The Feral Detective

by Jonathan Lethem

  “I’ll dig out my boots.”

  “Good.” He waited, I understood only slowly, for me to exit his truck.

  I grabbed his shoulder instead. “Charles, goddamn it.” The moment my hand found his form through the jacket it was way more detailed and interesting than I’d expected. I wanted him to look up from my feet.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Tell me what the hell is happening here.” I made it commanding and yet open-ended, in case Heist wanted to ply his troth. In fact, if the wheel weren’t in the way, I might have climbed up to straddle his lap. I endured a crazy oscillation, between scorn and amusement on one side and lust and terror on the other. Either Charles Heist was a bore and a joke, his mountain a total waste of time, or he was monstrous and irresistible, and plotting to savage me beneath frozen cliffs.

  Now he met my eyes, but his gaze was a wasteland. I could crawl across it for a lifetime pleading for a glass of water. And his reply—well, it was the reply I deserved, one effortlessly splitting the difference between our two unnamed topics. “I can’t say yet.”

  “You can say where you were for the past two hours.”

  “We’ll lose the light,” he said. “Let’s talk when you’re back in the truck.”

  16

  MY COLLEGE BOYFRIEND WAS A BORE ABOUT MUSIC, BUT I MADE SOME OF his stuff mine. Then I painstakingly peeled off the memories—the discovery of sex, mostly—afterward. He couldn’t haunt me when I played his favorites, because I’d stolen them. (Later I dated someone else with his same first name, another good erasure move.)

  There was one CD, a live recording, by a singer I’d regarded only as a pudgy bearded crooner, a joke. Nowhere near as handsome as Arabella’s idol, L. Cohen, he also had a name I mixed up with some other hippie lover boy. But when I played the live recording one night while that same boyfriend was out fucking someone else, I stole that record, most particularly. The actual CD, but the idea of it too.

  On the CD, the singer climbs into the corny tunes to find extra space, secret rooms. Yet he climbs them from inside, like the bars of a cage. The limits of the cage are those of the singer’s life: his hunger for ecstasy, and his terror of it too. At the top of the cage of practically every song, the singer screams, or barks, or howls, “It’s too late to stop now!” The message might have been damning me to my life, the secret cage of my autonomy. I was nineteen.

  At this point, I could have turned and descended that mountain. Heist had no control of “my ride.” But then, there had been a dozen exit doors, beginning with not getting on the plane, or not quitting the job for which, to fit myself to it, I’d whittled off parts of my soul for a decade. This was the thing about it’s too late to stop now: it always already had been.

  17

  LESS THAN A QUARTER MILE UP GOAT RIDGE ROAD, HEIST DIVERTED TO the left. The snow hadn’t fallen here, or had melted—this might be the sun side of the mountain. So much for having Arabella treed, or thinking this mountain was as simple as its representation on Google Earth. I followed onto an unposted dirt road that soon became perilously steep; just as quickly, past a curve, there appeared a cabin, barely more than a shack. The windows were dark, and one was broken.

  Heist pulled into a rut up ahead, then stepped out of his cab and waved me into the cabin’s ragged, overgrown driveway. I steered in, and he ran up alongside, giving encouragement, as I got the rental out of sight of the road we’d turned from. Then I retook my place in the passenger seat of his truck. Heist had stolen a moment to unbutton the tarp and run his hand underneath, giving comfort, I supposed, to the infinitely patient dogs. I could have used some of the same. But he only pushed a water bottle across the seat to make it available to me, then backed into the drive and returned us to the road that climbed Goat Ridge. By contrast to the dirt path it seemed a positive highway.

  “You know all the nice out-of-the way places,” I teased.

  “It’s impossible to know them all.”

  “Who owns this land?”

  “Nobody owns it. The Forest Service runs it.”

  “Then whose cabin is that?”

  “Right at the moment it belongs to your car.”

  “That’s my absolute limit, Charles. If I hear one more Zen koan, I’m going to barf.”

  He looked at me oddly.

  “Talk to me in the King’s English, Tarzan, just like they taught you in finishing school.”

