Sing Her Down, page 14
She picks herself up. There’s a chicken wire gate, double thick, and a broken section of wall. She hoists herself over this and hits the embankment—a blanket of grit and grimed flora.
The embankment runs downhill to the freeway. The growth is dense in places, sparse in others.
Florida inches down the hillside and crouches behind a blue-flowering bush.
She waits for her heart to slow.
She waits for the sirens to fade.
It does. They do. Then it’s just her, the ragged intake of her breath, and the whir of an occasional car.
The freeway is nearly empty. Each car seems like an unlawful trespasser—a nefarious alien invader. Florida imagines anyone on the move must be up to no good.
Her entire life in Los Angeles, and this is a wholly new outlook, this hillside by the freeway. It’s a raw, vulnerable vantage that makes her aware of her pedestrian handicap.
In her Jag, she’d owned this section of the 10, dismissed it with the pressure of her toe on the accelerator. She’d weaved and merged—easy driving, a straight shot to or from the beach. Such a simple stretch of freeway she could drive it with her eyes closed. In fact, she had, allowing herself the moment of blackness when she was both in control and control could be snatched away.
She’d been on foot on the 10 too. Breakdowns and accidents and escapes from strangers’ cars with Ronna. She’d felt the rushing roar and suck of passing traffic. She’d heard it squeal and screech a few feet from where she walked. But she’d never been on the embankment before.
Florida stares between the branches of the bush that shields her from view, across the eight-lane gulf of freeway. The opposite embankment is denser than where she sits—a full covering of rich green vines interrupted by a waterfall of trash dumped from the top of the slope. Car seats, playpens, a mattress, part of a chair, part of another chair, a shopping cart, two strollers, and several garbage bags that spew their guts.
Florida leans back and stretches her legs. She glances west and for the first time notices a pop-up canopy a few feet away, the sort you’d find at a farmer’s market or tailgate. The black tarp advertises an energy drink rumored to get kids high.
Beneath the canopy she can see a camp—cookstove, sleeping bag, a tangle of plastic bags and bundles. Above it there’s another tent camouflaged by the bracken.
Florida stands, taking in the hints of a community clustered in the ragged bushes—the clothing she now sees is hung to dry on the wall. The bedding draped in a spindly tree. Buckets for water and washing. A cooler and a storage container.
Her eyes move to the freeway, where someone is running, cutting across the sparse traffic from the eastbound lanes and over the divider to the westbound. He’s waving his arms and bellowing a war cry. What’s he holding? A stick? A crowbar? A jagged piece of metal?
He’s locked in on Florida, gesturing wildly as he fords the freeway, making two cars swerve and slow. Then he’s on the embankment.
She is a trespasser, an intruder, a threat.
And now she’s running again.
This time down the embankment on the diagonal, away from the man who is heading straight for her. Over the bracken and vines, her foot caught on a root, a branch tearing her shirt.
The man is behind her now, still waving his piece of metal, still shouting his incoherent threats.
She’s on the freeway, running, her pace mocked by the few passing cars. A couple honk. One offers a ride.
The man on the embankment is no longer yelling. He’s defended his turf, leaving Florida to find her own—a patch of her hometown where she can rest and regroup, a small square of Los Angeles to call home for even a few hours.
Her legs ache. Her shins feel splintered and her feet blistered. Florida doubles over, hands on knees, her breath a ragged harmonica gasp.
And then there are sirens. They spur her westward until—
Until she can’t go on. Her legs are on fire. Her feet numb.
Florida sits on the guardrail. She knows the exit well—the accident investigation site pull-off just before La Brea—a short service road that curves off the freeway.
She’s too exposed, just cooling her heels along the 10. But the AIS will provide shelter and protection in the form of a wall that shades it from the passing traffic. A few more steps, and that is all.
There are no cars in the investigation site. The wall blocks the scant freeway noise. Behind Florida is a dense tangle of trees. Beyond that the city streets of a residential neighborhood, too close to the 10 to be desirable.
