Bill Pronzini - A Wasteland of Strangers

As dead as all my big plans.

As barren as my future.

I couldn’t go on, because I didn’t have the guts to go on. A man like John Faith could steal $209,840 without a single qualm or backward glance, but George Petrie is too anxiety-riddled, too paranoid to be a successful thief. All I’d ever had was a meager supply of courage, and now the supply had been used up. From the first I’d built this mad scheme of mine on a foundation of lies, false bravado, self-deception. It was amazing I’d gotten this far before the flimsy foundation collapsed.

The only thing I could do now was to give it all up, slink back home to Pomo. Time enough left to do that and return the money to the bank vault before Fred and Arlene show up on Monday morning. Time enough to pick up where I’d left off, go begging to Charley Horne or Burt Seeley if I can’t cover the $7,000 shortage any other way. Time enough to save my sorry ass, so I can start dying again, slowly, by inches.

The heat in the car was so intense now I was having trouble breathing. I threw the half-smoked cigarette out the window, rolled up the glass, started the engine, and put on the air conditioner. And then I made a careful turn across the empty highway and headed back the way I’d come.

The ancestral Kent roscoe was a Smith & Wesson snub-nosed .38. After I lurched home from the Advocate offices, full of grief and Doc Beefeater’s Magic Cure-all, bent and bowed under the weight of my bag of sticks, I rummaged in the closet and there it was, packed in an old shoe box. Carefully wrapped in chamois cloth (the old man’s work, not mine), clean and well-oiled (not unlike its present owner), all six chambers bristling with shiny circles of oblivion. I carried it into the kitchen and laid it gently on the table. After which I poured another dose of salve and plunked myself down to contemplate the thing.

Pa Kent’s piece, of course. If there is one thing Kent Junior has never been, it is a staunch supporter of the National Rifle Association. Wrote impassioned gun-control and anti-NRA articles, once upon a time. Thought about writing another when I first arrived in Pomo, but for a change prudency prevailed. There are gaggles of guns in Pomo County; half the adults and a third of the kids — or possibly, it’s the other way around — have at least one tucked away within easy reach. If I had written the article for the Advocate , I would probably have been blown away at sunrise by an irate ninth-grader whose old man kept a collection of automatic weapons in the toolshed.

Still, even I had to admit that Pa Kent’s rod had a certain deadly magnificence. Short and squat and ugly and cold, which, come to think of it, was an apt capsule description of the pater himself. He’d never fired it except on a pistol range, so far as I knew, but he’d always had it close at hand in case of burglars, bill collectors, and/or overly aggressive pink snakes or other figments of his pickled brain. It was one of the few, the very few, of his personal possessions that I’d appropriated after his fatal midnight plunge into the Monongahela. Wasn’t sure why at the time, or why I continued to cart it with me on my various peripatetic wanderings—

Liar.

Bullshitter.

You know very well why you appropriated and kept it, Kent, my lad. Same reason you dragged it out of its nest this evening. Same reason Richard Cory kept a bang stick hidden away in his digs. Ah, Cory, that “gentleman from sole to crown, clean favored, and imperially slim,” loved by one and all in his little New England town. Kent is a far seedier specimen, loved by no one, but underneath he and Mr. Cory are soul brothers.

And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,

Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Yes, indeedy, Edwin A. Robinson understood the private demons that lurk behind the public facade. Likely owned a few himself, being one of that breed held in even greater contempt than whores and newspaper hacks, poets. But failure wasn’t one of them. Nor, I’ll wager, was he plagued with unrequited love for a woman as stormy as the late Storm.

Storm, Storm. Gone and no longer blowing — metaphorically or otherwise. “Temporal skull fracture leading to subdural hematoma of mid brain.” Ding dong, the wench is dead. “Death of brain due to necrosis or mass effect.” Ding dong, the wench is dead, the wicked wench is dead.

And I wish, I wish, I wish Kent was, too.

And Douglas Kent, one dark Stormless night,

Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Or did he? Is he as willful as Richard Cory, as ready to plunge into the abyss? In the last analysis, are they soul brothers or simply two sides of the same tarnished coin?

I poured more salve.

The gun and I watched each other, like old enemies or new friends.

“I told you, Earle!” I screamed at him. “I told you there wasn’t anybody but you, I never once slept with anybody else the whole time we’ve been married! I told you not to hit me anymore! I told you, I told you, how many times did I tell you? Why didn’t you listen? Why didn’t you believe me?”

I was shaking so hard I could barely stand up. I didn’t sit in my chair, I fell into it. My mouth was bleeding where he’d punched me and opened up the cut he put there yesterday. Bleeding all over my sweater and jacket and dripping onto my pants. It hurt a lot and the blood tasted salty. My jaw hurt and my ear felt all swollen and my eye hurt, too. The eye was going to be black and yellow and purple, worse than the other times because it was already so puffy I couldn’t see out of it. He always hit me in the face. Never cared how I looked the next day, that I had to go to work with my face all bruised and swollen, that I had to lie to people and see the pity in their faces and listen to Darlene and I don’t know how many others tell me what an idiot I was for staying with a man who kept beating me up.

“You never cared, you son of a bitch! How I looked or what I had to put up with! ‘Poor Lori, why does she let him get away with it,’ why why why! That’s what I had to listen to, that’s what you made me put up with, you dirty son of a bitch bastard Earle, you.”

I am an idiot. I must be. I quit loving you long ago, just like you quit loving me, and now I hate you the same way you hate me. Oh Jesus, I hate you so much, Earle. You know the one thing I regret most? That I didn’t cheat on you not only once or twice but a hundred times, a thousand, that I didn’t have men lined up around the block waiting to screw me the way Storm Carey did instead of hanging on to the stupid idea that a woman ought to be faithful to her husband, stick by him even if he beats the crap out of her for no damn reason. For better or worse, what a joke. My word was never good enough for you, oh no. You and your jealousy, you and your drinking, you and your hitting.

“You and your hitting, Earle. Didn’t I tell you the hitting had to stop?”

He sat in his chair over there, staring at me.

“And then you had to go and follow me today. Why’d you do that, huh? Why couldn’t you leave me alone today of all days, let me do something worthwhile for a change, let me care for somebody and have him treat me like a human being instead of a piece of ass and a punching bag? If I’d told you about John Faith, you’d have kept on hitting me anyway and then you’d have called the cops and turned him in and tried to get some kind of reward out of it. I know you, Earle, I know you like a book. I couldn’t let you do it. John Faith’s everything I wish to God you were and he’s had a rough time of it and he deserves a break and I couldn’t let you turn him in. Or keep on hitting me after I told you the hitting had to stop.”