A World the Color of Salt

by Noreen Ayres

  I raked wispy bangs down onto my forehead and scrunched curls at the sides, the hair there grown too long to comb back anymore like Sheena. Maybe I’d go a real deep brown with red highlights, be cutesy-pie again. Were those creases at the eyes? Yep. Did I care? You bet.

  No one was coming over, but I pulled out the drawer where I keep my makeup and brushed on color anyway. Two long swipes on the Cherokee cheeks—thank you, Oklahoma—so I wouldn’t look so ghostie to myself. Stood there some more, staring at myself, no expression in the pigeon-gray eyes, which were, at the moment, a touch red, to match the shirt, from herbal shampoo. “Knock-knock, who’s there?” I said. “Smokey.” “Smokey who? “Smokey the Bare.” I thought, Smokey the B-a-r-e, making those know-it, done-it, will-do-it-again eyes, sliding one shoulder out of the wide neck of my shirt, Oh, you hot thing. Then crying, or starting to. I said, “Ah, shit,” and went to the kitchen, reached up over the oven where I keep two bottles of booze, one fancy, one general-purpose.

  In the dining room, I put on some old Peggy Lee: “Is That All There Is?”—not the rip-off by Christine Somebody, but the real thing by the real laid-back lady. I always figured Peggy Lee had a secret she’d only tell in the sack, next to the man who’d been doctor-lawyer-actor-Indian chief and owned a quiet hideaway in the mountains of both Idaho and Peru. I stole the Peggy Lee album from my mom when I left home, but Etta James and B. B. King I bought on my own. The blues side of town. Tell it like it i-is.

  I sat down on the sofa, put my head back for a moment, and thought how utterly lonely I was. Southern Comfort is what I was drinking, and oh, you shouldn’t mix whiskey and lonely in a low-light apartment when you’re alone.

  Trying to stop sniveling, I got up and emptied the contents of the plastic department-store sack, where the gifts were stashed in gold foil boxes and wrapped with gold sparkly ribbons: a non-do-it-yourself job that set me back fourteen dollars and left me choking.

  I didn’t have a tree, but if I sat on the end of the couch by the window and looked west, I could see the one on my neighbor’s balcony. She was a woman about my age but from another generation, if you know what I mean. Redwood slats formed the container for the tree that always sat there on my neighbor’s balcony; an evergreen, ever green. Twice a year it grew nubby pale fingers, as if it were stretching to reach the balcony edge and hoist itself over, and I’d see my neighbor out there nipping them off, and for some reason that made me sad. A week ago she had decorated it with tiny blinking lights.

  I set the gifts against the window under, if you will, her tree. There. Christmas. Poured just a teeny bit more Comfort and sat back on the couch. The presents looked big there. “Maybe intent makes up for crimes, Smokey-girl,” I said aloud and took another sip of whiskey.

  As I leaned back, the ceiling became a movie screen where I saw the rolling hills above the reservoir, arroyo willows sticking up in the gullies like green broom heads, and then the little black baby in the pink bunting sleeping forever by the coyote bush and scrub where the Cessna made cornmeal of new tract homes.

  In this work you learn to force the pictures away because they’re worse in memory than in real life, some of them anyway. A puzzle to me, why that happens. The first time I saw a body, a traffic-accident victim with mortal head wounds, I told my partner, who was my own dear Bill at the time, that I thought it would’ve bothered me more. He said, “Just wait.” Bill knew something then that I didn’t: The pictures don’t just come back to you—they become a part of you. You understand why man developed impersonal speech for it: the deceased, the corpse, cadaver, remains; the stiff, the floater; fish-food, decomps, burn-ups, swingers, jumpers, blues. Sometimes I think we who do this type of work must be some kind of strange. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a job where you go to work and your biggest problem of the day is placating some poor homeowner who wants his escrow speeded up, or figuring how you’ll get the new-parts shipment inventoried and stacked before you lose your strong kid back to college?

