Wonder Valley

by Ivy Pochoda

  Cassidy wouldn’t meet her eye and focused instead on digging her bare feet into the dirt.

  “Cassidy is turning away from the game,” Britt said. “Cassidy is afraid of the truth. And here’s truth. I got cut from the team right before the women’s champs. I had to stay home, but fuck it because there was an awesome party up in Laurel Canyon. I convinced the captain of the men’s team to drive me because I couldn’t afford a cab. The party was epic, the kind of thing that makes you forget you’re a Florida girl, about to lose your one shot of getting out of Pensacola for good.” She glanced around the circle, making sure to catch each intern’s eye. “And don’t you all act like you think partying is stupid. Because that is what you’re doing right now. Always. Partying. You just give it a different name.” Britt took a breath, preparing for the next round. “Even Goody Two-shoes Andy had fun. Even without drinking—because I promised him I wouldn’t make him drink and wouldn’t tease him about his commitment to stay dry until the end of the season. I didn’t even mind when he told me he wanted to leave to practice in the morning. All I said was, I used to be just like you. Then we got in the car.”

  Cassidy tried to stand up, but Gideon pulled her back down. “We weren’t going fast,” Britt said. “It was impossible to go fast. I was messing with the radio when the car skidded off the road down into the ravine.” Britt curled her mouth into a thin, nasty smile. “Now this is the part of the story where I should tell you that the universe was holding out its hand to me. That the big wheel of fate had swept me along in its wake. Because the car was caught between two trees. So there’s a fucking blessing, right? There’s something to marvel at in the whole damn universal equation.”

  The fire sparked. The interns were staring now. All of them, even Cassidy.

  “Let me tell you how I counted that particular blessing. I ran. I didn’t even check to see if Andy was okay. He wasn’t moving. And I didn’t want to know. I got myself out of that car and fled. Because I’m selfish. Because I fear myself. Because what I want more than anything is to be anyone but who I am. And that’s why I ran. And that’s why I’m here.”

  She’d crossed the city on foot, then on a bus, then on foot again. Then into her dorm. Then, before the sun came up, before her coaches, teammates, parents, or the police could call her, off campus, out of town. First up to Santa Barbara, then into the Inland Empire. And now the desert.

  Andy could be dead. He could be in the hospital. Or he could have won the goddamn NCAA Men’s title like he was supposed to before she’d dragged him to that party. Britt didn’t know. She told herself she didn’t care.

  “So,” Patrick said, standing and placing both hands on Britt’s shoulders. She could feel the electricity course out of his palms now. It was undeniable—a current that penetrated her skin, sped right to her heart. He knew. She knew. They were in this together now. “You are right to fear yourself. But that is only the beginning. Once you have confronted your fear, then you must overcome it; otherwise, our little game around the campfire will have been worthless. Are you ready?” His hands kneaded Britt’s shoulders as if coaxing out her answer. “Are you ready?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You will have to trust us. You will have to trust me. I will lead you back to a place without fear where you can begin again.”

  Through the fire, Britt saw Cassidy roll her eyes again and whisper something to Gideon. But Gideon wasn’t paying attention to her. He had clapped a hand over his mouth and was pointing in the direction of the driveway.

  Patrick and Britt turned to look behind them. Someone was staggering from the driveway toward the fire pit.

  “James?” Patrick said. “What are you doing?”

  But it wasn’t James. He was sitting on the porch in his glider.

  “Dad?”

  Owen stumbled forward. He was holding his arm against his chest.

  “Dad?”

  Patrick stood and caught Owen as he lurched forward, his son’s blood streaking the front of his faded polo shirt. Patrick gently peeled Owen’s arm away from his body, turning it toward the firelight.

  A deep gash ran from his elbow to wrist.

  “Grace!” Patrick bellowed. “Grace!” He picked Owen up.

  “I can walk,” Owen said. But Patrick didn’t let go.

  The interns rose and followed. They paused at the foot of the porch, left outside as the screen door swung closed.

  Cassidy came to Britt’s side. “We all have stories. It doesn’t make you special.”

  “I know,” Britt said.

