The Low Desert

by Tod Goldberg

  THE SALT

  Beneath the water, beneath time, beneath yesterday, is the salt.

  The paper says that another body has washed up on the north shore of the Salton Sea, its age the provenance of anthropologists. “Washed up” is a misnomer, of course, because nothing is flowing out of the Salton Sea this winter of interminable heat: it’s January 10, thirteen years into a century I never thought I’d see, and the temperature hovers near 100 degrees. The Salton Sea is receding back into memory, revealing with each inch another year, another foundation, another hand that pulls from the sand and grasps at the dead air. Could be the bodies are from Tom Sanderson’s family plot, first swallowed by the sea in 1971, or perhaps it is Woodrow East’s girlfriend, risen up from the muck at long last, or maybe it is my sweet Katharine, delivered back to me in rusted bone.

  I fold the newspaper and set it down on my lap. Through the living room window I see Rebecca, my wife of seven months, pruning her roses. They are supposed to be dormant by now, she told me yesterday, and that they are alive and flowering is nothing short of a miracle. Much is miraculous to Rebecca: we met at the cancer treatment center in Rancho Mirage a little over a year ago, both of us bald and withered, our lives clinging to a chemical cocktail.

  “How long did they give you?” she asked.

  “Nothing specific,” I said. The truth was my doctor told me that I had a year, possibly less, but that at my age the script was likely to be without too many twists: I’d either live or I wouldn’t. And after spending every afternoon for three months hooked to an IV, I wasn’t sure if that was completely accurate. What kind of life was this that predicated itself on waiting?

  “I’m already supposed to be dead,” she said.

  “You should buy a lottery ticket,” I said.

  She rummaged in her purse and pulled out a handful of stubs and handed them to me. “Pick out one you like, and if you win, we’ll split it.”

  We live together behind a gate in Indian Wells, and our backyard abuts a golf course that my knees won’t allow me to play on and that my checkbook can’t afford. My yearly pension from the Granite City Sheriff’s Department is more suited for the guard gate than the country club. But Rebecca comes from money, or at least her ex-husband did, and so here we are living out the bonus years together. At least Rebecca’s hair has grown back.

  I pick up the newspaper and try not to read the stories on the front page, the colored bar graph that details the Salton Sea’s water levels from 1906 until present day, the old photos of speedboat races I can remember, the black bag that holds a human form, the telephone poles jutting out of the placid water, the quotes from environmentalists decrying the ecological disaster of California’s fetid inland sea. Almost $9.8 billion to preserve it, saving it is out of the question. If we let it go any further, all that will be left in fifty years is a toxic dust bowl, blowing disease from here to Los Angeles. I try to read page A-3, where the local news stories are housed safely out of sight from passing tourists: A broken water pipe has closed the Ralphs in Palm Springs. A dead body found in Joshua Tree identified as a missing hiker from Kansas. Free flu shots for seniors at Eisenhower Medical Center.

  “Morris,” Rebecca says. “Are you feeling all right?”

  I see that Rebecca is standing only a few inches from me, worry etched on her face like sediment. “I’m fine,” I say. “When did you come in?”

  “I’ve been standing here talking to you and you haven’t even looked up from the paper,” she says.

  “I didn’t hear you,” I say.

  “I know that,” she says. “You were talking to yourself. It would be impossible for you to hear me over your own conversation.” Rebecca smiles, but I can see that she’s worried.

  “I’m an old man,” I say.

  She leans down, takes my face in her hands, and runs her thumbs along my eyes. “You’re just a boy,” Rebecca says, and I realize she’s wiping tears from my face. “Why don’t you ever talk to me about your first wife? I know living out here triggers memories. It wouldn’t bother me, Morris. It would make me feel closer to you.”

  “That was another life,” I say.

  “Apparently not,” she says.

  “She’s been gone a long time,” I say, “but sometimes it just creeps back on me and it’s like she’s just in the other room, but I can’t seem to figure out where that room is. And then I look up and my new wife is wiping tears from my face.”

