A World the Color of Salt

by Noreen Ayres

  “You were going to ask me to drive three hundred miles ten minutes ago.”

  The Mexican came back. Now he stood on a concrete bumper, hands in his pockets, as he looked at me. I put up one finger to tell him I’d be done soon. At the curb, a man got out of a car on the passenger side and headed toward the front door, passing close to me. He was grossly fat, with long brown hair arrowed down onto his shirt. He had a beard and the blackest elbows I’d ever seen. Not work dirt, but forever-there dirt. When he glanced back, I felt a strange needle of fear.

  When I hung up, I was going to go directly back to Henderson and come back out in the morning. I was going to go out the quicker way too, through Logandale, and not be driving alone in that dark country in a car that had a ninety-thousand-mile reading on the odometer. But when there’s a blip in your nature that compels you to think that if you do just one more thing—check one more fingerprint card, study one more photomicrograph to compare this screwdriver with that doorknob; or, as a cop, compile one more plastic sandwich of transparencies for an “artist’s rendering” of a suspect, or run one more vehicle ID number through the VINSLEUTH system while your FBI buddy is yawning and rubbing his eyes, this at three A.M. when your shift ended twelve hours ago—you think that somehow, somewhere, you’ll come up with something like a hit.

  That same nature made me take one more turn back through town, where I saw a square-grilled vehicle parked deep behind the bar, red neon light from a rear window coating its dark sheen. A big flatbed truck was sticking out into the narrow driveway at the side, so I drove slowly up over the curb and into the lot until my headlights reflected off the white plate of the vehicle, the plate with a tin frame around it that said it was from a car lot in Victorville.

  Inside the Eagle’s Nest were about fifteen people, mostly on the old side. I looked for someone tall, someone blond, call him Ronnie Deutsch or Roland Dugdale.

  At one table a young woman in a black loose-weave sweater and a black flower tucked in her white-blonde hair was speaking to a guy with hair so short it looked as though he had a bald spot in the back of his head.

  The waitress, a girl who didn’t look old enough to be serving drinks, said, “Diet?” and set a glass in front of the woman and slid a bottle of beer to the man. The woman in the black crocheted sweater laughed and switched drinks, saying, “Why do they always think the women take the diet?” as if the waitress were not still standing there.

  When the man reached out to pay the waitress, I saw what I first thought was a yellow bracelet coiled along his forearm to the elbow. His profile showed a hook to the nose and a ridge of mustache. An odd feeling grew in the pit of my stomach.

  I stepped up to their table, and in those few steps I could see that the bracelet was a snake inked among the black hair, and on the other arm there was a green peacock.

  “Excuse me. I wonder if you could tell me if you all are from California?”

  Phillip’s face fell slack, and then recomposed. He pulled a chair over from another table and said, “Take a load off.”

  “Thanks. I might need a ride back to California. My car’s giving me trouble. I’ll pay,” I said.

  “I’d like to help you out, but I’m going to be here awhile,” Phillip said. “I’m curious, though.” He was smiling. “How’d you know I’m from California?”

  “You look different,” I said, and nodded toward the patrons at the bar.

  “I see what you mean,” the girl said, getting a smart look on her face. “I’m from Phoenix,” meaning Phoenix was definitely more cosmo than this hick town.

  “You know of a place to stay around here, then?”

  “There’s a motel down the street. Two, in fact.” His eyes held directly on me without blinking.

  “Where you from in California?” I asked.

  “Beverly Hills.”

  We all laughed. Fake it, Smokey. I said, “Me too.”

  He said, “Goddamned small world, isn’t it?”

  The girl from Phoenix said, “You could probably stay at my aunt and uncle’s. They got a place out on Overton Beach. I’m staying the week—they take care of my little boy.”

  “I’ll do just fine.”

  “We ought to get you something to drink,” Phillip said. “I stay off the sauce. This is as high as I get.” He took a swig of his diet. “You don’t love me now, you miss out.”

  Now he was looking at the blonde and she was smiling back, running her tongue halfway around her mouth. Her upper body jerked, and I imagined the arch of her foot sliding up Phillip’s shin, her flexing toes going for the groin.

