by Tod Goldberg
“I’m sure you did what you had to do.”
“Had? Maybe. Maybe. You know, Ted, you got lucky. I wish I’d never seen a gun.”
The two women lift the trunk of the body up out of the dirt. There’s still bits of fabric stuck to the ribcage, and my first thought is of those old pirate books I used to read as a kid, where the hero would find himself on a deserted island with just the clothed skeletons of previous plunderers lining the beach. How old was I when I read those books? Eight? Nine? I can still see my father sitting on the edge of my bed while I read aloud to him, how the dim light on my bedside table would cast a shadow across his face, so that all I could make out was his profile. He was already a sheriff, already knew about empathy, had spent a few sleepless nights on the beginnings and endings of people he’d never know, though he was only twenty-eight or twenty-nine himself. Thirty-five years he’s been gone. You never stop being somebody’s child, even when you can see the end of the long thread. Maybe that’s really what Rebecca finds absent; it’s not Katharine that calls to me in the night, even when the night is as bright as day, it’s all that I’ve lost: my father, my mother, my brother Jack, who passed before I was even born, but whose presence I was always aware of, as if I lived a life for him, too. My second wife, Margaret, and the children we never managed to have. My younger brother Conrad, who has been absent in my life for thirty years, because Margaret had once been his girlfriend, a slight he never recovered from. How many friends of mine are gone? All of them, even if they are still alive. And here, in the winter soil of the Salton Sea, the air buttressed by an ungodly heat, I remember the ghosts of another life, still. These bodies that keep appearing could be mine.
I tell myself it’s just land. My mind has ascribed emotion to a mere parcel of a planet. It’s the very duplicity of existence that plays with an old man’s mind, particularly when you can see regret in a tangible form alongside the spectral one that visits periodically.
“They bother looking for kin?” I ask.
“Oh, sure,” Farmer says. He waves his clipboard and for the first time I notice that it’s lined with names and dates and addresses. “We got some old records from back when Claxson was out here detailing where a few family plots are and such. Claxson kept pretty good record of who came and went, but this place has flooded and receded so many times, you can’t be sure where these bodies are from. Back then, people died, they just dug a hole and slid them in, seems like.”
“That’s about right,” I say.
“Anyway, we get a couple visitors a week, like yourself.”
“I’m just out for a drive,” I say.
“What did you say your name was?”
“Morris Drew,” I say.
Farmer flips a few pages, running his finger down the lines of names, and then pauses. “I’m sorry,” he says quietly.
“So am I,” I say.
I DRIVE SOUTH along the beaten access road that used to run behind the marina but now is covered in ruts and divots, the pavement long since cracked and weathered away, plant life and shrubs growing between bits of blacktop. Back when Claxson Oil still believed life could take place here, they built the infrastructure to sustain a population of one hundred thousand, so beneath the desert floor there’s plumbing and power lines waiting to be used, a city of coils and pipes to carry subsistence to a casino, one hundred condominiums, tourists from Japan. They’ll bring in alien vegetation to gussy up the desert, just as they have outside my home on the twelfth hole; they’ll install sprinklers to wash away the detritus of fifty years of emptiness. There are maybe six hundred people living permanently around the Salton Sea, Ted Farmer told me, more if you count the meth addicts and Vietnam and Gulf War vets out in Slab City, the former Marine Corps base that became a squatter’s paradise.
I stop my car when I see the shell of the old Claxson barracks rising up a few hundred yards in the distance. To the east, a flock of egrets have landed on the sea, their slim bodies undulating in the water just beyond the shoreline. They’ve flown south for the winter but probably didn’t realize they’d land in the summer. I can make out the noise from the lone boat on the water.
The barracks themselves are a Swiss cheese of mortar and drywall, to the point that even from this distance I can see the sparse traffic on Highway 86 through their walls, as if a newsreel from the future has been projected onto the past. Farmer warned me not to go into the old building, that transients, drug addicts, and illegals frequently use it for scavenging and business purposes.
