Bill Pronzini - A Wasteland of Strangers

I read it. When I was done, I didn’t say a word. Zenna was waiting for me to make some comment, but if I’d opened my mouth I’d have said what I was thinking, and I wasn’t ready to do that yet. Soon, but not yet.

I’d have said, “This is why, Zenna, exactly why I’ve been driven way past my limits.” And then, with the same savage triumph in my voice, I’d have told her where I really was and what I was really doing last night when she thought I was sitting alone in a Redding motel room.

Dick said, “I’m worried about you, Audrey. You sure you’re all right?”

It was what I wanted to hear. But I couldn’t help thinking: If you’re so worried, why didn’t you stop by instead of calling? Or at least call earlier?

“Don’t I sound all right?” I said. “I’m fine, really.”

“Maybe you’d better not stay there alone tonight.”

“Where would I go?” Your house?

“Stay with a friend.”

“I won’t be driven out of my home, not even for one night.”

“Then ask someone to come and stay with you.”

How about you? I almost said it. And at that, what came out was a variation: “Why don’t you come over after you’re off duty? I’ll make something to eat, and we can talk.”

“... I don’t know, Audrey. I’d like to, but I’m pretty tired and likely to be here late as it is. You know how Friday nights can be. I don’t want to make any promises I can’t keep.”

Oh, I knew how Friday nights could be. Lonely. And I knew excuses when I heard them, too. I had an impulse to ask him if he was too tired to accept an invitation from Storm Carey, but that would have been senseless and catty. I didn’t know he was seeing her again. Didn’t want to know if he was, not right now.

“Try to make it if you can,” I said. “For supper or... anytime.”

“All right. In any case, I’ll have one of the patrols keep an eye on your house.”

“Please, Dick, I really do want to see you... I need you tonight.” Shameless. How much plainer did I have to make it? Four-letter words? Storm Carey plain?

All he said was, “I’ll try.”

I went into the kitchen and brewed a pot of tea. The old, bitter Elem variety made from pepperwood leaves. William Sixkiller’s favorite cure-all for colds, fevers, sores, boils, and general malaise. When it was ready I carried a cup back into the living room. But instead of sitting down, I stood, sipping the tea in front of my memory cabinet.

After William Sixkiller died I gave most of the native artifacts he’d collected — woven sedge baskets, beadwork, bows and arrows, spear points — to the Pomo County museum. But I’d kept a few special items, favorites of mine and his. Looking at them, touching them, made me feel close to him. I slid the glass door open, ran fingers over the blackened bowl of the long pipe he’d carved from wild mahogany and smoked for forty years. He had helped to make the baby basket, too, that had been mine when I was an infant; the beads and bird feathers and other sleep-inducing charms attached to the hoop above the head were still bright after nearly three decades. The elderberry-shoot flute he’d played so sweetly had belonged to his grandfather. Even older was the musical bow made of a willow branch two feet long, with its twin sinew strings and the small stick you struck against the strings while you blew into the hollowed end of the bow; it dated to the days before the white man came, when, according to legend, the People were giants and the blood of the young warrior Kah-bel, slain in a battle over his beloved Lupiyoma, daughter of powerful Chief Konocti, painted the hills red and Lupiyoma’s tears of grief formed the mineral spring called Omaracharbe.

Wise Father, I thought, what am I going to do?

Well, I knew what he would say if he were beside me now. “Stop this foolish mooning over a white man,” he’d say. “Stop your white-acting ways. An Indian woman belongs with her own kind. If you wish to marry, choose a Pomo for your husband, or at least a man from another tribe.”

A man like Hector Toms, Father? Handsome young Hector, my first lover. Simple, gentle, one of the finest woodworkers in Pomo County until prejudice cost him three good jobs, one after the other, and bitterness and weakness made him turn — as brother Jimmy and so many others had — to alcohol and drugs. When I went away to school at UC Berkeley, Hector had left too, drifted to Sonoma County to pick fruit and then to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas. A string of small and large cities, the new Trail of Tears. By then Native Americans were no longer being relocated to large urban centers by the Bureau of Indian Affairs — a well-intentioned (or was it?) program sponsored by the Eisenhower administration that was supposed to “mainstream” the Indian, end his reliance on Federal aid and benefits by providing employment training and housing in a more “acculturated” environment. Instead it succeeded only in uprooting 200,000 men, women, and children from their cultural and spiritual homes, dropping them into uncaring, alien cities and ultimately forcing some into menial jobs, the unintegrated majority into even more dependence on the government. The new Trail of Tears remained after the mainstreaming program was finally ruled a failure in the mid-seventies; it still remained today. And Hector had drifted onto it and was lost. The last I heard of him, years ago, he was said to be homeless in Chicago, a simple, gentle Elem woodworker with an alcohol and drug dependency living and dying alone on the cold, acculturated streets of a white man’s city.

Better off with my own kind? None of us is any better off with our own kind than we are with the white man’s kind, it seems. None of us.

And to that William Sixkiller might say, “Then don’t marry and bear children of any blood. Spend more time educating the white man’s children. Spend more time helping the cause of our people.” Yes, Father, except that I want a husband, children, and I already spend so much time teaching and in volunteer work I have little enough left for myself. Five days a week at the high school, adult education courses two evenings, graduate studies toward my master’s at Berkeley in the summer; the tribal council, aid and counseling service on the rancheria, one Saturday a month at the Indian Health Center in Santa Rosa. What more can I do?

My tea had cooled. I finished it, put the cup into the kitchen sink, and wandered into the back bedroom that had once belonged to Jimmy, that I had turned into my study. There were themes on the California missions to be corrected; I’d been doing that, with half my mind, when Dick called. I sat down and looked at the top one on the stack. The computer-generated type seemed blurred even after I rubbed at my eyes with a tissue.

Dick Novak isn’t the answer, I thought, more teaching and volunteer services aren’t the answers. What’s the answer?

Maybe there is none, at least not in this life. Live today, live tomorrow when it comes and not before. Events will happen, certain things will change — that’s inevitable. Some will be good; some will make you happy, if only for a while. Live for those.

William Sixkiller would approve of that philosophy. His daughter approved of it, too. But William Sixkiller was one of the spirits now and his daughter was still among the living, and the simple truth was, she wanted the white eyes so badly he was an ache in her heart and a fever in her soul...

I made an effort to concentrate on the themes. It took an hour to grade them all. Only three were worth more than a generous C, and half a dozen deserved F’s and received D’s instead. F grades were discouraged by Pomo’s civic-minded school board.