Especially now. She laid the .38 across her palm, barrel pointed to the side. “This is to keep us safe.”

“From him?” Logan said.

She nodded.

“But he’s in jail now, right?”

“He won’t stay in jail, honey. That’s why we can’t go home for a little while.”

Logan reached for the gun again, but she tucked it back in her jeans. “Time to put it away.”

The boy’s eyes converged on the gauze over her nose. “It’s my fault he hurt you, Mom. I know I wasn’t supposed to use Sandro’s stuff.”

“No, it isn’t your fault, don’t ever think that.” Blythe’s voice constricted. “It’s my fault. I couldn’t protect you, so you protected me instead.”

He shook his head. “But I didn’t. I ran away.”

“So you could call 911.” She held his face in her hands. “That was a very smart, awesome thing you did.”

He shrugged, then his eyes darted behind her. “Mom, a scorpion!” he said, pointing to the marble floor.

The bug idled only a few feet from them, pinkish exoskeleton a translucent window to its dark innards. The stinger was folded downward into the lowered tail.

“Stay here,” Blythe said.

As she drifted toward the invader, it did not back away. The stinger rose. With her boot, she quickly stepped on the tail end. Squatting, she used the butt of the gun as a hammer, twisting each blow into the writhing body. Even after the scorpion went still, she kept on hammering and hammering until Logan touched her shoulder. “Okay, Mom.”

Lodge time elapsed in a reel of mindless TV, board games on the bed, takeout and pizza deliveries. Logan, young and resilient, didn’t need the sling for long as his range of motion in the shoulder improved. Blythe’s rib pain faded enough so she could tolerate sit-ups and some floor exercises. The bruises on her face slowly cleared. Her nose, bandage-free, now had a subtle curve to the left but thankfully wasn’t flattened any.

Sometimes Logan cried out in his sleep. He told her he was having nightmares of Sandro chasing him. And he was drifting inward, away from her. Was he shifting blame to her for what happened?

Sandro had done this to her son, to them, and she hated him for that. Yet there were also moments when her mind replayed the good times and she pined for what could have been. It was a maddening cycle that manifested as long late-night soaks after Logan crashed, plus Vicodin, washed down with whatever beer was on special at the liquor store.

She was soaking this way when her sister called just after midnight.

Soon as Blythe answered, Jackie blurted, “Your creep was here.”

“Sandro? When?”

“Like three minutes ago.” Blythe heard the crackle of a joint being hit, hard, before her sister continued. “Fucker wakes me up knocking on the window of the master. He thought I was you, kept calling your name.”

“What happened?”

“Not much. I showed him Dad’s shotgun and he got gone like real fast.”

“You had Dad’s shotgun that handy?”

“So, wait, all this shit’s gone down, and you think I wouldn’t sleep with it like a lover?”

Anger, its molten lava, gushed from Blythe’s chest, up her neck and into her cheeks. Now he was terrorizing her sister. “I’m sorry, Jackie, for all of this. I should’ve gotten a restraining order.”

“Hon, I just showed him two barrels’ worth of restraining order.” Her joint crackled again. “Just come home. You can have your room back.”

“Not yet.” Blythe wanted off the phone, to think, to plan, to do what? “Soon though. Love ya loads, sis.”

“Do not go back to that creep, Blythe, no matter how much he begs.”

Next morning, northwest of the valley, past the wind farms where a dirt lane dead-ended into open desert, Blythe stood behind Logan, a hundred yards from the car. His arms were extended, the .38 in his hands. Blythe reached around him and held his wrists to help him aim. He needed both thumbs to cock the hammer.

“Just relax,” she said, resting her hands on his shoulders. “Now exhale as you squeeze the trigger like I showed you.”

A bull’s-eye target, drawn on cardboard from a pizza box, was stuck to the spines of a saguaro cactus twenty feet away. Beyond, the desert raced toward the apron of the mountains. Blythe loved the desert at this hour, how the early sun on its upward arc gave this world a flaxen sheen.

She felt Logan’s shoulders tense. The gun barrel flinched upward with a crack like a giant whip snapping, followed by three echoes slapping off the distant rock face.

Logan lowered the gun. “Cool.”

“Right?” Blythe said, mussing his hair.

“How far does a bullet go?”

“Far, but we want to hit the target, not the mountainside.” She positioned herself behind him again.

When he brought the gun up to the target, Blythe spoke into his ear: “Pretend the cardboard is Sandro’s face.”

Logan’s hands tightened around the gun. “Yeah... I hate him.”

“I hate him too,” Blythe heard herself say, which immediately brought pangs of guilt, as if she were somehow betraying Sandro.

Three days later, on an unusually cool early April evening, they were at the sports arena. Blythe knew the promoter, so they’d slipped through a staff entrance to avoid the pat downs and security wands. She and Logan sat in a reserved row alongside the octagon. Biggest crowd she’d ever seen, maybe five thousand heads. She had taken extra time with her hair and wore her short black leather jacket over a mauve blouse. Tight jeans. She wanted Sandro to see what he could never touch again. Never is a long time came a voice deep in her mind.

“Fuck off,” she said aloud.

Embarrassed, she looked down at Logan but he hadn’t heard her over the crowd noise.

Logan sat frowning, hands clutching the armrests. He had not wanted to come, but she told him if he did, if he met Sandro in the eye, the nightmares would go away. For herself, she hoped it would reduce her flashbacks of the incident.

The first three fights blew by. Then, impossibly, the emcee was back in the cage announcing Sandro Garcia and his opponent, Hank “Inglorious” Stoddard, also undefeated, for the amateur super-welterweight matchup.

Attacked by nauseous fear, Blythe struggled to hold it together. Logan sat low, head sunk into the neck hole of his sweatshirt. She pulled it back down under his chin. “C’mon, Logan. Show him you’re a brave boy, not a turtle.”

He sat up and repeated the word turtle, and for the first time since the assault he actually laughed. The music of it filled her with relief and she laughed with him, thankful for this momentary lifting of a long dark stretch.

Both fighters were in the cage now, loosening up as Chicano rap pumped through the house.

Against her nervous fear, Blythe felt the excitement of fight night coming back.

Sandro shadowboxed and shuffled in her direction.

Blythe stood. Look at me, asshole, she willed, even as her knees trembled.