It’s not the barracks that I’m interested in; they merely provide a map for my memory. It’s 1962 and I’m parked in my new Corvair, Katharine by my side, and we’re scanning the scrub for the view she wants. It’s not the topography that she cares about; it’s the angle of the sun. She tells me that anyone can have a view of the mountains, anyone can have a view of the sea, but after living in the Pacific Northwest her entire life, she desired a view of the sun. She wanted a morning room that would be flooded in natural light at dawn, that would be dappled in long shadows in the afternoon, that at night would glow white from the moon. All my life I’ve lived in clouds, she said, I think I deserve a view of the sun. She got out of the Corvair right about here, I think, and she walked out into the desert, striding through the tangles of brush and sand while I watched her from the front seat. She was so terribly young, just twenty-three, but I know she felt like she’d already lived a good portion of her life out. Still, she always told me that she envied the experiences I’d had already in life, that she wished she could see Asia as I had, wished that she knew what it felt like to hold a gun with malice, because to her that was the thing about me that was most unknowable.
Late at night, she’d wake me and ask what it felt like to kill someone, to know that there was another family, somewhere in North Korea, who didn’t have a father. She didn’t ask this in anger, she said, only that it was the sort of thing that kept her awake at night, knowing that the man sleeping beside her, the man she loved, had killed. I’d find Katharine dead long before I was able to give her a satisfying answer. And still, when I wake in the night, I often search for her in bed, only to find Rebecca there, a woman I do love, a woman who has chosen to die with me at my least. Which is a different kind of love, a choice for near sorrow. When I did find Katharine, mere yards from where I stand, I made promises that would result in a viscous loss of self that would turn me into something foreign and angry. And when I saw Katharine last, though she was long gone, I would see her in the moonlit glow of the Salton Sea, her body slipping between my hands into the deep, murky waters.
I step out of the car and there’s Katharine, her face turned to the sun, motioning for me to join her, to see what she sees. She calls out for me to hurry to the spot that will be our home. Did this happen? I’m not sure anymore, but at this moment it is true. Surrounding me are nearly a dozen old foundations, this tract of desert bifurcated by the phantom remains of paved roads and cul-de-sacs. From above, I imagine the land surrounding the old barracks must look like a petroglyph left by an ancient civilization.
I triangulate myself with the sea, the mountain, and the barracks and then close my eyes and walk forward, allowing my sense memory to guide me, to find the cement that was my home. But it’s useless: I trip over a tumbleweed and nearly fall face-first into the ground. Sweet Christ, I think, it’s lucky I didn’t break my hip. How long would it be before anyone found me? With the heat as it is, I’d die from exposure before Rebecca noticed that we’d missed the early bird at Sherman’s Deli. So instead I walk from foundation to foundation, hoping that the layout of the Claxson Oil Executive Housing Unit makes itself clear. I picture the payroll manager, Gifford Lewis, and his wife, Lois, sitting on their patio drinking lemonade, their baby frolicking between them in a playpen. I picture Jeff Morton, sitting in his backyard, strumming a guitar he didn’t know how to play. I picture Sassy, the Jefferieses’ cocker spaniel, running across the street to our scratch of grass, her tail wagging in a fu
rious motion. I picture myself leaning down to pet Sassy and the way the dog would lick up the length of my arm, her tongue rough and dry from the heat and how I would step inside and get a water bowl for the dog, and that the dog would sit and wait patiently for my return and then would lap up the water in a fuss, drops of water flying from the bowl and catching hits of sun. I see Jim and Gloria Connelly, pulling away from us in their nearly empty station wagon, leaving behind every damned and ruined thing for me to fix.
I try to see the world as it was and as it is now, try to find what used to be my home, what used to be my life, try to locate the Fourth Estate of my memory: a dry reporting of fact. You lived here. You slept there. You made love and you witnessed death and you mourned and you buried your wife in the simple plot Claxson provided and allowed behind your home and you carried your wife’s corpse—because that’s what it was, it wasn’t a body anymore, not with the dirt and the sand and absence of any kind of reality, any kind of relevance beyond what you’d emotionally ascribed to it—to the sea, because that was what she asked of you, not to allow her to rot in the desert, but to give her a perpetual view of the sun and the water, to let her float free. That is across the way. And you see the end of your own life, don’t you? You feel the creeping dread that you’ve beaten that same slow poison yourself but have found another, more insidious invader. And what will you do about it, Morris Drew? Why did you bring that gun with you?
