The Low Desert

by Tod Goldberg

  “For what?”

  “The due date,” the librarian said. “You could get the digital version instead.”

  “I already know how it ends,” Tania said, but she checked out the book, too, so she could read it if she started to fall behind. “And I like having the physical CD. Makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something when it pops out of the player.”

  As she winds up the last miles of I-5 toward the prison, Tania has begun to wonder if she really does know how it all ends. She’s only three CDs in and everything seems insurmountable. The cold. The disease. And worst of all, the fear. Cold and disease were knowns; it was the unknown that trapped the Pilgrims. In the three hours she’s driven from the low desert, through the Inland Empire, the San Fernando Valley, and now up into the Santa Clarita Valley, the Pilgrims have crossed the Atlantic and found themselves in a land that seems intent on ruining them. How much more could they possibly take?

  Tania passes the exit for Magic Mountain, an amusement park she’s never visited and hadn’t even heard of before moving to California nearly twenty years ago. That it’s only a mile from one of the state’s largest prisons is surely an unplanned irony, but even still Don has told her that at night he can hear kids screaming on the roller coasters and every now and then the wind picks up the scent of churros and hot dogs and cotton candy so that there are days when he’s on the yard that he can smell what life used to be.

  It saddens Tania to hear Don talk like that, not because she feels he’s been wrongly imprisoned, because she doesn’t, but because she doesn’t believe Don’s life ever consisted of those things. It’s just another tiny lie, one of thousands he’s told in his life, and if she really wanted to know the truth of it, if he’d ever tasted a churro, ever rode a roller coaster, she could certainly ask him. Avoidance, she’s learned, is not something Don is good at, and with thirty years to think about what that means, he’s proved to be especially forthcoming when pressed. Lying now is moot. It’s easier for Tania not to ask. It’s easier to have that connection, even if it’s false.

  The exit for Woods comes up quickly on the right. The sign says it’s a mile off, but Tania is sure it’s much less than that; she always means to set her odometer to find out exactly but is usually so flustered in her attempt not to miss her turnoff that she forgets. Today she’s too busy listening to an excerpt from one of William Bradford’s journals and has to slide across three lanes of traffic at the last moment, a trail of honking horns at her back.

  When she was learning to drive, Tania’s father told her never to honk her horn on the freeway unless she had to warn someone that they were about to hit her. Honking your horn because someone had bad manners was useless, her father told her, and it might lead someone else to slam on their brakes or swerve and that could cause an accident. “Better to just let stupid people be stupid and maybe they’ll kill one another off,” he told her.

  It was funny how often her father would creep up on her these days. He lived in the Robeson Home now, an assisted living facility in Spokane, and had since her mother died two years ago. Tania last saw him at Christmastime. Her sister Justine offered to buy her a ticket and to pay for everything (“We’ll have a sister’s weekend,” Justine said, as if they’d had such things when they were kids), and though at first Tania felt like she should be offended by this, she accepted. Her sister was a good person. She knew that. Married for thirty-two years, two children who were now adults, a home in Walnut Creek with a long driveway, a birch tree in the front yard, and, Tania finally understood, regrets of her own, even if Tania didn’t know what those regrets were.

  All these years they’d led different lives—Tania a cocktail waitress, first in Reno, then in Las Vegas, and finally in Palm Springs; Justine a wife, a mother, and then, when her kids were in middle school, she got her law degree, so now she was also a lawyer, just like her husband, Mark—but they came from the same place, the same people. Justine probably thought this trip might get them closer together, and maybe it had—they now talked nearly every day—or it could have been from necessity: neither wanted to visit their father alone. Growing up, their father was paranoid and angry, afraid always of what might happen next, his entire life a series of presumptions about what he might do in worst-case scenarios. Maybe that’s why he, too, always read spy novels, Tania realizes now. The difference, Tania knows, is that not everything is a conspiracy. Some things are just bad.

