THE EYES OF SALTON SEA

We never expected anyone to come back. Tourists won’t eat fish that might have eaten other tourists, nor bathe on beaches where the sand is bone and the water dark. They don’t sip drinks on a shore that comes and goes, rises and falls in floods and droughts, and every time it leaves behind a fresh blanket of dead fish. But the scavengers came. First, birds—for the fish. Then, men—for the wrecks that poked out of the fishbone sand like grave markers.

From the presidential suite of the abandoned resort, our balcony was a crow’s nest where we watched for the treasure hunters and filmmakers who came in investors’ SUVs, towing rented boats. They brought their cameras and robots, their hired divers and diggers, and enough money for the few of us who had stayed behind to make a living. It was a new kind of tourist. Not rich, but wild. Dreamers, like Alden, all after gold and tragic stories. The Salton Sea had both.

We housed them on the first floor of the resort, and I’d cook the fish they didn’t think twice about—sometimes fish they’d bring in themselves, their grins big—addicted to finding things, if only dinner.

And they’d ask Alden questions—interview him with their wide cameras. He’d show them his gold and pearl crucifix. But he never spoke of the ship in the inlet.

It was the sort of secret we didn’t even tell each other. Because someday the water might clear again, or recede even further, and all that would be left is gold and pearls. A treasure beach. When the shore shifts again.

I didn’t like the big cameras or the questions or the way they stepped across the dry fish bones as if it was any other dirt beneath their feet. I encouraged the sunflowers and yucca claiming the old golf course, read the books left forgotten in the bedside drawers. Sewed the ballroom linens into new sundresses. I fed stale crumbs of ice cream cones to the swarms of birds who seemed to be the only ones who understood what it meant to belong here.

The treasure hunters asked Alden to guide them and he’d decline, on account of his feet—and they’d think he meant that it hurt, or that he wasn’t a strong hiker or swimmer. But I knew he was afraid that the curse would take another piece of him. Like it was waiting for the rest of him.

***

When we were young, the water was clear and fresh. My brother and I would swim in the shallows, where a rainbow of polished round stones shone up at us like a thousand eyes. We’d watch the yachts bob across the sparkling water and listen to the music carrying over the waves. Alden celebrated the popularization of the bikini while I cupped my hands in the water, knowing that somewhere along the shore, the Beach Boys were swimming. While our mother cleaned resort rooms, we spent our days in an endless vacation.

We thought the sea was clear because it was young—unmarked by the wear of anxiety that had weathered our mother’s face. We thought it was beautiful. But a young sea has a childlike temper, and one night it swallowed the towns and the desert around it. It had rained for a week straight and the swollen farm canals flushed their agua negra into the Salton Sea and the sea heaved. Some tourists ran for the boats, and some ran for the surrounding hills. Alden and I perched on the roof of the resort. Mother stayed below, going from room to room—cleaning, as if in competition with the scouring wave.

When the water withdrew back into its bed—then lower and lower still, till it shrank back to a fraction of its former self—the people withdrew as well, each drifting further from the other till nothing was left but the broken bits of resort towns and those of us willing to stay, and those who had died in the water. Like mother, her apron a shroud, a duster bouquet of wet feathers in her stiff fingers. The receding water had pulled her from the hotel, as if calling her to the beach to play. Her hair had caught on the wrought iron fence and tied her there. I spent hours untying those dark, wet knots. I wouldn’t let Alden cut them.

When the tourists left, the workers followed—their white service jackets the same no matter where they went. And then the fishermen left—back to the ocean coast, to happier shores where the fish didn’t tie your gut in knots. To ancient oceans with mature tides, not the fickle temper of this inland sea.

The town was nearly deserted. The big hotels sat like empty seashells, still stinking of the life that used to be there, pieces beginning to break off around the edges. The news declared that the pleasure towns had turned to ghost towns. We supposed, then, that we were ghosts. And we haunted our old resort, stretching across luxury linens in the presidential suite. We needed that familiar shore, needed to be near the cluster of concrete crosses set back from the water in the tall, dry grass. Near where mother lay safe under the desert. I dug my roots deep into the rocks.

