A World the Color of Salt

by Noreen Ayres

  Herb, his gaze fixed somewhere in the middle of the floor, said, “The beat goes on.”

  We stood there with our Christmas-party plates piled with food, the bright poinsettia patterns spearing through beans and guacamole, lemon squares and brownies.

  I said my Merry Christmases to everyone, hugged the men as well as the women—bless ’em, bless ’em all—and decided to leave my car in the lot and walk over to meet Gary.

  Waiting for the traffic light, I thought about what I’d be doing for Christmas Day, tomorrow. I didn’t expect to spend Christmas with Joe. But when he told me last night he was sort of obligated to see Jennifer and their son, David, home from college, on Christmas, I already felt lonely. He said if he got away early, he could come by later. Just like dating a married man. Wow, I didn’t come anywhere close to waiting a year and a half for Joe to clear the doorsill. Patricia asked me one time how you know when you’re in love. I said it was when you say his name over and over again and you’re not even moving your lips.

  CHAPTER

  28

  It was warm outside, maybe seventy-two, but cold in the café. Gary got there two minutes after me and found me sitting on my hands. He sat across from me in a booth, facing the light, the sun bouncing off the white metal tables outside, constricting his pupils to almost nothing. Our surroundings of used brick, bleached oak, and shiny brass rails were a soothing contrast to the beige bleakness of the lab, but it was chilly. “This could be a satellite to the morgue,” I said.

  “Marvellen’s always cold,” he said. “I tell her on trips if she’d just put her feet on top of the bologna we wouldn’t need the ice pack.”

  I laughed because he said it with such roundness to his eyes.

  I said, “At work I get coffee just to warm my hands—snake blood I guess.” A waiter came up with menus. “Could I have some hot tea, please?” emphasizing the t because in California when people hear tea they always think cold, don’t ask me why.

  Gary said, “I’m going to have the meat loaf. You?” His stubby finger mashed the menu as he looked up at me, the walrus mustache glinting golden-orange in the light.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Hey, Gare, you notice I gave you the crow’s nest?”

  “Huh?”

  “The best seat. In Oakland you watch your back.”

  “I watch my back, front, sides, and feet,” he said. The waiter came back with my tea and Gary’s diet soda, and took the rest of our order. Then Gary laid one big arm on the table toward me, grinned, and said, “Phillip Dugdale’s got himself shoveling monkey caca morning to night in the Santa Ana Zoo.”

  “What? Gary. What’d he do?”

  “You know, the Mexes you can kind of understand, they don’t have all the advantages. But these here are white boys. Our pal Phillip had the bad sense to commit a drunk-and-disorderly in the city of Garden Grove, to which my friend Frank Ellis is assigned. Except for the fact he came up in front of Judge Rickenbacker, he’d be doing a sixteen-monther on assault.”

  “What happened? Tell me.”

  “Dugdale tells her this stuff with AA, how he’s been trying real hard to get straight, got a good job washing dishes seven days a week if he wants it, and when he’s not doing that he’s down at the Cultural Arts Center, learning how to work out his frustrations in clay. Doesn’t that just get ya?”

  “Crooks we shall always have with us.”

  “Con men we shall always have with us. That guy . . .” Gary rubbed the back of his neck.

  I was hopeful. “Why do those two bother you so much?”

  “I told you. They’re bad news.”

  “What’d he do to get your friend’s attention?”

  “You’re not eating hardly a thing. You want some of my potatoes here? This is good stuff. How’s the salad? Okay. Frank gets a call from a motel owner. The guy has to take a slug of booze just to calm down. He points out back, and there’s Phillip sitting on the swimming-pool slide, up at the top, yelling all over the place. Frank asks him how long he’s been drinking, and he says, ‘I just wanted to go for a swim. Look, I’ll pee in a bottle for you,’ and starts unzipping. Turns out there was an argument over a broken shower rod and Phillip grabbed up a fistful of motel manager shirt and offered to rip him a new A-hole. Well, Frank gives him the Breathalyzer and he blows a five, poor dumb sonofabitch.”

