Everyone comes to a meeting with a point of view.
—Simon Baker, “The Art of Decision Making,” www.myCEOlife.com
IT WAS ANOTHER FALSE LEAD; KUECK WAS NOT CORNERED AT all—at least in the sense that the cops were hoping for. Although no one knows for sure, it seems most likely—and this is the conclusion that many searchers came to themselves—that by day six of the manhunt, Kueck was hiding in the tunnels that tips kept pouring in about, emerging at night, like all desert creatures, to hunt. Unlike those who were chasing him—equipped with all sorts of elaborate gear and optics—he had no need for such trappings, knowing well how to take advantage of such things as the excellent nocturnal visibility of the Mojave Desert. “Its light-colored soil,” wrote the naturalist Raymond B. Cowles, “varies from pale buff to soft pink, and the plant life is so scanty it throws few shadows. All the natural light from moon, sky, and star, vivid in the clear air, remains to aid one’s vision.” In just a few minutes, with automatic ocular adjustment, Don was able to move easily through the night, foraging, drinking, and returning to his subterranean safe house before sunrise.
Is it possible to know which tunnel our hermit would have hidden in, on this, his last day of freedom? Perhaps it was the one near his trailer, with the periscope that he had shown Jello’s friends. Or perhaps it was an outlying tunnel, which he had shown no one. Or perhaps it was a tunnel that even he had not seen before, had only read about as he wandered the pages and visions of the old shamans. A portal might have appeared out of nowhere, drawn open by some unseen power or force, or there might have come an opening to a pack rat’s nest, and it might have enlarged, or possibly it was already large enough for a man to crawl through and into, entering a world that could have held him for who knows how long. There’s a strong chance that the tunnel in which Kueck was hiding in these final hours was not really a tunnel, but a kiva, a holy room, possibly the very one in which the shaman that had been unearthed by the bulldozer at the Anaverde development nearby may have once danced and prayed, in what manner we do not know, for so little is known or understood about the Indians of the western Mojave, the place that seems to have removed so much of its past and even recent history, as if in defiance of being remembered.
Given that Don may have been inside a kiva, of which tribe might this room of worship have been affiliated? Among the first peoples of the Antelope Valley were the Shoshone, and then there were their descendants, the Kitanemuk, the Vanyume, the Serrano, the Southern Paiutes, the Northern Mojave, and the Kawaiisu. All of these tribes invoked animal totems, some carving depictions of these creatures on rocks and on basalt walls, in tribute and perhaps as a route of spirit access, after certain plants were ingested or appropriate ritual was carried out.
Inside the kiva, on this, his sixth day as a fugitive, Don may have been undergoing withdrawal from powerful pain medication; he may have lost considerable weight, the result of not being able to acquire enough food or water in spite of having quenched himself at his friend’s house and at various caches and quite possibly faucets in the yards of the unsuspecting. He may have been hallucinating, seeing all manner of ghosts and demons, and was it not in a moment such as this that the Devil had come to him some time ago and shown him the way out?
With the walls literally closing in, he may have called on certain powers he had read about in his beloved collection of books, some of which or whom he may have communed with at one time or another. Like many of his generation, he had read the works of Carlos Castaneda, the celebrated and mysterious author who had journeyed to Mexico and encountered the Yaqui shaman Don Juan, who guided him on the inward journeys that transpired after ingesting magic plants, instructing Castaneda about the parade of power animals that crossed his path and loaned the pilgrim special powers. In a book found in Kueck’s belongings when it was all over, The Second Ring of Power, Castaneda encounters a powerful female figure called la Gorda, and finds himself confessing all sorts of personal torment while sitting in a desert gully. For example, he tells her that he once had a son whom he dearly loved and then one day forces conspired to take the boy away. To understand this dilemma, he had gone to consult Don Juan, asking the sorcerer to help him regain his son. Don Juan explained that a true warrior should not seek comfort after the fact. Instead, he could achieve results simply by the force of his own awareness and intentions. But it’s too late even for that. “If I would have had the unbending intent to keep and help that child,” Castaneda laments, “I would have taken measures to assure his stay with me. But as it was, my love was merely a word, a useless outburst of an empty man.”
