A Wasteland of Strangers

by Bill Pronzini

  When I brought him his beer and a basket of French bread and butter I said, “You’re from a big city, I’ll bet. San Francisco?”

  “L.A., recently. How’d you know?”

  “You have kind of a big-city look about you.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  “I don’t know. Only big city I’ve ever been in is San Francisco. You on vacation?”

  “No.”

  “Just passing through?”

  He shrugged. “I might stay for a while.”

  “Well,” I said. Then I said, “This is the best place on the lake to eat, no kidding. Lunch or dinner.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Darlene came over as I was pouring coffee to take to the couple in booth nine. She tucked up a piece of her red hair and said, “That’s some hunk over there. He looks like a refugee from a slasher movie.”

  “Looks can be deceiving.”

  “Yeah? You can’t help liking ’em big and nasty, I guess.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “You know what I mean, Lori. New bruise on your chin there, isn’t it?”

  “No.”

  “Makeup doesn’t quite hide it. It wasn’t there yesterday.”

  “Mind your own business, Darlene, okay?”

  “I just hate the way that man treats you.”

  “Earle’s got a temper. He can’t help it.”

  “He doesn’t have to take it out on you.”

  “He’s getting better. He’s trying.”

  “Sure he is.”

  “He is. He promised me he’ll stop drinking.”

  “For what, the hundredth time?”

  “I mean it, that’s enough.”

  She said, “It’s your life,” and went back into the kitchen.

  Well? It is, isn’t it? My life?

  The venison stew came out and I brought it to the big guy. I leaned low when I set the plate on the table and those silvery eyes went right where I knew they would. I let him look a few seconds before I straightened up. I’ve got nice boobs, firmer than most women in their midthirties; I don’t mind men looking at them. There’s no harm in looking, or being looked at. I think it’s a compliment.

  “Anything else you’d like?”

  “Not right now,” he said.

  “Just wave if there is. My name’s Lori.”

  He nodded.

  “What’s yours, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  I thought he wasn’t going to tell me. Then he said, “John.”

  “John what?”

  “Faith. John Faith.”

  “No kidding? You don’t look like somebody with a name like that. No offense.”

  “None taken.”

  “What do you do? I mean, for a living.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “I’m just curious.”

  “I work with my hands.”

  “I’ll bet you do.”

  “I’m not married, if that’s your next question.”

  “Huh?” It wasn’t going to be.

  “But you are,” he said.

  His eyes were on the gold band on my left hand. I glanced at it, too, before I said, “Yep, I sure am.” But right then I wished I weren’t.

  “I don’t play around with married women.”

  “Well, that puts you in the minority, John. Most men don’t care who they play around with.” Some women, too. Like Storm Carey, for instance.

  “I’m not most men.”

  Lord, no. “Truth is, I don’t play around either.”

  “Come on like you might.”

  “But I don’t. See, I’m a friendly person,” I said, because I didn’t want him to keep thinking what he was thinking about me. “Naturally friendly. I like men and I guess I can’t help flirting, but that’s as far as it goes. Really, I mean it.”

  He stared at me like he was trying to see inside my skin. Then he smiled, slow—a genuine smile this time. “Okay,” he said.

  “You know, John, you ought to use that smile more often. It’s a real nice one.”

  It was, too. He didn’t seem as ugly when he smiled, and it made those silver eyes look a lot softer. He likes me, I thought, and I felt good that he’d changed his opinion. I want people to like me, the ones I like in particular.

  “I’ll keep that in mind, too,” he said. He finished what was left of his beer. “How about getting me a refill and letting me eat my dinner before it gets cold?”

  He said it like a joke, and I laughed. “Sure thing.” I touched his arm, you know the way you do, just being friendly, and picked up his empty and turned away. But I hadn’t taken more than about three steps when I happened to look over at the entrance, and all at once I lost my smile and the good feeling I had. If I’d eaten anything before coming on shift, I might’ve lost that, too.

  Earle was standing inside the door.

  Standing there with his hands on his hips, glaring at me and past me at big John Faith.

