Wonder Valley

by Ivy Pochoda

  He and Puppet circled each other on these rounds, the little hood monitoring Crocker, checking that his dudes on bikes were rolling in to replenish his dealers’ stashes, and keeping an eye on his crew as they worked their various corners. Puppet watched Ren too, calling out, “my man,” when they passed. Ren only ever replied with a nod so small he might have been blinking something out of his eye.

  “You play a cold game, you feel me?” Puppet said each time. “You too stubborn to get on the up-and-up.”

  WAY TOO LATE AND CROCKER WAS ROCKING. A MAN AND A WOMAN WERE having it out going on two hours now, one yelling from the middle of the block, the other standing across from Ren’s camp. Around the corner, a dude wouldn’t shut off his radio and was threatening anyone who said they’d make him. Puppet’s crew were sending coded calls up and down. And in one of the tents nearby, a couple was having loud, hard sex.

  Ren had been trying to sleep—pointless, he knew. He flung off his sleeping bag, unzipped his tent, stepped out into the air that was no fresher than where he’d been tossing and turning. Sometimes he felt like the only straight man on the street—the only person who didn’t rely on drugs, booze, meds, or weed to get himself through the day and survive the night.

  He shouldered his backpack but left his tent up, too tired to give a fuck about his sorry possessions. He had an idea, if not a plan—head to the Cecil, find that kid Flynn, take him up on the offer of a joint, smoke until he passed out even if doing so meant he broke his own code of conduct. Because Ren had promised himself when he got out of juvie to stay on the straight and narrow. He planned to live his life clean, repentant. He wanted to make his small slice of world better, not partake in the things that poisoned it.

  But he guessed you could call these extenuating circumstances. Because if he didn’t sleep soon, good and hard, he was going to become part of the problem, cracked and crazy and capable of who knows what. So if he broke his personal prohibition on weed or booze to make sure that didn’t happen, that was okay for the time being.

  Ren had seen Flynn a few times during the last month, sometimes passing by the camp to do a quick exchange with Darrell, sometimes smoking on San Pedro with a cute girl in tight jeans, shiny combat boots, and a bleached mini ’fro. He’d spotted the kid in Gladys Park, chilling under a statue of an angel with an older Rastafarian, dreads gone gray, and caught him once checking out a guy and a girl freestyling for a small crowd in San Julian Park. But one thing Ren learned quick-smart was that in Skid Row, when you want to find someone, that person becomes straight-up invisible.

  He passed the row of tents where hookers set up. He watched two women work the streets, keeping out of the streetlamps’ glow.

  Ren didn’t like to be on the move so late. The neighborhood’s desperate energy this time of night made him jittery, like his skin was turned the wrong side out. Two men made a handoff under the tattered awning of a closed convenience store. On the corner of Wall, a stone’s throw from Central P.D., Ren smelled the chemical burn of a crack pipe.

  A few police cars rolled down Sixth, slowing whenever they passed someone moving instead of sleeping, turning their flashlights on the bodies lined up against the roll gates, revealing faces with dilated pupils and twitching lips.

  At the corner of Seventh and San Julian, he caught sight of Puppet and ducked his head. But it was too late—the little hood had clocked him and in no time he was bopping down the block, attracting way too much attention. “My man.” Puppet tried to bump fists, but when Ren didn’t mirror the gesture, simply landed a light blow on Ren’s chest. “My man, my man, my man. Where’re you off to, my man?”

  “Taking my constitutional,” Ren said.

  “Your what-now?”

  “Just walking.”

  “You always walking. Walking around and around. ’Specially this time of night. ’Specially around my turf. I’m starting to get ideas about you, my man.”

  “Such as?” Puppet was buzzing up and down, not doing much to alleviate the persistent dizziness in Ren’s head brought on by lack of sleep.

  “Such as you’re playing your own game out here. You’re running your own business.”

  “I’m just taking a walk.”

  “Not the way I see it,” Puppet said. “Not the way I got you figured out. You up to something. Which is why I want to bring you in, cut you into my game. I picked you for smart with all your big words. I could use a fool like you.”

