A World the Color of Salt (36 page)

“Come on out here, or I'm coming in.”

In my mind, Cipriano was still forty-five-ish, slender, with a mass of black hair on his head and a bunch more sticking up out of his shirt in the back. He had most of the elements for being handsome, but he wasn't quite, though now I couldn't remember why, and despite that lack there was about him a look of worldliness that I had found compelling. I'd kid with him, making suggestive remarks, and he'd do the same with me, though I was certain he'd never violate the relationship with his wife, nor did I want him to. Such self-sacrifice on my part was not so noble as it may sound, nor was it that I understood what marriage meant. I just didn't want to disturb or disrupt a man who had been good to me. There were days I thought all he'd have to do would be to crook a finger. That was when my body was separate from me, with a will of its own, the head minding its own business, the body saying, Kiss me, you fool. I loved men and I loved what they owned; not material things, but their own clunky, solid, purposeful, and peculiar energy. My desires were not so different from what most men and women of vigor want: a deep drink of the opposite sex, not in one flavor only. I wanted every man at least once, and a few more than once, and I didn't much care what they looked like as long as they weren't mean. Their mystery is what I wanted: all they knew that I didn't. Their special awareness of the world, their privilege, their special language. By rubbing against hairy skin long enough, hard enough, I figured one day I'd ease into the pores, osmosis perfected, ease out again, both of us the wiser; then go on quest to find one I could swallow, whole.

Inside the bathroom there was utter silence for a long while. I said, “You can hide but you can't run. On the count of five, Cipriano.”

“Who is that?” His voice boomed out at me.

“It's either a bounty hunter or Marlene Dietrich. You have to come out to see.”

Silence.

“No—make that Rita Hayworth. Rita Hayworth.” I remembered now, she was his favorite.

The water trickled again and the pipes whined off. “I know that voice somewhere.” There was the rattle of the door handle long before the man emerged. I was standing with my arms crossed and one ankle laced over the other, leaning against the wall. Would he recognize me? My hair was short, it wasn't red, it'd been fifteen years and I was probably a long history away down a row of babes Cipriano had hired and fired, pampered and protected. If I could have planned for this moment, I would have dressed up, come feminized, wearing at least a dress; maybe brought a plant, or, better yet, a flask and a copy of
Playboy.

He came out. Older, God, and smaller, wearing gray slacks and a gray plaid shirt, brown slippers on his feet. Wearing glasses. His forehead was spotted both brown and purple.

He looked at me steadily as I said, “Hey, big fella, I can use a little help.”

“Shit-bones,” he said. “What in hell are you doing here, Smokey?” And then he shuffled over and grabbed me in a big hug, and I felt how bony he was and how bent for a man who used to be a full head taller than I. He patted my back as if he were not too sure this was at all okay, swatting with the palms only. Then we pulled away, and as we walked to his side of the room I said, “Shit-bones yourself, Cipriano. What in the world are
you
doing here? You don't belong here.”

As he sat on the edge of his bed, he motioned for me to take the chair. “Nothing wrong with me a little privacy wouldn't cure. I don't mean you.” He told me how he had phlebitis and fractures of the right metatarsal all at once, the foot injury from a hefty woman treading on him at a Veterans of Foreign Wars dance. He told me how he didn't like his sister but he liked her cooking; so he'd come here to the rest
home once in a while for respite, manufacturing some ill or another, and then, when he couldn't take that any longer, he'd go back home to his sister's.

“But why don't you live alone, then?” I wanted to ask about his wife and daughter. In some places, and not just New England, you wait for people to tell
you
about the deeply personal things. You ask
around
the subject.

“Aaah,” he said, with a wave of his hand. “That's no good. Hear your own voice bouncin' back at you from the walls. No, that's not for me.” A look came to his eyes. “Now that
you're
here, I'll come live with you.”

A voice from behind us said, “His name is . . .”

