The Feral Detective

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Maybe you should tell her less about contrails, Lorrie, and more about rattlesnakes.”

  “Rattlesnakes?” I said, picking up my hands. How long had Anita stood there listening? Or did she simply know Lorrie’s obsessions? There might be plenty of time to delve your fellow Rabbits’ minds, out here.

  “She’s teasing you,” said Lorrie. “They’re mostly hibernating around now.”

  “I didn’t know rattlesnakes hibernated.”

  Anita nested her fingers together and bugged out her eyes. “In big piles all squirmed together for warmth. Though lately we’re suffering signs and portents, in that regard Lorrie is correct. Nothing is certain anymore. A sun like this one might bring out some hungry confused young fellow.”

  “Great,” I said.

  Anita bent and swept up my sage branches from where I’d dumped them. She’d have been one of those older women setting an impossible standard at the yoga class—for me, always a reason to quit. She spoke to Lorrie again. “I’m taking Phoebe back. When you finish, you can start the fire.”

  “Okay,” said Lorrie. She might be a wild-eyed off-the-gridder, obedient to none but contrails, but Anita was Chief Rabbit, and Lorrie hopped.

  Anita and I left Lorrie there and strolled into the anywhere, perhaps the direction from which she’d come, perhaps not. The array of rock formations might have spelled some sense to her eye, but for me it was a page of planetary hieroglyph. I was in this woman’s hands—if she had a pit dug somewhere, and a bunny costume, I was in deep shitsky.

  “I want to show you a place where you can rest when it gets dark,” she said. “I don’t know if Charles is coming back before tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” I said, Rabbit style. If it smarted that Anita knew Heist had shrugged me off, like a bug from his coat, I felt her flinty kindness in treating the fact so casually.

  “There’s a spare bed at Neptune Lodge, and a room with a closing door.”

  Neptune Lodge? This was the first I’d heard that name. But I gathered these were luxury accommodations—a closing door, be still my heart! I felt like the Princess and the Pea, out among these desert rats. “I’m appreciative.”

  Anita smiled in her quick, dry way, then said, “I never thought he’d come back here at all.”

  She examined me as if having posed a question. What should I say? Lady, back in the real world, where transactions occur in denominations other than kindling, I paid him for his services? But I hadn’t, actually. Darling, I sucked his dick?

  “I think he did it for you,” she said.

  He did it for you. I do it all for you, baby. I shut my eyes and felt the lowering sun on my lids. How long could I crunch along beside Anita with my eyes closed? Then suddenly I understood. It was so simple: we walked in a westerly direction. Some things organized themselves in traditional ways, sun setting in the west, for instance. Men did things for women and then vanished, and the women discussed them. I might be cracking up, here in the desert. Perhaps this was the void encounter Stephanie had predicted for me. Another in a series of them. My father had force-educated me in the ways of men and women by showing me black-and-white movies on VHS tape, all of them musicals or romantic comedies, all of them lighter than air (my mother would have meanwhile been drinking herself into a film noir fog in the kitchen). I’d spent my life waiting to be swept off my feet. A snippet of lyric floated into mind, one never far from the surface: “A fine romance, with no kissing . . .”

  “The Bears have gotten dangerous.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess that much even I know.”

  “They’ve gotten dangerous in new ways. I tried warning him.”

  “I’m sure he understood.”

  “I mean to him especially.”

  Yes, I wanted to say, it’s all my fault. It felt better to believe that than the opposite: that it had nothing to do with me at all. Eyes shut, I kept pace, walking into the sun.

  “Actually, there’s another reason I wanted to get you to Neptune Lodge,” said Anita. “Something I want to show you. I didn’t tell Charles. But I feel I can trust you. I hope I’m right.”

  “I hope so too. What did you want to show me?”

  “We’ve got a downer,” she said.

  “What’s a downer?”

  “A Bear, a sick one.”

  “What are you doing with him?”

  “We’re taking care of him, of course. And then, if he gets better, we can kill him.”

