A Wasteland of Strangers

by Bill Pronzini

  “What makes you so sure?” I asked wearily.

  “If you’d seen him you wouldn’t have to ask that question. He has an evil face. Pure evil.”

  “Man can’t help how he looks.”

  “Howard, he’s been in Pomo two days now. And all he does is drive around in that old car of his, hardly saying a word to anybody. Just looking.”

  “Looking at what?”

  “Everything. Our house, this morning. Driving by so slowly he was hardly moving and staring right at our house.”

  “So? Maybe he likes this kind of old-fashioned style—”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Howard! That’s not it at all. I know why he was staring. It gives me chills just thinking about it.”

  “You figure he’s a rapist, I suppose? Hot after housewives?”

  “You’re not funny, not one little bit. Rape is serious enough, but there are worse crimes.”

  “Such as?”

  “Kidnapping. Child molesting.”

  “Jesus, Zenna!”

  “Blaspheme all you like, but you weren’t here and I was. Our house wasn’t all he was staring at—he was staring at Stephanie and Kitty Waylon, too. Watching them on their way to school.”

  She’d been saving that, easing into it for maximum effect; I could tell by the way she said it, with a kind of triumph mixed in with the fearful condemnation. Still, the words gave me a chill. I’d lost all love and respect for my wife, but Stephanie … I loved that kid more than anything else in the world.

  “Are you sure? You weren’t just imagining the worst?”

  “I was there, wasn’t I? I know what I saw. If I hadn’t stepped out on the porch just then, the Lord knows what might’ve happened.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Ran out and got the girls and drove them to school.”

  “Did he say anything to them? Try to get them into his car?”

  “No. They didn’t even know he was there.”

  “What’d he do when you ran out?”

  “Drove away. He saw me, that’s why.”

  “Has he been back?”

  “No, thank the good Lord. But the police haven’t seen fit to do their duty; he’s still in town, up to the devil knows what. Claire Bishop saw him less than an hour ago—”

  “You called the police?”

  “Well, of course I called the police.”

  “And they said what?”

  “What they always say. They’ll look into it. But I told you, they haven’t done anything—he’s still roaming around free.”

  The edge was off my concern now. I’d been through this kind of thing too often with her—too damn often. Another false alarm, another pot of trouble stirred and boiled for little or no reason. The only danger Stephanie was likely in was from too much exposure to her mother.

  I snapped open a beer, drank half before I lowered the can. It didn’t take away the sour taste in my mouth. “Made a bunch of other calls, too, I’ll bet. All your cronies.”

  “Cronies? What kind of word is that to use?”

  “The mayor? You call him, too?”

  “No, I didn’t call Mayor Seeley.”

  “The newspaper?”

  That produced one of her tight little smiles. “Yes, I called the Advocate. I spoke to Douglas Kent himself. He listened to what I had to say. And he did something, at least.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Wrote an editorial,” she said, and the triumph was in her voice again-—sharper this time, almost savage in its serf-satisfaction. She pushed today’s issue under my nose. “Right there on the front page. Read it, Howard, then you’ll see. Go ahead and read it.”

  I read it. When I was done, I didn’t say a word. Zenna was waiting for me to make some comment, but if I’d opened my mouth I’d have said what I was thinking, and I wasn’t ready to do that yet. Soon, but not yet.

  I’d have said, “This is why, Zenna, exactly why I’ve been driven way past my limits.” And then, with the same savage triumph in my voice, I’d have told her where I really was and what I was really doing last night when she thought I was sitting alone in a Redding motel room.

  Audrey Sixkiller

  DICK SAID, “I’M worried about you, Audrey. You sure you’re all right?”

  It was what I wanted to hear. But I couldn’t help thinking: If you’re so worried, why didn’t you stop by instead of calling? Or at least call earlier?

  “Don’t I sound all right?” I said. “I’m fine, really.”

  “Maybe you’d better not stay there alone tonight.”

  “Where would I go?” Your house?

  “Stay with a friend.”

  “I won’t be driven out of my home, not even for one night.”

  “Then ask someone to come and stay with you.”