  “I’m not your new wife,” Rebecca says, standing back up. “I’m your last wife.”

  “You know what I mean,” I say.

  “Of course I do,” Rebecca says.

  The fact of the matter, I think after Rebecca has walked back outside, is that with each passing day I find my mind has begun to recede like the Sea, and each morning I wake up feeling like I’m younger, like time is flowing backward, that eventually I’ll open my eyes and it will be 1962 again and life will feel filled with possibility. What is obvious to me, and what my neurologist confirmed a few weeks ago, but which I haven’t bothered to share with Rebecca, is that my brain is shedding space; soon all that will be left is the past, my consciousness doing its best imitation of liquefaction.

  I go into the bedroom and change into a pair of khaki pants, a buttoned-down shirt, and a ball cap emblazoned with the logo of our country club. In the closet, I take down the shoe box where I keep my gun and ankle holster and for a long time I just look at them both, wondering what the hell I’m thinking, what the hell I hope to prove after fifty years, what exactly I think I’ll find out there by the shore of that rotting sea but ghosts and sand.

  Dead is still dead.

  I FIND REBECCA in the front yard. She’s chatting with our next-door neighbors, Sue and Leon. Last week, Leon wandered out in the night and stood on the fifteenth fairway shouting obscenities. By the time I was able to coax him into my golf cart he’d stripped off all of his clothes and was masturbating furiously, sadly to no avail. That’s the tragedy of getting old and losing your mind—that switch flips and everything that’s been sitting limply beside you starts perking up again, but you can’t figure out exactly how to work it. Today, he’s smiling and happy and seems to have a general idea about his whereabouts but is blissfully unaware of who he is, or who any of us are.

  “I can’t thank you enough for the other night,” Sue says when I walk up.

  “It’s nothing,” I say.

  “He was happy to do it,” Rebecca says. “Anytime you need help, really, we’re just right here.”

  “His medication . . . Well, you know how it is. You have to get it regulated. I wish you’d known him before all of this,” Sue says, waving her hands dismissively, and then, just like that, she’s sobbing. “Oh, it’s silly. We get old, don’t we, Rebecca? We just get old and next thing you know, you’re gone.”

  Leon used to run some Fortune 500 company that made light fixtures for casinos. They called him The King of Lights, or at least that’s what he told me in one of his more lucid moments. But today he’s just a dim bulb and I can’t help but think of how soon I’ll be sitting right there next to him at the loony bin, drooling on myself and letting some orderly wipe my ass. Part of me wonders if forgetting wouldn’t be so bad, if maybe I’d get a decent night of rest for the first time since the 1950s. And then another part of me wonders what it was all worth if it can just slide off the back side of my brain into nothingness. All the sorrow, all the joy, all the fear, all the hope, and in the end, you’re left with blackness? It hardly seems right.

  “I have to run out,” I say to Rebecca once Leon and Sue have made their way back to their condo.

  “I could clean up and come with you,” she says. “It would just take a moment.”

  “Don’t bother,” I say. “I’m just gonna drive out to the Salton Sea. See what’s going on down there. Talk a little shop.”

  “Morris,” she says, “if I go inside and look in the closet, will I find your gun there?”

  “I’m afraid not,” I
say.

  “You’re a fool to be running around with that thing.”

  We stand there staring at each other for a solid minute until Rebecca turns heel and walks inside. She doesn’t bother to slam the front door, which makes it worse.

  TO GET TO the Salton Sea, I drove east through La Quinta and Indio and Coachella on Highway 111, even though I could have taken I-10 and arrived a little faster. The 111 used to be the only way out to the Imperial Valley, Indio the last real bit of town before the desert gave way to date groves and farmlands. Even now, the desert reclaims itself for the last twenty miles before the great mirage: a sea where no sea should be.