  Since her mother died, Tania had made it a point to call her father at least every couple of weeks. They’d talk for a few minutes about mundane things—she hadn’t even told him about Don, figuring that it wasn’t information he needed to have—and then she’d hang up feeling like she’d done what was right. She loved her father, had loved her mother, too, and knew that both had spent the better part of their lives worried about her. It was a shapeless truth that only seemed to find its way to Tania after Natalya, the child Tania adopted from Russia, had disappeared in 2001. Disappeared wasn’t really the right explanation for those events; Natalya had likely run away, probably back to Russia, though Tania has never learned that definitively. She’d been gone so long—nineteen years. Gone was gone, and it was then that Tania understood the responsibility that existed between parents and children, the unspoken contract that they’d be there, even when they were gone. Her mother was dead, but she was still alive in memory, still a temporal truth, just as her father was, sitting in an assisted living facility but for the most part an inactive concern. He’d been her father and now he was this man in Spokane who sounded like her father but who didn’t have any real responsibility to her anymore.

  But when Tania saw her father at the Robeson Home she was struck immediately by how happy he seemed. He greeted Tania and her sister in the foyer to the home dressed in a red V-neck sweater, tan pants, and smart-looking loafers, as if he was just back from the country club and not spending his days in a facility meant to hide the dead end at the bottom of the road. He proudly took Tania and Justine around the facility to meet his friends, the facility’s administrators, the cooks, even the woman who came in and took out his trash every day. “We all just love having Stu around here,” one of the cooks said. “Your father makes everyone feel good.”

  That afternoon they went to the Sizzler for lunch and Justine spent most of the meal talking about her kids, which was fine.

  “Do you remember how we used to come here with your mother?” Stu said after a while. He’d been listening intently to Justine, but Tania could tell something was bothering him and had been since the cook had told them how well-liked he was. “It wasn’t a Sizzler then, was it?”

  “No,” Tania said. “It was a Sambo’s.”

  “Right, right,” Stu said. He’d worked his entire life in the restaurant-supply business, even owned a fleet of refrigerated meat trucks for a time in the nineties, and when Tania was a kid he generally refused to dine out; the mere sight of a ramekin sometimes enough to throw him into a rage about some perceived workplace injustice. “She used to love their pancakes, didn’t she?”

  “I don’t remember,” Justine said.

  “How can you not remember?” Stu said. He was suddenly so surprised, so animated, that Tania found herself shrinking in her seat, like she had as a child when he’d make some announcement about, say, the likelihood that the Russians would nuke them all to death sometime in the next decade. It wasn’t fear she felt sitting across from him at the Sizzler, not like when she was a kid, but rather it was a feeling closer to shame. She’d forgotten, too, or maybe she never knew, what foods her mother liked. It seemed a silly thing to commit to memory in the space of an entire life, but at that moment it filled her with an uncommon sadness: How could she not know what made her mother happy?

  “It’s so long ago,” Justine said. “I guess I’ve replaced it with other things.”

  Stu nodded once, as if Justine had confirmed something important to him, and his energy seemed to wane. “I don’t ask this to be sappy,” he said, “and
I don’t ask this because I feel like I’m going to die tomorrow or something—because I want you both to know I feel good these days, I really do—but I guess I just need to know if you think I was a good father.”

  “Of course,” Justine said immediately, but Tania didn’t say a word because she didn’t really know and figured she wouldn’t know until he, like her mother, was gone.

  “Tania?” he said. There was a queer half smile on his face that Tania remembered from her childhood.

  “What does good mean?” Tania said. “You were our father. I think that was enough.”

  “I don’t think I was, particularly,” he said. “And that’s okay. I want you to know that I think it’s okay; that’s important to me. I’m not angry about it anymore, because for a long time I was, you know. Even while it was happening. Your mother ever tell you I went on vacations by myself?”

  “No,” Tania said, though it made sense to her in retrospect.

