Read the Excerpt: The Last King of California by Jordan Harper
Chapter One
If the world is flat like the Internet says, then this is the edge. The mountains on either side of the Cajon Pass are crumbled and cracked ruins slumping under a starless sky. It looks like where the earth runs out, the place before no place. Not that Luke really believes the earth is flat. But just now it seems like one of those online ideas — like the one about how the government and corporations are run by lizards only playing at being people — that’s true enough to make a point.
Luke is nineteen, tall in a way nobody ever seems to notice, everything about him drawn thin like he’s been stretched on a rack. His hair is getting long, odd bits sticking out all over. He’s got the eyes of someone outnumbered, even when he is alone — maybe then most of all.
He’s driven for sixteen hours now, that long slow fall from Colorado to California, stopping only to piss or buy food. He drives slumped forward so that he steers with his forearms resting on the wheel, so tired that ghost rabbits dance at the corners of his eyes. His stomach burns, his gut flora roiling in open rebellion. He figures they’ve earned the right. He’s been firebombing them all day with energy drinks and bags of flamin’ hot extruded whatever.
Or maybe it’s something else that’s riled them. Something that’s been bubbling in him since he passed into California for the first time in twelve years. Something thick and black that tastes like root beer.
He is coming home.
His head snaps up, a trance breaking. How long had it been since he’d thought about the road? Weird how the body can drive without you, how there is a stranger in your brain that keeps you from drifting across the center line while you are somewhere else. He cracks the window to let the cold air slap him awake. In his memories of this place — the ones he lets himself have — the Inland Empire is a place of unending heat. He forgot how cold the nights can be, how sometimes the desert holds no ghost of the heat that rules it during the day.
The music he’s streaming feels wrong now. Skittering mumble rap he got into at school, echoing weirdness that sounded right in his cave of an apartment in Colorado Springs. Here on the edge of the world it sounds tinny and bad. He pokes at his phone to shut it off.
He drives in silence.
His teeth harvest the skin off his lips in thin strands. His hands drum against the wheel.
He jabs the radio button. A blast of static. He jabs again, his radio scanning to find a station. A man bellows — Low-cost insurance even if you have a DUI — an air‑horn choir behind him. It is demonic as fuck. But better than the silence.
Luke’s phone tells him the turn‑off is coming. He checks behind him to switch lanes, catches a rear‑view glimpse of the back seat crammed with everything he owns. His clothes piled in a hamper, his skateboard. The box with his single pot and his single pan, the plastic spoon and spatula. His box of books, his Algebra 101 text‑ book poking out of the top.
Looking at the math book fills him with hot shame. Maybe that’s why he brought it, gave it this place of honor in the rear‑view mirror. To remind him how he wound up here, the only place he has left to run to, the last place in the world he belongs.
The exit to Devore looms ahead.
The pulse in his neck thumps turn-back turn-back turn-back.
Turn back where? To his apartment in Colorado Springs that he fled owing two months’ rent? To his mother’s people who had passed him around like a serving dish from the time he was seven until exactly the day of his eighteenth birthday?
Again he has that feeling like he’s standing with his toes poking over the edge of this flat earth. He thinks on something he read in a novel in Intro to World Lit, before he quit going to class altogether. About how when you peek over the side of a cliff and get that swooshing feeling in your belly, that it isn’t a fear of falling. In fact, the book said, it is the opposite. Vertigo is the fight in your mind between the part that wants to save you and the part that wants to fall.
The exit lanes slopes down from the highway. He takes it down into the dark.
His only memories of this place are a child’s, so that it feels both familiar and strange at the same time. Like the rooms in a dream.
Luke’s wheels spit gravel as he leaves the paved road and heads up into the hills. Rock walls dotted with greasewood and mummified monkeyflowers rise up on either side. He looks down at his phone. Here in the crevices there is no signal. Something inside tells him when to turn. He drives in submarine dark for three football fields before he sees the lights.
Home. At least it was once.
