Bill Pronzini - A Wasteland of Strangers

Those, and so many more memories. But I wasn’t allowed to be alone with them this morning. Other thoughts intruded, another face appeared in my mind’s eye — not the face of last night’s incubus but the ugly visage of John Faith. An effort to block it out did no good; instead it was Neal’s image that blurred and turned to shadow and faded away.

The Hunger wasn’t satisfied. I’d known it in the shower earlier, when the mouth began to stir again inside me. For some reason it still wanted John Faith. Another surrogate like all the others, another incubus... or was he? The Hunger seemed to sense a difference, something to do with the part that remained hidden from me. It wanted Faith — that was enough for me to know now.

It wanted him and so I would have to find a way to feed it what it craved.

I left the porch, the lordly view, the warm memories of Neal, everything that had once meant something, and went to do the Hunger’s bidding.

I kept blanking out on my class notes, on what the kids were saying and doing. Usually I have no problem maintaining order in my classes; today I couldn’t even maintain order in my own mind. The prowler last night had shaken me more than I cared to admit. That, and not being able to reach Dick until after three, and then not being able to sleep again after he left. Zombie woman. I probably shouldn’t have come to school at all, but at dawn it had seemed more important not to give in to the anxiety, to plunge right back into my normal routine. Now I wasn’t so sure.

Well, I could still take the afternoon off. Hang on until noon, then go home and regroup in private.

I wondered if Dick had found out anything. Chances were he hadn’t. He’d said he would have a talk with John Faith, but if the man was guilty he would hardly admit it; all Dick could do, really, was to try to scare him into leaving Pomo County and not coming back. And if he was innocent, there was nothing to point to anyone else. Dick had come back this morning, a while before I left for school, and searched my yard and the neighboring yard and hadn’t found even a scrap of evidence. He’d tried to convince me that the shot I fired would keep the intruder, whoever he was, from trying it again, but we both knew that wasn’t necessarily true. Being shot at could just as well make a would-be rapist even more determined to finish what he’d started.

Dick worried me, too. His concern had been genuine but he’d seemed remote, as if other things were weighing heavily on his mind. All he’d say when I asked where he’d been so late was that he couldn’t sleep and had gone for a long drive around the lake. He suffered from insomnia — Verne Erickson once told me it started after his wife left him — and quite a few insomniacs are night riders, but he’d never admitted before to being one of those. There was so much about him I knew little or nothing about.

Yes, and a few things I did know and wished I didn’t. I couldn’t help wondering if he was seeing Storm Carey again, if that was where he’d really been last night...

Giggle. Giggle, giggle.

The sounds penetrated, and all at once I realized the entire class — my ten o’clock, California History II — was staring at me. I’d been sitting there God knew how long, lost inside myself. The expressions on their faces told me what they’d be saying to their friends later on. “Wow, Ms. Sixkiller went brain-dead for a little while this morning.” Or “It was, like, you know, she lapsed into some kind of Indian trance thing.”

I cleared my throat. “Okay. Where were we?”

“We were right here,” Anthony Munoz said. “Where were you?”

That broke them up. I laughed with them; you don’t get anywhere with kids nowadays by being either authoritarian or humorless, a lesson a couple of Pomo High’s other teachers have yet to learn. And Anthony was the class clown, a leader the others followed. A poor student, barely passing, and a sometime troublemaker, particularly when he was around his older brother. Mateo was a bad influence — drugs, antiauthority behavior, Attitude with a capital A. He’d been expelled two years ago when another teacher and I caught him using cocaine inside the school. Anthony looked up to him; it troubled me that he might be led in the same direction, drop out or get himself expelled, too, one of these days. Underneath, Anthony wasn’t a bad kid. All he needed was to use common sense and develop a purpose in his life, one that would settle him down. Meanwhile, you had to walk a very careful line with him.

I glanced at my notes. “Upper California under Spanish rule, right? Established as a province of the newly established Mexican republic. What year was that, Anthony?”

“What year was what?”

“That California became a province of Mexico.”

“Who knows, man?”

“And who cares, right?”

A little more laughter.

“Well, I do,” I said. “And you should too, un poco. Come on, Anthony. What year did California become a Mexican province?”

“I dunno.”

Better, not quite as smart-ass. “I’ll give you a hint. It was twenty years after it became a province of Spain.”

“Yeah? What year was that?”

“1804. You can add twenty and four, can’t you?”

He scowled at me. But then his girlfriend, Trisha Marx, leaned over and poked his arm and said, “Yeah, Anthony, twenty plus four equals fifty-three, right?” Everybody laughed again. Anthony decided to laugh with them. He said, “No, fifty-seven, you dumb Angla,” and there was more laughter and then they settled down.

I treated them to a five-minute monologue on the period 1824 to 1844, the political turbulence that sprang up then and its root causes: anticlericalism, separatist sentiment, dissatisfaction with Mexican rule, demands for secularization of the missions. I was defining secularization for them — the smarter ones were taking notes, those like Anthony looking bored and getting ready to bolt — when the bell rang.

I reminded them of the reading assignment for next week and let them go. The room emptied in the usual jostling, noisy rush. I was arranging my notes for my next class when a tentative voice spoke my name.

Trisha Marx, alone and looking nervous. A bright girl, Trisha; if she applied herself, her grades would be much better and she’d have a more promising future than most kids in Pomo. But she’d fallen under Anthony Munoz’s spell, begun hanging out with him and his brother and their crowd, skirting the edges of real trouble. She needed the same thing Anthony did: a settling purpose in her life. I liked her and I hoped for her. In some ways she reminded me of myself at her age.

“Yes, Trisha?”

“You suppose I could... well...”

“Yes?”

“... Like, talk to you about something?”

“Class work?”

“No. It’s, you know, personal.”

“Important?”

“Kind of, yeah.”

“Of course we can talk. But I have another class...”

“I don’t mean now. Later. I’ve got something to do first.”

“Well, I’m thinking of playing hooky this afternoon. And you know where I live. Why don’t you come by my house and we can talk there?”

“Um, when?”

“After school. Say around four?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “maybe it’d be better if I do what I have to tonight, instead of... um, yeah, it would be.” She nibbled dark-red lipstick off her lower lip. “Would it be okay... tomorrow morning? Could I come by then?”

“If it’s early, by nine. I have a tribal council meeting at the Elem rancheria at eleven.”

“I’ll be there before nine. I... thanks, Ms. Sixkiller.” And she hurried out, clutching her books.

Now, what was that all about?