Cut to the Quick (24 page)

He wasn’t looking at her, but at the strands of hair he held. He released them and grabbed another lock at her scalp.

“Dad’s been drunk a lot again.”

The “again” cut her. She swiveled her chair and took his hands in hers. The dismay in his eyes nearly undid her. She burned with anger at Mark for having caused this. She could handle just about anything, but she couldn’t tolerate someone hurting her children. She’d dreaded this moment with Luddy. He took family disturbances harder than Dahlia, who had always been more inward-directed than her brother, more concerned with herself and her issues. As long as her life wasn’t affected, she cared little. Dena had worked to balance this trait with mixed success, fully aware of where that could lead the teenager.

While a happy boy, Luddy had always been the more
sensitive and intuitive of her children, aware of slight changes in his environment and in the people close to him.

She took a breath before beginning. “Luddy, things have been tough lately for Daddy. He was close to Mr. Mercer and he liked Mrs. Richards a lot. Their deaths were shocking, and it has affected Daddy. But he’s going to be okay, sweetie. We’re going to be okay.” It would be years before he would realize the multitude of ways she’d painted a brighter picture to spare him. She hoped that he would at least understand and respect it.

He frowned, as he did when he was in a dark mood. His supple young skin was too elastic to form wrinkles, but made three ridges between his eyebrows. Dena visualized the creased brow of his adult face.

“Why does Daddy keep getting drunk? It makes him sick.”

A voice sounded in her head.

Your father is weak
.

Who was she to call Mark weak? Standing with Bowie on the terrace of the Malibu house, the coolly logical part of her mind had warned: Don’t do it.

She had nerve, calling Mark weak, even if only in her mind.

With her thumb, she smoothed the ridges between Luddy’s eyebrows as if she could force the worry from him. She pulled him into her arms and hugged him hard, breathing deeply of his neck. He was growing up quickly, but she thought she could still detect a whiff of that sweet baby scent, that fresh pure smell that was inevitably slipping away. She had the sad realization that recent events had hastened his march into adulthood.

She wanted her children’s lives to be what her childhood hadn’t been—happy and carefree. From her own experience she knew that sad, tough early years marred
a person, like a strawberry birthmark. The stain faded over time, but never completely disappeared. One could always find it, if one looked hard enough.

As she gazed into her son’s troubled eyes, she knew that the chickens had come home to roost.

“Sometimes adults do things that are hard for children to understand. Please always remember one thing, Luddy. Your daddy and I love you very much.”

She tried a smile. It felt stiff and false. She kept it on anyway. Smiling was part of her profession. “Everything’s going to be fine. Okay?”

His eyes grew hopeful. “Okay.”

She released him. “Go get your sister and let’s go eat.”

“Great. I’m starving. Aren’t we going to wait for Dad?”

“He has some things to take care of.” One lie following another. It was all too easy.

Luddy again took her hand. “Mom, don’t worry.”

“I’ll be down in a minute.” She swatted him on the butt as he ran out.

She barely made it to the door, quietly closing it, before she broke down. She stumbled to the bathroom, sobbing, leaning against the sink. She wet a washcloth with cold water and pressed it against her face.

Snuffling, she looked in the mirror and splashed on more cold water to reduce the puffiness. She administered Visine and began fixing her hair and makeup, still feeling shaken.

She didn’t know much right now, but she knew one thing. Her fling with Bowie Crowley was not helping anything. When something deep inside her began to wail at the thought of giving him up, she drowned it out with that cool voice of reason she’d been ignoring.

“It was a one-night stand during a time of emotional distress. It’s over.”

As for Mark, one day at a time.

TWENTY-TWO

K
issick reached
Indio, the ugly stepdaughter in the strip of fashionable desert towns that began with Palm Springs. Continuing south, he passed through the aptly named town of Thermal before reaching Highway 111, which would take him down the Salton Sea’s eastern shore. The ribbon of highway slithered across the desert, moving up and down as if riding rolling ocean waves. He drove alongside a long train hauling containers from China and FedEx shipping trucks along the Southern Pacific tracks.

