“Who is Alien?” demanded Neil. “Tell me who Alien is and maybe I can help you.”
From the house, he heard Susan call: “Neil? Neil?”
The man in the long white duster turned his head slightly. “Alien went for help,” he repeated, in a flat, desperate whisper. “Alien went down toward the creek for help.”
“But who is he?” asked Neil. “Who is he?”
“They’re all around us” said the man. “They’re all around us and they won’t take prisoners. For God’s sake, Alien. Help us, Alien.”
Susan was running toward them. Neil turned, and he could see her bright apron in the dull morning sunlight. He turned back again, and in a curious way the man in the long white duster was fading. He seemed to be retreating from Neil, shrinking, yet at the same time vanishing into the air. In a few seconds, he had disappeared.
Susan reached the fence, panting for breath. Neil walked back toward her silently, and took her hands across the split-log fence.
She asked, “What are you doing here? What’s happening?”
Neil looked down at her. “Didn’t you see him?” “Who?”
He turned, and pointed to the place where the man had been standing. “Don’t you see the man in the white coat? He was right over there. I was talking to him.”
“You were talking to him? Where did he go?”
“He went-well, he just kind of went.”
Susan frowned. “Neil,” she said, “you’re sure you’re not-”
He stared at her. “Not what? Not nuts? Not ready for the funny farm?”
“Neil, you mustn’t think that I-”
“Susan, he was there!” Neil shouted. “He was right there, right there by that patch of grass! I talked to him!”
She let go of his hands. He stood by the fence and watched her as she walked back across the yard to the house, with her head lowered. She climbed up the steps to the veranda, went into the kitchen door, and closed it behind her. He banged his fist against the fence railing in frustration. Of all the damned, stupid, ridiculous things. He needed help and reassurance more than he ever had in his whole life, and everybody, including his wife, thought he was turning into a raving lunatic. He looked back at the grass where the man had been standing, and he felt confused, frightened, and helpless. Almost as helpless as the day that the jack had slipped, and Jim had reached out his hand toward him and begged for some miraculous salvation which Neil just didn’t have the power to give him.
Neil climbed over the fence and trudged back to the house. In the kitchen, Susan was sitting at the table scraping carrots. The tears were running down her cheeks into the salad.
Neil put his arm around her. He said, “Susan?”
There was a moment when she tried to be strong, but then she burst into tears and clung to him, and for a long time they held each other close, her hot cheek wet against his; he was almost moved to tears himself..
At last she looked up at him, flushed and unhappy, her eyelashes stuck together with crying.
She said, “I don’t know what to do. It’s all so frightening.”
He shrugged, “I know. I don’t know what to do either. But I’m doing whatever I can.”
She swallowed, and then she said, “You won’t mind me asking this, will you? I know it sounds awful, but I have to ask it.”
“Go right ahead.”
“Well,” she said uncertainly, “you’re not-you’re not going mad are you? You don’t have madness in your family?”
He couldn’t help smiling. “Not that I know of. I think my grandfather used to fly Chinese kites out on the point, and got himself a name for being quite an eccentric, but real madness …”
“Not even way back? I couldn’t bear it if Toby-” He squeezed her close. “Listen, I’m not going mad, and neither is Toby, and neither is anyone else. We just have one of those weird situations that nobody quite understands. It’s like flying saucers, Doctor Crowder told me, or ghosts. All we have to do is find out what it is, and when we know, we’ll be fine.”
Susan dabbed at her eyes with her apron. “I’m sorry. I guess it’s been a strain, that’s all. I was sitting there thinking that you must have had a mad cousin in your dun and distant past, and that you and Toby were paying the price for it. I’m real sorry, Neil. I mean it.”
Neil kissed her. “I’m glad you came straight out and asked. If I’d have been you, I would have been thinking the same thing. I’m happy to say, though, that there hasn’t been anybody in my family’s illustrious history who-”
He paused. She stopped in the middle of drying her tears and looked up at him. He gave her a quick, uncertain smile.
“What were you saving?” she asked him. He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. It seems ridiculous. I guess I’m allowing this thing to get under my skin.”
