A World the Color of Salt

by Noreen Ayres

  I said, “That better be all you did.”

  We heard the bumping again, and then a louder sound, almost like a crash. And then another one as Annie was getting up out of her chair, and I recognized it as the sound of the trailer door smashing against the side. I jumped up and moved past Phillip and Annie, but she grabbed me by the back of my shirt and yanked, and then I saw the yellow flash and Phillip reaching for me. I threw a shoulder onto him, and we stumbled about a bit, and I heard Constance yelp and Patricia make a sound like a little hum.

  Outside, Annie was striding to my car. I saw the door was open on the driver’s side, and then saw the back of Cip’s shirt and purple suspenders rising from the interior like a humped whale.

  “Hold it,” I yelled, and as I did, Cip dropped down again.

  Annie turned—God help me, why?—or she would have shot him then and there. And how did I know that? At this moment I can’t say; but I did know it, as sure as if I’d read it in a police report after the fact. And what plan did I have for what I would do next? None. There was this woman, turning in her tracks, a look of sudden calm on her face, raising the pistol, and I thought, as if my body were separate from my mind and another part of me were watching, She’s going to shoot me, even as she tried.

  The gun went off like a firecracker and I heard the round smack into the plywood behind me. I’d heard that sound before, in a bedroom in Oakland, a housewifey type ruining my day. Behind me, one woman’s scream and then both their voices; Phillip’s voice, too, shouting, “Ma,” and then another pop reverberated in the solid air.

  If I was shot, I did not feel it. It seemed as if I were walking up to her as I might any person on any other steady, imperturbable day. When she was almost upon me, or I upon her, I don’t know which, my left arm snapped up and out, clamping her at the elbow, while the heel of my right hand slammed under her chin as I fairly leaped upward.

  Her arm tore from my fingers, as her brain bounced like a handball on the backstop of her skull.

  Annie planed out as she went down. Actual dust flew.

  The weapon landed two yards away, and I scooped it up and went to see what happened to Cipriano, popping out the magazine as I went. Over my shoulder, I saw Constance and Patricia huddled together, crouching, and Phillip kneeling over Annie. Annie would be out for a while. Unfortunately, she wouldn’t be dead.

  I opened the passenger door and set the pistol, which was a Raven .25, a “purse gun,” inside on the floor, slipped the magazine in my hip pocket, and slammed the door.

  I walked to the other side. There was Cip, facedown, one arm under and one arm out. He was cyanotic, which is to say blue, and he was jerking. My Colt gleamed as it lay on the dirt under the car. Cip must have gone for it! What could have gone wrong? He couldn’t have been shot.

  Yelling his name, I tugged at his shirt and pants and rolled him over. There was no blood anywhere on him. His neck veins were engorged, as was a vein at the temple. His face was patched in blue and red, his eyes swimming in moisture, and he began to choke. “Oh, my God. Is it your heart, Cip, your heart?” White crusty dirt clung to the side of his face.

  I looked over at Phillip, Constance, and Patricia. Annie was rising to her elbows, Phillip aiding her. I yelled, “Help me. Something’s wrong here.”

  Shaken by my own panic, I thought I could not pull his shirt apart, but then the buttons gave. The pulse at his neck was very fast, and as my fingers started to drag away, I felt the beat stop, then start again, a dysrhythmia that panicked me further. I rolled him on his side, thinking surely he must be choking on his tongue, and reached inside his mouth to finger free the meaty thing, felt it flex and his jaws move down, and pulled my fingers out just in time. The airways must have been constricting, but from what? He began to quake again, his limbs jerking and flopping.

  I stood back, not knowing what to do, and then bent down again and tried to grip his shoulders. Patricia was calling, “Samantha.”

  When I looked up, Phillip was coming at me, his face mutated to red folds. I heard the word bitch yelled loud and clear, and then I said, as if I hadn’t, “Help me here! Help me.”

  Heaving Cip over again, I pounded his back three times, rolled him, pounded again. If there was something lodged in his windpipe, cutting off his oxygen and making him convulse, maybe it would pop out. No change.

  Phillip was standing near me. I didn’t look up, but I hardly cared what he might be doing. I heard Constance whining, “Oh, please!”