When he saw her, his hands dropped.

“Stand up, Logan, and look at him,” Blythe said, reaching her hand down for his. “C’mon, Logan.” But her boy had slumped into his chair again.

Through the mesh of the cage, Sandro smiled at her. Blythe did not smile back. She felt untethered, light-headed.

The fighters were called to the center of the cage for instructions from the referee. In a neon-orange sport bikini, some redhead walked the octagon perimeter hoisting a round one card. Decent legs but no flow in her stride, Blythe thought.

When the buzzer sounded round one, she sat, letting herself breathe again.

Inglorious, a muscled slab with a shaved skull, charged in and went for a hip toss. Sandro evaded it and they both ended up on the mat, bodies grappling like angry crabs. Sandro’s panther speed allowed him to slip behind Inglorious and throw his right arm around his throat. He wrenched Inglorious back and cradled him between his knees, trapping his neck in the vise of his forearms. In a lion-killer choke, Inglorious was at Sandro’s mercy now.

The crowd cheered, and up came the chant: “San-dro... San-dro...”

Blythe knew what it felt like to be Inglorious, and it reminded her how easily Sandro could have killed her, or her beautiful boy.

“Can we go?” Logan said.

“Not yet, honey.”

Any moment now, Inglorious would tap, or black out. But for some reason Sandro released him. Both men jumped up and faced off again. Boos erupted at Sandro for not finishing the job. Why would he do that? Blythe wondered. He never gave his opponents a break.

Sandro’s feet planted. He looked right at Blythe and winked, doing nothing when Inglorious threw a right hook that connected solidly against his jaw. The crowd moaned with the impact.

Inglorious went on throwing hooks, uppercuts, elbows to the face, knees to the body. Almost everything landed, the crowd roaring. Yet Sandro, staggered, one eye badly cut, threw nothing back.

Boos and jeers. Plastic beer bottles struck the cage.

The fighters stood slightly apart now, gathering their breath.

Sandro dropped his hands again and stood, as if waiting for a bus.

Reflexively, Blythe shot to her feet. “What the fuck, Sandro!?” she shouted through her hands. Others nearby stood and repeated, “What the fuck! What the fuck!” and soon, the whole arena joined, even Logan. Blythe’s body vibrated with the energy of the crowd.

This was her city, these were her people, in all their raunchy glory, who bled Mojave sand, bathed in the lustful winds, who were durable as cactus against the changing climate of their lives. Jackie was her people, the coolest, most giving person Blythe knew. Didn’t she and Logan need a person like that by their side for the long haul? Fuck yes we do. Fuck if the three of them weren’t a happy family whose love for one another ran pure as the waters beneath them. So fuck LA anyhow.

I’m a hard core of the low desert, like my father, my sister, and now, my son.

The WTF chant faded and everyone sat back down. Looking over at her boy, Blythe grew teary-eyed, his tender profile bracing her decision.

When she looked toward the cage again, Sandro met her eyes. He nodded as Inglorious rushed in and delivered an uppercut into Sandro’s chin. Backed against the mesh of the cage, face a smear of blood, Sandro seemed doomed as Inglorious kept on swinging, Sandro’s head getting banged side to side. After what seemed like eons to Blythe, Sandro broke away, so quickly that for a moment Inglorious punched at nothing but mesh, until he looked left: Sandro’s fist blazed in striking Inglorious’s jaw, hard enough to send his mouthpiece flying.

Inglorious crumpled to the canvas.

A roar swelled from the crowd.

With seconds left in round one, the ref stopped the fight.

Inglorious lay brain-rattled. Sandro wasn’t much better off. He stood swaying, fingers grasping the mesh to hold himself up as he gazed toward Blythe. Franco got in his face, screaming angrily. The trainer didn’t understand what had gone down.

But Blythe did now.

Sandro had taken a horrendous beating, nearly ruined his perfect record, and possibly his whole career, for her. That meant something, didn’t it, his willingness to risk his UFC dream? What other man would do that? Since growing up wild on the mean streets of Mexico City, Sandro had known no other way than the fist. Violence was his currency, his language, and now, his apology to her.

The emcee announced Sandro the winner by knockout to fresh boos and cheers. Entourages of both fighters swelled into the octagon until Blythe could no longer see Sandro.

“Can we go now?” Logan said.

In the concession area behind the bleachers, Blythe bought a draft of PBR then leaned against the sidewall. Logan beside her, they watched yabbering men line up to order schooners before the next fight.

“You said we were going, Mom.”

As if not hearing the boy, Blythe popped half a Vicodin, chased it down with gulps of beer. By the time she drained the plastic cup, she knew she had to see him. To finish things, one way or another.

A familiar security person walked past and said hello. Blythe smiled, asked if he could do her a tiny favor.

When the Staff Only door clicked shut behind them, Blythe lingered in the long bright tunnel. The left tunnel branch, she remembered, led to the men’s locker room. To the right, the arena.

Propping Logan against the wall, she lowered her face down to his. “I want you to wait for me right here.”

“No! You said we were going!”

“Stop it, right now. Give me one minute. And while I’m gone you do not move from this spot, understand?”

Logan’s eyes went wide over her shoulder, toward the sound of shuffling footsteps. Blythe turned, and there was Sandro, head hung down, limping along with one arm slung across Franco’s shoulders.

Sandro’s head lifted. His dusky eyes gleamed at the sight of her. He spoke Spanish to Franco, who then retreated down the tunnel.

Then it was just the three of them again, like the family they’d almost become. Blythe saw it up close now, the damage of Sandro’s self-punishment, his face like a cubist portrait, nostrils stuffed with cotton. A butterfly bandage sealed a cut over his right eye.

He limped to within a few feet of Blythe and dropped to his knees.

Bawling, he sputtered, “Lo siento mucho... so sorry I hurt you... and Logan...”

Blythe’s own tears came, and she went to him. Sandro threw his arms around her legs and buried his face in her stomach.

“Shhhh, it’s okay.” Blythe stroked his sweaty hair. “It’s okay, baby.”

From her right side, Logan’s hand swung down sharply and rapped Sandro on the head. The fighter grunted. His face turned to find Logan standing with the butt end of the .38 raised to strike again. The hatred in the boy’s eyes was far beyond his years.

