Snowbound

by Bill Pronzini

  Ann laughed. “Well, then, there’s always your father’s name.”

  “Mario? No way.”

  “Andrew is nice.”

  “Then we’ve got Ann and Andy, the Raggedy twins.”

  “I also like Joseph.”

  “Joey Tribucci sounds like a Prohibition bootlegger.”

  She made a face at him. “You come up with the most incredible objections. You’re still holding out for Alexander, right?”

  “What’s wrong with Alexander?”

  “It just doesn’t sound very masculine to me.”

  “Alex is one of the most masculine names I can think of.”

  “Mmm. But there have still got to be better ones.”

  “I haven’t heard any yet.”

  “Well-the last time you seemed to like Stephen.”

  “But you weren’t exactly overjoyed with it, as I recall.”

  “It kind of grows on you. I like John Junior better, but I guess I’m willing to compromise-for now, anyway.”

  “All right, for now it’s Stephen. On to girls’ names, since the unlikely possibility does exist that I’ve fathered a female.”

  “You,” Ann said, “can be a damned male chauvinist at times.”

  “Guilty as charged.”

  “And balls to you, love. Okay, you didn’t like Suzanne or Toni or Francesca, and I don’t like Pamela or Jill or Judith. But I’ve been thinking and I came up with three new ones, all of which are pretty and one of which even you are bound to like. The first is Hannah.”

  “Somebody’s German maid,” Tribucci said. Then, when she glared at him: “Just kidding, it’s not bad. What’s the second?”

  “Marika.”

  “Better, much better. Marika Tribucci. You know, that has a nice ring to it.”

  “I think so, too. In fact, it’s my favorite. But the third is also sweet: Charlene.”

  Tribucci had been smiling and relaxed in Vince’s old naugahyde easy chair; now the smile vanished, and his eyes turned dark and brooding. He got to his feet and walked across to one of the front windows and stood looking out into the darkness.

  Behind him Ann said, “Johnny? What’s the matter?”

  He did not answer, did not turn. Charlene, he was thinking. Charlene Hammond. It had been a long while since he had thought of her and of the night on the deserted beach near Santa Cruz. The incident had been in his mind often for the first few months after it happened; but that had been thirteen years ago, when he was serving the last of his four-year Army stint at Fort Ord, and time had dulled it finally and settled it into the dim recesses of his memory. Even so, it had only taken Ann’s innocent suggestion just now to bring it all back in sharp, unwelcome focus.

  He had met Charlene Hammond in late July of that year, on the boardwalk in Santa Cruz. She’d been blond, vivacious, ripe of body and suggestive in her mannerisms; not particularly bright, but at twenty-two and living on an Army base, you don’t really care about a girl’s intelligence quotient. They’d had a few dates-dances, shows, summer events-and when they’d known each other for three weeks, she let him make love to her in the back seat of her father’s car. He saw her again two evenings later, and that was the night they went to the beach-because the car was awkward and because they were young and there was something exhilarating in the idea of screwing out in the open with the ocean close by and the clear, vast sky overhead. Charlene had chosen the spot, and he’d known she had been there before for the same purpose; she hadn’t been a virgin for a long time.

  They parked the car on a bluff and descended to a sheltered place under the cliff’s overhang where they couldn’t be seen from the road above. There they had spread out a blanket and opened cans of beer, made out a little, taking their time, letting the excitement build. Still, neither of them wanted to wait very long, and excitement builds rapidly on a warm, empty night with the sound of the surf murmuring and throbbing in your ears.

  They were lying in a tight embrace on the blanket, she naked and he with just his pants and shoes on, when the two motorcycles came roaring down onto the beach.

  Startled, they broke apart, and Charlene fumbled for her clothing and made the mistake of standing up to put it on. The moonlight had been bright, and as clearly as he could see the cycles approaching, the two riders could see him and Charlene and Charlene’s nakedness. The bikes swerved toward them. He had an instant premonition of danger; he grabbed her arm, tried to pull her away in a run toward the bluff path. But the cycles swung in hard turns, cut them off, forced them back to the overhang.

