A Wasteland of Strangers

by Bill Pronzini

  “You’re not ugly, John.”

  “The hell I’m not. I look in the mirror, I see what everybody else sees. Big, ugly, mean-looking … dangerous. Face and body like mine, I must be some kind of monster.”

  “There’s nothing that awful about the way you look.”

  “Nothing a team of plastic surgeons couldn’t fix. Don’t patronize me.”

  “I wasn’t patronizing you, and I didn’t say it to get on your good side. I mean it.”

  “Okay, you mean it. Some people don’t judge a book by its cover. But ask most of your friends and neighbors what they think, what they thought the minute they laid eyes on me. Ask the guy who wrote the newspaper editorial, ask Novak, ask Trisha Marx’s father.”

  “That’s the poison talking,” I said.

  “The what?”

  “Poison. Indians believe there’s poison everywhere, in all things. Each person is born with some, and we can be infected with more, by others and by ourselves. Poison is the handmaiden of hate—my father said that. Together they can sour our hearts, eventually destroy us.”

  “I get the point, teacher. So there’s poison in me, plenty of it. But I can’t get rid of it without getting rid of myself. Simple fact is, I wouldn’t be sitting here with a couple of holes in me and a murder charge hanging over my head if I looked like the frigging boy next door. And if you don’t believe it it’s because you don’t live inside this body.”

  “No, but I live inside an Indian woman’s body. I’m not a stranger to mindless prejudice.”

  A few seconds trickled away before he said, “I don’t doubt it. So you ought to be able to understand how it is with me.”

  “Up to a point.”

  “What point? The amount of violence I’ve had to deal with? I’m a man, oversized and ugly, and that makes me a target.”

  “A small young woman isn’t a target?”

  “Sure she is. But her odds, your odds against it are a lot better than mine. You haven’t had much violence in your life before tonight, I’ll bet.”

  “Not directed at me, no. But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen again. Or that if it does, I’ll survive it. There are as many men in this county who hate women and Indians as there are who hate big white strangers. The same men, many of them.”

  “Look, I don’t want to argue with you. Maybe you’re right, maybe we’re more alike than I think and it’s only the kind and amount of crap we have to deal with that makes us different.”

  “There’s another difference, too. You keep dwelling on your crap, your poison. You let it rule your life.”

  “And you don’t? No sourness or anger in your heart? Well, then, you’re a better person than me. Or else you’ve got a thicker hide.”

  “I didn’t say I have no bitterness or anger. I’m angry right now. My skin is thick enough, but I can still be poisoned.”

  “You don’t show it.”

  “Indians learn to mask their emotions,” I said. “And I channel mine into teaching, volunteer work.”

  “So you are a better person. Can’t be easy to keep a mask on or to turn the other cheek in a place like Pomo.”

  “Easier than it would be if I drifted from place to place, always alone. I was born in Pomo, it’s my home.”

  “Right,” John Faith said. “And that’s the biggest difference between you and me.”

  “What is?”

  “I’ve never had a home.”

  That was all he would say; after the words were out he seemed to retreat inside himself again. It’s the only place he feels comfortable and secure, I thought. Within his own skin.

  I watched him for a time, sitting motionless and staring into the cold shadows beyond the candle glow. Swaddled in my thermal blanket, he seemed not nearly so large, but aged, shrunken somewhat, like an old man waiting quietly for his spirit to leave and enter the Abode of the Dead. But the illusion was false. I remembered him as he’d been earlier, when he’d finished changing his bandages: his bare torso sweat-oiled, the candlelight giving it a burnished look so that he resembled a life-size figure sculpted in bronze; shadows altering the rugged contours of his head and face without softening them. In that aspect, huge and dark and stoic, he might have been one of the People—a warrior marked by spear and arrow wounds after battle. One of the legendary chiefs, perhaps. Konocti, Kah-bel …

  But that, too, was illusion. When he’d gotten up to bring the water bottle to me, he’d become again what he really was: another big, unfathomable white man. That was what I’d thought at the time, anyway. Now I wondered if there might not actually be something of the warrior in him, a man different from other men, strong, and big in ways other than size. I was not sure I liked him, or would care to know him well; but I did understand and feel compassion for him, and I sensed that he was an honest person, a good person, and most if not all of what he’d told me tonight was the truth. How can a wounded fugitive who risks his own safety to save a woman he barely knows from sexual assault be either a cold-blooded murderer or a threat to any community?

