Bill Pronzini: Snowbound

The memories flooded his mind unbidden, unwanted, and he could not seem to consume enough alcohol to drive them back into that mental corner. The loneliness was born then, selfish pathos, and because he didn’t want it and could not reconcile it, he was angry with himself and almost desperately uneasy. The normality of his past life was dead and buried-he too was dead, inside where it counted-and even at Christmas, even if miracles were possible and the effort was worth making, you could not resurrect the dead. But the loneliness persisted, creating a senseless paradox: hollow man who wants and needs to be alone, and is lonely.

Cain lay motionless on the bed, with his face turned toward the closed door-vaguely aware of the thin strip of light filtering in beneath it, aware that he had not shut off the lamps when he’d quit the front room a few minutes earlier. The hell with it, he thought. The hell with the lamps. He moved his head in a quadrant then and stared at the closet door opposite. Inside, the 30.06 Savage was propped against the back wall, fully loaded, where he’d put it when he first came to Hidden Valley. He could not get up and go over there tonight any more than he had been able to do it any of the other nights. He simply did not have the guts to kill himself, the fact of that was inescapable; he had found it out on the evening three days after the accident, when he had left the hotel room in downtown San Francisco, driven out to Oyster Point, got the rifle from the trunk and loaded it and put the muzzle into his mouth, finger stiff on the trigger, and sat there for thirty minutes that way, sweat drenching him, trying to pull that trigger and not being able to do it. It would always be as it had been on that night-but that did not stop him from thinking about it, the single shot that would end all the suffering and allow him the same oblivion which he had through his carelessness inflicted on Angie, on Lindy, on Steve…

“Christ!” Cain said aloud, and reached over to drag the bourbon bottle and an empty glass from the nightstand. He poured the glass half-full, drank all of it in two convulsive swallows, gagged, felt the liquor churning hot and acrid in his stomach.

Lonely. Lonely!

He swung his feet off the bed and went shakily into the bathroom and knelt in front of the toilet and vomited a half dozen times, painfully. When there was nothing left, he stood up and rinsed his mouth from the sink tap, washed his face and neck in the icy mountain water. Then he returned to the bed and sprawled out prone, breathing thickly.

Angie and the kids, gone, gone.

But not architecture, not San Francisco, not Don Collins and Bert Rhymer-not me.

Lonely.

No!

Lonely, lonely, lonely…

In the living room of his brother’s Eldorado Street house, John Tribucci sat with his wife, Ann, and played that fine old prospective-parents game known as Choosing a Name for the Baby

“I still think,” Ann said, “that if it’s a boy, he should be called John Junior.” She was sitting uncomfortably, hugely, on the sofa, one hand resting on the swell of her abdomen; beneath the high elastic waist of the maternity dress she wore even her breasts seemed swollen to twice their normal size. Long-legged and normally slender, she had high cheekbones and rich-toned olive skin and straight, silky black hair parted in the middle-clear testimony to her part-Amerind heritage, her great-grandmother having been a full-blooded Miwoc. Pregnant or not, she was the most beautiful and the most sensual woman Tribucci had ever known.

He said, “One Johnny around the house is plenty. Besides, I refuse to be prematurely referred to as John Tribucci, Senior.”

Ann laughed. “Well, then, there’s always your father’s name.”

“Mario? No way.”

“Andrew is nice.”

“Then we’ve got Ann and Andy, the Raggedy twins.”

“I also like Joseph.”

“Joey Tribucci sounds like a Prohibition bootlegger.”

She made a face at him. “You come up with the most incredible objections. You’re still holding out for Alexander, right?”

“What’s wrong with Alexander?”

“It just doesn’t sound very masculine to me.”

“Alex is one of the most masculine names I can think of.”

“Mmm. But there have still got to be better ones.”

“I haven’t heard any yet.”

“Well-the last time you seemed to like Stephen.”

“But you weren’t exactly overjoyed with it, as I recall.”

“It kind of grows on you. I like John Junior better, but I guess I’m willing to compromise-for now, anyway.”

“All right, for now it’s Stephen. On to girls’ names, since the unlikely possibility does exist that I’ve fathered a female.”

“You,” Ann said, “can be a damned male chauvinist at times.”

“Guilty as charged.”

“And balls to you, love. Okay, you didn’t like Suzanne or Toni or Francesca, and I don’t like Pamela or Jill or Judith. But I’ve been thinking and I came up with three new ones, all of which are pretty and one of which even you are bound to like. The first is Hannah.”

“Somebody’s German maid,” Tribucci said. Then, when she glared at him: “Just kidding, it’s not bad. What’s the second?”

“Marika.”

“Better, much better. Marika Tribucci. You know, that has a nice ring to it.”

“I think so, too. In fact, it’s my favorite. But the third is also sweet: Charlene.”

Tribucci had been smiling and relaxed in Vince’s old naugahyde easy chair; now the smile vanished, and his eyes turned dark and brooding. He got to his feet and walked across to one of the front windows and stood looking out into the darkness.

Behind him Ann said, “Johnny? What’s the matter?”

He did not answer, did not turn. Charlene, he was thinking. Charlene Hammond. It had been a long while since he had thought of her and of the night on the deserted beach near Santa Cruz. The incident had been in his mind often for the first few months after it happened; but that had been thirteen years ago, when he was serving the last of his four-year Army stint at Fort Ord, and time had dulled it finally and settled it into the dim recesses of his memory. Even so, it had only taken Ann’s innocent suggestion just now to bring it all back in sharp, unwelcome focus.

He had met Charlene Hammond in late July of that year, on the boardwalk in Santa Cruz. She’d been blond, vivacious, ripe of body and suggestive in her mannerisms; not particularly bright, but at twenty-two and living on an Army base, you don’t really care about a girl’s intelligence quotient. They’d had a few dates-dances, shows, summer events-and when they’d known each other for three weeks, she let him make love to her in the back seat of her father’s car. He saw her again two evenings later, and that was the night they went to the beach-because the car was awkward and because they were young and there was something exhilarating in the idea of screwing out in the open with the ocean close by and the clear, vast sky overhead. Charlene had chosen the spot, and he’d known she had been there before for the same purpose; she hadn’t been a virgin for a long time.

They parked the car on a bluff and descended to a sheltered place under the cliff’s overhang where they couldn’t be seen from the road above. There they had spread out a blanket and opened cans of beer, made out a little, taking their time, letting the excitement build. Still, neither of them wanted to wait very long, and excitement builds rapidly on a warm, empty night with the sound of the surf murmuring and throbbing in your ears.

They were lying in a tight embrace on the blanket, she naked and he with just his pants and shoes on, when the two motorcycles came roaring down onto the beach.