They’d been dead for months and were so decomposed that proof of rape or anything of the sort would never appear. So the ding-dongs at the sheriff’s department just went with the sob story. After all, they didn’t have anybody to rough up and arrest, and the DA had nobody to prosecute, so what the hell.
Boy, I wonder who did the embracing. Probably the ex-boyfriend, who murdered his ex-girlfriend, considering that he killed her first, before turning the gun on himself. And after pulling down her pants and raping her. I wonder if she was already dead by then.
The park service public affairs office had the gall to repeat this garbage: The sheriff’s department concluded that Francis De Leon had no intent to harm Emily Tran and that the use of the weapon was an unfortunate result of the couple’s desperation after having been lost for an unspecified amount of time and losing hope.
That’s the dumbest damned thing I’ve ever heard, and I used to cover the police beat full time.
He was her ex-boyfriend, the ex-boyfriend of a beautiful girl who was going somewhere in life, somewhere that didn’t include a security guard and gun nut. He got put in the friend zone. Then he scoped out Joshua Tree, the beloved weekend getaway, dragging his buddy along for the ride. And then Francis De Leon convinced his ex to take a little holiday together in the nice national park, just spend some time together, as friends. He brought a loaded handgun. And once they were a short mile or so down the Loop Trail — which might seem like a very remote location until you remember the little cabins and busy dirt roads and bachelorette parties just beyond — he shot her through the skull and crawled on top of her and shot himself. No harm intended! Just another day hike gone wrong.
This county is something else.
The Salt Calls Us Back
by Alex Espinoza
Salton Sea
It was one of ours who first found her things, along the gray silt and dried-up fish bones near the edge of the Salton Sea. They were simple articles — a pair of sandals decorated with jeweled tortoises climbing along the leather straps, a straw hat with a wide brim, a coin purse with a few dimes and pennies rolling around inside like errant thoughts.
Stuffed in a striped canvas bag, the boy found a thin piece of fabric stained with drops of blood, broken sunglasses, and an envelope with the name REBECCA scrawled in blue ink followed by a string of numbers and letters, dashes, and periods: 68–12.00W-87.01.02.RYZ. She was a woman, no doubt about that. Because of the sandals and the bag, the indiscriminate piece of fabric the boy said was neatly folded.
“Like this,” he told us, mimicking the motion of someone folding laundry. “Very neat. It was a perfect square.”
We wondered how he knew about these things. About perfect squares, how the numbers written on the envelope were strange enough to remember. We wondered all of this to ourselves but stayed quiet as he went on, his sticky hands smelling of maple syrup, his red forehead beaded with sweat we could see as clearly and plainly as the date palms lining the perimeter of the lot where we parked, the place we called home. For now.
“Who is this boy’s mother?” one of us whispered.
Some among us shrugged their shoulders. “I don’t know.”
“Yo no sé,” the old woman with the raspy voice and bloodshot eyes replied.
A few of the men smoked and paced back and forth, nervous in that way men always are.
“Go on,” we implored him. “Tell us more. What else?”
None of us ventured out much anymore. We preferred the cool darkness inside our trailers. We drew the blinds, turned fans on, the generators humming along like a swarm of giant hornets. We ate little. We listened to the preachers on the radio and waited for the end to come, just like we’d been taught. Now this boy was telling us a story about these mysterious items left along the banks of that salted sea. Was it a sign? Had she been sent to us by the Divine Presence? Was it a test? Was this boy even real? None of us were certain we even knew where he came from. Maybe he was making it up. Maybe he was lonely and looking for attention. When we asked him where he lived, where he came from, he pointed toward the opened doorway.
“Over there,” he said. “My father and I walked for days. We found your trailers. The gray man in the green truck took clemency on us. Invited us into the flock once was passed the Test.”
We knew the Test. Some of us in that very room had invented it. It was a way of knowing if a person was on the Righteous Path. If they passed it, then they were part of our movement.
“And your father?” one of us inquired. “Where is he?”
“Last seen eating some of the wild weed on the other side of the highway.”
We nodded collectively. The man had gone on a pilgrimage. He was probably deep into the desert now, seeing visions and talking to the ghosts of his past.
“How long has he been away, your father?” we asked.
“A few days now.”
We sympathized with the boy then. We knew that the pilgrimage was only supposed to last a few hours at the most. The father not coming back at that point meant he never would. He would be lost now, speaking in riddles to the hot wind and cacti.
The boy was our responsibility. That’s how it works among our clan. And his father missing and now this discovery his boy had just made, well, it was clearly all connected. We just didn’t know how yet.
Some said it was the salt and brine that brought her back. We thought it was something else entirely. We saw it as the omen we were waiting for. A dead body floating in the polluted water like that? What else could it be?
A sacrifice.
The Divine required it.
And we were meant to bear witness.
To watch it all unfold. To tell it then wait for the next sign to reveal itself: the Fire that would cleanse.
She had once been blond. That was for sure. That we knew right away. The yellow strands of hair were visible through the water’s grit. We gathered around our television sets, and some of us even went so far as to venture out, stumbling over the sand and silt. We stood at the edge of a broken dock jutting out toward the fetid sea like a severed finger. She surfaced in the middle of the afternoon, when the sun is the hottest and blanches the entire area. Everything is white, the moisture sucked dry from every living thing roaming out there, among all that nothingness, terrifying and beautiful at once.
The body bobbed up and down, and we could see the arms extended out as if they were in supplication, begging for something only she could see. Her back was pale, wrinkled as tree bark, and her toenails were painted pink. Some of us thought of rose petals, the soft kisses of the children we were forced to abandon once we heard the Calling that led us out here. Still others among our group laughed and cursed, said she was a sinner. A filthy whore who got what she deserved for not heeding the signs the way we had.
“The police,” someone stated.
A line of cars, sirens blaring, flashing red and blue, came up over the small embankment. Then there was an ambulance and a white van.
“Who called them?” the boy asked.
“The hippie artists,” we said.
They began appearing with more frequency over the past few months. They smoked pot and had tattoos and piercings all over their faces and bodies. They dressed in rags and built elaborate bonfires and danced naked in circles in the middle of the night. Those of us designated to do the shopping saw them at the small grocery store on the southeastern edge of the lake. They bought cases of water, rolls of toilet paper, matches, twine, canned beans, and neon-colored energy drinks.