  One more thing I tried: Quickly I rifled through Cip’s pockets—groin pockets, shirt pockets; slipped my hands to the rear, searching for a foil of medicine, anything, and removed his wallet. Opening it, I searched for an emergency medical card that would tell me what was wrong. Where the bills are kept I found a foil all right; it was a condom.

  The voice over me said, “Give him this,” and Phillip was handing me yellow pills, three of them. “It’s Valium.”

  What did it matter what it was? He was dying.

  “It’s Valium,” Phillip said again. “That’s all.”

  “I can’t give him those. How am I going to give him those?” I yelled, but took them anyway.

  He said, “Bite ’em. I’ll get some water,” and he walked away.

  I put the pills in my mouth, crunching them, then spit the mess out into my fingers and pinched Cip’s mouth open into a blue flower, I poked the pills in with two fingers. Then Phillip was lowering the bleach bottle over Cipriano, and pinching his cheeks to open his mouth. The water splashed, and yellow bits flowed out and down the sides of Cip’s face, but some stayed in as I moved behind him and picked his shoulders up a little and then let him back down. His mouth kept closing and gaping, like a bird’s. His eyes were swelling shut, and he seemed bluer. His fingers looked puffy. “Look at this,” I said. “What’d we do to him?”

  Phillip thrust another pill at me. I plugged it in, though it was no easy job, forcing it all the way down with my fingertip and glugging more water down, hoping the disk wouldn’t go the wrong way. He choked, and wheezing sounds were coming from him now, and I was heartened. Painful as it sounded, it was at least chest movement.

  I changed positions, thinking maybe I could straddle him and do a CPR compression or something if the breathing stopped, when I saw Annie through the car windows, weaving around in the background. I saw Patricia’s arms go up to the top of her head and a distraught look on her face.

  When I looked down, Cip’s forehead and cheeks were turning fiery again. His knees kept rising and falling, his feet flicking out. Crouching down, I was ready to put my hands on his shoulders to steady him, when I heard more yelling and the sound of rapid steps.

  Annie Dugdale was grinding around the car toward me. She had something in her hand. And then I saw it clearly: a length of pipe. She raised it above me at the selfsame moment I scooped up the Colt lying on the other side of Cip and pointed it. I did not yell, “Halt!” I pulled hard on the trigger. The kick threw my hand up, dirt shattered off the underside of the car, and I lost my grip and then recovered. And as Annie turned back from the slight tilt the first round sent her into, I fired again.

  I read about a man once, a Jew in Warsaw, in the last days. The ghetto had been razed and most of the people killed or long ago sent off to die in the camps. The ghetto was on fire. The man was on fire. He stormed the line of Nazis that stood in front of his apartment, and the SS knew he was coming for them, not running from the fire. They shot him nine times, and still he came. They shot him some more, until he was upon them, singeing the soldiers and killing them with a knife. The lesson here: That bullets seldom stop a man, not right away. Or a woman.

  Annie came on. I twisted in my crouch, this time both hands steady on the Colt, and fired three more times. One caught Annie in the mouth.

  CHAPTER

  40

  Cabbage gleaners are hard at it along Barranca and Sand Canyon. Their sweatshirted forms bend like croquet hoops.

  In the beds of pickup tr
ucks parked along the roadway are hundreds of cabbage heads in used plastic grocery sacks. Along the edge of the patch, tall dark-green eucalyptus swing in the wind, their silvery trunks shades lighter than the gray February sky.

  I know what the rows look like, after the gleaners come through: At each disrupted bowl of leaves, an empty spot remains, the tough outer leaves that lie on the ground shot through with .45-caliber worm holes.

  Today it is cabbage. All year it is cabbage. If you want to know what an autopsy room smells like, it is cream of broccoli soup; otherwise, cabbage. The same drafts that allow a rusty-tailed hawk, its wingtips kinked upward like thick fingers, to scout for rodents over the cabbage patch—these same winds bring currents of scent strongly anew.

  It seems late for them to be out, the gleaners, so close to evening. They work the fields southwest of a eucalyptus windbreak along Irvine Center Drive, and across Irvine Center the heavy, dark branches of orange trees in one of the few remaining groves in the county drag the earth; underneath, the fallen orange globes rest like polished stones on the ends of jewelry.