  Phillip gave her a deep wink so I could see it, and then, as a rap song came on the box, and someone at the bar said, “Turn that shit off,” and someone else said, “Right, turn that junk off, Mackie,” Phillip put a finger under my chin and said, “How’s our little cop-ette from L.A. today, Miss Brandon?”

  The girl from Phoenix said, “Oh, wow.”

  Phillip dropped his hand, wagged his head at me, and said, “What’s your next move, Suzy?”

  CHAPTER

  37

  “Where’s Patricia Harris?” I said.

  “Now, you think we’ve gone and done something to your friend, don’t you?”

  “That’s about it. I’d like to know how your brother just happened to move into her apartment complex.”

  “Hey, it’s a small world.”

  “Cut the bull-puckey, Phillip.”

  “Your friend has got a mind of her own. I noticed that.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Her and Roland are home watching TV, I guess. Countin’ pinto beans—hell, I don’t know, I never been married.”

  “What do you mean, married? She couldn’t have gotten married.”

  The girl with the white hair was flicking her eyes back and forth at us, hanging on to her beer. The skin above her breasts was flushed, and her nose had a damp sheen on it.

  “Where is she?”

  He said, calmly, “She’s the other side of the lake. We got a claim out there we’re guarding for a man, make sure thieves don’t run off with the equipment and sell it to Jackson Drilling. Look, honey, don’t imagine trouble where there isn’t none. She’s doing just fine.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be reporting to somebody?”

  “That’s the wonderful thing about this country, you know it? Man makes a mistake, he does his penance, he’s free to go friend-up the beautiful women.” He hung his gaze on the girl again, and smiled. She looked at me with a hard glare.

  I went back to Henderson to the motel, and slept. It was pointless for me to try to find the spot where Ralph Polk parked his motor home in the solid blackness around a giant lake in a country of wild burros.

  The next morning I went the short way to Overton, and stopped in at the restaurant before I headed out for the other side of the lake. I had pancakes and wished I hadn’t. When I went to pay the check, the man who was framed in the long open window behind the woman who took my money said, “You hear Leon got his water truck fixed?”

  She answered him without looking back. “No, I didn’t hear that. That’s a good thing.”

  The man moved back and forth, doing things at the grill. He said, “Ronnie Deutsch bailed him out.”

  She nodded and was toiling with the till, my money in hand. She asked me, “You have anything smaller?”

  I shook my head. “Ronnie Deutsch?”

  “Yeah, you know him?” she said.

  “I think so.”

  “Good boy, that Ronnie.”

  I said, “I met him once when I was passing through a while back. If that’s the one.”

  “Must be another Ronnie Deutsch. This one’s not from around here.” Her glasses slipped from her nose and fell onto her chest, dangling from a red cord. Her ash-blonde hair was pulled close to her head so that she looked like a post with features.

  “He come around a lot?”

  “When’s the last time Ronnie’s been around, Myron
?”

  “Huh?” the man at the window answered, the arms going wide and back again like a man at a piano.

  “Ronnie Deutsch. He’s been around when? Wednesday?”

  “I saw him this morning.”

  I spoke to the cook directly then, over Mrs. Cook’s shoulder, till she handed me the change and stood away. “He was in this morning, here?”

  “He’s over the hardware store right now.”

  “Can you tell me . . . did he have a tall, pretty redhead with him?”

  Myron did something back there that sent up a lot of steam. The woman moved away to clean a table. Myron came back to the window with a smile on his face. He looked at me as he patted something I couldn’t see, pat-a-pat-a-pat, like a tortilla maker, and said, “Not yet. But, then, it’s only eight-thirty.” Then he laughed a phlegmy laugh, until he had to cough and turn away from the window. “Gimme a cigarette, Mavis.”

  “You got half a lung left, you want a cigarette.”

  “I don’t have half a lung, I have two good lungs with a tickle, and that’s the God’s truth.” He winked at me and said, “Woman’s gonna be the death of me yet.”