  Trisha Marx

  WE WERE AT Northlake Chevron, where Anthony’s brother, Mateo, works, when the guy in the Porsche drove in. Just hanging, that’s all, Anthony and Mateo talking cars cars cars the way they usually did when they were together. Major boring on a good night, and this one wasn’t good. The whole week hadn’t been good. Maybe the last couple of months—maybe my whole life. I was afraid it was gonna turn into total crap and I didn’t know what to do to keep that from happening.

  Talk to Anthony, sure. Pretty soon I’d have to. And he’d probably go ballistic, same as Daddy would when he found out. All Anthony cared about was cars, fast cars, and going down to Sears Point to watch the Formula One races and getting high and getting into my pants whenever I’d let him. It was his fault as much as mine, but would that matter to him? Would he want to marry me? And if he didn’t, what was I gonna do then?

  Total crap at seventeen. If I was really pregnant.

  Two missed periods now, and throwing-up sick two mornings this week. Sure I was pregnant.

  That’s what I was thinking when the Porsche pulled in and this huge guy got out of it. I mean, really huge. Pretty old, around forty, with pocks and a scar on his chin and a head like a carved rock. Anthony and Mateo were staring at him, too, and it was plain they didn’t like what they saw. As if he was there to give them a hassle or something, when all he wanted was to buy some gas. He wasn’t paying any attention to any of us as he unhooked the hose and stuck the nozzle into the tank.

  Anthony said, “Man, will you look at him.”

  “Ugly fucker,” Mateo said. “Wonder if he’s tough as he looks.”

  “Why don’t you go find out, man?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So why don’t you?”

  “Shit, man, I can’t just go pop the dude, can I?”

  “Think you could take him?”

  “If I had to. Yeah, sure, I’m big enough. Look at that face, man. Makes you want to bust it up some more, don’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Face like that … man, you just want to smash it. You know what I’m saying?”

  “Like that Cisneros dude down in Southport.”

  “Yeah, like him. Ugly puto like that … what’s he doing around here?”

  “Go ask him, man.”

  “Freak him. I don’t care what he’s doing here, man.”

  I quit listening to them. Stupid talk. I don’t know what’s the matter with guys sometimes. Wanting to beat up somebody just because of the way they look. A person can’t help it if they’re ugly or deformed or something, can they? And don’t they have the right not to be hassled, same as everybody else?

  Anthony isn’t always such a macho jerk. Only when he’s with his buddies, and worst of all when he’s with Mateo. His brother’s three years older and a total asshole. Always strutting around and starting trouble. Once, when a bunch of us were partying at Nucooee Point, he put his hand up my skirt and tried to tear my panties off—he was drunk on Green Death, that ale from up in Washingt
on, and he’s even more of a pig when he’s ripped—and I practically had to scream rape before he let me alone. I told Anthony about it and he just laughed. As far as he’s concerned, Mateo never does anything wrong. Mateo could blow up the courthouse and Anthony would probably think it was a cool thing to do.

  So the huge guy finished pumping his gas and came over to pay Mateo for it. Mateo gave his badass sneer and said something I didn’t hear and Anthony laughed. The huge guy looked at them, one and then the other, not saying a word. Anthony stopped laughing and Mateo stopped sneering, just like that. So then the huge guy reached out and tucked a ten-dollar bill into Mateo’s shirt pocket, hard and with a sneer of his own, and Mateo didn’t move or say a word. Not then and not until the Porsche’s engine roared and its tires laid rubber as it went zooming out of the station.

  Then Macho Man gave the finger, jabbing it into the air half a dozen times, and yelled, “¡Carajo! Vete al carajo! Tu madre!” at the top of his voice.

  “You should’ve popped him, man,” Anthony said.

  “Yeah. Next time I see him I’ll break his ugly fuckin’ head with a fuckin’ tire iron.”

  I said, “Only if you sneak up behind him in a dark alley.”

  He raked me with his eyes. “What’d you say?”

  “He didn’t do anything to you.”

