The Low Desert

by Tod Goldberg

  Praise for The Low Desert

  “The wild west is alive in The Low Desert, a collection of stories as brutal and compelling as the landscape itself.”

  —Brad Meltzer

  “The first Tod Goldberg short story I ever read was ‘Goon Number Four,’ which he wrote for my anthology, The Darkling Halls of Ivy. I loved that story so much that I was eager to read his new collection, The Low Desert, and guess what? It’s engaging and supremely satisfying from the first page to the last.”

  —Lawrence Block

  “I’m a huge fan of Tod Goldberg, and these stories showcase all that I love best about his work—the wicked sense of humor, the razor sharp attention to detail and character, and the riveting momentum of a born storyteller. The Low Desert is a master class in how to write great Noir.”

  —Dan Chaon, author of Ill Will

  “There is something inherently violent about living in the California desert, about the imposition of human will—swimming pools and lush green lawns, air-conditioned palaces, and rolling golf courses—on an inhospitable, rust red, hard-as-stone landscape that otherwise seems indifferent to your suffering—be it from the punishing heat or the grifters and gangsters who’ve been drawn to the desert for generations. Tod Goldberg understands this and has written a collection of stories that are keenly observed, wryly funny, and heart-wrenching in equal measure. If wisdom can be gleaned from taking a sharp look at the human impulse toward violence, then Tod Goldberg is one of this nation’s sagest storytellers.”

  —Attica Locke, author of Heaven, My Home

  “The Low Desert is a powerhouse. Each story is finely crafted and flawlessly executed—gripping, surprising, and satisfying. Goldberg finds humanity in what others overlook, beauty in what many ignore. He seamlessly marries violence and grace to understand both the root and the aftermath of crime. And in doing so he tells a damn fine tale over and again.”

  —Ivy Pochoda, author of These Women

  “Tod Goldberg’s stories are full of humor, pathos, and sharp knife-twists of plot and insight. Featuring best laid plans that have gone horribly awry, and heartbreakingly authentic characters broken by violence, longing, and hope, The Low Desert packs a heady, emotional wallop. More of this, please.”

  —Paul Tremblay, author of

  A Head Full of Ghosts and The Little Sleep

  “The Low Desert blew me away. It’s an astonishingly rich collection of stories—harrowing and hopeful, gritty and funny, elegiac and electrifying, and always, always, deeply human. Tod Goldberg has written a book that’s impossible to put down and impossible to forget.”

  —Lou Berney, Edgar Award–winning author of

  November Road and The Long and Faraway Gone

  “Tod Goldberg is a terrific writer, and The Low Desert is a smart, surprising page turner.”

  —Don Winslow

  “Like Mario Puzo, Goldberg understands that the way to write about organized crime is to write about the people who live in that world. Yes, they are criminals, but most of them aren’t villains. A sterling collection that showcases the author’s gifts as a storyteller.”

  —Booklist

  THE LOW DESERT

  ALSO BY TOD GOLDBERG

  Gangster Nation

  Gangsterland

  Living Dead Girl

  For Wendy,

  who is the good inside all of these bad people

  A prisoner cannot free himself.

  THE TALMUD

  CONTENTS

  The Royal Californian

  The Low Desert

  Palm Springs

  The Spare

  Goon Number Four

  The Last Good Man

  Pilgrims

  Mazel

  Professor Rainmaker

  The Salt

  Ragtown

  Gangway

  Acknowledgments

  THE LOW DESERT

  THE ROYAL CALIFORNIAN

  Three hours out of the hospital, his left foot too swollen for a shoe, Shane’s car breaks down. It’s July, a trillion degrees outside, Interstate 10 a gray ribbon of shit unspooling east out of Palm Springs toward Arizona. Not exactly where he wanted to go, but who the fuck wants to go to Arizona? It’s what was on the other side of Arizona that mattered to Shane, the chance that there might be another life in that direction. He never liked being on the coast. The one time he ever tried to swim in the Pacific—during a vacation with his dad, so, over twenty years ago, half his lifetime now—he was gripped with the ungodly realization that unlike a pool, there were no sides. You were always in the deep end.