  I was into self-pity that night, boozy and thinking maybe I could go learn computers, like Roland was going to. Then Peggy Lee started on “Me and My Shadow,” and I thought then of Patricia, how she followed me that night at the station, Mutt and Jeff, me little and she big, right on my heels or clinging to the walls when she could. Of how she looked that night in Chi-Chi’s with the men ogling her in her hot pink and purple and the sparkly earrings. Smiling, teasing me. Then, with Roland and Annabel Diehl on the balcony outside my door, Patricia whispering and me whispering hard right back. Patricia again, digging in her purse for money to give the bag lady. Her voice on the phone telling me, Well, I’ve gone out with a felon before. And then I remembered, as though I’d never seen it before, the butterfly tattooed on her ankle, spotting it that first time when I met her dancing around on the beach with a bloody foot, and forgetting about it till now. Wondering what boyfriend got her drunk enough to do that; smiling, even through my sadness, to think I’d probably have one today too had I been with her. Guessing where else she might have a tiny inked picture. I got back up and put on some Sinead O’Connor, let her lull me into doze.

  When the phone rang, Ray’s Mustang was still on my lap. Like magic, it could ring and it wasn’t hooked up to anything. I came to my senses and crossed the room to the side table where I kept the phone. There was no voice at first, just background noise. Party noise. Then: “Smokey.” It took a second for me to understand it was Patricia.

  Someone else, a man, said: “Judy—a Heineken, two Becks, please.”

  “Where are you?” I said, leaning into the earpiece.

  “It’s hard to talk.” I heard what sounded like a door creaking loudly, and a male voice saying, Give it a rest, buddy, will ya?, and another voice saying, Says who?, and then the sound of it moving away, so that I could say, “Yes? Yes? I can hear you okay, Patricia.”

  “I have to ask you . . .” she said. Her voice was muted, quiet, as if she were cupping the mouthpiece with her hand. With her little-girl voice it really wasn’t working that well, trying to be heard and yet not heard. I strained to hear. The voices behind her were growing louder and all mixed up. I heard laughter, and then: “Jubey, make that a schooner tap, okay?” Another voice saying, “Piss in a glass, Jubey, he’ll drink anything,” and more laughter, and Patricia trying to say something.

  “It’s . . . it’s Phillip,” she said. “Roland’s brother?”

  “Yes, yes, I know, Patricia.”

  She paused another moment. “He’s done something.”

  “What? What’s wrong?”

  “I can’t talk—”

  “Where are you?”

  “Samantha, it’s a girl. He brought her, and—”

  “The one I saw you with?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Patricia?” I couldn’t hear anything extraordinary now, but I knew she still had to be on the line. “Annabel, Patricia? Is she the one? What’s wrong?”

  I barely heard her say no.

  “Is someone there? Is that why you can’t talk?”

  “No. That’s not it. I just don’t have very long.”

  “Tell me where you are.”

  “You can’t come,” she said forcefully but still in a whisper. “I just want to tell you, there was this girl. Roland didn’t like her. They—”

  I didn’t want to interrupt, but she kept pausing, and I was afraid for her. “Listen to me. I have to know if you’re all right. Tell me.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “You don’t sound all right.”

  “I am. Listen, I’ll call you later. You’re going to be home?”

  “Yes.” I was confused. Now she didn’t seem strained.

  “I’ll call you soon. Not tonight. Later.”

  “Patricia, are you afraid of something? Tell me where you are.” Silence on the other end. “Are you saying someone has been hurt?”

  “I can’t,” she said. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  And that was it. Click
.

  At first I panicked. I thought, Holy shit. What the heck is going on? What’d she mean, she’d call me soon? Five minutes? Thirty? I waited from eleven till midnight, thinking she might phone anyway, and then tried calling Raymond, though I didn’t think he worked second shift Saturday nights. If I could just repeat the conversation with Patricia to someone, maybe it wouldn’t sound so bad. I dialed his unit, and there was nothing. I dialed the watch commander. Correct: Ray was off. Taking a chance on bringing the wrath of Yolanda down—you could make a movie title out of it: The Wrath of Yolanda—I dialed Raymond at home. Before I punched the last number, my finger hovering above the nine, I put the receiver back on the hook. I told myself, “You can’t control everything, Smokey. Like the man said, Give it a rest.

