The Feral Detective

by Jonathan Lethem

  51

  HE’D ALREADY BUILT HIMSELF AN EVENING FIRE. THERE HE SAT, ELBOWS on knees, still barefoot, in sweatpants that reached mid-calf now, and with a large woolen poncho covering his distracting upper body. His skull glowed in the fire, and the scene brought out his resemblance to the people I’d come to know in the Mojave, the watchers in the pit, the gleaners at the Rabbit circle. He was reading a Tom Clancy novel, a stout paperback that resembled a pack of cigarettes in his clubby fingers. He greeted Melinda without rising, seemingly unsurprised. The dogs danced in to join him at the fire, one on each side, as if daring him to meet their animation. This dare he ignored, preferring to go on scowling at his pages. There wasn’t a puppy in his camp this time. Perhaps the puppy I’d seen earlier had reached a size enough to be worth eating.

  “Hey, Mary Poppins,” he said when I got close. “Where’s your umbrella?”

  “I loaned it to the Penguin,” I said.

  “Mistake,” said Laird, not missing a beat. “You’ll never get it back.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I’m learning to live without excess baggage.” I wasn’t sure what I meant by it. There was something about Laird’s size and stillness and wooly poncho that made me feel silly.

  Melinda sat right beside him. “We have to go get Charlie,” she said.

  “How’s that?”

  “He got tooken by the elders.”

  “I think he can handle himself.”

  “Not at the moment,” I said. I hadn’t told Melinda about the fight. I invented a version to tell them both now, one that included Heist’s injuries but left out the murder I’d abetted. “The Bears took them both away,” I lied. I left out the words Solitary Love too, not wanting to hear myself speak them. Like other names I censored lately, this was a vote against invoking monsters, against etching their reality into the air.

  “Come with us,” said Melinda.

  “Maybe after I finish my book. I’m on the last hundred pages.”

  I studied Laird. It seemed to me now that he split the difference between Solitary Love and Bartleby the Scrivener. I should feel rotten to be pulling the gentler giant back into what he’d fled, but I did it for Heist.

  “Read it in the Jeep,” I said. It sounded like read it and weep. “We’re leaving for the desert tonight.” I couldn’t keep from feeling that my run was a race, even if I couldn’t see my opponent.

  “Nah, that always makes me want to puke.” Laird stuck the book in the waistband at the back of his pants. He shook himself loose in a plume of smoke, as if he’d been sitting in the same position for a long time. He stuck his feet into a pair of blackened Adidas, the laces already tied.

  “C’mon,” said Melinda. She took him by the hand. Resembling a shot from The Princess Bride, they padded toward the ascent from the Wash to Foothill, where the Jeep waited. I followed, while Miller and Vacuum streamed past to forge the trail. Melinda, like the dogs, had become my agent, my deputy. Now Laird too. I felt better about the dogs, since I hadn’t managed to find a way to lie to them.

  52

  WE DROVE FROM THE LAST OF THE SUN. AS DARK GREW ON THE ROAD before us, the dogs and Melinda curled to sleep in the back. I kept wishing my Golden Girl would reappear—the woman on the motorcycle, my emissary into the desert the first time I’d come here, with Heist. Seeing her again, I’d feel my aim was true. But no.

  The only voice in the Jeep was Laird’s. He sat in his poncho, staring out ahead, intoning like some blunt irritable GPS: “No, this way,” or “You want to gas up here, it’s the last chance,” or “I told you, just keep going.”

  Under his navigation, we’d gone off the major route sooner than I’d expected, veering north through sprawls bearing the names Hesperia and Victorville, then east, onto two lanes of asphalt called Old Woman Springs Road. From there, into the scruff and crunch, the places the Jeep was for. The sun at our backs painted a distant rime of orange as we reached the limit of roads with names and began to jostle across rivulets of sand and gravel.

  “Should we deflate the tires?” I asked Laird.

  I was proud to brandish the lore, but he brushed it off without interest: “We’re not climbing anything yet.” So we fell into silence again, our headlamps illuminating a tunnel through yellow dusk, our treads crossing and recrossing palimpsests of the vehicles that had gone this way, whether an hour or a month before I couldn’t tell. If Laird had that tracker’s gift, he wasn’t saying.

