Scavengers
It looked like the discarded contents of a suitcase from twenty yards. Cloth and leather. But then Francis smelled it — sweet and rancid. Sulfur and ammonia.
He’d seen the birds circling the day before. Nothing special. He owned twenty acres of desert — dry wash punctuated by yucca, cactus and evergreen scrub. Things died unnoticed. Something that’d drawn him to this place — its naked hostility, of which he never tired.
He hadn’t gone looking the first day — likely a hare or desert rat — but that night he’d heard the squabbling of coyotes and in the morning the birds were overhead again.
Approaching, Francis saw the body was a man’s, tanned and shrunken by a few days in the Mojave. In Afghanistan he’d learned not to underestimate the desert, even in its modes of stillness. Arid ground desiccating flesh and organs. Half-starved buzzards under an apocalypse of sun. Coyotes doing coarse work by moonlight. A riot of insects.
It was laid on its back in a flat space. Mouth agape, soft tissues already eaten from the face. Damn near a skull. The scant bits of exposed flesh had weathered, starting to mummify.
Without a face, it was hard to guess what the man had looked like — except that he’d been substantial, built something like Francis.
Up close the odor was overwhelming. Francis pulled off his t-shirt, wrapping his nose and mouth. He checked the man’s pockets for ID. All empty, except in the coat pocket Francis found a polaroid. A woman, standing in underwear, the way an aspiring model might audition. But she wasn’t a model — slim and pale, yes, but not tall and no more remarkable than any other half-dressed lady. And she looked — not afraid. Unprepared. Maybe annoyed.
Digging deeper, he found a key, with a folded bit of masking tape flagging off it, labeled in sharpie with a 909 phone number.
And that was it. The clothes were sturdy — workingman’s dress — but otherwise nondistinctive. As far as dead guys went, it was nothing special.
◆ ◆ ◆
He walked a radius, probably fifty yards across, including the two-lane blacktop of Lost Lantern Road. No car. No tracks. No fresh litter in the scrub. On this corner of the property—land he’d owned for over a decade and knew like the features of a family member — there was a great tumbling of stone, bleached and weathered, smooth like edges of used soap. The rocks were jumbled into a rough kind of chair, immense, empty, as if abandoned by some giant former landlord. On the far side from the road, the body lay. Hastily obscured. Not meant to be found so soon.
He took the key and the polaroid back to his house, a cabin cobbled together over a century, begun under the Homestead Act and bulked out in fits and starts. Inside, at the round oak table—a roadside find he’d refinished years back — he studied the objects.
The key was too small for a house or car. Probably a padlock. Could be anywhere. Gates all around here. Sheds. A couple mini-storage places.
He brewed a cup of coffee with a cone filter over a chipped mug — only way he’d ever made it — same way as his dad, albeit with cheaper beans. Since he’d left the Marine Corps, he’d had a couple women try to live with him and he’d considered getting a machine. But they’d never stayed long enough for all that.
He thought of the body. From what was left, it’d been dumped within the last three or four days. No spray of blood on sand. No smashed skull or obvious grave injuries. Likely killed elsewhere. People didn’t just stumble into this part of the desert. Not in work clothes. Not in those boots. It was no place for a man unless he was dead or dying.
Francis tried the number on the key. It rang four times and went to voicemail, but an outgoing message hadn’t been recorded — an automated voice announced the number. The mailbox was full.
He tasted the coffee, already cooling, and it registered for the first time that he was supposed to call the police. There’d been something so natural about the fact of the body — the desert collected its dead. His mind had accepted the corpse as in Afghanistan. It wasn’t something you made a call about.
Eight years in the Corps. Two tours. He’d joined because, as a teenager, he’d thought of killing himself. Depression he supposed. Until he stumbled on a simple truth — not much more than a gambler’s hunch — that if he stayed in the game long enough, he might be called to something worthy. Some act of heroism. And that would redeem the suffering. By the time he graduated, he no longer wanted to die. But he stuck to his notion and enlisted.
