A Wasteland of Strangers

by Bill Pronzini

  The long walk tired me but did nothing for the restlessness. I called the station to see how things were. Verne Erickson, the night man in charge—actually, he’s a lieutenant and second in command; he works nights by choice—said things were relatively quiet. One D&D arrest, one minor traffic accident out on the Northlake Cutoff, nothing else so far. So I didn’t even have an excuse to go back to work.

  I made a cup of cocoa, sprinkled nutmeg on top the way Eva had in the early days of our marriage. One of our little rituals: a cup of cocoa before bed every night that I managed to make it home by bedtime. It’d been good with us in those days … hadn’t it? Good, yes, but even then there’d been a distance between us. Less passion, sexual and otherwise, than I would’ve liked. Less connection on important issues. She wanted children, and her job at a day-care center in Carmel Valley only made her want them more. I was ambivalent, and at some level I think she blamed me for the fact that she wasn’t able to conceive. She didn’t like my work; it kept me away from home too much and there was too much danger, too much violence involved in it. She believed in thou shalt not kill, turn the other cheek, the meek shall inherit. In her mind it would’ve been almost as bad if I’d shot someone in the line of duty as if someone had shot me. Friction there, friction over the inability to conceive, little frictions on other fronts, too. Then she’d gotten pregnant, and she was so happy she glowed. Things really had been good until the sixth month, the sudden pains and bleeding, the miscarriage …

  Christ, Novak, I thought, what’s the point of living it all again? Why beat yourself up like this?

  I sat in the living room of my nice, comfortable, two-bedroom, rent-free home—one of the perks that had induced me to accept the otherwise low-paying chief’s job seven years ago—and drank my cocoa and stared at the blank TV screen. Mack came in and laid his head on my knee, looked up at me with his dark, liquid eyes. He knew how I was feeling tonight. Dogs are sensitive that way. I patted him, switched on the tube, switched it off again.

  Get out of here, go do something, I told myself, before the walls start closing in.

  Go get laid. It’s been a while—maybe that’s what you need.

  Storm?

  No, no way. Over and done with, and except for the sex, not so good while it lasted. Too many frictions there, too; too many angry words. And don’t forget the flap it caused. The chief of police and the once respected, now vilified Mrs. Carey—tongues had really wagged and there’d been no mistaking the serious warning behind Burt Seeley’s private lecture about public image and civic responsibility. Take up with Storm again and I’d be even more strung out, and out of a job to boot. And then what would I do?

  God, though, she was amazing in bed. The best ever.

  Yeah, well, she’d had plenty of practice, hadn’t she? A hundred, two hundred others before and since. A wonder she hadn’t contracted AIDS or some other sexually transmitted disease—one of the things we’d argued about when she’d admitted to sleeping with others while she was sleeping with me. Hell, for all I knew maybe she did have a disease by now.

  Stay away from her. No ifs, ands, or buts.

  Out to the kitchen again, Mack padding along behind. I started to make another cup of cocoa, but I didn’t want any more goddamn cocoa. What did I want?

  Audrey?

  She wanted me; she’d made that plain enough. Smart, attractive, caring, funny, undemanding—everything a man could want in a woman. Casual, our relationship so far; a few dates, a couple of passionate clinches, nothing else, but I could sleep with her if I wanted to. She’d made that plain, too. Only if I did, then it wouldn’t be casual any longer because the one thing she wasn’t was a casual lay. It’d be a commitment, at least on her part, and then if I couldn’t follow through she’d be hurt badly. And I didn’t think I would be able to follow through. And I didn’t want to hurt her.

  One strike against us: She was twenty-seven, ten years younger than me. Another: I liked her, more than a little, but I didn’t love her. No feelings of almost desperate yearning, the way it’d been when I first met Eva. No hammering lust, the way it’d been with Storm. Another: Audrey loved kids, wanted children of her own; she was quiet domesticity, traditional family values. I’d had all that, or a taste of it, with Eva, and it hadn’t led to anything but pain; I couldn’t stand to live that kind of life again even if the person and the outcome were different. I was better off unmarried. I functioned better when the only responsibility I had was to myself.

