Empire Of Salt (5 page)

Natasha turned to Gertie and pointed. "I thought she was -"

Maude and Gertie exchanged looks as the Oliver family watched.

"We were both his girlfriends," Gertie finally said.

"Although lately he could barely stand us," Maude added.

"I think he was getting old."

"I don't know about that," Maude said mischievously, her gaze somewhere else. "Laz could perk up every now and then. Boy could he perk up."

"Maude!"

Patrick grinned and so did Auntie Lin.

Natasha closed her eyes and shook her head at the thought. "It's okay," Natasha's father said. "He had that effect on people, I was told."

Gertie nodded. "You were told right."

"There wasn't a soul who met your dad who didn't like him," Maude added.

A lump formed in Natasha's throat and her face tightened.

Then her father took a tentative step toward the women. He looked back at Natasha and Derrick, and took another step and held out his hands. Gertie and Maude took them and they stood there for several minutes, united in their loss.

Natasha began to feel uncomfortable. She felt the weight of the moment, but this seemed absolutely the wrong place for it. She looked around the restaurant and saw that although there was room for about thirty people, there was only one customer, the man she'd seen acting crazy on the beach. He'd cleaned up since then and looked almost respectable, if you discounted the wild eyes, wind-blown hair and broken teeth.

Gertie was the first to break the silence. "So what is it going to be? Are you kicking us out or what?"

Her dad didn't know what to say.

Auntie Lin saved him from having to. "How about some breakfast and then maybe we can talk about it? The kids need some food. We drove all the way from Pennsylvania in three days and could use a break."

"That's a terrific idea." Maude grinned. "Breakfast coming right up. How do you like your eggs, young man?" she asked Derrick.

"Hatched," he said.

"Derrick doesn't like eggs," Natasha said.

"Doesn't like eggs? Then he takes after his grandfather. I have just the thing for you, young man."

Auntie Lin pushed her way behind the counter despite Maude's protests and began to help in the kitchen.

Breakfast arrived within twenty minutes. Maude served them while Gertie wrangled coffees, waters, milk and orange juice. Auntie Lin brought toast, butter and an assortment of jellies for everyone. They even fed the man at the bar. He turned out to be Frank Gillespie, a local from back when the Salton Sea had actually been a resort.

Derrick was served French toast dusted with confectioners' sugar. Three strips of bacon and two links of sausage rode the top, all covered in syrup. By the way he inhaled it, Natasha was convinced it was the best thing her brother had ever eaten. When he finished, he looked around for something else to eat. Lucky for him Maude saw his glum face and brought him another helping of what she called Lazlo's Toast. From then on, as she moved about the restaurant, the boy's eyes never left her.

Auntie Lin found a spot at the bar and had wheat toast and coffee, her sparkling gaze taking in the new people and the new place.

As the family ate, customers began to trickle in, including a group of four elderly tourists in shorts, black socks and T-shirts. They were as old as Gertie and Maude, but acted much older. The difference was plain in the way the two old women goofed around with each other, compared to the two at the table, clucking and fussing over each little bit of life that was thrust before them, the cleanliness of the forks they were shining with their napkins and the way their husbands were sitting on their chairs. The final straw was when one of the women, her hair the color of an electrified smurf, tried to send her eggs back for the third time, claiming they weren't scrambled hard enough.

Gertie threw both hands in the air and headed back to the kitchen, muttering something about knowing where a bucket of spackle was. And that was that. The tourists saw neither hide nor hair of Gertie, and Maude patently ignored them, whenever she strode by. They finally stood, tossed a twenty dollar bill on the table, and left.

It was just about then that Patrick said to Natasha. "Why don't you and Derrick go and explore? Me and Auntie Lin need to talk with these ladies for awhile."

Natasha sat for a moment staring at her father, stunned that he'd just treated her like a child. She was eighteen, she'd graduated high school, and was as much as an adult as anyone else in the restaurant, with the exception of Derrick, of course. She glared, counted to ten, then jumped up from the table and stomped out of the restaurant. Derrick followed close behind. She'd moved across the country because she'd known that her brother would need her. If it wasn't for him, she'd have never come.

She fumed until she hit the outside air. As soon as the door closed behind her, she wished she'd never left the restaurant. The temperature had risen to at least a hundred without a breeze or cloud on the horizon. "Oven" was the word that came to her mind. She turned to Derrick, whose face had slackened from the sheer weight of his breakfast.

"You gonna make it?"

"Ugh," he said.

Natasha looked longingly at the door. She wanted badly to go back inside but knew that if she did her father and Auntie Lin would once again probably send her away. As hot as it was, unless she was going to burst into flames, she wasn't going back inside.

She gazed at her surroundings, musing that the town of Bombay Beach more closely resembled some war-torn East European town seen on a television news snippet. She'd been to Sandy Hook on the New Jersey coast. It was a seven mile stretch of perfect beach with the nearby town of Highlands seemingly transported from the suburbs. Food franchises and stores were the same there as the malls around Philadelphia. Even the people were the same, just more tanned and windblown, the cool sea air scouring their skin clean of big city grime.

Yeah, she'd been to beach resorts before and this place was no beach resort. Everything here was the opposite. Of the people she'd seen, the extraordinary old women Gertie and Maude included, none of them wore clothes she associated with success. The beach was a putrid stretch of rot. The water was the color of old soda. The buildings had either collapsed beneath the weight of their own decay or were on the way. And everything seemed to be encrusted with salt.

The Space Station Restaurant was probably the best-constructed building in sight. Rows of trailers, some clearly abandoned and others in questionable states of occupation, ran off to her left, each surrounded by rusted chain link fences. The occupants of a blue trailer down the line had woven a banner which said "God Lovs U" between the links of their fence.