  “It was wrong of me,” he said.

  “What exactly are you confessing to?” Justine said.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I want you to have the freedom to not remember me well. To not feel guilt about it. That’s all.”

  “This is a pointless exercise, Dad,” Justine said. “Can’t we just have a nice lunch?”

  “I was scared of you,” Tania said to her father. “But I’m not anymore.”

  “I’m happy to hear that, Tania,” he said.

  “Only took me fifty years,” she said.

  THERE ARE ALWAYS barefoot women walking up the steep road leading to the prison. Today was no different. The closest bus stop is half a mile from the front gates of the facility, across the street from Castle Rock Elementary and adjacent to a mini-mall with a Starbucks and a Cold Stone Creamery and a check-cashing place. Tania figures this must be a security precaution, can’t have some runaway inmate able to hop on a city bus right at the front gates of the prison, so there were always these women in tight dresses and miniskirts taking off their spiked heels and walking barefoot or, occasionally, in house slippers up to where the road levels off about two hundred yards from the gate.

  Used to be Tania would stop and pick up a couple girls on her way, but she doesn’t bother anymore. Tania can’t stand to hear their stories. Their men were always innocent. Their men were done in by bad cops or snitches or the system, whatever that meant. No one ever guilty of anything.

  At the flashing red light midway up the road—at the intersection that leads off to the Jay-Reigh Honor Rancho, a dairy farm operated by the minimum-security inmates—Tania spots a familiar face standing at the crosswalk in a leopard-print miniskirt. She can’t remember her name—Carol? Or maybe it was Susan?—only that her husband is a rapist. Tania had given her a ride once and then spent the better part of an afternoon processing through the visitation sections with her, sharing small talk about the weather, the smell of the prison, about how so many of the other women were girls, really, just kids and what a shame that was.

  Tania had liked her well enough—they were both about the same age—until she’d gotten around to asking what her husband was in for. “Oh,” Carol-or-Susan said, “he’s in for rape. But it’s not like he’s a rapist. It’s not like that. It’s not like he was out in a park waiting for some girl.”

  “What’s it like then?” Tania asked.

  “He drove a truck, you know, so I knew what that life was like, and I understood that sometimes, you know, he might get a girl. Anyway, he picked one up in King City and I guess they got high or whatever,” she said. She waved her hand dismissively, as if it was just one of those things that happens all the time in the course of a marriage. “I guess you could say he touched a woman in a way that was inappropriate. It all got blown out of proportion. And here we are.”

  “Do you even hear yourself?” Tania said.

  “My husband is a decent man,” she said. “Just like your husband is, I’m sure.”

  “I don’t have that delusion,” Tania said. “But I have the hope he can become one.”

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  It was a question Tania had asked herself at many different points in her life, so when this woman posed it to her she began to laugh. Who the hell knew? She’d worked her entire life bringing people drinks and along the way had adopted a child who ran away from her, and here she was, going to visit her incarcerated husband. A man she’d only kissed once, on the day of their marriage.

  At some point, Tania thinks as she goes through the stoplight, maybe you stop asking yourself about what and how and maybe begin focusing on why. Maybe that’s what she can learn from the book she’s listening to. The poor Pilgrims dying every day in the shadow of Plymouth Rock, their lives consigned to history, must have asked themselves that same thing. Every day they got further away from the life they’d known. Every day they got closer to dying or maybe they got closer to really living, though she didn’t suppose the Pilgrims were applying that kind of Oprah shit to their lives back then. All that, but at least they had the why down.

  There’s a lineup of cars waiting at the front gate of the prison, so Tania slows to a stop about a hundred yards away. Sometimes, if Tania is lucky, the guard will recognize her and just wave her through, though that’s pretty rare. Rules are rules and Tania can respect that. Today, she’s about ten cars back, which could mean five minutes or an hour, depending on who happens to be in the cars. So many of the people coming to visit have priors and they need to be smart about who gets inside, which strikes Tania as funny in only the barest sense. You spend your free time at a prison and weird things start to strike you as amusing.

