A Wasteland of Strangers

by Bill Pronzini

  One more season. I figure that’s as long as I can hang on, that’s all the time I’ve got left on Lake Pomo. This time next year, if there’s not some radical change—and I don’t see how there can be—I’ll have to put the resort up for sale and move to San Carlos and depend on Ella to support me and hope like hell she doesn’t decide to marry some jerk who’ll throw me out on my tail. Just the thought of it puts me in a funk.

  Like they say nowadays, life sucks. Some people, and it don’t matter how decent and hardworking they are, are just born to end up with the short end of the stick.

  Lori Banner

  BEFORE HE LEFT, John Faith came to see me at the Pomo County Domestic Abuse Center, where I’m staying now. He said how sorry he was about what’d happened to me and I said how sorry I was about what’d happened to him. He said he was glad the district attorney had decided not to press charges against me and I said I was glad the D.A. had decided to drop all the charges against him. It sounds funny and not very sincere when I put it like that, but it wasn’t that way at all. We both meant every word we said. We wished each other well, and hugged each other, and then he was gone and I knew I’d never see him again, and it made me sad. But that’s the way it has to be. I knew it, and so did John.

  I wish I’d met him a long time ago. There might’ve been something between us, something good. I’m sorry I didn’t and there wasn’t and it can’t ever be. Sorry about Earle, too—that I ever met him, and married him, and put up with his abuse, and killed him. But I can’t keep on being sorry about everything, and I won’t. I have to put the past behind me and start over fresh. That’s what my counselor says. She says my life didn’t end the night Earle’s did. She says if I want it to be, my life is just beginning.

  She’s right. It won’t be easy, but I’ve made up my mind and I’ll stick to it. When I leave here I won’t be going back to the Northlake Cafe and I won’t be living in Pomo any longer. I’ll be returning to school in Santa Rosa, reentering the training program. I’m finally going to do what I always wanted to do, and this time I won’t let anything or anybody stop me.

  I’m going to be a nurse.

  Lori Banner, R.N. The best R.N. any hospital ever had.

  Zenna Wilson

  HOWARD LEFT ME.

  Walked out, moved out, and he isn’t coming back.

  When I came home Sunday evening, bursting with news of Chief Novak’s shocking confession, simply bursting with it, Howard was in our bedroom packing his suitcases. I said, “For heaven’s sake, you’re not going on another of your trips already, on a Sunday night?”

  He looked me right in the eye. “No, Zenna,” he said. “I’m leaving you.”

  “Leaving me?”

  “I can’t spend another night in this house with you, not even for Stephanie’s sake. I’m moving out for good.”

  “Howard, have you taken leave of your senses?”

  “Come to them, is more like it. I’ll see a lawyer right away, have him start divorce proceedings. But you don’t need to worry. You can have the house, as much support for Stephanie as I can afford … just about anything you want. All I want is out.”

  I must have gawked at him with my mouth open like a half-wit. I was utterly speechless.

  He kept right on packing. And then, oh my Lord, then he said, “You might as well know the whole truth, Zenna. It’s not just you, this empty marriage of ours … maybe I could’ve gone on, at least for a while, if that’s all it was. But there’s somebody else. I’ve been seeing someone else.”

  “Another woman!” I spat the words at him.

  “Her name is Irene. She lives in Redding—”

  “I don’t want to hear about your dirty whore!”

  “She’s not a whore. She’s a widow with two small children—”

  I clapped my hands over my ears. “I don’t want to hear it, I don’t care who she is, oh my God, how can you do this to me? How can you do this to Stephanie, your own child?”

  “I’ve already talked to Stephanie. I think she understands.”

  “Understands? She’s nine years old! What did you tell her?”

  “The truth.”

  “What truth? That you’ve been fornicating with a whore?”

  “My reasons for leaving. All of them. She understands that most of the fault is mine, and she forgives me. Or will, in time.”