“Logan, no!” Blythe said. Before she could reach for the gun, Sandro’s left hand lashed out and knocked it away. The gun skittered along the tunnel floor. Snatching the boy by the throat, Sandro rose from his knees, fresh blood dripping from his hairline. He pushed Logan backward until the boy was pinned against the opposite wall, then began to lift him until his toes left the ground. Logan, choking, clutched at the fighter’s hands, unable to budge them.

Sandro’s growl rose, more lupine than human.

A contained explosion flashed in the tunnel, Sandro thrown sideways to the ground. Released, gasping for breath, Logan ran down-tunnel to his mother, who stood with the Diamondback hanging at her side. She hugged him tight. Fifteen feet from them, Sandro pushed himself off the floor. A hole in his left shoulder spewed blood down his arm.

Blythe moved in front of the boy and pointed the .38 at the wounded mess lurching toward them. She cocked the hammer, and exhaled.

The Loop Trail by Ken Layne

Joshua Tree

The Mojave Desert eats a couple of tourists every summer. It’s the nature of the place. More people die around Joshua Tree from car crashes and pill overdoses and trying to run across Highway 62 in the dark than will ever die from a day hike, even in the oppressive heat of monsoon season, but it’s the amateur hikers who make the headlines.

A couple of years ago, Joshua Tree became a destination. Not just as a weird desert wilderness a couple of hours from LA, but a weird desert wilderness that had become very popular on Instagram. You see it in music videos, in fashion shoots, the twisted arms of our signature yucca trees turned into backdrops for various celebrities and social media influencers. If everybody is coming out here, it must be all right.

A place with decent cell service and well-stocked grocery stores and stylish Airbnb cabins on every sandy road seems pretty safe to the modern visitor. And if you’re used to the easy green paradise of Yosemite, you probably think national parks are all like that: woodsy campgrounds and friendly rangers in Smokey Bear hats.

But the campgrounds in Joshua Tree National Park are just sand, hard-packed sand surrounded by boulders and cactus and scrub brush. There are rattlesnakes coiled on the trails and cholla lying in wait for bare ankles and suburban dog snouts. Most of the campsites close for summer because it’s just too hot, but people come anyway and feel lucky to be there at all.

Three seasons of the year, you can walk around in relative comfort. Summer is not one of those seasons. Summer is hard in the desert, even the high desert, where it’s fifteen degrees cooler than Palm Springs — and that’s still a hundred-plus in July and August.

Besides, it’s a haunted land. Desert wilderness is like that.

When the young couple vanished on the Loop Trail at the end of July, it was the Airbnb owner who reported it. They hadn’t checked out; their luggage was still in the vacation rental, beer in the fridge, toothbrushes on the sink. And their car was gone.

It was easy to assume they’d been dumb about things. Got lost, got confused, wandered the wrong way, hit one of those canyons without a phone signal, and that was that. The annual human sacrifice to the Mojave. Take them, oh desert gods, so that the rest of us might be spared.

Search & Rescue was out the morning after the pair had been reported missing.

I heard the helicopter rumbling over my little house up near the national park entrance and figured it was a Marine Corps chopper, because those noisemakers liked to fly low right over my dirt-road neighborhood, going back and forth between Camp Pendleton and Twentynine Palms. Always practicing for invading some unlucky country in the Middle East. But this one was making circles just inside the park boundary, maybe two miles away. That had happened a couple of times in recent years, when some amateur rock climber had learned about the reality of gravity and had to be flown out on a stretcher. The chopper would set down and take the injured party to the local hospital. Or to a better hospital if the situation was dire.

Making circles meant lost tourists.

It seemed ridiculous — lost tourists in sight of houses and cell phone towers and the highway — but it was the hottest time of year, when the humidity gets sucked up from the Gulf of California, producing a few good thunderstorms and flash floods once in a while. People get confused in the heat.

Out at Amboy Crater, an hour north of Joshua Tree alongside Route 66, there were a couple of deaths every year. People parked their cars and followed the sandy trail through the lava rock and maybe hiked up to the rim of the old volcano and snapped some pictures of each other. And then they became disoriented on the way back, a way back that is much more treacherous in the midday sun. Even in late springtime. There’s no shade. The path that seemed so clear on the way in becomes confusing. Soft bodies and weak hearts don’t know how to respond, so they overreact, overheat. With pounding pulses and sweaty faces, the frightened tourists become distraught. Which look-alike sandy path between look-alike piles of black lava rock leads to the rental sedan with the air-conditioning? So many day hikers have died at Amboy Crater that the federal Bureau of Land Management had to put up some big colorful flags to show people the way back to the parking lot.

Just as I was making coffee, I got a call from the little radio station where I work. Nighttime, mostly, although I fill in a daytime shift when necessary. But nighttime is the good time, just me and the airwaves and whatever souls might be listening. Community radio is a different animal than the sounda-like FM and AM corporate channels still around at this point in the fractured media environment.

It was Gary, the news editor. “You see the Search & Rescue over there?”

I did. Would I maybe go over and check it out? I said I would. Not my regular duty but I’d done enough of it. Enough to know I preferred the late shift, taking calls from Landers and Sunfair and Yucca Mesa and Pipes Canyon and the base, wherever people listened. Lots of calls about UFOs and meth shacks. Desert stuff. I played a little music between the calls. If you’ve got a community radio station in your town, you know what I’m talking about.

Professionally equipped with my one necktie and a travel mug, I got in the truck and drove down Quail Springs to the ticket booth of the park’s entrance. Marla was in there, scowling out at the world. I nodded hello and showed my annual pass.

“They’re at the Loop Trail parking lot,” she offered. “Couple of kids.”

“Little kids?”

“Young people.” She rolled her eyes. I said thanks and drove off before she could get started on the superintendent, or the RVs, or how many months until she could get full retirement. They must’ve put her in the booth to discourage people from visiting at all.

It was weeks before Labor Day, so the road was mostly empty. I hardly ever drove into the national park. The road was really just a loop that came out at Twentynine Palms, although you could keep going south and eventually come out at the 10, in the low desert. From October to June it was mostly a traffic jam. The people in my rural neighborhood just walked in, when they bothered at all. I loved the park best as my backyard view. It stopped Palm Springs from crawling up the hill, stopped the Inland Empire from spilling all the way up from the San Gorgonio Pass. And it was still full of mountain lions and coyotes and bobcats.

