A World the Color of Salt

by Noreen Ayres

  I’d seen plenty of living arrangements like that when I was in Oakland. There’d be a shack with a slanted roof attached to a backyard fence, the height no greater than a Doberman, yet some lanky tweak would come unfolding out from it, three of us yelling and waving big bad police specials at him. They can get in tiny places. I was after one jerk once, saw his hind end and sneakers go out the bedroom window. My partner looped him back into the house. We were all over that place for an hour. The rest of the family was huddled in the living room under watch of another badge, two preteen sisters sitting on the couch with their mother, sniffling, and the badge trying to ask them about school to divert their attention. I could not believe we couldn’t find him. I mirrored the attic space twice, finally crawling up there myself with my flashlight and gun, feeling very exposed the whole time, finding nothing but rat shit and spider webs. I looked under every bed twice. Ready to open the dresser drawers and look for him, I walked out on the back porch and saw a refrigerator about five feet high, the enamel worn off the edges. Something made me go over to it and open the door. There he was, one little raggedy-ass wimp we put away for, unfortunately, only five for murder and CCE—continuing criminal enterprise—and the tweak smiled at me and spit. It caught me under the chin. He was lucky he had an intact forehead when he walked out of there, but he did have one or two stretched finger tendons from application of our own brand of pain compliance. That, as I explained once before, was not the real me. That was someone named John Wayne.

  We got out of the car and went up to the trailer. Cipriano knocked.

  The door opened immediately, wham! slapping on the trailer skin, making me jump. What I saw then is hard to describe because I don’t think most people would believe me. This thing stood before us, about six feet tall, two-fifty. It wore baggy khaki pants and red bootie-type slippers with leather soles. It wore a tan shirt with short sleeves. And running down the length of the arm that held back the screen door were lakes of oozy red and pus-filled lesions. Her face was tinged a sort of orange and there were brown circles under the eyes; the eyes blue, the eyebrows yellow. Brown curls jutted out under her ears like boar horns. The thing spoke. It had no teeth.

  “Who you lookin’ for, bub?” it said.

  Who you lookin’ for, in a female voice. This was Annie Dugdale.

  CHAPTER

  38

  Cipriano’s posture changed. He grew taller. His voice grew younger traveling the distance between where we stood and the trailer door. When he removed his hat, his dark hair sprung out like foam. He said, “We’re wondering if you have a gallon of water.” Smiling at Annie Dugdale with the kind of twinkly eyes he reserved for his best girls. “These kids,” meaning me, “don’t know how to take care of cars no more.”

  She went back inside and brought out a white bleach bottle without the label, dark smudges around the neck.

  “Oh, we can’t take that.” I’m thinking, Why not?, when he adds: “That’s your drinking water.”

  She said, “Go on and take it. There’s more where that came from.”

  He stepped forward and took it from her, thanking her, and then put his hat back on and touched his fìnger to the brim.

  She said, “You want some coffee? I just made a pot.”

  We went inside. I had the same cramped feeling I’d had in Mr. Polk’s other trailer, only this was worse. Things were crammed deeply into the compartment above the driving area. Latches to the overhead cabinets were unlatched, and half of a potholder leaked out from one. On all the flat surfaces, including the stove, were coffee cans and salt-and-pepper shakers and casino ashtrays and decks of cards, along with a TV guide and a paperback book whose cover was off, and another one whose cover I could see, by Michener. Part of the claustrophobia came from watching Annie, the top of her head just inches away from brushing the ceiling.

  We sat on the bench at the table, watching the giant woman get mugs and pour. I looked for resemblances. This didn’t look like it could be the mother of Phillip and Roland; both of them were decent-looking.

  She said, “You take sugar?”

  I shook my head no, and Cipriano said, “Please.”

  Annie said, “I got sweetener.”

  “That’s just fine,” he said.

  She returned with the mugs, squeezing in behind the table. The lips that guarded no teeth looked like the pale underbelly of a fish. Above them there was a shadow of brown mustache, and along the side of her face where the light hit, a sandy forest of hair. The yellow eyebrows, I guessed, came naturally.