  But, of course, that is not my nature. It’s not always good living alone. There’s no one to bounce your late-night ideas off of. I went into the bedroom and slid into clothes. Be ready, I thought, breathing shallowly, waiting for the phone to ring. But it didn’t, and it didn’t. As they say, if the phone don’t ring, I’ll know it’s you.

  For the next hour, I fidgeted, trying to read, flipping the television on and off, arranging my sock drawer. Finally I went to the kitchen and fixed myself a cup of instant coffee, reached over the oven to that special cupboard, and dolloped a shot of brandy into it. I went back to the living room, curled on the couch as if I were casually calling a friend to chat, and dialed Joe’s number. I could hear my heart in my ears, and on the third ring, just as I was about to hang up, Joe’s voice came on.

  “Let me come over,” I said.

  “Smokey?”

  “How many of these calls do you get a night?”

  Long silence on the other end, and then: “You sure this is what you want to do?”

  “Yes.”

  Another pause. “What if I don’t?”

  I said—no bullshit—“You do.”

  CHAPTER

  25

  The fog had come in, slicking everything, forming strips of bubbles on the newly painted black wrought-iron balcony railing outside my door. The car roofs were coated with silvery wetness, the red pavers around the fountain shining as if hosed down by a movie crew for effect.

  By the time I reached Pacific Coast Highway, I felt stuck in a cotton ball. If it weren’t for the four gauzed green lights at Jamboree, I might’ve kept going and run smack into the Newport channel.

  Not here, but nearly up the whole length of the state, the highway trims the coast so that off your left shoulder if you’re traveling north and your right if you’re traveling south you see the Pacific winking harmlessly, cut away from the blank horizon by the sun’s rays, or at night by the moon’s cool diffusion. Then, sometime in December when you’re not thinking about it, the ocean heaves one long, secret briny exhalation toward shore, where people are out doing their holiday scramble over pitch-black stretches of curving roads, four drinks too many, and mortality stats begin to climb: a head-on here, a flip-over there.

  It was on a night like this two years ago I met Raymond Vega, six miles down the coast near Laguna. The fog was sliding up the cliffs, climbing the bougainvillea stretched onto the peach-colored stucco walls of homes and businesses. It drifted across the highway in a sheet, silent, quick, remorseless. I was on my way to a bookstore when I saw the lights and stopped to see if I could help. Ray had made a Häagen-Dazs run on a slow night, the weather perfectly clear inland at his substation in San Juan. On Pacific Coast Highway, he rolls into a wall of fog and thinks, Here comes trouble. Not a minute later he comes upon a car that rode up the guy wire of a telephone pole, then folded over on itself. The old man and his eighty-year-old bride were headed back to Leisure World after a celebration at the romantic, cliff-perched Ritz-Carlton, where tea alone sets you back six bucks. The son, the only survivor, sitting on the hillside, saying to Raymond, “That man always was stubborn, never let me drive his car, ever,” this fifty-year-old man with his pants wet and vomit down his shirt, hooing, Raymond said, while he told him this. And I, hearing Raymond tell the story while he’s standing by his unit, the ambulance ready to move off, me sizing up the CHP officer with the pretty teeth and the cast-iron heart, thinking, Well, now, this is another guy impressed with himself; until he said it again, how the man was sitting on the ice plant and hooing—long, deep sobs—then how he turned to Raymond and said, “The turkey-ass old fart, why didn’t he let me drive?”

  Passing over the Dover Bridge at the mouth of Newport Bay, I could see the faint runners of lights and the pale blue prow of the make-believe Mississippi paddlewheel boat that serves as a restaurant called the Reuben E. Lee. It looked like a ghost ship, and I would not have been surprised to see a skeleton on the bridge, hollow-eyed and asking, You alone?

  Joe had said, Let me come and get you.

  I said, What’s the address?

  He said, It’s late.

  I said, Goddamn it, Joe, I know it’s late.

  Now I was into the stretch of marine-supply stores and yacht brokers’ establishments where I knew there’d be parking-lot lights to aid my search for the correct turnoff. I found it, and then Hospital Street, named for Hoag Hospital. Such a name: A Texan could get confused—“You took ’er where?”