I looked around. Mr. Neff was going to tell me his stuffed dog's name. His long spatula fingers rested on the dog's head. As soon as my shoulders shifted around, and Cip turned his attention upon him, Mr. Neff forgot, and the bewildered look reclaimed his face. I said, “What is it? Your dog's name? He sure is pretty.” But Mr. Neff was far, far away. His eyes followed my face as I stepped over to him and patted the dog's purple head, saying, “Yes. You sure do have a mighty nice dog there,” and then I returned to my chair.

“There's only so much you can take of that, too,” Cipriano said.

Cip could walk, but he said he'd better take the wheelchair. I wheeled him down to the community room, where the big TV was playing in the corner, five wheelchairs in a row in front of it, all occupied by women. At the long folding tables other men and women sat plucking at the blankets in their laps. Some of them rested their heads forward on the table, asleep, mouths open. Others were backed up along the wall by the windows, heads lolled back, mouths wide. I said, “Cipriano. This can't be good for you here.”

“It's okay. I pinch the nurses.”

“What're you doing New Year's? You want to go gaming?”

“If you're in town, we'll do it,” he said. Then he pulled me down by my jacket sleeve and whispered in my ear: “Can you cop me some nookie with a cute little blonde?”

“Cipriano Rycken,” I said. “I don't remember you talking like that before.”

A satisfied smile crossed his face.

Eventually we got around to my story—what brought me to Vegas: the strange postcard with the waving cactus, my missing friend, my friend's current companion. When I said I thought the guy was a serious threat to society, Cipriano's glance went elsewhere and he did something inside his cheek with his tongue. “I guess I'd better tell you what I've been up to since I left you, Cip.”

We'd gone over near the windows, and now I sat facing him. It felt both strange and natural for us to be here like this. This would be the way it was if I had a grandfather. We'd sit in the window light and he'd ask me how I was doing in school. He'd tell me how it was in the old days. But this was Cipriano, and he had a wife and child I didn't know, and ran a club of dancers, or did.

“You cut your hair,” he said.

“Yes, yes, I did. It showers easy.”

He looked at me a while longer, then said: “You got kids?”

“No.”

“You ain't gay, are you?”

“No, Cipriano.”

“I only ask because of the stuff going around.”

I thought for a few seconds before I said it: “You ever hear of DES babies, Cip?”

“Don't think so.”

“Diethylstilbestrol. My mother took it so she wouldn't miscarry me. It gives some people cancer. Not me, but other things. So we jerked the plumbing.”

He thought about this for a while, then said, “You in show biz?” He wanted to make me feel beautiful.

“Well, let me think about that.”

There it was: the half-smile, the crink that always made me think he knew more than he was telling or than I could understand. And then the whole smile opened up, and I noticed for the first time the teeth that were too white, and wondered if they'd always been that way. “Lemme guess,” he said. “You got religion.”

“Of a sort,” I said.

“Like I got three sets of the family jewels.” His head cocked at me like a wise rooster.

“Let's say I have a kind of work that lets me feel I do some good once in a while. The county pays me.”

“For what?”

“For figuring out things. Putting puzzle pieces together. Actually, I work for the sheriff-coroner's.”

I could tell Cip was not sure how to answer, or if I was kidding. First I told him what I'd done after I left his employ, from grocery checker to cop. While we talked, nurses hustled to and fro through the great room, their voices loud, their laughter hearty enough to assure you life goes on. They'd stop and speak to a patient, or pick up a toy off the floor to place it back on the lap that lost it, with a pleasant word, and it crossed my mind that this is not at all what I expected in this place.

My old boss remained quiet as I explained what a forensic specialist was. “A lot of it's just paperwork. Peering into microscopes, typing blood, that sort of thing,” I said. I don't know why I didn't want Cipriano to hear how direct the work can be. Nor did I tell him how, after a few months on the job in Oakland, I had to go to a police therapist for six weeks to try to find a way to stop re-creating the last few moments of a victim's life: If he'd left one minute before. . . . If she only said (blank) instead of (blank). . . . If they hadn't used lighter fluid. . . .

Cipriano said, “You see dead bodies?”

“Sometimes.”