  It rained in January, a newsworthy event, and last week. Because of that, the gleaners’ shoes will cake with black clay; and after stepping flatfooted to their cars in the dirt lot, they will drive home in their socks so their car mats will not be clumped with black mud. The gleaners are people of heart, who, on their own time and for their own reasons, hack off, dig up, pick, pluck, rake, or rack a harvest of food that would otherwise succumb to weed, worm, and fungus after the paid pickers have been through. Their harvest goes to pass-out programs, that is to say, to soup kitchens and the like, to the homeless whom some forces attempt to drive out.

  I know these things because I, too, have gleaned. A four-inch curved knife and two hours on a Saturday is all I need. Saturdays, there are often a hundred people in the rows. Now, when I begin again, it will be Wednesdays, and there will be maybe only eight, mostly retired people or schoolteachers, I am presently on leave from the lab. This time, not medical. The fields are only about five miles from my house, so it is not much of a sacrifice to do this. I do not particularly count myself among the good folk mentioned here. What I will say, it beats a smelly gym; I get my exercise.

  October was the last time I came, for the peppers. The peppers are a sight to see. Motorists pull their cars up into the bike lanes along Sand Canyon, Jeffrey, Harvard, and Culver, to sit for a moment and gaze at the feast of color in this colorless geography: orange, yellow, light green, dark green, red. The peppers are lovely.

  Sometimes, even when I am not gleaning, I drive this back road for a portion of the nineteen miles to go see Ray Vega at the CHP substation down San Juan way. I cut over to the freeway at Alton to join one leg of the wishbone at the juncture of 5 and 405 called the infamous El Toro Y. There, cars bump like spermatozoa till they find a lane of the six-lane channel to freely flow through. That is, I take the back roads from the lab unless the day is one with high, white clouds in our normally uninspired sky. Those days, or with no bright peppers to see, I’ll go two or three miles out of my way down another freeway to take the 405 south, hoping for the sight of a passenger plane coming in for a landing at John Wayne, the beast moving ever so slowly only hundreds of feet above the commuters. I’ve seen a day-moon balance on an airplane’s tail over the freeway, or an orange sun against a lavender sky ride a Cessna’s back. I do not mind the other cars then, for the slow traffic is almost an agreement, as though we’ve forsworn erratic speed so that everyone can see this show of odd gravity. Especially in spring, before the smog and heat sets in, the skyworks are pleasant. Marine airshows will pull drivers to the side of the roads, where they get out of their cars and gawk. People filling their tanks at service stations turn and look to the skies. Sometimes I have seen, floating over the white towers of office buildings recently erupted from limabean fields, military sentry planes with radar turkey-platters on their backs, coming in for a landing. And I have seen the pregnant cargo planes swim slowly through the skies over Mexican workers in the strawberry fields, and shuddered from the jets cracking the air with continuous noise.

  The best, the absolute best, though, of these small miracles, occurred one day after I had been to the scene of a poisoning. I will tell anyone that if he or she—and it is usually a she—decides one day to kill herself, please do not use drain cleaner, lye, and the various acids. I would say, You will die a hideous, grotesquely painful death. Your tissues will spew about wherever you will writhe. You will tear your fingernails from their beds. You will rip your own lips off, shit your pants, and vomit black and green fluid. I tell this for contrast, to explain what I saw at ten o’clock and what I saw at five o’clock one autumn day.

  That hour, on the 405, when there still existed a grassy median between the north- and south-running lanes wide enough for six cars to line up across it like a police blockade, the sky at the bottom was a deep tangerine and above it a purple-blue. Traffic on both sides of the median slowed to a crawl. I was meeting Raymond for dinner in Dana Point, and I did not want to be late. The slow traffic must be an accident, I thought. Then at a wide curve I saw the slow spot, the cars picking up speed just beyond. No stalled or crumpled vehicles clutched the shoulders, no Cal-Trans cones were out. My turn was coming to creep by and ogle, because ahead, with stately neck extended and one lone staring eye set, it seemed, to car occupants, there stood a great blue heron, patient or maybe merely bewildered, I couldn’t tell which. Its motions always slow, it raised one foot as if to take a step, but didn’t. What thing was this, whose four-foot stature and accusing eye, whose preposterous black plumes thrust backward from the top like a Boy Scout with a cowlick, could slow a cascade of metal tonnage to a crawl?