  There was a guard gate at the complex. Jesus Christ. This is the edge of Costa Mesa, I thought, not a Lemon Heights place like where Joe and his future ex-wife lived, and here we have a manned gate, with a guard who looked like Ehrlichman, from Nixon’s crew, or an aged Bart Simpson. He checked for my name on the clipboard that lay on the shelf in front of him, the name he probably wrote there just minutes ago, Joe having called ahead. The light outside the shack transformed his hair into white wheat as he peered into my backseat to see if I had a burglar hidden there. Then he stepped inside the shack, and I waited for the wooden gate arm to raise, but it didn’t. I looked back. Only then did he say, his hand moving toward the button inside, and a knowing look on his face, “Okay, go on in,” a grin on one side of his face only, un-hnn, and him checking his watch.

  Reflective numbers that stuck up out of the shrubs fronting each section, guided me, eventually, to Joe’s unit. Two hundred, like 210: Roland’s, only not Roland’s. A tightness formed in my stomach. I said to myself, Don’t think. This is Joe you’re going to. Joe-baby. Joe.

  I parked facing a hedge and left the ignition on so I could use the car phone. I dialed. It rang once. Joe’s voice came on the line, a low hello.

  “Come down,” I said. “Please.”

  I didn’t want to be coming to him, though I was coming to him. I didn’t want to go stand outside the locked glass doors that I could see in my rearview mirror and talk through an intercom, to be buzzed in like the help.

  The double doors to the apartments opened, and I could see him in my mirror, standing on the step in his blue windbreaker, jeans, and pink shirt. He slid a doorstop beneath the door. I got out of the car and bridged the narrow parking lot, fog running a cold hand down my neck and pasting itself to my thighs through my jeans. I stubbed my toe on the asphalt though there was nothing there.

  Then he was close, and I looked at him a moment, checking the face, the kind cut of the eyes and the chiseled, slight hook to his nose. He wrapped his arms around me, and I put my face in his chest like an apology, and shivered.

  “You’re chilled,” he said.

  The elevator was only a few steps from the entry. As we began the rise, he held me and kissed me till we heard the doors open. His lips were soft, perfect, and I felt I was decoagulating, deliquescing, my knees giving in, my cheeks and the tips of my ears burning, as if I were coming down with a cold.

  “You okay?” he said as we started out down the hallway, perfectly relaxed. Like a husband: I’m coming home after a hard day’s work. He’s there, loving me, waiting for me, just finished building a doodad in the garage he wants to show off; or just finished polishing the Paughco pipes on his killerfine Harley; or reading something from Law Enforcement News he thinks
is a crock. Except this is Joe, somebody else’s husband for twenty-five years until three months ago. How did I know who he was, really?

  We entered his apartment, and I saw a liquor decanter and two glasses on a glass table in front of a white leather couch. Soft music was playing and the light was dim, so that I thought, Why, that bugger, he’s done this before. But, then, why wouldn’t he? Big boy, been around. Single. Attractive white male seeks fun & companionship by surf and sand. Well-off, nonsmoker, mature. Likes . . .

  He took my jacket, opening a door to a closet behind me, hung mine up, then removed his own. I stood looking around, aware of myself, how I looked, knowing I was okay in my blue-gray silk blouse, my real diamond earrings, but interested too in the place where Joe would live. The carpet, ivory; the walls, white, with one giant pink and peach paper-molded art piece in a white frame above the couch, of seashells, I think. Set around on the side tables were pearlescent glass balls and other such things. Near the white stone fireplace, dried silver dollar eucalyptus spewed out of a tall vase shaped like a woman with long flowing hair. Nice, but the whole thing colder, more nonrevealing, than I would’ve expected. Joe’d be cozy wools and musky leathers, like gentlemen economists from New England, though no clutter, not Joe: Every . . . thing . . . in . . . its . . . place.

  I felt his hands on my shoulders behind me. He moved close, so I could feel the whole length of him, and then he was sliding his hands down my arms. Kissing my neck, the side of my face, then turning me around, moving me back toward the wall. I started to kiss him back.