Bill Pronzini: Snowbound

Kubion had lived by and with violence for half of his forty-two years, but it had always been rigidly controlled, resorted to only when unavoidably necessary-as in the case of the Greenfront floor cop-and then in a calm, detached way so that he never lost his grip, relied on intellect to bring him through the tight. When he wasn’t working, there had been no thoughts of and no inclination toward force and savagery; only soft, big-assed black chicks (he had always had a thing for big-assed black chicks, screw what anybody thought) and the night life in New York and Miami Beach and L.A.-the balling ball money always bought you.

But a little more than a year ago the headaches had started. Any kind of tension brought them on, and any kind of irritation was liable to push him over the brink into impulsive and unreasoning violence. He had broken Tony Filippi’s collarbone and fractured his skull with a gun butt after a job in San Diego last spring because Filippi had fouled up his end of it and almost cost them the score; he had seriously beaten one of his women in a Miami hotel three months later because she had tried to play cute-sex when he was laboring over a payroll ripoff-and had been barely able to buy his way out of a threatened assault charge; he had ruptured a kid parking attendant just two months ago in Anaheim because the kid had gotten snotty with him and he had just finished checking out a job which proved unworkable-that, too, costing him money to fix. When he was feeling right, Kubion looked back on these times with disgust and apprehension and promised himself he would never let it happen again; but then he would get uptight about something, and one of the headaches would come on, and all the control would fall away under the black burning pressure of the impulse.

He had gone to two doctors, one in Miami and one in L.A., and submitted to two thorough physical examinations. Neither of the doctors had found anything organically wrong with him. The first one said the headaches were probably caused by nerves and prescribed tranquilizers; Kubion tried them for a while, and they had seemed to be helping, he thought the problem was licked-until the headache in the Miami hotel and the beating he had given the woman there. The second one said severe headaches were sometimes a sign of mental disorder and suggested Kubion ought to consult a psychologist. He hadn’t taken that advice; it was garbage for one thing, and he didn’t trust shrinks for another. They were nothing but sharks with fancy degrees and fancy two-bit double talk. He remembered the superior, patronizing son of a bitch at the Michigan state prison where he’d done a nickel stretch for armed robbery in the early fifties, his only fall. Penal psychologist, they’d called him, penal meaning prick: probing with endless questions, rapping pure manure about detrimental adolescent environment and sociopathic attitudes and a hint of latent megalomania-leaving Kubion feeling irritated and unsettled each time, alienating him completely. The hell with that crap.

He’d decided finally that he would just have to take care of it on his own-control himself when the headaches came on, work it out the same way he worked out a difficult score. He hadn’t been able to do it yet, but he would because he had to in order to keep on working and keep on balling. Things would smooth out all right. Hadn’t they always smoothed out for him in the past?

Kubion did not think of any of this as they drove along the snowswept and deserted main street of the village. There was only the throbbing pain in his head, and the jangling of his nerves, and the bitter frustration of the ripoff that had gone sour in Sacramento, and the overpowering, irrational need to smash something or somebody. He lit another cigarette, staring out through the windshield at the Christmas lights which still burned above the street, the buildings all unlighted save for more Christmas bulbs decorating the facade of the Valley Inn and two squares of yellow which came through its misted front windows. The red and blue and green glow of the bulbs limned his dark face surrealistically-a lean face fashioned of hard, vertical lines that gave it a somehow unfinished appearance, as if it had never been properly planed off and you could, if you looked closely enough, see the marks of a sculptor’s chisel. In normal light the darkness of his skin coloring, the sooty black of his hair and eyebrows, the heavy beard shadow combined to create about him a charred look, like a man recently emerged from a coal fire.

Beside him Brodie said the first words any of them had spoken in thirty minutes: “Not even eight thirty and they’ve rolled up the sidewalks already.”

Kubion said nothing, sucking at the filter of his cigarette.

There were rustling sounds in the rear seat, and Loxner said, “Jesus, we finally here?” His voice was thick; Brodie had bought him a pint of gin when they stopped to put on the chains in Nevada City-antiseptic for his arm and anesthesia for the pain, not wanting to chance buying bandages or pharmaceuticals with the word out that one of them was wounded.

“Finally here,” Brodie answered.

“All right if I sit up now?”

“Come ahead. There’s nobody on the streets.”

Loxner sat up, blinking. He was the same age as Kubion, running to fat in the middle from too much ale and food; he had thinning hair the color of tarnished copper and the beginnings of bulldog jowls. “My arm feels kind of numb now,” he said. “But I got to get something on it as soon as we get to the cabin, iodine or something. You don’t treat a gunshot wound and take care of it, you get infection. Gangrene, maybe.”

“Shut up with your whining,” Kubion said.

“Hey, I’m not whining. It’s just that I-”

“Shut up! I’ve been smelling your blood for five hours now, and I don’t need to listen to you shit at the mouth.”

“Take it easy, Earl,” Brodie said.

“Stop telling me to take it easy, you son of a bitch!”

Brodie took his foot off the gas and turned his head and looked at Kubion. He was tall, fair-haired, narrow-hipped, and looked like one of those smiling pretty-boy types Kubion had seen around the Miami resort hotels, looking for middle-aged and moneyed pussy; he had violet-blue eyes that were normally soft but which could harden until they resembled chunks of amethyst quartz-and they were like that now. “I’m no son of a bitch,” he said slowly, “and I don’t like being called one.”

“Fuck you, Brodie. You hear that? Fuck you!”

Brodie stared at him a moment longer, his hands tight on the wheel. Then he seemed to shake himself slightly, and his fingers relaxed; he put his foot back on the accelerator and his eyes fully on the road again. They were beyond the village now, at the junction of Macklin Lake Road and Mule Deer Lake Road. Silently he swung the car right, the tire chains making thin crunching sounds on the packed snow which covered the roadway, and almost immediately they began to wind through thick stands of lodgepole pine. The car’s headlights, made furry by the falling snow, tunneled through the darkness.

Kubion said, “Well, Brodie?”

Leaning over the back seat, establishing a small barrier between the two men in front, Loxner said, “You remember if there’s bandages and iodine at the cabin, Vic?”

“Yeah, I think so,” Brodie answered. “The place is stocked up with everything else.”

“We haven’t eaten anything since breakfast, you know that? Once I do something about this arm, it’s maybe a good idea to put some food on my gut.”

“We could all do with a little food. Steaks, maybe.”

“The hell with it,” Kubion said. Ice crackled loudly as he wound down his window and threw the cigarette out; the chill mountain wind blew snow against the side of his face, put an edge on the heater warmth inside the car. “The hell with it, the hell with both of you.”