Bill Pronzini - A Wasteland of Strangers

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.

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.