Other Resort Cities Read Free Page B

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.
    I try to see the world as it was and as it is now, try to find what used to be my home, what used to be my life, try to locate the Fourth Estate of my memory: a dry reporting of fact. You lived here. You slept there. You made love and you witnessed death and you mourned and you buried your wife in the simple plot Claxson provided and allowed behind your home and you carried your wife’s corpse—because that’s what it was; it wasn’t a body anymore, not with the dirt and the sand and absence of any kind of reality, any kind of relevance beyond what you’d emotionally ascribed to it—to the sea,
because that was what she asked of you, not to allow her to rot in the desert, but to give her a perpetual view of the sun and the water, to let her float free of the pain, because that’s what she wanted you to give her. That is across the way . And you see the end of your own life, don’t you? You feel the creeping dread that you’ve beaten that same slow poison yourself but have found another, more insidious invader. And what will you do about it, Morris Drew? Why did you bring that gun with you?
     
    When I get back home I find Kim sitting on our back patio, her eyes buried in a magazine, golf carts moving in a steady stream past her as dusk has begun to fall. She doesn’t see me, so for a time I just stare at her. I imagine what she might look like