A World the Color of Salt

by Noreen Ayres

  Even as I bore down on the accelerator, and the back of my seat was being flailed, and with the wretched couple locked together in the front, still in my mind’s eye I could see Patricia in her neck collar, shorts, sweatshirt, and blue canvas shoes walking away from me, looking back as she passed the corner of the shed and the goat pen, as if she didn’t know me, as if she were afraid of me. I called to her, but she continued in the direction of the drill site and Roland, clutching at the white thing at her throat.

  Annie I left lying on the ground.

  In the hospital, I sat in a tiny waiting room with Phillip. I could not supply much information to the doctors. I simply didn’t know what had happened to Cipriano. Later I would learn that he suffered anaphylactic shock, a phenomenon most often seen in allergic reactions to drugs or insect bites, but, with Cipriano, undetermined. The body, for reasons not well understood, turns savagely upon itself. I was told it could have been precipitated by an allergic reaction to the artificial sweetener he had used in his coffee, or by sudden exercise, sudden cold, peanuts, or seminal fluid–even that: Imagine, someone said later, the surprise, a guy with his date and the extraordinary earth movement beneath him.

  For the moment, the three of us stood in the waiting room, puzzled and afraid, then Constance went to brush her teeth. It escaped me until that moment that she had a purse with her, had managed to keep hold of it through the mayhem across the lake.

  The authorities had to be dealt with. I’d made the call to the Las Vegas police as soon as Cipriano’s gurney went through the double doors. They were on the way.

  But now, in that vacant hour, I said to Phillip, “I don’t know why she did that, Phillip,” meaning Annie. “I don’t.” I felt cold and began to shiver and wonder what I did with my jacket. He sat across from me on a brown vinyl couch, his wrists between his knees, making slow washing movements with his hands, and said nothing, but sighed. I said, “I realize you didn’t need to come here.”

  “You’re thinking I hate you,” he said.

  I nodded, or something like it, and stood and went to look at a blank wall.

  He said, “You could use a personality transplant.”

  When I turned to look at him, he was cool, kicked back, legs extended on the floor. The light from a television with the sound turned off was flashing from some sort of explosions in a commercial, and it turned the fine lines in Phillip’s face to deep scratches by the ears.

  Phillip said, “I want to say something, and I’m only going to say it once, dig? Stay away from my brother. I want him left alone.”

  “That’s up to other people, don’t you think?”

  “You can do something. To make up.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  He sat up and sucked in his cheeks and looked at the ceiling. Then cut his eyes to me and said, “You might look better without that humongous chip on your shoulder, ever think of that?”

  “I can’t do anything. Think of what you’re saying. I don’t even want to do anything. My friend is with your brother and she is not right, there’s something wrong with her. She’s taking drugs. She’s not herself.”

  “No, now you think of what you’re saying. Your friend is not herself—she’s alive, isn’t she? You don’t know but what she was on the sniff before, now, do you? Roland isn’t going to hurt her. My brother is the one who’s not himself. He did what he did because of her.”

  “Because of who? Patricia?”

  “Mom.”

  “You mean the Kwik Stop,” I said. “You mean the murder at the Kwik Stop in California.”

  “I mean my brother—” He broke off, lowered his head, and pulled his spread fingers through his hair at the temples. “Mom got us going sometimes. It’s not his fault. I can turn him around, I know I can. Don’t expect me to tell anyone else this, but I am going to tell you what went down that day, okay? And you are going to keep it to yourself.” His voice dropped. “Dig?”

  I gave a quick nod and sat down but didn’t look at him.

  “And that way we can put a thing behind us. You can quit worryin’ about Patricia, because she’s going to be all right. We have a deal here?”

  “You can’t seriously think we would,” I said.

  “All right. I’m going to tell you anyway. It’s up to you, then. But I am asking you not to harass my ass. You can understand that. I don’t think you’re a hysterical woman. I think you can handle this. Can’t you?”