  Right. And how about the other two strikes you don’t want to admit to: Audrey’s heritage and your job security. Seeley and the city council and the rest of the town didn’t like you making it with Storm and they wouldn’t like it any better if you took a Native American wife, now would they? Ask Burt Seeley if there was prejudice against Pomos in Pomo and he’d look appalled and vehemently deny it. But it was there, all right, in him and plenty of others, crawling like worms beneath the surface, so goddamn subtle sometimes you could barely see it or smell it for what it was. The Pomos and Lake Miwoks and Lileek Wappos were here a century or more before white settlers, the town and lake and county and a dozen other places and businesses were named for them, but the whites ran things and had ever since they’d shown up. Their word was law, and their laws were meant to protect their own. The natives were tolerated as long as they kept their place, stayed for the most part on their handout reservation lands, and didn’t try to change the status quo. It was all right for an Indian woman to teach at a mainly white high school, as long as it was subjects that didn’t matter too much in their way of thinking, like American history; and it was all right for a white man to date an Indian woman, and lay her if he felt like it, but when it came to taking one for his wife, particularly if he happened to be an appointed member of the white power structure and she happened to be the daughter of an uppity free spirit who’d had the gall to buy a piece of nonreservation land and build a home on it in their midst, well, that just wasn’t acceptable. No sir, not acceptable at all.

  Screw them, I thought. I don’t care that much about the frigging job, and Audrey being Pomo has nothing one way or another to do with my feelings toward her. Do I think Native Americans or any other nonwhite race is inferior? Hell, no. I treat everybody as an individual, some good, some bad, whites or blacks or reds or browns. If I wanted to marry Audrey I’d damned well marry her. I’m—

  What?

  What the hell am I?

  What do I want?

  Mack whined and nuzzled my leg. My head was pounding, the ache sharp behind my eyes as I reached down to pat him.

  And that was when the telephone rang.

  Audrey Sixkiller

  SOMEONE WAS TRYING to break into my house.

  I knew it as soon as I came awake. I’m a light sleeper, but I don’t wake up to normal night sounds, even loud ones. I lay very still, listening. The wind, the flutter of a loose shingle on the roof, and then the sound that wasn’t normal—a slow scraping, faint and stealthy. Where? Somewhere in back. It came again, followed by a different noise that might have been metal slipping on metal and digging into wood. The back porch, either the window there or the rear door: some kind of tool being used to force the lock on one or the other.

  It made me angry, not afraid. In the heavy darkness I lifted my legs out from under the covers, sat up, slid open the nightstand drawer. Whoever was out there must be white; Indians know how to function in complete silence even in the dead of night. Just as I’d kept William Sixkiller’s house and boat, I’d kept his hunting rifle and shotgun and handgun. I lifted the .32 Ruger automatic out of the drawer, eased off the safety with my thumb. Its clip was always kept fully loaded; he’d taught me that when he’d taught me how to shoot.

  Scrape. Scrape.

  Up from the bed with the gun cold in my fingers. The sleep was out of my eyes now; I could make out the familiar bedroom shapes as I crept across it and into the hall.

  Snap!

  I knew that sound: the push-button loc
k on the back door releasing. I’d been foolish not to listen to Dick and have a dead-bolt lock installed instead.

  Down the hall to the kitchen. Into the kitchen. I keep the swing door that leads to the enclosed porch propped open; it’s easier that way to carry in groceries, laundry back and forth to the washer and dryer. Through the opening I could tell that the prowler had the back door pulled all the way open, but I couldn’t see him clearly; he was behind the screen door and the cloudy night at his back was only a shade or two lighter than he was. Big, that much I could make out: He filled the doorway. Otherwise he was a shapeless mass of black.

