A World the Color of Salt (42 page)

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.

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.”