The Low Desert

by Tod Goldberg

  But for some reason the students were spending more and more time on the tests, as if they were thinking about each question, and the result was that class was not only going the prescribed length, sometimes it went over, and that wasn’t going to work today.

  Cooperman had a business meeting at the Sonic over on Lemon at 2:45 and couldn’t be late. The guy he did business with, Bongo Pocotillo, wasn’t real big on excuses and apologies. He said he wanted to meet at 2:45 at some crap-ass drive-in fast-food restaurant and you got there at 2:50? Might as well not show up at all. It occurred to Cooperman that working in academia and working in the illegal drug trade weren’t all that different: people expected a certain level of punctuality, which he thought was a really bent business model. If any two fields demanded fluidity, it was academia and drug trafficking.

  The professor stood up. “Excuse me,” he said, and when that didn’t elicit any response, he said, “Pencils down,” and then the entire room came to a full stop. It never ceased to surprise Cooperman how conditioned students were. He could have taken a shit on his desk and no one would have noticed, but utter those two words together and it was holy sacrament. “I’m afraid I’m not feeling too well. Today, everyone gets an A on their exam. Just be sure your name is on your Blue Book when you pass it in.”

  There was a slight murmur in the class and immediately Cooperman knew it meant bad news. Normally, a professor says, “Everyone gets an A,” and no one bothers to ask for any kind of explanation, but Cooperman had set a poor precedent on Monday. He’d asked everyone to turn in a two-page essay on what they perceived to be the most fascinating aspects of hydrology and then accidentally left the whole lot of them in the trunk of his rental Ford Fiesta, which wouldn’t have been a huge problem had he not torched the rental in Mexico when it became clear he had to lose that car fast . . . subsequent to a regrettable shooting incident. After making up a suitable lie (“I’m afraid I left all of your essays at an important conference in El Paso this past weekend”), he gave them all Bs on their papers, which caused a tribal war to break out between the Good Students and the Back Row of Assclowns, like those three frat guys whose names he intentionally didn’t learn, since he was pretty sure he’d seen each of them purchase weed from Bongo sometime in the last year.

  Predictably, perfect-student Monica Williard raised her hand.

  “Yes, Ms. Williard?”

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Cooperman, but I’d like to finish my exam and get the grade I earn. I think most of us feel this way.”

  He liked it when she called him Dr. Cooperman. Though he wasn’t a PhD, he didn’t bother to correct her. A little bit of respect went a long way. All these other kids? Half of them didn’t address him at all. Worse was the preponderance of adult students who’d found their way into the college after getting shit-canned from their jobs at the post office or bounced from the police force and now found themselves in GE-level courses with a bunch of kids; those students always thought they should be able to call him Will or, worse, Bill. He blamed the geology professor, James Kochel, for that particular slight, since Kochel let all the students call him Jim or Jimmy, said it was the pedagogical difference between teaching and fostering and he preferred to foster.

  Monica, she had a little class. A respect for authority. He kept thinking that he should Google her name from home to see if she kept a blog, see if maybe she was harboring a small crush on him. Who could blame her?

  “Yes, Monica, I understand,” he said. “That makes perfect sense. So why don’t we do this: Everyone, take your quizzes home with you. Complete them at your leisure and bring them back, and all of you will get the grade you’ve earned.”

  That was enough for the Back Row of Assclowns, which meant it would be enough for the Good Students, since all the Good Students really wanted was to be like the Back Row of Assclowns, the kinds of people who managed to pass their classes without any mental exertion at all. The whole school was filled with future middle managers anyway, Cooperman thought. It really was no use being like Monica Williard. Ten years from now, someone from the Back Row of Assclowns would be her boss regardless, if they weren’t reality TV stars.

  COOPERMAN FELT ABSURD pulling up to the Sonic in his white-on-white Escalade, but it was important to convey a positive image while doing business. It was the rap music he had to blast out of his speakers that really bothered him, particularly now that it was 2:44 and there was no sign of his associate, which made the fact that there was a middle-aged white guy dressed like a professor sitting by himself listening to The Game all the more obvious. If it was up to him, he’d have Gordon Lightfoot on. It’s what his parents used to listen to on long car rides, presumably to lull him into sleep. But now, decades later, whenever he felt his pulse quickening, he found himself humming “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

  He only listened to gangsta rap so that he could figure out what the hell people were saying to him, both in class and on the streets, and so guys like Bongo Pocotillo, who was now officially late for their appointment, wouldn’t think he was a complete asshole.

  It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Fresh out of graduate school, Cooperman got a top-shelf research job working for Rain Dove, the sprinkler-industry equivalent of being drafted in the first round by the Dallas Cowboys. Within a year he was the big dog in the Research & Development department, but by his fifth year he was thinking about bigger possibilities. The sprinkler industry had always been about making the world green, about giving customers the impression that no matter where they lived, they were in lush surroundings; that their backyard could look like the eighteenth hole at Augusta if only they purchased the latest automatic sprinkler system. It was a successful model—one only had to visit Rain Dove’s corporate offices in the middle of the Sonoran Desert of Phoenix for proof.

