A World the Color of Salt

by Noreen Ayres

  Frazier was good to me, bringing me to her apartment several times, giving me clothes. We took her little boy to the donkey rides. He cried. I gave him money to play a kid’s kind of roulette. Then he was happy. Frazier also lectured me, saying this was okay for a while, what we were doing, but I had to go to college. You listen to me now, she’d say, and you won’t be sorry.

  The last time I saw Frazier Baldwin, she was waving to me as she went out the door the second day of my new act. She had helped me with that too, watching the first night to tell me what I should be doing next, and when. She gave me her kid’s toy machine gun to use, the kid with the perpetual sour look on his face. She was on her way with him to Houston, to join a dance troupe there. “The hat stays down,” she said. I said yes. She said, “Don’t forget what else I told you, either. You save your money. You go to college.” I never promised her I would.

  I changed my name to Smokey Shannon, then shortened it to Smokey, period. Cip put up an eight-by-ten photo of me, in the window above the geraniums. Time does funny things to you. I think most people are basically the same all their lives, the same person. But I’m so many me’s, I’m going to have to start a color-coded file. Third up each evening, my act went like this:

  There’d be a flat, white movie screen set in the middle of the stage between partially drawn drapes. I’d be in silhouette behind it, in a trench coat and fedora, my hair tucked up underneath and a cigarette hanging out of my mouth. Cipriano’s nephew, a boy of fifteen named Buddy, would throw smoke down. Then he’d pull the screen up and draw the drapes back, all this while the intro to Santana’s “Evil Ways” played on the stereo behind us.

  I’d step out, head down, fedora brim resting on the bridge of my nose, hands clamped on the stock of the gun between my legs. The gun served as a pivot as I danced and played with it in ways not too hard to imagine, until Buddy would move in, like a version of Rudolph Valentino, wearing Frazier’s black hat and braided vest, and receive the gun from me, and he’d then rush backstage and cut the music to “The Game of Love,” where we would learn just what the purpose of a man was, and the purpose of a woman. Off would come the trench coat.

  The bra was black, the garter belt too. Bra came off, gloves stayed on, anchored by rhinestone bracelets. I wore a gray leather skirt I bought in Mexico one bad weekend with another dancer and her boyfriend, and over that I draped a belt of silver bullets. A few more beats, and then it was time to “drop trou”—off with the skirt. It slid off over gray high heels I sequined myself. Down to the basics then: sequined G-string, nothing on top but hat and gloves. You can do all sorts of things removing gloves.

  “The hat stays on. The hat stays down. Do it this way,” Frazier had said. I got good with the hat; it kept the stage light out of my eyes. Five years later Randy Newman came out with “You Can Leave Your Hat On,” and I grinned when I heard it, the guy in the song telling the girl to get up on the chair, do her dance, but she could leave her hat on. When that song came out, I thought about going back to Randy’s, see if I still had the touch, but I was checking groceries in Napa then, and quite happy to be doing it.

  Then Buddy would cut to “Poke Salad Annie.” I needed something I could let my hair down—literally—to. The grunt. That’s where. The whole song’s a humid, Southern, sexy sound; it was right for it. I’d turn my back to the audience, pause, and then lift off the fedora. The hair would fall to my waist, and would get some noise from the audience.

  Time for fun then. This is the part I liked best. All disguises gone now, I could be myself; look out at them and smile, come close, like the girl next door, and celebrate. Leave ’em happy, not just horny. I could see their faces, usually young—not like people think: old men with hats in their laps, doing things under there with one hand. These guys, their faces would be tan and their foreheads white—air force tan. They’d be smiling, their eyes would be shining in the light. They were out for fun. Only once in a while would there be one who was sad or angry-looking. He’d be sitting out of the light, back farther, his hand raising with his drink more often than the others. I remember one very handsome man, not an air force type, who chilled me—it was the only time I was afraid the whole time I worked there. He had a full head of long, curly, blond hair. His shoulders were massive. He always wore a white T-shirt under a leather jacket, summer or winter; maybe he was subject to colds. Every Wednesday night he came in, when it was slow, and sometimes he’d be alone, but usually he’d be with a buddy. They’d sit at a rear table and play cards as if this weren’t a strip joint, as if they were in the park in the sunshine at a picnic table or at a dining-room table, and only when Frazier would come on, and later when I would, did he swivel his head over to look. Even then, I knew it was an act, that aloofness, but I couldn’t figure out why. I took my break once at the same time this guy was leaving, stepping out back for some air. He left on a Harley, turning his square jaw to me for one brief moment as he rotated the handgrip to rev up, his jacket shining under the light like it was wet. Then he said, in a very deep voice, “See you later, sweetheart.” He came in two more times, and then he was gone. Cip told me he was a family man.

