A World the Color of Salt

by Noreen Ayres

  He felt my eyes on him. When he turned, I asked, kindly, I hope, “How old are you, Cipriano?”

  “Seventy-two.”

  “You mean you were an old geezer when I met you way back when?”

  “That I was.”

  “You coulda fooled me.” I leaned over, gave him a kiss on a brown spot the size of a thumbprint, and told him I’d try to see him on the way back through, probably tomorrow. I asked him just how I might find Ralph Polk in Overton.

  “It’s not that big a town,” he said. “Ask in the hardware.” As I was leaving, he said, “What else were you going to ask me? Before.”

  He was sharp. He may not have been exactly the man I remembered, but he was a man with eyes and maybe more heart than I wanted to give him credit for.

  “I don’t know,” I said, then looked around the room of rag dolls and said, “Yes, I do.” I walked back and stood before him, but not so close he had to look up, the way I don’t like to look up to people who are too tall. I asked him this, and the question was almost as much a surprise to me as it was to him: “What is it makes you happy in life, Cipriano?”

  “Me?” He’d wheeled himself forward, and I tagged along. Halfway through the wide door near the nurses’ station where several women in white uniforms had collected to witness the opening of the package, he stopped to give a proper response. “A good shot of JB whiskey,” he said, “and Ethel M chocolate, preferably at the same time.” He looked up at me as if that were the God’s truth, and then said, “And now I’m gonna see which of these fine ladies is going to give me some.” And then he winked and said, “Forget that other I told you.”

  “That other?”

  “Yah. Nothin’ but trouble, those.” To be sure I got it, he added, “Women.”

  I gave him a thumbs-up with that, and once again started to leave. I saw his reflection in the double-wide doors. He’d come to say something more. “Smokey? You know what else I got?”

  “What else?”

  “That goddamned Yuppie disease. Chronic fatigue syndrome. You ever hear of that?” He wheeled up closer to me. “Listen, I still had all my hair until six months ago. Now it’s comin’ out every which way. Everything hurts. I get fevers, and I don’t sleep well at night.”

  “That’s awful, Cip.”

  “Those peach-fuzz doctors take one look at me and say it’s everything from arthritis to phlebitis to sluff-off-itis. I say it’s chronic fatigue syndrome, you know why?”

  “Why?”

  He held up his hands, thumbs tucked in the palms as though I’d asked him how old he was and he was saying eight. “I lost my fingerprints. Now, there’s one for ya. Goddamned doctors think unless they say it first, it can’t be true. I tell ’em, they look, scribble some shit, charge me sixty bucks, and it’s good-bye.”

  I leaned down to see, holding his left hand in my fingertips. “You can’t see it here,” he says. “The light’s no good. But take it from me, they’re gone.”

  The light was good enough. The tips of his fingers were cold. They had longitudinal wrinkles in them, a chill in the room pulling them to corduroy. I gently pulled the pads on two fingers taut. “Smooth as a baby’s butt, Cipriano. Now, how would you notice a thing like that?”

  “How would I notice you drive a white Jap car?” he said. “With the paint off the right rear fender.”

  CHAPTER

  35

  Driving away from Saint Rose, I thought about the last thing Cipriano had said: “Maybe I’m just making it up. Who needs fingerprints, anyway? Maybe I’ll become a safecracker.”

  How could a thing like disappearing fingerprints be known somewhere in this world and the Orange County Crime Lab not be privy to it, not issue bulletins about it? Then again, any thief with CFS might be too tired to burg, so there ya go.

  I thought of Annie Dugdale not wanting to do her share of kitchen duty, which included dishwashing, and remembered that people who have their hands continually in water often lose their fingerprints. What, then, about Phillip Dugdale, cleaning brushes with solvents after painting a house? Do deep-sea divers have fingerprints? Sure they would; their hands are encased in heavy rubber gloves. Maybe I should get in my car and go home, save my money, my job, and my self-esteem. Patricia was probably back home, full of explanations, rife with apologies for having worried my little head. Probably selling real estate overlooking Emerald Bay, a millionaire by now. And maybe Forrest Sinclair had confessed to a few more murders while I was gone.