  Ren tried to sidestep the little dude, but as usual Puppet was standing too close, able to intercept his getaway.

  “Where you running to? Because I can see you’re running. Got business of your own and I’m gonna know what it is.”

  “No business,” Ren said. “Promise.” He wanted away from this tiny banger quick. Each second he spent around Puppet took Ren back to that apartment in the projects, reminded him of wanting to hold that gun, wanting to be hard, wanting to be like the little hood bopping up and down in front of him. Each minute he stood there listening to Puppet’s nonsense was another minute of sleep stolen from him. Each moment he remained solidified the ghost of the man he’d killed.

  Ren juke-stepped and this time Puppet couldn’t keep time.

  “Go your own way,” the little hood called at his back. “Just remember, you my number one draft pick.”

  Ren held up his hand in acknowledgment but didn’t look back.

  REN DOUBLE-TIMED IT. HE’D SPENT TOO LONG WITH PUPPET AND NOW could sense something moving at his back, something keeping pace with him. He didn’t want to check but needed to know if the ghost who’d followed him during his first years in juvie—the middle-aged man’s bloodless face he saw when he looked at himself the mirror—had returned. But when he glanced over his shoulder he saw it was a cop car creeping along the curb.

  Ren slowed. The car fell back. Then he picked up his pace. The cruiser gave him a beat, then accelerated. Two blocks, three blocks—the car was nipping his heels, then retreating, then catching him again. When Ren crossed into downtown, the cruiser pulled away for good.

  On Fifth Street, just before Main, Ren got lucky. There outside a late-night deli, he saw Flynn. The kid was talking to a middle-aged women with lank gray hair and baggy men’s clothing. Ren watched as he passed her something from his string bag, then hugged her briefly, before they parted.

  “Yo,” Ren called.

  Flynn spun around, like someone had just run fingers down his flesh.

  “Easy now,” Ren said.

  “Dude. You know the shit that goes on out here at night?” Flynn looked a little jumpy, his eyes a little too red, and a little too narrow.

  “Looks like you’re part of that shit,” Ren said.

  “Me?” Flynn gave him a dopey smile. “I’m offering compassionate care.” He patted his string bag.

  “Which is why I’m searching you out.” Ren glanced at the bag.

  “Last I heard, you were sober, brother.”

  “Don’t mind what you heard,” Ren said.

  Flynn worried the thin strap of his bag.

  “Do you think if I start smoking weed, things are going to get worse for me? I thought you said that shit was compassionate.”

  Flynn reached into the bag. “Dude, this stuff is nature’s antidepressant. All those meds people are lining up for at the clinics—that’s the stuff that will kill you.” Ren could hear Flynn’s fingers working the little, rolled packages. But he came up empty-handed. “I can’t sell what you can’t buy,” Flynn said. “So I’ll make you a deal. Come back to the Cecil, I’ll smoke you out. First time’s on the house. Dealer’s special.”

  On the way back to the hotel, Flynn smoked a thin, brown cigarette that smelled like a botanica candle. He tossed the butt as he pulled open the smudged brass doors to the lobby.

  The interior of the hotel looked different, larger and more imposing. Or maybe Ren’s perspective had changed since he was on the streets.

  They rode the elevator to the top floor and entered a room like the
one Ren had stayed in, except that Flynn’s pad was filled with all sorts of weird crap. A few rocks were lined up along the window ledge. A bundle of what looked like charred grass stood in a clay holder. Next to the bed was a stack of yellowed books on energy and sacred spaces and healing herbs.

  Ren picked up one of the rocks.

  “That’s a powerful one,” Flynn said. “Hold it tight and you can feel its energy.”

  Ren squeezed the rock, but all he sensed were its sharp edges cutting into his palm.

  He sat on the desk chair, while Flynn flopped on the bed and began to roll a meticulous joint, fashioning a filter from a matchbook and tapping the whole thing together with the clip from a ballpoint pen.

  “How’re you liking L.A.?”

  “For real? How the fuck you think?”

