Bill Pronzini - A Wasteland of Strangers

Indian women. Maria Lorenzo, that snooty little Audrey Sixkiller... what was it about the attractive ones that made me want it so much?

No use standing around here getting myself worked up for nothing. I went outside to the shed and fetched my tool kit. One of the downspouts on cabin three was loose, and this was as good a time as any to fix it. Maria knew enough to answer the phone if it rang.

Cold this morning. No sun, mist rising in the marshes, a high wind pushing thick clouds inland, with more scudding in behind. Couldn’t tell yet if we’d get rain on the weekend. Probably would, my luck being what it was. If it did rain, I wouldn’t get half a dozen rentals through Sunday night. I ought to be grateful to any guest deciding to stay another night, but not when that guest was John Faith. I’d take his money as long as he wanted to give it to me, but that didn’t mean I had to like it or anything about him. No telling what he was up to around here. Whatever it was, I wished he’d tend to it and go back where he came from. I’d sleep better when he was gone, that was for sure.

I was hammering a new clamp on the drain spout when the police cruiser drove in off the highway. Gave me a jolt to see Chief Novak at the wheel. Lakeside Resort is within Pomo township’s jurisdiction, just barely, but the town cops don’t patrol much out this way. No reason they should, really. I hadn’t had to call in the law in over three years, since the couple from Walnut Creek got into a drunken fight in cabin four and the man busted his wife’s arm for her. She had it coming, if you ask me, the way she kept running him down all the time, but that hadn’t kept me from calling the police. I can’t afford trouble.

Novak spotted me and pulled up. Instead of climbing out he rolled down his window. I pasted on a smile as I walked over.

“Morning, Chief. What brings you up here?”

“You have a guest named John Faith?”

No surprise there. I said, “That’s what he calls himself.”

“Check out already? I don’t see his car.”

“No, he paid me for another night.”

“When did he pay you?”

“About an hour ago. Little after eight.”

“Just one more night?”

“Just one. How come you’re asking about him? He get himself into some trouble already?”

“I just want to talk to him.” Novak’s face, now I looked at it close, was tight-skinned and hard around the mouth and jaw. His eyes were bloodshot and bagged, as if he hadn’t had much sleep last night. “What time’d he leave?”

“Right after he paid me.”

“Tell you where he was going?”

“Didn’t say a thing.”

“You know if he was here between midnight and two A.M.?”

“Midnight and two? Why? Something happen then?”

“ Was he here, Harry?”

“Well... not when I went to bed around eleven-thirty. He’s in six and the windows were dark and no sign of that Porsche of his. I was awake another thirty, forty minutes and I didn’t hear him come in.” The wind had chapped my lips; I took out my tube of Blistex. “Tell you this, Chief. Whatever he’s done, it won’t surprise me.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You had a good look at him, up close?”

“Yesterday.”

“Then you know what I mean. Makes me nervous as hell having him here, but I can’t afford to turn down anybody’s business.”

“How’d he pay you? Cash or credit card?”

“Cash. Both times. Wad of bills in his wallet big enough to gag a Doberman.”

“What address did he put on his registration card?”

“Los Angeles, that’s all.”

“No street or box number?”

“Nope. I should’ve asked, I guess, but he’s not somebody you want to prod. Touchy. Mean and touchy. I can tell you his car license number, if you want that.”

“I already know it.”

“Well, how about the cabin he’s in?”

“What about it?”

“You want to take a look inside?”

Novak shook his head. “Not enough cause.”

“I could just unlock the door with my passkey and then go on about my business. Never know it if you happened to step inside for a minute or two—”

“No.”

“But if he’s guilty of something—”

“I don’t know that he is. Don’t you go invading his privacy either, Harry.”

“Not me. No, sir,” I said. “Sure you can’t give me an idea of what it’s all about? A man can’t help being curious—”

“I’m sure,” Novak said. He slid his window up, swung around, and drove back out to the highway.

Well, I thought. Didn’t I see it coming? Didn’t I know Faith was trouble the minute I laid eyes on him?

I waited a couple of minutes to make sure Novak didn’t decide to come back. Then I took out my passkey and headed for cabin six.

When Neal was alive we almost always ate breakfast on the sun porch, no matter what the weather. The upper halves of the three outer walls are glass, with panels that slide open to let in air and garden fragrance, and you can look down the sloping rear lawn to the lakefront and the white finger of our dock, north to the sloughs, east all along the sharp, shadowed folds of the hills, brown now with their dark-green spottings of oak and madrone, south down the lake’s thirty-mile length as far as Kahbel Shores at the foot of Mt. Kahbel. A lordly view, Neal called it. Lord and lady of the manor, surveying their domain.

But the lord is dead and the lady is a tramp, and I seldom eat on the porch anymore, or even go out there. This morning, however, I felt drawn to it. I sat at the rosewood table and drank my coffee and ate my two pieces of toast and surveyed what was left of the domain and thought about Neal. He’d been warm in my thoughts when I’d awakened, almost as if he were still alive, as if he’d gotten up before me and was waiting on the porch for me to join him. Some mornings it’s like that, the feeling that he’s still here with me so acute I actually believe it for a minute or two. But, of course, the illusion soon fades and again becomes unbearable loss — a cramping deep inside like severe menstrual cramps, or what I imagine childbirth would have been if we’d ever managed to conceive. Then that, too, fades and I’m able to get up, shower, dress, do all the things that begin another day, that lead to another night.

The bed was a mess this morning, the sheets stained and even torn in one place, smelling rankly of the Hunger. Him, too, last night’s fodder for the voracious mouth. Here for two or three hours, and then gone again in the early-morning darkness. Night phantom, incubus. Strange, but when I closed my eyes I couldn’t picture his face or remember his name, even though I know him as well as I know anyone in Pomo, even though he’s been in my bed before. Instead, it was Neal’s face I saw, Neal’s lips and hands and body I remembered.

Before I showered I wadded up the sheets and pillowcases and the bathroom towel he’d used and took them out to the garbage. The girl would be in to clean today and she would remake the bed, but I didn’t want her to have to handle the Hunger’s dirty leavings. Some more residue of propriety, I supposed. And a pathetic residue at that: I seem to care more about a cleaning woman’s feelings than I do about my own.

So I sat alone on the porch and watched the clouds race across the sky, creating patterns of light and shadow on the lake’s surface, on the brown and dark-green hills, and drank more coffee to ease the dull hangover pain behind my eyes, and thought about Neal. The first night we’d met, at the party to celebrate the opening of a new winery in the Alexander Valley: the shy daughter of a Ukiah farmer and the handsome real-estate developer with hair that was already starting to silver even though he was only a dozen years older than my twenty-three. The first time we went to bed, and how patient he was with me... the evening at the Top of the Mark in San Francisco when he asked me to marry him... the month-long honeymoon cruise in the Caribbean... the day this house he’d built for us was finished and the way we’d celebrated, naked in bed, drinking Mumm’s, pouring it on each other’s body and then licking it off...