  It was a feeling that stuck with him, even when he was in one of those towns in the San Fernando Valley that sounded like an escape route from an old Western: North Hills . . . West Hills . . . Hidden Hills . . .

  The Honda was the one damn thing Shane thought he could depend on. But as soon as he pulled out of the parking lot at Centinela Hospital in Inglewood, the check-engine light flashed on. A hundred thousand miles he’d put on that fucking car and not a single problem and the one time he really needed it, it was telling him to fuck off. He didn’t have the time—or the money—to swing by the mechanic considering he’d left the hospital before the nurse had filled out the paperwork for the cops, which was a problem. Not as big a problem as staying would have been. It wasn’t the kind of thing that would have the cops trawling the city for him, especially since the wound did look self-inflected, since it was . . . someone else holding his fucking hand while he shot himself with his own damn gun.

  SHANE COULDN’T REMEMBER if he still had AAA, but he called anyway.

  “Looks like you canceled your account six months ago,” the customer-service agent predictably said.

  Rachel must have done it after she moved out. Like how she canceled their credit cards. Or how she took their dog Manny to get his teeth cleaned on the same morning she kicked him out of the house, knowing full well Shane wouldn’t have the cash to pick the dog up.

  God, he loved that dog. Probably more than he loved Rachel. Not probably. Actually. If he got out of this fucked-up situation, he was going to buy another dog that looked like Manny and name him Manny, too.

  “How much is it to re-up?” Shane asked.

  “Sixty-eight dollars, which gets you seven miles of towing service.”

  “What if I need to go farther?” Shane asked, thinking, What the hell, maybe I’ll have AAA tow me to Arizona, give me someone to talk to. Or maybe he’d just steal the tow truck. He could do that. He was capable of anything now.

  “You’d need the premier membership for that,” the customer-service agent said, and then he began to tell Shane the particulars of how amazing the premier membership was, going on about all the times you could get your car towed a hundred miles, the discounts you can get at resorts nationwide, Shane thinking that the only people who could afford this fucking service were the people least likely to need it. He had $274 in cash in his pocket; Gold Mike, the fucker who shot him in the foot, gave it to him as a parting gift after he’d asked him to stop by their storage unit by the Forum, Shane thinking it was to plan the night’s job, Gold Mike with other ideas.

  “It’s not working out,” Gold Mike told him. The storage unit was half empty already, Gold Mike’s van filled with their DJ and Karaoke equipment, all their locksmith materials, plus their three industrial-sized lockboxes filled with pills. They’d been coming up light lately, but for a while, it was a good living. Black-tie weddings in the Palisades, bar mitzvahs in Calabasas, retirement parties in Bel-Air. How it worked: one of them would be inside at the wedding, singing or DJing, and the other would be parking cars and collecting addresses off of insurance cards and registrations. Three-hour wedding meant they could get as many keys made as they wanted.
Spend the next couple days casing a house, go in and steal all the pills, which wasn’t a crime any cop gave a shit about, particularly when there was no evidence of breaking and entering. Plus, it was a victimless crime, Shane not feeling too bad about taking a cancer patient’s Klonopin, knowing full well CVS would hook them back up in thirty minutes, maybe less. They didn’t steal jewelry or TVs or cars or any of that shit. Just pills.

  Then this whole opiate crisis started getting on the news right when weed got legalized, so people in California started loading up on edibles and vape pens instead of Percocet and benzos.

  “It’s just an ebb,” Shane said.

  “I’m moving my operating base,” Gold Mike said. “Got a friend in Reno. Says it’s jumping off there. Everyone’s hooked on something. He can get me into the hotels. That’s next-level.”

  “Cool,” Shane said. “I’m down to relocate.” His only steady, legal gigs were running karaoke at Forrest’s Bar in Culver City and a honky-tonk in Thousand Oaks called Denim & Diamonds, across the street from a bar where a guy went fucking nuts and murdered a dozen people.

  “You’re not hearing me,” Gold Mike said. “You can’t hit the high notes anymore. If you can’t sing, this whole operation is moot.” Moot. Where the fuck had he learned that word? “Don’t make it weird, all right? We had a good run.”