Joshua Tree National Park was mostly lacking in the Joshua tree department. The southern half of the park had none, in fact. Back when it became a national monument — thanks to a well-connected desert-loving Pasadena socialite named Minerva Hamilton Hoyt — it was going to be called “Desert Plants National Monument.” Accurate, if not very poetic. Instead, FDR’s Department of the Interior named it after the yucca brevifolia, or what the Mormon pioneers called the Joshua tree. Imagine having religion so alive in your head that even a raggedy-ass yucca tree full of spikes and spiders reminds you of a biblical hero.

There are a lot more Joshua trees in Mojave National Preserve, another several hours’ drive to the northeast, but it’s too far from Silver Lake and Echo Park to get much visitation. Which makes it my favorite. But there’s no work out there. No radio stations. No listeners. Just a lot of wild and beautiful Mojave Desert.

When I came around the bend, the helicopter was landing in the trailhead parking lot and an NPS cop was standing in the road. There was no place to pull over; so many dimwits had driven off the pavement and into the raw desert that the park service had to build curbs along the whole way. It was like the old Autopia ride in Disneyland. So, I waited until the yellow rescue chopper had lifted off again and the Smokey Bear let me through, although he wasn’t happy about letting me turn into the parking lot.

“Trail’s closed.” He was new. Not young, but new. I fished around the glove compartment for my expired KCDZ press pass and he relented.

A burly retired marine named Miguel was the Search & Rescue captain. He was yelling into a walkie-talkie and pointing at various volunteers with his free hand. They were all volunteers. They all looked like hell.

“The dogs gave out,” he said. The scent-hound handlers were loading a couple of overweight old dogs into a van. “They couldn’t make it back.”

It was just an easy loop, maybe three miles total. But boy was it hot, and sticky. I loosened my tie and wiped the sweat off my sunglasses.

“I just need some basics to bring to the station,” I said. He didn’t have much, but it was enough. I wrote down the names and the ages and then I noticed a cream-colored Acura parked by the pit toilets.

“That’s their car,” Miguel said. “The dude’s car. You can’t touch it.”

“I don’t want to touch it,” I said. “Just show me the registration. Or anything else that’s interesting.”

He shook his head and went back to the dogs and the handlers. What a sorry crew. I took a phone picture of the sedan’s license plate and got back in my truck.

Of course I wound up driving to the station in Joshua Tree and typing up the story and recording it for the afternoon news because the morning crew was already home for the day. By the time I’d finished all this unintended work, it was only a couple of hours until my night show. So I went over to the saloon and had a bad early dinner and sweated some more, because Girard refuses to put in air-conditioning and the swamp coolers don’t work this time of year.

The press loves a missing-hiker story. And our missing Joshua Tree tourists got the full treatment. From a distance, I mean. It’s the kind of police-beat story you throw together in the newsroom back in Los Angeles, mostly taken from our station’s website, with some new bits from the sheriff’s department press release and the usual heartfelt statements from the families.

And this one had the bonus of an Instagram-era cautionary tale: They really were just kids, from suburban Orange County, both barely of drinking age. It was the girl’s twenty-first birthday weekend. Emily Tran, from Irvine. The boy was half a year older, Francis De Leon, from Fullerton. High school senior portraits were printed on the MISSING posters that immediately started showing up in restaurants and tourist shops around town. They looked like nice kids, as people say. Both from second-generation immigrant families, Vietnamese and Filipino, respectively. Her family was wealthy, all doctors and lawyers and bankers. His was middle class, small businesspeople. Both success stories of the kind America doesn’t produce too many of anymore.

That night on my shift, a lot of people called in with theories and ideas. Of course nobody had seen the kids, or knew them, or even knew much about where they’d disappeared. To a lot of the old-timers in the high desert, the ones who washed up here decades ago, the national park was as mysterious and distant as Los Angeles.

“I bet they were on drugs,” one of my regulars said, calling in from a mobile home park in Yucca Valley. “Most of these tourists are on drugs.”

By September, the Search & Rescue missions were a Saturday-only affair, at the insistence of Francis De Leon’s father. He owned a couple of restaurants in the OC. But every Saturday he was back in Joshua Tree, with a dwindling supply of volunteer searchers. And like my night callers, most people around town had just forgotten about it. Which is only natural, when the missing people are abstractions.

By then I had a weird feeling about the whole thing. And it became a lot weirder when a college friend of Emily Tran’s sent the radio station an e-mail that wound up being forwarded to me. She didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to use her name. But she had an angle nobody else seemed to know: Emily Tran and Francis De Leon had broken up three months before her birthday trip to Joshua Tree. Emily had broken it off, put Francis in the friend zone.

They had dated in high school, fell in love it seems. But then she got accepted to UC–Irvine and he sort of drifted. Some community college classes, a fight with his father over the family business. Nothing sinister, on its own. Still, you could sense a narrative: She was on her way up in the world. He wasn’t. Her life was expanding. His was shrinking. When Emily broke it off, Francis took it hard.

Sometimes a story gets inside you and then you have to see it through. Because nobody else is bothering with it. I started to feel like maybe Emily Tran got a raw deal.

The radio station is not the kind of enterprise that could afford to send its nighttime host on goose chases to Irvine and Fullerton and wherever else the trail might lead, so I did it the cheap way: by phone, on the Internet, collecting names and information from cached web pages and those sleaze-ball operations that sell public records to nervous spouses for thirty-five dollars. I figured out that Francis was training to become a rent-a-cop. That he’d qualified for a concealed-carry permit, as part of this training. And that he didn’t have a whole lot of friends — but he did have one friend in particular who still had a presence on social media, as they say on the cable news. Danny Mendoza. And Danny Mendoza still had a Facebook account.

There was a picture of Danny and Francis on the Loop Trail in Joshua Tree National Park, in a post dated two weeks before Francis and Emily vanished. I knew that trailhead pretty well; it was an easy mile-long walk from my cabin. No caption or location data necessary. It felt weird though it wasn’t terribly suspicious on its own. Three million people visit the park every year, most from Southern California.

