Wonder Valley

by Ivy Pochoda

  “He was dying,” James said.

  “You think I didn’t know?”

  “My dad said he only had a few days left.”

  “So that makes it okay that he was murdered. I’ll remember to tell that one to the judge next time I’m called up.”

  “It was self-defense.”

  “Kid, I know Sam. I know him better than I know my damn self. I hear him in my head every night. I know that he’s got a violence in him that would scare the darkest creature on earth. I also know he didn’t have the strength to slap that girl. So when she says self-defense, I’m going to say bullshit.”

  Blake inched forward, pinning James to the wall. “It was,” James said.

  “Imagine this,” Blake said. “Imagine someone murders your best friend. Imagine she lies to you, telling you it was self-defense. And imagine you will never have the opportunity to prove her wrong because you can’t report your friend’s death on account of the life he lived and the trouble it would bring to you. Now imagine you have to spend the rest of your life knowing you let him die undignified. That he just gets erased from the earth like he didn’t matter.” Blake pressed his nose right against James’s face. “Can you imagine that? Can you imagine living with something like that for the rest of your life?”

  The boy was crying now and Blake didn’t even have the knife to him.

  “Are you trying?” Blake said. “Are you trying to imagine that?”

  James either nodded or started crying harder, it was hard to tell.

  “Good,” Blake said.

  “I don’t know where she lives,” James said. “She was with my dad for a few years, but they split. She’s in the desert somewhere around Cathedral City. She teaches tennis.”

  “Tennis?” Blake rocked back on his heels. “Tennis?” he repeated. He stood up. His knees popped. He cracked his neck and stretched. He shouldered his backpack.

  “What are you going to do?” The kid was standing now.

  “Too late, kid,” Blake said. “Too late to ask questions.” He hoped he sounded hard. He hoped he sounded like Sam.

  Blake turned and headed for the fire door. But James was on him, tackling him from behind. He got ahold of Blake’s backpack, yanking it and pulling Blake backward. Blake struggled free of the straps. The zipper ripped open, the contents spilling onto the roof.

  Blake squatted down, but James pushed him aside. He’d picked up the dreamcatcher. “This was his,” James said. “Sam had it above his bed in the cabin on the ranch. You must have hung it there.”

  “I must have,” Blake said.

  James sifted through the rest of the stuff that had burst from Blake’s bag. “You have all his stuff.” He picked up The Chess Puzzle Book, thumbed the pages, and let it fall. Then he opened the chess set. He selected a pawn and flipped it over in his hand. He stared at that pawn so long and hard that Blake worried he’d gone into a trance.

  “You kept all this.” James held the pawn up to the gray sky.

  “You think I’d just discard my best friend’s stuff? You thought I’d throw it aside like you probably did with his body.” Blake dug in his pocket for a cigarette, then stopped himself from wasting time.

  James was staring at the pawn. “They buried him out in the desert. My dad and Britt and two of the other interns. They didn’t let me come.”

  “Did they leave a marker?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You probably think people like me and Sam don’t matter. But we deserve to be remembered.”

  “I think about Sam every day.”

  Blake pushed James aside with the toe of his shoe and began gathering his stuff. “I bet you do.”

  James was crying again, harder now. “I do,” he said.

  “Sure, kid, whatever you say.” Blake didn’t have time for this boy’s trauma of seeing Sam get murdered.

  “I can’t sleep. I never sleep.”

  “I’m sorry Sam’s murder turned you insomniac,” Blake said. He fished in his pack for a mostly empty bottle of Klonapin. “For what ails you.”

  “It won’t help,” James said.

  Blake finished stuffing his possessions into his bag. “In my humble opinion, pills help.”

  “Not me.”

  “Yeah,” Blake said. “What makes you special?” He’d shouldered his bag. He was ready to go.

  James was sitting on the roof, his knees drawn up to his chest, his head bent low. “I killed him. I killed Sam.”

  Blake dropped his bag. “How’s that now?”

  “It was me. He thought I was my brother. He grabbed my arm looking for the place where he’d cut Owen. When he didn’t see it, he called me a brujo and grabbed his knife.”

