Truly Like Lightning

by David Duchovny

  Holy shit, thought Maya, what the fuck is going on here? Early monkey-man talking about monkeys—weird shit. A small, muscular adult female with long dark hair stood, dramatically backlit by the flames. She spoke the same language that Maya could understand. “When I did stunts, I apprenticed to this legendary dude who was about sixty-five at the time, been an animal trainer for forty-five years. We’re on location somewhere and we’ve got to handle a bunch of baboons for this movie, there’s a knock on my door at five a.m., and it’s the old man, he says, ‘Come with me to the barn, I gotta get down with the ’boon and I need you there in case he kicks my ass.’ And I’m like, what? What do you mean ‘get down with the ’boon’? But he turns and leaves and I get dressed and follow him out to the barn where he’s got this big male caged. Baboons are nasty, mean. The old man shuts the barn door and takes his shirt off. He opens the cage and him and this big baboon start going at it, I mean, punching and biting, throwing as hard as they can, and they’re both getting good shots in.”

  As Maya was listening to this parable, it seemed like a subtitled movie to her—she saw the words embodied and screened across the black canvas of night as if it were a film. She wondered that these primitive souls could speak in images that were projected outward. She saw green lights shoot up from the ground and into the sky, turning the stars into dollar signs. This was the omen she had come here for—the barren desert would transform itself into money. But how? Were those precious minerals shooting into the sky turning into dollars? Silver, gold, oil even? Was that the play she would bring to Malouf? Or maybe a resort? She would bring a resort unicorn to Malouf? Another Twentynine Palms, only so much bigger—Twentyninethousand Palms? Another Vegas? She was in the right place now, she knew why she’d gotten this high, stolen a car possibly, and off-roaded this far. But she didn’t have the answer yet that she’d come for.

  The female primate continued her story, and as she spoke, the group around her seemed to turn into monkeys as well, and strobed back and forth in the pulsing firelight between human and monkey like a bunch of black-light Jesus paintings. “A couple times, the baboon landed some shots and I thought about stepping in, calling it, and pulling Hank out of the barn. But I knew that if the baboon won, that would be the end of Hank as alpha, and I sensed he’d rather die than be a beta. And wouldn’t you know it, even at sixty-five, ol’ Hank had enough for this big baboon, and the tide soon turned, and Hank’s straddling this monkey and landing haymaker hooks to his head and body till the ’boon turtles and starts to whimper and cry. So Hank lets up. He stands up, sweating and bleeding and scratched red, and he pounds his chest like a silverback, and points to his head. The baboon jumps up, jumps on Hank’s back, and starts grooming him. You see, after the battle, Hank was welcoming the ’boon back into his proper place in the pecking order.”

  A younger female stood and said, “That’s all macho bullshit. What about bonobos?”

  “Pearl…” warned the older dark-haired female who had been telling the baboon story, motioning for her to stand down. But this Pearl did not stand down. The one called Pearl continued, “Bonobos are almost identical to chimps and also ninety-eight percent like us, but they are matriarchal and they resolve conflict through sex and physical affection rather than violence. That’s just as much human nature. We are both chimp and bonobo, and we can choose the better way.”

  Maya felt herself rise up and walk toward them. “Greetings,” she said, “I am called Maya. I am a Homo sapiens from the kingdom of Santa Monica.”

  The hominids turned in her direction. They seemed shocked at her presence. She saw a young male spring up and assume an athletic stance, seeming to point at her, and then she heard a whirring sound and felt a sting on her upper left arm. She looked and saw an arrow sticking out at an almost right angle from her triceps. It hadn’t landed squarely or deeply, but she was bleeding and looked up to see that the small hominid was reloading his bow. Before Maya could say another word, the alpha male pounced on the arrow-wielding little one and confiscated his weaponry. She looked at her bleeding arm again, grasped the arrow, barely inside her, and pulled. It dropped to the ground like the punch line to a bad joke, and she lost consciousness.