But there was an interesting fact about Danny Mendoza that I learned about on his Facebook page — he had apparently enrolled in nursing school in Manila, at the beginning of September. He’d flown the coop.

By the time October rolled around, I had a pile of information. None of it compelling enough to bring to the sheriff, or to NPS law enforcement. The National Park Service has its own federal police, but in our present national dystopia it is underfunded and understaffed and mostly embarrassed to exist. The county sheriff’s department is, at best, indifferent to both the national park and the high desert. Which makes a kind of sense, as it’s based in the faraway city of San Bernardino. Another world from Joshua Tree. The kids had vanished barely a mile from the entrance station where millions of cars entered and exited every year, where scores of federal employees roamed on a regular basis, and where search teams had put in hundreds of hours specifically looking for these kids. People vanish in national parks. It’s a thing. And the National Park Service would rather not discuss such things.

The final search took place on the last Saturday in October. The weather was nearly crisp, the days short and the shadows long. Only two volunteers made the loop with Mr. De Leon, but this time they wandered behind a big desert willow that had shed most of its leaves and dried flowers. There was a narrow path behind it, no more than a jackrabbit trail. I’ve been there since and it’s a surprise anyone ever followed it, because it clearly didn’t go anywhere. But just before the wall of granite boulders, the searchers spotted the faded wrapper of a granola bar and the lid of a plastic water bottle. A few steps beyond, in a nook that barely fit them both, lay the baked remains of Emily Tran and Francis De Leon.

Francis was on top of her, his pants around his knees. His Heckler & Koch .40-caliber pistol was loosely covered in sand and dead leaves. Emily’s shorts were pulled down. The Search & Rescue volunteers — unidentified to this day — immediately backed out and radioed the sheriff’s department. They had to physically restrain Mr. De Leon, who was weeping and moaning and seemed determined to correct the crime scene.

I was, of course, out of town that day. At the dentist in Palm Springs. And then afterward I’d gone to Paul Bar because it’s on the way home, and by the time I got to the radio station everything had gone nuts. Inside Edition and People were calling. KTLA wanted me to show them the site, which I hadn’t yet seen for myself. Gary had done a good job on the story for our own station and all I could do was listen and learn.

That night on the air I thought I was saying the obvious: That Francis De Leon had raped and murdered his ex-girlfriend after luring her out to Joshua Tree as a “birthday present” and then turned the pistol on himself. That he’d scoped out the high desert two weeks before he brought her into the national park, close enough to see the traffic on Highway 62 from atop any boulder, and stolen her life. That he’d brought a loaded handgun on a short day hike and used it on the girl he claimed to love. And that his own father had a hunch all this had happened and had spent three months of weekends closely following the search volunteers, so he could be there when the bodies were found and have a chance to spin the story. Not out of any culpability in the crime, but for honor. Family honor, the family name, the family business.

Rape/murder/suicide. And Francis got away with it, by killing himself. And he used our national park, my backyard, as a slaughterhouse.

It was a total outrage and when I finally fell asleep late that night, at least it all seemed obvious.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

The headlines were all the same, in the days and weeks to come. Mr. De Leon not only didn’t get arrested for trying to fix the crime scene, but he managed to write the sheriff’s press release.

The couple was found “in a last embrace,” the TV news said, with the gun only being used as a last desperate way to end Emily Tran’s suffering. And then Francis had taken his own life, tragically but also maybe heroically (with his Acura parked an easy mile’s walk away).

They’d been dead for months and were so decomposed that proof of rape or anything of the sort would never appear. So the ding-dongs at the sheriff’s department just went with the sob story. After all, they didn’t have anybody to rough up and arrest, and the DA had nobody to prosecute, so what the hell.

Boy, I wonder who did the embracing. Probably the ex-boyfriend, who murdered his ex-girlfriend, considering that he killed her first, before turning the gun on himself. And after pulling down her pants and raping her. I wonder if she was already dead by then.

The park service public affairs office had the gall to repeat this garbage: The sheriff’s department concluded that Francis De Leon had no intent to harm Emily Tran and that the use of the weapon was an unfortunate result of the couple’s desperation after having been lost for an unspecified amount of time and losing hope.

That’s the dumbest damned thing I’ve ever heard, and I used to cover the police beat full time.

He was her ex-boyfriend, the ex-boyfriend of a beautiful girl who was going somewhere in life, somewhere that didn’t include a security guard and gun nut. He got put in the friend zone. Then he scoped out Joshua Tree, the beloved weekend getaway, dragging his buddy along for the ride. And then Francis De Leon convinced his ex to take a little holiday together in the nice national park, just spend some time together, as friends. He brought a loaded handgun. And once they were a short mile or so down the Loop Trail — which might seem like a very remote location until you remember the little cabins and busy dirt roads and bachelorette parties just beyond — he shot her through the skull and crawled on top of her and shot himself. No harm intended! Just another day hike gone wrong.

This county is something else.

The Salt Calls Us Back by Alex Espinoza

Salton Sea

It was one of ours who first found her things, along the gray silt and dried-up fish bones near the edge of the Salton Sea. They were simple articles — a pair of sandals decorated with jeweled tortoises climbing along the leather straps, a straw hat with a wide brim, a coin purse with a few dimes and pennies rolling around inside like errant thoughts.

Stuffed in a striped canvas bag, the boy found a thin piece of fabric stained with drops of blood, broken sunglasses, and an envelope with the name REBECCA scrawled in blue ink followed by a string of numbers and letters, dashes, and periods: 68–12.00W-87.01.02.RYZ. She was a woman, no doubt about that. Because of the sandals and the bag, the indiscriminate piece of fabric the boy said was neatly folded.

“Like this,” he told us, mimicking the motion of someone folding laundry. “Very neat. It was a perfect square.”

We wondered how he knew about these things. About perfect squares, how the numbers written on the envelope were strange enough to remember. We wondered all of this to ourselves but stayed quiet as he went on, his sticky hands smelling of maple syrup, his red forehead beaded with sweat we could see as clearly and plainly as the date palms lining the perimeter of the lot where we parked, the place we called home. For now.

“Who is this boy’s mother?” one of us whispered.

Some among us shrugged their shoulders. “I don’t know.”

“Yo no sé,” the old woman with the raspy voice and bloodshot eyes replied.

