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 his cigarette, flicks it off the balcony in a shower of ash, then closes both doors and walks down the stairs to the pool to take up residence under the solitary Joshua tree, on a vinyl-woven chaise that is almost brand-new.
For a few minutes he’s still hurtling down the highway. With his eyes closed Jack can feel the speed, conjure landscapes to flicker past in his peripheral vision.
Slowly, his body sinks into the warm plastic webbing, and he brakes. A liquid heat washes him. He arranges the towel over his eyes, inhales the pungent smell of industrial laundering and disinfectant. The setting sun scrapes its hot needles across his skin. Now, finally, perhaps he will sleep.
“Zach. Zachary, don’t you go in the deep end!”
Splashing sounds bring Jack to consciousness under the towel. He’s missed sunset, and the desert sky glows cobalt blue. Pale orange neon lights that rim the eaves of the motel are sputtering to life.
Jack adjusts the towel. The water in the pool at his feet is choppy, someone in it, splashing.
“If you go into that end, young man, we’re going back inside.” A woman’s voice ricochets, hollow, around the concrete courtyard, followed by more splashing, and a child’s imitation of an outboard motor. Lips to water.
“Zach—”
Jack doesn’t look up. He doesn’t need to. He paints a mental picture of the pale, plump woman with jet-black perm standing flaccid-thighed in plus-size swimwear at the end of the pool, glowering as her little tyke flails his way toward the five-foot mark, deaf to her threats. Former high-school prom princess turned pumpkin, her lips flattened into a humorless slit. Foam flip-flops slap over wet concrete, water churns—
“Ooowww!”
“You heard me.”
“That hurts!”
“Out.”
“I could still touch bottom.”
“Let’s go.”
The boy’s reluctant, soggy footsteps recede into the shadows, and Jack sits up in time to catch the greenish-white, fleshy backs of a woman’s legs as she leads her son toward a unit on the ground level, at the far end of the motel. Her white shorts gleam iridescent, lit from below by the pool lights.
What is Tory’s theory? Something about women, marriage, children, the time bombs mothers plant deep inside their daughters; hard body spoilage, breasts drooping, butts dropping, faces inflating like bread dough, the tight hats of sensible hair, car pools, Botox, and the desperation. Jack rises from the chaise and leaps out over the pool, arching his back, knifing into the tepid water.
Opening his eyes to the sting of chlorine, Jack grazes the pool bottom with his stomach, and then lets his momentum bring him back slowly to the surface. The hot night air inexplicably gives him goose bumps.
Jack floats easily.
“I lost the sight in my left eye when I was twenty.” Three gentle taps to the business end of Jack’s unlit cigarette, then he spins it in his fingers, forestalling the inevitable trip outside to smoke it. “If you look close, the pupil is distorted. Like a teardrop. But I don’t consider myself disabled or anything. I don’t even think about it all that much anymore.” Salisbury steak is the blue plate special, and Jack ordered his at the bar. “You adjust,” Jack says, answering what he always assumes is the unasked question. “I’m supposed to wear glasses, clear lenses, for protection. Of the, you know, good eye.” Jack is making conversation, enjoying the thrum of his own voice. “I don’t know why I never have.”
The
