Empire Of Salt

by Weston Ochse

  "He talked about you all the time," Maude said, as if she was reading his mind.

  Patrick shook his head. "He didn't know me."

  "Oh, yes he did. He used to travel to Philadelphia twice a year. He watched you play in your school band. He went to your high school graduation. He even went to your daughter's Christmas pageant last year."

  As she spoke, Patrick's eyes widened, and his jaw dropped. Suddenly, his mouth felt dry. Why had his father been there and never said anything? He was about to ask that question when a man in a wide-brimmed hat, white shirt and black dungarees burst into the restaurant. All eyes went to him as the door slammed open, then closed.

  "My boy is missing. I think something happened to my boy," he said. He was out of breath. His eyes were wild.

  "Abel, take it easy." Gertie stood and rushed to his side. She tried to grab his elbow but he jerked away. "We'll find him. Which one has gone missing?"

  "Obediah. He was getting driftwood and now no one's seen him."

  "It's the green," Frank said. "The green got him."

  "You hush your mouth, Frank," Gertie hissed. Back to Abel she said, "Do you know where he was collecting the wood?"

  Abel shook his head.

  Patrick stepped forward. "What about foot prints?"

  They all looked at him.

  "You're Amish, right?"

  Abel nodded.

  "If he's wearing boots like yours, which I bet he is, then all we need to do is look in the sand for the hobnailed prints."

  Abel's eyes brightened. "That's a great idea, Mister..."

  "Oliver," Maude said. "He's Lazlo's son, come to take over the place."

  Abel removed his straw hat and held it to his chest. "Sorry for your loss, Mister Oliver. Your father was a good man." His words came out in a rush. "He took care of our family and treated us well... always set a nice table." His gaze darted towards the door.

  Patrick felt an odd sensation of pride for the man who he'd never really known, but he didn't allow the thought to linger. He wanted nothing more than a couple of shots of something hard and wicked, but he found himself offering to help. "Listen, let me go with you and see if I can help."

  "Good idea," Maude said. "You go too, Gertie, and I'll call Will. With any luck, by the time he gets here Obediah will be at home drinking milk and eating some of his mother's bread. He's probably just goofing off."

  Abel shoved his hat back on his head. "Thank you," he said. Then he turned and bolted out the door.

  Gertie and Patrick followed. As they got to the door, Frank spoke one more time. "Green means no," he said. "If you see it. Don't go."

  The sea began right across from the restaurant between a break in the seawall. The break hadn't always been there. According to Gertie, Laz had bulldozed the seawall out of the way as soon as the Army Corps of Engineers had left. He wanted an ocean view from his restaurant even if the ocean was rotting.

  Will Toddrunner, who happened to be the Deputy Sheriff and the Justice of the Peace for the towns of Niland and Bombay Beach, arrived an hour into the search. After brief introductions between Patrick, Auntie Lin and Will, they set off down the beach, looking for tell-tale Amish boot prints.

  The sheriff ran down some of the vital statistics as they walked. The town had 345 people according to the last census, but he doubted that half of them were still living here. The unemployment rate was 25%. On a scale of one to ten with the average U.S. city at a three, the crime in Bombay Beach was at five. This was mostly the result of the unemployment rate and the air of hopelessness. Besides the unfortunate disaster of the Salton Sea, Bombay Beach - which was located squarely along the San Andreas Fault - was also blessed with earthquake swarms. Just last week three 4.7 earthquakes had struck the area. The only damage that had been done was to knock down the skeletal remains of a few of the teetering deserted homes. The only death had been Lazlo Oliver, which couldn't be and hadn't been connected to the geological events. Truth be told, earthquakes were a part of life around the Salton Sea. The residents enjoyed the frivolous violence of the quakes. Each one broke the monotony of another otherwise dreary day. Another interesting fact was that the nearest gas station was twenty miles away in Niland so the average Bombay Beach citizen got around on golf carts, or using the "often-preferred California flip_flop-powered locomotion."