A few of the men smoked and paced back and forth, nervous in that way men always are.

“Go on,” we implored him. “Tell us more. What else?”

None of us ventured out much anymore. We preferred the cool darkness inside our trailers. We drew the blinds, turned fans on, the generators humming along like a swarm of giant hornets. We ate little. We listened to the preachers on the radio and waited for the end to come, just like we’d been taught. Now this boy was telling us a story about these mysterious items left along the banks of that salted sea. Was it a sign? Had she been sent to us by the Divine Presence? Was it a test? Was this boy even real? None of us were certain we even knew where he came from. Maybe he was making it up. Maybe he was lonely and looking for attention. When we asked him where he lived, where he came from, he pointed toward the opened doorway.

“Over there,” he said. “My father and I walked for days. We found your trailers. The gray man in the green truck took clemency on us. Invited us into the flock once was passed the Test.”

We knew the Test. Some of us in that very room had invented it. It was a way of knowing if a person was on the Righteous Path. If they passed it, then they were part of our movement.

“And your father?” one of us inquired. “Where is he?”

“Last seen eating some of the wild weed on the other side of the highway.”

We nodded collectively. The man had gone on a pilgrimage. He was probably deep into the desert now, seeing visions and talking to the ghosts of his past.

“How long has he been away, your father?” we asked.

“A few days now.”

We sympathized with the boy then. We knew that the pilgrimage was only supposed to last a few hours at the most. The father not coming back at that point meant he never would. He would be lost now, speaking in riddles to the hot wind and cacti.

The boy was our responsibility. That’s how it works among our clan. And his father missing and now this discovery his boy had just made, well, it was clearly all connected. We just didn’t know how yet.

Some said it was the salt and brine that brought her back. We thought it was something else entirely. We saw it as the omen we were waiting for. A dead body floating in the polluted water like that? What else could it be?

A sacrifice.

The Divine required it.

And we were meant to bear witness.

To watch it all unfold. To tell it then wait for the next sign to reveal itself: the Fire that would cleanse.

She had once been blond. That was for sure. That we knew right away. The yellow strands of hair were visible through the water’s grit. We gathered around our television sets, and some of us even went so far as to venture out, stumbling over the sand and silt. We stood at the edge of a broken dock jutting out toward the fetid sea like a severed finger. She surfaced in the middle of the afternoon, when the sun is the hottest and blanches the entire area. Everything is white, the moisture sucked dry from every living thing roaming out there, among all that nothingness, terrifying and beautiful at once.

The body bobbed up and down, and we could see the arms extended out as if they were in supplication, begging for something only she could see. Her back was pale, wrinkled as tree bark, and her toenails were painted pink. Some of us thought of rose petals, the soft kisses of the children we were forced to abandon once we heard the Calling that led us out here. Still others among our group laughed and cursed, said she was a sinner. A filthy whore who got what she deserved for not heeding the signs the way we had.

“The police,” someone stated.

A line of cars, sirens blaring, flashing red and blue, came up over the small embankment. Then there was an ambulance and a white van.

“Who called them?” the boy asked.

“The hippie artists,” we said.

They began appearing with more frequency over the past few months. They smoked pot and had tattoos and piercings all over their faces and bodies. They dressed in rags and built elaborate bonfires and danced naked in circles in the middle of the night. Those of us designated to do the shopping saw them at the small grocery store on the southeastern edge of the lake. They bought cases of water, rolls of toilet paper, matches, twine, canned beans, and neon-colored energy drinks.

“Vagrants,” the store clerk told us. “Don’t like these artists. Ever since they been coming around, things in these parts have gotten funky.” He looked at us, smiled. “You folks are all right. God-fearing. Make no trouble. Call no attention to those of us out here who’d rather be left alone.”

We smiled. The men adjusted their suspenders, smoothed out their button shirts. The women pressed their skirts down and tightened their white head scarves.

It was one of them, for sure. They were probably out on the lake at sunrise, paddling along in one of their makeshift rafts constructed of discarded driftwood and frayed bits of twine. They probably saw her body, panicked, pulled out their cell phones, and called the authorities.

This was why we kept such distractions — things like phones and computers — to a minimum. They only worked to pull us away from the important tasks of prayer, fasting, and preparing for the Day.

We only had our television and radio with the one station we were instructed to listen to. There, in secret codes delivered by the preachers, we received our information.

The police officers stepped out from their cars, their guns clipped to their oversized belts, their black boots slick as oil. They wore puffy jackets even though it was hot. They strung up yellow tape. The medical examiners wheeled out a gurney from the back of their van as two men in a boat paddled toward the shore. Among the folds of the tarp we could make out her wet strands of hair, the web of veins poking from the thin pink membrane of her scalp.

The two men jumped out of the boat as it reached the shore. They wore rubber boots and gloves, and they hoisted the tarp containing the body out and onto the shore.

Her mouth was agape, her eyes open, the sockets empty, no doubt picked out by the wild birds who sat on the rocks and splintered telephone poles, watching us with sinister intentions. Her breasts were pale and flat, and the flesh made a rhythmic slapping sound as the men inched her farther and farther away from the edge of the water and up a small embankment, not too far from where we stood, clustered together, peering at the strange and foreign spectacle. Her belly was distended. Exposed like that, under the glaring desert sun, it looked like a giant egg, something a prehistoric creature would have laid. A series of black bruises dotted her arms and her right index finger was missing.

“The missing finger,” one of us muttered.

“Yes,” said a few others.

“It’s a sign,” said the first one. “Something’s coming.”

We bowed our heads then lifted them, closed our eyes, and turned our faces to the sun before walking across the gravel lots, past the abandoned homes and boarded-up shops toward our settlement.

They identified the body. Her name was Judith Arnold. Sixty-three years of age. A widow with a son and daughter. We heard them on the radio, their voices low and quivering. They asked the public for help in finding their mother’s killer.

“We are distraught,” the daughter said, in between sobs.

“We are begging you,” the son added. “If anyone knows anything, please come forward.”

More information surfaced as the days passed, as we listened and tried following the clues, looking for the sign we needed that would indicate our final departure.

She had been stabbed repeatedly in the stomach, chest, and back. The coroner’s office said there were strange words carved into her thighs: EROT, VALKUM, MEDCOLIUM.