  I’m standing on the other side of a stretch of yellow caution tape, though this isn’t a crime scene, watching as a rental security officer stands guard over a patch of dirt while two young women and a man wearing one of those safari vests and a pair of ironed cargo pants brush rocks and debris away from a depression in the earth. The Salton Sea laps at the edge of the sand, the stench rising from it as thick as mustard gas. The two women and the man are all wearing medical-grade N95 face masks, but the security guard just keeps a handkerchief to his face while in the other hand he clutches a clipboard. It’s not the body that smells—it’s the sea, rotting with dead fish; a winter marked by avian cholera; and the aroma of hydrogen sulfide gas wafting from the depths of this vast illusion: the shimmer of this fake ocean is at eye level, giving everything a dreamy resonance. It could be now. It could be never. I might be inside of a dream.

  Fifty years ago, this was roughly where Bonnie Livingston had her little bar and café. During the week, the working men would sit at the bar all night drinking the stink out of their skin, but on the weekends the LA people would drive in with their boats and water skis and, eventually, speedboats, and come into Bonnie’s looking for authenticity. More often than not, they’d leave without a few teeth and, on occasion, without their girlfriends, wives, or daughters. They thought the Salt would be like an inland riviera. They thought we’d find oil and prosperity and that a city would rise from the fetid desert floor.

  Forty years ago, Bonnie’s bar slipped into the sea. Thirty-five years ago, Bonnie’s home followed suit. Shortly thereafter Bonnie followed her bar and house, simply walking into the water with a bottle of wine in her hand, drinking big gulps all along the way. Her entire family watched her walk into the sea, bricks tied around her ankles. It wasn’t a suicide, her son wrote to tell me, because she’d been dead for at least three years, but more a celebration of the Salt. Of all the things that return to it.

  At some point, however, memory becomes insufficient in the face of commerce and space. These bodies that keep pulling themselves from the sea are a hindrance to something larger and more important than an old man’s past: real estate.

  The Chuyalla Indians intend to put a twenty-six-floor hotel and casino here and then, in five years, one hundred condos.

  Never mind the chemicals that still leach from the sand, the result of World War II B-29s test-dumping dummy atomic bombs into the Sea and across the desolate sand of the surrounding beachfront. Pretending this nowhere was Hiroshima, never thinking it would become somewhere. The next dozen years, the Salton Sea was the site of hundreds of ballistic tests and war games, the scraps of bombs leaving depleted uranium thick in the ground, back before cleaning such things up was much of a priority.

  I became the law here a few years later.

  We were told nothing, until people kept dying.

  But of course people are always dying.

  The government said they cleaned it all up in the nineties, but now the people still foolish enough to try to live beside this environmental disaster are showing up with innovative cancers, endocrinological disorders, and intestinal bacteria only found in Chernobyl. Problem is the people who live out here aren’t the kind of people to call their congressmen. So every few months, a twenty-five-year-old reporter from the Desert Sun gets a phone call and rolls out to check on the rumors and for a week or two, it’s a story . . . but then Coachella starts, or the big tennis tournament in Indian Wells, or President Obama visits, and the sick and the aggrieved, a blemish to the east, are forgotten again. Which is how everyone wants it.

  Nevertheless, the Chuyalla intend to fund a project that will eradicate the blight and once again tempt the folly of beachside living in the middle of the desert.

  I’ll be gone by then. Or at least without the ability to know the difference.

  The security guard finally notices me and ambles over, his gait slow and deliberate, as if traversing the twenty feet from the body to the tape was the most difficult task of his life. “Can I help you?” he asks, not bothering to remove the handkerchief from his face. I’d guess that he’s just a shade under sixty, too old for real police work, which probably makes this the perfect job for him.

  “Just came down to see the excitement,” I say. I open my wallet and show him my retired sheriff’s card. He looks at it once, nods, and then from out of his back pocket fishes out his wallet and shows me his retirement card from the Yuma, Arizona, PD. His name is Ted Farmer and he then explains, as former cops are apt to do, the exact path he took from being a real cop to a rental cop. When he runs out of story, he turns his attention back to the body in the sand.

