A World the Color of Salt

by Noreen Ayres

  “They bery hurry,” he said.

  “About what time was that?” I asked, tapping my wrist.

  “One o’clock. I do one o’clock.”

  Joe asked if Emilio could tell what kind of truck it was and he said, “Like my father. Chebrolet,” heavy on the ch. I grinned. I liked him. He smiled back, one tooth at the side missing, nice long crow’s feet at his eyes.

  “Your father has one? Same kind? About how old? What year?” Joe said.

  “Sixty-seben Chebrolet, half-ton.” Emilio’s face lit up. He seemed very proud. “Half-ton.”

  “That’s what your father has, right?”

  “On farm, half-ton. Big focking half-ton.” He was nodding happily now, pleased Joe understood, rubbing his palms again on the front of his thighs.

  “A half-ton is still a big truck in Mexico, I guess,” Joe said for my benefit. “If you get your four-by-four stolen around here, it winds up in Mexico pulling a plow.” He asked Emilio, “On the farm, what’s your father grow?”

  “El algodón. Uh, cotton.”

  I looked at Joe. Cotton in Mexico?

  “By Durango our farm,” Emilio added. “Cotton.” He was smiling as if he were proud, and a light came to his eyes.

  I said, “The men, Emilio. You saw these men?”

  He reached high over his head to indicate height, said, “Big. Bery big. Hat. Red bazeball cap. One habe”—hooking his hand behind his head in a motion to indicate the ponytail—“tail,” he said. “He dribe.”

  Joe said, “What color was their hair?”

  Emilio didn’t know the word for brown. We worked with him. He also said one of the men wore a Lebi jacket. Good. He couldn’t remember what shirt the other had on. Both of them wore boots. Better. How many people in SoCal wear cowboy boots? I asked if he could tell the men’s ages, how old they were. He shook his head but then said, “Nineteen?”

  Before we left, Joe asked if he could show us exactly where the truck was parked. He led us to a break in the hedge and we stepped through. I expected him to lead us down to the front, nearer the marked parking places, but he didn’t. He walked straight along the hedge a few feet and then stopped. “Back here,” he said, squashing one hand downward as if he were bouncing a basketball. “Front here.”

  “The back was here,” Joe said. “Then, you mean the truck was headed out toward the street.”

  Emilio nodded. “I see twelve-fifteen, too. Truck here twelve-fifteen.”

  “It was here at twelve-fifteen, and then it came back?” Joe asked.

  “No. I see at twelve-fifteen too. It here long time, long time. That’s why I say, “Oh! It go out . . .” and be blew a whooshing sound into the air above his scooping hand.

  Joe and I looked at each other. I said, “That truck was here a long time, then, forty-five minutes. Then it decides to book out of here? Why the hurry if it’s been there already forty-five minutes? I don’t know, Joe. We probably don’t have anything. Vaporware,”

  Joe asked him what hours Emilio worked. He said someone else might have to talk to him, and would that be all right? Oh, yes, Emilio said, assuring Joe with a big smile, and then he gave us his home address, which was probably the same address for sixteen other illegals, or false, or would change next week. “And how old are you, Emilio?” I asked, jotting this down.

  “Nineteen,” he said.

  I was back in the Kwik Stop parking lot when Joe left me to go talk to two more of our people who’d just arrived—Billy K. again, and it looked like the rookie too. I thought of Billy K. explaining to Joe why he violated scene integrity by using the restroom. And then something else flashed on me and my stomach began a slow twist. Because I stood there thinking, If Emilio could eye the pickup through the divided hedge, if the front was there and the back was here, then that meant, picturing my car the way it was parked last night, the truck would have been nosed into mine, driver’s side to the store. Close enough so that when the truck swung out sharply toward the driveway, a small, brass round thing could theoretically drop out, hit the asphalt, and roll into the grass.

  Joe was coming up the incline, the sun bringing out the coral shade of his shirt and the brown of his wool suit.

  “Joe,” I said. “You’re going to hate me.”

  “What else is new?” he said, a smidgen of a smile in his eyes.