  22

  WHEN HEIST HAD ARRIVED EARLY THAT SAME MORNING WITH THE JEEP, I’d been sleeping. Light barely crept into the mountain cabin, though the sky was pale, the fire long grown cold. Jessie was pressed along my side, pinning me in the bedroll. He didn’t rise at Heist’s entry but looked up balefully, perfectly expressing my resistance to being roused from the covers, into the chill. Heist tempted me out with a white Dunkin’ Donuts sack—black coffee and egg-and-cheese on a crappy bagel.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “The desert.”

  “Where are the other dogs?”

  “Better they stay back. Melinda’s keeping an eye on them.”

  “Should I follow you in my car?”

  He shook his head.

  “I’m responsible for this rental,” I said. “No way am I leaving it out here at this murder shack. Let me drive it down the mountain and return it.”

  “It’s six in the morning. We need to get a move on.”

  “I’ll leave it somewhere, then. In the village, at least.”

  “It ought to be out of sight.”

  “I’ll park it at the Zendo.”

  Heist nodded, satisfied enough. I drank half the coffee and followed him into the village. He and Jessie waited while I pulled the rental into the Zendo’s drive and around behind the main building. The drab green Econoline with the spiderweb-cracked windshield and the giant tires and the wooden bumpers was gone from the lot. I went inside to find a bathroom. Mercifully, there was no mirror.

  On my way out, I bumped into Nolan, sitting in his robes on the porch, festooned in dawn steam, sipping grassy tea from a bowl. He didn’t look surprised to see me, not even when I gave him the keys and asked him to watch over the car. It was a task compatible with his overall vibe, I suppose. I didn’t know how to say what I’d learned since I’d met him, how the mountain had changed me, but Nolan wasn’t one to pressure me. I liked him for that.

  “You should eat,” said Heist when I climbed back into the passenger seat of the Jeep. The sack with the egg sandwich waited on the seat between us, untouched.

  “Do I look that bad?”

  He didn’t reply, but started out of the Zendo lot and down the hill. The Jeep sat high on its suspension and jogged easily sideways with a freedom that spoke of its readiness for irregular landscape and also offered promise of sessions of high-seas-style puking. It featured roll bars, back and front, the implications of which I’d never really considered. It was a vehicle of freedom that was simultaneously, as we left my rental car behind and diverted eastward from the familiar zone of the Doubletree and the Wash, my new cage.

  I made an opening in the foil and nibbled, then tore off a portion of bagel and used it to lure Jessie from the Jeep’s back seat to a place at my feet, his head in my lap. I didn’t look at Heist. I didn’t care for Heist so much right now. I preferred the dog, my sweet acolyte. He and I shared the egg sandwich. By the time we hit the flats, I slept again, Jessie hugged to my stomach, obliging me.

  23

  I WOKE AT ONE POINT TO FIND WE WERE COURSING IN FOUR LANES OF traffic, much of it massive eighteen-wheeled trucks. The landscape was flat and yellow between the billboards and warehouses. An endless freight train rolled on a parallel track at my window, boxcars from Germany and Japan. I looked up at Heist, who kept his eyes glued to the lanes. At the driver’s side of the Jeep, also keeping perfect pace with us, at least for that instant, was a motorcyclist, a woman in leathers on a gold-painted Harley with flowing blond hair
under a gold helmet and wide goggles. Heist sensed me looking and put his hand like a calm cap on my forehead, shading my eyes, then moved his hand lower, to touch the dog’s head. I was unashamed to be put in this equivalency, to be petted. Our twin escorts, the train and the Golden Girl, traveled beside us at a fixed rate, pointed into the beyond. The ocean so far behind us now as to be unimaginable. To go east from the sea was to go deeper into the west, I understood, just before I fell back into my sleep.

  Or maybe I hadn’t awoken, maybe the train and the motorcyclist had been a dream. Yet the Golden Girl wasn’t so easy to shake. Had she sped beside me as a taunt, or a warning? Really, the Golden Girl might have been like a piece of my desire, my self-imagining, that had broken off against my will, to become cast in chrome and leather and velocity.

  I’d never been on a motorcycle, needless to say. Never once wanted to be.