  They could see Grace hold the screen door open for her son and husband. They could see her instruct Owen to sit at the kitchen table as she began to clean the wound.

  Owen’s back was to the window. James sat facing him, Patrick over his shoulder. Grace with her head bowed to Owen’s wound. From a distance, they looked like a normal family, playing a game, working on homework, sharing a newspaper story together, in their brightly lit kitchen after dinner.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Cassidy said. “But none of this changes anything—not you, not Owen. Patrick will still come to my cabin tonight. Sit up and watch if you doubt me.”

  “I believe you,” Britt said because it was easier to lie.

  16

  BLAKE, LOS ANGELES, 2010

  The sirens on Glendale set off the coyotes in the ravine a block east. At first their high-pitched yips and howls were indistinguishable from the wail of the police cars. But soon the yelping pulled away into feverish cries, a frenzied hunger calling down the night. Then the dogs in the nearby houses came to their gates, barking low, warning one another of the threat. After a few minutes, the coyotes fell silent. They rustled through dry underbrush, slinking into the hunt. The dogs barked themselves hoarse then pulled back into their houses. Two more sirens screamed down Glendale.

  Blake rolled over on his mattress, knocking his knees against the camper’s fiberglass wall. He sat up looking for Sam. But Sam was dead, four years now. Blake couldn’t kick the habit. He fucking missed him.

  The big man seemed too tough, too solid, to be murdered. And if Blake hadn’t been there as the Samoan’s blood gushed from the gash in his neck—more blood than Blake had ever seen before, warm, sticky, and metallic—he’d have trouble believing it possible. For days he found blood crusted on his clothes and under his fingernails, like the big man was clinging to him.

  And to think a woman had done that. It was almost beyond imagining. Except that it wasn’t. Because the memory haunted Blake day and night, reminding him that, although he’d tried, he’d done nothing to restore the balance that had been tipped by the big man’s death.

  Here’s what kept Blake up at night: if it had been him bleeding out over that rusty blade, Sam would have wasted no time in seeking revenge. But Blake had failed his best friend, his only friend, and the big man wouldn’t let him forget it. Late at night, when Sam’s voice kept him awake, Blake swore he’d find the lady and make her pay.

  When he’d first come to Los Angeles, he’d had days when he’d thought he saw her everywhere getting on with her life, always happy, as if she was set on reminding him of his misery. He’d made a fool of himself a couple of times, barging into a swank coffee shop and a boutique, placing his grubby paw on some redhead’s shoulder, then realizing his mistake and scramming before she hollered for the rent-a-cop. He’d begun self-medicating to keep these visions at bay.

  THE INTERIOR OF THE CAMPER SMELLED LIKE SMOKE AND OLD CLOTHES. Blake should have opened the windows, popped up the canopy, and sat out waiting for the air to change. But he didn’t have the patience to spend the day guarding his shit against people who saw an open window as an open invitation.

  His camper was third in a row of six lined up on Alessandro from Ewing to Oak Glen Place—all of them stranded without cars to tow them away. Blake inherited it when its owner headed north to pick grapes. A few people had knocked on the door claiming the camper had been promised to them, but
when they saw Blake, they didn’t insist.

  Except for the Jesus freaks—a middle-aged Mexican couple who’d decorated the outside of their trailer with bilingual urgings to praise the Lord and crude paintings of the Virgin and Christ—Blake ignored his neighbors. (Keep your face hidden and your plans secret, Sam always said and Blake still listened to the big man.) But he gladly suffered the smudged tracts about revelation and rapture Santiago pressed into his hands in exchange for the tortillas and spicy frijoles Soledad cooked up on the propane stove behind their camper. Sometimes they even gave him a chicharrón.

  Street camping was illegal. But the cops didn’t pay much attention to this strip of a street at the base of Echo Park. Instead they focused on the dwindling drug busts in the gentrifying neighborhood, the remnants of crime that kept housing prices somewhat attractive to rehabbers and flippers.