“Evidence suggests the victim was assaulted and killed elsewhere and then brought here in an attempt to hide the crime.”

The medical examiner spoke, said the water in her lungs didn’t match what was typically found in the waters of the sea. “We discovered different minerals suggesting she wasn’t drowned here,” he explained.

There were trace elements of iron oxide, barium, copper, and magnesium.

“The victim was drowned, stabbed repeatedly, and had her skin lacerated. All of this postmortem,” the examiner said.

Police presence grew in the area in the days that followed. We saw the squad cars parked out in front of the grocery store, by the gas station and convenience store, and out near the empty unpaved streets.

“I’m telling you,” the store clerk said as we did our shopping, “it was one of those artist freaks. Likely did some ritual bloodletting. Now the cops are all up in our business. Who knows what else they’ll find? Who knows how long they’ll be here?”

He was angry.

“They said she was killed elsewhere,” we explained. “They dumped her body here.”

“Bullshit,” he replied, then apologized. “I shouldn’t have said that to you holy types.”

We smiled and forgave him.

Who here among us has not sinned or committed an afront to His Holiness, after all?

The police continued their inquiry. We watched as they kept patrolling the area. They, in turn, watched everyone and everything going on around us. They must have been pressured by the woman’s family. A private investigator was hired, a young man with a pair of thick-framed glasses and neatly ironed collared shirts was seen wandering up and down the lakeshore. He took pictures on his phone and spoke into it from time to time. We wondered who he was talking to.

“He’s recording what he sees,” the boy told us.

“How do you know?” we asked.

“I was standing a few feet away, behind a pile of rocks, and I listened,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.

“Any word from your father?”

“No,” he replied. “It’s like he vanished into the air.”

He wasn’t a bother, and we all cared for him. We fed him, made sure he had clean clothing and that he attended the sermons we held each Friday evening in the tent.

Of course, we were bothered by the fact that his father had not come back. And some of us even went so far as to suggest that a search party be formed so that we might go out there and try to figure out where the man had gone. But we were not equipped to take on such risky endeavors, so we left it at that. And we tried never to talk about him.

We saw that investigator roaming around outside our property. He stood by the front entrance we’d erected when we first came. It wasn’t really an entrance. It was just two piles of stones stacked together. It was clear, though, to anyone passing by that this was a residence, a specific location, maybe even a home. He waved at one of us.

“Hello?” he hollered. “Can I approach?” He held his arms up as if he were surrendering.

We stopped what we were doing, and one of us said, “You may pass, young man.”

He was sweating, and we could see damp circles of perspiration underneath his armpits. He said he’d been hired by the victim’s family and was working closely with the county sheriff’s office to investigate the death of the woman named Judith Arnold.

“What a tragedy,” we said. We shook our heads and lowered our gazes.

“What do you all know?” He held a small pad and pencil.

“Only what we’ve heard on the radio. That’s all.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. A real tragedy. Shame.”

“May He bring her peace.”

The man glanced around, taking in the trailers and vans where we slept, the old chairs and rusted drums, the broken crates and strips of tarp we’d found and made our own. We had our washbasin, the small tubs where we bathed, the outdoor firepit where we sometimes cooked our food or sang hymnals and spirituals to His Holiness.

“So, am I to understand that your group is something of a religious sect?” he asked.

“We are an order,” we explained. “We don’t like terms like sect or cult. Of which we are neither.”

“I see. I apologize,” he said.

“What is it you seek?”

The man cleared his throat and said, “How many of you are there?” He waved with his pen.

We blinked, paused, thought for a moment. We could see the suspicion in his eyes. “Our numbers are great. We are many working as one.”

“Okay, okay.” He scribbled things down in his little notebook. “Do you all live here?”

“We’ve lost some along the way, but yes. All of us here make up the congregation.”

He nodded, took a handkerchief out from his shirt pocket, and wiped the sweat from his pink forehead. “Is everyone accounted for? Nobody missing?”

We thought of the boy, his father.

The investigator waited for our answer. Some of us shuffled our feet. Still others glanced away.

“Everyone is here.”

“Interesting,” he said. “Interesting. So, you can account for every single person then?”

“Yes.” We started getting annoyed. “Look. We have nothing to hide here. We’re quiet. Law-abiding and God-fearing.”

“I apologize,” he said. He could tell we were becoming angry. “I’m just trying to do my job. Just trying to get down to the bottom of things.”

And that was it.

He left.

We breathed a collective sigh of relief and continued on with our work.

He showed up again a few days later, holding a stack of papers in an envelope. We led him to a table, placed a cloth atop it, and poured him a drink of iced tea.

“Why, thank you,” he said, evidently stunned by the gesture, given the tone of his voice.

“We are civilized,” we replied.

“Of course.” He laughed, took a sip, and cleared his throat.

He had a habit of doing this. It annoyed us.

“What can we do for you?” one of us asked.

He opened up his folder and pulled out a few slips of paper. They contained a series of sketches and drawings that looked like symbols. It was a language, perhaps. We didn’t know. But whatever it was, it appeared ancient, primordial.

“Ever seen symbols like these anywhere?” he asked.

We shook our heads. “We have not.”

“You sure about this?”

“Of course, yes.”

He told us no one knew what they meant. He’d asked everyone he could think of, ran them through the police database, sought advice from anthropologists and university scholars versed in local lore. Everywhere he turned, though, he came up with nothing.

“If that’s the case,” we said, “then why do you think we can help you?”

“Friend of mine studied religion,” he answered. “Ancient sects.”

“We are not a sect.”

“Didn’t say you were. Just—”

“We don’t know any of this.”

He sighed. “Says this looks like something ceremonial.”

“What does this have to do with your investigation?”

He finished his iced tea. “Glad you asked. This little bit of information wasn’t released to the public, but it seems that these symbols, these bizarre-looking little stars and crosses and figures that could be letters and whatnot, well, they were carved into the skin of the dead woman.”

“And because we are a religious organization, you assume we have something to do with this?”

“I didn’t say—”

We pointed in a vague direction toward the horizon. “Why don’t you go and bother those crazy artists who come here and do drugs and dance around naked? They’re probably the ones that did it.”

“I’m only trying to gather information. That’s all.”