  “Maybe he’s only violent when he’s drinking,” I said.

  Gary finished the bread with the last bite of meat loaf as he said, “The twink is bad news, any way you cut it. Shoveling zoo doo is exactly where he belongs.”

  Debut House is on Hollywood Boulevard near an old theater heretofore host of the splashy movie premiere; a little beyond is the famous lingerie house, Frederick’s of Hollywood, where in the seventies you could get garter belts and crotchless panties and all manner of sexy stuff now sold right out in the open on the carousels of Robinson’s, amid the flannel pj’s and Ninja Turtle sleepers.

  It was Christmas Day. There’d been no traffic on the freeways going north. My jacket was off, my window half down, and I had a tape of western birdsongs playing. I was up to the mewing sounds of the tiny California gnatcatcher, which nests in coastal scrub but is now practically extinct from housing overdevelopment. Then came the deep chuh-chuh-chuh-chuh of another endangered bird, the cactus wren. A heavily spotted bird with a downward-scooping bill and a white eyebrow, it hides in the underbrush, sort of growling. I was privileged to see one once when I was walking Farmer outside Capistrano, in a wash. I studied it without knowing what it was, made mental notes, then looked it up later in Peterson’s.

  The hillsides were almost totally brown from the drought, but otherwise it was the kind of day people see on TV and give as reason to move to California; a day bright and clear, and I thought how nice it would be to keep going all the way up to Santa Barbara. A beautiful, perfect day for hunting Annie Gwendolyn Dugdale, mother of Phillip and Roland G. Last known address: Debut Halfway House, Hollywood Boulevard, Hollywood. Next to Frederick’s.

  Carolyn Snyder was a pleasant woman about my age, maybe upward, with a trim body and earnest eyes.

  When she talked it was as though you’d brought her a great problem to ponder, her eyes worried and far away.

  She was leaning one hand on the door frame, a blonde spear of hair drifting down the right side of her face. All I asked was, “Do you have an Annie G. Dugdale residing here?”

  Carolyn was responsible for seeing that twelve ladies had enough soap for the washer, sheets for the beds, and access to doctors and counselors. Early on in the conversation I told her who I was and where I worked.

  “Annie’s in trouble, then,” she said.

  “I just wondered was she here today by any chance. Just to talk to her.”

  “They’re like children, you know,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “They’re good for a while, you think you’ve done something; then they leave. Oh, they come back—usually, anyway. Sometimes they’re not even using. They just disappear,” she said, shrugging, looking at me now with a pleasant expression. “And then they show up again. I ask them where they’ve been and all they do is get quiet and smoke. Or yell. Sometimes they yell. They’ll say—oh, they’ll say I don’t have a right to treat them like kids, stuff like that.”

  I nodded, knew it was necessary for her to tell me about this life. I glanced at the window of the store next door, a plaster-of-Paris store where you buy chunky objects bare and paint them ugly colors. Rust rabbits with turquoise ribbons were clustered in a corner, their beady, hard eyes looking our way, and in front of them, a green chipmunk with a tiny Christmas wreath on its tail looked poised to run.

  I said, “So Annie isn’t here today?”

  “I’m afraid she vanished last Friday. I don’t think she liked having to keep house,” she said, and smiled for the first time. “She had kitchen duty for over a month, but that’s because one of the girls had bad dermatitis and couldn’t get her hands in water or rubber gloves, a
nd the other women had had their turn. She managed to wangle out of it the month before, so I stuck her on it. That seemed fair to me, doesn’t it to you?”

  No argument from me. “What does she look like, would you say,” I asked.

  “Oh, kind of heavy. Her hair won’t do much anymore, she keeps dyeing it. She’s . . . let’s see if I can remember . . . about fifty-five. Yes. She’s fifty-five August sixth. You can come in, see my records, if you like.”