Five minutes and Florida’s heart rate slows.
She breathes deeply, drinking in the quiet of this alcove off the freeway, the faint rustle of the trees, and the deep, unlikely silence.
And something else—the tang of human excrement. Fresh and specific. Her eyes cut to the side and find a bucket, next to it a torn towel on a branch.
She stands and looks behind her. A few ornaments—ribbons, old holiday decorations, two torn Chinese lanterns, and bits of mirror are hanging from a bush. Deeper into the trees prayer flags dangle from the branches, marking a definite perimeter.
The wind picks up, bringing with it the tinkle of bells and chimes. Florida’s skin prickles.
Before she can move on, a man steps from the trees. He’s white—with a dark patina of sun and dirt—pushing past middle age. His hair is an uneven, woolly cap of gray and black. A beard has patched his sunken cheeks, sparing the shadowed crevices that crater deep into his skull.
He’s dressed in dark, loose-fitting pants that might once have been another color and a shirt that might not have always been a shirt but perhaps a dress or even a blanket. He looks like a scarecrow from some distant farmland.
Florida freezes, trapped and terrified.
“Welcome.”
“I’m not—”
“But you are here.”
The smell from the bucket is overpowering, but Florida fights hard not to show her disgust. She glances up at the sky, where the sun is the color of shale.
“You’re tired.” He scratches his beard. “Thirsty, I bet. You shouldn’t be running wild along the freeway. The dust and exhaust will dry you out. There’s water if you want.”
Florida casts her eyes around the camp.
“You don’t think it’s clean, do you? Well, it’s clean. You don’t have a smoke on you? You don’t have nothing, do you?”
“Nothing.”
“Well look at that. You have nothing and I have something and you’re hesitating to take it. At least move away from where you’re standing. You can’t like the smell much. Shame is the one thing I can’t afford out here, but I do my best to keep everything tidy. You know what’s the first thing they do when they take you to the hospital? They check your feet. Foot health—that’s a sign. If you’ve got rot or fungus they send you home—doesn’t matter if you’ve been shot. Doesn’t matter if your intestines are poking out, you’re having a heart attack. If you’ve got the black feet, you best turn right around.”
Florida looks down at her boots, afraid of the blistered, raw state of her toes and heels.
“My sense is that you’re a long ways from that sort of trouble yet, but I’m also saying that it could be coming. Change is what happens when you’re killing time, just putting one day on top of the next. Day one through thirty out here feel like the world’s revolving at a fraction of its speed. After that time is like nothing at all.”
“I know about time,” Florida says.
“Maybe you do and maybe you don’t. They say it’s stood still these days. But you’re moving.”
Florida has stepped away from the railing, closer to the trees where the prayer flags whip-snap in the light wind.
“I know better than to ask where you’re going.”
“Sounds as if you’re asking,” Florida says.
The man is holding out a dented water bottle. It’s in Florida’s hand before she can double-think it. The water is warm, but she swigs it in one go.
“You want more?”
She shakes her head, but the man hands her another bottle anyway.
“Drink.”
Florida lifts the bottle to her lips. A siren rises, its brutal wail flattening the tinkle of the ornaments and paper flags. She sputters and drops the bottle, spilling water on her boots. She looks side to side—a route, an escape, a next move.
“You think that’s for you,” the man says.
Florida turns on her heels.
The man’s hand is on her wrist—a second skin of hard ridges and scars. “You think that’s for you.”
She tries to jerk free.
“It’s not for you. The sirens are not for you. They’re for the sick. They’re for the dying and the dead. The sirens are a lamentation. You’ll see.”
“Ambulances?”
“Fire trucks. Private transports. Anyone who will bear the bodies away to die alone.”
“I’m sorry about the water.”
