A World the Color of Salt (32 page)

“I could ask in a way that wouldn't jeopardize her.”

“It's a good thing you're not working for me,” he said.

“Now, what does that mean?”

“High on creativity, but I'd say sometimes low on judgment. That's how I'd mark your performance evaluation.”

“Oh, thanks.” I was genuinely hurt, but I couldn't show it. “What about initiative? What about quality?”

“Quality, yes.”

He stood up from the desk, put his hands on my shoulders, and pulled me to him. “Yes, yes, and yes.”

Up my arms went, around his neck. I kissed him. In the office.

When I went out of there, his scent still fresh in my senses, but his words also, I thought, I wonder if I could get along with him, all day, all night.

I packed that afternoon so I'd be ready to leave early Saturday morning. I packed stuff for a week, even some semi-nice clothes, thinking maybe if I got a cold trail in Vegas, I'd go on up to San Francisco and see an old friend. Then I was twirling my thumbs. What do I do now, between five-thirty and five-thirty?

I took a chance that Yolanda, Raymond's girlfriend, wasn't home from her day-care job yet, and called his house. He'd been doing overlap shifts during the holidays, logging extra hours because Yolanda was really putting the muscle on to get
married and he needed the extra dough if they were going to do it, so I wasn't sure he'd be there, but he was.

“Ray,” I said, “look, I'm sorry if I shouldn't call—”

“No problem at all, Smokes. Yolanda and I, we had a talk. She's cool now. She's got it. Friends, she says. As long it's just friends and nothin' else.”

“I won't ordinarily call anyway. Not everybody can understand.”

“You in trouble, hon?”

I said, “Ray, what do you think of accompanying me to Carson tonight?”

“No can do. That's why I'm getting to work overtime—they need me out there on the highways and byways. It's going to be party time till New Year's. Besides, that is not a smart thing to do. That is not a kinder, gentler city. There was a freeway shooting out there off Wilmington just last week.”

“I want to find Phillip Dugdale, Raymond. Listen, his brother's gone from the apartments, moved out, and so's Patricia. Well, she hasn't moved out, but she's left her job and I can't get in touch with her, and I'm telling you there's something walla-walla going on.”

“Why don't you wait till tomorrow? Maybe I can get away then.”

“Tomorrow I'm leaving on vacation. To San Francisco.” I didn't tell him about the postcard.

“Boy, one operation and you figure you like it out there in the world, huh?”

“Don't give me a bad time, Raymond.”

“Hey, I gotta run, babe. I just got out of the shower. Call me when you get back, huh?”

“Absolutely. You be careful now, Raymond.”

“You're the one going out there in a little Jap car.”

It was going to be a long night. I turned on the news while eating a microwave dinner. Protesters in Irvine were carrying signs that read
PEACE
,
DUDE
.

Afterward, I went to the bedroom, reached inside a fireplace I never use, and removed my .38 Colt revolver with the stainless-steel barrel that I hadn't cleaned in a long time. I sat on the bed, a newspaper spread out and the kit with the Gunslick, cotton patches, and cleaning rod in the middle. The gun
seemed heavy as I lifted it. I gave away a two-shot derringer backup when I left the force, and now I wished I hadn't. At the time, I thought it was a silly little gun, a .22 single action, which I never liked, but Bill had given it to me, telling me, No, no, a twenty-two's all you're going to need in a situation, close up. At least I could carry it in my pocket holster, and did. I could cock it in there and it would look like I was grabbing a ring of keys. Wearing an ankle backup didn't work too well with women, at least not for me, and wearing it Texas Ranger–style, tucked in a weak-hand holster in the small of your back, always seemed awkward to me. I gave the .22 to a copper since transferred to Michigan. She invited me to her house for dinner, and I paid her back with that. Her mom stopped by as I was leaving, and I remember her saying, “Are you a lady policeman too?” Yep. We were lady policemen.