None of us noticed him standing there, just a few feet away, listening to everything the investigator was saying. It was only when the young man got up to leave, handing over his empty glass and excusing himself before walking over toward his car, that the boy came forward.

“What is it?” we asked.

The boy stared down at the ground. There were rocks and small pebbles littered about. He kicked at some of them with the tip of his dirty shoe.

“Those symbols? The ones that were drawn there on those papers?”

“What about them?” we asked, leaning in now.

“I seen them before. In a book my father carried with him.”

“Show us,” we implored. “Show us now.”

The camper was cramped and hot, and there were flies buzzing around inside, bumping against the torn mesh of the door screen, hovering over the dirty dishes in the sink, piled up for who knew how long. Stacks of paper filled the ground, and it was hard for us to move in there. In a section of the tiny laminate kitchen counter, next to the stove, its four burners charred black as the desert night, was a picture of a woman. She wore pants, and her hair was tied in a bun. Her left hand rested on her hip, and her other was placed on the window of a blue van. Her mouth was open, a tiny red O, as if she were in the middle of saying something. The woman’s eyes were radiant, glowing. This we could feel, even as we stood there, in that forsaken space. There were a handful of pebbles and a lit candle near the photograph.

“Your mother?” we asked.

“Grandmother,” the boy responded, as if knowing the next question already. “She raised me. My real mother... she left. When my father came back from the service, he took me with him.”

“Where?” we asked.

He shrugged his shoulders. “All over. We slept in motels. Once we met some men on motorcycles. Followed them for a while. They gave my father drugs that kept him up for days. That was when he started seeing things. He started writing in his book.”

The boy riffled through a plastic bag and pulled out a spiral notebook. He held it out and told us to open it, to look through the pages. Inside there were scrawled images of distorted faces and scribbles, phrases, and words that made no sense.

“Witchcraft,” one of us muttered.

“Who is this devil?” someone else asked.

“The back,” the boy urged. “They’re in the back.”

They did look similar, though the marks on the dead woman’s body were distorted and blurred in the photographs the investigator had shown us. There was something sinister about the whole thing, something that made us feel as though we’d stumbled upon a situation not meant for us.

“Call the investigator back,” one of us said.

“No,” someone else replied. “They’ll think we killed her.”

“Let’s leave all of this alone. Pretend we didn’t see any of it,” still others insisted.

“I think he did it,” the boy said. “I think he killed her. That woman.”

They had stopped, he said, one night. A long stretch of road. Past the giant windmills churning their big, wide blades. He was fast asleep. His father had been driving for days. Without sleep, he explained.

“The squeak from the brakes woke me. I felt the camper stop. The engine turned off.” He took a deep breath. “I could see out the window.” He pointed toward the back of the camper. “Red lights flashing.”

“Was it the lady?” we asked.

“There was a voice I didn’t recognize.” He began to shake. “Then a scream.”

After that, there was nothing. He heard a loud thud, saw his father’s red, shaking hands, noted the look in his eyes.

“He was mad,” the boy said. “I tried asking him if everything was okay. But he stayed quiet.”

He only partially saw the name of the city where they were. Someplace with the words Hot and Springs in it. We knew then why her lungs were filled with water that had different mineral contents than the Salton, why she looked the way she did. She’d come from one of those expensive spas tucked away in the hills, those places that rubbed you down, sprayed your face with fragrant mists, where you could splay out under the hot sun and bake your skin until it itched and bubbled.

After driving for a long while, the car engine gave out. Steam hissed from the hood. His father beat his fists against the hot metal. He gulped down the last of their water, told the boy to take whatever he could carry, and they set off on foot.

“That was when we met you all. My father went back for our camper, somehow got it fixed, and brought it here.”

“Did you see a body?” we asked.

“No,” he said. “I only saw the blood.”

That was how we knew. We talked among ourselves. We held counsel and decided what steps we needed to take when it came to the knowledge we’d gained, this strange boy we’d inherited. Our scripture taught us to care for others and ourselves, but it also taught us to make sacrifices in order to fulfill the plan He had in store for us. Many of us argued over the proper solution.

Hand the boy over to the authorities, some felt.

Leave him to fend for himself. We could travel farther east into the desert. Get lost and prepare for the final days, still others said.

We prayed.

Finally, the solution presented itself.

We had very little. It was easy for us to pack up and leave. We were, after all, not tied to material things. We needed none of that. We gathered at the center of the wide clearing, followed the lead car out. We were a caravan of God-fearing souls lost in the dry wilderness. All we were looking for was hope, a home, a place where we could hang our hats, put our Bibles down, and rest. Finally, to rest.

We imagined lakes. Jagged granite peaks. Waterfalls cascading down boulders and rocks. The sound of the water, that beautiful and gloriously rich sound. We smelled pine-scented air. We heard owls and hawks screeching in the sky. There would be wide fields of wildflowers all around us. We wanted to live again. We wanted to breathe clean, cool air. We didn’t want our lungs to feel scalded by the hot desert wind that bit and begged and took so much.

Out. Somewhere far. Miles from the main highway that led us out of the state. We found a desolate road. We followed the main car leading the caravan — that car where we knew the boy rode.

There was nothing out there. No buildings or houses. No sign of anyone anywhere.

He looked confused. He must have been sleeping, because when he was ordered out of the car, he rubbed his eyes. He bit his lip and wiggled a finger through the hole in his shirt. “Are we there?” He glanced around.

“Yes,” one of us said.

He looked around again. “Where?”

One of us, an old man with a long beard and glassy eyes, said, “See that ridge? It’s there. Just past it. On the other side.” He held something in his hand. Some of us couldn’t see, though. It looked like a green duffel bag. The old man picked this up, and he led the child up a thin path, cutting through wild sagebrush and thorny cactus up and over the ridge.

We waited.

We prayed.

The Holy Spirit entered some of us. We spoke in tongues.

Ashohala. Ere al om tah collah.

The sun had set by the time he returned. The green duffel bag was gone. He held a long wooden club. The end looked as though it had been dipped in red paint, the color thick and dark, menacing. We pretended not to know what it was.

“I suppose we should get going now,” the old man said.

It was taken care of. We must push on.

Somewhere out there was our rightful home.

The place promised to those like us.