  I felt emptied out and complete. My giddy nonjoke about excess baggage lingered in the air—for me, I mean. From outward appearances, Laird hadn’t viewed his life in terms of baggage in a long while, if he ever had. That made him, with his Thoreau-of-the-vacant-lot aura, his salvage Adidas and spinner-rack paperback, a suitable companion for my current mood. The Girl Who Quit had only been testing her cage; now I was The Girl Who Divested.

  Old fears had flown the coop without my noticing and been replaced: I was positively aching to abscond into the Mojave again, the fewer road signs the better. No cities for me now, or families or tribes. This skeleton crew—Melinda, the dogs, and Laird—was the utmost human arrangement I could ratify or sustain. I wanted to call Arabella and apologize for hustling her out of this wonderland of vacuity, out from under this sky. Except I didn’t, because I didn’t want to call anyone. I’d stopped looking at my phone. The Jeep was my true body.

  In November the previous year, when the mask had been peeled off, when the worm had reached the bud, I remembered my eyes lighting on a magazine cover at my bedside. It featured a comic illustration, showing the man I now had to call president sawing an elephant in half, like a stage magician. The elephant was the Republican Party. How we wanted him to do it! Our confidence was sickening—it was the disease itself. That morning I’d thrown the magazine in the trash, feeling a savage distaste for artifacts from the old knowingness. Then for weeks I’d gone every day onto the Internet in search of a new and better knowingness to fill me up again. The disease still inside me, even if reversed into trauma.

  Maybe I’d now moved through the void encounter Stephanie had predicted for me that evening in Culver City. (Had Stephanie ever really had one herself, like I had? It didn’t seem likely!) In any case, I’d found my purpose, not in Cobble Hill, trying to settle Arabella back into that old world, but in making my own contrail back to find Heist.

  He was the thing I’d seize for myself, in this new world. An untamed creature of the middle spaces, a resister stranded from all camps, tending to decline needless battle, infinitely kind toward the weak, yet capable of killing if cornered. I’d be Heist’s other, he’d be mine. I understood him now, his appetite for distance, his noble disaffiliation—I’d show him we shared this, and then he could affiliate to me.

  Further, I should cease taking lustful glances at Laird’s veiny forearms, since he was something akin to my adoptive teenage son. Like a lot of overgrown teenage boys, he’d help his mom with a task, reaching a jar from a high pantry shelf, say, and unscrewing its tight lid—the equivalent to his effort in this rescue mission. Like a lot of overgrown teenage boys, he was on the endearingly sullen side. And Melinda could be Laird’s little sister, in our feral family. Heist and I, once I’d rescued him, would care for these two, along with our beautiful dogs. That such thinking was fucking insane didn’t make it less consoling. We lived in a fucking insane world. Such thinking might be the right gear for my expedition through it.

  Needless to say, all these epiphanies and delusions were native to the condition of steering a powerful vehicle through silent dark. The difficulty would be to sustain them when the night ride was over, when I found the Bears and whatever remained of Heist—assuming Laird had what it took to accomplish that, and that I could control him (my fantasy adoptive son).

  Maybe I was the one sawed in half.

  53

  OUT UNDER THE DARK, WE CONTINUED NORTH, AT LAIRD’S DIRECTION. What had been a road was now a rut, an established track in the cracked lake bed the land had b
ecome. We were hardly the first to go here, though the marks on this Etch A Sketch surface grew directionless and baroque. The joyriding treads inscribed grooves on the planet, suggesting the possibility of a tire-based language for communication with drones or satellites above, for beaming meaning back at passing contrails.

  Laird pointed again. I found what he wanted me to see. It appeared as a white blot on the dark horizon. It resolved as I approached in a wide arc: a string of mobile homes, their white broadsides strung in a circle, like a wagon train. One link in the chain wasn’t a mobile home, but a long trailer, with a ramp tilted off the back to release whatever it had released into the desert, a monster truck or military-surplus tank. The ring of vehicles made a flotilla in the desert’s dark sea, one lit by strings of bulbs like Christmas lights, and also by a pit fire at its center. Even as I curled toward it, adding my own track to the compilation, I made out another similar flotilla, burning white, far off and to the left of the one we approached.