Alone in the ground, Kueck may have replayed these words over and over, flaying himself with rebuke, simmering down in a self-obsessed stew of regret and shame, crying out what little water he had left, calling out to his son, and trying again to make contact, just like Dr. Moody had said you could do, his mind now a big mishmash of pathways and crackling neurons, fear and disbelief. Yet all of the good doctor’s suggestions for how to contact the dead were not working. In fact, they never had—who was this guy kidding, no wonder his relatives locked him up; there was only one way to talk to the dead and everyone knew what that was, and Jello, my son, do not fear, I am on my way, even though I am many days late and dollars short, but here I come you fucked-up son of a fucked-up father, here I come.
But first there were a few more things to take care of, farewells to be made, or hey, who knows, maybe I can still get away, it’s still a free country, right, and I’m still a free man, I got my rights. . . . It was time to call in his friends the animals. Oh, you could always count on them when the going got tough. They didn’t judge the way people did; they didn’t care if you ate your meals out of a can or snarfed drugs from the dirt if you ran out. And so here came Scorpion, who said, ‘Stay stealthy,’ and here came Bobcat, who advised that perhaps the time had come, but not without a fight, and then raven came—and Don thought, Raven? Underground? You are indeed some bird, one helluva bird if I may say so, and I thank you for finding me in my hour of need—and the black creature with the chevron wings hopped on Don’s arm, as always, and then the hermit looked him in the eye and saw his own reflection and he looked so bad and gnarly that it scared him. “Fear not,” Raven said. “I will help you fly away.” And then Don gave that some thought, and as he pondered, there came Ground Squirrel, and then several, and they hopped on his lap and on his shoulders, and they were running up and down his shattered body and chattering and just as the Indians used to say, they had come with news of the forest—or in this case, the desert, ha ha, the joke was on Don, for what they said was “You cannot win, my friend, give yourself up, there’s thousands of men out there and believe you us, they are heavily armed,” and the hermit knew that what they stated carried great weight and that he should probably heed their words.
Yet there was one tribe not yet heard from and this was Snake. Their absence disturbed him, as this was their domain, and he knew that some of the ancients, the Hopi in particular, that most unknowable of tribes, would go underground, taking snakes with them, and there they would dance, imbuing the rattlers with prayers for rain and then later sending them out to the four cardinal directions when they emerged, understanding that the snakes would carry the desires of their people with them and answer with the seasons and cloudbursts and life. Where were the Mojave greens who stood sentinel at his doorstep and who permitted him to handle them with no interference just because he lived with no fetters like they did out in the middle of nowhere? He couldn’t bear that the very creature who embodied the thing that he lived for—Don’t tread on me—had now forsaken him. And as he thought and thought and mulled it over, finally one of his beloved snakes may have appeared, though in a way that was not friendly, making it clear that he was no longer an ally. “Everything is out of whack,” Snake said. “Things are not right with you. We can no longer be of service.” It was all over then; there was clearly only one way for Don to get where he needed to go.
Or maybe it did not happen like that at all.
Darkness swept the sky on the night of August 6, 2003, and our hermit made ready for his last stand, figuring out how he would get from where he was at this moment to the place where he wanted to stand his ground. Sometime before daybreak, deep under the Mojave sands, Donald Charles Kueck understood that there was no refuge except what was supposed to happen, so he emerged from below to play the last scene out, promising himself that he would go out like a motherfucker. “Bring it on, old man,” came a voice, maybe his son’s. “Let’s see what you got.”
It was August, after all, the time when the end of things is on the wind; leaves are beginning to turn and fall, and even in the desert, the light is shifting, recalling, signaling, for those who have known it, the coming coolness and snap of impending freeze, the time of hibernation, sleep, and death.