Bill Pronzini: Blowback

What isn't simple is fighting off the craving for a cigarette, just one, just one more cigarette because it always tasted so damned good with that morning coffee.

I got to my feet again: all I seemed to be doing this morning was standing and sitting down. Well, I had to get out of there, that was all, before I became claustrophobic; I had to get my mind off cigarettes and off Tuesday. Go somewhere, do something. Bowling, maybe, some sort of physical activity The phone bell went off a second time.

Now who the hell? I thought. The hell with it, there was nobody I wanted to talk to. But I was not one of those people who could let the telephone ring without responding. Too many years of conditioning. The telephone was an integral part of my job and always had been. Reluctantly I went in and answered it.

A voice, vaguely familiar, said my first name. I frowned, and there was one of those awkward pauses where you try to place someone by his voice and can't quite manage it. I said finally, “Yes?”

“This is Harry Burroughs, buddy.”

“Well, Christ,” I said.

Harry Burroughs was a guy I had met in the Pacific theater during the early years of the war, when I was in Military Intelligence and he was attached to a combat supply unit. We had gotten to be friends, had done a good deal of drinking and carousing together, and had come back stateside on the same ship in 1946. Since we were both from California, we had stayed in touch over the years; he owned and operated a small fishing camp up in the Sierra Nevada, on Eden Lake in the southern Mother Lode.

He said the same thing I was thinking, “Been a long time. Too long.”

“Four years at least. You in town, Harry?”

“No, I'm calling from The Pines.” That was a small village not far from Eden Lake. “Listen, buddy, you couldn't get away for a few days, could you? Come up and do a little fishing and kick over old times?”

I hesitated. “Well-I don't know.”

“Be good to see you,” he said. “And the bass are big and hungry this year.”

I've got a lesion on my left lung, I thought. I might have lung cancer. I said, “Maybe I can swing it next week. I'm not sure yet.”

“No chance you could make it right away?”

“You mean today?”

“The sooner the better.”

There was something in his voice that told me he had more on his mind than fishing and kicking over old times. I said as much, and then I said, “You got some sort of problem, Harry?”

“Yeah, maybe,” he admitted.

“Urgent?”

“It could be.”

“You want to tell me about it now?”

“It's a little complicated,” Harry said. “Has to do with some of the people staying at my camp. You'd have to see the situation yourself to get a real handle on it.” He paused. “Hell, I hate to come out of the blue like this after four years and ask a favor, but I don't know anybody else. And it'd be good to see you again anyway, believe that.”

“Harry-look, I just don't know. I'll have to see if I can get away. Can I call back a little later?”

“I'll be here for another hour. That enough time?”

“Maybe. If not, I could leave a message.” There were no telephones at the camp; even though it was less than five miles from The Pines, Harry liked to maintain the illusion of wilderness and isolation.

“Fair enough.” He gave me the number: The Pines General Store. “I hope you can manage it, buddy.”

“I'll call,” I said.

I put the phone down and went out into the kitchen and poured another cup of coffee. I stood with it, staring down into the sink and its overflow of crusty-looking dishes.

You can't do it, I thought. You've got to go in on Tuesday and find out the results of the sputum test-find out that the lesion is benign.

Or malignant.

I don't want to know the results of that frigging test, I thought.

Tuesday.

You'll go crazy sitting around here, waiting for Tuesday.

Well, you could go up to Eden Lake and you could be back by Tuesday, couldn't you?

Unless Harry's problem took longer than that.

All right, suppose it did. I could always call White from The Pines; I did not necessarily have to go in and see him. Besides, I was in a sorry mental state right now and I needed activity, a place and a direction to concentrate my sensibilities. I had always been motivated by my work, and it was a tried and true antidote for self-pity and depression. So was fishing for lake bass and reliving some of the good moments of the past with an old friend. And I owed Harry a favor because of our friendship, if for no other reason.

Sunday morning coming down.

In the living room again I sat and stared at the walls and listened to the silence. After a while I said aloud, “You're a damned fool.” Then I got up and did what I had known all along I was going to do: I went in and called Harry Burroughs at The Pines General Store and told him I would be up later that day.

The Mother Lode extends one hundred and fifty miles north and south along the western slopes of the central Sierra Nevada. In the Southern Mines of Tuolumne County, due east of Modesto where Eden Lake was located, hundreds of thousands of men had used picks, washing pans, rockers, hydraulic rams, sluices, and crude and modern machinery to extract billions of dollars' worth of placer and quartz gold during the last half of the nineteenth century. Some of the towns that had sprung up then had long since died, become ghosts or nothing at all except historical memories. Others remained to the present, carefully preserving their heritage so that tourists could peer at the old brick-and-fieldstone and false-fronted buildings, prowl the nearby abandoned diggings, and study the relics left by those who had come long ago in search of dreams. And maybe a hundred years from now, if the world lasted that long, tourists of that era would come to gape and gawk at what was left of our dreams…

The Pines was one of those towns rich in history, situated in the foothills off the Mono Highway east of Twain Harte and set against a backdrop of forested mountains and snow-capped crags thirteen thousand feet high and more. The surrounding countryside was rolling, hilly grassland and placer-pocked limestone-the town had been built on mining claims-and a spur of the Old Sierra Railroad passed through it and up into the mountains to where lumberjacks still felled trees and cut logs for the sawmills at Standard and Tuolumne.

When I came into The Pines a few minutes before three, the main street was crowded with cars and people. Traffic had been heavy all the way from San Francisco, and especially heavy into and out of Sonora on the Mono Road, mostly transient tourists and vacationers from the resorts at Long Barn and Pine Crest and local families on a Sunday outing. It was very hot, up in the nineties; the hot-metal glare of the sun made the trees on Buck Horn Hill look as though they were aflame. I had my window rolled down, and the air was redolent with the scents of pine and wood smoke and summer dust.

There was not much to the town-a two-story, false-fronted hotel with double porch posts and a sign hanging from the second-floor veranda that said it had been built in 1882; the General Store, a couple of souvenir shops, three restaurants, a simulated Old West saloon that dispensed “genuine sarsparilla” instead of alcoholic beverages, a white frame church, and The Pines Museum-the last nearly dwarfed by a pair of seventy-foot, partially dismantled tailing wheels along its near side. Down the side streets were a few houses, open pasture land, and at least one example of gold-rush architecture that nobody had seen fit to restore-a low square building with a brick front and stone sides and heavy iron doors.

I wedged my car into a space in front of the General Store, between a VW bus and a big Dodge van that seemed curiously out of place in these surroundings because it had the words Vahram Terzian-Fine Oriental Rugs and Carpets painted on the side. I bought a fishing license and a few things I would need in the way of groceries: a small jar of instant coffee and a salami and some hard rolls. The place was jammed and the prices were exorbitant and the fat woman who waited on me wore a broad smile; I thought that she was probably the owner.