Other Resort Cities

by Tod Goldberg

  “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 like 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 lack empathy.”

  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 slicing shadow across his face, so that all I could make out was his profile. He was already a sheriff then himself, 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 yourself. Maybe that’s really what Kim finds absent; it’s not simply Katherine who calls to me in the night, even when the night is as bright as day, it’s all those 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 before she, too, passed. 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; if not my responsibility, my knowledge, my own real estate.

  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 records 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 Air Force 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 has 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 80 through its 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, a placeholder for a vision that blinds me with its radiance. It’s 1962 and I’m parked in my new Corvair, Katherine 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 desires a view of the sun. Katherine 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, that she needed to be a woman and not the girl she was. 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 me what it felt like to kill someone, to know that there was another family, somewhere in North Korea, that 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 before. I’d see Katherine get old before time had found its bearing with her, long before she was done being a girl. I would see her bald and shapeless, her bones the density of straw. I would hear her beg for me to use my gun without malice, to save her from the suffering of her very body, to relieve the pressure that boiled through her skin, the slow withering of her veins, the viscous loss of self that would turn her into something foreign and angry, her voice the consistency of withered crabgrass, begging me, begging me, pleading for a mechanical end to an unnatural death sentence. 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 see Katherine, 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 join her there in 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 f
all face first onto 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 Kim even 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 Jefferies’ cocker spaniel, running across the street to our scratch of grass, her tail wagging in a furious 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 flying from the bowl and catching hits of sun so that each drop glimmered a brilliant white.

  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 of the pain, because that’s what she wanted you to give her. 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 Kim 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 Katherine look like to me today? Would she be an old woman, or would she be young in my eyes, perpetually 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,” Kim 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 Kim 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 like, 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, Morr is,” 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 Kim 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 peek 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 silent perfection when I knew, finally knew, that I’d found a kind of contentment with who I was, who I’d been, and what I’d tried so desperately to forget. I am not surprised, then, when a strong gust of wind picks up from the east and I make out the faint scent of the Salton Sea, pungent and lost and so far, far away.

  Mitzvah

  That Rabbi David Cohen wasn’t Jewish had ceased, over time, to be a problem. He hardly even thought of it anymore except when ordering breakfast down at the Bagel Café. He’d sit there across from Bennie Savone, that fat fuck, watching him wolf down ham and scrambled eggs, or French toast with a steaming side of greasy link sausage, and his mouth would actually start to water, like he was some kind of fucking golden retriever. He didn’t even think Bennie liked pork all that much—sometimes Bennie would order a cup of coffee and a side of bacon and would leave the bacon uneaten, David assumed, in not-so-benign mockery—but David knew Bennie liked letting him know who was in control of the situation.

  But now, as he sat in his normal booth in the back corner facing the busy intersection of Buffalo and Westcliff, waiting for Bennie to roll up in his absurd black Mercedes that might as well have a personalized plate that said MOBSTER on it, he thought that he probably qualified as a Jew by now, if not in the eyes of God, then at least in his own eyes. It still wasn’t that he gave a fuck about religion—his personal motto, before all of this shit, had been “everybody dies”—but he probably knew far more about the Torah and the culture in general than the people who belonged to the Temple. And had he grown up with it, David was fairly certain he would have appreciated the subtle nuance of kugel.

  After fifteen years, though, he still couldn’t get used to the idea of baked noodles, raisins, apples, and cinnamon as a fucking entrée. Now pork loin. Pork loin was something he could get behind, especially this time of year, what with Christmas coming up. Back in the day, his wife Jennifer knew how to make it just how he liked. Brined in salt overnight, covered with juniper berries, a bit of garlic, maybe some thyme, and then slow roasted for three hours, until even the garage smelled like it.

  Christ.

  Fifteen fucking years and for what? He understood that his situation was fairly untenable these days, that those fucking Muslims had changed the way Family business was handled, particularly as it related to guys like David whose fake paperwork was fine in a company town like Las Vegas but wouldn’t pass muster even in Reno. David wasn’t inclined to give too much thought to the whole Israel-Palestine issue, but he had to keep abreast of shit in case someone dared ask his opinion, though he never could confide in anyone that he shared some anger issues with the Palestinians at least as it related to real estate, confined as he was to Las Vegas.

  “Can I get you something, Rabbi?”

  David looked up from his reverie and saw the smiling face of Shoshana Goldblatt. Her parents, Stan and Alta, were two of the biggest donors Temple Beth Israel had, and yet here she was busting her ass on a Tuesday morning running tables. And that was an ass, David had to admit. She was only eighteen and he’d known her since she was five, but . . . damn.

  “A cup of coffee would be fine, Shoshana, ” David said. “I’m waiting on Mr. Savone, as usual, so maybe just a toasted onion bagel for now.”

  Shoshana took down his order, but he could tell that something was bothering the girl. It was the way it took her nearly an entire minute to write the words “coffee” and “bagel” on her pad, her eyes welling up with tears the entire time. It was always like this. He’d go somewhere to just chill out, maybe smoke a cigar and catch a ballgame over at J.C. Wooloughan’s pub, and next thing he knew one of his fucking Israelites would pull up next to him with some metaphysical calamity.

 
“Is there something wrong, Shoshana?” he asked. When she slid into the booth across from him and deposited her head into her hands, thick phlegmy sobs spilling out of that beautiful mouth he’d just sort of imagined his dick in, he felt himself wince and hoped she didn’t notice. He’d spent the better part of his life avoiding crying women of all ages, never really knowing what to say to them other than “Shut the fuck up, you stupid whore,” and that hadn’t seemed to help anyone, least of all himself. Whatever was wrong with Shoshana Goldblatt would invariably ruin David’s whole fucking day. First there’d be the guilt he felt hearing her secrets, and then there’d be the guilt associated with him finding it all rather humorous.

  “Oh, Rabbi,” she said. “I wanted to just come in and talk to you in private, but there’s always such a crowd, and my mom, you know, she’s always telling me to not bother you with my problems, that you’re a busy man and all, so I’m like, okay, I’ll just figure it out for myself, but then, like, you’re always saying that we should trust that the Torah has answers to all of our problems, right?”

  “That’s right, Shoshana,” he said, though he wasn’t sure if he’d ever said such a thing. Most of the time, he just downloaded shit off the Internet now, but it seemed plausible that at some point he said something like that.

  “I’m just so confused,” she said, before explaining to David a scenario that involved, as best as David could suss out, her having sex with three different black guys from the UNLV basketball team while a graduate assistant coach filmed the whole thing on his camera phone. It was hard for David to concentrate completely on the story since Bennie Savone had entered the restaurant about five minutes in and was stalking angrily about the bakery area, dragging his black attaché case against the pastry windows, like he was banging his cup against the prison bars. So when David sensed that Shoshana had come to the basic conclusion of the issue—that she’d liked it, that she wondered what was wrong with her, but that she wanted to do it again, and with more guys—he reached across the table and took both of her hands in his.