  But the way I felt didn’t change the fact that I was his prisoner and would remain his prisoner for several more hours. Nor did it help the time pass any more quickly. Nor did it prevent my body from protesting the treatment it had been subjected to tonight, or exhaustion from creeping through me until my limbs felt as heavy as pepperwood logs. My eyelids were heavy, too. Yet it seemed important to stay awake and alert; to give in to sleep was a kind of betrayal.

  I dozed in spite of myself. And jerked awake.

  What time was it? I fought the urge to look at my watch.

  So cold in here. I snuggled down deeper under the blanket.

  Had Mateo Munoz killed Storm? If John Faith was innocent, then Munoz must be guilty. Suppose he ran all the way into Mexico? He had family there. Could the authorities find him, bring him back …?

  Dozing again. Wake up! Stay awake.

  But I was so tired …

  Richard Novak

  IT WAS NEARLY three before I went home again. Details to clear up, my recommendation on the shooting death of Earle Banner to bolster Mary Jo’s report. Two cups of coffee and some pointless talk with Verne Erickson. And still no word on John Faith. It was the frustration of that, more than weariness and throbbing pain, that finally prodded me out of the station and back to the house.

  Audrey wasn’t there. Just Mack, and my bed neatly made. I was relieved at first, but when I popped another codeine capsule and crawled into the sack, it seemed cold and empty. Audrey’s scent lingered, and I remembered the warmth of her nearly nude body pressed against mine. A feeling of loneliness and isolation welled up, the kind a castaway on a sand spit that was shrinking away around him might feel. Much as I didn’t want to admit it, I needed someone now more than ever, someone who cared—I needed Audrey.

  The painkiller knocked me out before too long and I slept another five hours and woke up just as tired, just as empty. Audrey was on my mind as I showered and shaved and dressed. Audrey and Storm, intertwined, like some sort of two-headed creature. I’d treated her shabbily, not only last night but for most of the time I’d known her. She cared so much; couldn’t I care just a little?

  I put the leash on Mack and took him for a short walk in the thin, cold rain. By the time I came back I’d built up a strong urge to see Audrey, apologize to her. Nothing more than that; I wouldn’t tell her I needed her because I was afraid the need was surface, temporary, and I wouldn’t hurt her with false hopes. Just let her know that she mattered to me, even if I hadn’t shown it before.

  I drove to her house. Her garage door was all the way up, her car slotted inside, but I didn’t think anything of it until there was no answer to my doorbell ring. I went around back, knocked on the door there and called her name; still no answer. Why would she go away and leave the garage door wide open? And where would she go in weather like this without taking her car? Not off somewhere in her boat; I could see the Chris-Craft, tarp-covered, on the lift inside the dock sh
ed.

  An uneasy feeling began to work inside me. The attempted break-in Thursday night, the threatening phone call yesterday morning … somebody stalking her. The feeling worsened when I found the piece of cardboard taped over the broken bathroom window. What’d happened here? I punched out the cardboard, climbed through, and took a quick look through the house.

  No sign of her. Except for her car in the garage, there was no indication she’d been here at all last night after leaving my place. The furnace was off; the interior was chill and damp.

  I climbed back through the window and went into the garage. The car’s hood was cold, too; it hadn’t been driven in several hours. The sense of wrongness was so strong now it was like a squeezing pressure in my chest and groin. I opened the driver’s door, checked the front seat, then the backseat. Nothing to find. I slammed the door, started to turn, and stepped on something. I looked down at the floor. Lipstick. I bent to pick it up, saw something else, and dropped to all fours to peer under the car.