The sheet‑metal gate that dead-ends the gravel road is pulled shut. Past the gate, up the hill, Luke can see the house with its broad front porch. He remembers a swinging loveseat. Now there’s only a row of fold‑out camping chairs, the kind that look woven out of seat belts. A couple of big trucks sit in the gravel in front of the house. Lights burn behind the curtains of the front windows. Behind the house the box canyon stretches, and in the half‑moon light he can see shadows of junkers and brush piles, and something new, something like a second house against the far back wall of the canyon.
Luke knows there’s no nerves in the meat of the brain, so this feeling of a thumb pressed deep into the center of his head is just bullshit. But he feels it anyway — the pressure that is almost always there, juicing his adrenal gland. You cannot smell adrenaline, but Luke’s sure it smells like root beer.
Luke stops his car and climbs out to lift the hitch and open the gate. He’s too tired to lift his feet clear. They shush through the gravel as he walks to the latch.
“Hey now,” a voice says in the dark.
Luke freezes, his hand inches from the latch. He has this feeling like being dunked in cold water.
This scuzzy kid comes out of the dark. The kid, old enough to drive but not much more, is a head and a half shorter than Luke, but stocky. His dark hair hangs greasy down to his shoulders; he has a sad teenage mustache. He wears a heavy metal T‑shirt under a jean jacket with the sleeves hacked off. He carries something long in his hands.
The pit bull that runs ahead of him is the color of a bad day. Her ears are combat‑clipped into tiny triangles and her muzzle carries old scars, but when she pokes her head between the wide slats of the gate her tongue lolls out of a friendly idiot grin. The kid follows behind. When he steps into the slashes of headlight Luke sees the thing in his hands is a rifle.
“You’re in the wrong place.”
No shit, Luke almost says.
“I’m Luke.” He tries to say it strong and clear, but it gets caught up in his throat and comes out a rasp.
“You’re what now?” The kid is not pointing the rifle at Luke, but he holds it at the ready. Luke can’t meet the kid’s eyes so he studies his shirt, the words power trip written in electric letters, a skeleton king underneath the logo.
“I’m Luke,” he says again, better this time. “They know I’m coming. Del’s my uncle.”
The kid spits into the dark. “You’re Luke Crosswhite?”
Luke almost reaches for his wallet, like he’s going to show this kid ID to prove it. He catches himself, thinks about how lame that would be. He nods instead and mumbles some sort of yes.
The kid works his jaw like he’s thinking of spitting again but can’t wrangle the sputum to pull it off.
“Kathy said you was en route. I thought it was like next week is all. You’re a college kid, right?”
“I was.” He doesn’t say, Before I blew it all up.
The kid scratches himself under the chin with the barrel of the rifle, as if thinking on casual suicide. He looks Luke over, like he’s trying to make sense of how this skinny kid with scared eyes could be the seed of Big Bobby Crosswhite.
“You even know what goes on down here?” he asks. “Yeah.”
The kid laughs like the hell you do.
“So you’re coming to join the Combine then?” the kid asks, but Luke’s pretty sure he’s fucking with him, that even in the dark this kid must be able to see from the sweat on Luke’s forehead and the pulse of his neck that Luke has no place in his family’s business, no matter who his dad is.
“I just need a place to crash, get my head above water, you know?”
The kid blows across the rifle’s muzzle, drawing out a low sad tone.
“Well, they got a place laid out for you. Hell, it’s your dad’s land anyway, right?”
Luke can almost see the thoughts splash across the kid’s face next as he has them one by one: But your dad’s not here — ten years left on his sentence at least — oh shit oh shit —
“Oh shit,” the kid says. “You were there. At Arrowhead.” Luke’s face must do something. The kid whistles low like goddamn. Luke worries he’s going to want to talk about it, maybe ask questions that Luke can’t handle. But instead the kid moves forward and reaches for the gate latch.
“I’m Sam,” he says. The pit bull goes through the gap in the gate as soon as it’s wide enough to fit her. She hits Luke with her body, that way dogs do like they love you so much they want to mix their atoms together with yours. Luke kneels down to take her hungry affection and give some back.