  “In any other circumstance I’d tell you to get fucked.”

  “Fine. That’s my mom layin’ out there in the dirt, no matter what, Scooter. And it was you put holes in her.”

  I hugged myself and bent forward.

  “You sick?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, then.”

  And then he told me what happened the day of Jerry Dwyer’s murder. He told how he and his mother and Roland were going to meet at the Kwik Stop and pull a job. Be there, or be square, Roland told him. Phillip didn’t want to do it. It’d been years since they clipped a place. Roland said they needed money to bring up the rig from Texas. We could all be rich in a matter of weeks, he told him. Phillip said no.

  “But you don’t argue with my brother,” he said. “He’s bone-head stubborn, always was.” Phillip wasn’t painting that day; he had a chiropractor’s appointment that morning. But he had no transportation. His license had been yanked, and for once he was trying to live up to it. He was trying to work the AA program because it was the only way he was going to save himself, he said. He walked the three miles to the chiropractor’s, the whole time what Roland told him weighing on his mind so that even after, his muscles did not relax and his shoulder did not unbind. He took the bus to Costa Mesa, where he knew Annie and Roland would be waiting for him. They liked the Kwik Stop because it was close to two freeways. “The goddamned bus,” he said. “I took the bus.”

  “By the time I got there, the yellow tape was up.” So he walked to the next stop, and waited.

  The job went down pretty much as Joe Sanders called it. While Annie was hanging around, Jerry Dwyer accused her of lifting a candy bar. She got mad and Roland couldn’t calm her. She said, Let’s do it fucking now. When the kid saw the gun, he put two hands on the counter as if to leap over, as if he were coming for her. She fired once and he ran, and she kept firing, but it didn’t put him down. Roland went for the other gun once the kid got behind the storage-room door; he’d be able to identify them both. Annie couldn’t make it again in prison, Roland just knew.

  Phillip leveled his eyes at me and said, “Roland is not a bad person. He cares, he really does. It broke him up, what he did. He helps people. What could he do, with her like that? He was protecting her.”

  “The boy he killed was twenty years old.”

  “I just wanted you to know.”

  “That is pure bullshit, the whole thing. Is Patricia in serious trouble with your brother? Is he going to hurt her? You have to tell me this.”

  “I don’t think so,” Phillip said.

  “What else would you say. Why did I ask?”

  “I think she can help him, if we stay out of it.”

  “She can’t help herself across the street. And what about now, with . . .” What about Roland seeing Annie, her big feet cambered out, dead with her boots on in the red Nevada dirt. “What’s he going to do now?”

  “He’ll be relieved, believe me. She should have been harder on me. I’m the oldest. She was harder on him.”

  “He’ll kill her, won’t he?”

  “Of course he won’t kill her. I told you.”

  I looked at him a long time before saying, “She called me from Jubilee’s in Long Beach. She said you hurt a girl. Or was it Roland?”

  Phillip stood up. He was shaking his head, walking away from me now. I was afraid he was going out.

  “Hey—”

  His hand was resting on the door, his back to me. The line of his western-style shirt across the shoulders made them look broader than they were. I
felt a terrible, awful sadness, and I didn’t know who for.

  “I did hurt a girl,” he said, walking out into the hallway now, stopping, looking down the hallway at some different terrain. The air was better there.

  “How?” I asked him.

  “I slapped her around. She sat down on the ground outside and Patricia thought it was more than it was.” He looked at me with no expression I could discern. Then he said, “I was drunk.”

  “Which one of you broke into Patricia’s apartment?”

  “Roland does some shit. He likes to shake people up. He doesn’t mean anything by it.”

  “How’d you know where we lived?”

  “Ran your plates.”

  “How could you do that?”

  “If I tell you that you’ll know as much as I do, now, won’t you?” As he looked away, the expression in his eyes seemed dead or far away. Then he said, “We have some buddies who sell cars. They can run ’em.”

  How I hated this family. The witch that spawned this.