  I was suddenly sweaty in my gray leather jacket, thinking how bad-ass I thought I had been last night telling Joe off. Picturing the brass object sitting in my desk drawer instead of Property, the custody of a potential piece of evidence compromised. Jerkhood, never forget it, cuts both ways.

  I said, “I think I maybe have something for you.”

  CHAPTER

  7

  Ass-chewing is always harder on me than it should be. I do stuff, then get surprised when the consequences turn out different than I expected. Naïve I am not, so what’s the problem, except maybe a case of terminal good intentions. Because I mean well.

  Joe gnawed rather than chewed. Here, he says, here’s my lawyer’s number. He wrote on the back of his own business card in black ballpoint while I stood there. “Tell him he can take that trip to Cancun.” I looked at him, not getting it. “Soon as he sues your surgeon for excising your brain.”

  Not nice, not nice at all. People told me Joe could get sarcastic—but in three years working with him I hadn’t myself seen it. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention. Funny how things roll off when it’s not your back. Or, I don’t know, maybe Billy Katchaturian pissed him off again when Joe went over to the car.

  Now I was on my way to the coroner’s, and hardly paying attention to my driving. I must have done something wrong, because a guy in shades and a blue baseball cap turned backward flipped me off when he passed me. I was going sixty-two, but he must have thought I was going too slow for the second lane. And before I knew it, I was on Santa Ana and Shelton.

  Set into the ivy ground cover next to the sidewalk is a low stone block with unobtrusive letters; SHERIFF-CORONER FORENSIC SCIENCE CENTER, which spells morgue if you know how to read it. A few yards away is the building itself, a narrow belt of glazed orange ceramic tile coursing around its middle. Opposite, a four-story fiercely white building glares like a glacier in a tar pit: Building 42, the jail. North of 42, a smaller structure, Building 44, houses the women. I have not been in either one, since I am not a cop in Orange County and I’ve never had reason to go there. But whenever I come to the morgue, I imagine the prisoners looking down from cell windows, seeing their buddies hauled out of the vans and wheeled in through the automatic doors in the back, and later their buddies’ families walking out the front all squeezed together, hands cupped over their mouths.

  I crossed the red pavers at the entrance and went in the front door. Janetta, the records clerk, and pretty, was cloaked in her two cardigan sweaters, a white over a pink, and under those a navy blue polka-dotted dress. Janetta caught a glimpse of me and said, “Hi,” a big smile looking pretty on her Hispanic features. “It’s always cold in here,” she said, and hugged herself. I smiled sympathetically, and wished she wouldn’t dress that way. A Beatles song was playing on the intercom: “If I give my heart”—thump-thump—“to you-oo-oou . . .”

  She walked to one of the antique wooden cabinets that still held the records not yet converted to the automated system, pulled open a drawer, and started flipping through files. In the back of the room a woman I didn’t know sat working at a desk, asking Janetta, “Now, what do we do with the Does? File ’em by number also? Or do they go in a separate file?”

  Janetta said, “Just a minute, Smokey,” and tucked something down in the drawer. She’s as nice to women as she is to men, and knows her job. Going for her degree in business administration. That’s why I wish she wouldn’t dress the way she does. I want people to take her seriously. I leaned on the shelf of the customer window. I always felt strange here, at the window, because it’s got a foot-wide lip to it, as if anyone might at any moment slide a hot apple pie onto
it and invite me to wait for dessert to cool down, there’ll be coffee later.

  Glancing at the sign-in sheet, I saw a long list of names. I said, “Who are all these?”

  “Student tour,” she said, smiling. “You know how Jack tells them, ‘Don’t faint. Anyone faints, we put ’em on a tray’? This girl excuses herself right then. She left out the door looking green, I mean seriously.”

  I pictured the student, sitting in her car in the parking lot, trying to get up the courage to come back in. They usually do, embarrassment or curiosity bringing them back. Once when I was witnessing an autopsy of a man who seemed to die of nothing, a student tour came through. The coroner’s clerk walks the line of students each time, intoning, “Don’t stare, don’t lock your knees. Don’t stare, don’t lock your knees,” until they get used to the sight of the bodies in whatever stage of the procedure they might be in at the time, some already split open, some with the scalp pushed down over the face so the techs can get at the brain. One student didn’t take the advice. He fainted three times, kicking a metal-utensil cart into the middle of the room, on which lay the shears and turkey baster used for gathering urine. At least the techs don’t have to worry about sterilizing the instruments here.