The beach, now extending hundreds of meters from the resort doorway, shone white with crushed fish bones. Their desiccated bodies plated the bone sand like scaled armor. The sharp jaws and jagged ribs of wrecked yachts poked out of the slick mud.

As everything dried, baked under the desert sun, the toxins that had stripped that water to glass clarity concentrated in the remaining sea, so that at high noon the water was the color of a sunset and a chalky residue clung to anything that had been wet.

When the wind blew, that powdered bone carried the poisons right between our teeth, into the corners of our eyes. It flavored the back of our throats like a bitter pill. If you squinted and held your nose, it was paradise.

We turned to the beach looking for whatever might be left of our lives—or anything we might use to forge new ones. We ran past the old shoreline out onto the mud flat that had once been seabed and across the rainbow eye stones that had watched as our world fell apart.

The new shoreline rose and fell as if the earth beneath it rocked. It carved out twisting inlets and hidden lagoons. We followed it, hiking the topography of old seafloor, near the hills where the stones betrayed an ancient high-water mark that promised a future of nothing but sea. We came to a stretch of choppy shallow water surrounding the battered hull of a ship. It was larger than the yachts of rich musicians that had dotted the water before the flood. It had a round hull and two tall masts that trailed tattered sails like funnel webs. A third mast lay beside it, half-buried in sand. The wood was crusted with an armor of sprawling arthropods.

Alden waded out into the water toward the wreck. He crawled around the hull in search of gold and silver, but instead we found bodies—staring up out of the water, eyes like a thousand polished stones.

I stepped lightly into the water. I was scared to see my brother splashing, leaving a foaming wake that disturbed the surface. He bent and dragged his fingers through the rocks, looking for coins. I nervously filled my sundress pockets with pretty stones, my own small treasures. I paced the shallows and sat in the stones and twisted my hair, tasting that new chemical tang that hung suspended in the still air on the back of my tongue.

The way the water nudged the bodies, they looked as if they slept, and might wake and grab my ankle. Small brown birds with feathers as fine as hair bobbed their heads in the water and nibbled at the corners of their mouths.

Alden pulled his hands from the water, cupping them below his face and smiling for the first time since the flood. His fingers—wrinkled and stinking from the water—clutched a gold and pearl crucifix.

He wanted to stay and find more. He wanted to move the bodies, comb the wreckage, pick it all apart like a bird on a fish. But the sky was growing dark, threatening rain. I backed away from the water, afraid of the fickle shore and storm-fed tides. Alden was forced to follow. He held his hands to the sky and marked the spot in his memory, tracing the old shoreline pattern on the hill above.

As we walked back to the resort, the bright white beach began to snap under our feet. The water turned red as rust, and the rainbow of stones was buried under stiff dried fish.

He tried to go back the next day, but the skin of his feet had turned the color of the dry tilapia shore, the whites of his eyes the color of the rusted-out campers in the surrounding desert. Whether it was poison from the toxic water, a corpse virus, or a ghost ship curse, he didn’t care. He limped, feet dragging through the fish, till the fever slowed him, then stopped him, and he knelt in the crackling granules of beach.

“Bones,” Alden said, running his hands through the splinters. “Some are fish, some are birds, bet some are from the yachts we never found.”

I knew he said it to scare me.

It worked.

***

The scavengers paid for their rooms at the resort, sometimes in food, sometimes in doubloons, or, when Alden wasn’t looking, with pretty stones or sea glass. They tied their boats at the water’s edge—a long walk, now, from the resort’s door, and getting longer every year. They hiked across the bone beach, inspecting destroyed structures, tiptoeing around the bulbs and fins of unexploded dummy bombs from the naval base on the north shore. They followed old train tracks that lead straight into the water, and tied rags around their faces to keep from breathing in the dust cloud of evaporated pesticides and fertilizers. They dug in the sand and trawled from their boats, and—if they were brave or foolish enough—dove in the water.