  Heist knew to keep his promise. “Sage wasn’t making a whole lot of sense, but she kept repeating that part about Chinese people on the mountain. There’s a property up here, a portion sold off to foreign investors before its designation as a national monument shut down any mining rights. I think they’re Koreans, not Chinese. She’s hardly the first to get that wrong. They stuck out like sore thumbs when they showed up, long strings of black SUVs and a private surveying company. People up here enjoy a live-and-let-live atmosphere. ‘Wild West’ is another word for it. These folks put up a high fence topped with razor wire across a popular foot access to the peak. It didn’t seem they’d picked up the vibe about right-to-pass. The Forest Service conspicuously wouldn’t touch it, which set off a round of the usual grumbling about payoffs. Some said they’re building a survivalist compound up there—apparently somebody flew a low plane and spotted a number of large water storage tanks.”

  Heist leaned forward as he drove and talked. His voice was as deliberate as ever, but I could hear some resonance, some melody, even, as he for once placed a few sentences end-to-end. His left forearm lay across the top of the wheel, his eyes squinting into the prospect before us, except at the tight switchbacks, when he’d ease back and lift his right hand to help him steer. The rest of the time the right rested lightly on the shift knob, like I wished it was resting on my knee. The sky around the peaks had begun to glow, hazy yellow beneath bands of pink. I was hearing a lot about things I didn’t think could possibly concern Arabella—mining rights?—but I didn’t want to stop the flow, not even to insert a joke like It speaks!, though this discovery certainly did float my boat. Nor did I stick my tongue in his ear.

  “Nobody here’s too quick to put a nose in anybody’s business, but when I asked around today, I learned somebody’d struck a deal with the compound people, for access to that old trail. It set off some alarms. This mountain has a certain allure for people who like to go off and do their own thing. Mostly loners, hermits, sure.”

  He faltered here, once again unaffixing from his present situation, shifting off toward an interior horizon. Or maybe it was that he couldn’t decide what he wanted to tell me, how to put some bad news.

  “But also . . . groups. People who want to do rituals. Stuff attaches to this place. Did you know it was Baldy where they measured the speed of light? By beaming it from the peak here. And it’s the only place to mine lapis lazuli in the fifty states. You never know when you’re going to run into five people in white sheets with twigs in their hair, reenacting a Greek play. You hike in here, you’ll often find fruits and gourds, squashes in the creek beds, sometimes tied with colorful ribbons. Sometimes animals too, killed differently from how a hunter would do it.”

  I clapped my hands. “I knew this story was going to have animals in it.” This joke I’d swiftly regret.

  “The people going up here might be some I’m familiar with. They’re gleaners, of a kind. I’m pretty sure they swept up Sage at one point, maybe some other kids down in the Wash. They need bodies, extras for some of their . . . ceremonies. Maybe they scooped up Arabella.”

  “You think there’s one of these ceremonies tonight?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But that’s the hurry, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t want to waste time.”

  “You wasted a lot of it, Charles. You knew about this and you didn’t tell me. Why don’t we call the police?”

  “The jurisdiction inside the monument is federal, they don’t answer calls up here very fast. It’s often days before they come. They wouldn’t climb
to the peak on some hunch.”

  “Plus, that wouldn’t have put you in the driver’s seat, would it?”

  He ignored this. I wanted to slap him, but I might have damaged the tender flesh of my hand on his die-cut features, his Brillo sideburns. Instead, I put on my Nancy Drew hat. “So, these mining rights are for lapis? Isn’t that just some semiprecious, kachina-doll crap?”

  “Some people would say it’s more than that. I think the Egyptians used it for the eyes of their mummies. Anyhow, there’s gold up here, and a vein of tungsten too. Baldy was about ten years late for the gold rush, and a certain amount of panning still goes on.”

  “Like those Japanese soldiers who don’t know the war is over?”

  He shrugged. “The war for gold is never over.”

  “You make this place sound like the Mountain of the Damned.”

  He didn’t respond. I’d either touched a nerve or bored him. I wondered if I’d stick around long enough to learn to tell the difference.

  Then again, it might have nothing to do with what I’d said. We’d rumbled up a sharper grade and around another sickening swerve, and now were presented with the razor-topped fence of recent legend. From a padlocked gate across the road it fitted itself to the contour of the rocky bare clearing and on into the trees on either side. Heist shifted into reverse and backed us a few yards from the NO TRESPASSING signs and off to one side, but in no way hidden.