  The deputy was pure Californian. As it turned out, Will's father had been a deep sea fishing master out of San Diego and his mother had been an artichoke picker from Brawley. When it came to a choice on what to do with his life, Will had done four years in the Marine Corps then joined the Imperial County Sheriff's Department. Now going on ten years, he'd kept his father's laissez-faire outlook on life, while maintaining his mother's concentration and attention to detail. Although both traits seemed to be necessary to be a successful warden of the people, often times the latter helped more, for it was Will who spotted the first boot print.

  "Here!"

  Will ran forward three steps and knelt. Using his baton, he circled the boot print to separate it from the wavy lines in the sand nearby. He also used the baton to remove a piece of seaweed that had come ashore sometime after the print had been left. The green leafy length sprawled across the impression of the heel in the print, as if to lay claim to whoever had made it.

  Patrick turned and hollered down the beach to where Abel and Gertie had gone the other way. They ran to him.

  Patrick squatted next to Will and pointed. "See how those nails are square? Those are definitely Amish nails. Everyone else uses round nails, if they use nails at all."

  The print's angle of travel suggested that Obediah had been heading along the sea's edge. Patrick glanced back to try and see the other prints, but they'd either been eaten by the waves or were buried under the detritus of the sea. He thought he saw an edge here, and a heel there, especially now after having seen a full print, but he couldn't be certain.

  Suddenly the stench of rot and putrefaction washed over him. He nearly gagged. A mat of seaweed floated in the beer-colored water. The vines had trapped several fish and an egret, its white upturned eye staring into a sky within which it would never again fly. The bird's chest had been torn wide open. Maggots wriggled in the noonday sun.

  Near the bird a pacifier lay enshrined in the weed. With a light green handle, the teat upturned like the egret's eye, it brought Patrick a sense of foreboding. He had to find out if his worst fears were only imagined. Without thinking, he waded into the tide. He immediately felt the sting of the warm water, the alkalinity like an acid to his skin. He plowed past the dead fish and the bird and grabbed for the pacifier. He missed it and instead pushed it under. With a shout, Patrick leaped for it, shoving his arm and head under water, until he felt the familiar shape. When he came up, he turned around. He held the pacifier to his face and was gratified beyond belief not to have found a baby's finger hooked through the ring on the other end.

  "My god, man! What have you done?"

  "Get out of there!" Gertie shouted. "That water ain't safe."

  The skin of his face and scalp had begun to burn. The smell he'd all but forgotten assaulted him anew, this time from him. He climbed out of the waist-deep water and dripped along the shore toward the others.

  Auntie Lin held her nose with one hand and used her other to point back towards the town. "You better go back to the restaurant and find some way to clean up."

  Gertie shook her head as she backed away from him. "Tell Maude to show you the utility room. You don't want to get anywhere near your new home before you burn those clothes and get the stink out of your hair."

  Patrick nodded and headed back the way he'd come. He was happy to have the pacifier, in a way that he couldn't put his finger on, almost as if amidst the horrible decay of the resort there glowed one pure thing.

  A few minutes later, after scolding him for swimming in the lake, Maude showed him the utility room in the back of the restaurant and took his clothes to burn after he removed them. It took Patrick an hou
r of using everything from hand soap to powdered bathroom cleanser to get the stink of the sea off, but he finally managed.

  Maude brought his suitcase in from the car, from which he pulled a pair of shorts and a Fresh Prince of Bel Air T-shirt. He tossed these on and went into the restaurant. For a moment he considered going back out and helping with the search, but the proximity of cold beer changed his mind. He told himself that he'd have just one, maybe two, before heading back outside, and sat down at the counter beside Frank. Maude poured him a cold one, which he heartily drank down to the suds.

  He pulled out the pacifier and held it in his hand, turning it this way and that as he considered it and waited for a refill. Now that he was in the cool confines of the restaurant, alcohol soothing his blood, it seemed strange that the pacifier had attracted him so. He'd never responded to something like that before.

  When Maude came back around to refill their beers, she saw the pacifier and stopped cold.