  “Stop the Jeep,” said Laird.

  “What’s this place?” I said to him. I whispered now, not for fear of waking Melinda, more in a spirit of stealth. It was a foolish compensation on my part, since Laird jumped out even before I’d killed the engine. I pocketed the key and hurried after him, but left the headlights on to see by. The surface underfoot wasn’t sandy, more a layer of powder riding a floor of baked clay.

  “Hammertown,” he said.

  I’d stopped fifty yards or so from the encampment, near enough now to see by their light. We charged in its direction, Laird heedless of any type of caution or consultation. My eyes adjusted to the starry show blanketing the antediluvian lake bed. I thought I could make out other constellations of mobile homes on the distant flats.

  “Okay, what’s Hammertown?”

  “It’s where they crown the King of the Hammers.”

  “A Bear thing?”

  “It’s a race.”

  “A race? Like another desert tribe, you mean?” I tasted adrenaline laced with possibility. I got ready to meet the Hammerhead Frogs now, or Armadillos, or whatever.

  “No, a motor race, like bozos in Evel Knievel suits tearing up rocks in Ultra4 vehicles. It’s quiet now. In a month there’ll be a million day-trippers out here. These RVs and toy haulers are just holding down the playa in the meantime.”

  Melinda and the dogs came up to join us from behind as we approached the Hammertown encampment. No, we wouldn’t escape anyone’s notice. Melinda fell into step, groggy and uncomplaining.

  “You’re looking for the carnival, ain’t you?” she said to Laird.

  “It’s a place to start,” he said.

  Carnival. It was the second time I’d heard that word. The first time I’d taken it as metaphorical, the same mistake I’d made with rabbits and bears. If there was one thing I should have learned this past year, it was to take my fellow Americans literally.

  So I asked. “What’s the carnival?” I was willing to play the dopey mom, the one needing all the latest slang terms explained.

  “I wouldn’t get your hopes up,” said Laird sardonically. “It’s just a few Tilt-A-Whirls on flatbeds, and a Ferris wheel with the buckets held on by duct tape. Oh yeah, plus a bouncy house, if you like that kind of thing. The Bears once had the idea of using it as a walk-in bong, which I have to admit was actually pretty cool.”

  “The Bears have a Ferris wheel? Uh, could we slow down, actually?” Laird’s long strides would have us charging in between the mobile homes and into the midst of the Hammerkings, or whoever they were, in no time.

  Laird obliged me, barely. “They’re not Rabbits, Mary Poppins. They don’t know how to make cactus pie or tell time by the dewdrops. They need U.S. currency for beer and dope and frijoles. Some of the elders make bank driving their sad rides around and parking at campsites where even sadder people pay to put their kids on a rusted carousel in the noon sun, or into a bouncy bag full of diesel exhaust from a fifty-year-old compressor.”

  “Okay,” I said placatingly. I’d begun to grasp the necessity behind the Diogenes routine. Laird had copious rage. I’d hope to tap it usefully when the time came, or at least point it away from myself.

  “These people give the Bears handouts, like at Jellystone Park. They let them park their stuff here sometimes. Not likely now, because the race is coming. But they might know where they’re at. They won’t hurt you, Mary Poppins.”

  “Okay,” I said feebly. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “I’m not upset. I’m just not digging saying so many words.”

  “I’ll save my questions.”

  “I could be reading my book.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “Anyone wants to wait in the Jeep, that’s cool too.” Even as Laird said this, Miller and Vacuum had wagged their way into the center of the ring of mobile homes, toward the fire. Melinda ran after them.

  “I want to hear what they say,” I said. We’d gotten close enough now that I could hear the music, something recorded, metalish or countryish, metal-countryish, if that existed. I felt responsible for Melinda. Now that I’d roused him, Laird stalked the planet like an indomitable ghost, unwary of what might see or touch him. But I’d lured the furry girl onto this quest without telling her she sought one of the Bear King’s murderers, and accompanied the other.

