The Low Desert

by Tod Goldberg

  “Did it make you worse?”

  “No,” I said. A man and woman came walking by us on the beach then, hand in hand. Tomorrow, the beach would fill up again with spectators, and the boy Darren East would still be dead. “I didn’t hate myself for what I did,” I said once the couple had passed. “If that’s what you’re wondering. It was either me or the other guy. A situation like that, you always choose the other guy.” I poured myself another drink. “Fact is, Jim, I liked it. Wish I could say it was about justice or liberty or some such thing, but it wasn’t. It was power.”

  “You kill refugees? Women? Children?”

  “I aimed,” I said, “and fired, for three years, Jim. The orders were to kill everyone. So I did.”

  I heard a splash. Down the beach, people were running, drunk, into the Sea.

  “I need you to take care of something,” Jim said. He dug a small plastic sandwich bag from his back pocket, handed it to me.

  Inside was an eight-inch length of snipped concertina wire.

  “What the hell did you do?” I said.

  “I made a decision. For our families,” Jim said. He sat down in the sand. “Do you know who we work for, Morris?”

  “I’m trying not to.” I took the wire out, turned it over in my hand.

  “That boy is dead no matter how it happened. You did your part. Now we need to let it go.”

  “A good cop,” I said, “is going to see the wound on that boy’s leg and will investigate. With or without this wire.”

  “A good cop,” Jim said. “Look around you. Look at this place.”

  “Is that what your book tells you, Jim?”

  “My book tells me that boy is at the right hand of God now,” Jim said. “He has the ultimate peace.”

  “What about us?” Nothing. “What about his mother?” Nothing. “If I had to guess,” I said, “she’s buried underneath the pool in Woodrow East’s backyard. I don’t suppose you have a backhoe?”

  “Please,” Jim said. “I don’t want to know anymore. I can’t, Morris. I can’t.” He began to cry.

  The concertina barbs were covered with tiny matted shards of fabric, hair, and skin. I picked the barbs clean, placing the bits of Darren East, or whatever his name was, back into the plastic bag, which I then topped off with a handful of sand and rocks and shells and hurled it all back into the Sea. I imagined the bag floating south, against the current, picking up the tributary of the Alamo River and getting swept down across the low desert riverbeds, through Baja California, and then out into the Pacific. I imagined the boy sinking to the bottom of the ocean, mixing with the silt, washing back up in the sand at my feet. Imagined him in the blister of wind, burnt into my skin by the sun, until he was everywhere and nowhere at once. And how, the wire balled inside my fist, tearing into my flesh, I wished right then that I could join him.

  PALM SPRINGS

  Used to be Tania hated taking the bus. She didn’t want to become one of those people who brought the bus up in every conversation, as if it were part of her life and not just how she got from one place to another. Like her friend Jean, back when Tania was still living in Reno and working at the Cal-Neva. They’d sit in the smokeroom—back when they still had a smokeroom—and Jean would always have some story to tell about the bus. There was the time a guy had a heart attack in his seat and died before the bus could even come to a complete stop. There was the time a little girl fell off her seat and bit through her bottom lip and ended up bleeding on Jean’s new shoes. There was the time Jean swore she saw Bill Cosby in the seat across from her and that he was just as sweet as could be and had asked for her phone number.

  Tania wonders now, as she steps aboard the #14 that will take her from her apartment in Desert Hot Springs to the Chuyalla Indian Casino in downtown Palm Springs, whatever became of Jean. After Tania left Reno for Las Vegas in 1985, they exchanged letters for a few months, though Tania quickly realized she didn’t have much to write about other than the weather or various personal calamities: a broken toe that kept her from cocktailing for a week, a winter heat wave that blew out her car’s AC, her basset hound Lucy getting into an anthill. And so she just stopped writing, eventually tossing out Jean’s letters unopened. Tania remembers a vague sense of guilt concerning this whole episode, but in retrospect it all seems petty. Just because you’re friends with someone doesn’t mean you have to stay friends with them. Sometimes it’s just easier to go without.

  And anyway, what would they have to talk about today? Yes, better all around.