“I’m sorry about the dying, but there’s nothing we can do about these things. The water has spilled. The dying are nearly dead. The world spins slow and time seems to stop for some. Let me show you something.” He ducks back into the trees. “Once I was a gardener up in the hills. I learned about plants from my grandmother in Michigan, who could make the gray earth blossom. I came here and worked some fancy estates—hedgerows, English kitchen gardens. Flowers and landscaping that cost more than any apartment I’d ever lived in. But it’s a mean city here, a mean city in a mean world. The fires came. They came hard. I’m not saying I don’t know who started them. I’m not saying that at all. They took the whole house. Guesthouse, gardens, and all. They took the people too.”
He’s carrying a box that he places on the ground. He lifts the lid and reaches inside, retrieving an object that he cradles in his hands. Florida takes it. A skull, small and perfect, somehow preserved or shellacked.
“This is a cat I saved from the fire. The only thing to get out alive. This is just a story. A story within my story. I’m not saying anything by it. I traded the body a few years back. A neighbor wanted it to make a lamp. This I’m not trading. I’m just keeping. A reminder of life. A reminder that those sirens aren’t for you.”
The man takes the skull back from Florida and nestles it in the box. “We need reminders,” he says. “We need reminders of this world come and gone and what might remain when we ourselves are no longer.” Florida follows the path of the man’s hands as he tucks away his prize. “It’s my barter box. My collection box. Alms and alma. You understand? The lamp man gave me a fishing rod and a birdcage for the bones. I traded the fishing rod to a guy who fishes in MacArthur Park. He gave me a carp the size of your arm. I tanned the fish skin and made a wallet. I kept the birdcage but traded the wallet.”
Something in the box glints in the dim light.
“You never know what people want. Out here these are not things, these are currency.” The man looks Florida up and down. “What have you got?”
Florida pats her pockets, feeling the smooth rectangle of her debit card. “Nothing worth anything.” Only currency.
“For the wallet I got a set of walkie-talkies. For those I got a flare gun.” The man reaches back into his box. “As I said, alms, alma, and arms. For the flare gun I got this.” He pulls out an old .44.
Florida doesn’t flinch. Maybe there was an older version of herself—a version of Florence—who might have recoiled as the man held the gun aloft.
“You live outside long enough there’s no telling what crosses your path. You sure you don’t have anything to trade? This one sits on me like a deadweight. A deadweight of death.”
“I have nothing for you,” Florida says, holding out her empty hands.
“Nothing begets nothing,” the man says. “You’ve used one?”
“At my dad’s in New Mexico. Out in the mountains and at nothing in particular,” Florida says. She can hear the bullet crack against the distant mesas. She remembers the gun’s weight, her father’s phony cowboy hoot and holler as she recoiled from the recoil. Was it in her all along? Was it in her then? Is it here now?
“One day I’ll trade it. Something better will come along,” the man says. “But for now I hold on to it, not for protection. For protection I have these.” He glances at the chimes, dream catchers, and prayer flags swinging from the trees. “I keep it for the same reason I keep my kitty. We are but passing through. Sometimes the world acts upon us, sometimes we act upon it. Either way, the same things remain behind.” He takes his box and ducks back inside his camp and emerges with a milk crate and a folding chair missing some of its fabric. “You’re welcome to sit a while. They aren’t looking for you here.”
Close your eyes and there’s a chance you are camping.
Close your eyes and the intermittent roar of a car over the limit on the 10 is a fierce wind through a valley.
Close your eyes and the trash blurs, blends, is remade as undiscovered flora.
Close your eyes and for a moment be at peace.
The world is elsewhere.
The world is on pause.
It has stopped hunting and hurting you.
Close your eyes and you hear chickens—you are in the country, on a farm, far away.
But the chickens are there, pecking in the grit, sifting through the man-made grime—bottle tops, ring tops, plastic tabs, rubber rings—for grubs.