  54

  THEY WEREN’T ONLY MEN, BUT MOSTLY MEN, AND THE WOMEN HUNG back. And they weren’t all white guys with beards, only mostly so—some were Latino guys with beards, and some had no beards at all. There were trucker hats and bandannas, fancy sideburns, beer cozies. Maybe twenty or twenty-five people, and nothing to distinguish the scene, really. It could have easily been a tailgate party in a stadium lot, or a gathering at the far side of an outdoor concert, where the stage was so distant, it wasn’t worth your attention. Except it was a gathering in the dark at the end of the world, a ring of RVs and trailers shored against the sand and wind of an apocalyptic vacancy, and the whole thing scared me shitless.

  Ordinary people might be the most terrifying thing on earth. Or ordinary Americans, I should say. For months now, I’d studied them in the backdrops of the ceaseless televised rallies, stacked in those vertical arenas revering the back of a blue suit and a red hat, trying to fathom what it was they saw in him, and wondering where they went to, after. Here was one place, anyway. Apparently they carved up immaculate desert in their off-highway vehicles, things somewhere between a monster Jeep and a tricycle, two of which came barreling back from the rim of darkness just after we’d entered the camp. The headlamps made two columns of riotous dust flare before them, the stuff they’d been out kicking up with their treads—I guess we were breathing it. All shouted huzzahs at the vehicles’ return, and the riders were quickly enfolded into that mellow, aimless atmosphere that I could interpret only as one of utter seething menace.

  Was I unfair? Probably. True, there was the one guy who made it his business to corner me and Melinda away from the fire long enough to ask if we liked to party, but you could meet that anywhere. (It was when five or six asked the question as one that you’d worry.) We’d created a little hubbub, coming in unknown from the wild, but maybe less than I would have predicted, to be honest. They were nice to the dogs, fed them sausages, which they offered us as well. Some paid us no attention at all. But I was helpless not to consider them in light of the Bears. They made a tableau of both what I feared finding—the citadel of Monster Men—and, at the same time, its banal opposite. I suspected many of these guys could likely pack up and stow these vehicles behind suburban homes, even if in some cases the homes would be those of their parents. A few of the older ones surely had wives, or divorces, and underwater mortgages. They hadn’t journeyed to this apocalyptic frontier honestly, weren’t fugitives from Vietnam conscription or SDS or LSD or of a Janov scream that never ended, like the Bears. They’d watched a movie, perhaps starring Mel Gibson, or a YouTube clip, and geared up. I saw guns—a rifle rack in a pickup’s cab, and two handgun
s inside open jackets—but they were slickly holstered, locked away, probably with their safeties on. I’d have bet they had paperwork.

  Laird loomed in among them, searching for someone in particular. I don’t think he found the person, but he mingled easily, despite his height and strange garb. I suppose he’d been acting as the checkpoint between the People of the Wash and the outside world. Who knew what earlier experiences with the social services bureaucracy, or with desert people, lay in his arsenal. I shouldn’t underestimate his versatility just because he didn’t care to use my real name. There were others with shaved heads at that circle, and I’m sure his muscles impressed everyone else as much as they did me. The men here appeared to find him a kick in the pants.

  Contrary to what I’d said, I didn’t stick near enough to listen. I stayed with Melinda instead, helping her to keep tabs on the dogs—I had a guilty wish for leashes, but it would have felt betraying to Heist—and held to the edge of the gathering, rather than on its inside, and accepted the hospitality of a Dr Pepper instead of a Pabst Blue Ribbon. By the time I figured out that Laird had been right, that they weren’t going to hurt us, I was almost disappointed.

  It occurred to me that these were the people who could afford to pity the Bears, my sacred enemies—to throw them a little charity, to treat them as harmless talismans, as “desert rats.” It made me hate them even more than my enemies. In my new incoherence, I’d become affiliated. The people at the campfire seemed contemptible to me not because they provided a glimpse of the ethical and aesthetic mysteries of the Other America, but because in their jolly way they condescended to the Viscera Springs tribes, to Melinda and Laird, to Heist, to me.

  55

  BACK AT THE JEEP, LAIRD ASKED ME FOR THE KEY. HE WANTED TO BE THE driver. Melinda was just now in front of the vehicle, in the aura of its headlights, soothing Vacuum through a gastric episode. Someone in the fire circle had found it amusing to feed him a long sequence of ungrilled frankfurters, as if in some Coney Island contest, and they were coming back out.