  When I woke again it might have been twenty minutes or a million years later, but in any case Heist still piloted the Jeep stoically into the vastening landscape, the trees growing fewer, the desert scrub dotting the dusty flayed surface with the feebleness of armpit sprigs or teenage pubes. I blinked and squinted into this distance while Jessie licked my neck and ears as if I were a puppy he’d birthed. I detected scents of bagel and egg on his teeth but behind it lay a breath not doggish but sweet and ethereal as a lover’s.

  The valley ahead was dotted, I saw now, with weird white looming sculptures, white sky spurs, wingless aircraft by Brancusi. First I saw five or six of these, then hundreds, as if we drove into a valley of alien towers, planted in some static invasion.

  “What are those?” I croaked.

  “Windmills.”

  “Why aren’t they turning?” One or two drifted slowly around, though not enough to scramble an egg.

  “The turbines go on when the grid needs the juice.”

  We soared on into their dwarfing midst, into the dry wastes reaching to distant moonlike ridges in every direction. I didn’t understand about the windmills but it wasn’t the windmills I needed to understand.

  “Were you raised by animals, Charles?” I’d cleared the sleep from my throat, and I pronounced these words with a sincerity distinguishing them from my ordinary whimsicality and sarcasm, at no small cost. I knew Heist could hear the difference.

  Still, he made a first move to brush me off. “Seeing how we’re all animals ourselves, who wasn’t?”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  He touched my head again. “We’ll be where we’re going in a couple of hours. Let me know if you need a pit stop.”

  I pushed his hand away. “Were you raised by the Rabbits or the Bears?”

  “A bit of both.”

  “Tell me.”

  24

  OF THE MANY UTOPIAN-MINDED PACKS OF HIPPIES WHO’D TAKEN TO THE wilderness in the late ’60s, few lasted more than a winter or two. Most dissolved, come to ruin at the crossroads of ideological dissension, venereal disease or parasites, starvation, jealousy, and sheer ignorance of the raw facts of wilderness survival. The Viscera Springs Ranch was a tenacious commune, if not the smartest, or the luckiest. Their group was served that whole menu—ideology, pubic crabs, hunger—yet held on.

  Year to year their population waned, down to a core of those most resilient, visionary, or desperate. Then swelled again, as rumor of a sanctuary in the desert enticed those disenchanted with the state of things elsewhere, in the cities, in their colleges or revolutionary cells. One way or another they held on, through the brutal exposure of Mojave desert sun and wind and the scarcity of their water. For the springs that gave the name to the mining camp they’d purchased for a song had revealed themselves as a bare sulfurous trickle.

  It was the bargain that sunk them: seven years in, it was revealed they’d been swindled. The group had acquired a mining claim from a previous occupant, nothing more. The claim granted no specific rights to occupy, expand, build, or smoke dope and fuck and grope in groups of three or four in the shady hollows and embarrass the older prospectors. They weren’t even technically given the right to spend a night. The land was nontransferable anyway. The acres on which they’d pitched their teepees and erected their clay-and-wattles huts weren’t theirs, but a holding of BLM—the Bureau of Land Management.

  It was BLM who explained to the Viscera Springs gaggle, sixty or seventy of them, man, woman, and child, that they should vamoose. This was 1974. Charles Heist was only six years old when Viscera Springs was dislodged from its fantasy of a “homestead” in the desert, but he seemed to recall it as a fresh rupture. I suppose it was this rupture that had created his life. But there must have been something of the preternatural watchful child about him even before it. Something of the detective, gathering clues. That faintly wounded and yet un-self-pitying character, the deliberate and patient and other-directed and sometimes utterly infuriating depressive I’d walked in and discovered in the office on Foothill Boulevard must have been well under construction even before the Viscera Springs Ranch was dissolved, or exploded, and became the two tribes: Rabbits and Bears.

  I filled in some of the facts around Heist’s tale online later, when I had a free minute and a signal—on an airplane, as it happened. (Spoiler alert: I’ll board an airplane again at least once in this story. At least once in my life.) The most useful link was a Berkeley sociology student’s dissertation, A Place Was Our First Idea: Oral Accounts of Red Bear, Breath Ranch, Eveningstar, and Viscera Canyon. Nothing contradicted Heist’s story, but what came after 1974 was barely represented there at all.