  “Who needs a high note? You think Mick can hit a high note?”

  “Who the fuck is Mick?”

  “From the Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger.”

  “Bro,” Gold Mike said, “I don’t even like music.”

  “So that’s it? No severance?”

  “You think you’re getting COBRA up in this bitch? Come on, man.”

  “Manny’s chemo put me back ten grand,” Shane said. Manny had a tumor on his ear that turned out to be a treatable cancer, in the sense that the dog could get treatment and still die, but he hadn’t yet, as far as Shane knew. “I’ve been upside-down ever since.”

  “That was like eighteen months ago.” Gold Mike took out his wallet, thumbed out a few fifties, put them on an empty shelf next to a broken turntable.

  “Couple hundred bucks?” Shane said. “How about you give me 50 percent of everything or I walk into a police station. How about that?” And then Shane pulled out his gun, which had actually been a gift from Gold Mike. A .380. He’d given it to him after a robbery went sideways: a Vietnam War vet came home and found Shane in his bathroom, beat the fucking shit out of him with a golf club, Gold Mike coming in at the last minute and knocking the fucker out with a Taser.

  You pull out your gun, you gotta be ready to use it, no talking shit, no hands up, nothing, just pop-pop-pop. That’s what cops are always saying; it’s what Gold Mike had taught Shane, too. Which is how he also had all of Gold Mike’s credit cards and his driver’s license, in addition to $274.

  “Seven miles is fine,” Shane said to the customer-service agent and gave his location on the 10, half a mile from the Monroe exit, according to the GPS on his phone, which it occurred to him he’d need to ditch. Shane examined all the main street names in either direction—Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Calhoun, Van Buren—trying to find a street that sounded friendly, a place he could tell the customer-service dude to find a room for him, but the dead presidents were giving him bad juju. He wasn’t going anywhere near that fucking asshole Andrew Jackson. “There any motels near Jefferson Street?” he asked, thinking Jefferson seemed about 65 percent decent, relative to our other slave-owning asshole Founding Fathers. “I need a place with a karaoke bar, if possible.” He had a hustle he liked to do where he’d bet people that he could make them cry and then he’d bust out “Brick” by Ben Folds Five and every girl who ever had an abortion would be in a puddle. It didn’t make him proud, but he had bills to pay.

  “Let’s see what we have here.” The agent made a whistling sound. “Well, the Royal Californian is 6.7 miles from where you are,” the agent said, “and located between Jefferson and Monroe on Highway 111.” He paused and Shane could hear him clicking away on his computer. “They have free HBO and free wi-fi, a pool, and a sports bar with karaoke. If that works, shall I charge it to your existing credit card and get the truck to you?”

  “How about I give the driver cash,” Shane said. He needed as little paper trail as possible.

  “I’ll need to check with my manager,” the agent said, and put Shane on hold.

  He was parked beneath a billboard that advertised The Wonder of Waterfront Living in the Desert! and showed a happy couple of indeterminate race walking into what appeared to be an Italian lakeside villa surrounded by palm trees. He looked to the west and could make out the obvious signs of civilization: the sign for a Starbucks, an RV park called The Long Run, a billboard touting an upcoming concert by Rick Springfield at the Fantasy Springs Casino. That fucking guy.

  “We’ll have a tow truck to you in about twenty minutes,” the agent said. “May we get anything else for you?”

  He looked down. His foot wept blood, the gauze packed around the wound a deep red. Shit. He’d need something to dull the pain, soon. And then stop the sepsis. Which was a thing he didn’t worry about, usually, but this was not a usual day.

  “Iodine? Anyone carry that?”

  “Uh. No, sir, I don’t think so.”

  It was worth a shot. Shane hung up. It was nearly four o’clock. He was supposed to be singing “Come On Eileen” in a couple hours, always his first song over at Forrest’s, everyone always losing their shit when he did that “toora loora toora loo rye aye” bit, like it was 1982 and they were thirteen at the eighth-grade dance.

  That fucking song.

  More trouble than it was worth, that was for sure.

  He couldn’t think about that now.

