The Feral Detective

by Jonathan Lethem

  70

  ANYONE MIND IF I SKIP THE CHASE SCENE? IT WASN’T MUCH. Exit, pursued by invisible Bears. Laird, somehow so thorny and so copacetic at all times, hadn’t riled them at the mining camp. (This was by his own account, which was all I had to go on.) When he’d gathered the lay of the land—that Heist had been abandoned into the care of Yogi, whose real name, I’d learn, was Paul Apollo—he’d done as he’d predicted: accepted some breakfast. Made small talk of the ex-Bear-but-no-hard-feelings variety. He hadn’t mentioned my presence, or Melinda’s—for this reason, he had to apologize for not bringing any food or coffee out for me. Then he’d driven my rental Jeep with aimless calm back out of their camp, only breaknecking it back in our direction once he’d been sure he was beyond range of their hearing and sight.

  Did they follow? We didn’t wait to see. Melinda pulled the lever that stopped the Ferris wheel at a level where I could be freed from my cage. Heist had gotten himself upright, sitting in the shade at the base of the wheel. He was dehydrated but alive. His beard had filled in the gaps between his sideburns, making his face a crazy quilt of lengths. Shirtless, he wore beneath his red leather jacket a kind of heavy poultice, bound by cloth to his damaged ribs and shoulder. It had a rank yeasty smell, but I left it alone. Laird and I helped him into the front seat of my rental, after I’d proven it was aligned enough to drive and moved it nearer to where Heist sat. I gave him water.

  Then we went around the shack, and there quickly found Heist’s keys, unconcealed in his Jeep’s cup holder. Laird started the car, and we watched the needle bob up: half a tank. Laird drove it from the hollow, and Melinda and the dogs joined in it, as if by some previous arrangement. Then Laird piloted us, making a comet of dust, on a run from whomever was or wasn’t compelled to try and stop us.

  Heist went into a daze, his eyes half shut when they weren’t all the way shut. Laird didn’t stop our little train of Jeeps until we’d come out of the unmarked wastes, to park in the front lot of a drab little liquor and dry goods store in a town, or the idea of a town, called Landers. I picked up another bottle of water from the desert hippie inside. Laird went around the back with the Joshua trees to pee and brood. He had one bright red slash on the bare skull over his left ear, where the Jeep had touched him in the collision. Though I suspected his entire left side might be purple with bruises tomorrow, he claimed to be otherwise uninjured.

  I conferred with Melinda by the side of the road.

  “Laird wants to go see Anita,” she told me. “We gotta find Jessie too. The dogs belong together.”

  I nodded, but I wasn’t clear on just what she proposed. Melinda made it clear.

  “Take him away from here.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  When a pickup truck passed by, we both started, but it was only a pickup truck. The driver could have been a stray Bear, or just an old white guy with a beard. It had begun to seem possible that it didn’t matter. The man with the Ferris wheel was killed, or close to killed; we hadn’t examined him closely. There wasn’t a storm or a flood, not at the moment, and this wasn’t a pit in the night. It was a dusty two-lane road, and a pickup could roll by without it meaning so much, even if it had a bad bumper sticker or two on it. In the absence of the fever to anoint a king, Bears might merely be old white guys with beards.

  “Take care of him,” she said.

  “I will.”

  “He’ll be worried about me and the dogs.”

  “I’ll tell him you’re with Laird.”

  She almost laughed.

  71

  THE TWO JEEPS PARTED THEN, MELINDA AND LAIRD GOING NORTH FROM Landers, up in a direction I could now begin to chart, toward Giant Rock, there to turn eastward off the two-lanes, seeking into the hills to find the Rabbits. They’d shuttled back into their own old worlds, really, the Viscera Springs lineage that wasn’t so simple to depart or be rescued from. To be feral wasn’t merely to be a wild child, but to be one cut loose, or run loose, from some point of origin. I fooled around with the allegorical implications a little, as if I were still the person who’d try to pitch an op-ed or a Sunday Magazine piece, then I dropped them, because I wasn’t. My task was simpler. I was in Heist’s role now. I had simply to extricate a person from the perversities of Viscera Springs, to let them breathe free, set them on their feet. I’d do it for Heist as he’d done it for others, whether it was destined to stick or not.