  He was pushing on the screen door; I heard it and the eye hook creak. Not trying to break the hook loose from the wood—that would’ve made too much noise—but creating a slit at the jamb so he could wedge something through to lift the hook free. More scraping, metal on metal, as I detoured around the dinette table, past the stove to the open swing door. My bare feet made the softest of whispers on the cold linoleum. But he wouldn’t have heard me in any case because of the sounds he was making.

  It would have been easy to reach through the doorway, around to the porch light switch. But if I did that, with my eyes dilated as they were, the sudden flare would half blind me for two or three seconds; and if the light triggered him to break through instead of run away, he might have enough time to overpower me before I could get off a shot to stop him. I would shoot him only as a last resort. So I braced my left shoulder against the door edge, spread my feet, extended the automatic in a two-handed grip. It was steadied and aimed when the hook popped free, making a thin, jangling sound as it dropped. The screen door started to creak inward.

  “Don’t come any farther. I have a gun and I’ll use it.”

  My voice rising so suddenly out of the darkness froze him. Four or five seconds passed; then the door creaked again, louder, and the lumpy shapes of his head and shoulders appeared around its edge.

  “One more step, I’ll shoot.”

  Creak.

  He didn’t believe I was armed, so I made him believe it. I raised the Ruger slightly and to the left and squeezed the trigger.

  The report, magnified by the closed space and low ceiling, was a heavy pressure against my eardrums. The bullet went into the wall alongside the jamb, and in the muzzle flash I saw him duck his head below an upraised arm. That brief glimpse caused me to suck in my breath. I saw his eyes, bulging, wild, but that was all I saw.

  He was wearing a ski mask.

  In the darkness the screen door banged shut as he let go of it and backed off on the landing. Then he was thumping down the steps, off onto the brick path that angles down to the dock. It was a few seconds before my legs would work; then I was at the screen, yanking it open and rushing outside. By then he was off the path, running toward the low fence that separates my property from the closed-up cottage on the north that belongs to summer people. The absence of any nearby lights and the low, thick cloud cover made him little more than a moving shadow; his clothing was dark, too, so I couldn’t even tell what he was wearing. He vaulted the fence, stumbled, righted himself, and disappeared behind the junipers that grew at the rear of the cottage.

  The wind off the lake was icy; I was aware of it all of a sudden, stabbing through the thin cotton of my pajamas, prickling my bare feet and arms. Back inside, quickly. I put the porch light on, and when my eyes adjusted I peered at the door lock. Scratched, the wood around the plate gouged; but it still worked all right. I set the button, closed the door, then rehooked the screen door. The splintered hole in the wall was about twelve inches from the jamb, at head height—exactly where I’d intended the bullet to go.

  I switched on the kitchen light, entered the front room, and turned on a lamp in there. The clock over the fireplace said that it was one-thirty. The gunshot had seemed explosively loud, but the house on the south side of me was also empty—up for sale—and the noise hadn’t carried far enough to arouse any neighbors farther away on this side or across the street. When I drew back an edge of the front-window curtain, Lakeshore Road was deserted and all the houses I could see were dark. Everything looked normal, peaceful, as if the entire incident might have been a dream.

  Goose bumps still covered my arms; there was a crawly sensation up and down my back. In the bedroom I put on my woolly slippers, the terry-cloth robe that was the heaviest I owned. The chill didn’t go away. I turned the furnace up over seventy and stood in front of the heat register until warm and then hot air began to pulse out.

  I kept seeing his image in the muzzle flash, the upflung arm, the wild eyes bulging in the holes of the ski mask. Burglar? There hadn’t been a nighttime break-in of an occupied house—what Dick calls a “hot prowl”—in Pomo in as long as I could remember. The penalties were much more severe for that kind of crime than they were for daylight burglaries. Besides, thieves weren’t likely to wear ski masks.

  Rapists wore ski masks.