  He needed to get Gold Mike’s body out of the trunk.

  Or, well . . . parts of Gold Mike’s body.

  IT’S 2009 AND Shane’s working the Black Angus in Northridge. They’ve got something they call the “Fun Bar,” a relic from the disco years, lit-up floor, big dark booths, great sound system, but no one dancing. Just frat boys over from the college drinking vodka and cranberry, like they all have UTIs. At first, he’s just doing karaoke like anybody does karaoke, stands up there and lets some drunk come up and sing “American Pie,” helps him out when he realizes the song is eight minutes long and he doesn’t have the wind. Flirts with the bartender, maybe gets a handjob in the dry storage. Woman or man. He didn’t give a fuck. Handjob was a handjob, Shane equal-opportunity back then, because of all the coke and a profound lack of giving a fuck. Love is love, friction is friction.

  Maybe a little guilt now, thinking about it, thinking about how he did Rachel wrong, staring at the ceiling fan twirling in his room at the Royal Californian, 11 p.m., still a hundred degrees outside, giant flying roaches committing suicide against his window every couple minutes, Shane dying for a fucking Percocet, a million of them still in Gold Mike’s van, Shane could hit himself for being so stupid, not thinking this all through, his foot throbbing, sweat sticking his shirt to his chest.

  His own fault. Rachel, that is. A lot of lying. Fuck it had been his point of view back when he worked at the Angus. Go home with a hundred bucks for the night and an empty load? Fuck it. Problem was, he’d kept that point of view long into his relationship with Rachel and she was not a Fuck it kind of person, so he pretended it was just how performers were, though by the time Rachel came along, he wasn’t a performer anymore.

  “Baby,” he’d tell her, “you gotta just say ‘fuck it’ when you’re in this business, otherwise every night would crush your spirit.”

  And Rachel, she’d say, “Then you should get another way to earn a living.”

  And so he had.

  Kind of.

  Thing was, Shane could really sing. All this other shit was ephemeral. His talent, man, that was in his genetic code. His dad played in the Catskills back in the day, singing in cover bands, even came out to California tha
t one time he brought Shane with him, doing a night at Melvyn’s in Palm Springs. Typically, Dad would come back home the first week of September with a roll of cash, and for a month everything would be good between him and Shane’s mom. Dinners out. New clothes. Shane’s mom falling in love all over again, talking about how maybe this year they’d get married, maybe she’d go to college, then maybe law school, Shane’s mother always talking about how she was going to be a lawyer, but by the time she died, she’d spent twenty-five years as the lunch lady at Rensselaer Point Elementary down in Troy. She’d had Shane when she was fifteen. Dead by fifty-one. Got diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s and put a fucking noose around her neck two hours later, Shane’s dad saying, Maybe she didn’t really have the old-timer’s, because wouldn’t she have forgotten? His dad was still alive, that was the irony, doing what Shane thought of as the Dead Man’s Tour: Buddy Holly and Elvis tribute shows at Indian casinos in Connecticut, Shane keeping track of him on the Internet, that fucker doing pretty well.

  But the Angus.

  In comes Gold Mike. Sits at a table right by Shane’s kit, nurses a Diet Coke. Really gets into it when Shane sings. Tapping his foot. Bobbing his head. When Shane hits his full register during “Come On Eileen,” Gold Mike stands up and whoops.

  When he goes on break fifteen minutes later, Gold Mike follows him outside, where Shane is having a smoke and watching the traffic on Corbin Avenue.

  “You got a nice presence,” Gold Mike says.

  “Thanks, man,” Shane says.

  “Wasting it out here, if you want my opinion,” Gold Mike says.

  “Just waiting to be discovered.”

  “That’s not ever gonna happen,” Gold Mike says, like he knows. He’s maybe twenty-seven, but he’s one of those guys who talks like he’s been around the world fifty times. Shane’s seen Gold Mike on the circuit. Weber’s in Reseda. Sagebrush Cantina out in Calabasas. Shutters in Santa Monica. Gold Mike fingers a diamond-encrusted V that hangs around his neck. Shane counts twenty-five little diamonds.