  Cipriano told me to go back through town and take 1-15. I said, That’s okay, I’ll take the scenic route.

  When I left, the sky was cast with peach and crimson at the horizon; the day would soon be shutting down. Saturday night, Ralph Polk could be out. He could also be home eating baked beans and watching American Gladiators.

  The road out of Henderson spilled quickly into craggy sand- and limestone formations. Like fired copper from the sun, a table rock and a spire next to it glowed incandescently, while neighboring boulders were as black as if the rocks themselves had burned. In the rearview mirror were the trillion lights of Vegas, a desert aurora borealis.

  A few miles off Boulder Highway, a long, tapered sluice of Lake Mead came into sight. These waters form a meandering, inverted Y, like stress lines in a wound. One arm inches along the Arizona border, another struggles north toward Utah, and the leftmost tentacle stretches west toward Vegas and south toward Needles, California. The Virgin River and the Muddy, and the great Colorado back up a hundred miles behind Hoover Dam to form this giant reservoir that feeds the power plants that light up Vegas like a golden eye.

  I’d driven half an hour and came to a valley set in shadow, a long string of charcoal mountains in the distance tapering toward the lake. As I pulled into one of the bends crossing the valley, the gray shape of a burro materialized over a rise, head first and weaving. I slowed and stopped and so did he, and we peered at each other for the longest time, he chewing whatever life this barren land would give up, until I let off the brake and rolled on.

  You’ll come to the silica plant, Cip had said. You’ll see rail cars there, on your left. Eight tenths of a mile from there you’ll hit a big dip. Don’t speed: It goes from fifty-five to twenty-five real quick before that gully, and there’s one cop with nothin’ to do but spy California plates like a spider spies an ant. You pass the Eagle’s Nest and the restaurant. Let’s see . . . there’s the supermarket. Oh, hell, I don’t know. Across the street there’s a pizza place where the teenagers hang out and play those noisy shoot-em-up games. Well, the movie house is on the corner. Turn there.

  What’s the name of the street, I’d said.

  You don’t need the name.

  Okay.

  Go down the end. Knock on the door even if there’s no light. He’ll open up.

  Cip was right: No light at the trailer. I knocked anyway. A light came on, and then a bare lightbulb outside the trailer.

  “Sorry to bother you,” I said when a man in blue bibbed overalls came to the door. “Are you Ralph Polk?”

  He turned to look at a custom tag under the window that read R.M. POLK, in scrolled letters. “Yep, I guess that would be me. What can I do for you, little lady?”

  “I’d like to talk to you about a business you owned. Cip Rycken gave me your name.”

  He told me to come in. I sat on a brown couch at the front of the trailer, and saw through a window the shed out back. Light from one of its small windows threw a yellow glow onto the bushes.

  “Well, now, I had a lot of binisses. I got a lot of binisses now. Which one you interested in?” His eyes were ringed in puffiness, his broad lips purple, and his backward-waving hair sat too heavy on his head. He turned on the fire under a teapot and then sat down at a table.

  “The Beaver Tail Inn.”

  He waved a hand and expelled a puff of air as if to say, Oh, that old thing.

  I said, “Cip told me it burned down.”

  “Yeah. Nineteen eighty-five.” He got up
and removed a tin box from overhead, above the double stainless-steel sink. “Damn thing was a money loser. Utilities ate me alive.” He brought the box over to the table and set it down and began to unload loops of wire, scissors, a pocket knife, sheets of hobby-store metal, and a squat jar of colored feathers compacted against the glass. Before he sat down again, he said, “Want some tea or something? I’m a tea drinker myself, but I got a V-eight and one bottle of beer.”

  “Nothing, thanks.”

  He sat down. “I should have arsoned it, that place. Some people think I did, but I didn’t. That’s not a very charitable thing to say about a person, do you think?”