Sam comes through the gate behind her.
“That’s Manson. She’s a stone killer. Only thing is she doesn’t know it.”
Luke rises, looks toward the light spilling from the house. In the windows, shapes from inside project against the closed curtains. Men standing close to the light so their shadows fill the windows, making them giants, the way they’d always seemed to Luke back when he had lived here and the house was often filled with the huge roaring men of the Devore Combine.
“Del and them’s talking with this dude Pinkle from out in the desert,” Sam says, talking low, his eyes gleaming like he’s sharing juicy gossip. “Some shit went down out in Hangtree, I think. I think maybe somebody got got.”
A dark thrill runs through Luke at those words, and he thinks about asking more, to find out what really goes on down here. But a wave of panic washes through him at the thought, and he studies the gravel until the moment passes.
“It’s black hearts only, so they got me on lookout.” Sam touches his shirt over his heart. “I’m due mine soon, for real.”
Black hearts kicks up memories of black‑ink hearts tattooed over real ones, men laughing and lifting Luke into the air, the taste of ice and root beer.
Luke swallows the memories before they swallow him first. He thinks, Please don’t let it happen here.
“So, should I wait?” Luke asks. “I’ve been driving since dawn, mountain time. I just want to crash.”
“Don’t think you’re meant to stay in the big house. Kathy fixed up the trailer out back for you.” Sam nods to the shape back against the canyon wall.
Luke wants to say But my bedroom is there, but he knows it would come out weird and childish. Something about this feels right anyway, that he wouldn’t be let inside. He just nods again.
“I’ll let them know what’s up when the meeting’s done,” Sam says. “There’s room to park right next to the trailer.”
“Thanks.”
The kid touches his shirt over his heart again. “Blood is love.” Somebody says Hey Bobby what’s up Bobby blood is love Bobby in Luke’s head. He’s worried that if he stays out here much longer he’s going to say something strange. So he mumbles some sort of see ya and climbs back into his car.
Luke drives up onto the property. As he passes he looks behind him to the back of the house, at the back right corner, the window of his childhood bedroom where he thought he’d be sleeping tonight. The window is dark. He drives through the skeletons of old cars, junk, shadowy and unidentifiable on either side of the gravel. He parks next to the trailer that is his home now. It is covered in brown siding, lifted off the ground with cinderblocks, spear grass growing tall around it.
He kills the engine. The dash lights glow for a while. Then they go out. He sits in the darkness and tries to make sense of his insides. Other folk seem to know right away what it is that they’re feeling, have words for it and everything. Luke hardly ever knows how to name the things that swim so huge inside him. He doesn’t know if he is smart or dumb, happy or sad. He doesn’t know what he’s doing or where he is going. All he knows for sure is that he does not belong here. That he is his father’s child but not his son.
He watches in the rearview as Sam pushes shut the gate. It’s like he can hear it shut from here. But of course he can’t.
He lets himself into the trailer, bringing in just his backpack and a half‑drunk bottle of water. He doesn’t turn on the lights. In the dim he sees the hotplate kitchen, the bathroom with its toilet and shower in the same stall, before falling onto the bed. Sleep comes fast for once.
He wakes to the sound of meat and bone colliding.
Chapter Two
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
He rolls over on the thin mattress — he’d fallen asleep in the clothes he drove here in. He sits up, thick with dreams, lost in this strange new dark. He grasps for the near wall. The trailer is still unset in his mind.
His tongue lies heavy and too large in his mouth. He gropes for the plastic bottle on the floor by the bed, gulps stale water. Not even sure what it was that woke him. If it had come from the outside or from within.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Overhead the stars are blotted and dull.
A single light burns from the window of his childhood bedroom. It seems too far away for the sounds to have come from there. But he knows how noise can be funny in a canyon.
Rocks bite the bottoms of his feet as he walks toward the house.