  Settling into her regular seat—third from the left—Tania can’t help but think Jean would find Tania’s present condition all very ironic, particularly since Tania used to tease her about “taking the limo” to work every day even when Tania offered to pick her up in her Honda. She loved that car: a black Honda Accord with leather seats, a cassette player with a detachable face, six speakers. She remembers how important it was that she have six speakers, how she obsessed over the sound quality in her car, how she rolled down the windows on even the hottest days so that passing strangers could hear her stereo. Twenty-three years old then and the thing she was most proud of was a set of goddamned speakers.

  Tania closes her eyes when the bus leaves the curb. The ride from Desert Hot Springs to the casino takes between thirty-seven and forty-eight minutes, depending on whether or not the bus stops at all the benches along the way. It’s a Sunday morning, so she figures she’s only got thirty-seven today, seeing as the bus is stone-empty. She likes to close her eyes for the trip, though she never sleeps, because she knows it’s the only time for the next nine hours she’ll get to see darkness. Cocktailing in a casino isn’t like what it used to be. Back in Reno, they kept it midnight inside the casino: black ceiling, purple carpet, bloodred walls. These days it’s all bright lights and warm yellows everywhere. The young girls think it’s soothing, but Tania finds it irritating, wonders why anyone would want to see so much. What she wouldn’t give to have missed a few things. Forty-seven years old now, Tania figures she could unsee ten, fifteen years and be happy about it.

  Sometimes, when she’s done looking for her adopted daughter Natalya on the Internet, or chatting about her with other mothers online, Tania tries to find her twenty-three-year-old self on the Ouija board she bought at Toys“R”Us. She figures if a Ouija board can talk to the dead or people living in other dimensions, it might very well have the ability to reach back in time, too. It hasn’t worked yet, but Tania thinks that maybe she’s just not asking the right questions, thinks that maybe all she needs to do is find someone else to do the Ouija with her, double up on the spirit power, you see. And when she finds herself, she’ll tell her to sell that fucking car and concentrate on getting her shit right because the future is painted in bright colors, baby, and no one will notice you.

  IN ALL HER years working at casinos in Reno, Las Vegas, and now Palm Springs, Tania has only hit it big once. It was 1995, nearly fourteen years ago now, back when everyone had money, and she was working at the Mirage in Las Vegas. After a particularly good night—Tania can’t remember what that means anymore, but when she tells everyone about Las Vegas in the nineties, she tells them she pocketed between two and three grand on a weekend night, though that sounds absurd now, the truth probably a good 50 percent below that—she put $500 down on a hand of Caribbean Stud and flopped a Royal, and just like that she was $50,000 richer. Taxes took fifteen off the top, leaving Tania with thirty-five; still more than enough at the time to put a down payment on a house, something with a great room, a nice yard, room for a pool, maybe even something on a golf course if she really kept banking at her job. Plus, she still had good credit back then, unlike most of her friends who had to keep changing their phone numbers to stay a few months ahead of the collection agencies, and loved living in Las Vegas.

  Five hours into her shift at the Chuyalla Indian Casino and with just thirty-seven dollars in tips, Tania can’t imagine ever risking $500 on paper again, because, really, she thinks while ma
king her tenth round this hour through the blackjack tables, that’s all gambling is: placing hope in colored paper. She wonders sometimes if her life wouldn’t have been better if, instead of betting $500 on cards, she’d taken that money to a stationary store and purchased reams of 25-weight linen resume paper. Maybe that investment would have forced her into a better life, one where success was predicated on having something to put on all that paper.

  Tania drops off three White Russians, five beers, and a Tom Collins to a kid who is clearly underage, since no one under seventy would have the audacity to order a Tom Collins and no one over twenty-one would even consider uttering it around a pack of their friends. Not when they could order Courvoisier and pretend to be 2Pac. Did kids still listen to 2Pac? She supposed they did, but Tania remembered listening to him when he was alive, thinking he was just okay, just another guy with mommy issues, like half the men she’d hooked up with since high school. When she decided to adopt Natalya, she threw out her entire gangsta-rap CD collection, figuring it wouldn’t be appropriate for her new role to be singing along to songs about hustling. Plus, she wanted to like what Natalya liked.