  Phillip moved back into the room, and sat down, and began to talk some more, even as Constance came in, combed and with a new flush to her cheeks. I’d moved to the chair opposite. He said, “No person should endure abuse of any kind.” Constance was watching me, the both of them together on the vinyl bench holding hands, a tiny frown appearing between her brows. “And if they do, they’re fools.”

  “It’s their own damn fault, is that what you mean? Well, Phillip, what do you think of me? Would you say this ‘copette’ is a number-one fool? ’Cause if you do, all the fast freddie ain’t out of your system.”

  “No, ma’am,” he said. “I think you’re a person trying to do good and came close but no cigar.”

  I am not the only one on leave. Billy Katchaturian is. His is for infraction of taste, and possibly more, though the bosses are trying to keep it hush-hush. It wasn’t Joe who told me, but Trudy Kunitz. She said, “You hear what Billy Katch did?” She was sitting on my desk and swung one denim shrouded leg to and fro, the heel of her sneaker rattling the steel case of my desk, and I wondered if she and Billy ever got together, these two; and decided no, they did not. She said, “With some photos. He’s hung out to dry, I think.”

  I smiled and said, “What were they? Pornographic? All the girls he made it with the last five years, or what?” At the time, I had not even mentally included myself in that number, having put Billy’s pillows and white fluffy cat out of mind, though the memory rushed in soon enough.

  “He had a show, down at Laguna Beach?”

  “Yes?”

  “His pictures, all in black and white,” she said, spreading both hands before her. She leaned closer. Two tarnished silver arrows fell forward from her hair, swinging from her earlobes. “Splatter,” she said. “Every one. Can you believe it? He calls it ‘Lifelines.’ Is that a crock?”

  I’m passing now through Mission Viejo. I’m thinking of what Phillip said to me—about being a person who’s trying to do good—and the words comfort me but I wish it wasn’t he who said it, Phillip with his piss-poor yellow snake and punctured peacock. Brake lights are coming on. The flow always thickens before Crown Valley, but I know it will open up again between here and Avery.

  Roland and Patricia have disappeared. Roland, of course, is on the run for the Dwyer murder, my dimpled and measled friend in tow. I told the Las Vegas police and the Orange County sheriff what Phillip told me, as I’m sure he knew I would, but Phillip is not repeating any of it, just as he said, and the detectives visit him every Friday.

  Who pulls the strings? I ask myself. And I asked Joe, each time I saw him before I called a halt for a while: Joe-baby, do you think it’s getting any better? Meaning the state of things: the load at the lab; the gang shootings we now just call “Santa Anas”; his knee that hurts every January; the big and the little wars. And he has said he doesn’t think so. He’s told me that he loves me. I have not told him back. I do, but I can’t bring myself to say it yet.

  On the right side of my vehicle, I hear a high, squeaking sound. Oh, great, I think. There’s something wrong with my car. I push the button to roll down the passenger window to hear it better. A symphony of high-pitched yipping wafts in. I look and look again, thinking there are birds, maybe, on the wires. But no. In the gully that runs along the freeway are tall willows, the tops still at a level ten feet below. It is there the sound is coming from. I finally recognize it: A chorus of coyotes.

  The humans on the freeway above have slowed for this chilling song. At Back Bay, of course, there are coyotes. They prevent the meso-predator release of racoons and weasels, which in turn would eat the eggs of the endangered least tern, a beautiful white bird with a black crown and an expressive eyeline, who makes its vulnerable nest in the sand. I’ve seen coyotes all the years I’ve lived in California, loping along residential streets early mornings and evenings, tails tucked well down between their legs, no more fear in their eyes than a wary gang member on his way to a wedding party.

  This valley of cries beside the freeway says to me that life goes on, in all its variety, in all its single-mindedness. Stay alive, it says. Stay alive.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For invaluable help with the details of criminalistics, my deep appreciation goes to Larry Ragle, retired director of the Orange County Sheriff-Coroner’s Forensic Science Services Center and instructor of criminalistics at the University of California at Irvine; and to the staff of the center.