They found artifacts of the Salton Sea’s heyday. Speed boat parts, depression glass shards, even a flask engraved with F.S. that the diver swore was Sinatra’s.

Some would ask about the lost Spanish galleon. Others would laugh, and the night would be spent telling tall tales of tall ships.

The diver with pale brown eyes the color of sand drying in the sun was the first to ever ask about a curse. He’d met a fisherman, now working far from here, who spoke of his old seaside town and its flood wrecks and the riches no local would touch, and which no diver could find.

Alden just laughed and shook his head. Don’t scare away the business is the motto of every haunted shore. Stories sell, but paradise sells better.

“I’m going to find that wreck,” the golden-eyed diver promised.

Every season there’s at least one treasure hunter who wants to buy more than room and board from me. If I feel like it, I say yes. If he has nice eyes.

The golden-eyed diver had scars like he’d been at war with the sea. The snaking lightning of jellyfish whips. The dotted crescent of a small shark’s appetite. The starburst of a rogue harpoon.

I traced them with my fingertips and gathered his stories. And then he asked for mine.

“I can tell you know about the wreck,” he said, smiling with half his face, scolding with the other half.

“It’s just an old wives’ tale,” I said.

“Tell me anyway. What do the wives say?”

“There’s a ship, somewhere out there. Too big and too old for the Salton Sea, and no one remembers it. There are bodies aboard—rich people with nice jewelry. Gold. Pearls. They must have gone down in a flood, or when the water receded.”

“But no one has ever been there, to see what’s left?”

“The water changes. Sometimes it’s sea, sometimes it’s sand. Bone. It might have been re-submerged in toxic water, or buried in a sandstorm. There are people who say they’ve seen it, but no one has ever seen it twice.”

“Ah. Well, not much point then. How far have you been out onto the sea bed?”

His probing fingertips and thick red wine made me sleepy, dizzy. I wanted to lay my head on his sun-hot chest and sleep.

“A half day, no more. I could never sleep on those bones.”

***

In the morning, he was gone, as adventurers often are—but this was the first time I felt sad for it. Alden noticed.

“You wanted that one to stay?”

“Wouldn’t have minded. Best he left, though. He only wanted the wreck.”

“They all want the wreck, even the ones who don’t know it. You didn’t tell him where, did you?”

“No. Told him it was probably long buried. Or never existed.” I toyed with the stones in my pocket.

Alden nodded approval and handed me coffee. “Maybe he’ll come back for you after he’s made his fortune.”

“Ass.”

Some did come back, but not for me. They came for treasure.

I licked my lips, tasting him still. “I hope he does come back, though. He had good stories.”

I stretched my sore back and made the climb to the roof to clean the day’s fish. The birds had learned to catch the strings of offal I threw over the side. I named them by the way their pinions pivoted on the wind—after fish, the way they dove for each scrap. Marlin was the largest. He’d eat till the breeze couldn’t carry him; then he’d drift into the sunflowers below.

The rooftop was a mess of fish guts and bird shit, awaiting a long-overdue rain. The horizon promised a storm. Black clouds bubbled up above the dark strip of distant water studded with the bright jewels of treasure divers’ boats. The rain would come and the shore would creep closer. The water would get deeper and bury her secrets.

Far to the north of the gathered boats, closer to the brewing storm and the distant hills, the water seemed rougher. The white gauze of chopped waves laced its surface.

A red boat bobbed on the inlet.

I dropped the pail of fish. Heard the frantic beat of descending wings behind me as I raced back down the concrete stairs, around and around, back to the lobby.

“Alden! Alden, he’s at the inlet! He’s in the water!”

Alden paled. “I don’t know what to do about that.”

“You have to stop him. We have to save him!”

“How? Dive in after him? Set a net? Bait a hook with your pussy?”

“Fuck you, Alden! We have to go.”

“Go to the beach. I’ll meet you there.” He limped out from behind the desk.

I didn’t wait to ask his plan. I ran.