  Flynn held up his hands, like, Don’t blame me for asking. “Listen,” he said, “just because you’re living in Skid Row doesn’t mean you need to spend the day downtown. It’s a big city.”

  “So what do you suggest? I should take a tour?”

  “No, man, all I’m saying is you need a place to clear your head. You’ve been to Griffith Park? The Observatory?”

  “Naw.”

  “How about the beach?”

  Ren shook his head. Just like Laila, came all this way to get waylaid.

  “That’s a trip,” Flynn said. “The man’s never been to the beach. But I dig it.” He looked out the window. “Staring at this shit all day, it’s easy to forget that it’s there. But when you remember”—he popped his fingers open like exploding fireworks—“bam, it’s like you’ve been saved. I grew up in the desert and each time I see all that water, it’s like I realize that for the last months I’ve been forgetting to breathe.” He exhaled loudly.

  “Maybe I’ll have time when I figure out my way out of my present situation,” Ren said.

  Flynn licked the edge of a paper. “What you need is a hustle.”

  Ren pursed his lips and exhaled loudly. Back in Brooklyn he had enough game to rustle up the cash he needed to put him and Laila on the bus. But the streets downtown had drained him. Anyway, the game was rigged against him. Everyone had the jump on him and no one cut him in. The folks who’d been out longest went about their jobs like pros and guarded their turf like gangsters—recycling, window washing, collecting cardboard, or selling beers from shopping carts to feed the two A.M. drinkers when the stores closed.

  “I’m too tired to hustle. What I need is sleep.”

  Flynn held up the nearly rolled joint. “Almost there, brother.”

  “So that’s your hustle then?” Because even the lowest-level street dealers Ren knew in Brooklyn, the ones who sold dimes of schwag, lived better than Flynn in his dingy room at the Cecil.

  Flynn spun the paper closed at the tip. “It’s a medical service.” Then he took the charred grass from its holder, lit it, and waved it around the room, until the flame turned to embers and it began to smoke. “Sage clears your space,” he said, replacing the herbs in the holder. “It also hides the smell of the weed.” He sparked the joint, took a long drag.

  “But you could play that game anywhere, offer your medical services,” Ren said. “I mean, wouldn’t you rather play that game somewhere else? Like the beach for instance.”

  Flynn exhaled an impressive gust and held the joint out to Ren, filter first. “Down here is where I play. These streets are my beat. And my people need me. I undersell the clinics.”

  Ren put the joint to his lips. The hoods in his housing project smoked blunts—fat and brown and sometimes sealed with honey that hot boxed a room in no time so that even though he had been too chickenshit to smoke back then, they assured him he was getting a contact high. Joints are for hippie-ass motherfuckers, one of them had said. Now Ren dragged deep and the smoke stung his lungs. “How’s this your beat?” Ren asked. He passed the joint back.

  Flynn hit it then examined the cherry like it was going to tell him something. He took another drag and shot a stream of smoke up toward the ceiling. “You ever get the feeling there’s nowhere you belong. Like the world isn’t made for you?”

  “Sure.” But in Ren’s case it wasn’t a feeling, it was a certainty, something he was as sure of as the fact of his own heartbeat. Despite the administrators’ best efforts, he didn’t jibe with the JV hoods in juvie, the violent kids from similar backgrounds as his. He had no place back in the housing project where he’d been raised, and the rest of the neighborhood where he’d grown up had passed him by while he was inside. And it wasn’t just the neighborhood. It seemed that the whole world had rushed on ahead, leaving him behind, closing the gap around the small space that had been meant for him. So, yeah, he got the white boy’s drift.

  “Well,” Flynn said, making some small adjustment to the filter, “this is the place to be when you don’t belong anywhere else, when you’ve done things that make the straight world an impossible place to live.”

  Just like me, Ren thought—just like killing a man when you’re not even old enough to get into a PG-13 unaccompanied. “I hear you,” Ren said. “Problem is, maybe I belong, but maybe I don’t like it.”

  “Make your peace with it or don’t,” Flynn said. “But down here your past is your past, no better or worse than anyone else’s. People don’t ask questions and they don’t judge. We’ve all got stories. And trust me, there’s always someone whose story is worse than yours.”