  Nevertheless, Cooperman saw the future one night while watching a Steven Seagal movie, the one where Seagal plays an eco-warrior who, after breaking fifty wrists over the course of two hours, makes an impassioned speech to save the world from the disasters of human consumption. As far as epiphanies went, Cooperman recognized that this was one he’d probably have to keep to himself, but he realized change was coming—that if even marginal action heroes were taking time out to admonish the very people they entertained to conserve, hell, it was only a matter of time before the offices of Rain Dove would be picketed by some fringe water-conservation terrorist cell or, worse, Seagal himself. Better to be ahead of the curve.

  He spent the next two years developing new technology that would limit the need for the expansive sprinkler systems Rain Dove was famous for. He migrated Doppler technology into existing systems to measure air moisture and barometric pressure, developed a probe that would constantly measure soil dampness, linked it all to a master program that calculated exact field capacity reports that would then decide, without any human interaction whatsoever, when the sprinklers needed to go on. Or if they ever needed to go on.

  And that was the rub. Test market after test market determined that most people who were buying Rain Dove systems lived in places that needed no irrigation at all. Grass would grow and die in precisely the manner it had since the beginning of time, with or without a system, and specifically without Cooperman’s vaunted RD-2001.

  At the time, he had a huge house in the Sunny Hills neighborhood of Fullerton (the locals called it Pill Hill because of all the doctors who took up residence there); he and his now-ex, Dawn, were talking about having kids (which meant he’d have to cut down on his weed smoking, since their doctor said it was lowering his sperm count to dangerous levels) and seriously considering a little condo in Maui. Still, he always had the strange sense that he was living in the opening shot of a Spielberg movie, right before the aliens showed up to turn the bucolic to shit.

  He shouldn’t have been surprised, then, a week after the last test market showed everyone just how cataclysmic the RD-2001 would be to the sprinkler industry, to find himself out of a job. But that was his proble
m. He was like one of his goddamned students, never thinking about ramifications, never watching the ripples, even when his own fear kept setting off alarms.

  A month later, he was out of a wife.

  A year, he was living in his parents’ house in Buena Park and making pro–con lists about his life, trying to figure the relative value of killing himself. His parents blasting Gordon Lightfoot during every shared meal.

  Two years and he was using the RD-2001 technology to grow some of the most powerful weed in the universe.

  Three years, he was supplying.

  Cooperman checked his watch again. It was now 2:55. Where the fuck was Bongo? In the years they’d been doing business, Bongo had never been late for anything; in fact, Cooperman couldn’t remember showing up to a meeting and not finding Bongo already shifting from foot to foot like a five-year-old needing to piss. Back in the day, when Cooperman just bought weed for his own consumption, Bongo was his connect. Now they were partners, though he never really got the sense that Bongo liked him. They didn’t have much in common, of course, apart from the weed, but they’d made each other a lot of money, and because of that they often shared moments of happiness together, which Cooperman thought gave their relationship a unique value.

  At 3:00, Cooperman’s cell phone rang, the opening strains of “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang” replacing his preferred rotary-dial ring tone. When he looked at the display screen and saw Bongo’s digits, he felt inordinately relieved.

  “You had me worried,” Cooperman said when he answered.

  “You wanna tell me again what the fuck happened in Mexico?”

  “I thought we were meeting.”

  “You at Sonic?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then we’re meeting.”

  “This is bullshit, Bongo,” Cooperman said.

  “So is shooting a motherfucker in the face,” Bongo said. “Now we’re even.”

  The problem in dealing with criminals, Cooperman had learned, was that most of them were paranoid and narcissistic, which isn’t an ideal combination. Everything was a personal affront. There were only so many ways of telling someone that you weren’t going to fuck them and that you respected them completely, before you started to think of ways to fuck them and disrespect them just to change the conversation. Cooperman hadn’t reached that level with Bongo yet, but he recognized that his problem in Mexico was probably a subconscious manifestation of that very thing.

  “Listen, Bongo,” Cooperman said, “it was completely my fault. I got nervous and everything fell apart super quick. But I want you to know that I’d never fuck you, and I completely respect you and your position.”

  “You shot a motherfucker who couldn’t even read,” Bongo said. “You realize that? You killed a motherfucking illiterate.”

  “The failure of education isn’t my problem.”

  “You think this is funny?”