“They live over the wall,” the man tells Florida. “They have a flock of about twelve with two roosters. Can’t help it if they come to this side. Can’t help it at all. Figure that makes them half mine. Figure I can help myself to their eggs. Figure from time to time I can do this as well.”
He grabs one of the birds and, before Florida can say a word, snaps its neck.
“If only all death came with such swiftness and mercy.”
You ate in prison. You ate food you could never have imagined eating—gray and tasteless. Shapeless, soggy, indeterminate. Your stomach growled despite itself.
You ate the steamy institutional takeout dropped at your motel. You ate what you were given. You ate a cardboard pizza for a day and a half.
You eat this—a chicken killed and carved on the side of a freeway and cooked over a camp stove.
And then you sleep in a stand of trees, protected from the city and its sounds. You sleep with the sirens still searching in the dark, some perhaps for you and others mostly not. You sleep while fireworks light up the night, celebrating nothing.
You sleep while the helicopters take to the sky, patrolling from on high.
You sleep while the coyotes howl and hunt and the chickens flutter in their coop. While the eyes of the night animals pop from the dark like freeway headlights. And the world turns unfamiliar.
LOBOS
Easton rolls up as the woman vanishes, over the slight incline of Rimpau. The landscaped palms sway in the breeze. The sun stays sullen and out of sight.
“That’s her?”
“That’s somebody,” Lobos says. She cracks a mint between her teeth, letting the splinters nick her tongue.
“Why’d you—”
Lobos silences him with a look. One promise she made herself when she transferred downtown, transferred back to homicide from vice: no more men casually laying blame.
How come you never reported your husband before?
How come you let it get so bad at home?
How come you couldn’t handle the situation yourself?
How come your head’s not in the game? How come you let your husband do that to you?
No more.
“What happened?” Easton asks instead.
“I was … I was looking for the wrong person.”
“But … but wasn’t that Florence Baum?” Easton trips over his words, stunned Lobos has admitted an error.
“I expected to find her mother. Not her. If that even was her.”
“Like you said, it was someone.”
“Someone who got away.”
“Don’t beat yourself up.”
Lobos squares round so she and her partner are face-to-face. “Who says I’m doing that?”
“Easy now. I’m on your side.”
“There aren’t sides.”
“Whatever you say, Lobos.” Easton glances down the empty street. “Want to bet that we find her in the next forty-eight?” He holds out his hand.
“This isn’t fantasy football.”
“Live a little, partner,” Easton says, forcing her into the handshake. “I’ll give you the terms up front. Bottle of whiskey. I bet a woman like you knows her top-shelf booze.”
“A woman like me?”
“It’s a compliment. Take the bet or not?”
“Fine,” Lobos says, withdrawing from her partner’s grip.
* * *
They caravan back to the station, Easton speeding, Lobos white-knuckling it behind him in her borrowed cruiser. She hates driving, even in the vacant city. She knows better than to let her guard down despite the nonexistent traffic. This is when people turn their kids loose to play ball and ride bikes helter-skelter. This is when dog walkers cross on a zigzag, heedless of lights and crosswalks. This is when cyclists and runners reclaim the streets.
Back at the station they sit in a conference room, the photos from the crime scene in front of them. Lobos has pinned Florence Baum’s mug shot to the wall.
“Remind me again, her crime?” Easton asks. “Besides being a pretty rich girl.”
“Thought you boys liked pretty rich girls.”
“Who said I don’t?”
“Last I checked, being rich and pretty isn’t a crime,” Lobos says.
“It is if you waste it doing dumb stuff.”
“You mean criminal stuff. Felony accessory to murder. Turned in her accomplice and pled down.”
“Like I said, dumb.”
“Seems more serious than dumb to me.”
“But she didn’t pull the trigger or whatever,” Easton says.
“Easton, this woman most likely slit the throat of a man twice her size on a bus filled with other passengers. How come you can’t wrap your head around the fact she might be violent?”