The sun was slipping behind the Santa Rosa Mountains to the west, tipping the peaks of the Orocopia and Chocolate Mountain ranges to the east with purple, and turning the Sea into a golden mirror. The land exulted in contrasts. Fields abundant with grapes, bell peppers, and cows grazing on alfalfa were across the highway from the flat expanse of natural desert with its sandstone, sagebrush, and manzanita. The flatlands between the mountains on the east had been appropriated by the military for live bombing areas.

Fields of overgrown palm and date trees, remnants of building foundations, and partially constructed concrete walls attested to abandoned moneymaking schemes. The area had lured dreamers for decades. Early in the last century, the Salton Sea was born because of a miscalculation in entrepreneurial vision on the part of men who
sought to make the desert bloom with irrigation water from the Colorado River brought across the mountains via canals. Southern California was adept at expropriating others’ water. An engineering mishap diverted the Colorado River into an ancient lakebed crusted with salt, creating the largest lake in California, thirty-five miles long, fifteen miles wide, and 195 feet below sea level.

The breach was finally repaired. The Imperial and Coachella Valleys became important agricultural regions. Visionaries then set their sights on the Sea as a vacation destination. But its glory days of speedboat regattas and celebrity sightings in the fifties and sixties were long gone, the shoreline resorts destroyed by hundred-year storms, the creeping salinity of the Sea—now 25 percent saltier than the ocean—and the slow determination of the desert. With no outlet, the water evaporated, leaving salt behind.

The Sea, against all odds, remained, fed by agricultural runoff. It still has its promoters, claiming the reports of its death are widely exaggerated. As the largest inland body of water on the Pacific flyway for migrating birds, it attracts one of the greatest concentrations of wildfowl in the country. Shortly before Kissick’s visit, birders came from distant corners to see a rare Ross’s Gull, an Arctic bird that flew several hundred miles farther south than normal, to feed in the muck.

Kissick knew the Sea was close when he detected its unique smell of sulfur and decay. It was especially pungent during the late summer, when algae overgrowth caused the tilapia, the only surviving fish species from those seeded decades ago, to die in even greater numbers.

The powerful odor was potent enough to waft to the tony
boutiques in Palm Desert, thirty-five miles northwest.

Kissick drove past the once-hopeful shoreline towns—Mecca, Corvina, Desert Shores, Bombay Beach—held together by paper clips and duct tape. Cobbled-together mobile homes and abandoned hotels lined broken streets near collapsing boat docks. Souls seeking respite from the rat race lived here, alongside those on the run and those who had washed up, like the beached tilapia gasping for air.

He entered Niland. The commercial district was right on the highway. There was a bar, the Ski Inn, a remnant from the area’s salad days. There were dune buggies and vintage motorcycles in front—a gathering place for aficionados of the obscure. There was a small hardware store and a five-and-dime. A take-out stand advertised hamburgers, tacos, and pupusas.

The buildings were low to the ground, like any desert town, as if avoiding looking the sun in the eye. Most were built of utilitarian concrete blocks. Some were painted baby blue. Others sunflower yellow. Others pink. The cheap paint was the sole stylistic flourish.

Jenkins’s Stop ’N Go Market and gas station stood out. It was on a big corner lot. Kissick pulled onto a side street off the highway across from Jenkins’s to have a look. A neon sign on a pole brilliantly announced the store name in yellow and green. A series of red arrows flashing in a moving arc directed motorists inside. A wooden sign on the roof was encircled by chasing white lights.

There were three gas pumps. A sign on the road announced the price per gallon for regular, unleaded, and diesel, along with the price of a carton of Marlboro Lights, a six-pack of Bud Lite, and a gallon of milk. Bait was for sale. The property was surrounded by a fence
made of chrome car bumpers atop wooden posts. The red stone mini-mart was built in a hacienda style, with arches lining a covered porch.

Behind the gas station was a house in the same style as the mini-mart, surrounded by a chain-link fence. The front yard boasted a well-established cactus garden with some otherworldly looking specimens as tall as the tile roof. Succulents were tucked between decorative boulders. Parked in the driveway in front of the detached garage were a tired Saturn sedan and a perfectly restored Triumph TR6 sports car painted British racing green. Kissick guessed it was from the seventies. The lights from the house and porch picked up a metallic flake in its undercoat.