  At first, she and Don traded letters for the better part of six months after she’d seen a photo of him in another cocktail girl’s order book. Tania cocktailed at the Chuyalla Indian Casino with Britney for years but barely knew her, just as she barely knew anyone she worked with. You work at a casino long enough, you realize everything there is transitive, including interpersonal relationships, and so if you’re smart, Tania reasoned, you just came in and did your job and made your friends elsewhere, which Tania had done for over a decade. No sense getting too connected to other people who’ve made the same mistakes you have.

  Britney wasn’t even thirty, but Tania knew she had a ten-year-old boy, who had some developmental problem that the casino’s health insurance didn’t cover. The health insurance problem was a constant source of Britney’s running break-room chatter with the other girls. She was always telling them that soon as she got her AA from College of the Desert, the local junior college, she was going to find a better job at a place that gave a damn about its employees, but in all the years Tania heard this patter she’d never once seen the girl with a textbook. She wondered if Britney even had her GED.

  But that afternoon, as they stood next to each other at the bar waiting for their orders to be filled, Tania couldn’t help but notice the photo Britney had in her order book. Britney had laminated it, so the photo picked up the lights circling around them, but it was also wider than Britney’s book, so the edges of the photo had become jagged and Britney picked absently at the wrinkles of plastic.

  “He’s handsome,” Tania said, though in truth he was just average, the kind of guy you’d pass on the street and never imagine what his life might be like, but he had a smile that appealed to her.

  “That’s my brother Don,” Britney said.

  “Oh?” Tania said, because she didn’t know the proper response to Britney’s answer. After Natalya ran away, she’d learned how hard it was to explain to people things like photos and pillows and what might otherwise be considered silly trinkets. Other people’s keepsakes . . . that was land she didn’t cross into. It was usually just easier, and better manners, to say, Oh?

  “He’s in prison.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Something went wrong in Kettleman,” Britney said with a nervous half laugh, and for the first time in the years that she’d worked with her, Tania saw someth
ing more in the girl than the compendium of complaints she heard her mutter each day. Britney was someone’s sister and that someone was in jail.

  “Oh,” Tania said.

  Gordon, the bartender, put Tania’s and Britney’s drinks onto their trays and then gave Tania’s wrist a playful pinch. They’d gone out on a date once, a million years ago, and though it hadn’t gone well, he still casually flirted with her, though Tania knew he was now sleeping with a Korean blackjack dealer named Sang.

  “Well, okay, sweetheart,” Tania said. She picked up her tray and examined the drinks against her order. They were all there. “It’s not my business.”

  “No, no,” Britney said. She reached out and put her hand on Tania’s arm. “Hold up for a sec.”

  Used to be a lot of the girls came to Tania for advice, but that time had passed once word got around that Tania had her own problems. Gordon was probably to blame for that, which was okay. He was the only person at the casino she’d told about her daughter, and though she regretted telling him, it had released a burden from her. So even when she heard Britney going on about her health insurance and her kid, she didn’t bother to interject with whatever wisdom she might have. Problems weren’t solved in the break room; they were just examined in minute detail and then left on the floor.

  “We used to say that to each other back when we were kids,” Britney said. “Kettleman is this place . . . I think it’s from a Western we saw. I don’t even know anymore. It just meant that a bad thing had happened in the past. You know, some unspeakable horribleness?”

  “I do,” Tania said.

  “So whenever anyone asks about him, I think about that. This one time he broke the kitchen table—I don’t even remember how, only that one of the legs was gone—and so mom comes home and she’s like losing her mind, because we didn’t have a bunch of money and no one expects to have to go out and buy a new kitchen table, right? So he just tells her, totally straight-faced, that something went wrong in Kettleman. And you know, what could she say?”