“Because look at her. Chances are, yeah, she did it. But until I know for sure, I’m gonna struggle to believe it. You have a problem with that?”
The embankment runs downhill to the freeway. The growth is dense in places, sparse in others.
Florida inches down the hillside and crouches behind a blue-flowering bush.
She waits for her heart to slow.
She waits for the sirens to fade.
It does. They do. Then it’s just her, the ragged intake of her breath, and the whir of an occasional car.
The freeway is nearly empty. Each car seems like an unlawful trespasser—a nefarious alien invader. Florida imagines anyone on the move must be up to no good.
Her entire life in Los Angeles, and this is a wholly new outlook, this hillside by the freeway. It’s a raw, vulnerable vantage that makes her aware of her pedestrian handicap.
In her Jag, she’d owned this section of the 10, dismissed it with the pressure of her toe on the accelerator. She’d weaved and merged—easy driving, a straight shot to or from the beach. Such a simple stretch of freeway she could drive it with her eyes closed. In fact, she had, allowing herself the moment of blackness when she was both in control and control could be snatched away.
She’d been on foot on the 10 too. Breakdowns and accidents and escapes from strangers’ cars with Ronna. She’d felt the rushing roar and suck of passing traffic. She’d heard it squeal and screech a few feet from where she walked. But she’d never been on the embankment before.
Florida stares between the branches of the bush that shields her from view, across the eight-lane gulf of freeway. The opposite embankment is denser than where she sits—a full covering of rich green vines interrupted by a waterfall of trash dumped from the top of the slope. Car seats, playpens, a mattress, part of a chair, part of another chair, a shopping cart, two strollers, and several garbage bags that spew their guts.
Florida leans back and stretches her legs. She glances west and for the first time notices a pop-up canopy a few feet away, the sort you’d find at a farmer’s market or tailgate. The black tarp advertises an energy drink rumored to get kids high.
Beneath the canopy she can see a camp—cookstove, sleeping bag, a tangle of plastic bags and bundles. Above it there’s another tent camouflaged by the bracken.
Florida stands, taking in the hints of a community clustered in the ragged bushes—the clothing she now sees is hung to dry on the wall. The bedding draped in a spindly tree. Buckets for water and washing. A cooler and a storage container.
Her eyes move to the freeway, where someone is running, cutting across the sparse traffic from the eastbound lanes and over the divider to the westbound. He’s waving his arms and bellowing a war cry. What’s he holding? A stick? A crowbar? A jagged piece of metal?
He’s locked in on Florida, gesturing wildly as he fords the freeway, making two cars swerve and slow. Then he’s on the embankment.
She is a trespasser, an intruder, a threat.
And now she’s running again.
This time down the embankment on the diagonal, away from the man who is heading straight for her. Over the bracken and vines, her foot caught on a root, a branch tearing her shirt.
The man is behind her now, still waving his piece of metal, still shouting his incoherent threats.
She’s on the freeway, running, her pace mocked by the few passing cars. A couple honk. One offers a ride.
The man on the embankment is no longer yelling. He’s defended his turf, leaving Florida to find her own—a patch of her hometown where she can rest and regroup, a small square of Los Angeles to call home for even a few hours.
Her legs ache. Her shins feel splintered and her feet blistered. Florida doubles over, hands on knees, her breath a ragged harmonica gasp.
And then there are sirens. They spur her westward until—
Until she can’t go on. Her legs are on fire. Her feet numb.
Florida sits on the guardrail. She knows the exit well—the accident investigation site pull-off just before La Brea—a short service road that curves off the freeway.
She’s too exposed, just cooling her heels along the 10. But the AIS will provide shelter and protection in the form of a wall that shades it from the passing traffic. A few more steps, and that is all.
There are no cars in the investigation site. The wall blocks the scant freeway noise. Behind Florida is a dense tangle of trees. Beyond that the city streets of a residential neighborhood, too close to the 10 to be desirable.
