A World the Color of Salt

by Noreen Ayres

  “He hurt his leg,” the bartender said. I looked at him curiously, wondering how many quarters I’d have to put in his mouth to keep him talking, when he added, “He’s my brother-in-law. He usually lives with us.”

  I thanked him for the info, intending to leave, when he came out from around the bar and walked with me toward the door. He said, “You’re not a friend of Kirsten’s, are ya? From California, you a friend of hers?”

  “No, I’m afraid not,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said, nodding.

  “Is that his daughter?”

  He nodded again. His jaw went tight, and then he turned and walked away toward the table with the tan shirts at it. The Indian-looking man with the baby met my eyes, then quickly looked away as I opened the door to go out.

  At a corner of the parking lot, conspicuous because there weren’t that many other cars around, was the Taurus. “Goddamn,” I said to myself, furious that someone was pinching my behind, all the way up from Orange County. “You fucker.” Keys in my hand and rage filling my throat, I made a beeline across the lot, walking fast, and sure I was going to yank the twit right out of the driver’s window by the hair. When he saw me headed for him, his elbow pulled in and he sank back as if he expected a blow, and the mirror of his sunglasses wavered and flashed.

  “Get out of the car!” I yelled. He looked bewildered, so I said it again: “Get out of the car. I want to talk to you.”

  The door opened. I knew he could have a gun. But something about him told me that that was not likely.

  He stepped out, and a waxed-paper wrapper fell to the ground near his black shoes. His socks were white, the pants gray, the knit shirt a deep rose. He had a nervous smile on his face, and he stuttered, “I . . . I . . .”

  “Who are you? Tell me right now.”

  He shut the door and let his hands fall.

  I said, “Take off your glasses.”

  “Listen, I’m—”

  “Do what I tell you, you creep, or you’re going to be kissing concrete.”

  He let a puff of air out his nose and turned his head—the start of a laugh—and I knew it was ridiculous too: I wasn’t going to flatten the guy, wasn’t sure I even knew how anymore. I took a step forward anyway, and said in a more normal tone, “Who are you?”

  The man’s pointed chin raised while he removed his glasses, and I saw a white scar on the red neck near the Adam’s apple, like maybe a thumbnail had dug in there once. He’d composed himself by then. “My name is Lionel Crowell, and I’m a licensed private investigator.”

  “Shit you are.”

  He pulled his wallet out and opened it. I took it. It was a California license.

  “What do you want from me?”

  “A client is seeking information.”

  “Now, that’s big news. What information? Where do you get off following me? Why not just come up and talk to me?”

  He shrugged and wagged his head. “Is now a bad time?”

  Too much. I had to laugh. Once I let down, it occurred to me: “Did Rowena Dwyer contact you?”

  “I don’t ordinarily give out my clients’ names.”

  “You’re not supposed to be following me, you dumb shit,” I said, smiling and shaking my head. He wasn’t even supposed to be wasting gas trailing someone out of state, and I figured he must be a few points low on the scale, and said, “What the hell, buy me a drink.”

  I eventually dumped Lionel Crowell, pointed him home the way you would a blindfolded partygoer holding the tail of the donkey, and vowed I’d call Rowena Dwyer as soon as I could and tell her not to pick her PIs out of the phone book. He’d meant no harm, but he was a history teacher whose wife stepped out on him, he said, and so he decided to try this profession. On the way out of the casino we went to, he dropped three quarters and won four-hundred, so what do I know?

  CHAPTER

  34

  Cipriano was in the bathroom when I came in. The nameplate on the door outside told me this was the right room: CIPRIANO RYCKEN and STEVEN NEFF. Steven Neff was the old man dressed in brown in the wheelchair next to the perfectly made bed with the woven bedspread, white horses rearing on a pale blue background. Parallel to that bed was another, with a green bedspread, an empty wheelchair beside it. On the high table next to the bed three decks of Diamond playing cards were stacked atop some magazines.

