Twentynine Palms. Daniel Pyne
was, in fact, where Tory found it)? Jack will go out now and get a new one, go right to the store, now, and get a new one—
• or just go—
• go—
• gone.
And Tory? Tory, after racking the cordless house phone in its cradle, will cross his cavernous foyer and hurry up his wide stone staircase, past the broken remains of Jack’s Nokia along the baseboard of the upstairs hallway not far from the dent in the hand-trowelled plaster where it hit and exploded after Tory fastballed it from the bedroom, their grand white master bedroom, where everything is slightly in disarray, women’s clothes scattered, bed unmade, the single golf tee Jack missed and Tory will find, under the bed, behind the corner of the duvet.
He’ll walk to a carved set of double doors salvaged from some foreclosed Oaxacan hacienda, and open them, to stare inside at the Italian marble tile tomb his wife modestly calls their master bathroom. Faint pink tendrils swirl in the tepid water of the massive tub each time another drop plummets from the flat-mouthed Italian spigot.
And like a commuter looking at a traffic accident from a passing car, Tory’s expression will never change. He’ll pull the tub drain, use the fluffy white bath towels to wipe the basin, drop the same towels on the marble floor and mop up the motley pattern of overlapping, bloody-wet shoeprints the EMTs left in the course of their recent visit, using his foot to push the towels around.
On the antique dresser is the teak brush from Fiji that Tory’s mother gave him for his tenth birthday. Tory will brush his hair, worried that it seems thinner than yesterday, possibly irritated by the prospect of early male pattern baldness when Jack’s hair is, no question, healthier and thicker and in no danger of leaving. Tory will brush his hair serenaded by the vacant thrum of the tub draining.
Jack, however, will only know that Tory called.
one
The merciless heat.
The whine of tires on asphalt, growing louder, louder, louder, loud.
A blue belly lizard charges up out of a rivulet creasing the pebbles of the shoulder, skitters to the broken line of white paint that splits the black road in two. It cranes its neck, head jerking up and down, jowls flaring, its tiny heart pumping wildly, its eyes narrow slits of fierce darkness and abject fear. The girl who sent the lizard running walks past, feet scuffing pebbles, her path taking her tight along the shoulder of the road. She doesn’t see the lizard. She’s fourteen, overheated, not really pretty yet, sundress, spandex, Day-Glo zinc oxide striped on her nose and cheeks like war paint.
Her icy blue eyes squint to study the horizon, hopeful, behind egg-shaped sunglasses. The heat comes up through the soles of her Converse All-Stars and sears her feet. She shifts the small Hello Kitty backpack to her other shoulder and takes a swallow from her big bottle of purified water.
Mechanical bumblebee sounds buzz from her backpack. Reaching to a side pocket and finding a flip phone, she has to cup her hand and shade the screen to read the text:
heyyyysup?
The salutation and question. Small fingers flick across the keypad of the phone and text back:
ssdd.
Same stuff, different day.
She senses the car behind her before she hears it. She turns around, legs still pushing her east.
What seems only a mirage—a dazzling black cartoon car—suddenly materializes out of the shimmering puddle of heat distortion on the highway horizon and hovers over it, growing quickly larger. Blaring rock-and-roll music from open windows, the car, a Buick sedan, races forward, at, then directly over and past, the blue belly, its life spared by a miracle of time and place.
The lizard tumbles wildly in the wake of the car, fifty, sixty feet down-highway. Its tail separates from its body, a useless tactic of survival that here only serves to cheat the creature of future mobility, and probably hasten its surrender to the food chain.
Thumb out, the girl watches the Buick whip past her, tossing her hair and dress around. No brake lights, it’s not stopping. She smoothes her dress, fixes her hair, keeps walking.
Her bumblebee ring tone offers comfort:
wysiwyg.
What you see is what you get.
A falcon swoops across the highway, catches the blue belly in its talons, and soars again gracefully out over the brown desert. The lizard thrashes desperately, and in doing so executes itself on the point of a sharp talon.
The girl never sees it, walking and texting:
iyss.
If you say so. And then, an afterthought:
icbw.
It could be worse.
The falcon settles lightly on the top of a broken knob of rock, high on the hill above the highway, and eats a late lunch in the afternoon sun.
r u ok?
gr8. 404. nbd.
kewl.
yup.
The screen indicates no service. The battery icon flashes, low. She folds the phone and puts it away.
A few miles west, on either side of the highway, modular slant-roofed homes squat defiantly on their parceled acres of Mojave Desert. Fierce-looking, wind-whipped zealots with rusted TV aerials for hats, they wait for the God of Fast Food Chains and Mini-malls to send property values skyrocketing, or for the Big Earthquake to put them out of their misery. Higher up, in the ragged hills among giant, broken, burnt-orange boulders turned bloody by the sun, the larger stucco tract homes with industrial air-conditioning and polarized windows and upside-down loans gaze back emptily at traffic that hurries past as if embarrassed.
Joshua trees, thick and spiny thugs with multiple arms held aloft, swarm in from the south in an outrage at the invasion of men; tens of thousands of trees storming the interlopers’ highway and then retreating into the barren, scraped-out, labyrinthine valleys to the north, where the poor subsist, and the wealthy hide their multi-million-dollar desert homes, and where, at the end of a rutted road, Tory Geller and his wife Hannah have thirty-five acres and a purposefully crooked house designed by a famous young Chinese architect.
Inexplicably, just beyond the RESUME 55 speed-limit sign that establishes the eastern boundary of Joshua Tree city proper, the horde stops short, as if what lies ahead, in Twentynine Palms, discourages it. The only Joshua tree in Twentynine Palms is planted in the asphalt courtyard of the Rancho Del Dorotea motel, right next to the bleached turquoise swimming pool.
Jack cannot see it from his balcony.
The balcony in Room 203 looks west, to the lurching litter of civilization that is Joshua Tree and Yucca Valley, strung together like cheap plastic jewelry along Highway 62. It makes Jack smile.
He considers the dying day, and the lights beginning to glow across the desert, and for a moment he can’t remember why he’s here. Sometimes the world is clear to Jack; sometimes it’s an impenetrable abstract of shapes, colors, vectors, and emotions, strange values and stranger contrast.
His shirt is soaked through. The rasping of crickets soothes him. From his pocket he takes a pack of filterless cigarettes, then a platinum lighter, fires up and smokes, holding the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger like a movie star. After a moment, he balances the cigarette ash-up on the balcony railing, and starts to unbutton his shirt.
Inside, the air-conditioning control knob is broken off, stuck on the highest setting, blowing frigid air, while the open balcony door blows desert heat. Jack strips to the bathing suit he’s been wearing since he left Los Angeles. There are those thin, abrasive motel towels in the bathroom. He finishes