  Ren doubted that, but he didn’t want to share his story with this kid, didn’t want to summon the ghost of the man he killed. And what’s more, he didn’t need to know this kid’s story to add misery and anxiety to his own.

  He hit the joint in silence one more time, then signaled that he was through.

  “Trippy,” Flynn said. “This is your first time. You must have been a sheltered kid.”

  “Something like that,” Ren said.

  Flynn pocketed the roach. “You want to take a shower or something? Not that you need to, I just thought it might be groovy after so much time outside.”

  “Yeah,” Ren said. “Cool.” His words were like bubbles, rolling up slow from deep inside him.

  He took the towel. The hallways expanded and retracted in front of him. He found the bathroom. The hot tap released cold and the cold ran hot. It took him ages—or was it just minutes—to calibrate the temperature. He washed his hair and his body, marveling in the foam on his limbs, the rivulets of dirty water running off, the clean drip that eventually followed.

  The shower filled with steam. The hot water disappeared. But Ren kept the faucet on, enjoying the sharp sting of the cold. When he began to shiver, he stepped out and rubbed the abrasive towel over his body.

  His head felt light, his thoughts floating somewhere. When he got back to the room, Flynn was standing by the door, his bag strung across his chest, like he was on his way out.

  “The room is yours for the night,” he said. “My guess is you could use a real bed.” He ran his fingers through his floppy blond hair. “Anyway, I’m not much of a sleeper, at least not during regular hours. Shit just keeps running through my head.”

  Ren knew and he didn’t object as Flynn closed the door. He didn’t ask where Flynn was going. To the ocean for all he cared. He just lay down, felt the give and groan of the springs, listened to the door click behind him, and closed his eyes. And for a few moments, he was convinced that he was going to sleep, tumble into the same blackout slumber as he did during his one night at the Cecil.

  But his eyes popped open. This room wasn’t his, didn’t feel like his. He didn’t have the key and couldn’t come and go as he pleased. It smelled strange, like that burning sage, and someone else’s sweat.

  He rolled from side to side, trying to pull back that split second of peace that had come when he’d first lain down. It was gone—replaced by the walls coming in, the ceiling crashing down, the unfamiliarity of being in someone else’s space, breathing in someone else’s life. Like juvie. Too much like juvie.

&nb
sp; Ren flung back the covers. He scrambled for his clothes. His mind was flipping over. He pressed back against the walls he swore were coming close.

  Down the hall, into the elevator, across the lobby, and outside. For a few moments the fresh air settled him, brought everything back into balance. But as he headed back to Crocker, things began to shift around him, moving at the edges of his vision. Shadows stretched, became solid, got up and followed him down the street.

  Ren knew what was up. He’d long suspected that it was only a matter of time, what with Laila’s and Puppet’s reminders and his constant lack of sleep, before the ghost of the man he killed stopped confining itself to his mind—to his dreams—but took corporeal form. Now he saw Marcus waiting at the crosswalk. There he was coming down the middle of the Sixth.

  Ren quick-stepped back to Crocker. But the ghost was everywhere, jumping right ahead, then falling behind. Ren unzipped his tent, momentarily comforted by the sight of his sleeping bag. But before he ducked inside, he caught Marcus standing across the way, just to the right of where Puppet kept his lookout.

  He zipped the tent shut. But he was certain the ghost had crossed the street and was now standing outside, biding his time as Ren passed another sleepless hour, waiting until Ren’s mind let go of reason and welcomed him in.

  19

  BLAKE, LOS ANGELES, 2010

  Blake spent the morning hovering near the free clinic on Sixth Street in Skid Row, waiting for the right kind of homeless to emerge, the people who were jonesing to sell him their scrips. In two hours he had a pocket full of Klonopin, Percs, Vikes, generic Ritalin, Oxy, and Valium. It was a cheap scam, easy and quick with a whole bunch of upside and very little risk. When he was loaded up, he scuttled out fast, turning a blind eye to those unmedicated fools raving in the street. Not his fault, Blake told himself. No one forced them to sell.