  I’d been headed west, back to Upland. He’d waved off the suggestion of a hospital, twice, so I left it alone. It freed my fantasies: we’d go back to his Airstream. I had him to myself, to soothe and rehabilitate. He might not require a hospital for his ribs, but he and I both needed a place of recovery, a circle drawn around us within which we could determine what we’d be to each other in the wake of our bold, strange conspiracy in desert murders and absconded kings.

  I almost couldn’t believe it had gotten so simple. Then it turned out it hadn’t. On the Twentynine Palms Highway I pulled in to gas up the Jeep and checked my phone. We were back on the grid. My newly loathsome device, my pocket enemy, suddenly bulged with the contents of the denied world: a few hundred e-mails, Facebook notifications, and tweets, outraged news of appalling executive orders, a couple of late-night texts from aspiring Manhattan booty callers, and the single ominous phone message from Jane Toth. So the Airstream was out.

  It was the very nature of my delirium that I was only further exhilarated. I had Heist alone in my Jeep now. By magic chance we’d even shaken off his dogs, delightful as they might be. Obligated by our fugitive state, I couldn’t deliver him back to his tawdry office, his secret marsupial lounge. Instead we existed in free conceptual space, strung between the Mojave and the suburbs at the base of Baldy, where the fuzz might be prowling. I continued east, into the valley of giant windmills, but before Interstate 10, I hung a left onto a two-lane called Indian Valley Road, heading for the unknown terrain of Desert Hot Springs. That would be our hideout.

  A hideout, perhaps a love nest too. I was thinking like a fugitive, maybe like an abductor, and—though it wasn’t pretty to admit it—it turned me on.

  72

  I’D LEARNED ABOUT THE FAMOUS SPA RESORT CALLED TWO BUNCH PALMS from Inland Empire magazine, back in the time of my Doubletree rainstorm occupation, seemingly a million years ago. It was a place with natural mineral springs and mud baths, a Saratoga of the West—which meant it also featured a resident shaman, and Reiki as well as Swedish massage, and a trail called Coyote Walk. The resort had been used as a set in an important film by a ’70s maverick director, and as the backdrop for an episode of The Bachelor, because of course it had. In the photos in the magazine’s spread, the spa visitors went from their rooms to the hot springs and massage appointments and even sat in the plush restaurant in robes and slippers supplied by the resort, which was useful, since Heist would be arriving without much to wear besides his mud- and blood-stained jeans and the signature jacket.

  I called and got a reservation easily. My credit card, that old tether to the official reality, cleared without a hitch. When I’d bought the couple of fresh T-shirts for Heist at the Walgreens, I also grabbed a loaded travel Dopp kit, with a razor and a toothbrush and a mini deodorant, and a black one-piece swimsuit for myself and some trunks for him, so we could immerse in the famed healing waters, though I thought first I’d better take a look under the poultice beneath his shoulder.

  He was still out when I pulled around the resort’s back edge to park near our room. The cheapest, it was also the farthest from the restaurant and spa and waters, a happy accident. Our view looked out beyond the well-trimmed border cacti and yucca to the hilly scruff beyond. Our room was on no one’s route to the tennis courts or morning tai chi circle or anything else. I let him snooze while I moved us in: the assemblage of new-purchased Walgreens crap, a Jeepload of empty water bottles and Kind bar wrappers, and a suitcase it now occurred to me had been thrown together in the Obama era.

  Then I went and woke him up. I couldn’t h
ave carried him to the room without Laird along to help, and anyhow I was impatient.

  God help me, the first thing he did was smile.

  “C’mon, cowboy.”

  “What’s this place?”

  “It’s literally neither here nor there. That’s all you need to know for now.”

  “Palm Springs?”

  “Close. Another place with palms in the name. Think of it as where you get to go after you’ve got nothing left to prove—cloud nine.”

  The way Heist gazed at me broke me apart. As though even here, being helped from my Jeep, at the furthest limit of his wreckage and rescue, he was still my knight. The gaze said he knew that whatever wacky exhibition I put on was merely a disguise for my troubles, the troubles he’d ease for me if he could manage it. It electrified me, as much as if he’d caressed my nape hair. Fucking men. Of course, the gaze stirred my sensations of being wrecked too.

