Forty years ago, this was roughly where Bonnie Livingston had her little bar and café. At night during the week, the working men would sit at the bar 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 would 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.
Thirty-eight 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. They never did find her body, but that was okay: 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. All things 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. They intend to fund a project that will eradicate the dead—both the people and the lingering fumes of a sea that was never meant to be—and once again tempt the folly of beachside living in the middle of the desert.
I’ll be dead by then myself. 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 were 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 himself, 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 he fishes out his own wallet and shows me
his
retirement card from the Yuma , Arizona PD. His name is Ted Farmer he tells me, and then he 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 point 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, a hundred years, more fertilizer than person. But still.”
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. When she was at her sickest, when it was apparent that the only salve for her illness was the belief that tomorrow could only be better, when we’d begun to live in increments, separating the positives into single grains of sand, Katherine was certain that when she was well (never if ) we’d have a houseboat on this inland sea, that our lives would be lived rarely touching land, that each morning we’d pick up anchor and find another destination, another view of the sun-charred Chocolate Mountains.
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 Katherine. 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. Goode” 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 that 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 it could have been fifteen minutes ago.”
Farmer winces noticeably, like he knows what I mean. We watch the anthropologists going about their work in silence. It becomes clear after a while that the two young women are actually 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 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 fall 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.