  Tania winds back to the bar and hands the bartender Gordon her orders: four beers, a Sex on the Beach, two Johnnie Walkers, three more White Russians. A blackjack table full of Marines in from the base at Twentynine Palms erupts in a flood of loud obscenities, prompting half of the casino to turn and stare.

  “Classy people out there today,” Gordon says. “Barely noon and people are trashed.”

  “I hate Sundays,” Tania says. “People should just go home. Watch TV. Read the Bible. Something. ”

  “It’s algebra,” Gordon says. “In order for other people to have a good time, we have to suffer their stupidity and then someone else will have to hose their puke off the parking lot. Altogether, we get off pretty good.”

  “I’ll be lucky to walk with fifty,” Tania says. “You know what fifty gets you? Nothing. It’s not even worth it to come in for fifty. Once I pay for the bus, get lunch, pick up dinner on the way home, what have I got left? It’s not worth it.”

  Gordon places the four beers on her tray and for a moment Tania considers downing one of them, maybe line up a couple shots, too, see how the day passes with a little less clarity on things. Back in Las Vegas you could rail a line and . . . well . . . no, Tania thinks, you just can’t compare your life along some arbitrary timeline, can’t think of yourself as a compare and contrast. The past was different. The present is ever changing. No, it has to be about what comes next. About staying focused. Keep yourself together. Gather resources. Find Natalya. Don’t force an apology. Fix things. Buy Christmas presents. Move to the city, any city, but get out of casinos and hotels and bars.

  “How long you lived in the desert?” Tania asks. Gordon is new—she’s seen him a couple of times in the last month, but this is the first shift he’s been on alone—so they haven’t found that rhythm yet, only know each other enough to flirt a little, tell a joke or two. Nothing personal. But for some reason today Tania feels like talking and can’t stand to listen to the other cocktail girls on the floor. They call her “Mom” and always want her to listen to their problems, Sundays inevitably taken up by whatever horror happened at the club the night previous, or whatever drama they have with their “baby daddies,” a term Tania just can’t wrap her mind around. When did people stop being “parents”? But Gordon seems nice, maybe even smart. Smarter than her other choices, anyway.

  “Five years, plus or minus,” Gordon says. “I used to come here when I was a kid, you know? I remember my dad once drove us right up to Bob Hope’s front gate and we got chased off by dogs. Big old Dobermans. I’ll never forget that.”

  “What did your dad do?”

  “Low-level crook,” he says. “Stole cars, kited checks, told everyone he was in the mob, but I don’t think he was.”

  “Everyone in Las Vegas,” Tania says, “knew a guy who knew a guy.” Including herself.

  Gordon pours himself a Sprite, adds a little grenadine, sips at it for a moment. “My dad was one of those guys who always had something cooking the next town over. One day he’d bring my mom a fur coat, next day he’d pawn it. Basically a professional liar.” He takes another sip, then nods toward the floor. “Like half of these people. Everyone’s on their bullshit.”

  “That’s why I can’t see myself living here much longer,” Tania says. Gordon puts the rest of Tania’s drinks down and then rechecks the order. No one ever does that, Tania thinks; no one else here gives a damn if they screw up her money.

  “Oh,” Gordon says, “you live here a while, it becomes like anywhere else. You find your shit, you know? This town, I can bartend until I’m sixty-five, seventy, and no one would think differently about me. Maybe along the way I find a rich old woman who wants to take care of a young stud like me, I hold her hand for a few years, take her to her Botox appointments, and then, one day, she dies in her sleep and I’m a millionaire.” Gordon’s laughing now, but Tania sees something sad in his face, like it’s not just him joking around, like part of him believes this might be his best chance for a good life.

  “You’ve got it figured out,” Tania says.

  “Presuming I don’t blow my head off first,” he says.

  “You don’t seem the suicide type,” Tania says.

  “They’d just prop me behind the bar. It wouldn’t be much difference. But if you stick around until I get my millions,” Gordon says, “I’ll let you move into my guest house. We’ll sit around the saltwater pool all day reading thrillers and sipping cognac.”

  “I see myself moving somewhere with a bit more character. Less tourists. All my life, I’ve been stuck with tourists.”

  “Like where?”