The few times he was certain of a kill, he’d felt bad — kinship with the dead that caused not guilt exactly. More like regret at the part he’d been assigned. Like it would get played over and over — him pitted against some strange — this way and not another.
That wasn’t why he left the Corps though. No. It was a feeling he’d first encountered on some aimless patrol. A new tone in the chain of command. He’d known he was living in strange times — politicians who’d marooned them, bankers who gamed the system. Even his commanding officers were part of the theater. They’d all cooperated in a fake world because they no longer understood the real one. And, back home, the intellectuals, the artists, the so-called radicals, were retreating into make-believe too. No one understood, so they managed. Except the threats shifted and festered in the dark, threatening to break through. He was tired of being on the bleeding edge of the farce.
Francis stood and stepped outside. No sight of the body from his porch. The day was quiet. The sun scorched. He swallowed. Sometimes it was like the terrain had a taste. Hot iron, burnt mesquite. Like the air was carrying its own sordid history.
The police could wait another day. They would estimate how long the body had been there but they’d never know how long Francis had waited to call it in. He wanted time to make sense of it, to consider the key and the photograph.
◆ ◆ ◆
That night he woke to voices. His adrenaline was already up — like waking to mortar fire. The killers were back.
But no — he heard conversation and music. Murderers didn’t bring a soundtrack.
He pivoted out of bed, flicking a finger through the blinds. Lights from the northwest. By the big rocks. He gathered yesterday’s clothes from the floor and dressed in the dark.
His shoes crunched on the gritty soil. A shard of moon mingled with the glow from Yucca Valley and described a faint path.
He saw them. Four teenagers, three boys and a girl. Junkyard Toyota pulled up close to the rocks, trunk open, lights on. Drinking Coors. The body was on the far side, well out of any trace of headlights. Had they seen the body? No. They wouldn’t be loitering.
He was close — they’d see him soon. “This is private property,” Francis said.
His words cut the air, and their faces shifted, stark in the reflected light. He glimpsed what they saw — a tall figure stepping out of the gloom like some desert spirit, baseball bat dark and threatening in his hand. He’d grabbed it, unthinking, from its place by the door. But their shock faded as he stepped into the cone of headlights. Just a man. Some hermit.
“Time to clear out,” Francis said.
Of the boys, there was a tall one, a short one and a fat one. The girl was a stick-thin dishwater blonde with bad skin, attached to the tall one. She glanced in Francis’s direction but dodged his gaze.
The short one stepped forward, puffing up his meager chest. “We’re not causing you any problems, old man.”
Francis was forty-seven. Until now he hadn’t considered himself through the eyes of a teenager. Hadn’t felt old until now, hearing it from this kid who didn’t know a thing about the years or what he’d discarded in their passing. The boy was fit — wrestling team maybe — but there was not enough weight on him. And Francis had seen more hasty violence than the boy could imagine — friends carried off by bombs constructed on kitchen tables.
“Private property,” Francis said. “What you do is your business, just do it elsewhere.”
He wished he hadn’t brought the bat. Wished he could go back, step out empty-handed, let them see he was just a guy seeking his peace. But it was done. Four of them, and the bat was a fact. He couldn’t afford to face them all, risk losing the weapon. If the boy moved in — squared up — Francis would strike first. Open palm. Quick. Hard enough to stun him, before the others could commit.
The fat boy stayed rooted, beer in hand, looking polite. The tall boy gave him an uncanny look, the meaning of which Francis couldn’t gather. “Let’s go,” he said, grabbing the girl around the shoulders.
The short boy chucked his beer at Francis, a near miss, spattering him with foam. But he gave a wide berth returning to the car.