  “Most of the fault is yours?”

  “That’s right. Part of it is yours.”

  “How dare you! Mine?”

  “I’m sorry, but that’s also the truth. Believe it or not.”

  “You’re the one who’ll be sorry, Howard Wilson. You’re the one who’ll be sorry. Cheating, fornicating with God knows how many—”

  “Only Irene. And we love each other.”

  “—and you have the gall to blame me …” I had to choke out the rest of the words. “Damn you, damn your lying, cheating soul to the fires of Hell!”

  “Good-bye, Zenna,” he said, and he was gone.

  That was three days ago and I still don’t understand how he could do such a terrible thing to his wife and daughter. To me. I’ve been a good wife, a good mother, I’ve made a strong Christian home, I never so much as looked at another man or lusted after one in my heart in sixteen years of marriage. Cooked his meals, washed his dirty clothes, cleaned his house, let him have my body whenever he wanted it even though I can no longer conceive. What more could a man ask of a woman, a marriage, a home? How could he do this to me after sixteen years? How could he humiliate me this way?

  Well, he won’t get away with it. I’ll make him pay. As merciful God is my witness, when I get through with him he won’t have a dime left to give to his Redding harlot and her two little bastards!

  George Petrie

  RAMON A MADE ME tell her everything. All of it, every detail. Then she made me write it all down and sign it and she took the papers and Christ knows what she did with them. And then she let me go ahead and put the money back in the vault. She’ll help me raise the $7,000 to cover the shortage, too; she’s already planning ways, in case the Indian Head Bay property doesn’t sell in time. We’re going to be much closer from now on, she said. A tight-knit unit, the way a husband and wife should be. Just Ramona and me. Together from now on.

  So I’m out from under. Safe. I don’t have to worry about a thing anymore. Ramona will take care of everything for the next ten or twenty or thirty years. I go to work, I come home, I eat and sleep, and if Ramona decides she wants me to, I’ll even manage to perform stud service. But I’m not really here. I’m like one of the condemned convicts on death row, the ones who have no hope left—I’m already dead in my prison.

  Dead man walking.

  Anthony Munoz

  I DON’T KNOW, man. They picked up Mateo in Southern Cal, all the way down near the border in some town called Chula Vista. He had a knife and he tried to rob this liquor store and the owner busted his arm with a bottle. They said he was trying to get money so he could cross over into Mexico. Where’s the sense, man? He was always goin’ on about how he’d never be caught dead in Mexico. L.A. was the place he wanted to be, he says, and he went right on through L.A. to this Chula Vista, heading straight for the border.

  They’re bringing him back to Pomo pretty soon. I ain’t decided yet if I’ll go see him or not. The old man says he won’t, he washes his hands, and the old lady says she will, Mateo needs her as much as he needs God’s forgiveness, but I haven’t made up my mind yet. Sometimes I think I ought to, sometimes I think I’m better off if I wash my hands, too. Same as with Trisha and my kid. Sometimes I think I oughta go ahead and marry her—cool it with the drugs, get a job, maybe even finish school nights. And sometimes I think I’m better off the way I am, free and easy, get high and get laid whenever I want, go anywhere and don’t answer to nobody.

  I don’t know, man. I just don’t know.

  One thing I do know. I don’t want to end up like Mateo. Kidnapping, assault, attempted rape, attempted armed robbery �
�� he’s gonna be in prison a long time. He could’ve killed somebody, too. Maybe he would’ve, someday. If I’d gone with him like he wanted me to … man, I don’t even want to think about it.

  My big brother, Mateo. I always looked up to him. I always thought he was the coolest. But he’s not, no way. Es un don Mierda. He’s a real nobody, man. He’s a real Mr. Shit.