  Brujo—that damn curse. The one that had undone him in the end. “Jesus,” Blake said. “Fuck.”

  He could see it. He could finally see it—how the big man died, undone by his spiritual mumbo jumbo, too drugged or delirious to understand that there were two boys, too stubborn to listen. No wonder Blake’s mind had never quite wrapped around the scene in the cabin with the redhead. No wonder his imagination had failed.

  Five years of seeing it wrong. Five years of halfheartedly hunting the wrong person.

  “So,” James said. His eyes were red. His nose was dripping.

  “So what?”

  “What are you going to do to me?”

  Blake’s knife was in his pocket. He reached for it.

  The kid looked pathetic, crouched on the grimy roof in the drab early dawn. So he’d killed Sam? Look what it had done to him. Look where it had landed him.

  “Shit,” Blake said. Because the kid wasn’t that much different from him from time to time—wallowing, weeping, messed up on whatever it took to get him to silence Sam’s voice. The big man had done that too, done it to Blake. Sam had brought Blake low enough. He wasn’t going to let the big man sink him further.

  “Fuck it,” Blake said. “Fuck it all.” He took his hand out of his pocket and found a smoke instead. “Look at you. Look at this place. If this is what killing Sam did to you, I think we’re even. If he haunts your dreams, we’re square.”

  Somewhere an ambulance was screaming through downtown. Blake glanced across the rooftop toward the building opposite with its grimy row of darkened windows.

  He picked up his pack off the roof and slung it over his shoulder a final time. Then he opened it and dug out Sam’s shit—the dreamcatcher, the chessboard, the chess book. He dropped these on James. “I thought I needed his stuff to remember, but fuck me if I’ll ever forget.”

  He headed for the fire door. He didn’t look back. He didn’t need to see the kid sniffling and sobbing. He knew too well what that looked like.

  Outside the hotel he lit his smoke, then walked to the bus stop.

  The sky was the dull color of dirty sheets. Downtown was waking up. People from Skid Row were trekking west for their daily hustles. Hipsters were walking clean pit bulls and yappy Chihuahuas. The traffic was already thickening with delivery trucks, cars, and cabs.

  Blake should have left ages ago. From the side pocket of his pack he pulled out the same road map of California he and Sam had used to get to Wonder Valley. He ran a jagged thumbnail down to the border, to where the Sonoran Desert began east of San Diego. He was sure somewhere in that hot, wild place there was a cabin for him.

  There were two tourists at the bus stop, both of whom were wearing their backpacks on their chests. One was filming the other, like there was something worth remembering about this particular moment. Blake opened his map again. It nearly came apart in his hand. The paper was soft, the lines and print faded. He had to bring it up close to his nose to make it out.

  Blake was so engrossed in the map that he almost missed him. If it hadn’t been for the angry screech of wheels, he wouldn’t have even looked up.

  James was running down Main, not on the sidewalk, but threading his way through traffic. He was moving quickly, weaving in and out of cars. He was stripping off his cloth
es. People were rolling down their windows, shouting at him to getthefuckoutofthestreet.

  Blake watched him pass the bus stop. James was naked now. The tourist filming his girlfriend turned and trained the camera on James, catching him as he skirted a bike cop. James darted in front of a city bus coming in the opposite direction. Blake stepped onto the street, cutting in front of the cameraman to get a better look. He saw James slow for a moment and then stagger slightly.

  The bus came. Blake got on. Bystanders were holding up their cell phones as James passed, making this scene permanent.

  Main was a chorus of honking horns, screeching tires, enraged drivers shouting at James as if he was the source of all their frustrations—as if this one man, moving on foot through traffic, would bring ruin to their days. Blake took a seat and folded his map, silently urging James on, hoping he’d keep going, that he’d snarl and snag these drivers, tangle their commute. Sitting behind their wheels, moving from point A to point B, they didn’t understand what it was to need to escape.