“You mustn’t, honey,” she said gently. “We’ll work it out somehow.”
“Sure,” he told her, but he didn’t feel very convinced. “Now, I’d better get upstairs and finish off that wardrobe.”
“Do you really have to?” she asked him. “It seems such a pity, just breaking it up for the sake of it”
“Would you sleep with it in the room?” asked Neil. “Would you let Toby sleep with it in the room?”
“I guess not. But Doctor Crowder may have been right. It could have been Toby’s window banging.”
“So you think I’m imagining things, too?”
“Honey, I don’t. I believe what you say. I heard the noises myself. It’s just that, well, a wooden man? It could have been a freak kind of reflection, you know. A trick of the light.”
Neil walked across to the other side of the kitchen, and stared for two or three minutes out of the window. He could see the grass waving on the opposite side of the fence, the grass where the man in the long white duster coat had been standing.
Perhaps, after all, the man was nothing more than an optical illusion. Dave Conway hadn’t seen him in the bay, and Susan hadn’t seen him outside the yard. Perhaps he only existed inside Nell’s mind. And Toby’s, too, of course.
Neil said, “I think I’m going to go out for a few hours. I need to turn this thing over, get it straight in my head.”
Susan came over and put her arms around him. “I love you,” she said in a soft voice.
“I know,” he told her.
“What are you going to do about the wardrobe?” she asked.
“I’ll break it up when I get back. We’ll have a bonfire in the yard. Maybe we can bake some potatoes. It’s about time we tried to have ourselves a little fun.”
“You won’t be long, will you?”
He checked his watch. “It’s eleven-thirty now. I’ll be back in time to pick up Toby from school.”
He gave her a light kiss on the forehead, and then he took the pickup keys from their hook by the door, and left the house without another word. Susan watched him go.
When the dust from the truck had drifted away, she went through to the living room and called her mother on the telephone. She had a feeling that what she had just felt was the first tremor of some kind of earthquake, and that before long she was going to need all the help she could find.
The phone rang and rang but her mother didn’t answer. She hoped that wasn’t a bad omen.
Neil drove through to Santa Rosa, over the winding rural road that took him through Sebastopol, and out onto 101 by the Shell gas station. Inland, it was sunny and hot, and he drove with what he always called his two-fifty ah- conditioning (two windows open at fifty miles an hour). He was sweating, and his shirt stuck to the vinyl seat, but he scarcely noticed the temperature. He turned left on 101 and headed north.
On the pickup’s radio, Warren Zevon was singing Werewolves of London. He wasn’t listening. He was looking for the turnoff to Petrified Forest Road, which would lead him over the redwood-forested Sonoma mountains to Calistoga.
He almost missed it, and when he jammed on his brakes and signaled a right, a lumber truck blared
its five-tone horns at him, and the driver leaned over to mouth some unheard obscenity.
Along the twisting, climbing highway, it was peaceful and deserted. The pickup labored on the grades, but now Neil had made up his mind what he was going to do, he didn’t feel the same desperate urgency. Through the forests of pines and cottonwoods, madrona, and red-barked manzanita, he climbed into the clear fragrant mountain air.
The Petrified Forest itself was just below the brim of the mountains that sloped down to the town of Calistoga. Neil had always promised Toby that he would take him there to see the giant petrified redwoods, but it was one of those trips that they’d never gotten around to taking. He drove past the wooden gates of the entrance with his pickup blowing out blue smoke.
In Calistoga’s main street, a sleepy one-horse thoroughfare at the head of Napa Valley, Neil parked the pickup in the shade of an old flat-fronted hotel building and climbed out. It was way up in the high eighties, and he wiped his forehead on his shirt sleeve. Beyond the main street, there were only the dark-green, forested mountains, and the air was heavy with the scent of the trees. The sky was cloudless and inky blue.
He walked along the street until he found a drugstore. Inside, it was air-conditioned and smelled of menthol. He went up to the prescription counter and waited while the short, bespectacled druggist wrote the label for a large bottle of stomach pills.
“Can I help you?” the druggist asked bun. His spectacles had such strong lenses that his eyes were hugely magnified.