  “Excuse me,” I said to the man. He was looking across the room, out the sliding-glass doors that led to a veranda. A badly pilled brown throw lay across his lap. A moment later, his eyes locked on my face. I smiled and said, “I’m looking for Cipriano Rycken.”

  Then I saw that the old man had a small purple stuffed dog sitting in the crook of his arm. Mr. Neff’s blank blue eyes and the dog’s stony black ones held on me, no answer forthcoming. I heard water running in the bathroom. As though a spell had been broken, Mr. Neff’s expression changed, and I tried again: “Is that your dog?”

  “Yes,” he whispered slowly.

  “He’s a great-looking dog.”

  The man’s head dropped to look at it. “Yes,” he said again.

  “I’m going to wait here, all right? For your roommate.” I smiled as pleasantly as I could and got out of the way of a yellow-skinned black woman who came in to empty a waste-basket. As she straightened up, one hand at the small of her back, she looked outside where pink roses from the veranda stretched close to the glass and shone like cups on stems. “Gosh, aren’t those beautiful?” she said. “Looks like we’re finally going to get rain. That’ll be nice, won’t it?” The basket in her hand, she turned to the patient and said, “How you doin’ today, Mr. Neff? You doin’ all right?” and the old man looked away, toward the roses, with a forlorn and lonely or maybe just bewildered expression on his face, as if he were trying to remember the word for those flowers.

  She left, and I went to the bathroom door and said, “Cipriano?”

  I heard a muted, “Yeah?”

  “Come on out here, or I’m coming in.”

  In my mind, Cipriano was still forty-five-ish, slender, with a mass of black hair on his head and a bunch more sticking up out of his shirt in the back. He had most of the elements for being handsome, but he wasn’t quite, though now I couldn’t remember why, and despite that lack there was about him a look of worldliness that I had found compelling. I’d kid with him, making suggestive remarks, and he’d do the same with me, though I was certain he’d never violate the relationship with his wife, nor did I want him to. Such self-sacrifice on my part was not so noble as it may sound, nor was it that I understood what marriage meant. I just didn’t want to disturb or disrupt a man who had been good to me. There were days I thought all he’d have to do would be to crook a finger. That was when my body was separate from me, with a will of its own, the head minding its own business, the body saying, Kiss me, you fool. I loved men and I loved what they owned; not material things, but their own clunky, solid, purposeful, and peculiar energy. My desires were not so different from what most men and women of vigor want: a deep drink of the opposite sex, not in one flavor only. I wanted every man at least once, and a few more than once, and I didn’t much care what they looked like as long as they weren’t mean. Their mystery is what I wanted: all they knew that I didn’t. Their special awareness of the world, their privilege, their special language. By rubbing against hairy skin long enough, hard enough, I figured one day I’d ease into the pores, osmosis perfected, ease out again, both of us the wiser; then go on quest to find one I could swallow, whole.

  Inside the bathroom there was utter silence for a long while. I said, “You can hide but you can’t run. On the count of five, Cipriano.”

  “Who is that?” His voice boomed out at me.

  “It’s either a bounty hunter or Marlene Dietrich. You have to come out to see.”

  Silence.

  “No—make that Rita Hayworth. Rita Hayworth.” I remembered now, she was his favorite.

  The water trickled again and the pipes whined off. “I kn
ow that voice somewhere.” There was the rattle of the door handle long before the man emerged. I was standing with my arms crossed and one ankle laced over the other, leaning against the wall. Would he recognize me? My hair was short, it wasn’t red, it’d been fifteen years and I was probably a long history away down a row of babes Cipriano had hired and fired, pampered and protected. If I could have planned for this moment, I would have dressed up, come feminized, wearing at least a dress; maybe brought a plant, or, better yet, a flask and a copy of Playboy.

  He came out. Older, God, and smaller, wearing gray slacks and a gray plaid shirt, brown slippers on his feet. Wearing glasses. His forehead was spotted both brown and purple.

  He looked at me steadily as I said, “Hey, big fella, I can use a little help.”

