Empire Of Salt Read Free Page B

watered.
    "Oh my God," Auntie Lin echoed from inside the car. "Mr. Oliver, for God's sake, please close the door. You're killing us."
    He slammed the door, but remained outside, his desire to drink overruling his desire to get out of the stench. He leaned against the car, wondering how he was going to survive the reek, and swallowed the vodka he'd been holding in his mouth. If he took shallow breaths, he could breathe.
    He took another drink, keeping his eyes on the birds, lest they turn and think he was Tipi Hedron. There had to be thousands of seagulls fighting to get to the shoreline of what appeared to be a beer-colored inland sea. The noise was as deafening as the smell was rotten.
    Then, by some miracle, the wind shifted to an offshore breeze and the air was clean once more. Patrick stood straight and watched the sun rising over the far edge of the sea, its golden rays illuminating the water and the edges of the birds' wings in a glistening nimbus of light. Everything had gone from hellish to heavenly in a moment.
    Suddenly a man appeared, stick held high, screaming in barbaric rage as he ran, all elbows and knees, towards the birds. They ignored him until the last second, then rose heavily out of his way. He swung madly, screaming over the shrieks of the birds with an edge of madness in his voice. His fifth swing sent him twisting in the air, his legs entangling as they failed to keep up. He fell face first into what the birds had been feeding on and lay there for a moment.
    The back door of the station wagon opened and Natasha and Derrick rolled out.
    "I gotta pee," Derrick murmured, looking around, then running to where a trashcan stood overflowing beneath a "Do Not Litter" sign.
    "Is this it?" Natasha's hair was tangled into a brown-tentacled nightmarish mess that sought to go in every direction at once. Her narrow face still held the imprint of the seat. "This can't be it."
    "Do you see what I see?" Patrick asked.
    The man by the water pushed himself to his knees, retched mightily into the surf, then stood. Twin rivulets of yellow drool fell to the ground. The man ambled off the way he came, his gait uncertain.
    "A drunk puking in the surf?" Natasha asked.
    "Hey, we have those at home," Derrick said, having finished his business and rejoined his family.
    "No. What's on the shore. What the birds were after." Even as he said the words, the first of many birds began to return. Within moments, the sky darkened and those that had fled returned to their interrupted meal of rotting fish.
    "How many are there?" Derrick asked.
    "What? Fish or birds?" Patrick asked in return.
    "Dunno. Both?"
    "Hundreds. Thousands."
    "Is this really the Salton Sea?" Natasha asked.
    Before anyone could answer, the wind shifted once more, drawing the stench back over them like a heavy oil cloth. Everyone groaned as they covered their noses and mouths. They rushed to the car, jumped inside and slammed the doors behind them. Then they sat in stunned silence watching the rotting fish, the birds and the barbaric drunk who had once again found a stick and was ready to resume his Don Quixote stand.

 

    G erald Duphrene sat behind the wheel of his golf cart, glaring in morose fascination at the remains of the coyote lying in the middle of Highway 111. The crushed body was perfectly perpendicular to the double yellow line, crossing it like a "T". It wasn't just the positioning of the body that had transfixed him, but also the juxtaposition of the absolutely flattened body with the perfectly undisturbed head. The long snout, the lolling tongue, and the wide bright eyes seemed alive on the dead creature. They stared back at Gerald in surprise, as if to ask, how did I get here?
    The sight reminded him of Private Abner Johnson back in '53. Old Ab had perished in a similar way on the hills north of Seoul when the Chinese were pushing them back and back to Pusan, though Abner never did see Pusan. They were lying on the side of a hill, trying to sleep amidst