  "Where'd you find that?"

  Patrick held it up as if to ask her if it was what she was referring to. She nodded as he placed it on the counter.

  "In the sea."

  "Where in the sea?"

  "I don't know. Where we were looking for the Amish boy, I suppose. Why?"

  Maude paused for a long moment. She licked her lips, never once taking her eyes from the pacifier. Finally she nodded, as if she'd made a decision. "You might as well know. That belonged to your father. Well, to you, I suppose."

  Patrick stared at the plastic thing on the counter and drank the cold beer while Maude explained how it had belonged to Patrick as a baby. One day about fifteen years ago, Lazlo had found it in one of his boxes when they were unpacking. He'd decided to wear it, so he'd put a shoe string through it and placed it around his neck, where it stayed for most of the next twenty years. Lazlo took it off infrequently, mainly to change the string; otherwise it had been on him like a charm, and had served to remind him of his son each day - morning, noon and night - right up until he died. In fact, he'd been wearing it when he'd died.

  When she moved off after refilling his beer, Patrick sat stunned, trying to digest the information and match it with the idea that his father had deserted him. If his father had intended to leave forever, why had he kept coming back? Why had he kept the pacifier?

  Frank dug around in a pouch at his waist and found a length of string. Although it smelled vaguely of fish, the drunk inexpertly made a necklace of the pacifier. When it was done, he handed it to Patrick, who placed it around his neck. Doing so made him feel a connection with his father that he'd never known before.

  Patrick fell deep into thought as he tried to imagine his father and what things would have been like had they known each other and been friends. He was still sitting there and thinking two hours later, when the search party returned empty handed.

  The dog was diabolical. Abigail Ogletree had finally managed to pull in her favorite soap opera from a Mexican television station - it was an American soap opera, rebroadcast with Spanish voice-overs and English subtitles - and the dog wanted to steal her attention. God forbid she sit for a few quiet hours and watch the grainy lives of happier people with more interesting lives played out on her all-but-useless television. Trudie, her sassy miniature poodle, just wasn't having it.

  Abigail muted the television and jerked her head towards the kitchen. "Shush!"

  The dog stopped barking and Abigail returned her attention to the television. And for the ten thousandth time she cursed her husband, Roger, for dying and leaving her in this backwater cesspool. Her television was ten years past its prime and the cable companies had long ago moved on. She was relegated to using an old antenna that kept shifting in the wind - always, it seemed, at the most inopportune times.

  She could just make out a man and a woman through the ever-present snow on the television. The man was Charles Hargrove and had just recovered from a traffic accident. He had amnesia; Abigail counted that it was the third time he'd lost his memory in eleven years. The girl was Genevieve. She was his best friend's daughter, but was pretending to have been a long time mistress, acting on a crush she'd had on Charles since she was a child.

  Abigail couldn't wait to see what would happen when Charles finally remembered who he was. Would he burn so many bridges he'd never be able to return to a normal life? Would he consummate his relationship with Genevieve, thus destroying his lifelong friendship with his best friend? Would she succeed in trying to convince him that he'd asked her to marry him, and elope to Cabo San Lucas?

  Abigail had long ago given up trying to guess what would happen on the show. The story writers were too good and always kept her guessing. She shivered in anticipation, leaning forward to make out what was happening.

  Charles and Genevieve were close enough to be kissing, but the distortion of the television made it questionable. She had to pay careful attention to try and discern what they were actually doing. Plus, in addition to the fact that the actors and actresses were always in a blizzard of electric snow, the soap opera had Spanish voice-overs, with English closed captioning amidst the snow which always seemed thickest at the bottom of the screen.

  Trudie started to growl, deep throated and low.

  Suddenly, on the television, a door opened and a man entered the picture.

  Abigail covered her mouth and inhaled deeply. It was Genevieve's father.

  Charles held the girl tighter, not recognizing the man.

  Trudie's growl turned into a bark.

