A Desert Reckoning

by Deanne Stillman

  Yet amid the chaos, nature took over. The sun began to sink, and the desert cooled, and another magnificent display of color swept the skies; the valley was now a red and orange tabernacle, and it encircled one and all, and everyone was silent and humbled, wiped of all memory of bad news, unless you’re standing next to it or near it or you can smell it or sense it, and then the paradox of the beauty and the terrible event of a moment ago stops your clock and makes clear that two opposing aspects at any given time is the way of all things and that’s really all there is to it. In a few days, there would be a full moon, but as red and orange faded to ink and then as dusk faded to black, there was an unusual occurrence in the region known for its sparkling night skies: no waxing moon was visible, nor were there stars. Yet a strange white light illumined the site where Deputy Sorensen’s body was lying, and it cast harsh shadows and was accompanied by an ungodly hum. The false sun was coming from a large generator, which had been set up so the coroner could examine Steve’s body. As he worked, cataloguing the elements of the scene, various members of law enforcement surrounded the felled deputy, and in the distance, on the paved two-lanes south and north of the remote enclave, sirens screamed and red lights flashed and danced in the strange modern constellation that spells trouble.

  There was still no sign of Kueck. At the nearby Lancaster station, Captain Carl Deeley, Sorensen’s commander, ran through some options. He knew his beat, and he knew that if Kueck were still in it, he’d be trying to flee the area, traveling at night, when the temperature had cooled and under the cover of darkness. It was time to call in the FLIRs—forward-looking infrared thermal imaging—used by the military to target the enemy in another desert war, the one raging at the same time in Iraq. In fact, the technology was borne of wide-open, flat space, having first been deployed in Operation Desert Storm during the Gulf War. Deeley contacted Edwards Air Force base and asked for support. A thermal imaging plane was dispatched, flying over the Mojave at 30,000 feet, scanning every inch of the desert floor, looking for the telltale blip of heat that would indicate a human form. A special SWAT team backed up the FLIRs, ripping across the sands on ATVs, now joined by deputies on foot and horseback, and by K-9 units from three jurisdictions.

  By midnight, the FLIRs had picked up nothing but coyotes and kit foxes and all manner of desert predators on the move. The cops were right back where they started—at Kueck’s abandoned car in the middle of the desert. “People are creatures of habit,” Detective Paul Delhauer, a profiler with the sheriff’s department, told me on the phone months later. “Their personality is their fingerprint.” There was only one place Donald Kueck would hide—right in his own backyard, the Mojave. They were right. As the FLIRS were sweeping the area, he walked through an unlocked back door into the home of an associate and neighbor. This was C. T. Smith, a forty-year-old ex-con with an extensive arrest record. He had done time for two felonies, possession of controlled substances, and lewd and lascivious acts, and the last thing he wanted was further contact with law enforcement. C.T. lived about a mile away from Kueck in a dilapidated compound of sheds and had not seen his friend in months. He was surprised, not so much by the unannounced entry—these things happen in the desert—but by the whole picture: Kueck was tired, sunburned, and upset—and armed with an assault rifle and a short barrel revolver. “What’s up, buddy?” he said. “Got any water, man?” Kueck said. “I’ve been living in the desert.” Did C.T. know that the local deputy had been killed? Had he heard the sirens and choppers in the area? It would have been hard not to, yet we do not know what condition he was in, nor do we know if there was talk of anything that happened that day among his immediate circle. “Sure, man,” he said, and then filled a jug that his friend was carrying. After a while Kueck headed out the door and into the night. A solitary FLIR continued to sweep the valley floor, but Kueck eluded it for a while and then dug a hole that was wide enough to crouch in. He got in and covered himself up with a piece of cardboard. To many, the makeshift hideout sounds like a joke, but Kueck, a self-taught scientist among many other skills, knew that by then, the ground had cooled down enough to match human body temperature, and there would be no heat for the infrared to detect.