  “Came in here with a chip on. Tough guy.”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  Anthony said, “You saw the way the dude looked at us. Mean, man, like he wanted to break our heads.”

  “Why don’t you grow up, Anthony.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Say that again, Trish, I’ll bust your lip.”

  “Now who’s being mean?”

  “I’m telling you, man. Go bitch on me and I’ll pop you.”

  I’m pregnant! I’m gonna have your kid!

  I felt like screaming the words at him. But I didn’t, because then maybe he really would smack me. He’d never laid a hand on me before, but there’s always a first time. His eyes were hot and squinty, his face all scrunched up like a little boy getting ready to throw a tantrum. I’ve always thought Anthony’s the handsomest hunk in Pomo and that I was, like, beyond lucky when he first asked me out; I practically wet my pants the first time he kissed me. But he didn’t look handsome now. He looked mean, like he’d accused the Porsche guy of being. And a lot uglier, somehow.

  Funny, but all of a sudden I wasn’t so sure I wanted him to marry me. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to keep on being with him, whether or not I had his damn baby.

  Douglas Kent

  STORM’S EYES WERE all over the strange beast as soon as it lumbered into Gunderson’s Lounge. When it settled its hairy bulk at the other end of the bar, she shifted slightly on her stool so she could keep watching it without turning her head. Large, the way she liked ’em. Large and unsightly and endowed, no doubt, with no more than two active brain cells. What did she talk to them about afterward? Or were her postcoital conversations limited to contented sighs on her part, satisfied animal grunts and purrs on theirs?

  You’ll never know, Kent.

  No Stormy nights for you, bucko—past, present, or future.

  I lit a weed and studied my glass through the smoke. One more swallow to savor and on to the next. Dry martinis, the universal salve. The good folks at AA tell you that if you can’t imagine a world without booze, you’re a major-league alcoholic. I couldn’t imagine a universe without booze. So what did that make me?

  I knew what it made me, yes indeedy. My own brain cells pickled and expiring in daily droves. Ah, but there were still plenty left—too many, as a matter of fact. And the too many too active.

  “How about another?” I asked Storm.

  “No, I don’t think so.” Still staring at the Incredible Hulk who had wandered in out of the cold. “You go ahead, Doug.”

  “Don’t mind if I do.”

  I took the last swallow and signaled to Mike for a refill. He brought it dutifully and quickly; Mike and I have an understanding based on mutual need. His, of course, being filthy lucre.

  When I had it cozily in hand and a third of the salve working its warm way into the Kent depths I said, “Bigfoot lives.”

  “What?”

  “Him. Humongous, isn’t he?”

  “Mmm. He came into the bank today while I was there.”

  “Did he now.”

  “I wonder who he is.”

  “Why don’t you go ask him?”

  Out came the tongue to slick her lips. The tip of it stayed out at one corner. I knew that gesture and the sultry expression that went with it; I’d seen them aimed at a dozen different men in the past three years. Never at me, however. The gesture and expression I knew well, but the moist lips and tongue themselves I didn’t know at all and never would. Kent the deprived.

  “I’ll bet he’s hung like a horse,” I said.

  “Don’t be vulgar.”

  I applied more salve. “Sure you won’t have another, pal?”

  “I’m sure.” Then, delayed reaction: “Why did you say that?”

  “Say what?”

  “Call me pal.”

  “Why not? We’re drinking buddies, aren’t we?”

  “I suppose we are.” Eyes on the fresh meat again.

  “Aloof drinking buddies,” I said. “Martinis and chaste good-night handshakes.”

  No answer this time. She wasn’t even listening.

  I gave my glass closer scrutiny, holding it up so the back-bar lights reflected in tiny distorted glints off the salve’s oily surface. Time once again to ponder the oft-pondered question: Was I in love with Storm Carey, or was she just another whip-hard unit in the Kent bag of sticks? Tonight I felt more philosophical than usual. Tonight I decided it was a mixture of the two. Long ago I’d come to the conclusion that I was incapable of real love, the selfless, giving kind; but I was capable of a pallid, selfish version and within its boundaries, yes, I loved her. Ah, but was it Storm the woman that I loved pallidly and selfishly, or was it the insoluble mystery of her, her hidden eye that I couldn’t reach or ever possess? A little of both, I decided again. Which was what made the stick that was Storm whip hard, the pain more exquisite when it was applied to the tender portions of the Kent psyche.