  He saw, as the bikes pulled up in front of them and stopped, that the two riders were young, in their late twenties or early thirties, dressed in black metal-studded denim and heavy boots, one bearded, the other wearing a gold hoop earring. Charlene was crying, terrified; she had most of her clothing on again, but it was much too late-he knew it had been too late from the moment they’d been seen. He tried to talk to the two cyclists, and it was useless; they were either very drunk or flying on drugs. The bearded one told him to move away from Charlene, and he said no, he wasn’t going to do that, and the one wearing the earring dropped a hand to his boot and came up with a long, thin-bladed knife.

  “Move now, boyfriend,” the bearded one said, “or both of you going to get cut. And we don’t want to cut nobody, really.”

  Charlene screamed, clinging to him. The bearded one grabbed her wrist, spun her to him and held her. Instinctively he started to move to help her, but the knife jabbed forward, darting, pushing him back against the dirt and rock of the bluff. Charlene’s cries then were near hysterical.

  “Soggy seconds for you, man,” the bearded one said to the other. “Watch boyfriend here until I’m done.” And turned to Charlene and slapped her several times and pulled her over to the blanket and threw her down on it; tore her clothes off again, dragged his own trousers down. She kept on shrieking, and he kept on hitting her, trying to force her legs apart to get himself inside her. The one with the knife divided his attention between them and Tribucci, giggling softly.

  He stood it as long as he could, held at bay by the knife and by fear. And then he simply forgot about the knife and forgot about being afraid and waited until the earringed one’s attention had drifted once more to the struggle on the blanket, pushed out from the bluff at that moment, and kicked him between the legs with all his strength. The earringed man screamed louder than Charlene, dropped the knife, and bent over double. He kicked him in the face, kicked him in the head once he was down, turned. The bearded one had released Charlene and was trying to stand, trying to pull his pants up from around his ankles. He ran toward him, shouting, “Run, Charlene, run!” and saw her fleeing half-naked toward the path, and reached the bearded one and kicked him three times in the head and upper body and then threw himself on top of the man and hit him with his fists, rolled his face in the sand, hit him and hit him and hit him and hit him And stopped suddenly, because he had become aware of the man’s blood spattered warm over his hand and forearm. He struggled to his feet, gasping. The bearded cyclist did not move. He turned to look at the other one: not moving either. One or both of them might have been dead, but he did not care one way or the other then; he just did not care. He walked to where the surf frothed whitely over the sand, knelt and washed the blood off himself; then he found his shirt, put it on, and went slowly up the path to the road. Charlene and the car were gone. He walked along the road for a mile or so to where three teen-agers in a raked station wagon responded to his outthrust thumb and gave him a lift down the coast to Fort Ord. He had been very calm the entire time; reaction did not set in until he was in bed in his barracks.

  When it did, he could not seem to stop trembling. He lay there the entire night trembling and thinking about what had happened on the beach and asking himself over and over why he had done what he had. He was not heroic or even particularly brave. He had no strong feelings for Charlene. The two riders very likely had had rape and nothing else on their minds. Why, t
hen? Why?

  He had had no answer that night, and he had none thirteen years later; he had done it, and that was all.

  The next morning he had called Charlene, and she’d asked him briefly if he was all right and how he’d got away and for God’s sake he hadn’t called the police, had he? Because she didn’t want to get involved; if the police came around to her house, her father would-throw her out on the street. She did not thank him, and she did not tell him she was sorry for having left him maybe hurt or dying, for not having summoned help. He hadn’t seen her or spoken to her again.

  For a week he combed every local newspaper he could find, and there was no mention of anyone answering the description of the cyclists having been found dead on the beach or anywhere else near Santa Cruz. So he hadn’t killed one or both of them, and that knowledge had taken away some of the haunting immediacy of the incident and he had been able to begin to forget; he’d told no one-not Ann, not Vince, not his parents-about that night, and he never would…

  “… Johnny, what is it? What’s come over you?”