  Her purse was there, open, her wallet another of several items that had been spilled out of it. The one thing that wasn’t there was the Ruger automatic she’d told me she was going to carry for protection.

  Douglas Kent

  I WOKE UP at dawn’s early light, but there wasn’t much of same, just gloom and rain, so I went back to sleep. I was awake again at nine, feeling fine, feeling fine. No hangover this a.m., whoop-de-doo. And some Good Samaritan of a sneak thief seemed to have made off with my heavy bag of sticks, whoop-de-dee. Walking unburdened, walking tall, I padded into the bathroom, shook some dew off the old lily, and had a squint at the Kent phiz in the mirror.

  Amazing. I actually looked alive this morning. Doubly amazing, in fact, considering my morbid contemplations of last night. Eat your heart out, Richard Cory, you gentleman from sole to crown, you imperially slim rectal aperture. You may have put a bullet in your puddin’ head one fine night, but I didn’t and won’t be a copycat. My demons are better than your demons, my demons can lick your demons any old day of the week.

  Out to the kitchen. More rain and gloom at the windows, but ’twas of no import, for I was bright and sunny inside. Keep your sunny side up, eh, Kent? Oyez, oyez.

  One glass, relatively clean, plucked from the cupboard. Splash in approximately two inches of ice-cold, delicious orange juice. Add approximately six inches of crystal-clear, delicious salve. Stir lightly with index finger. Over the lips and over the gums … ahh! Quaff again until glass is empty. Ahh! Repeat process, once immediately and then as often as needed.

  Had I remembered to turn on my answering machine before doddering off to the sack? Wonder of wonders, I had. No messages, however. So. Nothing new on the fate of Faith or young Jaydee would’ve rung up as promised. Too bad, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles. Heigh-ho! One thing at a time. All in due course, everything in its proper order. The Faith will be kept when the time comes to keep the Faith.

  I chuckled. Kent really was in fine fettle this a.m.

  “Yes you are, pal. In fine fettle, and for less we’ll not settle.”

  I turned around. Pa Kent’s .38 was sitting in the center of the table where I’d left him. Old enemies? Hell, no. New friends. Bosom buddies. My pal, Roscoe. I winked at him; he winked back.

  “We had a gay old time last night, didn’t we, pal?”

  “Gay, of course, meaning lighthearted and carefree.”

  “Of course.”

  “Then we certainly did, pal.”

  “Shall we reopen lines of communication? Shall we talk of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings? Shall we discuss the imminent collapse of Western civilization?”

  “No,” Roscoe said.

  “Why not?”

  “Guns can’t talk.”

  “Damn right they can’t,” I said.

  We both laughed until my sides hurt.

  Oyez, I hadn’t felt this cheerful since Pa Kent took his last late-night dive.

  Harry Richmond

  MY MOOD WASN’T any better in the morning. The media cheating me the way they had kept right on rankling. I managed to be civil to my few Saturday-night guests when they checked out, but Maria was late again because of church. Missed the early Mass or something, some damn excuse that I didn’t pay attention to, and then instead of just skipping it altogether or putting her praying on hold until evening and coming to do her maid’s work on time, she went to the nine o’clock Mass and didn’t show up until quarter to eleven. I laid into her pretty good. More than I would have if I’d been in a better mood, probably, but those Indians have a way of setting me off. Say they’re sorry but they don’t mean it. Look at you with their big liquid eyes and you just know that behind them they’re thinking about how much they’d like to cut your throat or lift your scalp. Savages, the lot of them, and no amount of education or religion or government handouts will ever civilize them.

  Maria knew better than to argue with me. Just stood there and took what I dished out and then went and did her work and left again without saying a word. I walked around after she was gone and checked up on her, to make sure she hadn’t sloughed off or done something else to get back at me, like stealing or damaging property, but there was none of that. And there better not ever be any of that if she wanted to keep her job and her fat ass out of jail.