  The hardware store looked like a warehouse, covering many hundreds of square feet. It was loaded up with everything from clothes to chainsaws. I completed a quick round of the store and didn’t see Roland, didn’t see Patricia. I took another tour and dawdled at the hammer rack, thinking maybe he was having keys made in the back, or a screen cut or a pipe severed.

  On my way out, I stopped at the cash register and asked a man who was sticking price tags on silver bolts, “Was there a man in here a while ago, tall, light hair?”

  His left top incisor and the tooth next to it were a dark silver; at first I thought they were missing. He wore an orange-visor cap with a fish emblem on it. He said, “You’re my first and best customer, doll.”

  An older man in a gray shirt pulled up from kneeling at the bottom of one aisle, hung a plastic packet on the peg-board, then turned to me and said, “We got a real good buy on Christmas lights.” Only these two in the store.

  “People in the restaurant said they saw Ronnie Deutsch in here. You know him?”

  The older man said, “No, ma’am. I don’t. But if he comes in, I’ll sure tell him you’re lookin’ for him.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I think I have the wrong person.”

  I took a packed dirt road around the lake. At times I could go only twenty miles an hour where storm runoff had cut new rust-colored channels across the road. Several times I thought I was lost. I passed a dead tree up on a low rise, and sitting on it was a golden eagle, eye turned toward whatever morning menu scurried from one hole to another. And then nothing more for many minutes but the bleak landscape of alkali-crusted soil.

  At a long curve of road, I came upon a bustle of dust from a lumbering, yellow, older Pontiac ahead of me. Just as down south, you’re supposed to pull over when the person behind you doesn’t have an Old Fart’s license and wants to go more than ten miles an hour.

  I was pretty close on his bumper when his brake lights came on, and then he came to a complete stop. He was slouched down, wearing a brimmed hat. It passed through my mind that this was Lionel Crowell, the pseudo-PI again. And then it passed through my mind that whoever it was would get out, pull a pistol, and whack me. Before leaving the motel that morning, I told myself, What if I run into a rattlesnake? I reached for the Colt I’d taken from the trunk and slipped under the seat.

  What piled out was a sight I wouldn’t have bet a million against a dollar on: Cip Rycken, in a floppy hat, gray shirt, and purple suspenders clamped onto gray pants. My eyes went automatically to his feet, to see what sort of miracle shoes a guy with a fractured metatarsal and phlebitis would wear, and saw thick white socks and brown leather bedroom slippers. In my paranoia, even though this was Cip, the man who’d given me a job when I desperately needed it, who nursed me a few times when I was physically ill and a few when I was emotionally needy, this man might be the man whose turn it was to put me under. Who knew, in this world? I slid my jacket onto my lap from the passenger’s seat, over the gun.

  He came up, leaned close to the window, and said, “Why don’t we just go in one car?”

  At that moment I could hear my Bill’s voice telling me—the both of us sitting on our bed with the one slat that kept falling down, and me in a literal sweat because I’d scared myself on duty that night, almost blowing away a guy who’d been trailing me the day after we’d testified in court and sent his buddy to piss ‘n’ puke dinners for seven years—Bill telling me, It’s all right. Think that way and stay alive. Stay alive. He said that to me again that last night in the hospital, his forehead a mass of clear bubbles. It was just after I thought the fever’d broken. I thought, Oh, boy, we’re on the way up, here. I was tipping the water pitcher, which was filled with ice, to wet the washcloth I would put on his head, when he called me in a whisper to come—it’s what he said: “Come.” I had both hands on his shoulders and I was leaning over him, willing him to be all right. He said, “Smokey.” Yes, yes, I said. He said, “You stay alive.” And then the pupils of his eyes widened until there was barely any retina left.

  I followed Cipriano until we came to a turnout, and as he was climbing in with me, I nudged the Colt I’d returned to the floor back underneath the seat with my heel because it had drifted forward. His eyes flicked to it and then up to my face.

  “You think we’ll see bison, dearie?”