  Up on the hills overlooking the ravine that dropped down to Alessandro were an assortment of houses in stages of disrepair and rehabilitation—Craftsman bungalows, Spanish-style haciendas, modernist homes—houses that had been desirable before the 5 interstate was built. Most of the residents were families who couldn’t afford the trendier neighborhoods or kids just out of college who were trying to start bands or make art or do something besides nine to five.

  These kids weren’t Blake’s style. They pretended to be hard when they were as weak as generic beer, but they provided a market for the pills Blake scored from nursing homes and shitty clinics in East L.A. and the folks down on Skid Row. So he went to their parties and peddled his goods.

  His dirty clothes and battered Ranger hat gave him cover among their grungy uniforms. He lingered in their backyards, listening to skinny girls with black-rimmed eyes and carefully ripped T-shirts talking about art and industrial music (or was it industrial art and music?), and wondered if they tolerated him because they thought that he’d once been like them. More likely, they didn’t give a fuck as long as he had a pocket full of Oxys or Vikes. Blake wasn’t sure when or why hard drugs had gone out of fashion—in his day he’d only resorted to pharmaceuticals when the dealers ran dry—but this trend worked in his favor.

  Between the houses where the kids lived and the nicer places owned by families were tumbledown cabins and disintegrating shacks, their windows boarded with plywood and their porches and walkways missing steps. These places were of no use to Blake, but their inhabitants, an assortment of hermits, interested him. They managed to blend into their environment—off the grid but smack-dab in the middle of the city. Wasn’t that something? Sam would have loved it.

  One of these hermits had kept Blake up the whole night, a woman who lived in a two-room shack that seemed ready to give into the hillside—in the little off-road warren of Fellowship Park. She had a dog that looked more like a pig than any dog should. Blake had peeked into her place a few times. It was hard to see much behind the dirty windows and the screens studded with leaves and twigs, but he could just make out the slippery bodies of her cats slinking through the dusty shafts of light. There must have been twenty of them, rattling empty tins of cat food and clawing at the shredded screens.

  How she could keep track of her cats was beyond Blake, but last night she was pacing up and down the Oak Glen stairs from Lake Shore to Alessandro, clapping her hands in threes and calling out for Ernie. For two hours she was at it, that three-beat clap followed by a drawn-out two-syllable wail. In her place, Blake would have welcomed Ernie’s loss.

  Sam would have done something about those cats, picked them off when they wandered out of the cabin, culled the population. He was good like that, sitting up on the roof of their trailer outside Phoenix, sharpshooting feral creatures. But Sam was gone.

  The loss still felt like a shot in the gut. He could have prevented it—he could have stopped messing around the campfire with those stoned farmhands who called themselves “interns,” listening to their tripped-out nonsense and, instead, spent the evening at Sam’s side. Maybe then he would have seen Britt slip into the cabin. He couldn’t think about that—at least he tried not to think about it. But the trying was the hard part.

  While the hermit was beating time up and down Oak Glen, Blake turned on his LED lantern and took out the chessboard. Over the years he’d replaced the missing pieces. Although the set was complete, it didn’t look right. Some of the pieces were too big for their squares, nudging their neighbors and messing Blake up. Others just didn’t look right and he had to give them a good stare to remember what was supposed to be what.

  ANOTHER BURST OF COYOTE NOISE SHOT OUT OF THE RAVINE, A QUICK YIP and howl. Blake stepped from his camper. The sky hung like a camp blanket. Nearly half a decade in Los Angeles and he still couldn’t get used to the run of gray days that didn’t hold the promise of rain. The city felt smothered, the sky that same bathwater gray, the air still, making everyone stir-crazy even outdoors. It would have pushed Sam over the edge.

  One of the guys down at the Midnight Mission, where Blake sometimes grabbed a free meal when Soledad wouldn’t feed him, called it “earthquake weather.” They’d been standing in a line that ran from the door of the Mission all the way down Sixth to Maple. The man had looked at the sky and told everyone around him that he’d lived up and down the coast and knew earthquake weather better than anyone. He could feel it, he said. Then the whole crowd standing in line for a hot tray of nothing good latched on to the idea, as if an earthquake—a real trembler—was exactly what was needed to pull back the gray blanket and reveal the sun. Like it would solve problems, put a roof over their heads and money in their pockets so they wouldn’t have to line up for hot slop.