Kissick didn’t see anyone around. He took off, crossing the highway and heading down Main Street. On the corner of the building across from Jenkins’s was a hand-painted sign that said “Salvation Mountain,” with an arrow pointing toward the Chocolate Mountains.

The domiciles in the town were nearly all mobile homes on lots demarcated by chain-link fences. Two and three were slammed together, sometimes with a brick chimney rising from one end among the aluminum siding, like a granite headstone in a cemetery.

Yards were landscaped with cacti, succulents, and colored gravel or left natural with hard-packed sandy dirt and dry scrub brush. Grass and flowers, while rampant in the gated golf-course desert communities to the northwest, were rare luxuries here and were as carefully tended as hothouse orchids. Statuary abounded: wishing wells, cement burros, deer. Found objects—auto parts, farm tools, old mining implements—were transformed into decorative items. Some decorations, such as the plastic Holstein on the roof of one house, had no discernable
genesis, like many of the people who ended up in this desert hamlet.

Kissick found the sheriff’s substation. It was a square, flat-roofed prefab building on a dry grass lot where a tall flagpole flew the U.S. and California flags. Shades were pulled down inside over the windows. A window air conditioner hummed. A wooden placard on posts announced that this was the Imperial County Sheriff’s Department in white with green letters, matching the colors of the SUV in the driveway and the patrol car at the curb. In the back was a satellite dish.

Beside the sheriff’s substation was an old one-room jail, circa 1920, with thick walls and a pitched roof. Railroad ties braced the shingled awning over the porch. Old wagon wheels adorned the walls. The small windows in the front door and around the sides were fitted with thick iron bars. On the slab floor inside, a sleeping bag was wadded in one corner.

Across the street, people sat in resin chairs on the porch of a mobile home, talking and laughing. They were young Latino adults, friends and family, having drinks and kicking back after the workday was over. All talking stopped when Kissick got out of his car and walked up the front path to the sheriff’s substation.

Just then a middle-aged man drove up in a mammoth Chevy Suburban. He wore a well-creased Angels cap over a brush cut. His short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt was snug around his belly over rumpled khakis.

Earlier in the day, Detective Mike Arnold had told Kissick he would be driving his wife’s “ ‘burban.” There was a trailer hitch on the back. A bumper sticker said: “My child’s an honor student at Desert Middle School.”

“Mike? Jim Kissick. Thanks for coming out on such short notice.” Arnold had told him that the substation
was not manned all the time. Any deputies there were based out of El Centro, thirty-five miles south.

“No problem. Welcome to Niland.”

“Gee, thanks. Not much to do around here,” Kissick observed.

“Nope. Just drink, smoke, talk, and fuck. This time of year, it’s too hot even for much of that.”

Arnold knocked on the door of the substation. A young deputy opened it. His nametag said R. Villalobos. The short sleeves on his dun-colored uniform barely hid a tattoo on his upper arm.

The interior was as spartan as Kissick had expected from the outside. A couple of desks, chairs, phones, computers, and maps.

“What we’ve got in Niland is a lot of drugs,” Arnold said. “And everything that comes with it. There’s high unemployment. Lots of transients. You’ve got Slab City.…”

“Slab City?”

“Oh, hell yeah. Slab City is a squatters’ paradise. It’s on the site of what used to be Camp Dunlap, a Navy base that was decommissioned after World War Two. Everything was razed, and all that’s left are the guard station, bunkers, and concrete building foundation slabs. During the winter, as many as 3,000 people park their RVs there. A bunch of nutcases live there year-round. There’s no water, power, or other services. But they’ve got a social club and even a church.”

“What’s Salvation Mountain? I saw a sign for it.”

“That’s on the way to Slab City. That’s another piece of work. For decades, this old guy has been painting this mountain and pretty much everything else around it—trees, rocks, vehicles—with the Word. He’s got biblical quotes, praise the Lord, Jesus is love, repent sinners.… He’s gonna save the world.”

“How do you paint a mountain?”

“With a lot of time and a lot of paint. About thirty thousand gallons of it, I understand. I learned this from my wife. She’s given the guy paint. All this is on government land, by the way. The government came close to bulldozing it until the do-gooders got involved, claiming the mess was folk art.”