  I saw Cipriano’s eyelids drop briefly, his gaze taking in the graveyard of Annie’s crusty arms. When I looked again at her, her eyes were set on mine.

  She said to Cipriano: “What are you doing out this way? Prospecting?”

  “I know Ralph Polk.”

  “You do, huh?” She held her cup of coffee with both hands, completely obliterating it.

  Cipriano said, tearing the packet of sweetener, then stirring the coffee with a tablespoon she’d brought him, “Maybe he’s got some oil out here, what do you think? Think maybe we can pull up some money from this old parking lot?”

  She smiled and patted the front of her shirt looking for cigarettes, then rose and went to the sink, where the pack was resting between two water glasses. “You got money in this?” she said.

  “I sure do.” He glanced sideways at me, and I shook my head and grinned, not knowing whether to believe him or not, but thinking, Yes, he probably did, the old fart.

  I touched a finger to the bottom of the faded turquoise curtain near me. The cloth was stiff and moved easily forward so that I could see, in the deeper cup of the sickle, a green pickup truck, two bales of alfalfa in its bed, one up, one down. I kept staring at it: It can’t be this easy. It’s there, by damn, it’s there. And looking harder, taking in the lines of its rounded fenders and top, I saw through the dusty windows a red baseball cap on the dashboard—a red bazeball cap—and felt my face flush.

  I dropped the curtain as Annie was saying, “Not many people out this way. It gets a tad lonesome.” But she was looking at me, blowing smoke up to the ceiling.

  Cip was saying, “You ought to come into town once in a while.”

  “I’m not much of a one for gambling. I like a sure thing,” she said.

  “You’re a wise woman,” he said, and took the first sip of his coffee while she could think about that. Then he said, “You probably didn’t invest any of your hard-earned money in Ralph Polk’s scheme, neither.”

  Her eyes, small and empty, flitted to me once, then back again to him. “I don’t like all that hustle in town,” she said. “I like the peace and quiet.” As she hoisted her cup, her lips took on a life of their own, like an elephant seeking a peanut, but she kept looking at Cipriano, sizing him up for dinner or bed, I couldn’t tell which.

  “Maybe we should cut to the chase here,” I said, speaking for the first time. Cipriano flicked a glance to me but said nothing.

  I heard a soft sniff as Annie touched her nose with a finger. Pack my nose, shoot my veins, fuck it. When my septum disintegrates, stick me between the toes, in the stomach, the groin; hell, I got skin to spare.

  I looked at her and said, “You know, I came upon a girl in jail once was shooting herself up in the blue vein of her breast with a needle she would not surrender till four officers pinned her down.”

  Annie’s stare could’ve knocked over a silo. She said, to her credit and to the point: “You’re looking for Roland.” Her small eyes leveled out to me, and she smirked. “He’s over the hill.”

  “A lot of us are,” Cip said, still quick, not sure if this was the way the conversation should go.

  Annie propped both elbows on the table, her cup at the pinnacle.

  “He’s drilling out some old pipe.” She sipped her coffee, and then, without taking her eyes off Cipriano, she tipped her head a little toward one shoulder and yelled, “You gonna come out and meet our company?” She turned her eyes on me, and t
he gap that was Annie’s mouth spread to show fences of pink gums.

  A door opened down the, quote, hallway. The foundation shifted as someone stepped out, the door blocking my view. I realized then that it was the bathroom. And in there was someone who’d been watching us the whole time we were parked like two dumb nail kegs in the front seat of my car.

  “Well, well, well, well,” Phillip said, coming toward us. This time the tattoos were covered with a light yellow flannel shirt, his jeans dirty brown at the knees.

  He pulled up opposite us, sitting on a director’s chair with a leather sling, near the door.

  I felt trapped and wanted Cipriano to slide out, but he just sat there, his hand on his coffee mug but his thumb jiggling up and down and his right knee moving.

  “Didn’t I tell you last night your friend likes my brother? I don’t interfere. Neither should you.”

  “Is she here?”