  “Yep,” he says, motioning his head in the direction of the grave. “Lotta fireworks. My opinion? They should just leave the bodies where they are. No sake digging them up just to move them somewhere else.” One of the female anthropologists carries a hand and wrist over to a white plastic sheet and sets them down across from another hand and wrist. “That first hand? Still had rings on it. That sorta thing messes with your head. It’s dumb, I know. Lady’s probably been dead fifty, one hundred years, more fertilizer than person. But still.”

  “In my experience,” I say, “hands are pretty durable.”

  About two hundred yards from the shore a small aluminum boat with a screaming outboard motor trolls back and forth. I can just make out the outline of a shirtless man sitting at one end, a little boy at the other, a long fishing pole bent between them. I can hear Katharine in the whine. You know, the water doesn’t know where it is, it only knows it is beautiful. It doesn’t see the ruin around it. Those are blinders I wouldn’t mind wearing.

  When she passed, I gave her that.

  I look now at the bones being sluiced from the ground and know, of course, that it’s not Katharine. Oh, but she is here, holding my hand as we walk from Bonnie’s and dip our toes into the water, the air alive with laughter behind us, music wafting through the thick summer air, Chuck Berry singing “Johnny B. Good” into eternity. Her hair is pulled back from her face and she’s wearing a V-neck white T-shirt, her tanned skin darkening the fabric just slightly, a scent of vanilla lifting from her skin. It’s 1962. It’s 1963. It’s today or it’s yesterday or it’s tomorrow.

  “You okay, pal?” Farmer says. I look down and see that he’s got a hand on my chest, steadying me. “Drifting a bit to stern there.”

  “Not used to the heat anymore,” I say, though the truth is I feel fine. Though my perception is dipping sideways, it does not bother me. Seeing the past like a ghost is a welcome part of my new condition, and if it brings with it a few disorienting side effects, I suppose I’m willing to make the trade. Farmer fetches me an unused bucket from aside the dig, turns it over, and directs me to sit. After the horizon has straightened out, I say, “I used to be the law out here, if you can believe that.”

  “When was that?”

  “About a million years ago,” I say. “Or fifteen minutes ago.”

  Farmer winces noticeably, like he knows what I mean. We watch the anthropologists going about their work. It becomes clear after a while that the two young women are students—graduate students, most likely—and that the man in the funny vest is the professor. Every few minutes he gathers their attention and explains something pertaining to what they’ve found. At one point, he goes back to the white plastic sheet and lifts up
a leg they’ve pried from the earth and makes sure his students have made note of an abnormality in the femur, a dent of some kind.

  “You know what I think?” Farmer says. “Guys like us, we’ve seen too much crazy shit, our brains don’t have enough room to keep it all. Pretty soon it just starts leaking out.”

  “You’re probably right,” I say.

  “I guess I’ve seen over a hundred dead bodies,” he says. “Not like this here, but people who were alive ten minutes before I got to them. Traffic accidents and such, sometimes I’d get called out on a murder, but I was mostly a low-hanging-fruit cop, if you know what I mean. I tell you, there’s something about the energy surrounding a dead body, you know? Like a dog, it can just walk by, take a sniff, and keep going. Us, we got all that empathy. What I wouldn’t give to not have that.”

  “You ever kill a guy?” I ask.

  “Jesus no,” he says. “I pulled my gun nine times. You?”

  “I was in a war,” I say. “And for a time, I wasn’t a great cop.” The truth was that I wasn’t really a cop when I was out here. Working for Claxson gave me power, but not authority, a symbol, like a noose looking for a hangman. In Granite City, when I became sheriff, I was better. When I could be. “Comes down to it, you begin to wonder if the badge is just an excuse to be the worst kind of person.”