  Maya came to on the back of a galloping horse, her arms around the waist of a man she had never met, his one huge, rough hand grasping both her wrists in a fist so she would not fall. He smelled strongly of sweat and fire. She heard nothing but the sound of the horse’s labored breaths and the wind in her ears. She felt lost, but safe. She tried to get a look at the man’s face, but saw only long dark hair and a short beard in the moonlight. He turned to look at her. His eyes were like two burning stars, his pupils looked like lightning bolts. She was still very high, but she was coming down; lights were losing their trails, sounds their echoes.

  Her arm throbbed. She looked at it. It was bandaged cleanly, a spot of blood seeping through. “Thank you, Bronson,” she heard herself say. She didn’t know how she knew to say his name. Magically, the horse transformed into an iron horse, and Maya, arms still clasped around the cowboy savior’s waist, was hurtling through the desert night on a motorcycle. She held tight, looked up at the stars, and passed out again.

  When she woke up next, it was late Saturday afternoon and her back felt like someone had drained it of all fluid and suppleness. There was a clean bandage on her arm and she wore a thick cotton robe, her skin oily all over from what must have been a massage she could not recall, a Bulgarian woman at her feet asking her what color she would like her toenails, black or red? “Paint them black,” she said, “please.”

  Sunday morning came without warning to Joshua Tree, and Maya, sacrum locked tight and achy, slumped gingerly into the car with the boys. She was cagey about what she told the Turks on their way back to Los Angeles in the G-wagen. She let ride the narrative that had begun in her absence Friday night, that she was a total boss who had stolen (“borrowed,” she amended) a Maserati and taken it on a screaming joyride into the night only to return hours later on a motorcycle with a silent cowboy and a fucking arrow wound in her arm! Epic! That was pretty close to the truth, and she was fine leaving it at that.

  Feigning to be unimpressed with herself and uninterested in her adventure (no biggie), she asked what the boys had gotten up to. Not much of note. JJ, no doubt still smarting from being bested by Maya, had tried to walk through the fire grate, something he had heard Tony Robbins does in some mind-over-matter malarkey. Didn’t go so well. He was now elevating his burned and bandaged feet in the car, his stigmata a beige Band-Aid of shame compared with Maya’s red badge of courage. She was well on her way to becoming a legend even as the Turks eventually tired of being stonewalled on specifics about the mystery cowboy who had, speaking not word one, dropped her off safely and then vanished with a roar back into the desert. She honestly didn’t know who the silent horseback/motorcycle hero was, but she was damn sure going to find out, all by herself, in secret. Sphinxlike, she declined to elaborate on Friday night’s events.

  So the Turks moved on to an excruciating verbal replay of each and every one of the thirty-six holes of golf they had played on Saturday. The heated dissertations on the proper dispensations and accurate length of “hangover gimmes,” the upper limit of “tequila mulligans,” and the merits of 3-irons versus 5-woods was a perfect soporific, and once again, Maya passed out, in triumphant lack of interest, until home.

  5.

  ONCE BACK ON PRINCETON STREET, Maya took a long, hot shower and went straight to bed, hair still wet. She could feel her body coming to, annoyed with her for the chemical trauma of Friday night. Her arm was fine, it didn’t hurt much, didn’t look to be infected. She privately hoped it would leave a decent scar to accompany the story. At about 3 a.m., she awoke from unrecalled dreams that were the dying embers of her nightlong mushroom hallucinations, and fixed herself a triple espresso. She sat down at her computer to research the part of the desert she had, both psychically and literally, stumbled into.

 
Her initial Google searches turned up some cool facts, but no gems. The park itself was massive—790,636 acres, 1,235.4 square miles. The nearest major city was San Bernardino. A nonstolen, not speeding Maserati drive through the park might take a couple hours. As she read through these easily discoverable facts, she felt like a detective taking the first broad steps to tracking down a mysterious man and woman; the woman happened to be herself in the lost hours of peyote-induced happy madness, and the man was this Bronson fellow. She intuited that this cowboy and his extended family were not squatters—she entertained vague images of getting bandaged by one of the women in a well-managed home with many children around, including the little shit who had Rambo’d her. She knew these things had happened, but it was also bleeding into things she’d read and movies she’d seen about the Manson Family on Spahn Ranch (her ear tricking her into a false equivalence of Manson/Bronson). She wanted to try to nail down some hard facts before real memories twisted forever, like wild vines, with false memory and word association.