  Rape wasn’t uncommon in Pomo County. The home invasion kind was, but still, it happened elsewhere—it could happen here, too. Young woman living alone, a man with a sick sexual bent decides to take advantage—

  If you’d like some company …

  My God. The stranger on the pier tonight?

  Big, and a little odd. And I’d told him we didn’t have much serious crime in Pomo. I hadn’t told him I lived alone, but when I’d said I had to take the boat home or walk two miles and another two back in the morning, the inference had been there. He’d been gone when I returned from Safeway with my groceries, but he could’ve been lurking somewhere, watching; he could’ve followed the running lights on the Chris-Craft—Lakeshore Road does what its name implies, follows the water-line all along the northwest shore—and seen where I docked and that the house was dark; he could’ve watched the house and when no one else came he’d have known for sure I was alone …

  But I was jumping to conclusions. It didn’t have to be the stranger; it could be anyone, a resident as well as an outsider. And what if I hadn’t scared him off permanently? What if he came back, tonight or some other night?

  I was still angry, angrier than before, because whoever he was, he’d made me afraid. That was the one thing William Sixkiller had never let me be, that I hated being more than anything else. Afraid.

  In the front room I peeked out again through the drapes. Lakeshore Road was as deserted as before. I sat on the couch and picked up the phone. If I called the police station to report what had happened, it would mean patrol cars, questions, neighbors being woken up … people knowing I was afraid. But I had to tell someone, and that meant Dick. He was the only one I could talk to right now.

  I tapped out his number. And it rang and rang and rang without answer.

  Where was he, for heaven’s sake? Why wasn’t Dick home at 1:40 in the morning?

  Part II

  Friday

  George Petrie

  RAMONA SAID, “I asked you a question, George. Where were you last night?”

  I heard her that time, but the words didn’t register right away. I had so damn many things on my mind. My head felt stuffed, the way it does when you have a bad cold. I couldn’t concentrate on any one thing. It was all churned together, pieces here and there breaking off like swirls of color in a kaleidoscope; hang on to one, focus on it for a few seconds, and then it would slide back into the vortex and there’d be another and the same thing would happen.

  “Well?”

  “Well what, for Chrissake?”

  “You don’t listen to me anymore,” she said. “You act as if you’re alone half the time we’re in the same room.”

  “Ramona, don’t start—”

  “‘Ramona, don’t start.’” Like a goddamn parrot. Hair all frizzy after her shower, nose like a beak jutting at me, mouth flapping open and shut, open and shut. And that dressing gown of hers, green and red, white feathery wisps at the neck and on the sleeves. Wings, feathers, bright little bird eyes … a scrawny, scruffy, middle-aged, chattering parrot. W
hat did I ever see in her?

  “What did I ever see in you?” I muttered aloud.

  “What? What did you say?”

  “Nothing.” Sip of coffee. Bite of toast. Glance at my watch even though I know what time it is. “I’d better get to the bank.”

  “It’s only eight-twenty,” Ramona said. “I want an answer first.”

  “Answer to what?”

  “God, you can be an exasperating man. Where you were until after two o’clock in the morning. On a weeknight.”

  The squawking and screeching echoed inside my head, making it ache. My eyeballs actually hurt from the pressure.

  “George. Where were you?”

  “At the Elks Lodge, playing cards.”

  “Until two A.M.?”

  “Yes, until two A.M. Pinochle. I lost nine dollars and had four drinks and then I drove home. Does that satisfy you? Or do you want to know who else was in the game and who won and how much and how many drinks each of them had?”

  “You don’t have to yell—”

  “And you don’t have to interrogate me as if I were a fucking criminal.”

  Her mouth pinched until it wasn’t a mouth any longer, just a bunch of hard ridges and vertical creases. Kissing that mouth was like kissing two strips of granite. Was it ever soft, even on our honeymoon? I couldn’t remember her lips ever being soft.

  “At the breakfast table, George?” Hard and tight like her mouth. “That kind of language at eight-twenty in the morning?”