A World the Color of Salt (25 page)

Her ex-husband was selling the business, coming back to the Midwest with her, Rowena said. He'd suffered a mild heart attack since the murder. “I just don't want us to go back there and we're out of sight and out of mind.”

I let her show me every single piece she had in the folder, and told her again that we'd do our very best to find her son's killers, that I had a lot of faith in our law-enforcement personnel. She shook hands with me when she left. No tears, not even wet eyes, but a droop cutting sharply on either side of her lips, almost down to the chin.

After work I drove to Patricia's. She wasn't there. I passed Roland's number 210. No lights. I did this three evenings in a row, after calling her machine throughout the day. On the weekend I tried I don't know how many times to reach her by phone, and drove by twice.

My brother, Nathan, called. He said, “If you want to visit the folks Christmas, I'll pay your way out.” I told him I hate Florida.

“You're being petulant,” he said.

“I'm busy, Nathan.”

“One of these days they're going to be gone and how then will you feel?”

“Guess I'll deal with that later.”

“You're heartless, Samantha. A regular stone.”

“Nathan, I have nothing in common with them.”

“How about they wiped your little fanny when you were a baby? They fed you, didn't they?”

“Let me work this out my own way, okay, Nathan? They know I love them.”

“In an abstract way.”

“Yes, in an abstract way. I love the
thought
of them, happy in their Stratoloungers. Going clubbing, making pot roasts, whatever it is they do. Who are you to tell me how to feel about them? I'll see them in my own time, don't worry.”

He doesn't understand because he's a miniature of them. It's funny how it happened in our family. My parents were straight arrows when Nathan was growing up. Then, in the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies, they got weird with minor drugs and did sneaky shit on each other, and I guess I wasn't old enough to handle it. I went a bit tweako myself. Straightened up before they did, but by the time they came around, they were religious, I was in Vegas, and, I'm sorry, I just don't want to hear it.

For one second while talking to him, though, I recalled Rowena Dwyer's face and wondered if those puzzled, distant expressions ever crossed my parents' countenances. And if so, I was sorry. Crum, maybe I'd have to go Christmas shopping anyway.

“You can come Christmas shopping with me, Joe,” I said when he asked me out. We were standing by my car at the lab when he said he wanted to take me to dinner.

We did eat, we did shop, we did fight. We argued when I said I wanted to mix it up with Roland Dugdale because I couldn't get in touch with Patricia. Joe said I should mind my own business. Oo, the
wrong
thing to say to a Smokey-girl.

Before that, though, in the darkness of the fanciest restaurant I'd been in in a long time, Joe kissed me several times and I thought I was going to slide off the cushions onto the floor. He was wearing some sweet-smelling thing on his face, and though I can't stand being blasted by a woman's perfume, her coming at me down an office aisle or ahead of me in a store, it's a fact that men's colognes do all the right, or possibly wrong, things to me.

Joe had a smidgen too many bourbon-and-waters, and I'll say I loved the white zin. So when the back of my hand slid down to the well-earned round of Joe's belly and Joe said he
was losing his girlish figger, I looked at him leeringly and said a thing I shouldn't have, smiling: “More cushion for the pushin', darlin'.”

“Why, Smokey, you do have a mouth,” he said, and I swear he was going to attack me right there on the leather bench.

“There was this famous actress in the forties—oh, I can't remember her name.”

“Yes?” he said, drawing a finger down the side of my face and across my lower lip as I talked.

“I don't know, I wish I could remember. She was real famous, real wholesome-looking. She had very round cheeks and robust lips, shall we say. Not someone you'd think a reporter would catch with his camera under a restaurant tablecloth performing fellatio on her date.”

Joe looked across the room, grinning while he thought about that. “Think there're any reporters here?” He lifted the tablecloth and peered underneath. He was about to say something very serious and lecherous to me, and I probably would've responded with the same, but the mussels and lobster were delivered thereafter, and that precipitated slight musings about where, exactly, various sea creatures come from, where they are farmed, in what waters, and I started talking about diving and what divers do, and one thing led to another.

I said, “Remember, Joe, you're the one said criminals are stupid. So, stupid Roland Gene Dugdale brings a goddamned diver's collet to a crime and leaves it there. Nice of him, I'd say. I'm going out there. Saturday. I am.” Ruined a dinner.

We'd driven in separate cars. We stood in front of mine, both of us rigid enough to know the night was over.

He said, “What are we going to do, Smokey?”

“What do you think we should do, Joe?”

As if I'd provided an answer instead of a question, and nodding slowly, he said, “Turn down the heat for a while.”

“You know best,” I said, worker to boss, student to teacher, but it probably didn't sound that way, and it sure didn't feel that way:
I
was writing this scene;
I
knew we needed to back off awhile. Coming closer, I kissed him once again, this time tenderly, sadly, saying, “I'm sorry.”

He answered, “Me too.”

Sunday and no Patricia.

Two days before Christmas I shop, bring home presents. One was a telephone shaped like a black Mustang for pal Raymond. I took it out of The Sharper Image bag and put it on the coffee table.
Zoom. Zoom
. The thing had wheels. I raised the antenna.

