The Low Desert by Tod Goldberg

Author:Tod Goldberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781640093379
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2020-11-11T00:00:00+00:00

PILGRIMS

The drive from Palm Springs to the Woods Detention Center just south of Castaic usually takes Tania a bit over three hours, mostly because she refuses to speed. She was always eager to see Don, her husband of less than one year, but there was something about breaking the law to see her incarcerated husband that didn’t seem logical. Of all the choices she was forced to make in her life, Tania figured putting her car on cruise control three miles beneath the speed limit was the easiest to make. And besides, it was one less thing to concentrate on, which was good since Tania liked to listen to audio books while driving. Fifty-seven years she’d been alive, but it was only in the last three that she’d found the comfort of literature, though she understood that her predilection toward spy novels didn’t exactly make her feel intellectually invigorated. It occurred to her a few weeks ago that she’d be wise to pick up some nonfiction titles, too, see if she might learn something to tell Don about during those weekly moments when conversation halted and both of them realized how little they knew about each other.

So today, on a Saturday in January, Tania listens to a book about the Pilgrims’ first winter. When she took it out from the library, the librarian said, “You understand that this is eighteen hours, right?”

“No,” Tania said. “Is that a problem?”

The librarian, a woman named Crystal that Tania sometimes saw playing slots at the Indian casino where she cocktailed, but who never seemed to recognize Tania in either place, shrugged. “It’s just that you might not finish it in time.”

“For what?”

“The due date,” the librarian said. “You could get the digital version instead.”

“I already know how it ends,” Tania said, but she checked out the book, too, so she could read it if she started to fall behind. “And I like having the physical CD. Makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something when it pops out of the player.”

As she winds up the last miles of I-5 toward the prison, Tania has begun to wonder if she really does know how it all ends. She’s only three CDs in and everything seems insurmountable. The cold. The disease. And worst of all, the fear. Cold and disease were knowns; it was the unknown that trapped the Pilgrims. In the three hours she’s driven from the low desert, through the Inland Empire, the San Fernando Valley, and now up into the Santa Clarita Valley, the Pilgrims have crossed the Atlantic and found themselves in a land that seems intent on ruining them. How much more could they possibly take?

Tania passes the exit for Magic Mountain, an amusement park she’s never visited and hadn’t even heard of before moving to California nearly twenty years ago. That it’s only a mile from one of the state’s largest prisons is surely an unplanned irony, but even still Don has told her that at night he can hear kids

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