To her right were several regular buildings. All but one, a corner market with a window filled with paper signs advertising specials on fruit and vegetables, had been abandoned. Three women sat on a bench in front, chatting amongst themselves in the shadow of the awning. Each of them wore shorts and bikini tops, although Natasha felt seriously that none of them should have been allowed to wear the latter. As nice as they might be, their days of showing cleavage had passed when Bill Clinton had been president and parents still let Michael Jackson play with their kids. Now their bodies were more a study of geography than anatomy.

She peered between the trailers as movement caught her eye. At first glance it appeared to be a dog chained to a doghouse in a chain link-fenced yard. But interspersed weeds and the heat of the air made it hard to make out. She stepped closer, moving a foot or two into the alley beside the restaurant. Then the dog snuffled at the ground.

She sucked in her breath. For a brief moment the creature wasn't a dog but a person. The face was covered by what looked like a baseball catcher's mask, metal bars sheathed in leather and fastened at the back of the head.

Then the creature wrenched its face to the sky, made a strange barking noise and ran into the doghouse.

Natasha turned to Derrick, who was admiring the mural on the alley wall.

"Did you see that?" she asked.

"Mmm?" he turned towards her, and by the look on his face, it was clear that his attention had been riveted on the fading space battle.

"Over there, in that yard." Natasha pointed. "It looked like..." She didn't know how to finish the sentence.

"Like what?"

Natasha shook her head. Had she really seen it or had it been a mirage?

"I thought I saw someone chained to a doghouse."

"'Someone'?" Derrick laughed. "As in a person?"

"I know. I know." She shrugged. "It sounds stupid. Forget about it."

She looked once more at the empty yard and the chain trailing into the dog house, then strode back to the front of the restaurant. She began walking down the street, gravel and sand crunching beneath her feet.

A portable arrow sign down the road announced a sale on salt. The arrow pointed to an immense tent with a banner above the entrance which read "Duvall Brothers Imperial Salt Exports."

"My uncle said if the Duvalls can sell salt in the Salton Sea then they could sell water to a drowning man."

Natasha turned at the new voice and saw a girl in her mid- teens, with long brown hair twisted into tight braids. Freckles danced across a wide nose on a light brown face, and her smile was one her mother would have called "petulant." Even though the girl was younger than Natasha, she wore eyeliner, mascara and blazing red lipstick.

"Those your uncles?" Natasha asked.

The girl shook her head. "Nuh-uh. My uncle collects salt for them. He goes out and brings it back so that they can press it into bricks. He says they have a good market with the Chinese."

She spoke quickly with just a hint of Spanish to her pronunciation.

"Why would the Chinese buy salt from here?" Derrick asked.

"Who knows?" The girl shrugged. "Why do they sell dried bear penis? Or goat spleen? Sometimes you shouldn't ask."

Derrick's jaw dropped as he looked at Natasha. "Did she say bear penis?" he mock-whispered.

Natasha grinned. "I think she did." She held out her hand. "Natasha Oliver. This is my brother Derrick. We're new here."

"No shit," the girl said, taking Natasha's hand then letting go. "I could tell by the way you're looking at everything that you weren't from around here."

"Is it that obvious?"

"You all do it when you come. Someone probably told you about the resort and about the sand and the sea. You might have even heard about some of the problems with the place, but you said to yourself,
How bad can it be
?"

Natasha found herself nodding as the other girl spoke.

The girl held out her arms as if to encompass Bombay Beach, the Salton Sea and the universe. "How bad can it be? It can be this bad." She shook her head and laughed. "Name's Veronica Lopez. I used to be like you when I first got here, then I got used to it."

"I don't know if I can get used to this."

"You'd be surprised how easy it is to get used to something. Hell, girl, give it a few weeks and you'll be telling someone else the same thing I'm telling you right now."

"Where are you from?" Derrick asked.

"Los Angeles."

Derrick's eyes rounded. "Really?" His expression was a mix of incredulity and puppy love. He tried not to grin, but had no control over his mouth.

"Oh, Lordy." Veronica shook her head. "This one's going to be trouble."

Although the girl can't have been more than two years older than Derrick, there was an epoch of experience between them that was clearly noticeable. Veronica was sixteen going on thirty.

"Did you ever meet anyone famous?" Derrick asked.

"My cousin."

"Which movie was he in?"

"He wasn't in no movie. Raul was arrested by the cops in South Central. He was a gangbanger. Everyone knew Raul. It's why I'm out here living with my auntie and uncle. Mom didn't want me getting hooked up with the same crowd."

"Gangbanger?" Derrick said. "You mean like drive-bys?" He made a firing motion with his fingers.

"For some of us drive-bys aren't something on the evening news. I bet where you're from you can walk down the street just as plain as day and not worry about who's gonna shoot you for wearing the wrong color shirt." She shook her head and her eyes softened. "Never mind. Listen, let me give you a tour. There's some funny shit in this place."

Veronica walked with a strut, like she had something to prove. She guided them down a side street and began to point at different homes and cars, telling stories about each one. The streets were arranged in a simple grid system. Numbered streets ran east and west and lettered avenues ran north and south. There were no lawns or plots of vegetables. Everything was covered in sand, even the road, which at times couldn't be seen for the sand blown across it. The only plant-life -aside from weeds - was palm trees that grew stubby, browning leaves and gray beards as if they were old men of the sea. Giant satellite dishes were prominent in many yards, as were aluminum antennas growing on the roofs of homes like the strange technological horns of prehistoric animals. When asked about these, Veronica responded that Bombay Beach didn't have cable, so if someone wanted more than the three static-laced channels broadcast from El Centro, they needed these antique satellite dishes. None of the regular subscription satellite companies made Bombay Beach part of their territory, so it was a retired rocket scientist who, for a few bucks a month, came by and serviced everyone's dishes.