Truly Like Lightning Read online

  “Like I said—you to a T.” Mary laughed, Bronson didn’t.

  Hyrum was quiet. He usually did not speak unless spoken to. As always, he wore a shark’s-tooth necklace that he’d made himself. This desert had once been a huge inland sea, and the boy found loads of the fossil fish teeth, ranging in size from a dime to a finger, as he roamed freely what used to be a prehistoric ocean floor. He was patting the old cow, Fernanda (named after a beloved baseball hero of Bronson’s—the portly Dodger great Fernando Valenzuela), on the top of her head. Bronson began to pat Hyrum’s head exactly the same way; the boy brushed his father’s hand away.

  “How are you feeling, son?”

  “Feeling?” the boy replied, as if he’d never heard the word. “You mean what am I doing?” For in his boy’s world there was only doing.

  “You know that was a woman you fired your arrow at, Hy.”

  “I thought it was a coyote.”

  “Coyote, huh? Mighty big coyote. On two legs.”

  “I seen coyotes that big walking like that.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Maybe. It came to kill us.”

  “Were you scared?”

  “Scared?” Again, like he didn’t know the meaning of the word, like he’d never heard or considered the concept before.

  When the boy was seven, he had developed a large pustule under his armpit. Yalulah, who crash-course trained as an EMT in preparation for joining Bronson in the desert, lanced the boil and drained more than a quarter cup of bloody pus out of it, squeezing and kneading until it deflated. Bronson had held his son as his wife cut and probed. The pain must have been searing, not that you could tell by looking at the impassive Hy. The boy didn’t even need to be held. He just stared curiously up at his father’s eyes while one of his mothers cut him open, as if looking for clues as to what a vulnerable human should feel. Much as he was looking at his father now.

  “If I tried to really hit it, I woulda really hit it. I jez wanted to clip it.”

  “Well, boy, you clipped a her, not a it.”

  “Her.”

  “You gotta know that more people might be coming down now, and you can’t be clipping any more of them, okay?”

  “Why more gotta come? I like it the way it is.”

  “I like it the way it is, too. I’m not saying more are gonna come; I’m saying it’s possible, and if I’m not around, you can’t just shoot at them.”

  “It’s them or us.”

  “It’s not them or us. It’s them and us. Them over there”—he pointed southwest—“and us over here. Okay? Put it there, Pilgrim.” Bronson extended his hand.

  “Okay.”

  Bronson shook the boy’s little hand. It was remarkably callused and strong for his age. “Have I ever told you how much you remind me of my father?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you do. You look like him, a redheaded him.”

  “What was he like?”

  “I’m not sure how to answer that, Pilgrim.”

  “You brought it up.”

  “Yes, I did. He was very funny.”

  “I’m not very funny.”

  “No, I guess you’re not. Though that was kind of funny.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “His name was Fred.”

  “Fred?” Hyrum laughed at the name, as kids do.

  “Yeah, and he was not a good man, Hyrum. Not at all.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “See, you are funny like him.” Hyrum didn’t laugh.

  Bronson didn’t know why he’d brought his father up and wished now that he hadn’t. He just knew that his son was a mystery to him, as his father had been, unreachable in some primal way, and dark. “Anything else?” he asked. “You seem like maybe you got something else on your mind.”

  The boy took a few breaths, almost starting to say something a couple times, then … “If I’da wanted to hit its … her … heart, I woulda. I don’t miss. I hit where I aimed. Exactly.”

  “I believe you, Hy. You’re the best shot of all of us.”

  The boy brightened. “Better than Deuce?”

  “Way better than Deuce. Bow and gun. And slingshot.”

  “Better than you?”

  Bronson took a fake dramatic pause like he used to see the hammy actors do in the action films that were his bread and butter once upon a time; the directors would say, “Take a comic beat.” The muscle action guys always thought they could be funny, which usually meant arching an eyebrow muscle. He held his index and thumb a small distance apart and nodded, raising the Nicholson eyebrow his father said had been stolen from him. The boy, his boy, this rough stone, smiled wide. He still had a couple baby teeth left.