  In fact, Cooperman did think it was funny, if only in the way everything seemed off-kilter to him these days, as if each moment were separate from the next. He liked to think that he’d finally learned how to compartmentalize, finally got over his obsessive tendency to overanalyze all things, what his ex used to call his “ego-driven OCD.” But the truth was that once he set something aside, he never bothered to think of it again. Cooperman realized this likely meant he was losing his mind, but in time even that got shoved aside. Like this Mexico shit. He’d driven down to Tijuana with a trunk full of his reconfigured RD-2001s to sell to a contact of Bongo’s, who was supposedly going to move them to some influential people connected with a prominent cartel—William couldn’t remember which one, except that it wasn’t the one El Chapo was in charge of, because Bongo had assured him they were a “less violent” cartel, not the guys who were beheading priests and tourists and whatnot, which made William feel better about the situation—who, if they liked the system, would bankroll an entire development program. Or at least that was the story. But when Cooperman finally met up with the contact—he was just a punk, really, maybe eighteen or nineteen, who didn’t look all that different from the faux gangsters and frat boys who rolled across the Fullerton campus en route to their Freshman Comp sections—a switch flipped in Cooperman’s head. He finally saw the ripples in their entirety: the cartel would take his technology, reverse engineer it, and he’d be out of a job in two months, maybe less. And what would it matter, anyway, since how much longer would weed even be illegal? This Obama guy running for president? There was no way he didn’t get high. Grew up in Hawaii? Please. This motherfucker was high as fuck as a kid, which meant it would only be a few years before some state would make it legal. Probably California. Then Washington. Oregon. And then he’d be out of the game. Halliburton and Kellogg’s and Disney would be making weed, no doubt. How much longer did he have? Five years at most. This teaching shit, which he only did so he could pay off his monthly alimony, would be his entire life. Teaching Intro to Goddamned Water to a whole legion of consumers who wouldn’t change anything for the better would just perpetuate the world’s problems, so that in ten years, or twenty, when people were really staring at the end of things, they’d ask who was responsible for teaching these morons how to conserve, and that’s when fingers would start getting pointed at the educational complex and guess what? He’d be out of a job again anyway.

  Cooperman ran it all through his mind from several different angles to make sure he wasn’t overreacting, examined the empirical evidence, and then shot the kid in the face.

  It wasn’t like it had happened without Bongo’s complicity, really. Bongo had asked Cooperman months before if he wanted a gun, since Cooperman refused to have any additional security at his house, apart from the rent-a-cops who worked the gate at the Coyote Hills Country Club, and since Cooperman thought the neighbors would find it odd that a bunch of gangsters were loitering around the community pool. So he said sure, absolutely, since it sounded like the type of thing he should want, even if the idea of shooting a gun went against all of his political inclinations. Yet, once he had his handsome chrome-plated nine, Cooperman started going to the Orange County Indoor Range in Brea to shoot, and he found he liked unloading into the bodies of the various people who’d done him wrong over the years, at least metaphorically. The problem was that Cooperman wasn’t much on metaphors, and after a while he started thinking about making a trip out to Rain Dove’s corporate offices in Phoenix to discuss his anger regarding his termination. It wasn’t like he wanted to kill anyone, specifically, only that whenever he left the range he felt positively Republican for the first time in his life. Like the kind of guy who handled his problems versus having his problems handle him.

  So when the switch flipped, Cooperman did what those leadership-structure books always advocated: he rightsized his problem.

  Crazy thing, it felt pretty good. Taking the power back. All that.

  “I admit my mistake, Bongo. What do you want me to do? The kid shouldn’t have stepped to me. You know me. I don’t G like that.”

  Cooperman heard Bongo sigh. It wasn’t a good sound. He’d already sketched out for Bongo a general idea of how things had gone down in Mexico the day previous, substituting the moment of self-realization for a hazy recounting of the kid waving a knife in his face and trying to steal his car. He knew when he told Bongo the story the first time that it was filled with holes, so he tried to cover his tracks by saying things like, “And I’d never seen so much blood!” and “I can’t sleep now, Bongo, I keep seeing that knife in my face!” and “It was all slow motion. One minute, we were sitting there in the Fiesta, the next he was jabbing a knife at me. What was I supposed to do?” Cooperman thought his mania would make Bongo realize he’d been scarred by the event, since it wasn’t every day Cooperman killed somebody, and that it was therefore only reasonable things weren’t lining up correctly.

  “All you had to do was hand him a couple boxes. That’s it. No reason for you to feel threatened in the least. It wasn’t even illegal. And this is what you
do? You make some shit up about a knife?” Bongo said. “That kid had parents, dog. Relatives. Motherfucker had an existence, you know? That shit went over five fucking borders. You think the Mexican Mafia is going to just let that shit slide?”

  “I thought you said it was a cartel,” William said.

  “I never said that,” Bongo said.

  “So, are we talking MS-13? Is that the same as the Mexican Mafia?”

  “Dog,” Bongo said, “you are focusing on the wrong shit.”

  “I highly doubt MS-13 death squads are coming for me,” Cooperman said, but as soon as he said it, he began to think of it as a real possibility. “This is Orange County.”

  “You think that matters?”

  “This is America!”

  “Dog, place don’t matter in the least.” Bongo went silent. William thought he heard a baby crying. Bongo was always having childcare problems. His wife, Lupe, was trying to be an aesthetician, so she had classes in the daytime. “They got partners in Palm Springs. They got fools doing home invasions in Las Vegas for kicks. Like, nothing jumping off on a Tuesday, let’s tie up some people, kill their cat, and steal their Oxy. We ain’t dealing with normal people. You feel me?”

  “I can explain it.”

  “My cousin Peaches,” Bongo said, “he paved this road for you. You shooting this motherfucker is like him shooting that motherfucker. I vouched for you. Maybe that don’t mean shit at your job, but that’s all we got up in this game. Word is bond, you heard that shit before?”

  “I am familiar with the concept as a lyric,” Cooperman said.