  The last number in the act was a song I loved the very first time I heard it. Later, after Bill died, it would bring tears to my eyes whenever I heard it, and I usually turned the radio off. It was “I Can Help” by Billy Swan. I can still sing it, know every word—except in my act I changed the male words to female.

  At the end of the record there were whistling and whoops in the background. My little buddy Buddy would hike the sound up at that point, the kid into it, sending out a whistle or two himself so the audience would pick it up—and they would.

  I liked that.

  CHAPTER

  33

  As Yogi Berra once said, “It was déjà vu all over again.” Along Lake Boulevard there were still more telephone poles than trees, and among the bait-and-tackle shops, boat lots, and cement houses with weedy yards were patches of mobile-home parks. I’d come into Vegas the back way, through Henderson, which is just a few miles southeast of town.

  I stopped at a Travelodge and paid for a room. It was only two o’clock but the sky had turned dark, shoving a coolness down, and in a couple of hours more it would be nearly dark and I’d need a place to come back to.

  When I parked at the motel, I made sure I could see my car from inside. Though the Colt was safely nestled between my socks and my turtlenecks, you can punch a trunk lock in nothing flat and have free binocs, suitcases, clothes, cameras, tire tools, down to the carpeting, if you’re greedy. It had been a long time since I’d worried about a gun.

  I paid my money, not nickels this time, to an Iranian whose attention remained fixed on the Lakers game playing on a tiny black-and-white. He stood up to bring me a guest-information card, sliding it to me, asking, “One night?”

  On the way out, I’d barely passed under the open stairway when a guy with a fortyish face came around the corner with a beer in his hand and said, “Hey.” His jacket covered a blue shirt open to his breastbone. I didn’t figure he was talking to me until I was several steps beyond and he said, “You, with the earrings.”

  True, long earrings, kind of Indian style, were dangling from my ears, but I’d forgotten about that. He was propped against an open door, presumably to his room. He said, after taking a sip from the can, “I’ll bet you and me could party down real fine.” In the V of his shirt dangled a silver dollar on a gold chain. Cool. Real cool.

  I headed for the Thrifty’s next door, mad at myself for letting him make me stop, hoping he’d go back into his room and not see which car I was going to get into. Then thinking, This is nuts; wheeling back, glaring him down as I walked to within ten feet of him and said, “Why don’t you just go on in there and mind your own business, Slick?”

  His tongue flipped a gray ball of gum across the cavity of his mouth as he grinned at me. “Sassy lil’ thing, aren’t ya?” he said.

  I kept my voice level, almost qui
et. I said, “When’s the last time you been arrested?”

  He pulled up, held my gaze for one second. Then rotated his shoulders, the rest of him following, right into the room, quietly shutting the door behind him, as if I’d never been there at all. You can put the fear of God in with that question. You don’t even have to be looking in their eyes when you ask it. They know you’re a cop.

  This incident coming so close on the heels of my reminiscence of my time at Cipriano’s, as I crossed to my car I felt ashamed. Sure, I was young and stupid then. I also felt I was equal. We were all there having a good time, doing something a little naughty, nothing to hurt anyone. Our bodies were fun; sex was fun; booze and music and a tin of reefer were fun. Fun. Only much later did I come to feel like prey—as now—and did I come to have respect for consequences. How’d I get to be a cop with that history? I can say only that I told the truth. I didn’t lie. They hired me anyway. There’s no way that that would happen now. Now you have to be cleaner than squeaky.

  As I drove away from the Travelodge, I slipped the earrings off and put them in my purse on the passenger seat. Then I wondered why I did that. What’s wrong with earrings? Guys wear them. At a light, I put them back on. It’s a damned confusing world.