  That night in the shared bed, Bronson lay with Mary and Yalulah. The three of them made love all together for the first time in years, as if they needed all their bodies to reaffirm some broken circle and to form a blockade against intruders by their sheer joined moving mass. Bronson felt like they wanted to keep him in their bed. He hadn’t felt that in a while. Keeping him close like this seemed both a desire for and a fear of him—he would be there, yes, but he would also not be somewhere else. There was something between them they were trying to squeeze out, to kill the distance, and it hadn’t quite worked.

  In the dark, spent, he still felt alone on one side of the bed, the two women together on the other side. They all stared up into their own shared darkness.

  Mary spoke first: “I think we’re in trouble.” Yalulah, often the voice of mediation, was quick to defuse: “Well, we’ve had park rangers come by a few times over the years and nothing’s come of that.”

  “Did Hyrum shoot an arrow at any park rangers?” Mary challenged.

  Bronson stirred. “No, he did not. He wasn’t old enough.” They laughed, they could still laugh at that, at the boundless nature of their wild son.

  When Mary stopped laughing, she said, “You can’t blame it all on Hyrum.”

  “No one’s blaming it on Hy, seems almost a miracle it hasn’t happened before.” Yalulah was trying to help Mary inoculate her son against blame.

  Mary turned to look Bronson’s way in the dark. “You brought her here, an outsider, into our home, Bro’.”

  Accused, Bronson held where he felt Mary’s eyes to be in the darkness. “What was I supposed to do? Leave her out there to die of exposure? No way she would find her way home. She was high as a kite.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe?”

  “Maybe nothing will come of it,” Yalulah interjected. “It’s been almost a week.”

  “Things are already coming from it,” Mary continued. “Questions in the kids’ minds. In mine.”

  “What do you mean?” Yalulah asked.

  “Don’t be blind. The kids are getting older. Even before this, I’ve felt maybe they want more, Pearl and Deuce, especially.”

  “Not Pearl,” said Bronson.

  The two women fell silent for almost a minute. The conversation was poised at a fork; both threads led into a different kind of darkness. Mary forged on—“Even without this, the time is coming when we have to make some big decisions about the older kids. College.”

  “Yes, we always said they’d go to college,” Yalulah agreed. “But that’s not for two years.”

  “Two years is nothing. Two years will be here tomorrow,” Mary said.

  “Go to college and then what?” Bronson asked.

  “We can’t know that.” Yalulah sighed.

  “I need to know,” Bronson stated firmly.

  “How? How can we know? There’s no test. Bro’, just because your father taught you nothing doesn’t mean you have to teach your kids everything,” Yalulah said, as sympathetically as she could, knowing Bronson hated to be put on the couch like that.

  “So all our talk”—Mary kept at him more directly—“about releasing them back into the world was bullshit?”

  “No one is saying that,” Bronson said. “The kids got us out here, but maybe we ha
ve to keep our eyes open for more miracles. Maybe God has other plans. The kids are happy here.”

  “Are they?” Mary asked.

  “What do you mean?” Yalulah asked Mary.

  “I mean,” Mary replied, “we have nothing to compare it to and neither do they.”

  “We can ask them,” Yalulah offered.

  “Ask them what?”

  “When they’re eighteen, ask them if they want to stay or go.”

  “They may be eighteen now. We haven’t been keeping track like that. They may be nineteen. And why eighteen, anyway?” Bronson argued. “Eighteen is an arbitrary designation. ’Cause the government says that’s when you’re an adult? Why not thirteen? Why not twenty-one? Thirty? As arbitrary as a fucking speed limit. Bullshit.”

  All three of them fell silent again, imagining the possibilities, and the impossibilities. “Deuce is fine,” Bronson finally added to the fraught silence, choosing the more obvious path. “Do you want for more, Mary?” he asked.

  “No,” Yalulah answered for the woman she loved.

  “No,” Mary agreed softly. “But nothing lasts forever. We never came out here saying ‘forever.’”

  “We take eternity day by day,” Bronson said, and it felt like an empty platitude immediately.

  Mary ignored it, moaning, “Are we the worst parents in the world?”

  “We’re the best,” countered Yalulah. “Have you seen what’s going on out there? It’s a disaster.”

  “How do you know?” asked Bronson. A very good question. How would she know?