  I smiled, and pulled away, glad he was with me. The sun was out, and the sky was clear, and the air just the right amount of cold.

  We started out again in this drear land and I said, “You sure you’re not taking me somewhere to have your way with me, Cipriano?”

  He said, “This stick hasn’t dipped for a long time, Smokey, but thanks for the thought anyway.”

  He offered me a piece of cinnamon gum. Its sweet smell reaching me, I recalled the smell of my home in San Jose where I’d gone after leaving Cipriano’s employ and before becoming a grocery-store checker. In that rented bungalow, I’d stashed bundles of cinnamon sticks in closets and drawers. Cinnamon must have been in that year. When I smelled that fragrance, I felt a loss at who that girl was, the one who had wanted to settle down and study painting and wildlife and wound up probing dead bodies.

  I said, “Tell me what you know about Ralph Polk.”

  “Ralph’s been stuck out here a long time, long before this oil thing came up. I’m beginning to think he’s gone a little round the bend.”

  “Does he have any kind of criminal record?”

  “Ralphie? Naw-w.”

  “By the way, how’d you spring yourself from the rest home?”

  “Walked out the door. Got tired of restin’. Hey . . .”

  “What?”

  “How come you don’t smile anymore?”

  “Whose life do you have to make miserable when I’m not around?” I said.

  We were into hillier terrain now. There were a few Joshua trees and creosote bushes, and the earth was striped with rust and gold and gaining a few patches of green.

  “Who would ever think you could put a lake on top of this land and it would stay there?” I said.

  “You know where we are now? We’re southwest of Mica Peak. You can go across these hills and see shards of mica laying in the gullies like kids been down there breaking bottles.”

  We sank into a wide wash, rounded the hill to the far side, and arrived at a sickle-shaped cut in a low cliff face. Nested in the cavity was a white-and-tan motor home. Off to one side were two goats behind a wire-and-wood fence, idly sweeping up alfalfa. Our tire noise did not keep the goats from their appointed munching, though they did raise their heads and stare with wary eyes.

  On the other side of the goat pen sat a long, flat-roofed plywood shed. I saw no Bronco. I saw no other vehicle of any kind. I cut the ignition and we both just sat there, staring ahead.

  “Cip, I’d better tell you s
omething else about my friend Patricia. She was seeing a guy who’d been in the jug for robberies.”

  “If you threw a stick in a prayer meeting, you’d hit a couple with some history,” he said. “What’s a girl to do?”

  “That’s a little tough for me to buy into.”

  “You always were a hard-nose,” he said.

  “I don’t know how you can say that.”

  “The other girls never gave a shit.”

  “What about Frazier? She did.”

  “Yeah, she did. She was different, like you.”

  “Listen, Cip—I’m pretty sure one of the guys helping Ralph out is her guy. And this guy’s brother, Phillip, is bad news too. These are not reformed people.”

  “Seems to me you don’t even know for sure these people are the ones you’re lookin’ for.”

  “You’re right. I don’t. What would you do if you thought a friend sent you that postcard, and the postcard traced to here? What would you do?”

  “I’d wait for another postcard.”

  “Fine. Well, that’s not me.”

  He reached over and patted my hand and smiled at me.

  I sighed and said, “So, what do we do, walk up and ring the bell like the Avon lady?”

  After thinking about this awhile and looking out the window toward the fence and the goats, he said, “Ralph Polk never did have any sense.”

  “I saw Phillip last night. In the bar. He was with someone, a pretty girl from Phoenix named Constance, and it seemed, you know, okay. I’m not saying I have this figured out. I could be wrong all the way to Minnesota. You follow me?”

  He nodded, thoughtful.

  I said, “It doesn’t look like anyone’s here.”

  “The old lady’s in there,” he said.

  I’d forgotten about the mother. “How do you know?”

  “Ralph told me. He said she don’t do nothin’ all day but sit and smell up the place. He’s not too happy she comes along with the deal.”

  “They can’t all live in there.” I was estimating the length of the trailer at maybe thirty feet, then assumed the shed wasn’t just an equipment shed but a domicile as well.