Five minutes and Florida’s heart rate slows.
She breathes deeply, drinking in the quiet of this alcove off the freeway, the faint rustle of the trees, and the deep, unlikely silence.
And something else—the tang of human excrement. Fresh and specific. Her eyes cut to the side and find a bucket, next to it a torn towel on a branch.
She stands and looks behind her. A few ornaments—ribbons, old holiday decorations, two torn Chinese lanterns, and bits of mirror are hanging from a bush. Deeper into the trees prayer flags dangle from the branches, marking a definite perimeter.
The wind picks up, bringing with it the tinkle of bells and chimes. Florida’s skin prickles.
Before she can move on, a man steps from the trees. He’s white—with a dark patina of sun and dirt—pushing past middle age. His hair is an uneven, woolly cap of gray and black. A beard has patched his sunken cheeks, sparing the shadowed crevices that crater deep into his skull.
He’s dressed in dark, loose-fitting pants that might once have been another color and a shirt that might not have always been a shirt but perhaps a dress or even a blanket. He looks like a scarecrow from some distant farmland.
Florida freezes, trapped and terrified.
“Welcome.”
“I’m not—”
“But you are here.”
The smell from the bucket is overpowering, but Florida fights hard not to show her disgust. She glances up at the sky, where the sun is the color of shale.
“You’re tired.” He scratches his beard. “Thirsty, I bet. You shouldn’t be running wild along the freeway. The dust and exhaust will dry you out. There’s water if you want.”
Florida casts her eyes around the camp.
“You don’t think it’s clean, do you? Well, it’s clean. You don’t have a smoke on you? You don’t have nothing, do you?”
“Nothing.”
“Well look at that. You have nothing and I have something and you’re hesitating to take it. At least move away from where you’re standing. You can’t like the smell much. Shame is the one thing I can’t afford out here, but I do my best to keep everything tidy. You know what’s the first thing they do when they take you to the hospital? They check your feet. Foot health—that’s a sign. If you’ve got rot or fungus they send you home—doesn’t matter if you’ve been shot. Doesn’t matter if your intestines are poking out, you’re having a heart attack. If you’ve got the black feet, you best turn right around.”
Florida looks down at her boots, afraid of the blistered, raw state of her toes and heels.
“My sense is that you’re a long ways from that sort of trouble yet, but I’m also saying that it could be coming. Change is what happens when you’re killing time, just putting one day on top of the next. Day one through thirty out here feel like the world’s revolving at a fraction of its speed. After that time is like nothing at all.”
“I know about time,” Florida says.
“Maybe you do and maybe you don’t. They say it’s stood still these days. But you’re moving.”
Florida has stepped away from the railing, closer to the trees where the prayer flags whip-snap in the light wind.
“I know better than to ask where you’re going.”
“Sounds as if you’re asking,” Florida says.
The man is holding out a dented water bottle. It’s in Florida’s hand before she can double-think it. The water is warm, but she swigs it in one go.
“You want more?”
She shakes her head, but the man hands her another bottle anyway.
“Drink.”
Florida lifts the bottle to her lips. A siren rises, its brutal wail flattening the tinkle of the ornaments and paper flags. She sputters and drops the bottle, spilling water on her boots. She looks side to side—a route, an escape, a next move.
“You think that’s for you,” the man says.
Florida turns on her heels.
The man’s hand is on her wrist—a second skin of hard ridges and scars. “You think that’s for you.”
She tries to jerk free.
“It’s not for you. The sirens are not for you. They’re for the sick. They’re for the dying and the dead. The sirens are a lamentation. You’ll see.”
“Ambulances?”
“Fire trucks. Private transports. Anyone who will bear the bodies away to die alone.”
“I’m sorry about the water.”