He thought about this awhile and then backstepped to the police work. “I can't figure you a cop.”

“Why not?”

The cheek flowered out again before he spoke. And when his cheek collapsed, the flesh around his mouth settled down like ears on a beagle, and his neck became a long fin. “A woman cop,” he said.

I said, “There's lots of them now.”

“I never liked cops much myself,” he said, looking out the window. We spoke then in that measured way people do when they're trying to figure each other out, or the way married people do when they're having a
serious
discussion and they're trying not to trip the trigger.

“I didn't know that, Cip. I guess I should've.”

His head gave a slow nod. He said, “You couldn't stick with it, huh?”

“Couldn't stick with it.”

He lurched forward to start the wheel of his chair, headed for a table about ten feet away, where a water dispenser stood. He glugged a Styrofoam cupful, then raised it in a gesture to offer me some.

“You always told us no drinking on the job.”

He smiled. “So this is a job? I ain't dead yet.”

I looked at him, saying in the shake of my head, Of course not, adding, “So you never heard of that motel? The Beaver Tail.”

“You believe women ought to go to war?”

“Cip, are you going to answer my question or not?”

“Yeah, I heard of it.” He told me then. He knew the owner. Ralph Polk. The motel burned down a few years ago. “He's in Overton now. He was making flies, you know, for fishermen. People bought his flies, they went away home with fish in their
shoes
. He had one I bought from him he called Miss Piggy would call every crappie in the lake to dinner. Then for some reason he gets this harebrained idea he's going to find oil the other side of the lake. Wants me to go in with him on a rig, bring it up from somewhere in Texas. I told him not no but hell no. He says, ‘You don't know luck when it lays down and begs.' ‘Bring me that luck shined up with oil and I'll lick it clean down to the bone,' I says. ‘Till then, don't bother me.'”

I waited for the smile, but his face was washed of humor. “Cipriano?”

He was sitting with the chair swung outward now, toward the door that led to the front desk, where a delivery person was causing a commotion with whatever package she brought. Across the way, in the doorway that led to another hall, Mr. Neff was attempting to enter the great room, but his chair was lodged against a woman's who was dressed in a bright-red sweat suit, trying to enter too. She kept saying, over the noise of the TV, “Just hold on there. Just hold on.” I popped out of my chair to help, when Cipriano called me back: “They'll get it,” he said. “We're always having traffic jams.” And they did.

He felt my eyes on him. When he turned, I asked, kindly, I hope, “How old are you, Cipriano?”

“Seventy-two.”

“You mean you were an old geezer when I met you way back when?”

“That I was.”

“You coulda fooled me.” I leaned over, gave him a kiss on a brown spot the size of a thumbprint, and told him I'd try to see him on the way back through, probably tomorrow. I asked him just how I might find Ralph Polk in Overton.

“It's not that big a town,” he said. “Ask in the hardware.” As I was leaving, he said, “What else were you going to ask me? Before.”

He was sharp. He may not have been exactly the man I remembered, but he was a man with eyes and maybe more heart than I wanted to give him credit for.

“I don't know,” I said, then looked around the room of rag dolls and said, “Yes, I do.” I walked back and stood before him, but not so close he had to look up, the way I don't like to look up to people who are too tall. I asked him this, and the question was almost as much a surprise to me as it was to him: “What is it makes you happy in life, Cipriano?”

“Me?” He'd wheeled himself forward, and I tagged along. Halfway through the wide door near the nurses' station where several women in white uniforms had collected to witness the opening of the package, he stopped to give a proper response. “A good shot of JB whiskey,” he said, “and Ethel M chocolate, preferably at the same time.” He looked up at me as if that were the God's truth, and then said, “And now I'm gonna see which of these fine ladies is going to give me some.” And then he winked and said, “Forget that other I told you.”

“That other?”

“Yah. Nothin' but trouble, those.” To be sure I got it, he added, “Women.”

I gave him a thumbs-up with that, and once again started to leave. I saw his reflection in the double-wide doors. He'd come to say something more. “Smokey? You know what else I got?”