  “Aren’t you afraid they’ll see the truck?” But he’d stopped, and I followed him out, however reluctantly. I watched him put his nose to the air, whether in concern at my question or for some other reason, I had no idea. For my part, I thought I smelled far-off smoke, but it could have been my imagination. My ears had popped, climbing this high, and the oxygen had a sharpness that might have mimicked smoke.

  “They can’t exactly call and have me towed. Anyway, from what I’ve heard, the people who built this compound aren’t always around, and when they are, they’re not necessarily patrolling the perimeter. It’s a lot of ground to cover.”

  “You keep calling it a compound, like you know something.” Another nonstarter. My prodding grew desperate again. I wanted reassurances, but Heist had none. He was busy freeing the dogs, who snouted up through the first gap and over, then half vanished into the shadows of the darkening roadway. Miller and Vacuum took up the natural path of investigation, to the padlocked gate. There they began sniffing and whining. Jessie came to acknowledge me, to push under my hand, enabling my wish to believe the dogs were Heist’s arms and legs, a vehicle he’d employ to reach me when incapable by other means.

  Heist scrabbled in the truck bed until he came out with a battered red plastic torch light, the kind that took eight or fifty batteries. When he tested it, I was surprised to see it worked, and then I wished he’d leave it on, but no. He clipped it to a leather loop at the back of his jacket so both his hands were free.

  “Where from here? Do you have a bolt cutter for the lock?”

  He pointed with his chin at the tree line. “There’s supposed to be a gap, for those in the know.”

  “That wouldn’t include you, huh? This is all just chatter you happened to pick up this afternoon?” I couldn’t quit taunting him with my own fears. If Heist himself was one of those gleaners, he’d gleaned me good.

  “I took this trail a few times, before the fence went up. It should connect after the bypass.”

  He was right, of course. A few dozen yards through the trees and underbrush, the Koreans’ fence was breached, peeled from below, much like that earlier fence, the one delimiting the San Antonio Wash from Foothill Boulevard. It wasn’t hard to scramble beneath, ignoring the razor wire high above, ignoring the razor wire’s implications too. Then, within a few paces marked by snapped branches overhead and leaf-muddy footprints below, we cut back to the clearing, only long enough to discover a well-beaten trail, off from the fence and the paved roadway, upward through the trees. The dogs examined everything for us as they threaded back and forth across our path.

  “We’ll be sheltered from the wind,” said Heist. “It’ll be darker, though.”

  “What wind?”

  “It’s sundown. Also there’s a storm that might reach us.”

  “Who needs the Weather Channel when you were raised by wolves, huh?”

  “That’s right,” he said, so squarely I felt ashamed. After that we were silent for a while. I needed my breath for climbing, my eyes lowered to navigate the roots and stones. I got stuck inside my own head at that point, a little diorama with me and Heist like doll figures in a tiny gleaming Airstream, and another figure of Arabella-Phoebe wandering outside somewhere in distress. She’d begun to merge with me in my own conjuring, not a good sign.

  Then I felt Heist abruptly grip my arm, and I realized he’d kept me from falling. We stopped on the trail, deep in the trees, halfway to nowhere—at least I hoped it was halfway. The dogs, concerned, swarmed close.

  “Did you have anything to eat today?”

  “A sticky bun at the Doubletree.”

  “There’s a place to rest just up ahead.”

  “I’m glad I have you to look out for me.” It was a thought I formed sarcastically but all sarcasm stripped off en route to speech, like one of those joke guns that sprouted a daisy when you pulled the trigger.

  18

  HE MOVED HIS HAND TO THE SMALL OF MY BACK AND KISSED MY FOREHEAD and some shudder moved through me, like a shadow moving across the moon, or some kind of quasi-orgasm. Maybe it was the thin air—maybe I should look into erotic asphyxiation techniques when I got back to civilization. Heist held me still there for a moment, probably thinking he’d saved me from fainting. Maybe he had.

  “We should keep on,” he said, infinitely gently.

  “Absolutely.”