◆ ◆ ◆
It took a while before the adrenaline wore off. Francis lay in his bed in electric silence. He thought of the boy and the girl, and of girlfriends past. When he’d gotten his discharge, he’d taken up with a Marxist. So he became one too. He enjoyed being admitted to a club that negated everything from his prior life. But he felt phony and incoherent when he tried to talk like her. She was pretty and cleverer than him, but she ran hot and his own comparative iciness, instead of cooling her moods, turned them to steam.
He thought of the look the tall boy had given. He still couldn’t figure it out. They hadn’t seen the body — if they’d known, those kids would’ve been either more frightened or more threatening.
What if they came back though? A prank. Or revenge. Unlikely.
Still, they posed a new problem. If he reported the body, it’d make the local news. And one of those kids might phone the cops with a story about Francis with the baseball bat in the dark.
Shit. New plan.
Of all the damn nights. All the fucking boulder piles. It’d been four years since some meth head’s car had rolled into a ditch and caught fire — the last memorable event out here.
Another cosmic joke.
Except Francis never sensed any laughter. Any malice, when it showed itself, was cold, weighty, inert. If some god had constructed the world, he’d made it in the image of an earlier corruption. And he ran it like a factory for damnation — effort met with suffering.
It was settled. The body was his to contend with.
◆ ◆ ◆
The sky was bluing when he sent the blade of the shovel into the dense ground for its first bite of soil. He figured he could have the remains buried in four hours. He had gloves. He’d dug latrines. Then he would call the police and report the trespassers. Ask for a deputy to be sent out. He’d say they’d threatened him — which they had, albeit in the sorriest way.
Moving the body had been the worst part. He’d wanted to bury it away from the rock formation. To avoid dragging it by hand, he’d got the legs up, using the shovel as a sort of lever, and looped a rope around the ankles — the armpits would’ve been better, but that’d require putting hands on the body. He’d dragged the guy maybe fifty yards toward the opposite corner of the property. He’d worn the big respirator he kept for painting, but it couldn’t stop the black rot seeping in as he hauled the gory mannequin across the sand.
Before the hole could fit a watermelon, Francis was huffing and blowing. This is what you got for trying to stay out of things. A corpse, a shovel, a couple days of sore muscles.
He’d moved to Yucca Valley because he’d been unhappy in the city, wasn’t going home to Oregon and he’d remembered being stationed out here at Twentynine Palms. It had merits. The simplicity. The sky’s calming hues at the day’s edges. Even the undisguised ferocity of noonday heat.
But today it was an adversary. The layer of hardpan defied his shovel. He was forced to break it up with a pickaxe before removing it.
He dug through the sweat, his mind following bizarre old paths. He remembered something he’d read years ago about an archeological site in England with a pit full of human remains. Some innocuously British name — a Down or Warren or whatever. Except the store of bones was not the leavings of a burial ceremony. Or even everyday slaughter. No, these were men, women, children — dozens of them, unarmed, unprepared. Captives, maybe. And the remains told a story of unspeakable acts: a jawbone marked by the removal of a tongue, bones bearing blade marks where flesh had been stripped away. Smaller fragments — hands, feet — gnawed by the teeth of their own kind. A mute record of the degradation of victim and killer, removed by time from any comprehensible motive.
He stopped digging only briefly, for water. His hands in the gloves got slippery with burst blisters. Still, it took him six hours. When he finished backfilling the hole, he found a loose Russian thistle by the roadside and raked it over the path of the body and the fresh dirt of the grave, like one of those Zen monks forming his garden except instead of orderly lines the tumbleweed left indecipherable chaos.
Then he walked back to the house and called the 909 number again. Same voicemail. He imagined what the woman in the photo might be like. Sure, she could be in danger — maybe he should be more concerned for her — but his gut didn’t say so.
◆ ◆ ◆
Deputy Jeff Tinsdale looked bored. Fine by Francis. The Sheriff’s Office had been resistant to sending anyone. Francis had insisted, saying he wanted to show them the evidence — the beer thrown at him. The location, in case the kids came back.
But what Francis truly needed was a witness to the absence of other evidence. Nothing that’d make a cop suspicious.