“I’m sorry about the dying, but there’s nothing we can do about these things. The water has spilled. The dying are nearly dead. The world spins slow and time seems to stop for some. Let me show you something.” He ducks back into the trees. “Once I was a gardener up in the hills. I learned about plants from my grandmother in Michigan, who could make the gray earth blossom. I came here and worked some fancy estates—hedgerows, English kitchen gardens. Flowers and landscaping that cost more than any apartment I’d ever lived in. But it’s a mean city here, a mean city in a mean world. The fires came. They came hard. I’m not saying I don’t know who started them. I’m not saying that at all. They took the whole house. Guesthouse, gardens, and all. They took the people too.”
He’s carrying a box that he places on the ground. He lifts the lid and reaches inside, retrieving an object that he cradles in his hands. Florida takes it. A skull, small and perfect, somehow preserved or shellacked.
“This is a cat I saved from the fire. The only thing to get out alive. This is just a story. A story within my story. I’m not saying anything by it. I traded the body a few years back. A neighbor wanted it to make a lamp. This I’m not trading. I’m just keeping. A reminder of life. A reminder that those sirens aren’t for you.”
The man takes the skull back from Florida and nestles it in the box. “We need reminders,” he says. “We need reminders of this world come and gone and what might remain when we ourselves are no longer.” Florida follows the path of the man’s hands as he tucks away his prize. “It’s my barter box. My collection box. Alms and alma. You understand? The lamp man gave me a fishing rod and a birdcage for the bones. I traded the fishing rod to a guy who fishes in MacArthur Park. He gave me a carp the size of your arm. I tanned the fish skin and made a wallet. I kept the birdcage but traded the wallet.”
Something in the box glints in the dim light.
“You never know what people want. Out here these are not things, these are currency.” The man looks Florida up and down. “What have you got?”
Florida pats her pockets, feeling the smooth rectangle of her debit card. “Nothing worth anything.” Only currency.
“For the wallet I got a set of walkie-talkies. For those I got a flare gun.” The man reaches back into his box. “As I said, alms, alma, and arms. For the flare gun I got this.” He pulls out an old .44.
Florida doesn’t flinch. Maybe there was an older version of herself—a version of Florence—who might have recoiled as the man held the gun aloft.
“You live outside long enough there’s no telling what crosses your path. You sure you don’t have anything to trade? This one sits on me like a deadweight. A deadweight of death.”
“I have nothing for you,” Florida says, holding out her empty hands.
“Nothing begets nothing,” the man says. “You’ve used one?”
“At my dad’s in New Mexico. Out in the mountains and at nothing in particular,” Florida says. She can hear the bullet crack against the distant mesas. She remembers the gun’s weight, her father’s phony cowboy hoot and holler as she recoiled from the recoil. Was it in her all along? Was it in her then? Is it here now?
“One day I’ll trade it. Something better will come along,” the man says. “But for now I hold on to it, not for protection. For protection I have these.” He glances at the chimes, dream catchers, and prayer flags swinging from the trees. “I keep it for the same reason I keep my kitty. We are but passing through. Sometimes the world acts upon us, sometimes we act upon it. Either way, the same things remain behind.” He takes his box and ducks back inside his camp and emerges with a milk crate and a folding chair missing some of its fabric. “You’re welcome to sit a while. They aren’t looking for you here.”
Close your eyes and there’s a chance you are camping.
Close your eyes and the intermittent roar of a car over the limit on the 10 is a fierce wind through a valley.
Close your eyes and the trash blurs, blends, is remade as undiscovered flora.
Close your eyes and for a moment be at peace.
The world is elsewhere.
The world is on pause.
It has stopped hunting and hurting you.
Close your eyes and you hear chickens—you are in the country, on a farm, far away.
But the chickens are there, pecking in the grit, sifting through the man-made grime—bottle tops, ring tops, plastic tabs, rubber rings—for grubs.
“They live over the wall,” the man tells Florida. “They have a flock of about twelve with two roosters. Can’t help it if they come to this side. Can’t help it at all. Figure that makes them half mine. Figure I can help myself to their eggs. Figure from time to time I can do this as well.”