  “I guess people like to speculate.”

  He nodded, smiling. “I swear the school superintendent fired his own boat down at Echo Bay two weeks ago, and I don’t have a bit of proof on that, now, do I? Goes to show.”

  “Mr. Polk, would you know how a person might come by one of the old postcards from your motel?” I retrieved the card from my purse and handed it to him. He turned it over a couple of times, just as I had when I first received it, and just as I had a dozen other times.

  As he looked at the card, a grin pulled the purple lips tight. “I will say I had some good parties there. I’d roast a pig right in the ground, throw in some corn wrapped in aluminum foil. Invite people over. I got a girlfriend or two out of it, once they knew where to come. One time I put up a whole passel of women headed for the Valentine Ranch up out of Carson City. You wouldn’t know about that, would you? Their car broke down, see, and I was coming back from towin’ a fella up to Indian Springs, and there they were, waiting alongside Ninety-five for a kindhearted soul like me.”

  The humor went out of his eyes when he focused again on me. “How’d you say you know Cip Rycken?” Only he pronounced it Rick-en, instead of Rye-ken.

  “I used to work for him.”

  “Work for him . . .”

  “I stripped,” I said.

  He stared at me awhile, and gave a little grunt before he said, “Well, now. You never do know, do ya?”

  “Nope. You never do.”

  He got up and poured himself a cup of hot water, put in a tea bag, and returned to the table after offering something to me one more time. Then into the glass jar went the tweezers, to pull out a tiny red feather. From where I sat I could see knuckles and fingers, but not what went on between them.

  He said, “Where’d you get that card?”

  “I have a friend. I think she sent me this card.”

  “People could have those cards. Like, you know, people take towels when they don’t need ’em. But that’s a long time to be holding on to a motel card don’t exist no more. How come your friend wouldn’t—?”

  “I don’t know. I think she might be in trouble. How do you think somebody would have a card like this?”

  “Only other place I know would be my motor home. I got a bunch under the bed in a shoe box. I don’t know why I keep that junk.”

  My expression must have shown disappointment and fatigue, because his own changed then as he asked me, “See this here little feller?” He held up a tiny bright-yellow feather. “This is gonna catch me a mess o’ trout after they restock the lake. The dry spell about sucked up all the water, and the striped bass about cleaned out all the trout, so all that’s left is catfish, and I don’t eat ’em.”

  I stood, saying, “I’ll be on my way, Mr. Polk. Thanks again.”

  “You might want to come out to my drill site.” He stood now too. “There’s a host of minerals out there, Miss. You want to invest, I got the opportunity. I’m sittin’ on a leaky oil fault, down about four thousand feet. High-gravity oil and methane gas, and I’m gonna get me some. Goddamned Iranians and Iraqians and all them other towel-heads don’t need to think they got it all, uh-uh.”

  “Let’s hope you’re able to make it work,” I said.

  “You might want to take a look out there tomorrow, like I said. I’ll give you directions. I can’t go out there myself tomorrow, because I’m a deacon at the church and it’s my turn to count money.”

  “That’s quite all right. I appreciate it.”

  “You by yourself?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, my hand on the door handle.

  “We had a real cold wind last week. Raised waves so big on the lake it sank a houseboat.”

  “Is that right?”

  “That’s a pretty nice drive around there. I wish I could go with you. You wouldn’t want to wait a day?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t make it. I’m sort of on a schedule.”

  “Uh-hm. Well, if it rains, I wouldn’t chance it. The whole geography can change in a day’s worth of rain.” He sat down again at the table, and from a square tin he took a black fish-hook and began fidgeting with a thin wire I could barely see and another feather. And then he said, “I wouldn’t mind you going out though, if it don’t rain.”

  His gray, rheumy gaze was direct, and as he blew across his tea, I knew there was something else he was going to tell me. I said, “Why is that, Mr. Polk?”