Closing the cylinder, I worked the action. Wow—stiff. I stood up and took the stance. In the mirror, the gun wavered. Out of shape, Smokey. Way out of practice.

After cleaning the Colt, I slipped it into its rug and found space in my suitcase, then went to the living room to look at the reflections over the bay. The light was off and I left it off. I walked to the window where the gifts were stacked, and pulled back the drapes. Moonlight made the gold paper on the gifts glisten. I hadn't even given Ray his Mustang. The paper banner with his name on it was still taped to the antenna.

Out on the bay, white ripples scalloped the surface of the water. It might have been a painting on black velvet, the salt-grass backlit, the outline of ragged pampas off to one side. Below my apartment, a car's headlights came on, and a possum's eyes lit up red in the near brush.

Maybe I'd go knock on Mrs. Lambert's door, see if Farmer wanted to go for an early weekend walk. Farmer and I, we think well together.

It isn't that Californians love to drive. We just
drive
, like we just brush our teeth.

Still, it surprised me that there were so many cars on the freeway before the light broke Saturday. Weekdays it's bizarre: You can get on the freeway at 4:45 in the morning and see thousands of taillights shrinking in the distance. Farmer would love it, all those little red bunny tails inviting chase, except to him the red might be Garfield-the-Cat-orange, and Garfield himself might be yellow. Joe and I had an argument once about whether dogs could see color. He called his vet to check. The vet said no. But I remembered reading somewhere that they do, so I called Washington, D.C., and found two scientists who said, yes-indeedy, dogs do discriminate colors, just differently from you and me; and so I collected from Joe a high-priced lunch at the Boardwalk, ordering wine as well.

I was thinking this and then wondering if I'd have a job to come back to, if I'd be having lunch with Joe at the Boardwalk ever again and be making bad jokes about Glop in a Crock-Pot. With county cutbacks in the offing, they could trim a Smokey Brandon and not miss her a bit, though they wouldn't gain much from the saved salary.

As my six-cylinder whined up the El Cajon Pass, heading into Victor Valley, the L.A.-syndrome shackles began to fall off, but as I approached Victorville, I thought of the license plate on the Bronco parked at Patricia's apartment complex, which I later learned did belong to Roland, and wondered why a guy who lives in Huntington Beach, formerly of Garden Grove, would buy a car in Victorville.

A gray Taurus kept pace with me, I noticed, and I remembered that when I left the lab Friday night, a gray Taurus kept making all the turns I did, even down my street and into my lot, and I thought, Hm, here's a guy maybe I could carpool with. I could carpool with him all the way up to Vegas, it seemed, if that was the same guy. Picking up speed to test him out, I was flying, and so was he. Then he surged ahead of me and around a big truck and then I saw later he got lodged between two of them and couldn't pull out for a third one on his right. Ho-hum.

I drifted right through, or rather, over, Victorville, the city getting so upscale it has its own massive discount stores and a Holiday Inn I could see from the freeway, and a more unattractive shade of turquoise it could not be.

This is the territory of ugly names: Victorville, Cleghorn Road, Barstow. And out of Barstow, Boron, not the place of covered wagons and Ronald Reagan advertising for Twenty Mule Team Borax, but the locale of a federal prison camp, where, I was reminded, I had a relative. The camp was a former radar tracking station. Now it houses five hundred or so inmates, one of them a cousin on my mother's side, Daniel Cross, a man I've never met. Last time I talked to her, she told me Danny, as she calls him, wound up there on a drug-related charge. I thought, driving by, I should go introduce myself. But why? It's not that I condemn people who get in trouble, not the way some of my copper buddies do who're absolutely hard-ass on all miscreants. Who say arrests are a way of life for these people, that the jug's just another word for a change of scenery. I hadn't quite reached that point of belief, but the work does give you a different take on life, and even that changes: First you hate 'em, then you cry for 'em. Then you hate 'em, then you befriend 'em. Then you hate 'em. Then you hate 'em. I knew there'd be types in there who'd hold a guy down and pour a strip of nondairy creamer on him, touch it off with a lighter. It burns like napalm. I wouldn't be stopping there today.