  He didn’t ask again where it was I’d taken him—I suppose he knew he’d figure it out from the stationery. Me being me, his abiding silence only unloosed further verbal incontinence. “I’m glad you don’t recognize it, since then I’d know you’d brought some other girl here, and I’d be too jealous. I’d have to check us in somewhere else instead, like Four Ripe Avocados or Prune Springs or something. Though probably you’ve had multiple ladies in all those places.” I only wanted my joking to skirt any reference to the Wheel of Dharma and its turnings, or to any animal tribes. We’d keep all allusions vegetal and fruitous for the time being.

  He squinted at me in the high sun. “I’ve never been to Four Ripe Avocados.” I’d forgotten his masterly deadpan, which might actually be dead sincerity—it was the uncertainty as to which that kept me so crazy. Maybe I just liked that he listened.

  “Heck, I’ll take you there tonight, big boy.”

  Heist steadied himself with one hand on the Jeep’s hood, then followed me down the little flagstone path to our door. I swiped the key card and showed him in. The room was nice and clean, stylish, with a big bathroom and a patio area outside sliding doors, with a high fence. Heist halted just through the doorway, seeming not to know where to stand or sit. There weren’t so many possibilities.

  I gestured him to the bed. He propped himself there on the spread and spent a little while just breathing. I handed him one of the bottles of artisanal water that would surely turn out to be a twelve-buck charge on my card, then carried on my inane nervous chatter, avoiding all radioactive topics. Meanwhile I opened the closet and there they were, just as promised in Inland Empire magazine: the white and fluffy robes. I wasn’t particular about Heist going in for the full menu of qigong and shiatsu and wheatgrass, but I was damned if, having gotten him this far into my fantasy, I wasn’t going to see him, to see both of us, in those robes.

  “You rest,” I said. “I’m taking the first shower. Then I’m having a look at that shoulder of yours.” I said it like I had some kind of Florence Nightingale tendencies to draw on, which I didn’t. I just lowered my voice into a Bacall register and hoped it played.

  The shower was a walk-in with a smooth-pebbled floor that beveled to the drain. The geyser of hot water and the A-grade freebie soaps and scrubs were a kind of revelation on my tight airplane- and desert-weary skin. Afterward I sashed the robe up high to my neck, playing fair with cleavage for the time being, and woke my poor captive again.

  73

  I RECLAIMED HIS NAME, CHARLES, MEASURED IT GENTLY IN MY MOUTH. I still couldn’t get to Charlie or Baby, not quite. I propped him up on the nice pillows and helped him out of his jacket and the T-shirt. The patch extended farther around his back than I’d realized. It was woven with fine grass fibers, through a cement of some kind of herbal gum—aloe maybe, or chewed Joshua branches. Whatever the substance, it had condensed and shrunk during the time he’d baked in his captivity on the wheel. And Heist was a hairy man. Even if I’d trusted that he was intact beneath, it would have been impossible to free him of the stinking thing without waxing a large portion of his chest.

  “We’ll steam it off.”

  He blinked his eyes to give consent, like a hostage.

  There was a teakwood stool in the shower stall. I cleared it of the bath products it had been holding up, then undressed Heist and placed him sitting on it and got the shower going. While the steam began to relax the poultice back to its mud origins, I took the shower attachment and began gently cleaning him around the patch. My robe sleeves began to get soaked, so I took the robe off and hooked it on the bathroom door. Swirling steam only partly cloaked us from each other. He didn’t say anything, but allowed me to begin shampooing his hair. Where the poultice softened at the edges I broke chunks free and let them flow gunkily to the drain, where they dissolved like gray ice cream.

  “I can’t believe the Wheel Bear spent so much time patching you up,” I said. “I guess they wanted you alive.”

  “His name is Paul Apollo.”

  “Yeah, well, I think we killed him.” I said it just to hear it. I didn’t need Heist to explain the parts I didn’t know, or to console me for what I’d seen and done. I don’t know what I wanted, except to place the knowledge between us.

  “Paul Apollo died in a car wreck. Remember that if anyone asks.” It was the most he’d said since refusing the emergency room. “And you weren’t there to begin with, it was just something you heard about.”

  I nodded. “He claimed you’d been elected King of the Yahoos. That was a new one on me.”