From the house to the back of the canyon, an asteroid belt of junk, old cars, weeds and brush. Some cars have been there since his childhood. The old once‑white Dodge. Luke, maybe only two, had once pried loose a wasp’s nest that hung under the rear bumper. He remembers stings like a wave of fire all over him, his mom mumbling something like a scream, moving sloppy, moving slow. Although maybe that last part is made‑up, a fake memory created after he learned the truth about his mom.
He passes the old shed, the red siding now faded to dullness by twelve summers. A duct‑taped punching bag hangs from the metal T of a clothesline hitch just behind the house. Under it, a circle of dust made by scuffing feet.
Twelve years ago he’d sat here in the back seat of a strange car, not talking — he had barely talked for months after Arrowhead — just looking out, seeing Uncle Del and Kathy, the other men of the Combine, his play‑cousin Callie looking back at him waving goodbye with these big sad eyes. His Uncle Ted, his mom’s brother and a stranger to all of them, drove him away.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
The sounds bring him back to now. He walks softly to the house. He brings his face to the window of his childhood bedroom. He’s awake but he thinks on sleepwalking, and on the stranger inside you who steers when you don’t.
The man standing in Luke’s old bedroom is shirtless. His back is to the window, muscled up, slick with sweat, his skin sheeted in ink. An eagle soars between his shoulder blades. A skull with vampire teeth on one shoulder. At the center of his back grins a devil’s face made of flame, sinners spilling from his jaws. BLOOD IS LOVE in gangster script across the small of his back.
Behind him, the same wood paneling, pinpricks all over where Luke had used thumbtacks to hang up pictures of Wolverine and the Diaz Brothers and anime spaceships.
The man’s head tilts back. He raises his fist. He drives it down into his own stomach.
Thud.
The man puffs out loud air. Luke’s stomach muscles spasm like he’s the one taking the punch. Inside, the man’s fist rises again.
Thud.
Luke moves closer to the window. His reflection rises up against his face. Luke looks through himself to the man living in his bedroom.
Thud.
Luke feels like he’s peeking at another world, one without Arrowhead. A world where Luke didn’t shatter and they hadn’t sent him away, where he’d stayed and grown up solid and strong, a member of both his father’s families. Like he’s seeing the ghost of what should have been, a world where he is not cracked and weak. He watches until the man’s hands fall to his sides and his fists unclench. Luke backs away from the window so that his reflection melts away into nothing, leaving only the man standing there. Like maybe Luke has it backward. That man in the room is animal and alive. If anyone here is a ghost, it’s Luke.
Chapter Three
Convertibles are for a different California than this one. The California of white surf and wind off the ocean, rich folk eating funny little food arranged on plates just so. Not the sprawl of San Berdoo, this place of sun and scrub and dust. On the 5 with the top down the wind whips Callie’s hair so it batters her face, so it flies wild in its roots, so later when she and Pretty Baby stop moving she’ll feel each follicle in her head individually aching. But Pretty Baby loves having the top down and Callie loves Pretty Baby. Anyhow, this whipping feeling matches how she feels inside just now.
We could do it.
See her, twenty‑two, these wild eyes that used to make the other girls’ moms cluck their tongues. She clacks her nails on the shotgun window. She takes three breaths, slow in, slow out. It helps to dull the skittering feeling all over her. She does the math in her head. If they did it, they’d clear six thousand dollars. Enough to achieve escape velocity.
We could do it.
She turns her face up to the sky, gun‑metal gray from smog ‑ trash in the air. The Inland Empire is always burning, even when it isn’t. It’s just it burns so slow most people don’t know they’re on fire. But Callie knows.
She turns to Pretty Baby, driving slouched, his left leg bent up so the foot is wedged up on the dash. Her hand steals over to him of its own accord, the way it always does when he’s near. He’s pale, bleach‑blond hair with pink streaks and these heavy‑lidded deep green eyes. Eyes that shine like the light goes out instead of comes in. He is scribbled all over with careless ink — to him his skin is so much notebook paper to be doodled on. Over his real heart sits a black ink one, the same tat as the one above her left boob. Only his is a little shinier on account of being newer.
“So what are we going to do?” she asks him.