  Time passed and the choppers peeled off. The coroner was finishing his gruesome inventory as Deputy Sullivan continued to stand guard near her fallen brother. When a few last measurements and tallies were completed, Deputy Sorensen was placed in the refrigerated van and taken out of the desert he had loved and patrolled, down the hill and back to the city, and into the county morgue. The generator had been turned off, and the desert went dark again, and the night became the worst version of itself. Sometimes, often in fact, you can hear the coyotes howl in the blackness, and those who are attuned hear all sorts of other things—all the sounds and whispers and quivers of the night hunters that assume different shapes from ours—the snakes and the bobcats and the smaller, less noted creatures. But on that night, Deputy Melissa Sullivan heard nothing. The dead zone was everywhere, she later remembered: the animals knew what happened.

  DAY

  TWO

  CROSSING THE REPTILE DOOR

  May your trails be crooked, winding,

  lonesome, and dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.

  —Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

  THE ANCIENTS SAID THAT LIZARDS DWELL IN THE DREAMTIME, and when they appear it’s to tell us to break from the past, lose a tail, and hit the road. Of course, at the time the lizard appears, we may not recognize that any sort of portal or window has opened, any sign suggesting a geographic or inward journey, and certainly a child would not take the appearance of a reptile or any other creature as an invitation to change location. But then again perhaps only a child would recognize such a thing, even though the information may not resonate until some time later, might be buried under years of being told to do the right thing, adhere to the rules, get a job, get married, follow the middle-class way . . . until one day the future desert dweller finds him or herself on a different path, stepping through an entrance, forcing open a crack in the window, leaving things behind and why? The explanation never does satisfy those in his or her immediate circle, some of whom are obliterated by the break, but no matter . . . the call is answered and the man vanishes, and it only starts to make sense later, when the narrative is over.

  Donald Charles Kueck was born on August 21, 1950, into a Southern family that prided itself on military service and law enforcement. His father’s father served in Kaiser Wilhelm’s navy, fleeing Germany after World War I as Hitler began to seize power. His father was a pilot at Eglin Air Force base in Mobile, Alabama, and that’s where Don was raised—3,000 miles from the Mojave Desert. His mother’s brother was head of the Louisiana State troopers, the top cop in the state. Two of his older sisters would later join the army and the navy.

  Exactly when Don succumbed to the gravitational pull of the desert we do not know. But as a little boy, he would play in the woods, and it was there that lizards entered his life. They were blue ones—called runners or racers—and one day he picked one up and took it home. He named it Thing 1. Soon there were more—Thing 2 and Thing 3—and one day Thing 2 escaped and Don grabbed it and squished it by mistake. “He was heartbroken,” an older sister Peggy recalls. But it was not just a momentary loss, she says; he had an affinity for the lizards and they for him, and it went beyond playing with reptiles, the thing that lots of boys did. Somehow you could just tell—there was some sort of harmonizing of energy, a cross-species understanding perhaps, the kind of thing found in the character of Dr. Doolittle or others who have a way with creatures.

  Another thing that was noteworthy about Don was the fact that he had an IQ of 140. He was always thinking, making and rigging contraptions, wondering about how things worked. A friend would later say that he was “too smart for his own good,” one step ahead of everybody and everything, rolling out theories of physics and mechanics and the ways of the universe to the degree that he had trouble shutti
ng down all of the chatter. But he received one message loud and clear: he was not cut out for the family tradition of service in the military or law enforcement. In 1970 or so, at the age of twenty, he hit the hippie trail, heading to Southern California and beginning to orbit the desert. He was not alone: at the time many were walking away from family or national expectations, fleeing the military draft, heading north to Canada, west to San Francisco or Venice, or underground. Often such acts were fraught with difficulty and danger. Don’s number was never called in the draft lottery, so on that front, he considered himself lucky. But a friend of his was drafted and the two made a pact: Don, already a longhair, would not cut his hair until his friend came home from Vietnam. His long hair had already made him an outcast in his native Mobile, Alabama, with people making jokes about his pony tail and cops giving him the evil eye even if he were just sitting in his car at a traffic light. Still, when he left, it was the fact that he had forsaken so much—Southern tradition and on top of that the Air Force, progenitor of the right stuff and US air supremacy—that really puzzled many in his community and family. What else was there? they wondered. What kind of a man would not want to claim his heritage in this world?