My feet found their way across the bone beach, each footstep snapping down, sinking beneath the small skulls, their empty sockets folding shut under my toes, raising a fine dust of chemical calcium. I dodged bubbling mud pools and slid over polished eye stones. I grazed my shins on young yucca growing up from the new beach, until my knees hit the bone grit of the hidden inlet. The water was deeper than it had been years ago. Only the tip of a mast was visible above the water, its scrap of sail like a grey flag.

The red boat rocked offshore, anchor dropped into the dark water, her deck bare, her winch line taut.

I advanced as far as I dared, my toes right up against where the sand turned wet.

“Robb!”

I knew he couldn’t hear me. There was no one else on the boat. His whole life was strung on that winch line. I twisted my hair into fisherman’s knots. The sky had begun to growl.

Alden came stumbling up behind me, a large package under his arm, his pack slung over his shoulder. He let it fall to the sand and pulled the ripcord, and a small inflatable raft expanded at our feet.

“Is it safe?” I stared at the dark water and the thin rubber bottom of the raft.

“No. Doesn’t matter—we have to do this.”

We dragged the raft to the chopping waves. I flinched as the water brushed my feet. Alden didn’t touch the water. He hopped over the side and pulled me in after.

We cast off and paddled to the idling boat. I climbed over the rail and ran to the winch, slammed the lever, and anxiously watched as the line coiled slowly around the bobbin.

Alden tied the raft to the boat and stumbled to my side, pulling a pair of loppers from his pack. He reached out and clipped the line.

The sprung end whipped across my face. I cried out and fell back against the railing.

“Alden!” I cupped a hand over my bleeding cheek as my vision cleared. “What are you doing?”

He had moved to the side, where he sawed at the anchor line.

“He knows where the wreck is. He’ll lead a hundred other divers here. They won’t wait for another quake wave or a drought to clear this dark water. They’ll have it stripped clean in a day. And everything we’ve waited for will be gone.”

“I wasn’t waiting for anything. Is this the only reason you stayed?”

“We’ll power the boat out of the inlet and set it adrift.”

“What about Robb? He could die down there. Without his line—”

“Just another diving accident.”

“You heartless fuck.”

“Happens all the time. You think this is the first time a diver’s found the wreck? I ought to throw you in, too. Blabbing secrets to a scavenger.”

“You’re a scavenger. No better than them. Worse. How many divers have you left down there? How many?”

Alden threw the boat in gear and angled it toward open water. He steered against the tide as we wound toward the broad horizon, our raft bouncing along the side.

I watched the black water behind us. It had gone perfectly still. Even the wake of the boat calmed too quickly. There was no sign of the diver.

***

The other divers noticed Robb’s absence. Their competitive nature didn’t follow them ashore. They assumed he’d run out of funding, or hope—or that he’d hit a honey spot and camped out. No one would think the worst for hours. Maybe not till his boat was found. If it was found.

I tried to remember how many times I’d heard this conversation. How many divers had been reported lost. I wondered how many I never even knew about.

Alden laughed with the crews, his twisted feet twitching under the table.

They were still gathered in the lobby, increasingly drunk, riding out the storm with an endless supply of stories on their tongues, when the report came in that Robb’s boat had been found drifting. Al at the West Shore Casino had spotted it. The police were on their way—a courtesy call.

Alden took the phone from my hand. “No. We haven’t seen him since last night. Or was it this morning? Sis, was he there when you got up?” The divers stared into their drinks, cheeks red and ears straining.

I scowled back as the report continued. The boat’s line had been cut. Anchor gone. They suspected something—foul play, perhaps by another diver. But they could prove nothing. Gulls make bad witnesses. So do the eyes under the water.

The divers drank more—to Robb, and all the others that came before, to all the souls claimed by the sea.

The ones they would plunder.

Come morning, the divers were strewn about the lobby as if they themselves had been wrecked there, tossed around as if by the storm. Outside, rain hammered the corrugated steel that patched our roof. Steady dripping echoed through the resort halls. The sea had crept closer. Boats that had been anchored to shore now bobbed a hundred meters out. Our raft had been tossed halfway up the shore.

I put rum in the orange juice. Extra grease for the eggs. I knew they’d dive anyway.