“I’m looking for an old man named Billy Ritchie,” said Neil. “I guessed, since he was old, he might come in here for prescriptions.”
The druggist finished off his label. “Sure. I know Billy Ritchie. I’d like to know someone in town who doesn’t. A real old character. Where are you from?”
“Out by Bodega Bay. I met a friend of his, an old sailor, and the sailor said I ought to drop by and see Billy if I was passing.”
The druggist nodded. “Sure. If you cross the street here, and take the first on your right, that’s Washington Street, then take the fifth right again, that’s Lake Street, you’ll find Billy in the green-painted house on the left. You can’t miss it, his name’s on the mailbox.
“Thanks.”
Neil left the store and crossed Lincoln Avenue in the shadowless midday heat. He walked as far as Lake Street, sweating and short of breath, and the house was right there. A small clapboard cabin, painted the color of lawn mowers. It was shaded by maples and firs and looked deserted. Neil went up to the door and knocked.
It took a long time, but after a while he heard a clattering sound inside, and the security chain was drawn back. The door opened, and in the dun hallway, Neil saw a wizened old man in an invalid chair.
“Are you Billy Ritchie?” he asked, quite loudly, in case the old man was deaf.
“That’s me, sir. What do you want?”
“I’m afraid it’s kind of hard to tell you in one breath. But I was talking to Doughty out on the jetty at Bodega Bay, and he said I should come see you. He said you could tell me some stories of the old days.”
The old man nodded. He was bald, smooth-shaven, and toothless, and the only hairy thing about him was the black chinchilla cat which sat in his lap, and which he endlessly stroked.
“I can tell you stories, sure. What stories do you want to know?”
“I’d like to know about the Fenners, back in the days of the Wappo Indians, if that’s convenient.”
Billy Ritchie coughed. “Those were bad days. What do you want to know about them for?”
“A couple of reasons. For one, my name’s Neil Fenner.”
The old man laughed, and coughed some more.
“Sounds like as good a reason as any. Tell you what, I’ll strike you a bargain. Get yourself back down the road there and bring me a six-pack of Coors and a pint of Old Crow, and that’s all I ask in return. I can’t tell stories on a dry whistle.”
“You’ve got yourself a deal.”
Ten minutes later, his hair dripping with sweat and his shirt soaked, Neil came back with the liquor. The old man had left the front door ajar, and as Neil walked up the path, the host called, “Walk straight in there, friend. Close it behind you, though. You never know who might come prowling to steal my valuables.”
The little house was dark and cool, and surprisingly clean and well cared-for. Billy Ritchie, without his legs, had made his home his whole world, and it was wallpapered from floor to ceiling with color pictures cut from calendars and magazines. Every room was a patchwork of scenic views snipped from tourist brochures, close-ups of butterflies and flowers, religious scenes and snow scenes, cartoons and classic works of art, all interleaved with center spreads from Penthouse and Hustler.
“Most folks comment on every damn picture except the girls,” said Billy Ritchie. “But what I say is, if an old gent can’t admire some young flesh when he’s past everything but spitting contests, then it’s a sad world.”
The old man was sitting in a shadowy corner of the room, his head silhouetted by the light from the half-closed Venetian blinds behind him. Through the slats of the blind, Neil could see a tangled garden, overgrown with wild grass.
“There’s glasses on the side there,” Billy Ritchie said. ‘Tour me a beer and a stiff one, and whatever you want for yourself.”
Neil went across to a low sideboard with a decorated glass front and laid out three glasses. He opened a beer for each of them, and poured out three fingers of bourbon for Billy Ritchie. Then he sat himself down in an uncomfortable, yellow-painted, basketwork chair, lifted his drink, and said; “Good health, Mr. Ritchie.”
The old man raised his glass in return. “Same to you. But call me Billy, and don’t worry too much’ about my health. I lost the use of my legs twenty years ago when I fell off a damn bad-tempered horse, and I’ve been fit as a damn drum ever since. I’ve seen a lot, though, and talked to a whole host of the old-timers, and there isn’t much that’s passed me by.”