  Ann had gotten up and crossed to stand beside him, and she was tugging at the sleeve of his shirt. Tribucci blinked and pivoted to her, saw the concern in her eyes-and the dark recollection faded immediately. He smiled and kissed her. “Nothing,” he said, “just one of those brooding spells a man gets from time to time. It’s finished with, now.”

  “Well, I hope so.”

  He put his arm around her and walked her back to the sofa. “I didn’t mean to upset you, honey; I’m sorry, I won’t let it happen again.”

  “You had the oddest look on your face,” she said. “What could you possibly have begun brooding about when we-”

  And the door to the adjoining family room opened, and Vince appeared, sparing him. Heavier and three years older, Vince wore thick glasses owing to a mild case of myopic astigmatism and was just beginning to lose his hair; for the past hour he and his wife, Judy, had been watching television, or what passed for television on a winter night in the Sierra.

  “Just saw an early weathercast from Sacramento,” he said. “There’s a heavy stormfront moving in from the west, coming right at us. We’ll likely be hit with one and maybe two blizzards this week.”

  “Oh fine,” Tribucci said. “Great. A few more heavy storms without a long letup, and we’ll sure as hell have slides before the end of winter.”

  “Yeah, and I’m afraid at least one of them is liable to be major.”

  “You two sound like prophets of doom,” Ann said. “Where’s your Christmas spirit? This is supposed to be the jolly season, you know.”

  “Ho-ho-ho,” Vince said, and grinned. “You people decide on names for your offspring yet?”

  “We sort of like Stephen if it’s a boy.”

  “And if it’s a girl?”

  Tribucci looked at Ann. “Henrietta Lou,” he said.

  She threw a sofa pillow at him.

  Seven

  Earl Kubion had a savage, pulsing headache when Brodie finally brought them into Hidden Valley at twenty minutes past eight.

  They had been on the road for more than five hours, fighting snow and ice from the time they reached Grass Valley, forced to stop in Nevada City to put on chains, forced to drive at a reduced speed over the treacherous state and county roads. And even though they hadn’t encountered any roadblocks or spot checks, and the three highway patrol units and two local county cruisers they had seen had paid no attention to them, Kubion sat tense and watchful the entire time, waiting for something that had not happened. Waiting and listening to the monotonous swish of the windshield wipers; listening to the radio newscasts on the robbery: Sacramento police and the highway patrol were making a concentrated search for the three holdup men, one of whom was reportedly wounded in the left arm; the armored car hadn’t been found yet; the one security cop was dead and the woman shoplifter had suffered a nervous breakdown; citizens warned to be on the lookout-the same bullshit over and over again. Waiting and smelling the heavy odor of Loxner’s blood from the back seat, nauseating in the warm confines of the car. Waiting and smoking two packs of cigarettes in short, quick inhalations. He felt now as if his nerves were humming like thin wires in a storm, as if he wanted to hit something, hurt somebody; headaches like this affected him the same way each time: making him irrational, poising him on the edge of pointless violence.

  Kubion had lived by and with violence for half of his forty-two years, but it had always been rigidly controlled, resorted to only when unavoidably necessary-as in the case of the Greenfront floor cop-and then in a calm, detached way so that he never lost his grip, relied on intellect to bring him through the tight. When he wasn’t working, there had been no thoughts of and no inclination toward force and savagery; only soft, big-assed black chicks (he had always had a thing for big-assed black chicks, screw what anybody thought) and the night life in New York and Miami Beach and L.A.-the balling ball money always bought you.