Pretty Baby smiles that numbed‑out way he has. Her hand climbs up him to touch the rose inked across his cheek. The one with pretty baby written around it. It’s no lie. He’s prettier than she is. So goddamn pretty you can feel him pressing against your eyeballs when you look at him.
“There’s nothing to do.” His voice is soft and Xannie‑slow. He’s higher than he’d admit to being. “Bet Scubby was talking shit. You know, talking like he’s big time. I mean look at this sad shit right here.”
He fishes in his pocket, pulls out the wad of bills Scubby has just paid them for a baggie of percs. The bills are wadded to dirty softness.
“Think he’s got twenty thousand more of these lying around so he can buy a pound of crystal?”
He’s right of course. Scubby has white‑guy dreads and teeth like a mouth full of dog kibble. She knows he was probably lying when he said he had this big‑time friend looking to buy serious weight. But it gave her this little dollop of hope and she doesn’t want it to melt yet.
She turns, looks out the window. Next to them is a minivan. The back seats are a riot of kids. One presses her nose against the glass of the window, streaking snot, licking the glass. The woman behind the wheel has the face of a person driving a hearse.
Not me, never me, she thinks.
Pretty Baby puts a hand on her leg to soothe her. She doesn’t want to be soothed.
“What do you want to do?” he asks, turning it around on her the way she knew he would.
A tricked‑out hatchback swerves past them. The guy driving wears a polo shirt with a corporate logo on it, on his way to work or getting off work. His cheeks puffed up, his neck tight, like he’s holding his breath. She thinks on how all the people around them are running and they don’t even know from what.
“I got this feeling, you know?” she says. “Like the world is spinning faster and faster every day. Like it’s getting closer to the sun and picking up speed. Like if things keep going the way they’re going, pretty soon stuff’s gonna start flying off into the void.”
“Truth.”
A bright red teardrop of a car roars past on the right. The man behind the wheel is squat, his face the color of ham. She thinks on how the ugliest men drive the prettiest cars.
“And it’s like, when Scubby told us the deal, my first thought was, we could do it. We could get together some money and run. I don’t want to grow old here. I don’t even know if there’s going to be an old to grow to, you know? Like is there even a future? Doesn’t feel like it. I want to run with you, baby. Run while there’s still places to run to.”
They sit in the roar of the air for a while. When Pretty Baby talks again it’s so soft Callie has to lean an ear toward him to catch it.
“You want to run with me?”
“You know I do.”
He takes her hand and kisses her chewed‑up fingers. “If we went? Where would we go?”
She looks up at the Inland Empire’s dull gray sky, the smog‑ dimmed mountains.
“Someplace the sky ain’t dead.”
Chapter Four
Uncle Del drinks coffee like it is the cure. He sits in a big brown easy chair with the cupholder built in. It’s not the same one that Luke’s dad had, that one had been gray, but it serves the same purpose — Luke knows a throne when he sees one.
“So the prodigal son returns.”
Uncle Del in his memories: shaggy black hair and a tight goatee, arms ropey with muscle, eyes that stuck you like pushpins.
Uncle Del now: the hair and mustache thick with rags of gray. His arms are ropey, what little fat has started to cling to him all in a little pooch at his belt‑line. Gray stubble on his cheeks, with the mustache big and droopy in a way that would be funny on the wrong face, the kind of face that would let you laugh at it. The eyes have some lines around them now, but they still stab at you. Luke was too young then to see the cleverness in Del’s eyes. The searching.
“Thanks for giving me a place.”
“Couldn’t leave you to the wolves, now, could I?”
When Luke lived here the walls had held mostly family photos, the kind of frames that can hold four or five snapshots apiece. There was usually some sort of electronics opened someplace, car stereos or speakers with wires like veins and all sorts of video
game consoles — all of it stolen, Luke would realize much later as the truth of his family slowly dawned on him as a teenager.