  Yalulah raised herself up on the headboard. “’Cause I’ve snuck into town once or twice a year the past few years and I sit and have a coffee at Starbucks in San Bernardino and look at the world and go on a computer in the library with my library card and it scared the living daylights out of me.”

  “Yalulah Putnam Ballou!” Mary gasped with mock outrage. “You sneaky bitch! Busted.”

  “I had no idea,” Bronson said. “You had coffee?”

  “You have a library card? That’s so … you.” Mary smiled, having fun.

  “Yes, I had a Venti Mocha Frappuccino. Or three. And I fucking loved it. That’s what you want to focus on right now, Bro’?”

  “Did you drink alcohol?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You’re a badass, sister,” Mary said, with a laugh.

  “Please, I had a beer. A cold Corona with lime! It was heavenly. And I’m not joking. It’s so much worse than you can imagine. They all have their own phones now. No one looks anyone in the eye. There’s something hideous called ‘social media.’ It’s the worst of the worst. Like when Sartre said, ‘hell is other people’ … he must’ve been prophesying this. Hell is other people with phones. You must’ve seen the changes, Bro’, when you have to go into San Bernardino.”

  “It’s true, I’ve seen the changes, and it is bad, accelerating, but”—Bronson wagged his finger—“I didn’t have any coffee. No freedom without obedience, baby.”

  He kissed Yalulah on the top of the head, and she looked up into his eyes, challenging. “Amid all that noise, you’re still gonna get hung up on the Starbucks of it all?”

  “I’m a lawman, Yaya.” He smiled, using the old TV Western terminology for himself. “God’s law, Mosaic law, Christ’s law, Mormon law. It’s the ground beneath my feet. It’s how I stand upright. I can’t pick and choose what I believe like from a menu. I believe all or I believe nothing. And if I believe nothing, I am nothing. I swallow it whole.”

  Yalulah snarked, “Are you done, Lawman?”

  “Jesus, Bro’, it’s just a cup of coffee,” Mary interjected.

  “The outrageousness of God’s demands is a precise validation of their holiness.” This was one of Bronson’s self-coined aphorisms. It drew a smirk from Mary, who promptly high-fived Yalulah. Bronson clenched his jaw. “And the beer, if I’m being rigorous.” Yalulah shrugged. “Yum. But I want to be here. My kids are here. I never want to go back there. You two are here. My love is here.”

  Mary seized the opportunity to steer the conversation back to the children. “Are they going to go out into the world? The kids? Eventually? If that’s the case, well … fuck. What the fuck are we doing? How are we preparing them for that?”

  “This is the world, right here,” Bronson asserted.

  “No, Bro’, it’s a world, not the world.” Mary rose up in bed.

  “It’s Eden,” Bronson said, trying to settle his wives. “And there’s a snake come in the garden. But God created the snake, too. The snake has always been part of the garden. Where the path is bad, the obstacle is good. We will see our way through this. Together. In time, we will be shown the way as we always have been.”

  The three stayed in the silence, as if waiting for a blow they wouldn’t see coming but knew had to come. The first hint of daylight was creeping through the windows. Bronson felt he had made himself known, that was all he could do. He would leave them alone for a couple nights now, let them come to their own understanding; then they would speak some more. That’s how they’d always done it. He would have them feel slightly lost with his absence. There was another room for him, another bed.

  The sun was coming up now. There was work to be done. “Time to make the doughnuts,” Bronson joked as he got out of bed. Decisions would have to wait. Bronson dressed, temple garment first, as he said, quoting his old NA sponsor, “Don’t future-trip. Expectations are future resentments.”

  “Ugh. Fine,” Mary replied. “Just show me how not to expect, and I’ll be good.”

  Yalulah kissed Mary and stood up and, while pulling on her own temple garment, smiled hopefully. “The kids could be park rangers and stop by for lunch all the time.”

  Mary shook her head and turned to face the wall, eyes open. “But what’s the plan? Like, what do we do?” she asked. “I mean, like right now? Like today—what do I do?”

  “We wait on the snake,” Bronson said, and left to begin another day in paradise.

  7.