  The resting place was a turn atop a large jutting rock that seemed to form out of nowhere beneath our feet. At the high edge of the turn, before the path resumed among the cloaking trees, we emerged to a view of the moon, three-quarters full and throwing light behind some cloud cover that intersected nicely with the remains of the sunset. Below, an inch of horizon, the rhinestone necklace of the suburban valley, covered in fog. But Heist pointed even lower.

  Down below our feet, the road that the fence had blocked curled into view. Beyond the tops of the trees, two blimp-like metallic structures, each topped with a series of seals or nipples, and with a tiny ladder to give a dwarfing human perspective to their bulk.

  “Are those the water tanks?”

  He nodded. “That’s why I call it a compound.”

  “As in, say, preparations for the apocalypse?”

  “If you like. Anyhow, it’s defensible ground.”

  “But we got in.”

  “We’re not the only ones.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Signs are everywhere. Just watch the dogs.”

  They’d only looked like dogs to me, excitable, using their noses, shitting repeatedly. But I took his word for it: that we had company, or at least that there’d been recent passage on this trail. But then, I’d long since had to take his word for all of it.

  “You know this mountain, Charles.”

  “A little.”

  “More than you’ve let on. Your grudge against this place isn’t some passing thing. It’s personal.”

  “How so?”

  He might have humored me, but I was grateful for the invitation to haul out my Nancy Drew stuff. “It’s the little things. Your undue pride in the lapis lazuli and tungsten. The way you knew this clearing was approaching.”

  “Like I said, I haven’t been up here since the fence went up.” There was nothing defensive in his tone.

  “Then it’s even more impressive that you remember.”

  He was silent a little while. “We should get to the top, if you’re okay.” He pointed at the trail, which now appeared a dark tunnel. He hadn’t resorted to the flashlight yet, but it would soon be time. The dogs, alert to his cues, scurrie
d into that vortex. It was colder here on the bluff, the wind was picking up as he’d predicted. I’d caught my breath from my faintgasm, whatever it was, and was ready to reclaim the shelter of the trees.

  “Hold my hand,” I told him, and he did. He held it until we reached the top of that awful place. The moonlight and the residual light of the day in the high layers and his hand in mine were enough, though I couldn’t make out the expression on his face. That hadn’t meant much to this point anyhow. I didn’t beg him for the flashlight, but I wanted to hear his voice.

  “Charles?”

  “Yes?”

  “When you came up here, before the fence, why was that?”

  “A lot of reasons. I grew up partly on this mountain.”

  “Your parents let you run wild on these trails?”

  “It wasn’t so much what anyone’s parents let me do or not do. It was just what I did.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  I fastened onto later—that there would be one. This turned out to be all I required. I might be learning to live in Heist’s wasteland, but, hey, when you looked close, it had a fauna and flora, maybe a place for me in its blasted ecosystem.

  We’d ascended back into the frost now, where nothing had melted, only blown off or never made it through the canopy of trees. The crisp layer glowed in the moonlight. It compressed nicely underfoot, except where it had already been pressed into a slick boot-shaped print. The boots pointed up and downhill both—I congratulated myself for graduating into the company of the dogs as a reader of signs. I didn’t kid myself, though, that I’d attained their level.

  When we rose into that place, I felt it. Heist let go of my hand. We still didn’t need the flashlight. The clearing was wide, ridged with dark trees on all sides, no obvious point at which the trail resumed. We were nowhere near the peak but it was plainly a destination, our destination now. The moon lit the snow and us, the glow nearly unbearable after the adjustment our eyes had made in the tunnel of trees, a day-for-night scene you’d have judged bogus in a movie. As for the plot, it was made of footprints. This investigation no longer required dogs or Nancy Drew. A child could have found its way to the ceremonial center of that snowfield, the pit ringed with stones. Heist and I moved for it, but the dogs were first, and when they reached it, they began whining. I took the dark hole for the flat remains of a fire until I was near enough to see that it was cavernous. When Heist leaped inside, he vanished from view below the middle of his chest. Vacuum and Miller began barking. Jessie came back to find me. I touched his head with my cold fingers and trudged forward as though hypnotized to the rim of the pit.