  “Shit-bones,” he said. “What in hell are you doing here, Smokey?” And then he shuffled over and grabbed me in a big hug, and I felt how bony he was and how bent for a man who used to be a full head taller than I. He patted my back as if he were not too sure this was at all okay, swatting with the palms only. Then we pulled away, and as we walked to his side of the room I said, “Shit-bones yourself, Cipriano. What in the world are you doing here? You don’t belong here.”

  As he sat on the edge of his bed, he motioned for me to take the chair. “Nothing wrong with me a little privacy wouldn’t cure. I don’t mean you.” He told me how he had phlebitis and fractures of the right metatarsal all at once, the foot injury from a hefty woman treading on him at a Veterans of Foreign Wars dance. He told me how he didn’t like his sister but he liked her cooking; so he’d come here to the rest home once in a while for respite, manufacturing some ill or another, and then, when he couldn’t take that any longer, he’d go back home to his sister’s.

  “But why don’t you live alone, then?” I wanted to ask about his wife and daughter. In some places, and not just New England, you wait for people to tell you about the deeply personal things. You ask around the subject.

  “Aaah,” he said, with a wave of his hand. “That’s no good. Hear your own voice bouncin’ back at you from the walls. No, that’s not for me.” A look came to his eyes. “Now that you’re here, I’ll come live with you.”

  A voice from behind us said, “His name is . . .”

  I looked around. Mr. Neff was going to tell me his stuffed dog’s name. His long spatula fingers rested on the dog’s head. As soon as my shoulders shifted around, and Cip turned his attention upon him, Mr. Neff forgot, and the bewildered look reclaimed his face. I said, “What is it? Your dog’s name? He sure is pretty.” But Mr. Neff was far, far away. His eyes followed my face as I stepped over to him and patted the dog’s purple head, saying, “Yes. You sure do have a mighty nice dog there,” and then I returned to my chair.

  “There’s only so much you can take of that, too,” Cipriano said.

  Cip could walk, but he said he’d better take the wheelchair. I wheeled him down to the community room, where the big TV was playing in the corner, five wheelchairs in a row in front of it, all occupied by women. At the long folding tables other men and women sat plucking at the blankets in their laps. Some of them rested their heads forward on the table, asleep, mouths open. Others were backed up along the wall by the windows, heads lolled back, mouths wide. I said, “Cipriano. This can’t be good for you here.”

  “It’s okay. I pinch the nurses.”

  “What’re you doing New Year’s? You want to go gaming?”

  “If you’re in town, we’ll do it,” he said. Then he pulled me down by my jacket sleeve and whispered in my ear: “Can you cop me some nookie with a cute little blonde?”

  “Cipriano Rycken,” I said. “I don’t remember you talking like that before.”

  A satisfied smile crossed his face.

  Eventually we got around to my story—what brought me to Vegas: the strange postcard with the waving cactus, my missing friend, my friend’s current companion. When I said I thought the guy was a serious threat to society, Cipriano’s glance went elsewhere and he did something inside his cheek with his tongue. “I guess I’d better tell you what I’ve been up to since I left you, Cip.”

  We’d gone over near the windows, and now I sat facing him. It felt both strange and natural for us to be here like this. This would be the way it was if I had a grandfather. We’d sit in the window light and he’d ask me how I was doing in school. He’d tell me how it was in the old days. But this was Cipriano, and he had a wife and child I didn’t know, and ran a club of dancers, or did.

  “You cut your hair,” he said.

  “Yes, yes, I did. It showers easy.”

  He looked at me a while longer, then said: “You got kids?”

  “No.”

  “You ain’t gay, are you?”

  “No, Cipriano.”

  “I only ask because of the stuff going around.”

  I thought for a few seconds before I said it: “You ever hear of DES babies, Cip?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Diethylstilbestrol. My mother took it so she wouldn’t miscarry me. It gives some people cancer. Not me, but other things. So we jerked the plumbing.”

  He thought about this for a while, then said, “You in show biz?” He wanted to make me feel beautiful.

  “Well, let me think about that.”