  When my car was nearly even, the sun broke one last ray across the coastal hills like a laser beam striking the bird. It took wing, thrusting out its neck and yellow forebill, then retracting its neck again into the shoulders for flight. That evening, coming back from seeing Raymond up Pacific Coast Highway through Laguna Beach, I stopped at a bookstore and bought my first bird book. My heart would celebrate that freak of time, forgetting the morning’s gruesome visions. I would remember the dinner with Raymond, and I would celebrate that moment when human beings with every conceivable background, in every conceivable state of repair and disrepair, of urgency and dullness, removed from their particular lives and away from time and corruption for scant minutes to honor a heron. These are the things we must come back to. The heron itself, and the people who would pause.

  I am on my way to see Raymond again. Once again, it will be for dinner. Yolanda is East. Ray called her, told her he’d be having dinner with me, as if to say: See, I’m doing everything aboveboard here. I will tell Raymond tonight that if Yolanda is still troubled by our friendship, I won’t be doing this again. He’ll protest, and I will insist. Some things you just must give up for the sake of others. Joe Sanders understands my relationship with Raymond. If there is any jealousy or worry, I have not seen it. But I will do this as much for Raymond as Yolanda.

  A therapist would say I’m in self-punishment mode, but I don’t think so. I do not feel I should be on leave, and in fact I was back on the job Monday by noon. After the incident in Nevada, Stu Hollings and the sheriff himself had me in to headquarters. This was a big deal, going to the sheriff’s, sitting down across from him in his office, facing his gray pin-striped suit, his pale yellow shirt and gray-and-yellow fleur-de-lis tie with the onyx tie tack in it. We rarely ever see him except in newspaper photos. He spends his days in ways I can’t imagine, his nights with politicians and rich people from Newport. Or so we think. Why did I need this? I was already back at work. I felt fine. I didn’t need to go talk to the dude. Stu tried to send me to the county shrink, but I refused. We were too busy, I said; I don’t need it. “You only think you don’t,” Stu said. “This will catch up to you, and then we’ll have another disability on our hands; in terms of cost, you’ll be saving the county money—think of it that way
.” Stu Hollings, I’ve come to learn, is not my favorite sort of person. He said, “The sheriff wants you to do this.” I said, “The sheriff doesn’t even know who I am.”

  It was not so bad, the meeting with the sheriff. He told war stories about when he was on patrol. He told a joke about the Heiny Lick maneuver, the trick where you bear-hug someone who’s choking, and didn’t look at me till the last moment, but at Stu. And then the been-around eyes quieted, and he said, “We labor and wait, Smokey. Labor and wait,” and I didn’t know what he meant then and don’t now. When we shook hands, mine disappeared.

  Then Stu and I were back on the street, walking to the lab, and I was saying, Sure, I’ll take the rest of the afternoon off. And sure, I’ll keep the appointment.

  That was five weeks ago. I have not spoken with Joe or anyone at the lab for three of those weeks, except for a follow-up call to the woman I was forced to see and try to tell how it feels to whack someone.

  Cipriano Rycken is in a coma, the result of perpetual seizure—status epilepticus, they call it. The muscles of his body grabbed and ground like a seized motor. Such strenuous action of the muscles brings on fierce heat, hyperthermia, as it is called. He simply cooked almost to death. Cooked, not choked, though he could have done that too. Continuous convulsions over a period of time destroy the muscle cells, sending residue to the kidneys, which clog and eventually fail. He may die.

  I thought, when Phillip gave me the Valium, that we had Cipriano. The flailing desisted. The tremors calmed, though he was still blue and gasping for breath. Now he suffers the effects of post-hypoxic encephalopathy, or oxygen deprivation.

  Phillip knew what he was doing, shoving me the Valium, but it would’ve been better if he’d had something injectable. It was an hour’s ride to Vegas, Phillip in the front with me, Constance in the back, Cipriano’s legs in her lap until he started jerking again. Phillip said, “Sit on his legs,” and I said no. I had her get in front, on Phillip’s lap. She stayed bent over like that till we reached the freeway; by then the car phone had a cell to lock into, but when we called the paramedics they said we’d be just as quick heading for the hospital ourselves.