  But this was not a murder mystery, and this wasn’t true crime; well, yeah, that kid had shot an arrow into her, and that could be filed away as an assault chip to be cashed at a later date, but if the Bronson family weren’t squatters, drifters, or killers on the run, they were landowners in a pristine and likely infinitely valuable part of California-America. And if they were landowners, they could be land sellers. The park had been established only in 1994. It wasn’t that long ago that all this edenic “wasteland” was privately owned. Praetorian was in the business of buying land. A pristine sizable parcel abutting a national treasure, Joshua Tree National Park, would be worth untold millions in possible mineral rights—gold, silver, oil? In possible housing development rights? A resort? What if the private land was, like the famous Twentynine Palms, on the waters of the Oasis of Mara? Or something bigger, flashier, and more starfuckery than Twentynine Palms, as per Malouf’s Hollywood leanings.

  Was the land Indian-designated and therefore possibly zoned for gambling establishments? Fuck the Mohegan Sun; build a second mini-Vegas out there. Now we’re talking billions. That would appeal to Malouf’s thirst for a final score to shore up his legacy as he approached his mid-sixties. He could be the second coming of Bugsy Siegel. A sexy, biopic-worthy figure whom the next generation’s Warren Beatty would play. Malouf would come in his pants over that idea.

  The Bronsons didn’t seem too worldly or too wealthy—in fact, they looked dirt-poor, perhaps they’d want to cash out? Could it be that she had indeed, as her stoned self thought, discovered a lost primitive tribe in America or, better yet, a wormhole in time to prehistory, and that she would be their educating savior, buying their arid, “worthless” land and educating them in modern ways before relocating them into the easy pleasures and accumulated wisdoms of late capitalist, twenty-first-century civilization. She could be a good person in this feel-good story and make a ton of money. Win-win. These were the absurd fantasies spinning through Maya’s whiplashed consciousness as the caffeine kicked in and she clicked randomly at her laptop hoping for a clue to open windows to new worlds, or knock some valuable perception free.

  Who was this Bronson person? She googled “Survivalist Bronson” and “Cowboy Bronson,” stumbling onto a quintessential 1969 TV series, Then Came Bronson—“a disillusioned reporter quits his job and starts wandering the road on his motorcycle.” Ah, those must have been simpler days, she thought. She tacked back, typing “Horseback Bronson,” only to be euphonically led down a “best of BoJack Horseman” cul de sac for about ten minutes, which felicitously, algorithmically, curved her to the oeuvre of a thespian named Charles Bronson. She’d never heard of this macho, mustachioed actor from the ’70s, but she meandered through the thread of his apparently very big box office life. Death Wish sounded like an awesome flick. She would look for it on Netflix sometime, or Hulu or Amazon. She was on IMDb scrolling through Charles Bronson titles when her frazzled cerebral cortex flashed on the stories that the alpha male had told around the campfire, about a monkey fight or something. He said he’d done “stunts”—he must’ve been in the movies too, like his namesake. Maybe they were related?

  She IMDb’d “Stuntman Bronson” to see if this generic person might have a Hollywood profile. And indeed he did. When she saw the credits listed for a “Bronson Powers, Stuntman,” her breath caught. The list of movies he’d worked on was three pages long, impressive. There was no bio on the page, no personal details, as stuntmen were generally unsung heroes, but Powers’s last credit was 1996’s Independence Day, the Will Smith sci-fi blockbuster. And then he had disappeared. But he hadn’t been killed or abducted by aliens after all. It seemed he had vanished into the desert for decades, and had been fruitful and multiplied. Maya did not know she’d been searching for this particular man, but she’d found him.

  By the time proper morning rolled around, Maya knew most everything the internet had to offer on a middle-aged former stuntman named Bronson Powers, and had the incipient makings of a plan to pitch to Bob Malouf.