  “’Cause there’s two fellas I got out there helping me guard the equipment. One of ’em’s married, and the lady seems a bit queer to me. Maybe she wrote your postcard for ya.”

  “There’s a woman out there?”

  “There’s two women out there.”

  “Who are these people?”

  “Oh, a family kinda down on their luck.”

  “How old, would you say, is the woman you’re talking about? The one—”

  “I’m not too good with ages. I’d say . . . oh, hell, I don’t know. Childbearing. She’d be childbearing age. Twenty-five, I’d say. Deutsch is the name. The other one, whew, I wouldn’t kiss her in the dark with a blindfold. But boy, I can tell you one thing, I wouldn’t mind having ’er around when I need some muscle. She’s one big galoot.”

  “Is the young one named Patricia?”

  “That I don’t know. I don’t always hear so good, or maybe I don’t pay attention. Now, the kid with the heartbreaker smile, that’s Ronnie. My little niece got near blown off her feet she saw him in town. She’s sixteen—girls that age, you put their brains in a hummingbird’s noggin, they fly backward. The other fella’s a real sharp guy. He knows people back in Texas, a whole bunch of ’em outa work with layoff money to spend. He’s going to help get up some investors. Sure you don’t want to get in on this, now?” he said, and grinned at me.

  “This fella—is his name Phillip?”

  “Phil, yes. How’d you know?”

  CHAPTER

  36

  “Smokey, you are one nutty motherfucker.”

  “Go easy on the compliments, Raymond. Can you do it?”

  I was talking on a pay phone outside the Overton drugstore. Standing a few feet away was a Mexican man in a blue quilted jacket and jeans, waiting to use the phone too.

  Yolanda had answered. When I asked for Raymond, she handed the receiver over without a word.

  “You know I can’t.”

  “You don’t have to take your Mustang, if that’s what you’re worried about. And I’ll pay your gas.”

  “I got a hot-pursuit car goes a hundred and seventy in seven seconds and you think I wouldn’t open it up in the desert if I could?”

  I sighed. “I know.”

  “You know what you should be doing, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let local law enforcement handle it.”

  “You had to say it out loud.”

  “It’s hard not to.” His voice went soft. I knew he wanted to say something more, something like, “I’m concerned about you,” but with Yolanda there, he couldn’t. He said, “Did you get your buns beat when you were a copper, Smokey? Like, a lot?”

  “Shit, Raymond, I’m tame. We had cowboys.”

  “You got no license to be a cowboy, dear.”

  “That gives me even more freedom, then, doesn’t it?”

  “What about those other suspects, what’s their n
ames?”

  “They didn’t do Jerry Dwyer. I know it. I don’t want to talk about it. Ray, the Dugdales are out there.”

  “Hey, sweetie, why don’t you go drop some coin in Vegas and come on back here and let me feel up your legs.”

  “Raymond!” I found myself whispering as if I were the one having to keep my voice down. “Where’s Yolanda?”

  “She went down to the laundry.”

  “Well, cut it out, Raymond. I feel bad enough about calling you at home, disturbing her.”

  “You’re playing cop, Smokey. You’re not a cop.”

  “There’s nothing to get the cops involved with, Raymond, except to alert them to known felons tootling in their territory, and I’m sure they’ve got enough of their own to give away at raffles. Work with me, Raymond. Help me. I need some ideas.”

  The Mexican man walked all the way down the side of the building to the dark lot in back. From the way his elbows moved as he stood there, I knew he was urinating.

  I said then, “At least I brought along a whacker.”

  “Now, listen up, pal. I know you can take care of yourself, but don’t go doing anything stupid. Leave that thing where it belongs. You—”

  “Why Raymond, I think you’re mimicking me. ‘Leave that thing where it belongs.’”

  He laughed, but homed in again: “I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you let me see if I can find a buddy who knows someone on the Vegas force, just to have somebody to call in case anything gets funny.”

  “No, don’t bother, Raymond.”

  “It’s no trouble.”

  “Of course it’s trouble.”