  She nodded over her shoulder, and in the hallway behind her, I saw a woman—a dim silhouette, actually—start to cross the hallway, then stop and look our way, two holes where the eyes would be, a short line of nose, a scallop of chin. She moved on as I stepped in, and then a burst of laughter came from the room she entered, and I heard other women’s voices, and caught the heavy scent of what was probably a Christmas bottle of perfume.

  Carolyn led me into a waiting room, a sun room, my mother used to call it when we lived in a house in Northern California for a short while. But that was where you’d face an acre of mountain laurel and sage, not a grimy, too-long-between-rains Hollywood, U.S.A., street.

  I sat on a brown couch and studied the philodendron tendrils that dangled from a green plastic pot over the window, the roots spidering out of the holes in the bottom. Under my feet was a faded Indian rug, fringed on the ends. A press-board coffee table sat in front of me.

  What Carolyn brought me was semiuseful. She handed me a folder and said she’d be right back.

  Annie had been there two months this time. Three years before, she’d spent six weeks in Debut. Twice before that she’d been in halfways: one in Oklahoma City in 1972 and one in Reno, 1983. This was all information volunteered, in her own handwriting, on the paperwork. After the printed words, “Substance abuse?” she had written, “Booz and Speedballs.”

  Carolyn came back in with a tray of coffee and cinnamon rolls. “There’s plenty, and I’m glad to have the company,” she said, almost whispering. Then she sat beside me and cranked her head to read the file along with me.

  I said, “Seems she’s had problems quite a while.”

  “She goes on binges.” Carolyn was tearing at her cinnamon roll, eating as she talked. “I think it’s harder for Annie’s type. They can go years without taking a single drink, but when they slip, they slip big,” she said. “Annie said she wasn’t really an addict.” Carolyn raised an eyebrow. “We were working on that.”

  “She wrote down speedballs,” I said.

  “What’s that again, exactly? I have a hard time keeping them straight.” Her face was scrunching up. In another life we could’ve been talking about kids and PTA and husbands who don’t appreciate us.

  “Coke and heroin, cooked. How was Annie with the other women? I mean, how did she get along?”

  “She accused people of taking her stuff two or three times. Say, you wouldn’t like to come back for Christmas later? Haven House, over in Brentwood, invited us over. It should be real nice. Two twenty-five-pound turkeys and I think a ham. You’re welcome.”

  I said, No, thanks, I had to be going. Her face fell, and I thanked her again for her time and graciousness.

  Walking back to my car, I looked up at the tinsel decorations strung across the street, the red and silver strands winking as they rippled, no one but me and a raptor-looking man behind the steering wheel of an older Rolls-Royce, stopped at a light, to appreciate them.

  It wasn’t till I’d passed Wilshire on the 405 that I thought about Phillip Dugdale again, how he had sat with his slicked-back hair in the interview room, glaring at the detective, not giving him any more than he wanted to.

  I popped in the bird tape again. I kept having to rewind it and relisten, losing track of which song was which, thinking about the faceless man announcing the burrs and croaks and trills in his monotone voice. Who was it who’d go wading in a marsh, or pushing back tick-ridden branches, microphone in hand, to record this gab of nature for posterity?

  Gary had mentioned that Phillip lived in Carson. Carson was next to Long Beach and sort of next to San Pedro, where Roland worked. I pulled off the freeway at Wilmington near Spire’s, “The Pinnacle of Eating.” There were phone booths outside, but I went in to call Patricia’s number again, it being cheaper than from my car phone, and I could get another cup of coffee. I dialed; no luck.

  I borrowed the phone book and went to the counter to sit, opening it to “Taverns.” Asked the waitress for coffee and three dollars’ worth of change. Said to myself, Here goes nothin’.

  CHAPTER

  29

  The Goodyear airship floated in the distance ahead like a whale quietly intent on warm waters. A man in the restaurant told me I could take Wilmington Boulevard south to Sepulveda, and Sepulveda east to Long Beach if I didn’t want to get back on the freeway. I’d spent thirty minutes dialing the numbers of drinking establishments in the Carson/Long Beach/Wilmington area, found several open, and asked if anyone who worked there was named Judy or Jubey. I didn’t complete the list, though, because my coins kept not wanting to stick in the machine, rolling on through to the coin-return slot so that I had to try three or four times to make just one call. “The ones outside are worse,” the waitress told me as she rushed past to take a bathroom break. So I decided to travel.