But now he was wrestling with something unexpected — his own inability to stay calm. He’d finished showing the scene to the deputy, who stood making notes in a little flip pad. It felt like it was taking too long. What was he writing? How much was there to say about tire tracks and beer cans?
◆ ◆ ◆
The deputy left without much comment. Francis was pretty sure he’d bought the story — just reporting some kids, strangers lurking around his property, threatening behavior. He wished he were more confident about his own performance though.
Now, he was seized by the need for a drink. Nothing in the house. But it was a short drive to the Red Dog Saloon. They knew him there. He didn’t drink much anymore. Didn’t often make small talk either, but certain feelings were best dismantled by idle chatter.
He took a seat at the bar, near an older couple, their sun-roughened skin and the man’s sweat-stained Cattleman testifying to many years in the desert. They bullshitted with him a while, wanting to talk the state of the nation, the direction of history. Francis allowed it, drawn in by the sound more than the content. He didn’t care for structure — his interjections were accepted without expectation, and that suited him. It was about being in a shared space.
He thought of earlier times — back in the Corps, with girlfriends — when idle chatter was a daily fixture. But living with others made the years pass too quickly. Busyness and talk, another day gone without his consent. Even so, he remembered being happier in those days, tethered to something. Still, the lost time never felt like a fair trade.
The talk and drinks at the Red Dog settled him. Until they didn’t. Finishing his third or fourth — nerves soaking in a cocktail of paranoia and regret, thoughts dragging him back to his meeting with the deputy — he became unsettled.
He’d done nothing wrong. And sure, the cop had lingered while he made his notes, but there was no reason to make a second visit. The body was well buried.
But now he heard the scrape of the shovel while he’d lifted the corpse’s legs. The rasp of rope around the ankles. The weight of the body as he nudged it with the pickaxe. The tools were evidence.
He could make them disappear. Burn them, bury the charred metal remains. No trouble really.
◆ ◆ ◆
He dug a smaller, shallower hole across the driveway and threw in the tools. Then he doused them with gas and lit the whole thing with a kitchen match. The flame boiled and twisted. He was a little drunk. Alone again, soaking in the burn pit’s light and warmth, he felt satisfied.
Then the fuel can exploded.
He’d placed it off to the side, a dozen feet from the fire. But in his unsteadiness he’d left a thread of gas in the sand, invisible until a flame dashed and ripped a seam in the sand.
Flames spat from the burst can, mostly hissing on the ground, except a bright rope that lashed the trunk of a nearby Joshua Tree. The flames climbed, hastened by the breeze.
He ran for the house, for his fire extinguisher, knowing it was too late.
◆ ◆ ◆
The tree had nearly burned itself out when he saw the lights coming up from the valley. Someone had called it in. He reached into his pocket for his keys.
The fire engine was entering from Lost Lantern Road. Francis drove the other way, down a rutted track off the south end of the property, brush scraping the truck’s underbelly. He watched the fire fighters stop short of the fire, not wanting to get between the burning tree and the house. No fire plugs out here, but the truck’s tank would do the job. The fire was dying.
He felt bad about the tree though.
◆ ◆ ◆
He’d not gone much more than a mile before he saw new lights in his rearview. Police. He gave the truck a little more gas — it burbled reassuringly.
He entered the top of the canyon road, the patrol car close behind. Rounding a bend, the lights of Yucca Valley appeared below. He could imagine lamplit living rooms, clean but cluttered. Cheap sofas bearing up men in front of monolithic TVs. Women scrolling in darkened bedrooms. Electric cars sleeping on their umbilicals. Everyone seeking at least a partial respite from this century’s relentless push for productivity. For the first time, he wished he could be inside such a life.
But the lights persisted. Just before the highway he started slamming his horn, flicking his high beams. The signal changed green just in time. He steered a big sweeping arc around the intersection and doubled back — the cop realizing too late, failing to block him — driving back toward the midnight desert sprawl.
