[Another from the book review bin, written in 2003.]
Twentynine Palms: A True Story of Murder, Marines and the Mojave
Deanne Stillman (Harper Collins 2001, $12.95 list)
The earth’s bones show through in the Mojave. Tectonic forces stretch the desert thin, as if a giant had grabbed Los Angeles in one hand, Salt Lake City in the other, and pulled hard. The Mojave’s cinder cones and hot springs intimate the deep geological passions that rise to graze the surface of the desert. Whatever the violence those forces may exhibit, the brooding lava spatter cones and occasional 8.0 temblors and jumbled boulders poking through the surface from the earth’s mantle, you still get the sense that the earth is holding back. If Mother Earth really let go, desert dwellers would be in deep trouble.
Along the Route 62 corridor north of Joshua Tree National Park, those desert dwellers congregate in an attenuated string of communities. The largest is Twentynine Palms. Home to a huge US Marine Corps base, 29 is in effect a Pentagon company town, though desert tourism plays an increasing role in the city’s economy. And joining the jarheads and Joshua Tree tourists in this overheated string of strip development is a steady stream of the dispossessed: the bikers, the loners, the meth addicts and their suppliers and their suppliers’ girlfriends. More than in many places in the Mojave Desert, five-time losers drift into Twentynine Palms and get stuck there, like so many bleached plastic grocery bags wind-whipped against a barbed-wire fence. It’s hard to escape, and they can get desperate. While the protected, ancient rocks of the Pinto Mountains bake picturesquely in the National Park Service sun, unpleasant events unfold among the Morongo Basin’s denizens downhill and to the north.
On August 2, 1991, Valentine Underwood — a Twentynine Palms Marine just returned from the Gulf War, with a known history of violent attacks on women — raped Mandi Scott and Rosalie Ortega in their apartment, then stabbed them to death with a kitchen knife. The murders form the pivot around which Deanne Stillman’s Twentynine Palms rotates.
Random, thoughtless, notorious acts of violence are nothing new in the California desert. White settlers occasionally hunted local Indians for sport. Charles Manson and entourage holed up at Barker Ranch above Death Valley after the Tate-LaBianca murders. LA gangbangers have long used the High Desert as a dumping ground for corpses, and the landscape is dotted with illicit meth labs: woe be to he who hikes unknowing into an active factory. But Underwood’s murderous act still shocked and divided the town. Scott and Ortega were popular, with friends among 29’s disparate base and off-base communities. When it turned out the Marine Corps knew of Underwood’s violent past and yet had done nothing to prevent the murders, some in the town were outraged — while others disparaged the victims as trailer trash, aficionadas of cross-racial dating, hip hop music and drugs.
Stillman’s unflinching observation of the principals involved in the case takes some getting used to. Few crime writers are as deft with language. This is what the reviewers generally call “vivid prose” — in fact, the phrase is used as a backcover blurb on the paperback edition — and in this case, that’s a bit of an understatement. For those whose taste in desert literature tends more toward the placid likes of Ann Zwinger, Twentynine Palms might require a break after each few pages.
Stillman’s unorthodox chronology, seeming at first to bounce almost randomly between past and present, adds to the disorientation: this story line is as contorted as a Joshua tree’s branches. In time, though, her choice of structure makes sense. This is no mystery — we know who died, how it happened, and who did it almost from page one. Stillman’s narrative structure seems almost oral rather than written, as if someone you knew well took several days to tell you the story in person. Overall, the somewhat distracted effect is not unlike, well, spending time in a Mojave town. Here’s a curbside beer can on a dirty diaper, there’s a ladderbacked woodpecker in a hedge, yonder’s a glimpse of brilliant desert sky backlighting the friendly, dirt-caked fellow asking you for a dollar outside the Motel 6 as teen street thugs eye each other warily down the block. Stillman has this place nailed.
Some reviewers have been unkind to Stillman’s work here, claiming she portrays the town in an unfairly negative light. Others have objected to her portrayal of the Marine Corps as an institution that promotes murderous rage and violence both on and off the battlefield, or faulted her for minor errors in military terminology. Everyone has a right to a point of view; Stillman’s job is to present those of her subjects, and she does so exceedingly well. Her take on Debie McMaster, Scott’s mother, is a case in point. Unhesitatingly honest about McMaster’s sordid past, drug use, and apparent predilection for men who beat the crap out of her, Stillman nonetheless gets us closer to Debie than we expect, so that the scene in which she encounters the yellow police tape outside her daughter’s apartment is utterly wrenching, no matter for how many pages we’ve seen it coming.
Perhaps most effective of all is Stillman’s use of the story’s desert setting. Far more than just a backdrop, the Mojave is the foremost of the book’s dramatis personae. It’s a source of rejuvenation for McMaster and Scott, seemingly far from the perils and pitbulls of Route 62. It’s a Greek chorus, its blast-furnace wind portending grief, the rounded boulders of Joshua Tree both dispassionate observers and stage hands for the gruesome, bloody drama playing out below — a granite Guignol. But mainly, it’s a brooding, meth-addicted Mother Earth that is just this close to slapping her kids down hard, if they don’t shut the hell up and let her sleep. This is one of the most honest books on the high desert yet printed. Desert Solitaire it ain’t, but Twentynine Palms has earned a permanent place on my Mojave Desert shelf.