WHEN I GET back home, I find Rebecca sitting on our back patio, her eyes buried in a magazine, golf carts moving in a steady stream past her as dusk has begun to fall. She doesn’t see me, so for a time I just stare at her. I imagine what she might look like with the fine lines around her eyes smooth, her gray hair blond, her skin thick and healthy instead of thin and stretched like parchment. The trauma of memory is that it never forgives you for aging. What would Katharine look like to me today? Would she be an old woman or would she be young in my eyes, always twenty-three years old? The other trauma of memory is that it can absolve you of reality if you let it, and the reality is that I’ve come to love other women, finally, a fact I’m not ashamed of.
“I’m home,” I say.
“I know,” Rebecca says, not looking up.
“I didn’t know if you heard me come in,” I say.
“Morris,” she says, turning pages, “your footfalls have the delicacy of a jackhammer. There are no secrets between tile floors and you.”
I sit down beside Rebecca and put my arm around her and pull her close. I see the young woman she must have been. I’ve seen photos, of course, but you never truly see someone in a photo. You see what they looked liked, but not who they were. Fear shows you all the colors in a person’s skin.
I reach down and lift up my pant leg and show her my empty holster. “I almost killed myself today. I’m not proud of that, but I wanted you to know that it won’t happen again.”
“Jesus, Morris,” she says.
“I threw that gun into the Salton Sea,” I say, “even said some prayers over it. I’m not gonna let it take me from you.”
I know that if I look down I’ll find Rebecca crying, so I stare instead at the long shadows crawling into the bunkers on either side of the twelfth hole, at the last glimmers of sunlight that eke over the rim of the San Jacinto Mountains, at the green shards of grass that grow just beyond our patio. I watch as lights flicker on inside the condos across the fairway from us and I think that where I am now, at this very moment, with my wife beside me, with a hint of cool in the breeze that has swept by me, the smell of jasmine light on its trail, this is the memory I want to live out the rest of my years with. A moment of perfection when I knew a kind of contentment with who I was and what I’d tried so desperately to forget. I am not surprised when a strong gust of wind picks up from the east and I make out the faint scent of the Salt, pungent and lost and far, far away.
RAGTOWN
Doesn’t matter where in the world he is, February 11 rolls around, Jacob Dmitrov gets a phone call from Las Vegas Metro Detective Tiffany Peng. Today, he’s at Odessa, his restaurant over on Paradise, a couple blocks from the Hard Rock.
“I’m not bothering you, am I?” Detective Peng asks.
“Lunch rush won’t be for another thirty minutes or so,” he says. “Didn’t think I’d be hearing from you this year.”
“Oh, you read the paper?”
“Every morning,” Jacob says.
“Print?”
“Yeah,” Jacob says. “I like to spread it out on the table while I eat my breakfast. Read every page. Been like that my entire life.”
“I wouldn’t have pegged you for a guy who keeps up with the news,” she says.
“I was real sorry to hear about what went down.” There’d been a bank robbery in Summerlin. Three assholes with AR-15s and M203s, fucking grenade launchers. Review-Journal said Detective Peng was one of the first responders. It went bad. Three dead cops, a dead police dog, five dead civilians, plus two of the bank robbers. Third guy made off with $4,000. Police were still looking for him. Way Jacob figured, dude was probably already dead from embarrassment. Get all those people killed for four grand? “Thing I didn’t understand: Who shoots a dog?”
“Same person who shoots a cop,” Detective Peng says.
“So you’re still in the hospital?”
“Another week or so,” she says. Jacob thinks “or so” is the more likely outcome. Every word she says sounds like it’s coming from somewhere near her knees.
“Which one?”
“Sunrise. You’re not thinking of coming to visit, are you?”
“Let me send over a peasant pie. Everyone loves our peasant pies.”