A second cop car joined the motorcade now, staying close, calling over the loudspeaker but not escalating. Francis was driving carefully, going the speed anyone would on these roads this time of night. If not for the lights and the shouting, they looked more like a funeral procession than a pursuit.
He’d have to pull over soon. He wasn’t cut out for outlawry. Or suicide by cop.
He pulled out his phone, thumbed recents and called the 909 number again. He’d expected voicemail, so, when it rang, he was startled by the sound. Two times. Then silence. He lowered his phone to look. Seconds ticked off on the screen — it’d been picked up.
“Hello?” he said. Again.
But only silence answered. Not even dead air — just something blank and pristine.
He shoved the phone back into his breast pocket, his fingers brushing the key and the polaroid. Maybe the dead man had been running too — had reached the end of a more consequential pursuit.
◆ ◆ ◆
They searched him, pressing him on the ground, grinding dust into his clothes. One of the two was Deputy Tisdale. Tisdale took the photograph and the key from him, easing him up to check his pockets, the way Francis had done with the body.
Francis spilled everything he knew — had done — there on the roadside. Once he started talking, the cops let him stand while he confessed, hands cuffed behind. Then Tisdale fed him into the back of his cruiser and got up front, and they commenced their trip to the County jail. The second car followed.
◆ ◆ ◆
Tisdale shifted in his seat like an old bull trying to settle. Leather creaked. He eyed Francis twice in the rearview. Cleared his throat. “Hell of thing, burying a stranger like that.”
Francis thought of the scene two nights ago, opening the pale belly of the desert and pushing in the body. “Nothing you guys could do. All the same where he gets put, I guess.”
“It’s not the same if you’re the one doing the putting.”
“My hole. My land.”
“Our crime scene,” Tisdale said, shaking his head. “The deceased is evidence. Belongs to the Sheriff’s Department.”
“Your claim.” Francis wagged his chin at the passing landscape. “Look at all this. Think anyone remembers where the coyotes lie down?”
The deputy quieted, weighing something. “You don’t look like our usual bad guys. But you seem guilty.”
“Plenty on my conscience,” Francis said. “Just not this.”
A subtle shake of the deputy’s head. “You’d want someone to do better by you, if it was you out there.”
He thought of friends he’d lost — fates arbitrary, leaving not enough to bury. “I’ll get no say.”
The cop quieted. Traffic lights passed. Then, “We can let you know about that woman. Whatever we find.” He’d softened his tone. “Might’ve known by now if you’d done what you should.”
Along the side of the road, in an empty lot between low, shuttered buildings, Francis saw a dog in a streetlamp’s halo, still as carved wood, listening for something.
“You can keep all that under your Stetson,” Francis said. “No longer my concern.”
He was going to jail tonight. Probably he’d make bail — he had the house. He’d be charged with something. But so what?
Aside from the dead man, no one had been harmed. Looked at truly, he’d done a service. Offered his land. Accepted the world’s decaying matter. Same as the desert always did — he’d only helped it.
And yet in his gut he carried a gnawing. A dull pain of transgression. The police had everything now, but he couldn’t shake the feeling he’d picked up a moral burden that wasn’t his, and one he couldn’t set down entirely.
There’d been something selfish in his act. Some misguided seizure of power. From what, though? The system? That old bogeyman? Or death itself? He couldn’t say.
A hunch told him he’d leave this place for good. Not because of prison — his sentence wouldn’t be too long. No, something else. A bone-deep lack of belonging.
It wasn’t just the landscape’s intimacy with death — he’d lived with that, even welcomed it. It was the nearness of that deep, familiar disorder. An opportunistic feeder, same as ever. And even here, huddled in his sandy outpost, he could feel its nearness in a way he hadn’t for years. It was around before Francis. It would outlive him.
He thought of home, imagined the scene by daylight — a crew out there, digging, digging. Not because they believed in it. Because they’d been told to.
Better to leave it buried. Better to forget.