  “Somewhere,” Tania says.

  “No way for me,” Gordon says. “I’m California bred and spread.” Another girl—Tania can never remember if her name is Cindy or Bonnie, so she just calls her “sweetie”—slams her order on the counter, prompting Gordon to glare at her. “To be continued,” he says. “Don’t pack your bags just yet.”

  Really, Tania was thinking about Russia—Tula, Russia, specifically—but telling Gordon that would mean she’d have to explain her situation and she just isn’t prepared for that, at least not at work. Talking about Natalya here would make her seem trivial.

  Natalya was eighteen when she disappeared. If she’d been a minor, if she hadn’t been Russian, perhaps the police would have cared. But then 9/11 happened and that was the end of any real searching. That’s what Tania felt, anyway, that a part of her life dragged behind her like a rusted chain. Eight years of waiting to hear from her daughter.

  But still.

  Maybe there was an email from Natalya waiting for Tania right this instant telling her to come back to Tula, that she was sorry, too, and that she’d love to see her mother.

  Before she picked up Natalya in Tula, Tania imagined Russia would be a gray country filled with scary Communists, like the ones they used to show marching in Red Square, back when Ronald Reagan used to scare her, too. Everyone told her to be careful, tell people she was Canadian so they wouldn’t kill her, be as inconspicuous as possible.

  But when she finally arrived—she remembered the date exactly: February 22, 1996—after flying into Moscow and driving for two hours with an administrator from the orphanage, she couldn’t get over how beautiful the country was, how pleasant the people she met seemed to be, how substantial everything felt. The administrator kept pointing out interesting landmarks between Moscow and Tula, talked about Peter the Great, discussed the rich mining history of the city. And what a city: Citadels from the sixteenth century. Lush green forests surrounding the Upa River. Museums honoring famous writers and warriors. It was nothing like Las Vegas, nothing like Reno, nothing like any place she’d ever visited. She wondered what it might be like to settle in Russia, to raise her child in her home country, to live in such a place! Yes, she’d come back here when Natalya was fully integra
ted as an American. Adopting a twelve-year-old would present problems, she knew that, but Tania thought that later in life they would travel back here together, maybe buy a little house. Tania was thirty-five then, just twenty-three years older than her new daughter. Young enough that they’d be like friends the older Natalya got, less like mother and daughter.

  So foolish, Tania thinks, grabbing up her tray. All of it.

  Adopting Natalya wasn’t something Tania planned. It was the money that did it. Well, the money and loneliness. A few weeks after she hit the Royal, Tania’s fifteen-year-old dog Lucy woke up one morning and urinated blood; three hours later Tania’s vet quietly inserted a needle into her dog’s right front paw to put her to sleep (a term Tania has never liked as the implication is that the dog will someday wake up and be just fine), and just like that, after fifteen years and three hours, she was alone.

  She still had family and friends, people she had loved at some point. But when it all boiled away, she just didn’t keep people very well. Her parents and older sister Justine still sent her Christmas and birthday gifts, invited her to their homes for Thanksgiving (they even offered money if she couldn’t afford a plane ticket from Las Vegas, since her parents now lived in Spokane and her sister in San Francisco), called once a week.

  She’d had a series of boyfriends, too. Most of them long-term affairs, actually, and at the time she had just broken up with a DJ at the Rio after he accepted a six-month gig on a cruise ship, but their relationship hadn’t even been intimate. All things being equal, sitting on the sofa at home and talking to her dog was preferable most of the time anyway.

  That night, though, her dog dead, her parents and sister filled with the kind of comfort people without pets usually provide—“What you should do tomorrow is go to a rescue and pick up an abused dog,” her father said—she sat alone on her sofa and watched a documentary on HBO about the plight of children in Russian orphanages. By the film’s conclusion, Tania decided to put her Royal winnings to good use, give someone a chance at a better life, allow that money to be more than just a house she’d struggle to pay for night after night. She’d found the perfect place in Summerlin—a three-bedroom with a little lap pool out back, Corian counters throughout, a view of the Red Rock Mountains—and was preparing to make an offer, though she didn’t even know what that meant. Either she’d buy or she wouldn’t, and she hadn’t.