“Gonna be a while before I’m eating solid food, Mr. Dmitrov. But maybe my brother would eat it.”
“Well,” he says, “when you’re up and around, you come on down to Odessa and we’ll do you up, okay?”
“I just may take you up on that,” she says. “And Mr. Dmitrov? She would have been thirty-six today.” Detective Peng coughs. Then coughs some more. When she’s done, Jacob can hear her gasping for breath, but still, she hangs on the line. So Jacob says, “Where’d you get hit, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Stomach,” she says, “right shoulder, right leg. Left foot. Doctors took that. Couple other places.”
“What do you mean ‘took that’?”
“Shooter basically blew my foot off,” she says. “Doctors just finished the job.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. He really is. Eighteen years of phone calls. Eighteen years of Detective Peng showing up at his home, at his restaurant, once at Stateline to check the contents of his trunk, she’s always been straight-up. Just doing her job. “Well, get some rest, Detective.”
Detective Peng is silent but doesn’t hang up. They’re both waiting. “One day,” she says, eventually, “you’re going to wake up in a cell, Jacob.” There it is. Same as ever. But then she says, “It’s me, it’s someone else, that’s what’s coming. Do what’s right, Jacob. Jesus. Do what’s right.”
“Get better now, Tiffany,” Jacob says, and hangs up.
ODESSA DOESN’T EVER close. Midnight to nine a.m., everything on the menu is under five bucks. It’s been like that since Jacob’s dad, Boris, opened the place in 1980. Jacob took over in 2003, after his dad got sent up for ten years on some RICO shit, ended up dying in prison of pancreatitis two years short of getting out. Jacob’s adjusted the overnight menu so that it’s not just food from the Old Country, so as to get more people in the door. You can get still get borscht or goulash or bigos, but now there’s also steak and eggs, French toast, a Monte Cristo. Plus, whatever the strippers and soldiers and cops want. Pizza? Tacos? Peanut butter and jelly? Done. Long as no one acts up. Odessa is neutral ground after midnight.
Which is why it wasn’t so unusual to see Gang Unit Detective Cecil Kiraly eating a plate of eggs and potatoes at 1:17 a.m. in the bar, a week after Detective Peng’s annual call. Jacob’s known Kiraly since high school. Bi
shop Gorman class of 1989. The two of them sat on the bench for four years of baseball and football. Kiraly went on to UNLV, then the academy, worked as a beat cop, did some time in vice and homicide before settling down in the gang unit, where the real action was. If you wanted to work murders but didn’t want to care too much about the dead, gang unit was the perfect place to be. But the bigger issue was that it kept a local like Cecil from arresting his friends. Get to a certain age, you don’t even know the OGs anymore.
Jacob grabbed a stool and slid in next to him.
“There he is,” Kiraly says. “The Putin of Paradise Road.”
“Easy with that shit,” Jacob says. His cousin Svetlana, who works the bar, drops off a bottle of Stoli, two shot glasses. “You still on the clock?”
Kiraly looks at his phone. “Another forty minutes,” he says, but then he turns the phone off.
Jacob pours two shots. “To the end of Western civilization,” he says, and they toast.
“Putin is very popular with a certain segment of society,” Kiraly says. “Maybe change the name of this place to Putin’s Odessa. Bet you’d make a million.”
“Guys like him are why we left.” Not that Jacob has any real memory of the country. His parents got out with him in 1975, when he was four. “No one likes KGB except KGB. And anyway, Odessa is in Ukraine. Putin don’t have that yet.”
“Your old man know him back in the day?” Kiraly asks.
“No, of course not,” Jacob says. It’s like this sometimes. People think the USSR was some tiny little town where everyone knew everyone. “My pops was Militsiya. That’s actual, real police. Not like you, motherfucker.” Jacob pours them both another shot, but neither takes it down right away. Fact is, Jacob can’t stand the taste of vodka. Makes not drinking it easy. But the cliché, he’s found, makes working in his own restaurant untenable, so he’s learned to tolerate it. “Spoke four fucking languages. You believe that? Read all the classics. All that time devoted to those pursuits. All to die in Lovelock, two cells down from O. J.”