  Arriving on the West Coast, Don found himself in the port city of Long Beach by way of a sojourn in San Francisco, where—as he later told friends—he had taken a lot of acid, so much that his vision was destroyed and he had gone blind for a while. When his sight returned, it was difficult to focus; there were floaters and patterns and stars, and it was only when he was away from cities that the chaos seemed to vanish, sucked into a world without clutter and diversion. Certainly Long Beach was filled with distractions; it bustled and screamed with the traffic of three So Cal freeways whizzing by, and every day the world’s biggest cargo ships entered the harbor, offloading massive shipping containers that were hauled away by parades of big rigs that puffed particulates as they headed inland. But perhaps the fact that there was a navy base nearby provided some comfort, though it is not likely that Don would have thought that at the time, or even acknowledged it; he had wanted to get as far away from his family as possible. There were numerous jobs for able-bodied men at the shipping docks or in the aerospace factories that were then fueling the state’s economy; thousands of men and women were making airplanes and machines and munitions for California’s military compounds, including Edwards Air Force Base, another military base near which Don would soon be living.

  It did not take long to find employment, and he was hired at a place that specialized in restaurant upholstery, where he met and fell in love with the owner’s daughter. Soon the pair eloped and moved into a small, one-bedroom apartment in Bell Gardens, a working-class suburb that was home to many who toiled at the plants or the numerous mom-and-pop shops that serviced them. Don’s wife, nineteen or twenty, had a daughter named Rebecca from an earlier marriage. She was two or three years old. Some people take to being parents, welcoming toddlers into their arms and delighting in the routine of bringing them into the tribe—teaching them song, how to hold a spoon, the names of things. We do not know how Don played this role, whether he took to it with joy or a sense of duty, resignation or even resentment perhaps, but we do know that the first thing he did when he woke up in the morning was smoke a joint. “He was Mr. Mellow, Mr. Cool,” recalls his former brother-in-law, James Finch, not pegging the mellowness to pot smoking necessarily but to his general demeanor.

  But there were few like-minded spirits in Don’s orbit, and sometimes he would organize trips to Hollywood, a short hop up the 405 and then east across the 101 and into another world. “Let’s go look at the freaks,” Don would say to his wife and brother-in-law, and then they’d pile into the car and flee Long Beach. Don always brought his favorite drink, a can of Dr. Pepper mixed with cherry brandy, and he’d pass it around for all to share.

  In 1974, his wife gave birth to her second child, a son by way of Don; he was named Charles Donald Kueck, a reversal of his father’s first and middle names. Over time, the son became like his father in more ways than simply sharing a reversed name; they looked almost exactly alike, had the same temperament, the same exuberance and charm, the same brilliance and lack of follow-through, the same likes and dislikes, and one day the son would follow the father into the desert and there he, too, would bake.

  Shortly after the birth of Charles, or Chuck as they started to call him, Don adopted Rebecca, and it seemed as if he wanted to have this family. But several years into the marriage, it was clear to Don that he was not cut out for the conventional life. What exactly triggered the dramatic separation is not clear. He had lost his job because of a back injury, and a lifelong descent into pain-killing drugs began. Perhaps the drugs numbed him against the difficulty of being a parent and husband; perhaps his trips to Hollywood where he could “see the freaks”—all the runaways, drifters, and street punks who had cut society’s cord or had it severed—reminded him that he actually was one, and try as he might to fit in, such a thing was just not possible. “I don’t love you,” he said to his wife at dinner one night. “I’m going out for milk and cigarettes.” He never came back, at least to this particular configuration of his family, and years later, the story of his departure would attain a weird sort of status among friends and associates of his children, especially his son, adding to Don’s charisma with its drama and chill, inciting a certain kind of awe and wonder, even as the consequences of the exit were exacting a dire toll.