  AT HER PRAETORIAN DESK, a couple months after the now legendary Joshua Tree debacle/revelation, Maya shuffled some PowerPoint printouts together preparing to ambush Malouf with a presentation that would blow his greedy mind. In the intervening weeks, as she had researched the enigmatic cowboy, Bronson Powers, and the valuable real estate he had inherited from his unimaginably wealthy, land baron ancestors, she had acquired her very first tattoo. Among her classmates and peers, she had been the only remaining tattoo virgin. Hers was a reflexively self-scarifying generation. Right above the arrow wound on her upper arm, now healed, she had added the simple black, fine-point image of a snake swallowing its tail, the Ouroboros. No color, tasteful as shit.

  This was an ironic and/or very brave move, as Maya suffered from a rather stubborn case of ophidiophobia. She was terrified of snakes; a sad fact she discovered at a very young age when meeting the Sterling Holloway–voiced Kaa in The Jungle Book animated movie. The meeting did not go well. The mere mention of a snake caused her to freeze, and when she watched Planet Earth, her finger was poised nervously on the fast-forward button in case the awe-filled, priest-like Richard Attenborough encountered a serpent of some kind. And, conceiving of making a deal for desert space, she knew she had to somehow come to terms with the reptile whose natural domain it was. She told herself that the snake on her arm was a type of inoculation against her mortal fear, and besides, the Ouroboros was a kind of snake suicide, or making itself disappear. Win-win.

  She wanted all her ducks in a row, and didn’t want to alert Malouf to her scheme until all he need do was add muscle and cash and appear to be the savior riding in on the white horse. That’s the type of deal the boss loved. But Maya’s proposal was tricky, too. She would have to convince Malouf that she was like one of those speed-chess players in Washington Square Park in New York City who helm five games at once. Her scheme involved seeing ahead a few moves on multiple boards with different sets of adversaries, and she hoped to circumvent Malouf’s
overriding instinct for instant gratification with a more sober eye to the long game.

  Maya was led into the boss’s expansive corner office by the first male assistant of Malouf’s life, courtesy of the rampant #MeToo-phobia ever so legitimately sweeping social media in general and the Praetorian business culture in particular. Backlit by the room-length window with an LA-skyscraperless view all the way to the blue Pacific, Malouf appeared lost in his GQ magazine, no doubt a source of torture for him as he beheld people who appeared even richer, ever younger, and more beautiful and copiously fingered than he. With his slick, bald head, skinny shoulders, and long sinewy body, Malouf in silhouette looked, Maya thought for the first time, like a human snake himself. She shivered.

  She watched as Malouf became aware of her presence and, hiding that awareness, quickly switched out the lightweight mag for a weighty tome, pretending to be engulfed. The book was The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution by Henry Gee. Maya cleared her throat. Malouf acted surprised, as if he’d been shaken from deep contemplation, and stood up in gentlemanly fashion. He was wearing beige jodhpurs and a $200 black T-shirt. Maya dully surmised he had come from or was about to go play polo. On a horse. All she had ever played was Marco Polo. In a pool.

  “There she is,” he said, gesturing with his four-fingered hand to a seat facing his long desk, “Maya Abbadessa. My favorite name and favorite gal. I heard you got a tattoo. Sassy. May I see it? Leave the door open, please, Trevor. Have a seat, Miss Wharton. How can I help?” He waited for her to sit first.

  His desk was always empty of clutter, no computer, or paper, save for that omnipresent GQ and a changing stack of nonfiction hardcovers, like the one he had just closed, that seemed to be in the Stephen Hawking Brief History of Time genre (or the more recent iteration of the book that absolutely everyone is not reading, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century)—books that promised to make science, or economics, easy for the layman and to deliver the key to the universe without the pesky math, granular Marxism, or physics in fewer than 400 pages. Books that signaled to the world that Robert Malouf was more than a moneymaking machine—he had interests, he had curiosity, he had a soul. Maya had seen Malouf ostentatiously toting these types of books before. She’d watched him lug around and appear to read Yuval Harari’s Sapiens like an overeager undergraduate for almost a year. In a small vertical pile today she spied The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery, Y: The Descent of Men by Steve Jones, and 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson. The spines of the books were all cracked, too cracked even, more pages dog-eared than not, as if someone in a movie props department wanted to make them look well-read and digested.