  How about you? I almost said it. And at that, what came out was a variation: “Why don’t you come over after you’re off duty? I’ll make something to eat, and we can talk.”

  “… I don’t know, Audrey. I’d like to, but I’m pretty tired and likely to be here late as it is. You know how Friday nights can be. I don’t want to make any promises I can’t keep.”

  Oh, I knew how Friday nights could be. Lonely. And I knew excuses when I heard them, too. I had an impulse to ask him if he was too tired to accept an invitation from Storm Carey, but that would have been senseless and catty. I didn’t know he was seeing her again. Didn’t want to know if he was, not right now.

  “Try to make it if you can,” I said. “For supper or … anytime.”

  “All right. In any case, I’ll have one of the patrols keep an eye on your house.”

  “Please, Dick, I really do want to see you … I need you tonight.” Shameless. How much plainer did I have to make it? Four-letter words? Storm Carey plain?

  All he said was, “I’ll try.”

  I went into the kitchen and brewed a pot of tea. The old, bitter Elem variety made from pepperwood leaves. William Sixkiller’s favorite cure-all for colds, fevers, sores, boils, and general malaise. When it was ready I carried a cup back into the living room. But instead of sitting down, I stood, sipping the tea in front of my memory cabinet.

  After William Sixkiller died I gave most of the native artifacts he’d collected—woven sedge baskets, beadwork, bows and arrows, spear points—to the Pomo County museum. But I’d kept a few special items, favorites of mine and his. Looking at them, touching them, made me feel close to him. I slid the glass door open, ran fingers over the blackened bowl of the long pipe he’d carved from wild mahogany and smoked for forty years. He had helped to make the baby basket, too, that had been mine when I was an infant; the beads and bird feathers and other sleep-inducing charms attached to the hoop above the head were still bright after nearly three decades. The elderberry-shoot flute he’d played so sweetly had belonged to his grandfather. Even older was the musical bow made of a willow branch two feet long, with its twin sinew strings and the small stick you struck against the strings while you blew into the hollowed end of the bow; it dated to the days before the white man came, when, according to legend, the People were giants and the blood of the young warrior Kah-bel, slain in a battle over his beloved Lupiyoma, daughter of powerful Chief Konocti, painted the hills red and Lupiyoma’s tears of grief formed the mineral spring called Omaracharbe.

  Wise Father, I thought, what am I going to do?

  Well, I knew what he would say if he were beside me now. “Stop this foolish mooning over a white man,” he’d say. “Stop your white-acting ways. An Indian woman belongs with her own kind. If you wish to marry, choose a Pomo for your husband, or at least a man from another tribe.”

  A man like Hector Toms, Father? Handsome young Hector, my first lover. Simple, gentle, one of the finest woodworkers in Pomo County until prejudice cost him three good jobs, one after the other, and bitterness and weakness made him turn—as brother Jimmy and so many others had—to alcohol and drugs. When I went away to school at UC Berkeley, Hector had left too, drif
ted to Sonoma County to pick fruit and then to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas. A string of small and large cities, the new Trail of Tears. By then Native Americans were no longer being relocated to large urban centers by the Bureau of Indian Affairs—a well-intentioned (or was it?) program sponsored by the Eisenhower administration that was supposed to “mainstream” the Indian, end his reliance on Federal aid and benefits by providing employment training and housing in a more “acculturated” environment. Instead it succeeded only in uprooting 200,000 men, women, and children from their cultural and spiritual homes, dropping them into uncaring, alien cities and ultimately forcing some into menial jobs, the unintegrated majority into even more dependence on the government. The new Trail of Tears remained after the mainstreaming program was finally ruled a failure in the mid-seventies; it still remained today. And Hector had drifted onto it and was lost. The last I heard of him, years ago, he was said to be homeless in Chicago, a simple, gentle Elem woodworker with an alcohol and drug dependency living and dying alone on the cold, acculturated streets of a white man’s city.

  Better off with my own kind? None of us is any better off with our own kind than we are with the white man’s kind, it seems. None of us.

