Bill Pronzini - A Wasteland of Strangers

I’m going to be a nurse.

Lori Banner, R.N. The best R.N. any hospital ever had.

Howard left me.

Walked out, moved out, and he isn’t coming back.

When I came home Sunday evening, bursting with news of Chief Novak’s shocking confession, simply bursting with it, Howard was in our bedroom packing his suitcases. I said, “For heaven’s sake, you’re not going on another of your trips already, on a Sunday night?”

He looked me right in the eye. “No, Zenna,” he said. “I’m leaving you.”

“ Leaving me?”

“I can’t spend another night in this house with you, not even for Stephanie’s sake. I’m moving out for good.”

“Howard, have you taken leave of your senses?”

“Come to them, is more like it. I’ll see a lawyer right away, have him start divorce proceedings. But you don’t need to worry. You can have the house, as much support for Stephanie as I can afford... just about anything you want. All I want is out.”

I must have gawked at him with my mouth open like a half-wit. I was utterly speechless.

He kept right on packing. And then, oh my Lord, then he said, “You might as well know the whole truth, Zenna. It’s not just you, this empty marriage of ours... maybe I could’ve gone on, at least for a while, if that’s all it was. But there’s somebody else. I’ve been seeing someone else.”

“Another woman!” I spat the words at him.

“Her name is Irene. She lives in Redding—”

“I don’t want to hear about your dirty whore!”

“She’s not a whore. She’s a widow with two small children—”

I clapped my hands over my ears. “I don’t want to hear it, I don’t care who she is, oh my God, how can you do this to me? How can you do this to Stephanie, your own child?”

“I’ve already talked to Stephanie. I think she understands.”

“Understands? She’s nine years old! What did you tell her?”

“The truth.”

“What truth? That you’ve been fornicating with a whore?”

“My reasons for leaving. All of them. She understands that most of the fault is mine, and she forgives me. Or will, in time.”

“ Most of the fault is yours?”

“That’s right. Part of it is yours.”

“How dare you! Mine?”

“I’m sorry, but that’s also the truth. Believe it or not.”

“You’re the one who’ll be sorry, Howard Wilson. You’re the one who’ll be sorry. Cheating, fornicating with God knows how many—”

“Only Irene. And we love each other.”

“—and you have the gall to blame me...” I had to choke out the rest of the words. “Damn you, damn your lying, cheating soul to the fires of Hell!”

“Good-bye, Zenna,” he said, and he was gone.

That was three days ago and I still don’t understand how he could do such a terrible thing to his wife and daughter. To me. I’ve been a good wife, a good mother, I’ve made a strong Christian home, I never so much as looked at another man or lusted after one in my heart in sixteen years of marriage. Cooked his meals, washed his dirty clothes, cleaned his house, let him have my body whenever he wanted it even though I can no longer conceive. What more could a man ask of a woman, a marriage, a home? How could he do this to me after sixteen years? How could he humiliate me this way?

Well, he won’t get away with it. I’ll make him pay. As merciful God is my witness, when I get through with him he won’t have a dime left to give to his Redding harlot and her two little bastards!

Ramon a made me tell her everything. All of it, every detail. Then she made me write it all down and sign it and she took the papers and Christ knows what she did with them. And then she let me go ahead and put the money back in the vault. She’ll help me raise the $7,000 to cover the shortage, too; she’s already planning ways, in case the Indian Head Bay property doesn’t sell in time. We’re going to be much closer from now on, she said. A tight-knit unit, the way a husband and wife should be. Just Ramona and me. Together from now on.

So I’m out from under. Safe. I don’t have to worry about a thing anymore. Ramona will take care of everything for the next ten or twenty or thirty years. I go to work, I come home, I eat and sleep, and if Ramona decides she wants me to, I’ll even manage to perform stud service. But I’m not really here. I’m like one of the condemned convicts on death row, the ones who have no hope left — I’m already dead in my prison.

Dead man walking.

I don’t know, man. They picked up Mateo in Southern Cal, all the way down near the border in some town called Chula Vista. He had a knife and he tried to rob this liquor store and the owner busted his arm with a bottle. They said he was trying to get money so he could cross over into Mexico. Where’s the sense, man? He was always goin’ on about how he’d never be caught dead in Mexico. L.A. was the place he wanted to be, he says, and he went right on through L.A. to this Chula Vista, heading straight for the border.

They’re bringing him back to Pomo pretty soon. I ain’t decided yet if I’ll go see him or not. The old man says he won’t, he washes his hands, and the old lady says she will, Mateo needs her as much as he needs God’s forgiveness, but I haven’t made up my mind yet. Sometimes I think I ought to, sometimes I think I’m better off if I wash my hands, too. Same as with Trisha and my kid. Sometimes I think I oughta go ahead and marry her — cool it with the drugs, get a job, maybe even finish school nights. And sometimes I think I’m better off the way I am, free and easy, get high and get laid whenever I want, go anywhere and don’t answer to nobody.

I don’t know, man. I just don’t know.

One thing I do know. I don’t want to end up like Mateo. Kidnapping, assault, attempted rape, attempted armed robbery... he’s gonna be in prison a long time. He could’ve killed somebody, too. Maybe he would’ve, someday. If I’d gone with him like he wanted me to... man, I don’t even want to think about it.

My big brother, Mateo. I always looked up to him. I always thought he was the coolest. But he’s not, no way. Es un don Mierda. He’s a real nobody, man. He’s a real Mr. Shit.

My world has shrunk to a six-by-eight rectangle, to steel bars and concrete walls, to a hard mattress and a sink and a toilet. I’ve exchanged police blue for inmate orange; I’m looking out through the bars instead of in; I’ve become what I always despised. And so I pace a lot. I lie staring at the ceiling or sit staring at the walls and bars. I think too much. I even pray a little. Eva would be proud of me if she knew. She always said it’s never too late to reach out to God. Always said if you talk to Him, He’ll listen and understand and forgive.

Maybe she was right. I hope He can forgive me, because I don’t think I can ever forgive myself.

It’s not Eva I think much about, or even God. Mostly it’s Storm, and that crazy night, and what I did to her and to myself, all the things I threw away when I picked up that paperweight and brought it smashing down. Sometimes it seems it was someone else who committed that insane act — an impostor in Chief’s clothing. How could I have done it? And why? Love, hate, jealousy, passion... none of it seems very real now. Or very important. It’d be easy to believe that it was outside forces driving me, fate lifting that paperweight and smashing it down to complete some cosmic purpose. But I don’t buy that. It wasn’t outside forces, it was converging forces inside me. My responsibility. My guilt. All mine to live with for the rest of my natural life.