The year is 1978. Ares Ramirez, age 12, lives with his mother, Laurel, and his younger brother Malcolm in a trailer at the edge of the Salton Sea, an unintentionally man-made body of water in the middle of the Southern California desert. It is a desolate, forgotten place, whose inhabitants thrive amidst seemingly impossible circumstances.

Where birds fly by day across the desert sky, by night government fighter planes and helicopters make training runs using live ammunition, and an anonymous dead body floats in from the sea. These events inspire Ares, on the cusp of his adolescence, to enact elaborate fantasies of mortal combat. His membership in a troubled family marks Ares as a casualty of a different kind of war. Malcolm, age 7, is mentally handicapped, and his mother chooses not to do anything about it.

Ares' struggle with the burden of responsibility -- to himself and to others -- draws him into a world of drugs, violence, and sex that he is not prepared for, launching him into a very personal battle for his own identity, one that has a lethal outcome....

The year is 1978. Ares Ramirez, age 12, lives with his mother, Laurel, and his younger brother Malcolm in a trailer at the edge of the Salton Sea, a man-made body of water in the middle of California's Mojave Desert. It is a desolate, forgotten place, whose inhabitants thrive amidst seemingly impossible circumstances. Malcolm, age 7, is mentally disabled, but the boys' mother seems unwilling to do anything about it. The burden, then, is Ares' to shoulder, as he must protect his vulnerable brother from a world which sees him as strange, as "a retard." When this task becomes too great for Ares he moves into the sphere of an older boy named Kevin, an orphan who has been fostered by one of Malcolm's teachers. As their relationship arcs from dangerous to deadly, Ares comes to understand and embrace the uneasy relationship between selfhood and the responsibilities of familial love....