  So: some vamoosed. Others clawed in more deeply, arguing they’d been unwitting squatters for their whole experiment—so why not carry on wittingly? The planet was huge, especially the portion they’d lost themselves within. There were shacks abandoned practically everywhere in this landscape, and trailers, sheds, and caves where there weren’t shacks. Those willing to be nomadic rarely had to build anything at all. They weren’t tied to plots of land because they weren’t farming, not in the high desert. They lived by nearly any other means: hunting, foraging, trading. Those who still engaged with cash might be cooking drugs or selling their bodies, selling dusted-off Bakelite artifacts at the swap meet in the old drive-in movie lot, running back to cities to clean houses or to beg on street corners. Others might quietly cash pity checks waiting at Western Union, then return in dune buggies loaded with dry sacks of beans and flour. Others detached from any nonpsychic economy, never went near the roads or trading posts, learned to eat for months at a time only dreams, clouds, rattlesnakes.

  The ones who dug in deeper and continued to drag the teepees around and hold meetings and share food around the circle came to be called the Rabbits. The Rabbits were women and children and the men who, whether they’d fathered the children or not, seemed to recognize the presence of the children as a binding force, a kind of proposition for a new world, which is what they’d arrived here for in the first place. The kids who, being kids, ran wild into the landscape, but always at night returned into the comfort of the circle and seemed to give evidence of the deep human necessity for a home.

  The others, the ones who hewed off into the higher ranges, into the dark and wild, and who returned less and less frequently to the ceremonial fires to share what they’d found out there, were called the Bears. The Bears were men.

  “I know about them,” I joked to Heist. He’d been talking a long time, painting a world and sometimes seeming to dream his way back into it. I wanted to yank him back into this one. “They have websites for those kind of Bears, the hairy human ones who have sex with each other.”

  “The name was actually Bear-Killers at first,” he said, ignoring my funning. “Not Bears. The original king of the Bears, a man named Howard Burkhardt, he’d gone north and shot one and brought parts of it back on a dune buggy. Some of the Bears were wearing some of the inedible parts, the teeth and fur, and Bear-Killer shared his name with them, and later it got shortened to Bears.”

  “Okay
, so not exactly the same thing.”

  “I’m not saying there might not be some overlap.” I tried to catch Heist’s eye when he said it, but he was still driving, and his deadpan was good.

  “How many kids are we talking about?” I asked.

  “I think there were at least twenty in those days. Not all midwived out in the desert, there were a couple who’d been dragged there at the start, but they didn’t stay. More later on—it’s in the nature of things that they kept coming.”

  “In the nature of rabbits, you mean? Sure. That’s well known too. Especially if the Bears drop by for conjugal visits from time to time.”

  “They tended to do that.”

  “And you were one of these kids?”

  “Yes. I was the firstborn.”

  Now he had to be pulling my leg. “The first born of—what?”

  “At Viscera Springs. Well, actually there was another baby who died, I think that was part of why it seemed important. They knew they had to learn to do it right, and I survived, and they called me the firstborn.”

  “And you lived with the Rabbits.”

  “I spent some time living among the Rabbits.”

  “Excuse me, among. But you weren’t a Bear, right? Because they didn’t care about kids.”

  “Well, that’s a funny thing, Phoebe.”

  Through his long talk we’d coursed along shrinking lanes, six, four, now just one in each direction. The desert’s broken teeth ringed us on all sides. Farther off were the higher, snow-peaked ranges. I spotted my first Joshua tree, then hundreds of those knobby agonized forms, half Bosch, half Seuss. I kept my mouth shut, deciding it was a rube’s move to marvel aloud that they were real.

  At some point in this journey, while this tale emerged, I’d warmed to Heist again. Jessie had acted as my canine shield while I’d napped. Now he clambered into the back seat and curled up for a rest of his own. I mostly sat back and let Heist’s voice caress me while I stared, hypnotized by the desert’s yawning, wind-scratched contour, unfolding before us in every direction. I only stole a few glances at Heist’s gnarly profile, and was for the moment relieved when he didn’t glance back. It would have made things more complicated than I needed just now.