  I must admit I wonder about the people who work here. Cops, at least, have moments when they know they have protected and served, and rarer moments still when victims and bystanders actually express gratitude. But here, these processors of flesh are another breed. Some seem flat-out ghoulish. It’s not the jokes that bother me—humor keeps us all sane. It’s something weirder I have not figured out yet; something that delights in the repellent. I’ll say to Joe that this one or that one is a creep. He says, Hey, the guy has found his niche, don’t knock it. Then there are the students, and the doctors from foreign countries who can’t find other placement yet; the English majors who couldn’t either. As in all workplaces, the good, the bad, the indifferent.

  Janetta’s high heels croaked over the tile floor, ending with a sound like a little sput; I marveled at how well waxed all our floors are, wavy or not, as if to say, Death doesn’t happen here, no siree. We chatted awhile. She asked how I was doing. She asked if my operation was painful, screwing up her face; then backed up and showed me a fist-sized bruise she picked up on her shin from an open drawer.

  “Dangerous place,” I said. “You could probably find dead people here if you looked hard enough.”

  She laughed a rich sound, rolled her head as if she had a kink in her shoulder, and said, “Geez, it’s cold in here, isn’t it?”

  I requested the Dwyer file, and she went to the back of the room and lifted up folders in a wire basket near the door that leads into the lab. “You know, I think that’s still in the back. You want to go in, Smokey? I think it’s in Dr. Schafer-White’s.”

  She buzzed me in the door at the side.

  “Ask Barney for it, will you?”

  “Sure.”

  “And sign for it, okay, before you take a copy?”

  A few of the laser techies were fussing around with the bench laser in the back, trying to get it to work. I didn’t say anything to them, didn’t want to bother them. I passed through one lab area looking for Barney, feeling a little strange, as though coming into an old grammar-school classroom. Six weeks off the job could be a decade. The smell of formalin, which is formaldehyde gas mixed with water, was strong today. There were two nude bodies on trays in the hallway, having been wheeled in from hose-down outside. I looked in at one of the workrooms and noticed, probably for the first time, that the wooden bar stools at the workbenches were orange. The cabinets orange too, an old color, chosen no doubt when Orange County had real groves. In that early enthusiasm, city fathers decided to paint street signs orange with white letters, virtually ensuring no one would be able to read them after a year of sun-baking, and in the city of Orange they remain to this day. As if for the first time too, I saw the clean yellow Formica countertops, rubbed nearly white in the centers. And I felt out of place, not sure of where I belonged, but maybe not here.

  A big healthy girl with blushing cheeks and brown hair to her shoulders came through the back door, a McDonald’s lunch sack in her hand. The smell of French fries wafted in with her. She told me through a mouthful that Barney was outside. I walked by the big floor scale—orange, of course—where the corpse and cart are weighed together, the cart’s weight subtracted. On the wall in red crayon were the words HEAD HERE, with an arrow pointing down.

  As I approached the automatic doors, the yellow reflective sheeting on them squinched my figure into flat waves. Outside, there’s a three-sided shower stall for washing off corpses after autopsy—or staff, if they’ve gotten something especially contaminating on them. Vagrants used to take showers there until management fenced it off at the driveway.

  Barney was tipped back on an orange stool by the shower wall, face laid to the sun. His lab coat covered a green knit shirt and rock-washed blue jeans. Rubber beach shoes rested on the concrete apron beside him. “Barney,” I said. “You don’t hear about the bad things sun does to you?”

  He squinted over at me and rocked the stool down. “Hiya, stranger, how ya been?”

  “Oh, good, good. Listen, not to disturb, but Janetta said I could sweet-talk you into getting me a file.”

  “You can get it yourself. Nobody’s around. Just sign for it.” Ordinarily, the charts go directly up front, but sometimes they land in a pathologist’s basket for a while.