  I was now in an industrial area, surrounded by mute and towering constructs I knew had to have been designed by human beings, built by them, presumably tended by them, yet inhabited by none. Rusted trucks were parked in gravel lots, but nothing moved. Here I could go see Dark Man, mutilated and on the run within the channels and walkways of these abandoned hulks, see him slipping under the colored pipework: blue where the boiler steam travels, orange where the effluent flows, white where encapsulated electrical cables join with yet other conduit to form geometrical mazes, and say, Hey, Bud, how about a game of poker and a beer? We could sit there in the shadows together, one across from the other; and he would like that because I would show respect, and would not ask to see his face.

  I drove along Wilmington like the man said, then onto Sepulveda Boulevard, where my car rattled over asphalt ribbed from the weight of hundreds of tanker trucks, and saw one coming at me jiggling too, despite its weight, and wondered if it would stop at the stop sign like I had. The driver had a beard, and I could see his jaw moving and his white teeth as he chewed gum, but I could not see his eyes for a dark baseball hat he had pulled down low on his forehead. I rolled down my window and moved through the intersection as he made a right turn, and heard boo-boo-boo-BOOM, the sound of classical music thundering from the cab.

  There was a long stretch of chain-link fence corralling tank farms, metal windbreaker slats woven in the link, and on top, three-stranded barbed wire to keep out anyone who decided, for whatever reason, a tank farm is a good place to be. The barbed wire was supposed to angle out, toward the street, but on one side of the road the wire angled in toward the yard, maybe to contain the workers, but at any rate I hoped the supervisor on that one didn’t get a raise.

  Sepulveda became Willow when I wasn’t looking, and I was in civilization again. I passed a cemetery right there in town, with real headstones, upright, not flat for mowers. I passed a twenty-one-minute Laundromat, a war-games shop, and then a joint with a woman’s nude silhouette in red and the words HARDBODIES—GIRLS, POOL, FOOD, BEER, but today it Was closed.

  Graffiti coated the WELCOME TO LONG BEACH sign. Good, I thought—I’m in the right territory. I knew about the troubles Long Beach was having, with a small number of police and a massive and rapid increase in crime. This year in Orange County we had 170-odd homicides, the most in our history, and I could not even imagine the chore L.A. County cops faced, some 700 or so homicides to investigate. To top it off, the coroner’s office was receiving young Cambodian men of the Hmong tribe, dead of mysterious causes. They’d go to bed at night, wake up dead in the morning; and trying to trace their medical backgrounds was impossible because the Hmong have no written language.

  While I
waited at a signal, two men, one black and one Mexican, rolled a white dented VW up an incline to my left to reach the intersection. Ahead I could see a few people drifting in and out of doorways, and as I slowed at one corner, an older boppin’ black man, silver watch chain draped across his vest, black beret shading half his face, and an earphone wire running into his shirt pocket, stood waiting to cross at the light. His beard was swept neatly with gray, and as our gazes met, he nodded deeply. I nodded back, some acknowledgment passing between us, he and I alone in our irrevocably separate worlds.

  I turned onto Tenth, not wanting to get too close to the Queen Mary and Howard Hughes’s Spruce Goose, places where Roland and Phillip Dugdale would surely never be, and I got lucky. In my rearview mirror I saw a woman with dark hair walking down the sidewalk, wearing a pink blouse, black shorts that pinched her plump legs, a black cowboy hat, and high heels. There must be a bar around here somewhere. I circled and parked in front of a closed restaurant with Oriental writing on it, looked around, got out, locked my door.

  The bar was there all right, in the direction the woman had come from. There was no name above the open door, a door that looked like my father’s padded and buttoned office chair, but locals wouldn’t need a name; it would be called Freddie’s or The Club, or some such, and that’s all you’d need to know.