Everything is different now, down to the sofa and rugs. His aunt and uncle have a taste for paintings of wolves and moons and Indians on horseback, black velvet built into ornate wooden frames, antlers and shellacked fish and the like. There are book‑ shelves scattered around — the only books around before had been true crime paperbacks, the kind with black covers and lurid red titles. The one thing that sits unmoved is the old walnut gun cabinet in the corner, fuller now than in Luke’s memories, every slot full of long guns.
“You like it up there in the mountains?” Aunt Kathy asks him. “It’s awful pretty, huh?”
Aunt Kathy then: blond hair, usually with a stripe of brown at the roots, thin so her knuckles protruded from her hands like helmets and her fingers were always cold. A laugher, a teaser, quick to bribe a kid with candy and treats. Now she is blond to the scalp and speckled by a life in the sun. She wears camo tights and a T‑shirt three sizes too big so it hangs like a dress. Her voice is coarser now, living more in her throat. She’d woken Luke around eleven this morning, hugged him like a handshake and brought him down to the house for what he now sees is an audience with Uncle Del.
“Sometimes it was nice,” he says. “Then sometimes it snowed all the way into May.”
“Gawd. That’d just about get me to take the toaster to the bathtub.” She puts one of those skinny menthols in her mouth and sparks a flame on a plastic lighter. The scrape of the flint raises chills in Luke. He stands far enough outside himself to know he is not okay. That doubled‑up feeling Luke had the night before is back and stronger than before. That feeling of being two places at once is growing stronger and stronger. All around him in the living room, with the kitchen in the far corner, everywhere memories are crowding in around Luke like zombies.
Please don’t let it happen here.
“So didn’t quite make valedictorian, huh?” Del asks. “Something like that.”
“School’s a scam, boy,” Del says. “Only thing it really teaches you is how to live on their clock and do as you’re told.”
“Now you tell me.”
After high school he moved to Colorado Springs, a few towns away from his mom’s people who had fed him and clothed him and kept him from foster care but hadn’t done more for him than that. He was thankful they’d done that much but didn’t feel much else toward them either. His cousins went off to colleges all over the country. They took on six‑figure debt like it wasn’t even real. He took what money he’d saved working in a pizza place all through high school and moved to his first apartment, a basement deathtrap with thin carpet over concrete floors and a single window the size of a loaf of bread, but it was his. He took out some small loans and he started the fall semester at Colorado Springs Community College.
He’d met Julie the second week of classes. They’d fallen together so easy it almost fooled him into believing in fate. She was kind, the sort of kind that can drive a person crazy in these cruel days. She composted and reused plastic bags and didn’t eat meat. She wrote postcards to politicians in faraway states about ocean levels and carbon footprints. She told him about how polar bears are falling through the rotted ice. How they are drowning. She told Luke that this time we are the comet crashing into the earth. And it hurt her so much to be part of that evil without even getting a say in the matter, it made Luke want to press himself into her as much as he could. And for some reason, she pressed right back. Sometimes he worried that to her he was another drowning polar bear, another thing to try to pull to safety from this melting world. But maybe that’s what he was and maybe there are worse things than being saved.
The first semester he managed As and Bs, better than anyone thought he could manage. Him included. Julie told him how her plan was to transfer to Colorado University in Boulder in two years, that community college was just a stepping stone, a way not to get completely crushed by student loans. She told him he could do it too. And maybe he even believed her. And those memories he had fought so hard against, memories of root beer in his mouth and blood on asphalt, they went away mostly.
And maybe there were still those nights when sleep wouldn’t come, those nights he would stare at the computer screen with burning eyes, googling “gangs of Inland Empire” and “Devore Combine” and reading weird little webpages, databases of gangs, old news articles with headlines like guilty plea in bowling alley attack. Or he’d dig up the Facebook pages and Instagrams of people who in another life he would be friends with, like the twins Trent and Tyson or his old play‑cousin Callie. And maybe he’d never tell Julie or anyone about those nights, how they brought him right up to the edge of terror, but right up to the edge of something else too. That he was equally enthralled and repulsed by the people he had come from, this perfect orbit of push and pull. And as the semester went on those nights came less and less.