  This kind of madness—the contagious crazy of Skid Row—was what kept Blake in business, made it easy for him to get ahold of people’s meds for bottom dollar. Tell them that shit was government poison and they’d nearly give it away for free. For five dollars he could relieve someone of her antipsychotics, downers, and painkillers and resell them to the kids on the hill for ten times that. Everyone was on something and everyone needed a buck.

  He felt bad. But then again, he didn’t.

  BLAKE LOOKED UP AND DOWN ALESSANDRO. A FEW CARS WERE TURNING up the hill, heading toward somewhere better. He went behind his camper to relieve himself in the scraggle of dried-out bushes that blocked him from full view of Glendale. He could hear Santiago shouting. He shook and zipped and checked the street to see what possessed the little man. For someone who lived semi-illegal, it struck Blake that Santiago sure made a lot of noise, yelling at cars that came too fast or passed too close to his camper, heckling joggers and dog walkers, basically raising hell in the direction of anyone he suspected didn’t possess his holy-mindedness.

  Blake shaded his eyes against the strange glare that came with the gloom. Santiago and Soledad were standing outside their camper staring at something on the ground, hopping around and wringing their hands like a couple of nitwit grandmothers. Blake figured it was worth checking out in case he could score a meal.

  They were looking at a cat that had been run over. One eye was dangling from its socket and there was a break in its spine so its back legs swiveled out at a right angle. Its black fur was matted with blood. Reddish drool pooled below its mouth.

  “Alive,” Santiago said, poking in the animal’s direction with a broom. “All morning like this and alive.” He was dressed in a yellowed guayabera shirt, and his horny toes curled over the edges of old shower sandals. “The Lord says to pay attention. The devil works day and night.”

  Blake towered over Santiago and stared down at the shiny dome of the man’s head trying to figure out exactly where the communications from the Lord entered his brain.

  “Es un signo del diablo,” Soledad said. She kicked in the cat’s direction, her flip-flop nearly slipping off her dirty sock. Blake had seen women like her before—breasts, stomach, and neck, carved from wood and sold to tourists by the road in New Mexico.

  “No, no devil. No diablo,” Blake said. “It’s just a dying cat.”


  “No es natural,” Santiago said, crossing himself. “Un signo.” He pointed first to the sky and then to the ground as if he wasn’t quite sure who had delivered the sign. “You move, please? For us.”

  “I pick that thing up, it’ll fall apart in my hands. Let him pass on his own. Then I’ll deal with it,” Blake said. Sam would have killed the thing right there. But Blake had enough problems without a dying pussy’s juju in the mix.

  “He die here, he curse us,” Soledad said. “Then we move the camper. We leave and no more frijoles. No más cena para ti.”

  Blake ran a jagged fingernail down one of the deep creases in his cheek. “Jesus,” he said. He patted his pockets for a cigarette he might have forgotten about and headed up the hill.

  He took the staircase at Cove Avenue and up to Cerro Gordo, where he climbed a flight of stairs carved into the hill, then descended into the strange enclave of Fellowship Park—a hidden collection of houses and cabins connected by dirt paths.

  The two-room cabin was partway up the path. The pig-dog was digging underneath the small walkway that led to the front door. Blake banged on the screen. The entire cabin shook. Several of the cats mewled. He shaded his eyes, watching the felines slither in and out of the light. He banged again.

  The woman who came to the door was younger than Blake had imagined—closer to fifty than seventy. Over her shoulder he could see moving boxes stacked to the ceiling, so many moving boxes it seemed they were holding the place up.

  She wedged her foot between the screen and the door frame and looked at Blake though a four-inch gap. “Do I know you?”

  “There’s a cat down the hill,” Blake said. “Got hit.”

  “And?”

  “I thought you could come take a look.”

  Behind the woman the cabin rustled with animal noise. A large tabby snaked between her ankles, walking figure eights around her feet.

  “It’s not mine,” the woman said.