  And to that William Sixkiller might say, “Then don’t marry and bear children of any blood. Spend more time educating the white man’s children. Spend more time helping the cause of our people.” Yes, Father, except that I want a husband, children, and I already spend so much time teaching and in volunteer work I have little enough left for myself. Five days a week at the high school, adult education courses two evenings, graduate studies toward my master’s at Berkeley in the summer; the tribal council, aid and counseling service on the rancheria, one Saturday a month at the Indian Health Center in Santa Rosa. What more can I do?

  My tea had cooled. I finished it, put the cup into the kitchen sink, and wandered into the back bedroom that had once belonged to Jimmy, that I had turned into my study. There were themes on the California missions to be corrected; I’d been doing that, with half my mind, when Dick called. I sat down and looked at the top one on the stack. The computer-generated type seemed blurred even after I rubbed at my eyes with a tissue.

  Dick Novak isn’t the answer, I thought, more teaching and volunteer services aren’t the answers. What’s the answer?

  Maybe there is none, at least not in this life. Live today, live tomorrow when it comes and not before. Events will happen, certain things will change—that’s inevitable. Some will be good; some will make you happy, if only for a while. Live for those.

  William Sixkiller would approve of that philosophy. His daughter approved of it, too. But William Sixkiller was one of the spirits now and his daughter was still among the living, and the simple truth was, she wanted the white eyes so badly he was an ache in her heart and a fever in her soul …

  I made an effort to concentrate on the themes. It took an hour to grade them all. Only three were worth more than a generous C, and half a dozen deserved F’s and received D’s instead. F grades were discouraged by Pomo’s civic-minded school board.

  Time, then, to take the boat out. I’d been cooped up too long; alone on open water was much better than alone in a box. I was shrugging into my pea jacket when something smacked against the front door. I tensed until I remembered that this was Friday. Paper delivery, later than usual. I went and got it.

  Front-page editorial: STRANGERS IN OUR MIDST.

  What in God’s name is the matter with Douglas Kent? I thought angrily when I finished reading it. He might as well have headed this crap AN INVITATION TO VIOLENCE.

  George Petrie

  I DID IT.

  Oh God, I did it, I took the money!

  All afternoon I worried that I wouldn’t have enough nerve when the time came, the anxiety building as the bank clock crept toward six. Wasn’t until I said good night to Fred and Arlene and locked the rear door behind them that I knew for sure I was going through with it. And then, even while I was doing it, it all seemed to be some kind of waking dream—everything happening in slow motion, real and yet not real. Half of me watching the other half: Empty the vault of every bill except one-dollar notes. Carry the bags to the rear door. Set the time lock and close the vault. Tear up the printed list of serial numbers and flush the scraps down the toilet. Falsify some of the set of numbers on the computer and consign the rest to cyberspace limbo. Unlock the back door, make sure the lot was clear. Carry the bags out two at a time. Relock the door and get into the car. Seemed to take hours; my watch said forty-five minutes. Three quarters of an hour, 2,700 seconds, to steal $200,000.

  I’m still sitting here behind the wheel, another three or four minutes gone, waiting for my hands to stop shaking. I need a drink desperately, but I don’t dare stop anywhere before I get home. I feel numb, awed. All that money stuffed into six plastic garbage bags, the kind we use in the paper-towel hampers in the bathroom. Garbage bags! I want to laugh, but I’m afraid if I do I won’t be able to stop.

  Calm, everything depends on remaining calm. Can’t stay here much longer … suppose a patrol car comes in and the officers see me sitting alone in the dark? Mustn’t do anything to call attention to myself, arouse suspicion. If only my hands will steady enough so I can drive. Once I’m home, with a stiff jolt of scotch inside me, I’ll be all right. Even if Ramona notices how wired I am, it won’t matter. Won’t be there long, just long enough to pack. One thing worked out, the story I’ll tell her: Have to drive down to Santa Rosa; Harvey Patterson called and the real-estate deal may be on again after all, could mean big money for us, lot of details to be worked out in a hurry so I’ll probably be gone all weekend, might even stay over until Monday morning and then drive straight up to open the bank. Maybe she’ll believe it and maybe she’ll think I’m up to something, but she won’t try to stop me. Questions, yes, Ramona the parrot with her bright little bird eyes, but I can handle her questions. She won’t tell anybody I’m away for the weekend—I’ll swear her to secrecy, claim the real-estate deal has to remain hush-hush for the time being. She’ll sulk, but she’ll do what I say. I don’t have anything to worry about from Ramona.