  Two black jets passed overhead, so close their wings seemed fused. My stomach turned for them, guys younger than I mayhaps, guys getting ready to see duty in the Gulf. Do good is what I wished. Don’t fall asleep.

  Traffic slowed to a single lane to squeeze by road crews, and I could watch the jets come around in a flat circle and then take off straight up, the cloud cover broken now and the sun’s last rays painting the sky orange.

  I passed a military-surplus store, the Circle K, the Moose Lodge by Pecos Road, and the Messin’ Around Bar, a concrete box covered in plywood. I drove past the address on Lake Mead Boulevard where the Beaver Tail Inn was supposed to be, passing a storefront window with red lettering on it that announced COMPASSION REVIVAL CHURCH, only the letters spelled chruch and compassion was missing the o.

  When I could deny it no longer, that there was not a motel named Beaver Tail on Comstock and Lake Mead, I pulled over to the side. I was near a trailer park. The manager was up front, a sign in the front window to tell me. Inside, a man was busy scratching his back on the frame of the window, weaving back and forth. I could hear a TV or radio on. A tiny bell tinkled as I opened the wood-and-wire gate across the path, bringing the man to the door. He swung it and its screen out at the same time.

  “Can I help you?” He was tall enough that he had to bend forward, one hand still on the door. He looked like a high school teacher, clean blue jeans, wire-rimmed glasses, tan socks without shoes; the kind of twenty-nine that has the hair halfway up the skull.

  “I’m looking for a motel, actually. A Beaver Tail Inn supposed to be around here someplace?”

  “No, don’t think I ever heard of it.” Then, turning back to someone inside, he said, “Lizabet, you hear of a Beaver Tail Inn?”

  There must have been a negative, because he called back into the trailer a little louder: “Mom?” and then, “Excuse me,” stepping back inside, both doors swinging shut again.

  His shirt went by the window, and then a youngish woman with brown, curly hair stood up from wherever she’d been sitting to look out at me. She was smoking and chewing gum, and she looked ghostly through the window screen. She said, “Used to be one here. Before they put the trailers in. I don’t know its name, though.” A figure passed behind her then, followed by the man, and then the two doors opened and a gray-headed woman in a blue-and-white polyester blouse with wide collars and blue pants not quite matched to the blouse framed herself in front of the man. “There used to be a motel here by that name,” she said, her voice cracking. “I’ve had this place eight years now. It was before that. Who you lookin’ for?”

  “You mean the motel used to be here on this spot?”

  She nodded, clearing phlegm, coughing.

  Her son said, “You’re not looking for a place to stay?”

  “No. I . . . I just found a room key I was going to turn in,” I said. I had no idea why I told that story, and thought it must have sounded inane. Who turns in room keys? If you’re a good citizen, you drop them in a mailbox; if you’re not, you use them.

  The mother was saying something to me after I said thanks anyway, about how there were two, three vacancies at the back of the lot if I was interested; and I was smiling, waving, as I walked back down the dirt path to the gate, saying, Thanks, sorry to bother you; the guy still hollowed in the doorway, both hands up overhead now, and the woman named Lizabet framed sideways in the screened window, her cigarette hand arcing away from her mouth, and her chin lifting.

  On Main you can get married at a chapel and have the flowers, tux, license, rings, and apartment all in one, then step out on the sidewalk and buy yourself furniture at any of about fifty stores, the brass lamps and vinyl chairs sitting outside under a blanket of car exhaust.

  Ahead, I saw a sign for NUDES ON ICE and decided that was quite a concept. “Boy-lesque” was playing at the Congo with Cook E. Jarr and the Krums, but I thought I could pass on that too. If Patricia were with me, though, she’d go for it. Wouldn’t she? Patricia.

  Randy’s was still there, a slot between a bail bondsman and a furniture store whose windows were covered with bubbled-up cellophane sun shield. Across the street, the pawnshop’s roof sign said: LOAN—SELL—BUY—TRADE, and, on the windows beneath, I read that I could get ANTIQUE JEWELRY, GOOD GUNS, CAMERAS, AND MORE.