  “You want to see her, she’s in the add-on.” He made a motion with his head in the direction of the shed outside, and then stood up.

  Cip slid out, and I followed.

  “You stay here,” Annie said. She was up now, gripping Cipriano’s arm.

  I felt my first surge of adrenaline. “You don’t order him around.”

  “He can come, Ma,” Phillip said, quietly, and stepped through the doorway, and down. I went out too, expecting Cip to follow.

  Annie piled out of the trailer, entirely avoiding the grated iron step, taking one giant step for womankind. “Fuck you,” she said.

  I looked back and saw Cip hanging in the doorway. He said, “I’ll stay here,” and waved a hand.

  Now that I was out in the open, I thought I heard the sound of a TV coming from the shack, and noticed for the first time a small white dish antenna on the slope above the shed. Annie was standing with both arms out from her sides like a cowboy ready to draw or a man whose lats are too big.

  “Fuck you too,” Phillip said back.

  He was saying “fuck you” to his mother, and it sounded more like a ritual between them than anything else, until Annie came forward and slapped him on the upper arm.

  “Fucking ding,” she said.

  Phillip put up both palms as if to say, Okay, stop, but she came at him anyway, grabbing him by the shoulders and shoving him. He shoved back, the both of them clinging and pushing in a push-me-pull-you affair. Scorpions mate that way, the male grasping the female by the jaws and pushing her back and forth till she deposits her eggs in the sand, then fertilizing the eggs as he passes over them again and again.

  Phillip began to laugh, saying, “Ma, goddamn it, cut it out.”

  She dropped her arms, said, “Ah, ya little shit.”

  Cip stood in the doorway watching this special brand of Dugdale Dozens, shaking his head once as if to say, Jeezuz Christ, then bringing his hands to his elbows as if holding himself in.

  CHAPTER

  39

  Annie held back while Phillip and I walked to the shed. I could definitely hear the sound of a TV now, an odd sound out here in the blankness, and disembodied. The door was cut square in the middle of the gray, weathered, and peeled plywood, and above the metal cabinet handle was a slotted hasp and plate screwed into the wood, with an open padlock dangling by its shackle.

  I said, “Why don’t we just have Patricia come out?”

  “Sure. Call her.” Phillip opened the door and called in: “Company, folks.” A powerful smell reached me, of stale beer, hair spray, dirty dog, or sour breath. He stepped in, saying, “Here,” and motioning for me to follow. Opposite me there was a window covered with a sun-hollowed curtain with clumpy threads hanging at the bottom.

  “Somebody here to see you, Patty,” he said, and moved back. From the side of the door, I looked in.

  On the right was a mattress resting on the floor, two blankets curled around each other on top of a dirty sheet, three pillows in a pile in the corner, the top one upright, like a mock person.

  I looked left and saw, at the end of the shed, two women. One sat on the floor between a laminated coffee table and a couch upholstered in a fabric of brown roses on a white background. The one on the floor was Constance, the white-blonde girl in the black sweater I’d seen with Phillip in the Overton bar. She had on different clothes—a pink knit shirt and jeans—and a smile played across her lips when she saw me. She was smoking and picking at her fingernail polish. Next to her on the table was a silver can of beer. Opposite, against the wall, the television was playing a Cary Grant/Audrey Hepburn black-and-white movie, Hepburn getting the chance to see how rapidly she could talk, Grant dressed in a suit and hat, looking bumbled.

  I saw the other woman hitched under a dark green blanket on the couch, her knees up; looked straight at her, and glanced again to my right to see if I had missed Patricia when I first stepped in.

  “Smokey-y-y.”

  “Patricia?” I stared at her and went forward, glancing back at Phillip, who was staying his ground.

  “What are you doing he-e-e-re?” she said. Her hair was brown now, not red. It hung around her face, her face not completely visible because of the blanket and a thing around her neck that looked like a cervical collar or maybe a dirty towel, hiding her chin up to her lips, until she shifted so she could see me better and threw the blanket back. She wore a gray sweatshirt and black shorts. Red dots, many of them, stippled her face. And she was wearing glasses. I’d never seen Patricia in glasses. No way would I have believed it was Patricia if it were not for the little-girl softness in her voice. It hadn’t been five weeks since I’d seen her. How could a person change that much in that short a time?