  6.

  CONTACT WITH THE OUTSIDE WORLD necessitated a thorough cleanup. The “temple,” the sacred site where Jackie and two babies were buried, where they held weekly fire meetings, was razed and relocated. Above and beyond all else, Bronson knew that the buried children should never be found. There would be too many questions. The tiny handmade coffins were dug up, the half-burned firewood reclaimed, and the sand raked by Bronson and his kids. Signs of man were erased from this holy spot. They would make another shrine. What made the spot holy was the presence of the baptized loved ones now removed, and the holy value given the barren land by meaning-making humans. Once Bronson removed his children and beloved wife from the land’s embrace, it became palimpsest, unremarkable. Nobody would ever find this place where the woman had surprised his family. It was mute desert again. Only the homemade, weather-distressed spooky scarecrows and “No Trespassing” signs remained.

  That was the easy part, the physical work. Processing how this intrusion had upset the bubble—that was a more slippery psychic cleanup job. It had been ten years, at least, since the older kids, or the wives for that matter, had had real contact with an outsider, when some old work buddies had come out to help Bronson dig a second well and work on some trails. Ten years since they had gotten so much as a whiff of a world outside their small tribe, and the first time the younger ones had ever been exposed to such contamination. Bronson knew the desires and fears such contact made arise in him, so he could only imagine the inchoate intensity of that within his kids now, and his women.

  There was the problem of spiritual contamination, but there was also now the nagging, more pressing and practical suspicion that other intruders might follow. The woman had been wounded, and even though it wasn’t serious and she seemed grateful for the care, she had been assaulted and could make trouble. Bronson prayed on the matter, but he couldn’t see his way through. He had dropped her off in the dead of night. He had spoken to no one. He had driven the Maserati back himself that same night (fun, he had to admit), then had Mary come pick him up and take him back home on horseback. He had van-ished without a trace. They had been ghosts in the night. He had done the best he could, but now, for the first time in a decade, matters were out of his control. He knew that. It aroused his rage for order. He recognized the familiar feeling from so long ago; he hated it anew.

  First to minister to was the eleven-year-old boy, Hyrum, who had pierced the interloper with an arrow. Bronson found Hyrum this morning with their milk cow. Mary’s boy, whom he’d named after Joseph Smith’s loyal brother and disciple, seemed more at home with the animals than his siblings. Hyrum was a wild child whose nature was perfectly suited to the farmwork and the hard subsistence of desert life. He loved his chores—haying the horses, slopping the pigs, gathering the eggs from the ostriches, and milking the cow. He was also keen when it came time to slaughter. While the other children seemed to understand the necessity of killing for food, Hyrum looked at i
t almost mechanically, watching his father in those moments of life-taking with a removed fascination, like some other child might linger with a large puzzle split again into its senseless pieces—not malicious necessarily, just fully engrossed, at home. Still towheaded, untamed, undomesticated, he had never shown much of an interest in book learning like Deuce and the others. But like his father, Hyrum was a natural on the trampoline. Many nights, Bronson might wake from sleep and step out of the house for a cigaretteless cigarette break, only to be startled by the silhouette of his son flying through the air, casting night shadows—jumping, tumbling, falling, rising off the crosshatched canvas high enough to blot out the moon. When he beheld his boy in such unguarded, ecstatic private moments, Bronson thought of what Joseph Smith had said about himself: “I am a rough stone. The sound of the hammer and chisel was never heard on me nor never will be. I desire the learning and wisdom of heaven alone.”

  For sure, Hyrum reminded Bronson eerily of his own father as well, especially in the eyes and the defiant set of his downturned mouth. The kid could be a stuntboy, the way he rode a horse and shot. Try as she might, Mary could never see herself in their son. “I carried him in my belly, but he’s one hundred percent yours,” she would say. “That’s your clone.”

  “I think he’s more like my dad’s clone. He’s like my wild ram of the desert. He came out of the womb pissed off,” Bronson responded, unable to hide his admiration.