  30

  TONY, LOS ANGELES, 2010

  The mural is beautiful, which is what caught Tony’s eye in the first place—muted colors on the right showing a ribbon of road, a freeway to be precise, slicing through the drab downtown skyline. Then as it crawls to the left, the colors begin to brighten, grow bold, leap off the wall in a fluorescent tropical explosion ending in collision between the sand, the ocean, and the sky.

  It’s only when he takes a closer look that he sees that the artist has painted the outline of a man crossing the threshold where the freeway gives out to the beach. And the man is naked, or rather he’s flesh toned.

  Tony’s gripping Britt’s shoulder and staring at the wall. People have scooted their tents and carts to either side to make way for the painter to do his work.

  “What?” Britt says.

  The artist is a young black man. He’s wearing a dark hoodie and his hair sticks up in unruly tufts. He rattles his can and unleashes a spray of paint, electrifying the sky above a stand of palm trees.

  “What?” Britt says again.

  Tony pulls her over to the wall. “Is that—” He’s pointing at the shape of what must be James. “Is that?” It has to be. There’s no way this scene unfolding on the wall is anything but the naked runner coming down the 110. Because it’s exactly as he experienced it, an event brimming with possibility, something containing a secret beauty to those who knew how to look. “Oh my God,” he says.

  The artist rattles the can again but before he hits the wall, he checks over his shoulder and sees Tony and Britt watching him. He pulls his hoodie over his head and resumes his work.

  “Excuse me,” Tony says.

  The painter finishes a patch of sky and turns. “You’re breaking my flow,” he says. He picks up a different can and returns to his mural. Tony and Britt watch as he shades the sky with brilliant streaks of yellow.

  “Is that yesterday?” Tony asks.

  The artist drops the yellow paint. “That’s some philosophical shit you’re asking. This here is today.” Then he points at the wall, “And this is forever and always.”

  “But is that James?” Britt says.

  “I don’t know a James.” The artist steps back and tilts his head side to side. “Do me a favor,” he says. “Walk by it real fast. Tell me what you think.”

  Neither Tony nor Britt moves.

  “You’re not going to do me this thing? You’re just going to ask me questions about my work?”

  Tony walks along the wall left to right. The mural is still beautiful, but not different from when he was standing still. “Nice,” he says.

  “Other direction,” the artist says. “And double-time it.”

  Tony figures he’ll humor him just in case.

  He trots along the mural, his eyes trained on the wall. And then it happens—like the wall is coming to life, like he’s back on the 110, leaving the dull downtown skyline behind, like he’s really moving, dancing, accelerating while the city stands still. Except that this time he gets somewhere. He’s not taken down by the cops on the grimy outskirts of MacArthur Park. He makes it out of the city, out of the stop and go. He arrives at the ocean. He comes unstuck.

  “Oh my God,” he says. Because it’s so real, so perfectly perfect that it takes him a moment to come back down to the grim reality of this street corner. “That’s exactly what it was like,” he says.

  The artist gives him a wry half smile. “This your story too?”

  “Not really,” Tony says. “But I’d like to know how it ends.”

  “So is that James or not?” Britt asks.

  “That nude dude?” the painter says. “I know him as Flynn.”

  “James Flynn,” Britt says. “Did you see him on the news or something?”

  “In the flesh.”

  Britt steps closer to the mural. “Where?”

  “This is some detective-level inquiry.” The painter begins searching through his cans. “On the freeway. That’s where I saw him. And then again later.”

  Tony wants to ask the guy if he saw him, too, if he noticed him coming down the 110 after James, if he’d struck the artist enough to commit Tony to his mural.

  “Where later?” Britt asks.

  “At the beach.”

  “You followed him to the beach?”

  “Lady, my business is my own. All I’m going to tell you is I wasn’t following your boy. I just encountered him, fortuitous like.” The guy finds the can he was looking for. He rattles it and steps back from the wall, considering.