  There it was: the half-smile, the crink that always made me think he knew more than he was telling or than I could understand. And then the whole smile opened up, and I noticed for the first time the teeth that were too white, and wondered if they’d always been that way. “Lemme guess,” he said. “You got religion.”

  “Of a sort,” I said.

  “Like I got three sets of the family jewels.” His head cocked at me like a wise rooster.

  “Let’s say I have a kind of work that lets me feel I do some good once in a while. The county pays me.”

  “For what?”

  “For figuring out things. Putting puzzle pieces together. Actually, I work for the sheriff-coroner’s.”

  I could tell Cip was not sure how to answer, or if I was kidding. First I told him what I’d done after I left his employ, from grocery checker to cop. While we talked, nurses hustled to and fro through the great room, their voices loud, their laughter hearty enough to assure you life goes on. They’d stop and speak to a patient, or pick up a toy off the floor to place it back on the lap that lost it, with a pleasant word, and it crossed my mind that this is not at all what I expected in this place.

  My old boss remained quiet as I explained what a forensic specialist was. “A lot of it’s just paperwork. Peering into microscopes, typing blood, that sort of thing,” I said. I don’t know why I didn’t want Cipriano to hear how direct the work can be. Nor did I tell him how, after a few months on the job in Oakland, I had to go to a police therapist for six weeks to try to find a way to stop re-creating the last few moments of a victim’s life: If he’d left one minute before. . . . If she only said (blank) instead of (blank). . . . If they hadn’t used lighter fluid. . . .

  Cipriano said, “You see dead bodies?”

  “Sometimes.”

  He thought about this awhile and then backstepped to the police work. “I can’t figure you a cop.”

  “Why not?”

  The cheek flowered out again before he spoke. And when his cheek collapsed, the flesh around his mouth settled down like ears on a beagle, and his neck became a long fin. “A woman cop,” he said.

  I said, “There’s lots of them now.”

  “I never liked cops much myself,” he said, looking out the window. We spoke then in that measured way people do when they’re trying to figure each other out, or the way married people do when they’re having a serious discussion and they’re trying not to trip the trigger.

  “I didn’t know that, Cip. I guess I should’ve.”

  His head gave a slow nod. He said, “You couldn’t stick with it, huh?”

  “Couldn’t stick with it.”

  He lurched forward to start the
wheel of his chair, headed for a table about ten feet away, where a water dispenser stood. He glugged a Styrofoam cupful, then raised it in a gesture to offer me some.

  “You always told us no drinking on the job.”

  He smiled. “So this is a job? I ain’t dead yet.”

  I looked at him, saying in the shake of my head, Of course not, adding, “So you never heard of that motel? The Beaver Tail.”

  “You believe women ought to go to war?”

  “Cip, are you going to answer my question or not?”

  “Yeah, I heard of it.” He told me then. He knew the owner. Ralph Polk. The motel burned down a few years ago. “He’s in Overton now. He was making flies, you know, for fishermen. People bought his flies, they went away home with fish in their shoes. He had one I bought from him he called Miss Piggy would call every crappie in the lake to dinner. Then for some reason he gets this harebrained idea he’s going to find oil the other side of the lake. Wants me to go in with him on a rig, bring it up from somewhere in Texas. I told him not no but hell no. He says, ‘You don’t know luck when it lays down and begs.’ ‘Bring me that luck shined up with oil and I’ll lick it clean down to the bone,’ I says. ‘Till then, don’t bother me.’”

  I waited for the smile, but his face was washed of humor. “Cipriano?”

  He was sitting with the chair swung outward now, toward the door that led to the front desk, where a delivery person was causing a commotion with whatever package she brought. Across the way, in the doorway that led to another hall, Mr. Neff was attempting to enter the great room, but his chair was lodged against a woman’s who was dressed in a bright-red sweat suit, trying to enter too. She kept saying, over the noise of the TV, “Just hold on there. Just hold on.” I popped out of my chair to help, when Cipriano called me back: “They’ll get it,” he said. “We’re always having traffic jams.” And they did.