The rest—a fancy pin for Patricia and junk I know my parents don't need—stayed in the one big department-store bag. I'd already forgotten what I bought my dad, and my head hurt. Nothing, of course, for Joe.

On the way home from shopping, I'd stopped at a fast-food place for a chicken sandwich. I knew what I was going to wear to work the next day, the house was clean, so what would I do all night? I didn't feel like hearing a red-faced army general talk about new developments in tank warfare on
60 Minutes
, or how yet another talented and underpaid teacher was handling problems at inner-city schools. So I took an early shower, crawled into the long ruby-colored cotton T-shirt I like best to sleep in, and combed back my wet hair. It had been two months since my haircut, and I was looking not quite so scalped; maybe not quite so Sheena Easton either, if I could even dream, but if I were a tad or two prettier, maybe I could be a Theresa Russell with a murderin' little black-leather skirt. Rebecca De Mornay—now there's somebody. Her dirty broken fingernails in that film on the train with Jon Voight . . . the girl's got guts. I could still picture her in
Risky Business
, her sleekness spinning Tom Cruise's wheels, the boy in the priceless BVDs and white socks now all grown up and just as
stupid. Long ago, though, I figured out it's best to be average. Keep a low profile, then surprise people on special occasions puttin' on the ritz. I used to be pretty, wasn't I? It's hard to tell anymore what's pretty. Or what matters. Because once dead, none of it, none of it, does, and you think, Why in the world does anyone care what anyone looks like, anyway?

I raked wispy bangs down onto my forehead and scrunched curls at the sides, the hair there grown too long to comb back anymore like Sheena. Maybe I'd go a real deep brown with red highlights, be cutesy-pie again. Were those creases at the eyes? Yep. Did I care? You bet.

No one was coming over, but I pulled out the drawer where I keep my makeup and brushed on color anyway. Two long swipes on the Cherokee cheeks—thank you, Oklahoma—so I wouldn't look so ghostie to myself. Stood there some more, staring at myself, no expression in the pigeon-gray eyes, which were, at the moment, a touch red, to match the shirt, from herbal shampoo. “Knock-knock, who's there?” I said. “Smokey.” “Smokey who? “Smokey the Bare.” I thought, Smokey the B-a-r-e, making those know-it, done-it, will-do-it-again eyes, sliding one shoulder out of the wide neck of my shirt, Oh, you hot thing. Then crying, or starting to. I said, “Ah, shit,” and went to the kitchen, reached up over the oven where I keep two bottles of booze, one fancy, one general-purpose.

In the dining room, I put on some old Peggy Lee: “Is That All There Is?”—not the rip-off by Christine Somebody, but the real thing by the real laid-back lady. I always figured Peggy Lee had a secret she'd only tell in the sack, next to the man who'd been doctor-lawyer-actor-Indian chief and owned a quiet hideaway in the mountains of both Idaho and Peru. I stole the Peggy Lee album from my mom when I left home, but Etta James and B. B. King I bought on my own. The blues side of town. Tell it like it i-is.

I sat down on the sofa, put my head back for a moment, and thought how utterly lonely I was. Southern Comfort is what I was drinking, and oh, you shouldn't mix whiskey and lonely in a low-light apartment when you're alone.

Trying to stop sniveling, I got up and emptied the contents of the plastic department-store sack, where the gifts were
stashed in gold foil boxes and wrapped with gold sparkly ribbons: a non-do-it-yourself job that set me back fourteen dollars and left me choking.

I didn't have a tree, but if I sat on the end of the couch by the window and looked west, I could see the one on my neighbor's balcony. She was a woman about my age but from another generation, if you know what I mean. Redwood slats formed the container for the tree that always sat there on my neighbor's balcony; an evergreen, ever green. Twice a year it grew nubby pale fingers, as if it were stretching to reach the balcony edge and hoist itself over, and I'd see my neighbor out there nipping them off, and for some reason that made me sad. A week ago she had decorated it with tiny blinking lights.

I set the gifts against the window under, if you will, her tree. There. Christmas. Poured just a teeny bit more Comfort and sat back on the couch. The presents looked big there. “Maybe intent makes up for crimes, Smokey-girl,” I said aloud and took another sip of whiskey.

As I leaned back, the ceiling became a movie screen where I saw the rolling hills above the reservoir, arroyo willows sticking up in the gullies like green broom heads, and
then
the little black baby in the pink bunting sleeping forever by the coyote bush and scrub where the Cessna made cornmeal of new tract homes.

In this work you learn to force the pictures away because they're worse in memory than in real life, some of them anyway. A puzzle to me, why that happens. The first time I saw a body, a traffic-accident victim with mortal head wounds, I told my partner, who was my own dear Bill at the time, that I thought it would've bothered me more. He said, “Just wait.” Bill knew something then that I didn't: The pictures don't just come back to you—they become a
part
of you. You understand why man developed impersonal speech for it: the deceased, the corpse, cadaver, remains; the stiff, the floater; fish-food, decomps, burn-ups, swingers, jumpers, blues. Sometimes I think we who do this type of work must be some kind of strange. Wouldn't it be nice to have a job where you go to work and your biggest problem of the day is placating some poor homeowner who wants his escrow speeded up, or figuring
how you'll get the new-parts shipment inventoried and stacked before you lose your strong kid back to college?