I had just set the steaming pots of black coffee on the table when I felt the weight of eyes on my neck and a hand on my waist.

I turned and met a pair of golden eyes, bright like beach agates, shining round like ancient coins.

“Robb!” I threw my arms around his neck. His wet hair dripped cold water over my arms. His neck against my lips tasted like oil and aspirin.

The divers began to groan and pull themselves upright. They rose scowling at the sound of my shriek, but soon switched to cheering as they saw Robb, whole and hale, in my arms.

The commotion brought Alden out of the office. His smile split his face, but his eyes stayed cold.

Breakfast ran long as Robb recounted his survival story—his voice rough, throat salt-water chapped.

He’d felt his line snap. Watched it sink around him in coils, tugged by swift currents. Instead of surfacing, he said, he’d followed the line, followed the current, hoping he might find a treasure trove—a deposit of flotsam.

“Did you?”

“What did you find?”

“The ship,” he said.

Every mug slowly lowered. Full forks sunk back to plates.

“Did you go in?”

Robb smiled. He reached into a bag at his wetsuit belt and pulled out a fistful of treasure. Some gold, some silver, some black with oxidization, some glittered with cut stones, bright with pearls.

Nervous laughter circled the table.

“You didn’t . . . You wouldn’t disturb the remains, though. Must have just been . . . Maybe a box of treasure, right?”

Robb’s grin widened. His eyes weren’t dilating, but remained fixed discs of gold. “Must have been a chest,” he said. “Big pile of goods all in one place.”

The nervous laugh circled again. Alden’s smile had slipped.

“You register your find yet?” a diver asked.

The hangovers were gone. Sobered with gold lust. Filled up with need.

Robb’s round eyes bored into the man who’d asked. “’Course. Sorry if I kept you waiting. Made you worry. But when I saw my boat was gone, I swam to one of yours. Radioed it in while you were down.”

No laughter, then.

“Now, about my boat . . . ” He slipped the treasure back into his bag, precious metal rattling like chains.

“I’ll give you a share in mine till your insurance—”

“You’re welcome to come with—”

“I can draw up a contract right now—”

Robb held up his hands for silence. “I only want one partner in this, and it’s the man who knows these waters best.”

Every diver smiled, sure Robb meant them. Alden looked ill. Robb looked at Alden.

“It’s not your feet that stop you from diving. It’s what’s down there. That ends now. I know you’ve been waiting a long time. Suit up.” Robb tossed a mask at Alden and rose from his chair. He kissed me and took my hand, leading me back to his room.

The divers sat silent behind us like a flock of greedy birds.

***

“You shouldn’t have gone into that water,” I said. “You shouldn’t have taken that gold.” I twisted my hair as he buzzed around the room packing his bags.

“I didn’t.”

“What?”

“I was never in the water. Not there.”

My heart dropped like a cut anchor. “But, your boat—”

“I was watching from the shore. By the hill.”

I sat on the bed, my hands shaking. Every secret I had now lay naked under his bright eyes, like exposed seafloor under a hot sun.

He knelt before me, ran his fingers over the scab on my cheek. “I saw what he did. I saw you try to stop him.” He squeezed my hands between his and leaned in to kiss me again. I pulled back.

“But those coins?”

“From older dives, other shores. I keep them in a jar on my dash, as a reminder.”

“Of what?”

“Time. Death. That the sea controls both.” He let go of my hands and zipped up his duffel bag.

“Where are you going? What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to put your brother in the water.”

My gut heaved and I felt the sea at the back of my throat. “Robb, no. That beach . . . I know you don’t believe the stories. Yes, there are bodies under there. And yes, probably treasure, too, but it’s not worth it . . . ”

“You’re right, it’s not. Not to me. But it is to your brother—worth lying for, worth killing for. Worth hanging around this ghost town. Must be worth dying for, right?”

“Please, Robb. He did an awful thing. But please don’t hurt him.”

“I’m not going to. He’s going to hurt himself.”

I shook my head. “It’ll be harder than you think to get him in that water.”

“No, it won’t.”