  For information relating to law-enforcement protocol and investigative techniques, my sincere thanks to Long Beach police officers Larry N. Chowen and Robert Mahakian; Los Angeles County Deputy Sheriff Scott Anger; California Highway Patrol Officer Gary Alfonso; writer and private investigator Bruce Haskett; writer and former Foster City police officer Tom Arnold; and to Travis J. More and Wayne Apfeld.

  For information concerning the creatures and plants of nature, recognition goes to the Friends of Newport Bay; the Environmental Nature Center of Newport Beach; and Rick Weiss of Science News.

  For additional technical information, I am indebted to my friends Theodore Waltuch, M.D., and Dawn Waltuch, R.N. Thanks also to Ellen Sullivan, and to Ed Keyes of Ed’s Sporting Goods, and Nancy Kawamura, of Orange County Harvest.

  To my friends in Orange County Fictionaires, thanks greater than words.

  My sincere appreciation to the staff and conferees of the 1990 Squaw Valley Writers’ Conference for the opportunity of exposure and for sage advice.

  Special thanks go to Michael Silverblatt, host of National Public Radio’s Bookworm on KCRW in Santa Monica, for his enthusiastic confirmation and singular wisdoms.

  Without the unswerving support of my family, this effort simply could not have gone forward. To Tom Glagola, Kathryn Ayres, Gerald and Florence Pahlka, and John and Ann Glagola, my deep appreciation for support that involved spirit, love, and personal sacrifice.

  For his energy, optimism, talent, and grace, profound thanks to Michael V. Carlisle of the William Morris Agency.

  And finally, I am indebted to my editor, Doug Stumpf, for his early faith in me. Without him, I’d still be inserting/deleting/struggling/scrapping and most of all, whining. Deepest thanks to a correctly aggressive, patient, and intelligent man. Thanks also to Erik Palma, Doug’s assistant, and to keen-eyed Randee Marullo for her diligent copyediting.

  —NOREEN AYRES

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  NOREEN AYRES is an award-winning poet and short story writer. She has also been a technical writer and freelance editor for many years. She lives in Southern California with her husband. This is her first mystery novel.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  PRAISE

  “AYRES TELLS A CRISP STORY; SHE KNOWS HER TURF”

  Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “WONDERFUL . . . A HEARTFELT AND VERY ORIGINAL DEBUT BY A TRULY TALENTED NEW WRITER . . .

  She’s sometimes funny, sometimes sp
ooky, and always perfectly fluent in the language of dread.”

  T. Jefferson Parker, author of LAGUNA HEAT

  “IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO PUT THE BOOK DOWN . . . If you like a no-nonsense, well-written novel, grab this one, it’s first rate.”

  Knoxville News-Sentinel

  “TRULY ORIGINAL . . . A WORLD THE COLOR OF SALT marks the long overdue arrival of a major new talent on the mystery scene.”

  Donald A. Stanwood, author of THE MEMORY OF EVA RYKER

  “SMOKEY IS A DELIGHT”

  The West Coast Review of Books

  COPYRIGHT

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for the use of the following songs:

  “If I Fell”: Words and Music by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Copyright © 1964 by Northern Songs. All rights controlled and administered by MCA Music Publishing, a division of MCA Inc., New York, NY, 10019.

  “Hey Bobby”: Written by K.T. Oslin. Copyright © 1988 by Wooden Wonder Music. Administered by PolyGram International Tunes, Inc.

  “I Can Help”: Written by Billy Swan. Copyright © 1974 by TEMI Combine Inc. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission.

  AVON BOOKS

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  The Hearst Corporation

  1350 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, New York 10019

  Published by arrangement with the author

  ISBN 0-380-71571-6

  EPub Edition November 2014 ISBN 9780062376909

  A WORLD THE COLOR OF SALT. Copyright © 1992 by Noreen Ayres. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.