  “I wouldn’t think of pulling you away from the rays,” I said, smiling, but wishing he’d seen some of the young patients I had seen when Bill was in the hospital, one guy just twenty-seven with holes in his shoulders and neck where cancers were plugged out, and a continual look of fear in his eyes.

  I did what I was supposed to, signed for it, then took it up front to Janetta. On the way up, I glanced in the autopsy room at students lined up more or less against the wall. One held a Kleenex over her mouth and nose. Another leaned her head on a male companion’s shoulder. They tucked their hands under their arms or into their pockets, or fingered their own faces. These people would one day be cops: The first time they have to pull a body out of a crushed car or out of a burned bathtub, they’d better be able to take it, but I was glad to be reminded of an almost palpable compassion people feel when they first see the dead so helpless.

  Out front, a busload of light-custody inmates were waiting to spend the day picking up trash along the freeways. Some of the prisoners looked at me as I passed, their faces, what I could see of them, noncommittal. But I felt for them, maybe some of them dying to whistle, to inject some fun and normality back in their lives; some of them thinking of families and bosses and how those people would handle it all, thinking of what screw-ups they’d been and how if they ever get out of this they’ll never mess with so-and-so or such-and-such again; some of them saying to themselves, Fuck this noise, I’m doing it right next time, no goofs. Because most of them, like it or not, were there for reasons serious enough that they couldn’t escape even the cite-and-release program the sheriff had in place, and most of them, whether the average citizen wants to recognize it or not, had been jerks for a long time.

  Another bus waited just beyond the sliding white-iron gate at the Intake/Release Center, the gate topped with rolled razor wire, and the bus no doubt destined for a return trip to outlying housing facilities after the prisoners’ day in court. Business as usual.

  My car was out away from the buses, deep into the packed parking lot, so I could sit there a moment, the folder in my lap. The sun on the seats felt good on the back of my thighs, the small of my back.

  I looked at the label. “JEROME ALPHONSUS DWYER,” it said, and the case number beneath. I sat in my car a long time before I opened it.

  “We got a party at Bob and Dollie’s tonight you want to come,” Raymond told me. I’d called Raymond from my car phone, one of the first times I’d used it. I was able to do this because his hot-shit Saleen got installed with
cellular. Most coppers just have the radio. He asked me if that’s how I spent my disability money, on my new phone.

  “Now, don’t you be calling me every half hour, Raymond. It costs me money incoming as well as outgoing.”

  “Then what fun is that?”

  “You’re good at harassing. You a cop?”

  “Listen, come on to the party, I’ll buy you a beer.”

  “I need a party.”

  “Sure you do.” It was good to hear his mellow voice. Voices get me. His is brandy-nice. Why wasn’t I in love with him?

  This conversation was taking place while I was on the Costa Mesa Freeway, the 55, headed home after an afternoon spent going over and over again the details of the autopsy report. The smaller-caliber bullet caught Jerry in the mouth; rolled apart the tissue like the Red Sea, then lodged in the meaty part at the back. That would account for the torrents of blood. He’d be choking on it; yes, and slipping—failing in his desperate effort to keep the killers out.

  When I returned to my desk after retrieving the report, I tried to work on old paper, go through all the bulletins to read and toss that had piled up while I was gone, all the med-plan updates you never know what to do with and end up putting in a binder, unpunched, so they fall out the next time you pick it up.

  At lunch I walked down to one of the nice restaurants on Santa Ana Boulevard, trying to get the pictures out of my head. Lawyers sit at cozy tables at this certain restaurant, talking lawyer stuff. I could tune them out. I pretended interest in the abstract paper sculptures framed on the walls in mauve and green, and made a good deal of small talk with the waitress, who’d heard you can still get homestead land in Alaska.

  But I couldn’t get Jerry out of my head. Walking back to the office I thought of that last time I saw him alive, how he waved and said, “So long. Take care now.” And as I thought these things, the silica in the sidewalk swam together through my sunglasses, and I was finally actually glad to be back in the office doing routine things again.