  Abigail turned her head towards the sound for a moment, but the snowy soap stars drew her attention back to the television. But whatever had happened, she'd missed it. She didn't speak Spanish, and the text was already past. Now all she saw was a jumble of three figures wrestling in a winter storm.

  Damn that dog!

  She threw her remote control down on the couch hard enough that it bounced. She pushed herself to a standing position using the arm rest and slid her feet into her slippers.

  "What is it, Trudie?" She shook her head and headed towards the barking dog. "Why is it that whenever I sit down to enjoy myself and leave you alone, you find it necessary to -"

  The white and gray poodle barked louder now that she was in the kitchen. A man's hand gripped her hind leg. He'd tried to crawl through the doggy door, but become wedged. At first fear leaped into her chest, but then she remembered the Klosterman Kid, who'd stayed the same four year old he was thirty years ago. More than a little slow, his grandparents kept him out back with a catcher's mask on his face so he wouldn't chew anything and boxing gloves on his hands so he couldn't grab anything. It wouldn't be the first time he got loose. But it would be the first time he tried to break into her house... or for that matter, try and get her dog.

  Abigail grabbed the broom from where it leaned against the wall between the doorjamb and the refrigerator.

  "Let her go you -" She refused to use the word "retard," and instead shouted "- bastard!" She swung the broom, hitting the man in the back of his head.

  The dog barked and snarled at the hand that was around her leg. She reached out to bite, but couldn't bring herself to actually do it.

  Abigail switched her grip and began to poke the Klosterman Kid on the side of the neck.

  "Get out! Get out! Get out!" she screamed over and over, each time shoving the rounded wooden end into tender flesh.

  Trudie broke loose and dodged behind Abigail, and took up barking even louder.

  The man's hands moved to follow, and as it did, Abigail caught a glimpse of the face. It was not the Klosterman Kid. This man, whoever he was, had a much older face, skin wrinkled and gray and green.

  A hand grabbed at her foot. She stepped back, but lost her slipper in the process. He pulled it to his mouth and began to chew savagely at the furry purple and orange fabric.

  Abigail broke the broom over the man's head.

  He began to hyperventilate, wheezing coming from somewhere deep in his chest.

  She reached atop
the refrigerator and grabbed a heavy lead crystal bowl that she'd once used for fresh fruit, when there'd been fresh fruit to be had. She brought it down on the man's head as hard as her brittle old fingers could propel it.

  The head made a hollow squishing sound, and blood oozed out of the left ear as the bowl rolled to a stop in front of the stove, none the worse for wear. The dog suddenly stopped barking.

  Abigail took a step back.

  And was glad she did, for the man lunged forward, hands encircling the spot where her legs had just been. She let out a little scream, terror blossoming inside her.

  The creature on the floor, for it was no longer human to her, gazed at her through unholy yellow eyes. Saliva that reminded her of the frothy green pollution lining the edge of the sea fell from its lips and down its chin.

  She lifted the broken broom handle. Its sharp, broken end could easily pierce those eyes. Then it began wheezing louder, the sound coming faster and faster, until the sound filled the trailer. It lunged forward, pulling itself farther into the house.

  Abigail lost all sense of courage. She turned and ran to the back of the trailer. Thank god Trudie was close behind because if she hadn't come, Abigail was doubtful she'd have gone back for her precious poodle.

  She hit the door to her bedroom, running as fast as her legs could carry her. It slammed open, then shut. It was on a spring hinge and more substantial than the rest of the trailer. Her Roger - before he'd died, God rest his soul - had spent a small fortune disaster-proofing the bedroom. Not in case of hurricane, tornado, earthquake, or anything like that; Roger's greatest fear had been illegal aliens surging across the Mexican Border. So he'd built a room lined with metal, a door made of steel, and put enough weapons inside of it to obliterate Kansas.

  Just as Abigail snapped the lock into place she heard a wrenching sound followed by an explosion of wood. Then the wheezing came toward the bedroom like a muffled freight train, accompanied by the pounding of the creature's feet.

  It hit the door with a clang and began to beat upon it.