  Nothing much for me to do on a rainy Sunday except watch the morning NFL game on TV. In the middle of the first quarter Ella called. First time she’d bothered in a month. She’d been reading about the murder and everything, did I know any of the people involved? Gossip hound, like her mother. I cut her short on that subject, so then she started in with the kids’ lives and her own. Jason said this, Kim did that, she’d heard this really funny story at the salon but it was kind of risque so maybe she’d better not tell me over the phone, and all the while she was jabbering I could hear an unfamiliar male voice in the background, jabbering with my granddaughter. Somebody she’d just met, no doubt, and he’d spent the night like all the rest. My daughter, the slut. Try to raise your only kid right and this was what you got, a slut who was raising her daughter to be the same and her son to be a dope fiend. Jason had already been arrested once on a marijuana charge. I didn’t even ask her about “the new man in my life,” as she’d have put it; I said I got to go, the Packers were about to score another touchdown, and hung up on her.

  The Packers scored, all right, and no sooner did they kick off to the Cowboys than I had another interruption. Chief Novak, to pester me again. I heard the bell go off on the front desk and thought it might be an early guest and went out to find him and his bruised and bandaged face. Nobody with him today. And looking about as hangdog as I felt. Tense, too, as though there’d been some new development that hadn’t set well with him.

  “What’s up, Chief?”

  “I’m looking for Audrey Sixkiller.”

  “That so?”

  “Have you seen her last night or today?”

  “Nope.”

  “Any idea where she might be?”

  “Nope.”

  “Anyone mention her name to you recently?”

  “Nope. You think we have mutual friends, Chief?”

  “I don’t think anything,” he said. “I’m grabbing at straws. I’ve been trying to find her all morning, all over town.”

  “How come? She do something?”

  “Personal matter.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, you know how Indians are.”

  “… What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Never around when you want ’em, always off doing what pleases them. They’re not the same as us.”

  That touched off a scowl. He said snottily, “Don’t like Indians much, do you, Harry? Or anybody with a different skin.”

  “You saying I’m a racist? Me?”

  “Oh hell no, not you.”

  “Look here, you don’t have any call to insult me just because you can’t find your woman.”

  “She’s not my woman.”


  “No? Somebody’s woman, that’s for sure.”

  He laid his hands on the counter and leaned toward me, so suddenly that I couldn’t help stepping back. “Don’t play games with me. You have something to say, spit it out.”

  I spit it out, all right. Might not have—might not’ve even thought of it—if I hadn’t been in such a low-down mood and if he hadn’t started throwing his weight around and accusing me of being a racist. As it was, I felt like sticking it to him a little. Sticking it to somebody the way it’d been stuck to me by the media. So I did. And I put a little twist on it, too, that hadn’t even crossed my mind until that minute.

  “You been over to Nucooee Point?” I asked him.

  “Nucooee Point? No, why?”

  “Might be where she’s at. Her and her somebody.”

  “What the hell’re you getting at?”

  “She landed that boat of hers at the Point yesterday morning. I happened to see her, and that’s sure enough where she went. Nothing down there but the old lodge and a lot of privacy. No reason for her to go there all by herself unless she was meeting somebody, now is there, Chief?”

  Audrey Sixkiller

  “IT’S NOON, JOHN,” I said. “Whoever you’re waiting for isn’t coming.”

  “He’s coming, all right.”

  “Then why hasn’t he been here by now?”

  No answer.

  “Suppose he doesn’t come. What then?”

  No answer.

  “You can’t walk away from here, you know that. And the two of us can’t stay here indefinitely. You know that, too.”

  “Okay, I know it.”

  “Let me go, and give yourself up, John.”

  “No.”

  “It’s the only way you have a chance.”

  “It’s the only way I don’t have a chance.”

  “I’ll testify for you. I’ll tell them what you did for me last night—”

  “That won’t stop a jury from convicting me of murder.”

  “You won’t be tried if Mateo Munoz is guilty. Please listen—”