  His first move was into an apartment in North Hollywood—ever closer to the Mojave, a world of salvation that lay just beyond the San Gabriel Mountains to the north. For the next thirteen years, he had no contact with his immediate family, his ex-wife, and his two kids. From his base in this LA suburb just outside the studio gates, he wandered and worked a series of jobs that led nowhere. Even for the most stalwart, the hermit in the making, even for those with no desire for fame or recognition or even a hearty pat on the back for a job well done, living in proximity to the studios would not have been without travail. We do not know if he ever queued up outside Warner Brothers or Universal, along with the hundreds who routinely came in response to calls for extras, hoping to get discovered, meet someone who knew someone, hobnob with the Hollywood proletariat—after all, as the scripture went, that’s how Marilyn did it—her mother was a studio seamstress!—but with his Fu Manchu, long hair, and chiseled face, he was almost a stand-in for Clint Eastwood. And what’s more, he had the gift of gab—all of the men and women who knew him will tell you that he told a great story around life’s campfire, could keep you there all night, talking all silvery about philosophy and adventures and things of a spiritual nature, and later if you picked it apart, it didn’t really make sense or perhaps it required too much thinking and hurt your brain, but you didn’t really care at the time because it sure sounded good and you believed every word of his rap. But there are many pretty people at the studio gates, and some charming ones too, and in the end Donald Kueck would head out of North Hollywood and become a star of his own design—in his own drama, with a set that went on forever.

  One day our hermit in the making could no longer pay his rent. He moved into his van and parked it next door in a friend’s driveway. Every couple of days, he would take a shower inside his friend’s house, becoming a brother to the woman who lived there, Barb Oberman. In Don she found a brother who did not fit well in the conventional world. He did not need or want money, she recalls, and was not embarrassed about living in his van. He was on a spiritual path, one that did not involve material things, and Barb understood how that had made it impossible for him to function as a family man—at least in the way he was expected to in Long Beach. To earn a few bucks every now and then, the two of them would deliver phone books to the homes that lined the residential streets near the studio backlots. For the daily needs of life, they improvised. For instance, if something was broken or needed repair, or if they needed something that they didn’t have, Don could either make the repair or build the
new thing. Unable to afford a proper back brace to treat his old injury, he made one out of rubber bands. A student of the night skies, he made a telescope from a cardboard tube and added some lenses, although with the bright lights of the city illuminating Los Angeles on a round-the-clock basis, it was not always possible to view the constellations or even the phases of the moon. Minus such things in life, some of us are disoriented, even bereft; others who do not consciously notice their absence are adrift, although they may not be aware of that either, except in the vaguest sense, and they would probably live out their lives with that inchoate longing for something that they could not name or describe. Donald Kueck longed to live in the desert and talked about finding a place there; the lizards were calling and it was time to go.

  It wasn’t just the stars he longed for, it was the whole thing and everything it was and represented. Once the pair went into the Mojave to go shooting, and Don brought his 50 mm muzzle-loading gun. Now, a 50 mm is not a minor gun, even though it’s old-fashioned and from another time. It’s a serious weapon and can do a lot of damage. But lots of people have them—they’re their own scene, like pistols are for others—and on any given day, you can go out in the desert and discern their blasts coming from just over yonder. “He liked old guns,” Barb tells me on the phone months after his death. “But he was not a gun freak.” During their trip, she noticed that he seemed completely at home, at rest, in the hot, dry, wide-open space, and she understood that sooner or later he would be leaving North Hollywood. As it happened, she and her brother owned some land in the Colorado Desert between the Salton Sea and Colorado River. She told Don that he could go live there, but he declined; it was the wrong desert, she says, and some time later, he found a place just beyond the mountains, in the desert with the siren name, the Mojave, or the Mo-jave as some said in appreciation, pronouncing the j and drawing out the second syllable, savoring the name as if tasting the place as they named it. This was where he could park his van forever, and he went there.