Other Resort Cities Read Free Page A

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