I didn’t argue. I put them in my wallet and texted Mauricio.
Estoy en problemas. Muy serio.
Mi casa. Veinte minutos.
I left my Audi at the mall and threw my good cell phone out the window on the way, into the wastes before Highway 111. She took her time driving to Mauricio’s house, watching her mirrors, staying to sixty. She pulled up in front of his sweet suburban ranchito. I remembered when he lived in a shit RV in Desert Hot Springs. He’d done well for himself.
The vintage maroon Thunderbird drew admiring glances as we sat waiting. Her voice was huskier than ever. “Send me a postcard when you get where you’re going, doll.”
I hugged her, her brittle little bones.
I could still see Jack there in the desert, looking up from the dirt, laughing.
She waited with me until Mauricio’s truck turned into the drive, XTerra Gardens — Ecological, Beautiful, Sustainable. My cell number. He was going to have to change that.
I left at sunset, in a rattling ladderback truck driven by silent Juanito, the oldest of Mauricio’s crew. Sunset washed the valley in soft blues and rosy golds — the farther from the mountain we drove the more magnificent it became. The wind turbines let out their unearthly groans. Behind us, Palm Springs revealed itself only as a little cluster of lights at the foot of immense, solemn Mount San Jacinto, indigo against the oranges and purples.
Up ahead, night was coming. In the desert, night doesn’t fall, it rises. The moon, great and smooth-edged, appeared, eyeing the desert, casting its magic over mean little cities — Indio, Thermal, Mecca — bathing them in a light that would never burn.
I turned on the radio, tried to find something not ranchero. The Voice of the Desert came in, crisp. Frank. Come fly with me... Always Frank.
The Guest
by Eric Beetner
Historic Tennis Club
“We have a situation.”
Randall had been renting out the pool house at his place in Palm Springs for about a year and had expected the occasional phone call like this. Grayson, his friend who watched the house while Randall worked in LA, kept the calls to a minimum so Randall knew something serious had happened. Just not plumbing. Please don’t let it be plumbing.
“Can it wait till the weekend?” Randall said. “I’m coming out Friday night.”
It was Wednesday, the worst day of the week. All the Monday haters could shut up — midweek was the worst.
“Um... no. I don’t think so.”
“What is it?”
“I’d rather not say over the phone.” Grayson sounded odd. Hollowed out and monotone, which was unlike his usual flamboyant self.
“Can you take care of it?”
“I kind of need you to come out here.”
“Tonight?” Randall asked.
“Please?”
He’d been only half paying attention until then, but Randall took his hand off the computer mouse and focused on the phone, the strange dull flatness to Grayson’s voice.
“Jesus, you’re scaring me. Did something happen?”
“Just please come out. Tonight. Right now.”
“Okay.” Randall looked around his desk, set designs that had a firm deadline before cameras rolled in three weeks. Still, if Grayson was this freaked out... “I’m leaving now.”
The house was a Mediterranean style in the Historic Tennis Club neighborhood of Palm Springs. Almost fifteen years ago in a market lull, he’d acquired it for cheap in the highly desirable district. He loved the neighborhood and counted the days until he could retire there full time instead of only weekends and breaks between work, of which there had been more and more lately, putting off a permanent move further into the future.
The house was modest and a dated wreck when he bought it, but Randall had a designer’s eye and no family or kids so all his extra money went into it. His neighbors were boutique hotels, homes on the historic registry and, to the west, the San Jacinto Mountains. And of course, the Tennis Club where he had yet to play in more than a decade and a half.
He’d repaired the crack in the pool and had it refilled, then remodeled and turned the pool shack into a livable six-hundred-square-foot guest space. Once the idea of Airbnb came around, it was a natural fit. He paid Grayson, his on-site caretaker, by giving him a free place to live.
In the year since the pool house became an Airbnb, this was the first time Grayson had summoned him to the desert midweek.
He crossed over Palm Canyon Drive and into the placid tree-lined streets with expensive landscaping trying to fool people and keep them from realizing they were in the desert. When he parked at the house, Grayson was there to meet him at the front door, chewing his nails. Grayson was nothing if not a vain man, always worried about his looks and whether men found him attractive, so biting his fingers was a bad sign.
“What in the world is going on?” Randall said.
“Follow me.”
Grayson led him through the house to the backyard. The palm trees were uplit and the pool cast a lazy movement of blue light over the yard and back of the house from the underwater lights. A shadow moved across the patterns of rippling water. Randall looked down into the pool.
A body floated facedown.
When he turned back to Grayson, there was a smear of blood across his lip where he’d chewed his nails until they bled.
Randall tried to keep his voice even and calm, despite the sheer panic going on inside him. “What happened?”
Grayson spoke in a voice that was half whine, half pleading for his life. “He was staying here. He was fun. And nice.”
Randall’s pulse quickened until it made his chest ache.
“We were having fun,” Grayson went on. “He liked me.”
“Grayson, what happened?”
“We were drinking and then we did some poppers...”
“Poppers? Jesus, what is this, the nineties?”
“I fell asleep. When I woke up... he was like this.”
Randall turned back to the pool and looked at the floating body. He was young, early twenties. His shirt floated open around him, like delicate wings catching a breeze. Beneath the fabric Randall could see he was slim and broad shouldered, like a swimmer. Someone who should never have drowned.
“It was an accident.” Randall said the words out loud like maybe he was trying to make them come true. “Yes, it was an accident. He must have had a heart attack, or passed out, or maybe hit his head or something.”
“Did you try to revive him?”
“It had already been hours when I woke up.”
Randall crouched down, sitting back on his heels and staring at the water. “What do we do?”
A single cricket chirped from the planter bed and the sound bore into Randall’s ears like a needle. For all the romanticism around a chorus of crickets at night, a solo insect could drive a person to insanity.
He pictured police. Publicity. Questions. Unwanted scandal and attention.
“We need to get rid of him,” Randall said, not knowing exactly what that even meant. All he knew was that he wasn’t about to deal with police and the investigation into his life this would bring. He’d be a pariah in the neighborhood. The people in this enclave took their status seriously. The Tennis Club neighborhood was where you wanted to be in Palm Springs. And they didn’t have bodies floating in their pools.
And his past wasn’t entirely clean. There’d been a boyfriend back east and it had ended badly. A restraining order against Randall. An order he broke on more than one occasion. There’d been violence, a thirty-day stay in jail. Court-ordered anger management. Randall wasn’t proud of it, but it was in his past — both miles and years away. And he intended to keep it there.