Bill Pronzini: The Lighthouse

“Doesn’t make any difference. He’s lived out here for three years; he ought to have taken some pride in his surroundings, whether he was paid for it or not.”

“Not everybody feels about lighthouses as you do, Jan.”

“That’s no excuse either. This is an important piece of history; he should have kept it up.”

There was no arguing with him on the subject, so she let it go. But he was overreacting: the buildings didn’t look all that bad, really, at least not from the outside. They could have used a fresh coat of whitewash-and the fence needed repair-but for a coastal light that had been out of service for more than twenty years, everything was in fairly decent shape. Especially the lighthouse itself. Alix studied it through the windshield. It was a variation on the Cape Cod style of lighthouse architecture: a compact two-story rectangular frame building-the watch house-with its three-story tower rising through the center. The tower had been fashioned of bricks made from nearby clay deposits, Jan had told her, the surrounding structure from the timber that had once covered this headland. High above, a catwalk circled the outside of the glassed-in lantern room. She could just make out part of the massive Fresnel lens mounted inside, a marvelous piece of nineteenth-century engineering rendered obsolete by modem technology.

She asked Jan. “Does the light still work after all these years?”

“I’ll answer that after I’ve spent some time with it.”

“You’re not going to try operating it?”

“No,” he said, “of course not. Come on, there’s no sense in sitting here. We’ll track down Bonner ourselves.”

They found him inside the garage, in a workshop area toward the rear, packing tools into a wooden crate. “All of this stuff is mine,” he said, as if challenging Jan to call him a liar. He also said he hadn’t heard the horn, which likewise may or may not have been the truth. He was a dried-up little man somewhere in his fifties, with a bulbous head and dry brown hair combed sideways across the top. His eyes were dull and unfriendly, and so was his manner. Alix decided Jan was justified in calling him unpleasant.

“Need another hour to clear out the rest of my belongings,” Bonner said in sullen tones. “That is, if you don’t mind.”

“Why should we mind?”

“Keys on a peg inside the lighthouse door. I didn’t leave you no provisions. Didn’t see why I should.”

“We didn’t expect you to.”

“Kitchen stove’s almost out of propane. Enough for one more meal, maybe.”

“I’m not surprised,” Jan said. “Where are the empty cylinders?”

“Pantry.”

“Where do we get refills?”

“A-One Marine.”

“In Hilliard?”

“Closest place, ain’t it?” Bonner looked at Alix for the first time. “You going to live out here too, missus?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, you won’t like it.”

“No? Why not?”

“Just won’t. No place for a woman.”

“They had women lighthouse keepers at Cape Blanco a hundred years ago,” she said, quoting Jan. “Or didn’t you know that?”

Bonner grunted. “I’ll finish my packing now,” he said to Jan. “You can find your own way around; you been here before.”

It was cold in the garage; Alix felt chilled inside her light jacket. But the wind outside set her teeth to chattering. “I’m going to get something heavier,” she said. She went to the station wagon, rummaged around among the clothing bags until she found her heavy pea jacket. Jan helped her put it on.

“It’ll be warmer in the house,” he said, “even if Bonner didn’t bother to set a fire.”

“God, I hope so. It’s not always going to be this cold, is it?”

“Most of the time until March, probably. You’ll get used to it, California girl. You lived in New York and Boston, remember?”

“How could I forget?”

“Suppose we take the grand tour? When Bonner leaves we’ll unload the car; then I’ll make us hot toddies.”

“I could use the hot toddy right now.”

“Hey, where’s your pioneer spirit?”

“It froze to death about five minutes ago.”

He laughed, a sound that was lost in the shriek and bluster of the wind, and started away across an expanse of thick weedy grass. Shivering, hunched inside her pea jacket, Alix followed his broad back toward their home for the next twelve months.

The kitchen depressed her.

It was a combination of things. For one, the walls were painted a battleship gray and the plaster ceiling was so smoke-stained that it approached the same color. All that gray made it gloomy, even when the sun shone obliquely through the window over the sink. The propane stove was another problem: it was old and crochety and you couldn’t get it lighted without an effort. It was better than the one in the living room, though, the old wood-burner; that one smoked like crazy when the wind shifted and began baffling around the lighthouse tower and down into the kitchen chimney. They had had to open the first-floor doors and windows to air the place out, which of course robbed the first-floor rooms of most of their heat.

But the kitchen… it was still the worst room. The well water that came out of the taps had a brackish, mineral taste; they’d have to buy bottled water in Hilliard tomorrow. The refrigerator made funny humming, rattling noises, as if it were about to break down-or explode-at any second. As for the pantry, it wasn’t even attached to the kitchen; you had to go down three steps and through a small cloakroom to get to it, which made it inconvenient and not much good for anything except as a storeroom for bulk supplies. But at least it had an outside door, so you didn’t have to trundle the supplies through the kitchen and cloakroom.

And then there was the other well, the abandoned one under the trapdoor in the pantry floor. One of the early keepers, a man named Guthrie, had sunk the well in 1896 on open ground a short distance away from the original building; it was slightly less than twenty feet deep. When the next keeper took over in 1911 he had built the pantry as an addition and cut the trapdoor to give access to his water supply. (Jan knew all about this but had neglected to tell her beforehand.) The well had long since dried up, and once that happened it had been used as a refuse dump for a while. Jan had shone a flashlight down inside it to reveal rocks and scrap metal and God knew what else. Rats, for all she knew. She had a horror of rats.

Well, there wasn’t much she could do about the pantry-except to put up more shelves, maybe, and make sure the trapdoor stayed shut-but the kitchen itself would have to be dealt with. There was no way she was going to live here a full year surrounded by all that dingy gray. Repaint the walls, and either paint or replaster the ceiling, depending on whether or not she could get the smoke grime off. Put some color in, some of the Metropolitan Museum posters she’d brought.

…

She smiled wryly, aware of the fussy domesticity of her plans. Here they were at the beginning of their big adventure, and all she could think about was painting the kitchen.

But was it going to be an adventure? she thought wistfully. At the moment it seemed no more exciting than a child’s vacation at the seashore. Well, perhaps that was appropriate. Often when she thought about herself, she felt as if she were a mere child; felt that nothing real had ever happened to her, nothing that constituted a test of her mettle. Everything in her adult life-after a bit of initial career and romantic disappointment-had been too easy. And she herself had remained untouched by life, growing from a pleasant, smiling child into a pleasant, smiling woman with few problems.