  “Patricia,” I said. “Are you sick?”

  “I have the mea-a-sles,” she said.

  “You’re stoned to the gills.”

  “Have you had the measles? No? Uh-oh. Your balls drop off,” she said, and giggled, “or something. That’s what Roland says. That’s what happens when you didn’t have the measles as a widdle kid.”

  I looked at Phillip, furious that Patricia would be here, furious that she would be like this. I moved toward her, intending to yank her up and pull her out of there, though Constance was in the way, and so was the coffee table.

  The light changed then, and I twisted back, thought it was Phillip coming for me. But it was Annie stepping in. In her hand she had a chrome small-bore pistol that she held at gut level so that it looked like a silver button in place of a brown one on her tan shirt.

  Phillip said, “Ma. Put that away. You nuts?”

  “Shuttup. You”—meaning me—“get the hell over there.” She was pointing to a spot at the end of the table in front of the television.

  I complied, bumping the table with my leg and tipping the beer can off. Constance caught it and said, “Oh, wow.”

  Annie told Phillip, “Shut that thing off.”

  He flicked his eyes at us both and then slipped behind me and punched off Hepburn and Grant, pressing my elbow with a thumb and two fingers at the same time, and I wondered what that meant. I heard, or rather felt, a bump on the wall. The goats were displeased.

  Annie transferred the pistol to her left hand and took her long reach to the wall, whomp-whomping against it, and the soft bumping from the other side stopped.

  “This is real smart,” I said.

  “Shut your mouth. What do you think you’re doing coming around my family? I know who you are. You got no right poking your nose in our business.”

  I wondered where Cipriano was.

  “You don’t want to do that, Ma.”

  “Fuck you,” she said.

  “Calm the fuck down, Ma. Put the gun away. We’re not doing anything here. She’s just checkin’ on her friend.”

  Constance’s eyes were wide open now. She said, “I’d like to leave, please.”

  “Go get Roland,” Annie said. “Get him.”

  Patricia was watching the whole thing with no more expression than she might have had if she were choosing between two skirts.
>
  Phillip putting up his hands to placate his mother, shaking his head. “Sit down, Constance,” he said, and she did, and then, to his mother: “What about the guy? Get it together. Hey, we’ll chill out. Play some cards. Have a fuckin’ party. Didn’t Roland bring up some steak?”

  “She’s the one, goddamn it,” Annie said. She was rocking now from foot to foot, the top of her hair snagging on something on the ceiling, but she didn’t notice or care.

  “She’s the one what?” Phillip said. He bent his knees and shoved his butt onto the table, laying his arms on his knees. He faked a yawn and worked his shoulders, the mowed head dropping down on his chest and rolling back and forth.

  Annie drew up a gray wooden chair from against the wall, turned it backward, and sat in front of us all, the gun arm pointing down, the other across the top of the chair where she rested her chin. “I’d like to know what we do now,” she said. “You got any bright ideas. You know who this one is, don’t ya?”

  I had stepped back and took a seat on the couch arm.

  “So fuckin’ what? She works for the county, that’s all. She’s harmless. Okay, let’s kick her and her friend out, get back to normal here.”

  We heard the bumping again, the goats against the fence posts and the shed, disturbed from whatever psychic tremors were dancing in here. Annie’s attention left her son’s face as she listened to the bumping as well.

  Phillip’s voice conciliatory, his manner smooth, he said to his mother, “Everything’s fuckin’ A here, ay, Ma?” He turned his head to me and said, “Everything okay with you, sweetheart?”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Where’s the other guy?” he asked his mother.

  “In the head.”

  “What’d you do to him?”

  She thought a minute. The beginnings of a smile moved the mask that was her face up and back, a wave of flesh smoothing her brow and causing her two big ears, which were exposed, to move backward with her scalp. She brought the back of her gun hand to the side of her face, and said, “Kissed him,” and laughed.