  Not a new insight, but a sharper one than usual. Very good. I rewarded myself with more salve.

  How long has it been that I’ve been gathering sticks for the old bag? Long time. Long, long time. The first few had been picked up in the bosom of Pa Kent’s dysfunctional family. One or two more in Philly, fresh out of Penn State’s redoubtable journalism school, suffering through graveyard shifts on the AP rewrite desk. None in Pasadena that I could recall; my first job on a real newspaper, brash and eager and confident and still harboring a few of what I laughably considered ideals. Santa Monica? Yep, I’d gathered quite a few in good old Santa Monica after the promise of a freehand daily think piece became instead a restricted twice-weekly Pap smear and then, after four months, evolved into a reason to quit when the bastard city editor arbitrarily determined that I wasn’t columnist material after all and kicked me back onto the City Hall beat.

  They came fast and often after that, all the sticks on the twenty-year ride to the bottom. One more large-city daily (never a big-city daily where Kent could strut his stuff) and on to a couple of small-city dailies, a succession of small-town dailies, and small-town twice weeklies, and finally all the way down, plunk, to the tiny-town, once-a-week sheets. How many papers and towns altogether in twenty years? A score? Two dozen? They were all pasted together in my memory, a gray blur like the booze-soaked remnants of a cheap montage. The only things from each stop along the route that I remembered clearly were the sticks: missed deadlines, broken promises, bitter firings, random rants and clashes. But those weren’t the only mementos of the past two decades; there were plenty of other sticks, too, courtesy of one ex-wife (I wonder who’s laying her now?), a gaggle of ex-girlfriends, more
than one episode involving the nonperformance of a once dependable pecker, a clutch of drunk-driving charges, two or three sodden fistfights. Kent used them all, one by one (often, with certain favorites like the Storm stick), in the grand sport of Kent-bashing. And still the bag wasn’t full nor the psyche fully flayed, nor would they ever be even if my liver and lungs held out for another ten years or more. Which was about as likely as a black lesbian with AIDS being elected to the White House.

  Spend the rest of my short unhappy life in Pomo? Nope. Definitely not. The tiniest town yet, true, but there were tinier ones; tinier weeklies, too, than the Pomo Advocate, whose owners could be persuaded to tolerate the fine, ink-stained hand of Douglas Kent, crusading editor. The truth was, Pomo was wearing thin on me after three years. I wasn’t used to holding a job that long, staying in one place that long. I should have been fired long ago. Instead, I was still enjoying undeserved freedom, the largesse of a large-assed absentee owner whose only interest in the Advocate was a modest annual profit gleaned from its advertisers. He cared not a whit for the contents of the paper. Neither, for that matter, did its subscribers; their primary interest lay in a weekly search for the correct wording and spacing of their ads, the mention and correct spelling of their names and those of friends and relatives, ad nauseam.

  Perfect case in point: the long Kent-generated article last spring on alcoholism and its root causes in Porno County. Isolation, alienation, high poverty level on and off the Indian rancherias, high jobless rate, high density of the homeless and elderly retirees and welfare recipients, lack of adequate social services—all the usual crap, reshat and recycled. A temperance tract, in content and tone, on the insidious, long-range effects of John Barleycorn and his various spirited cousins.

  I wrote it drunk, of course.

  Blind drunk.

  Kent was amazed when he read the piece in print. About a quarter of it was borderline brilliant, some of the best writing I’d done in years, drunk or sober. The other three quarters was mostly incoherent. Sentences that made no sense, paragraphs that had little or no continuity, logic that was illogical, misquotes, even a couple of dangling participles. A shameful mess, in sum, from the first word to the final period.