The landscape became less desolate soon, between Barstow and Baker, and I took pleasure in the soft rust colors of sandstone crust and the deep blue shadows stairstepping down the craggy ridges in the near distance. In the far distance, the landscape softened as though a painter had swept a brushful
of milk over the canvas to plead away the harshness. Slight trees at roadside knuckled with parasites. In the slow-vehicle lane next to me, a truck laden with pipe crawled toward Halloran Summit, and just ahead of it, a silver tour bus loaded with Vegas bettors droned on, and as I pulled away approaching the ridges, I saw the broken black stone left by the glaciers, and the bleached sand that had swept up the sides of the mountains from the valley floor in lonely drafts.

Ten miles before reaching Baker is Zzyzx Road, as in
eye
and
six
, and down it to the east about five miles is the Desert Studies Center. A zealot of one sort or another squatted the land many years back and built a spa, hotel, and church that were in operation till the BLM—Bureau of Land Management, a big honcho in these parts—confiscated the buildings. I knew about this because Jeri Landsforth, our forensic anthropologist, taught a class in insects there two years ago. Who knows, if our department had had the training dollars then, maybe I'd be pushing around insects with tweezers the size of knitting needles today, or out in the brush bothering birds. Joe S. told me, my first week in the lab, You'll get one-sided here. Have a life apart from this, he'd say. Get involved in your community. Be around kids if you can. Enjoy your family. Join a baseball team. Play badminton or racquetball or bingo. If I were out of Building 16 more often, maybe I wouldn't get “possessed.”

By the time I reached Baker and stopped, the temperature was warm enough to be summer in most other places of the world. In the last week of December the so-called Yukon Express had made noble attempts to break through the desert heat, but failed. My body wouldn't have dry skin where I didn't know I
had
skin if the storm had made it this far, because it would've pushed through to California too. Orange County was into big-time drought, at the same time that land developers were spilling millions of gallons of water on graded land to keep the dust down, and cities were setting up the Water Police and cajoling us to take sixty-second showers. No thanks. This citizen is going to order water every time she eats in a restaurant too, so there. Put me in jail. Then release me in fifteen minutes.

I drove up to Bun Boy and saw it was boarded up, then
wheeled back to the omnipresent Denny's, where I parked under the inadequate shadow of a palm and stood by my car to remove the long-sleeved denim shirt I had on over my white T. The bumper sticker of a car parked next to mine with the blue-and-black plates from Baja California read:
NO A LAS DROGAS
! So—some Mexicans don't like drugs any better than we do. One time Raymond asked me to go blue-shark fishing in Mexico, before he moved in with Yolanda. I wish I had. But I was sick then. He brought back a seventy-pounder, showed the pictures around, and said, “Is that an ugly thing or what?” I said, “Which, the one standing on its tail or the one beside it?” and he said for someone who chickened out, I sure sounded jealous to him.

Inside, after taking care of business, I ordered a coffee and bagel, then sat imagining how it would be to take a vacation with Joe. Hours to talk with him, to ask what he was like as a little boy, what he wanted to be when he grew up; what his parents were like. To ask who his best friend was in grammar school—those kinds of questions. I wondered about things like who did Joe vote for in the governor's race, and I was afraid to find out. And I wondered if he and Jennifer ever wanted more than one child. That night in his apartment, after we'd finished the first time, he laughed and said, “An old man with a weak heart has just been seduced by a woman with none.” I said, “Wait a
minute
. Who was it who kissed who right on the ever-lovin' lips in the
office
, huh? You started this whole thing.” And then I asked him when was the first time he ever thought about me, and he said, “That's naughty.” I pressed him, and he looked like he was thinking, and then said, “What'd you say your name was?”