  There were no geraniums in Randy’s window. What replaced the dark-wood paneling was a yellow painted wall with a big clock made out of a wagon wheel in the center, and a bunch of old Nevada license plates tacked alongside, the significance of which was not apparent.

  I parked in back, thinking for one moment about my gun in the trunk, and then walked around, stepping nearly out into the street to read the name again, to be sure it was the same place. Not ready to go in, I dodged a cab to go across the street to the pawnshop, where I stood for a few minutes, staring at hinged boxes of dusty finger rings yawning open in the window, a banjo standing above a set of drafting tools, and a china doll whose face had checkered from time. The doll wore a green-velvet 1890s dress, spread out over her stiff legs. I kept looking at the doll, not knowing why, and then the picture of the Vietnamese woman in the doughnut shop, the one with the stubby legs and the white/red towel over her head, rushed in, and I pulled up, crossed the street again between two trucks to the doorway at Randy’s, and went in.

  The place was not at all what it was before. There were fluorescent lights in the ceiling, but not all of them were on, as if the owner were conserving. The stage had been carpeted with a yellow-brown paisley pattern and was now an upper-level eating area, where, I assumed, the barbecue sandwiches advertised by signs tacked onto the floor-to-ceiling stanchions were served to parties of more than one woman from L.A. At a table sat a paunchy man and woman both in tan knit shirts, the woman without her false teeth in. She laughed, and it was a deep diaphragm-evoked sound that was strangely soothing. Two tables away, a man with huge deformed knuckles polished to a gleam held a white-bread sandwich in both hands, his left cheek knobbed out with something already in his mouth, and when she laughed, he smiled too.

  My gaze then fell on a man to my right who’d been hunched over so that I barely saw him at first. He was young and thin, with a diamond-shaped face and very long, very black hair he flicked aside as he looked up. Cochise, except his skin was very light, as if he stayed inside all day. His hand was still on the infant carrier in front of him, the baby inside entirely pink, without a shred of hair. I smiled at him, not a thing I often do. His full lips pressed together, and then he looked away.

  I went over to the bar and ordered a coffee. “Put a little whiskey in it too, will you?” I said to the man. He was old, maybe sixty, with a flushed complexion. His close-cut brown beard and mustache seemed painted on.

  �
�You got ID?” he said, and he wasn’t smiling.

  “Thank you,” I said. He still didn’t smile. I brought out my license. He looked at it, then moved away down the bar and came back with the cup and plopped it down, sloshing some liquid over the side. He said, “That’ll be five-fifty.”

  “Five-fifty?” I said. “Isn’t that a little steep?” Something else was going on. “You always this friendly,” I said, “or you just having a bad day?” I’d pulled up my purse and unzipped it, complying.

  He moved directly in front of me and stood with his thumbs tucked in his back pockets. Keeping his voice down, he said, “No business here, lady. This ain’t that kind of place.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me.” And he turned his back to me and walked down the strip of black-rubber flooring behind the bar.

  I drank my coffee in peace and didn’t let it bother me. I needed information. I could wait. When the time came, I did have to walk all the way down to him though, but I didn’t wait for him to finish futzing around. I said, “Do you happen to know where I could find Cipriano Rycken? He used to own this place.”

  It took him half a second to answer, and this time I didn’t see quite so much hostility. “Did you look in the phone book? There’s a phone book over there,” he said, nodding toward the hall.

  “No, sir,” I said, “I didn’t.”

  I started away, and then the man said, “He won’t be in there.” He loosened up as much as he was going to as he told me I’d find Cipriano in Saint Rose, in Henderson.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “A rest home.”

  Rest homes are for old people—real old people. At eighteen I thought of Cip as “older,” but older as in forty, forty-five, not a gray hair in his head; though now as I thought back on it, the hair, yes, had been too black. But Cip was appealing in his own way if you were into father figures, and certainly appealing enough to be married to a pretty woman with perfect skin, I remember that, having met her once or twice. I couldn’t recall her name, though Cip talked about her often enough, seemed to be in love with her, the mother of his baby girl. Her picture had been on his desk, a wheat-scrubbed look to her. She’d been, he said, a dancer—not in a topless place, but onstage in one of the biggies—before they married. He was always talking about the casseroles she made him, patting his nearly empty shirt and saying she was making him fat.