  Richard Novak

  MY WORLD HAS shrunk to a six-by-eight rectangle, to steel bars and concrete walls, to a hard mattress and a sink and a toilet. I’ve exchanged police blue for inmate orange; I’m looking out through the bars instead of in; I’ve become what I always despised. And so I pace a lot. I lie staring at the ceiling or sit staring at the walls and bars. I think too much. I even pray a little. Eva would be proud of me if she knew. She always said it’s never too late to reach out to God. Always said if you talk to Him, He’ll listen and understand and forgive.

  Maybe she was right. I hope He can forgive me, because I don’t think I can ever forgive myself.

  It’s not Eva I think much about, or even God. Mostly it’s Storm, and that crazy night, and what I did to her and to myself, all the things I threw away when I picked up that paperweight and brought it smashing down. Sometimes it seems it was someone else who committed that insane act—an impostor in Chief’s clothing. How could I have done it? And why? Love, hate, jealousy, passion … none of it seems very real now. Or very important. It’d be easy to believe that it was outside forces driving me, fate lifting that paperweight and smashing it down to complete some cosmic purpose. But I don’t buy that. It wasn’t outside forces, it was converging forces inside me. My responsibility. My guilt. All mine to live with for the rest of my natural life.

  So many regrets, so much thrown away. Because I think about Audrey, too, more and more often. All the good things she is and tried to offer me. I ask myself why I couldn’t see her then as I see her now, why I couldn’t feel for her then what I feel for her now. Storm is the easy answer, but there are no easy answers anymore. My responsibility. My guilt.

  She’s still there for me now; she comes to see me nearly every day. But I’d be a fool to expect her to be there when I get out of prison. My lawyer is confident he can plea-bargain the charges against me down to second-degree homicide, maybe even felony manslaughter. At the minimum that would mean a sentence of eleven years, with the possibility of parole in five to six. I can’t ask Audrey to wait five or six years for a convicted felon. I won’t ask her; I don’t have any right to put that kind of burden on her. She has so much to give—let her give it to someone else, somebody better than me.

  You’re not given more than a couple of chances in this life. Screw them up, waste them, and that’s all there is. You get what you deserve then. You get exactly what you deserve.

  Douglas Kent

  ONE OF THE croakers sidled into my white rubber room a little while ago. I opened one eye to a slit, and when I saw that he wasn’t one of the shrinks with their idiotic questions (“Had any stimulating conversations with your bedpan today, Mr. Kent?”) or a nurse with a needleful of temporary fixative for the shakes, shimmers, and other fun by-products of alcohol withdrawal (perfectly calm at the moment, Kent had no desire to have his ass punctured unnecessarily), I decided to wake up and be sociable for a change.

  The croaker, however, didn’t look particularly sociable. Very solemn, he was. Like a judge about to pass sentence on a miscreant. Which, as it developed, was precisely the case.

  “I’m afraid I have unpleasant news for you, Mr. Kent,” he said.

  “Is that so?”

  “There is no easy way to say this, so I’ll be blunt. We have the final results of all your tests, and they’re conclusive. You have cirrhosis of the liver.”

  “No surprise there, Doc.”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “Prognosis? Terminal, eh?”

  “Barring a regenerative miracle, yes.”

  Is that you I hear chuckling maniacally, Pa, you old fook? Well, clear a place for me in the hot coals and dish up a shot of sulfur and brimstone. When I get down there, we’ll hoist one together and then go spit in Old Scratch’s eye.

  “How long do I have, Doc?”

  “That depends.”

  “On where I end up and whether or not I have access to any more of the nectar what brung me here. Correct?”

  “Essentially, yes.”

  “How long with the best of care and nary another drop of demon rum?”

  “A year. Possibly eighteen months.”

  “And how long with continued pickling?”

  “You’d be dead in three months. I’m sorry, Mr. Kent.”

  “Sorry? Sorry? Why, Doc, you couldn’t have brought me a better gift if you were Santa Claus and this was Christmas morning.”

  Kent smiled. Kent winked. Kent could have kissed him.

  Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

  Trisha Marx

  JUST WHEN I thought I’d never hear from John Faith again, the letter came. I knew it was from him even before I ripped open the envelope.

  Dear Trisha,

  I don’t have many friends, so I’m not very good at saying good-bye. Maybe this isn’t the best way to say it to you, but it’s my way and I hope you won’t mind.

  Thank you for being my friend when I needed a friend the most. I’ll never forget you, Trisha.

  Good luck. And don’t ever stop caring.

  Your friend,

  John

  It made me bawl like a baby. Right away I took it upstairs and locked it in my treasure chest, where I keep all the stuff that means the most to me. I read it once more first. I’ll never forget you, John, I thought. Don’t you ever stop caring, either.

  That night, when Daddy came home from work, I told him about the baby and that I wanted to have it and keep it. He was pretty upset at first, but he didn’t have a hemorrhage like I’d thought he would. Actually, he was pretty cool about it. He asked if Anthony was gonna marry me, and I said I didn’t know about that yet, which kind of surprised me because until that very minute I’d been so sure I wanted Anthony to stay out of my life for good, particularly after what that asshole brother of his tried to do to Ms. Sixkiller. Daddy said that, well, whatever happened I wouldn’t have to raise the kid by myself—I could stay right here at home and he’d help me, if that was the way things worked out. Yeah, pretty cool. He stays out all night gambling too much and works too hard and sometimes I think he’s like the Bitch and doesn’t give a shit if I live or die, but I guess he really does love me after all.

  One thing I didn’t tell him about: the baby. I won’t tell anyone until the time comes, not even Selena. It’s my secret and I’m not gonna share this one.

  If it’s a boy he’ll be named John, and if it’s a girl she’ll be called Faith.

  Audrey Sixkiller

  I’VE BEEN TO see Dick several times now at the county correctional facility. At first our meetings were awkward; he wouldn’t look me in the eye and what little conversation we had was limited to neutral topics—my teaching and volunteer work, how Mack was adjusting to living with me. But at the end of each session he asked me to please come back, with a kind of desperation in his voice, and I couldn’t have refused him even if I’d wanted to. He has no one else. In all of Pomo, in the entire time since his wife left him, he’s had no one but me. And it wasn’t until now, when it’s too late, that he realized it.

  There’s a hard irony in that, and in the fact that our roles have been reversed. He needs me now, but I no longer need him. I still care about him, and part of me will always love him, yet the feelings are detached, heavy with sadness but without yearning. It’s over. It would have been over even if there weren’t bars and steel mesh separating us. Indians are as blind as whites sometimes, but when we do see, we see more clearly than anyone. And we know better than anyone how to make compromises and adjustments, how to live with loss, how to channel feelings and be satisfied with less than we hope for. There is no self-pity
in that; it’s a simple statement of fact. I would be all right. Continue to try to make life better for my people, and my own life would be better for the effort. Someday, perhaps, I’ll meet someone new to need and love, and who will need and love me in return. I think if this happens he’ll be red, or more red than white, but in any case it won’t matter. What’s important is that then the long nights won’t be lonely anymore.

  I told some of this to Dick the last time I saw him. He said he understood and I think he does. It was the first time we’ve been able to talk about what matters to both of us—a good omen for him, too. Jail has been difficult for him, and prison will be twice as bad, but he takes full responsibility for his actions; the bitterness he feels is mostly toward himself. He won’t be the same man when he’s free again, or necessarily a better man, but he will be a wiser one.

  His one blind spot is John Faith’s role in all that happened. He’s said more than once, with anger in his voice, that if John Faith had not come to Pomo there wouldn’t have been nearly as much trouble. Deep down he may even believe that if it weren’t for John Faith, he wouldn’t have killed Storm.

  But he’s wrong. What Dick doesn’t understand is that John Faith is not guilty of anything other than poor judgment. He isn’t a poison-maker; he’s another victim, in a way the most tragic victim of all.