Eddie would go.
—Tribute to fallen lifeguard and big-wave surfer Eddie Aikau
AT MIDNIGHT—MORE THAN THREE HOURS AFTER THE FIRE BEGAN raging—SWAT was ordered to search the area. Now, two teams were sweeping the field. They still didn’t know if Kueck was alive or had escaped yet again. They formed skirmish lines and began walking through the rubble. Once again, they felt vulnerable. Yet odd things can go through your head at any given time. At least half of the men on site were planning to leave for a golf trip in Nevada later that day. They had put down their deposits months ago. “We gotta hurry up,” Bruce Chase was thinking. “If we don’t, we’ll miss our plane.” But of course what they were doing had no timetable, and on they walked, as if into a literal representation of the twenty-third psalm, the one that Chase often though of when in danger.
Strangely, although all four sheds had burnt to the ground, the main house where the Hispanic family lived was completely intact. In fact, as the compound had gone up in flames that night, Bruce remembers watching the blaze get bigger and bigger, moving toward the main house, while noting that a tree next to the house was on fire but the house was not, even as more of the tree’s branches began crackling with heat and flame. Except for a propane tank next to it, the tree was the only thing between the house and the rest of the bonfire. Oddly, the tank did not erupt either. Now, as Chase walked across the fallen timbers and ashes, the tree was still smoldering—and only half of it at that. There weren’t many trees in that part of the desert, in fact hardly any at all. This one was a mesquite, a tree with a root system than can run deep and run wide in order to tap into water. Far away in another desert there is a mesquite known as “the tree of life.” It’s the only tree for miles, and residents of the town of Bahrain where it lives have long regarded it as the marker of the Garden of Eden. Here in the Mojave, it was as if the tree had been protecting the house where Carmen lived, Steve’s friend, the devout woman who toiled in a church thrift shop that helped provide the destitute people of the valley with clothing and other provisions. It was some kind of miracle, Bruce figured. Yet that was not the only one. Inside the house were the family’s animals, left behind when they evacuated, safe and alive and well, waiting for everyone to come home and start over.
Other strange sights awaited SWAT as they continued to walk through the dregs of the compound. The power had been turned off several hours ago, and they were searching in the dark, with powerful handheld lights. It had been a long siege, and they were spent. Even Rik the Malinois stopped in his tracks. Joe Williams knew it was time for the dog to go home. He was replaced with another K9 who had been standing by, and the men continued their weary march. Ten minutes after the search began, Bruce Chase spotted two femurs jutting through the ashes. The men moved in for a closer look. Donald Kueck was on his back, nearly cremated, clutching his rifle. When they went to move the body, it crumbled. A few days later, his family scattered his ashes off the Three Sisters Buttes, the formation he looked to at dawn.
On August 11 at 8:06 PM, the dispatcher announced the traditional end-of-watch roll call for a deputy killed in the line of duty. “Lancaster 110 Charlie,” she called, and from his patrol car he responded, “114Boy, it was an honor to know you and a privilege to work with you, God speed,” and then from all over the desert the messages poured in—from 110 Lincoln and 110 Lincoln Adam and 110 George and 113 Sam—“Steve, you will never be forgotten, my brother. . . . Your family’s in good hands here, and we know you’re in good hands up there. . . . Rest in peace, my brother.”
Months after it all went down, the crime-scene tape at Kueck’s trailer still fluttered in the wind. There were some old jars of peanut butter and a pair of Nikes (size 11)—just waiting for the next hermit with a dream. The land remained a scavenger’s paradise of busted bicycles and generators, engines and furniture, lawn mowers and tables and chairs. There was a broken-down La-Z-Boy facing the buttes—Kueck’s chair, the one he sat in when he watched the sun rise over the Mojave. From here he could survey his strange desert kingdom. He had come out here to escape civilization, but he knew he could be evicted at any point. The desert was shrinking, and civilization didn’t like people who violated its codes.
“Lynne,” he said in one of his last letters to his sister, “I’m writing this down because I get choked up when trying to talk about personal issues. . . . I know the next life is waiting for me. . . . I don’t want you to blame yourself if the inevitable comes to pass. This feeling has been growing for the last one to two years.” Then, in a burst of optimism, he added, “Of course the future can be changed, and it would be fun trying. Since I was twenty years old, I’ve had the dream of building a little place in the desert.”
To the right of the La-Z Boy sits a pallet stacked with eighty-pound sacks of lime—construction material for the house that Kueck never built. One of these days, he was going to make a course correction. But as always happens with men such as this, he never got there—and never would. Instead, he had picked up a spade and dug his own grave at the edge of his property. It’s the first thing you see on the way in and the last on the way out, a project he made sure to finish, now filled in by wind and erosion. Months after he had gone out in the blaze, Jello’s friends drove out to the old man’s trailer, retrieved some mementoes, and scattered the boy’s ashes on top of Don’s grave.