He grabs one of the birds and, before Florida can say a word, snaps its neck.
“If only all death came with such swiftness and mercy.”
You ate in prison. You ate food you could never have imagined eating—gray and tasteless. Shapeless, soggy, indeterminate. Your stomach growled despite itself.
You ate the steamy institutional takeout dropped at your motel. You ate what you were given. You ate a cardboard pizza for a day and a half.
You eat this—a chicken killed and carved on the side of a freeway and cooked over a camp stove.
And then you sleep in a stand of trees, protected from the city and its sounds. You sleep with the sirens still searching in the dark, some perhaps for you and others mostly not. You sleep while fireworks light up the night, celebrating nothing.
You sleep while the helicopters take to the sky, patrolling from on high.
You sleep while the coyotes howl and hunt and the chickens flutter in their coop. While the eyes of the night animals pop from the dark like freeway headlights. And the world turns unfamiliar.
LOBOS
Easton rolls up as the woman vanishes, over the slight incline of Rimpau. The landscaped palms sway in the breeze. The sun stays sullen and out of sight.
“That’s her?”
“That’s somebody,” Lobos says. She cracks a mint between her teeth, letting the splinters nick her tongue.
“Why’d you—”
Lobos silences him with a look. One promise she made herself when she transferred downtown, transferred back to homicide from vice: no more men casually laying blame.
How come you never reported your husband before?
How come you let it get so bad at home?
How come you couldn’t handle the situation yourself?
How come your head’s not in the game? How come you let your husband do that to you?
No more.
“What happened?” Easton asks instead.
“I was … I was looking for the wrong person.”
“But … but wasn’t that Florence Baum?” Easton trips over his words, stunned Lobos has admitted an error.
“I expected to find her mother. Not her. If that even was her.”
“Like you said, it was someone.”
“Someone who got away.”
“Don’t beat yourself up.”
Lobos squares round so she and her partner are face-to-face. “Who says I’m doing that?”
“Easy now. I’m on your side.”
“There aren’t sides.”
“Whatever you say, Lobos.” Easton glances down the empty street. “Want to bet that we find her in the next forty-eight?” He holds out his hand.
“This isn’t fantasy football.”
“Live a little, partner,” Easton says, forcing her into the handshake. “I’ll give you the terms up front. Bottle of whiskey. I bet a woman like you knows her top-shelf booze.”
“A woman like me?”
“It’s a compliment. Take the bet or not?”
“Fine,” Lobos says, withdrawing from her partner’s grip.
* * *
They caravan back to the station, Easton speeding, Lobos white-knuckling it behind him in her borrowed cruiser. She hates driving, even in the vacant city. She knows better than to let her guard down despite the nonexistent traffic. This is when people turn their kids loose to play ball and ride bikes helter-skelter. This is when dog walkers cross on a zigzag, heedless of lights and crosswalks. This is when cyclists and runners reclaim the streets.
Back at the station they sit in a conference room, the photos from the crime scene in front of them. Lobos has pinned Florence Baum’s mug shot to the wall.
“Remind me again, her crime?” Easton asks. “Besides being a pretty rich girl.”
“Thought you boys liked pretty rich girls.”
“Who said I don’t?”
“Last I checked, being rich and pretty isn’t a crime,” Lobos says.
“It is if you waste it doing dumb stuff.”
“You mean criminal stuff. Felony accessory to murder. Turned in her accomplice and pled down.”
“Like I said, dumb.”
“Seems more serious than dumb to me.”
“But she didn’t pull the trigger or whatever,” Easton says.
“Easton, this woman most likely slit the throat of a man twice her size on a bus filled with other passengers. How come you can’t wrap your head around the fact she might be violent?”
“Because look at her. Chances are, yeah, she did it. But until I know for sure, I’m gonna struggle to believe it. You have a problem with that?”