  On the road no later than eight-thirty, out of this damn prison for good. But I won’t head south. East. Spend the night somewhere beyond Sacramento, up in the Sierras. Not sure yet where I’ll go from there, but I’ll have plenty of time to make up my mind. Have to make it as far away from Pomo as possible by Monday morning, that’s definite. Means a lot of driving, careful driving with the precious cargo in the trunk, but that can’t be helped. I’ll manage. Have to get rid of the Buick at some point, but maybe that can wait until I get to wherever I’m going. Some place I can settle in unobtrusively for a long, quiet stay. Change my appearance before I get there, too—dye my hair, buy a pair of glasses. Then rent a house or cabin with no close neighbors, hole up for a month, two months, even longer just to be safe. The FBI investigation has to’ve been back-burnered by the first of the year. Then I can travel again, go somewhere warm, somewhere exciting, Florida Gold Coast maybe, where I can start spending some of the money. Start living again.

  But that’s all in the future. First things first. Start the car, drive away from here, drive home. Can’t go anywhere without going home first.

  Christ, why won’t my hands stop shaking?

  Trisha Marx

  OUT THERE IN the dark, Anthony kept shouting my name. He’d sounded annoyed at first, then kind of exasperated; now he was just pissed. He had a flashlight from the car and he kept shining it here and there over the trees and bushes, trying to find me. But he didn’t even come close to where I was hiding under a big pile of dead branches and oak leaves.

  “Irish, goddamn it! You better come out, man. I’ll leave you here, I mean it, I’ll drive off and you can freakin’ walk home. That ain’t gonna make things any better. Trish? Shit, Trisha!”

  The flashlight beam danced and stabbed. It was hard, white, like frozen light, and it kept cutting weird wedges and
strips out of the dark—parts of tree trunks and limbs, ferns, rocks, like pieces in the magazine montage on the wall of my room. Don’t like all those pieces … I’m still stoned. Three joints, way too many. Why’d I think it’d be easier to tell him if I smoked some dope first? Stupid. Weirded me out and made him horny. Come on, querida, I’m getting lover’s nuts. Oh yeah? Come on, Anthony, I’m already pregnant with your kid. Wham. No more lover’s nuts, huh, Anthony?

  It ain’t mine. I always used a rubber.

  At least one time you didn’t.

  It ain’t mine. You been screwing somebody else.

  That’s the lowest, Anthony. You know better.

  I don’t want no freakin’ kid!

  You think I do?

  Get rid of it.

  No.

  You want me to marry you? No way, man.

  What happened to “I love you, Trish”? Just bullshit to get into my pants, right?

  I ain’t getting married. Lose the kid or we’re quits.

  I knew it. I knew it’d be like this. I knew it!

  Slapped him, hard, harder than I ever thought I could hit anybody. And then out of the car, into the woods. And here I am.

  “One more minute, Trisha. That’s all you got.”

  Jerking light, pieces of the night. But I couldn’t see him at all. Good. I never wanted to see his crappy, lying face again.

  “I mean it. One minute and I’m outta here, I’m history.”

  Fuck you, Anthony. You’re already history.

  I lay there shivering, waiting for him to go away, get the hell out of my life. The wind up here on the Bluffs was like ice, even down low to the ground where I was. The water in the lake must be like ice, too. Black ice. Deep, black ice.

  “Okay! That’s the way you want it, man, it’s on your head. I’m gone.”

  The light blinked out. So dark again I couldn’t see a thing through the leaves, not even the shapes of the oak branches swaying in the moany wind overhead. But I could hear him crunching around out there, heading back to his junky TransAm. Door slam, revving engine. Light again, spraying the trees, spraying the bare ground out toward the cliff edge as he swung away onto the road. Run, you asshole, go ahead and run. And the light faded away and he was gone and I was alone. Stoned and pregnant and all alone.