Bill Pronzini: The Snatch

“It’s not that easy to break the habit-how many times do I have to tell you that?”

“Other people do it every day.”

“Well, I’m not other people.”

“If you wanted to quit badly enough, you’d find a way.”

“Look,” I said, “we’ve been through all this crap before.”

“Oh yes, of course we have,” she said sardonically. “And that cough keeps getting worse every time I see you. You can’t be naive enough to think there’s no connection.”

“It’s a bronchial thing, that’s all.”

“Yes? Then why don’t you go the doctor for something to clear it up?”

“I don’t need to go to a doctor.”

“Yes you do, but you won’t go anyway. You’re afraid of what an examination might reveal. You’re afraid a doctor might find cancer or tuberculosis or-”

“Shut up, Erika!” I snapped at her. “Goddamn it, shut up!”

She got to her feet and looked down at me with a pitying expression, and I could feel anger building hot inside me, making the blood pound in my temples. We were coming on another fight, I could sense it; I didn’t want it, and yet I knew it was coming and I couldn’t find a way to stop it.

“When are you going to grow up?” Erika asked me. “For God’s sake, you’re forty-seven years old. Do you think you’ve got the body of a teenager? You’re susceptible to diseases at your age-”

“Listen,” I said, “I don’t need any frigging lectures from you!”

I was sorry as soon as I said the words, but it was too late to take them back. Her mouth went small and tight at the corners, and a veil came down like shutters closing over her eyes. “My, haven’t we got the pleasant mouth this evening,” she said, but all the vitriol was gone from her voice now and there was a kind of controlled and righteous fury in its place.

I said, “Erika …”

“Good night,” she said. “Please close the door on your way out.” And she turned and walked with quick angry strides across the room and through the doorway into the bedroom. The door closed a moment later, loud enough for me to hear, and there was the empty and unmistakably final clicking sound of the key turning in the lock.

I got to my feet and stood there in the now still, suddenly cheerless room for a long time; and then I went over to the front door and slammed out of there, making as much noise as I could.

I drove home in a dark blue funk and made myself a stiff drink that I barely touched and sat listening to the wind tugging at the stripping around the bay windows. After a while the anger drained out of me and left in its wake a deep feeling of depression, of brooding introspection. I went in and got undressed and slipped into the iron-posted bed-but I couldn’t sleep. I lay there in the dark, wanting a cigarette, not having one.

I kept thinking: She’s right. Damn her, she’s right.

* * * *

At a few minutes past eight the next morning, tired and stiff-jointed from lack of sleep, I sat staring moodily into a mug of black coffee in the kitchen.

There was a package of Pall Malls beside the mug, and I turned it over and over with the thumb and forefinger of my right hand, not looking at it, trying to make up my mind about them and about the coughing. Cigarettes were a crutch, the satisfaction of a small, obdurate craving, and I was good at telling myself that I could no more give them up than I could give up eating. And yet the thought, strong and vivid now, of what might be growing, festering, in my chest made sweat cold and viscid flow along my body.

I had been putting it out of my mind, effectively blocking it out each time it demanded attention, for better than two months. That’s one of the fine things about the human animal: if something bothers you, if something frightens you, you simply put it out of your mind and tell yourself that after a while it will go away of its own accord-and that makes everything okay again. But I could no longer indulge in that kind of speciousness, because the cough was getting worse and because Erika’s harsh and acerbic words had brought it all out into the open, into a light I could not flick off.

Well, all right. I had to give up the damned cigarettes, what was the use in kidding myself? I had to quit them cold, none of this tapering-off crap. I could chew toothpicks or gum until the gnawing went away, and after that it would not be so bad at all. Then I would have to go to a doctor and have a chest X-ray, and maybe a thorough physical, to find out about the cough. Maybe what I had told Erika was correct: maybe it was nothing more than a bronchial disorder.

Yeah, and maybe it was cancer.

Jesus, Jesus! I could feel my hands starting to shake, and I swept the package of cigarettes off onto the floor and got up and kicked them behind the stove. I was scared. I had been scared all along.

I thought: What would I do if they told me I had six months to live? What would I say, what would I feel? Or suppose I had to have surgery, to have a lung removed? How would I bear up under that? Because I was petrified of hospitals, of surgical steel, after having been in war-zone hospitals in the South Pacific and having seen things in them no man should ever see. God, maybe it was just better to let whatever it was alone, until it either cleared itself up or I just kicked over, but that was not the way it happened, no, an uncle of mine had died of cancer and he had been a hale and hearty man weighing two hundred and fifty pounds all his life and yet he had died at half that weight with his body yellowed and withered and the cancer eating at him, consuming him from within and making him scream with the pain of-

The sudden, strident sound of the telephone bell brought me whirling about. I had taken the phone on its long cord into the kitchen and put it down on the sideboard earlier, with the idea of calling Erika, but I hadn’t been able to do it; I had forgotten the thing was there.

I took a couple of deep breaths, getting the dark thoughts out of my mind, getting calm, and then I went over and answered it on the third ring. It was a secretary to Allan Channing, crisp and efficient and precise. She wanted to know if it would be possible for me to come by his office in San Mateo before I attended to my other commitment on the Peninsula. I said it would, and wondered what Channing wanted of me; but I did not ask. The secretary would not have known anyway.

I hung up and went back and stared at the coffee some more. I was not looking forward to what lay ahead on this day, or at any time in the near future, and suddenly I wished I were on a boat somewhere-an old bugeye sloop, perhaps, clean and sleek and well-provisioned- alone on that boat with the song of the sea wind in my ears and the feel of salt spray on my face. But that was a never-never land, a peace and a serenity I could never aspire to because I was too practical, too tightly bound to the city and her chaotic ways. I knew that, and the knowledge saddened me. I had today, and maybe tomorrow, and maybe a lot of tomorrows-but I had cold stark reality, too, and I could never escape from it …

I shook myself and thought: Come down a little, will you? Christ! I got a box of wooden toothpicks out of one of the cupboards and took that and the telephone into the bedroom. I slipped the toothpicks into the pocket of my suitcoat, and put the coat on, and found a tie that looked all right against the pale yellow of the only clean shirt I had in from the laundry. I stared at the telephone for a few seconds, but I still could not bring myself to call Erika; later, tomorrow, after I was finished with this Martinetti business, after I had made an appointment with a doctor. Tomorrow.

The same commuter traffic I had gotten caught in the night before, in reverse, tangled the Bayshore, and it took me forty minutes to travel the twenty miles to San Mateo. The fog was thick and gray and cold as far south as Millbrae, and then the sky cleared and it was warm and balmy again, a nice autumn morning that I could not enjoy at all.