***

Most of the boats waited near the shore, hoping Robb would come to them, waiting for him to pass so they could follow. Other boats swept up and down the water line, looking for him. None had seen him lead Alden north, darting from ruin to ruin, across the bone beach to the deep inlet.

Robb had warned me to stay at the hotel. I watched from the roof, from the center of a cloud of birds angry that I hadn’t brought fish. I twisted my hair till the ends broke off in my fists.

I waited till they appeared on the far side of the mud flats before I followed.

Robb had no need of a boat, not in the calm black water that followed the storm. He used the same inflatable raft we’d used to sneak onto his boat. The water didn’t ripple under their paddles.

They moved toward the spot where the grey flag had been as I crept across the round stones. I watched as Alden slipped a snorkel over his face. Not even a tank. He was still shaking his head, still reluctant. But Robb held out something shiny in his hand. Alden froze.

The gold? A gun? It didn’t seem to matter which. Alden slid his legs over the rounded side of the raft. His withered feet dipped into the dark water and his back arched. He dropped into the sea.

The water rippled away from him, the circles widening, growing—till they were a ring of waves cresting back toward open water and shooting up onto the beach, tossing limp tilapia at my feet. I danced away as the water chased me and sheltered in a mound of yucca and cactus at the base of the hill. Over and over, each ring curled into another wave, like a wild tide climbing the shore as if to make the resort waterfront property again.

Robb steered the raft over the unnatural swells, surfing their crests back toward the beach. A wave slid the raft over the sand and deposited it on a pile of drying fish.

There was no sign of Alden.

Robb climbed from the raft and pulled me from my hiding spot, leading me back across the beach toward the resort as tendrils of water spilled across the mud behind us.

“We need to go back for him, Robb.” I pulled against his grasp, wanting to turn around. “He’ll drown in that tide. Christ, you didn’t even give him a tank.”

“Would have been a waste of a tank. The thing is done.”

“What are you talking about?”

“They have the gold back. Their treasure is returned and they’ve caught their thief. The curse is broken.”

“There’s no goddam curse! We need to get him out of the water—he can’t swim—”

“He can swim fine. He knows what the water wanted; knew what it would cost him. He didn’t steal that gold, he bought it. Now he’s paid for it.”

He pulled me off the bone beach and into a copse of tall sunflowers.

Behind me came the sound of lapping water. Of music. The Beach Boys playing from a yacht that cruised past the resort. The arcing waves dragged at the beach, pulling dried fish back into the water, leaving fine white powder sand in their wake. I squeezed my eyes shut and swore I could hear laughter, the buzz of neon. The smell of fish frying, not baking on the shore.

I looked out at the sea, waiting to see if the water foamed with hunger, if it would surge right through the front doors and fill the rooms with bones and the dead. But the water had stopped, just kissing the beach. The music continued. Robb hummed along. The people on the yacht danced and waved.

“They can’t stop here now—there’s nowhere nice enough to stay. But they’ll be back. A whole fleet of them. Crowds.” Robb reached down and pulled up a fistful of weeds, the small beginnings of my sunflowers. “Better get to work. Let’s get this place ready. Clear out the trash and trailers, fill the pool. Clean the rooms.”

“What are you doing?” I grabbed the seedling flowers from him and pressed them back into the dirt.

“Treasure hunting.” He shook the sticky soil from his hand.

I shook my head. The birds above us, circling, made me even dizzier. Robb placed his scarred hands on my shoulders. They felt like anchors, like heavy stones pressing me in place.

“I’m not the guy who takes treasure out of the sea,” he said. “I’m the guy who puts it back. But if I found a billion dollars in treasure, I’d use it to live in a beachfront palace with a beautiful woman. So I don’t much see the need to sail off again. I’m staying.”

I tore myself out of his grip, spat in his golden eyes, and ran back to the beach, north across the powdered bone to the edge of the water, as close to the hill as I could get.

The water was clear. Fresh as a young sea with a temper. I could see straight to the bottom. There was no Alden. No wreck. There were a thousand smooth stones, round and bright as eyes.