Other Resort Cities Read Free

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