  Heist raised his hand to dismiss it, then winced. I put myself behind him to knead foam into his skull. I wondered how long it had been since he’d had a shampoo. Maybe never like this, I thought proudly.

  “Why wasn’t he the king himself?” I asked.

  “Apollo wasn’t the type. He had other priorities.”

  “He was the kidnapper,” I said. “The keeper.”

  Heist only sort of grunted. I worked my fingers beneath the poultice from where it had loosened at his back, and that made him grunt again. “Well, he built you a hell of a bandage, that’s one thing.”

  “It wasn’t him,” said Heist. “That’s Rabbit made.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “No. I was in a haze, they didn’t think I was awake, but I was. I saw her.”

  “Who?”

  “Anita.”

  I hated her then, a few ways. Not least for touching Heist with her Pilates desert bod. But screw Anita’s perfect calves. She had sinew, I had flesh. I let some of it fall on Heist, now that I’d cleared the mud from his steaky lat.

  “She knew you were captured.”

  “She did what she could.”

  “No, she didn’t.” I went on talking while I caressed him from behind, letting the foam in his hair and the melting poultice turn to rivers for my hands to ride. “Rabbits are no better than Bears,” I said cruelly. “The whole two-party system should be blown up.”

  I didn’t know if I believed what I said. Why shouldn’t Anita have salved his wounds, if that was all the king-mad Bears had allowed her to do? I should be more fair. The deep unconscionable complicity between love and hate, between woman and man, or animal and human, predator and prey—this, I could hardly lay at Anita’s feet, or at the feet (or paws) of any one species or tribe.

  At the rain-and-flame dance to Arabella’s song, with the sacrifice of my expensive lipstick, I’d become one with the Rabbits, become one of the Rabbits. And I needed there to have been the two Viscera Springs tribes, because it was the conjugation between them that had resulted in Charles Heist. Yet now I wanted it all to go away, much as I pried and kneaded Anita’s poultice from his body and rinsed it down the drain. I wanted Heist to myself. I’d draw a circle around us where nothing was left of these brutal oppositions but the enchanted residue between me and Heist, the vive la différence part.

  The last clumps fell, prodded free of his chest hair by my fingertips. He sighed when I explored the tender part of his ribs, then said, “Careful.” I went lower, acro
ss his bumpy belly. It might be time for the shutting up on my side of things, I decided. I thought I had him going—if I had him going half as much as myself, it was a lot, plenty. His hair was still full of shampoo. I took the attachment and rinsed it, petting him downward with the soft jets like an animal whose fur I smoothed. He closed his eyes, but he knew I was near, felt my body dripping on his, sometimes touching him. When I let the attachment drop and hang like an old Manhattan pay-phone receiver, the water coursing against the glass, his breathing said he was ready.

  But I wasn’t. I opened the glass door and went for the razor and shaving cream. I put some foam on my hands and worked it into his sideburns and the thickened shadow between his sideburns, under his nostrils and into the cleft of his chin, all the sculptural details I wanted to see clear, and to feel with my lips and tongue.

  “Don’t move,” I said, as quietly as I could. While the steam went on filling the space between us, I began to shave him. The steam had softened his whiskers, made them buttery, and the razor was new and good and sharp. The water poured into the drain without touching us, a lascivious waste he didn’t protest. I went up under his chin, delicately around his Adam’s apple, making my own decisions about where to quit, just short of his clavicle. Then I cleaned the bristles from his cheeks and chin and lips. I didn’t cut him once.

  Heist scooted the stool to lean back against the tile and let me do it. I took liberties, winnowed the piratical sideburns on all sides. I wished I could flatten them too, and trim his eyebrows, but I didn’t have clippers. It was okay. It was enough. I lifted the attachment one more time and sluiced away the foam and hairs, and then I shut it off. I stole a look at the broken part of him then, the shrunken pink and white and purple-blue skin that had been cooking beneath the poultice. I couldn’t see anything worse than that, but then I didn’t know how a cracked rib or ruptured spleen would look from the outside. His contour was intact, at least. He allowed me to pat him dry with one of the big folded towels, his eyes opening a little now, mostly staying on mine, roaming just enough to my body to make me feel good and shy. I put us both in the robes from the closet. Maybe we wouldn’t be in them long, but it was a picture I wanted in my head, along with a few others.