  Tony wants to stop him before he adds more to the mural. The artist uncaps the can, but doesn’t aim. “So I’m guessing you two are just going to stand there until you squeeze the whole damn thing out of me. Here’s the basics. There I am driving down the 110. I’m going south. It’s my first time. I’m not much for four wheeling. So I’m looking out my window—you should see the shit drivers get up to in this city—and there’s your boy headed in my direction, but across the divider, running against traffic. I’m guessing you know that he was in his birthday suit.” He cocks his head side to side, searching his mural. “I called out to him. But let’s just say, I didn’t need anyone looking into my driving credentials. So I wasn’t about to draw unnecessary heat. And I thought that was the end of it.”

  He finds a spot on the wall that suits him.

  “Then I saw him again where the highway lets out onto the beach.” He turns and looks from Britt to Tony. “You two ever been to the beach?” He shakes the can again. “The fuck am I asking? Of course you have. But that was the first time for me and my mom. I promised I’d take her. Not to the tourist area, mind you. We went north until I was sure we were the only people around. I found a cove or some shit, just a place for the two of us to see what’s what with the water. No one but us.”

  He sounds sad, like the memory of yesterday’s beach trip might be too much.

  “So when I drove back, that’s when I saw him. Still running. Still naked. Still looking like he didn’t have a care in the goddamn world. So I pulled over just before the road curved back to the freeway. Almost hit a dude riding a bike and balancing a surfboard. I watched him run to the edge of the water.”

  “I know the place,” Tony says. It’s just down from the fancy beach club his wife wanted to join.

  “Did he go in the water?” Britt asks.

  “I don’t know. I had to get a move on.” He rattles the can and approaches the far left corner of the mural. For a moment it seems to Tony as if he’s signing his name. But when the words blossom, the script reads Laila Davis, RIP.

  It’s been nearly twenty-four hours since James took his run, but Tony knows that he and Britt are going out to the beach to the place where this graffiti artist had seen him head out over the sand. But he wants to jog past the mural one more time before they go, wants to reach back for those twenty minutes when he’d been unencumbered, when he’d felt free to run, to chase something that was unreachable. When he had
n’t minded that he couldn’t catch the very thing he’d wanted. Because, he realizes now, it’s okay to know some things exist without grasping them.

  “Let’s go,” he says. He’ll leave the mural for now and only return when this whole episode has faded to a dream that he can barely recall—when he will need to remember.

  THEY TAKE THE BUS, SOMETHING IN TONY’S TWELVE YEARS IN LOS ANGELES he’s never done. He doesn’t mind that it’s going to take more than an hour to make it to Santa Monica because he knows this is the last stop on this wild ride. The bus crawls through downtown and then gets on the 10, where it stop-starts through the dregs of the morning commute.

  They pass over the old homes of West Adams, the freeway-sooted Victorians and Craftsmen. Baldwin Hills rises on their left. The Hollywood Hills on their right. They bring the sun with them as they go, as if the bus is pulling back the drab sky, rolling it out to sea.

  The bus exits the freeway at Bundy and wheezes through the wide, clean streets of Santa Monica until it emerges on Ocean a block from the beach.

  Tony and Britt get off. He’s always surprised by the temperature drop by the ocean and by how the Pacific doesn’t have the same briny smell he associates with other beaches. They head to the spot he believes the artist had been talking about, the place where the PCH curves onto the 10.

  He’s not sure what to expect and is reconciled to finding nothing. He’s pretty sure a naked man wouldn’t have made it through a day and a night on a popular public beach without getting rounded up.

  Britt barely spoke the entire ride. All she said was, “Blake couldn’t have followed him that far. Could Blake have followed him that far?” She repeated this or some version of this until she had convinced herself that it was the only truth.

  Tony has to agree.

  They leave the paved walkway, dodge surfers and people on beach cruisers, and head onto the beach. They take off their shoes. The sand is cool.

  The strand is filling up. The sun’s out and the clouds are stripped away. The water’s sparkling, catching the crystalline sky. Britt’s looking to the left and the right, scanning the sand for James. But Tony’s got his eyes trained on the water. It’s like he’s never seen it before, or noticed it—the whole reason people flocked to this city, just a few miles from his front door and he took it for granted, like it didn’t matter, like it belonged to someone else.