One night he had this dream, the best dream he has ever had:
He is in a green biplane, a little one only as long as he was tall, tractor green with yellow trim, and he flies in it nice and slow. And he doesn’t feel the terror of being in the air — Luke has never been in an airplane — but instead it feels like swimming. He flies in long loops over the campus of his school. Below him the other students run out — there’s Julie, there’s Jess from his lit class, there’s Woody, always shirtless with the frisbee, there’s Joe and Rebecca and Jamila and Allen and Shelley. They all look up at him and wave. He waves back. And he’s flying and he’s floating and he —
And then he woke up.
But the feeling stayed, at least a little of it.
Winter semester he signed up for Algebra 101, a math requirement he needed to transfer to CU. It crushed him. He knew a couple of the other students got tutors but he didn’t have the time and he didn’t have the money. His brain whispered to him that anyway tutors were for people who just needed a little extra, and that he was dumb, that this was beyond him and always would be.
Julie fell in with a group of political kids, and more and more her conversations were about boys who’d read the same books she had and didn’t have to work a double shift every Saturday, and he started to think the only reason she hadn’t ended it with him yet was because she was sweet or because she was a coward and sometimes Luke wondered if there was a difference. And anyhow, he figured the time to save a polar bear is before the ice cracks under its feet, not when it’s already in the water.
The first time he skipped class that semester, it was because of a head cold, but the day spent hiding in his cave watching old network sitcoms on endless repeat was like floating in one of those blackout dark tanks of salt water just the temperature of your skin, floating in nothing, and Luke found the nothing suited him just fine. So he did it the next day too. He knew he was fucking up and he watched himself do it, like when you drop something and you have time to watch it tumble but no time to catch it.
He slept and slept but he never had any more airplane dreams. One day he rallied himself enough to go to campus, and he walked into algebra class just a little late. Everyone in class was writing in silence so Luke walked up to the teacher and said, “Do I need something?”
“You mean the test?” the teacher asked. He kept his face calm as he said something like Yeah I mean the test. Even as he took the test he knew it was over, that he was already heading toward a D at best and now it was an F for sure. The next week he gave up class altogether, and then work, not even calling in, just no‑showing, ignoring the manager’s angry texts. He missed rent and he hid as his landlord pounded on the door and yelled his eviction notice. It was only after it was too late to do anything about it that he realized he had to run, and that he only had one place to run to. He opened up a DM on Instagram to his aunt Kathy and sent her a message. Her message back was brief, so full of emojis it was hard to parse, but the message was clear: We’ll find a place for you. It took him a night to pack what he could fit in his car and say goodbye to his couple of friends and Julie — there were tears, which was nice of her, but under them he could see the relief.
He left his basement apartment only half‑cleaned with a note to the landlord saying SORRY on the floor, written on the back of a junk‑mail envelope. Everything falls apart, Luke knows. Chaos and entropy pester everything to dust in the end. It’s just somehow everything crumbles faster in Luke’s hands.
Discover the Book
This stirring and brutal bildungsroman tells the story of young Luke Crosswhite, who after years apart from his criminal family returns to their flock deep in the California desert. Luke’s father is serving time for a brutal murder that Luke himself witnessed; now, his uncle vies for power and rival biker gangs encroach on the family’s various criminal enterprises. A sensitive boy grown hard man, Luke navigates the vicious pressures of “home,” and the loyalties to his old friend, Cassie, who has hatched a scheme with her boyfriend Pretty Baby to escape the control of the gang, the Combine. Hanging over these desperate, lonesome parties is the gang’s motto, tattooed indelibly across the heart: Blood is Love.
The Last King of California is a story of the West unlike any you will read.
“When I say The Last King of California subverts the stereotypical American Outlaw Mythos, it’s the highest praise I can give it. No one is thinking deeper about what crime fiction is than Jordan Harper.”— S. A. Cosby
“Burns bright and fast”— Peter Swanson
“Darkly irresistible” — Megan Abbott
“Urgent and beautiful” — Lauren Beukes
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