  But a little more than a year ago the headaches had started. Any kind of tension brought them on, and any kind of irritation was liable to push him over the brink into impulsive and unreasoning violence. He had broken Tony Filippi’s collarbone and fractured his skull with a gun butt after a job in San Diego last spring because Filippi had fouled up his end of it and almost cost them the score; he had seriously beaten one of his women in a Miami hotel three months later because she had tried to play cute-sex when he was laboring over a payroll ripoff-and had been barely able to buy his way out of a threatened assault charge; he had ruptured a kid parking attendant just two months ago in Anaheim because the kid had gotten snotty with him and he had just finished checking out a job which proved unworkable-that, too, costing him money to fix. When he was feeling right, Kubion looked back on these times with disgust and apprehension and promised himself he would never let it happen again; but then he would get uptight about something, and one of the headaches would come on, and all the control would fall away under the black burning pressure of the impulse.

  He had gone to two doctors, one in Miami and one in L.A., and submitted to two thorough physical examinations. Neither of the doctors had found anything organically wrong with him. The first one said the headaches were probably caused by nerves and prescribed tranquilizers; Kubion tried them for a while, and they had seemed to be helping, he thought the problem was licked-until the headache in the Miami hotel and the beating he had given the woman there. The second one said severe headaches were sometimes a sign of mental disorder and suggested Kubion ought to consult a psychologist. He hadn’t taken that advice; it was garbage for one thing, and he didn’t trust shrinks for another. They were nothing but sharks with fancy degrees and fancy two-bit double talk. He remembered the superior, patronizing son of a bitch at the Michigan state prison where he’d done a nickel stretch for armed robbery in the early fifties, his only fall. Penal psychologist, they’d called him, penal meaning prick: probing with endless questions, rapping pure manure about detrimental adolescent environment and sociopathic attitudes and a hint of latent megalomania-leaving Kubion feeling irritated and unsettled each time, alienating him completely. The hell with that crap.

  He’d decided finally that he would just have to take care of it on his own-control himself when the headaches came on, work it out the same way he worked out a difficult score. He hadn’t been able to do it yet, but he would because he had to in order to keep on working and keep on balling. Things would smooth out all right. Hadn’t they always smoothed out for him in the past?

  Kubion did not think of any of this as they drove along the snowswept and deserted main street of the village. There was only the throbbing pain in his head, and the jangling of his nerves, and the bitter frustration of the ripoff that had gone sour in Sacramento, and the overpowering, irrational need to smash something or somebody. He lit another cigarette, staring out through the windshield at the Christmas lights which still burned above the street, the buildings all unlighted save for more Christmas bulbs decora
ting the facade of the Valley Inn and two squares of yellow which came through its misted front windows. The red and blue and green glow of the bulbs limned his dark face surrealistically-a lean face fashioned of hard, vertical lines that gave it a somehow unfinished appearance, as if it had never been properly planed off and you could, if you looked closely enough, see the marks of a sculptor’s chisel. In normal light the darkness of his skin coloring, the sooty black of his hair and eyebrows, the heavy beard shadow combined to create about him a charred look, like a man recently emerged from a coal fire.

  Beside him Brodie said the first words any of them had spoken in thirty minutes: “Not even eight thirty and they’ve rolled up the sidewalks already.”

  Kubion said nothing, sucking at the filter of his cigarette.

  There were rustling sounds in the rear seat, and Loxner said, “Jesus, we finally here?” His voice was thick; Brodie had bought him a pint of gin when they stopped to put on the chains in Nevada City-antiseptic for his arm and anesthesia for the pain, not wanting to chance buying bandages or pharmaceuticals with the word out that one of them was wounded.

  “Finally here,” Brodie answered.

  “All right if I sit up now?”

  “Come ahead. There’s nobody on the streets.”

  Loxner sat up, blinking. He was the same age as Kubion, running to fat in the middle from too much ale and food; he had thinning hair the color of tarnished copper and the beginnings of bulldog jowls. “My arm feels kind of numb now,” he said. “But I got to get something on it as soon as we get to the cabin, iodine or something. You don’t treat a gunshot wound and take care of it, you get infection. Gangrene, maybe.”

  “Shut up with your whining,” Kubion said.

  “Hey, I’m not whining. It’s just that I-”

  “Shut up! I’ve been smelling your blood for five hours now, and I don’t need to listen to you shit at the mouth.”