“What do you know about Bloody Fenner? That’s what they called him, didn’t they?”
“Oh, they sure did,” said Billy. “Bloody by name and damn bloody by nature. But you have to judge a man like that by the days he lived in, and those days in the Napa Valley weren’t easy. This was fine land, and the Indians weren’t too happy about handing it over. If you wanted to survive, you had to be real tough, and ready to make the best of things. That was what Bloody Fenner was good at. Making the best of things.”
Neil swallowed beer and wiped his mouth with the back of bis hand. “I heard he was a traitor, of sorts.”
Billy Ritchie pulled a face. “Not to himself, he wasn’t. He did pretty well in the 1830s, made himself a fair pile of money, and owned a whole stretch of good land up along the Silverado Trail. Trouble was, the Fenner family lost most of their acreage in the late forties, after the year of the Bear Flag Party across at Sonoma, when the Californians declared independence from the Mexicans. Fenner had gotten along good with the Mexicans, on account of he was smart and wily, and willing to perform a service to any man who paid him.
But when the Bear Flag folks took over, they made life so damn difficult for the Fenner family they sold out and moved to the coast, and I guess the land they bought was where you’re living now.”
Neil nodded. “Part of it, anyway. My grandfather sold about a hundred acres during the Depression.”
Old Billy Ritchie took a mouthful of Old Crow, coughed, and said, “A lot of folks did, especially around Napa. First, prohibition hit the wineries, then the Depression. They weren’t good times.”
“But what about Bloody Fenner?” asked Neil.
“Bloody Fenner?” echoed Billy Ritchie. “Bloody Fenner was the best damn brawler and fighter this side of the Sacramento River. He knew all the Indians by name, the Wappos and the Patwins, and there were plenty who said that he’d been initiated in a Wappo temescal. The stories say that he was a tall man, with a face as fierce as a bear, and that he co
uld shoot a fly off of a horse’s ass if he was blindfolded and standing on his head.”
Neil grinned. “Sounds like that*s one talent that’s gotten bred out of the family.”
“Just as well, if you ask my opinion,” Billy Ritchie rejoined. “Bloody Fenner wasn’t loved by nobody, except for his wife, and by all accounts she was twice as hard-bitten as he was.”
Neil was silent for a moment, watching the old-timer sitting in his invalid chair, stroking and stroking that black, furry cat. Then the guest said softly, “Did you ever hear tell of a battle? A battle that Bloody Fenner might have fought in?”
“Sure. He fought in plenty. He fought for Jose San-chez back in the early days, and the story goes that he helped Father Altamira round up Patwins and put them to work for the mission at Sonoma. That was back in the late 1820s, and times were raw then, I can tell you.”
“I’m thinking of one battle in particular,” said Neil. “A battle where the white men came off pretty badly, and the Indians did well.”
“There were a few of those,” said Billy Ritchie, shaking his head. “I heard tell of a massacre of ten white farmers and their families by the Wappos up at St. Helena, and there was an ambush of three white squatters by Wappos in York Creek. Maybe the worst, though, was the time they say Bloody Fenner took a league of land from the Wappo Indians in exchange for leading twenty settlers and their families into a trap set in the forest up at Las Posadas, close to Conn Creek. The settlers had trusted Fenner, you see, and paid him in gold to act as their scout and interpreter, so that they could lay out claims to farmland in Bell Canyon. But he took them slap-bang into a Wappo ambush, and they were all killed. Twenty farmers, and their twenty wives, and fifty-three young children.”
Neil licked his lips. “Did anyone prove that it was Fenner who did it? Or was it just hearsay?”
“What proof did anyone have in them days?” asked Billy Ritchie. “The land was rough and the folks were rougher. You stayed alive if you were hard and dogged and used your gun without thinking twice. But the stories say that Fenner was the only white man who came out of that massacre alive, and that’s suspicious in itself. He said that he left the settlers, and rode back along Conn Creek to bring help from his Mexican soldier friends, and there’s nothing to say that he didn’t. But if he did bring help, it was a sight too late to save anyone; and what was oddest of all, the settlers’
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