The wet snow in the ruts was slippery and I had to keep my head down and pick my way along. Just as well, because the sun hurt my eyes whenever its glare penetrated the tree branches and reflected off snow. The morning had a hushed, crackling quality, so that each little sound seemed magnified. But I had gone about a third of a mile, past two more snow-blocked access drives, before I heard the one sound I was listening for.
It came as a low whine at first, some distance behind me. I tensed, and my heart began to beat faster—but I stayed where I was. No point in trying to avoid contact now. I had to deal with people again sooner or later, and maybe I could wangle a ride to the nearest town.
The engine sound got progressively louder until I could hear the change in tempo as the driver geared down for each curve. By the time the vehicle came in sight, I had moved to the edge of the road and was standing there waiting for it. It was a black Ford Bronco with oversized snow tires, the two rear ones wearing chains—the same Bronco, probably, that I had seen parked near the occupied cabin two days ago. The driver slowed when he saw me and as soon as he did I started waving one arm over my head, signaling for him to stop. But I didn’t step out into the Bronco’s path, and a good thing, too: It rolled right on past me in low gear. Only then the driver must have changed his mind, because the brake lights flashed and the big squat vehicle skewed to a halt thirty yards away on my side of the road.
I moved toward it, hurrying a little, trying to make myself look purposeful and yet harmless. The side windows were smoke-tinted so that you couldn’t look in from outside; but the driver had to be looking out at me, all right, sizing me up. When I halted alongside his door I stood motionless for a few seconds, fighting the tension, letting him take a good look. I must have passed muster because the window finally began to wind down, and in a few seconds I was face-to-face with the man behind the wheel—the first human being I had seen in ninety-three days.
He was about forty, heavyset, bandit-mustached, wearing a cowboy hat and a fleece-lined sheepskin coat. The macho outdoors type. The only expression on his face and in his eyes was a wary curiosity. He wasn’t alone in the car; the other occupant stood on the backseat peering over the guy’s shoulder with six inches of spit-slick red tongue lolling out. Big German shepherd, the kind with hard yellow eyes and teeth like spikes—the kind you’d walk a block out of your way to avoid if you saw it unleashed on a street corner.
The dog built even more edginess in me. I can get along with most dogs but I’ve had run-ins with this variety before. My hands were down flat against my sides and I could feel the hard outline of the .22 against my right wrist; but that wasn’t the way to deal with this guy or his dog, or anybody else if I could help it, except one man. I lifted my arms away from my body, put my eyes on the guy in the driver’s seat and kept them there, hoping the tension didn’t show.
“Morning. Thanks for—” The words came out in a rusty croak, and I had to break off and clear my throat before I could go on. How long since I had last used my voice? “Thanks for stopping.”
He didn’t acknowledge that. He said, “Problem?”
“You can say that again.”
“I didn’t see your car along the road.”
“That’s because I haven’t got it anymore.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, it’s like this. My name’s Canino, Art Canino,” I lied. “My wife and I been staying at the Carders’ place … Tom and Elsie, you know them?”
“No.”
“Well, they weren’t using it this time of year so they let us come up for a few days. We been having trouble, the wife and me, marriage trouble … you know how it is. So I suggested we get away, off by ourselves, try to work things out. Stupidest goddamn idea I ever had.”
“That so?”
“All we did was fight. All we ever do these days is fight. Last night we had a hell of a row and when I went to the can she took the keys and drove off with the fugging car.”
“You mean she never came back?”
“That’s what I mean. Stranded me up here, no phone in the cabin, no transportation out. Can you believe a woman who’d do a thing like that?”
He thought about it and decided he could. I watched his face relax, a tight little smile form on his mouth. He’d also decided to be amused. I was good for his ego, I was; he could feel superior to a poor schmuck like me. Some people are like that, the macho types in particular: They need the misfortune of others to make them feel good about themselves.
“My wife ever did something like that,” this asshole said, “I’d break a few of her teeth for her.”
“Yeah. Well, I’m through with mine—this is the last straw. Soon as I get back to Stockton, I’m hiring a lawyer to file for divorce.”
“That where you’re from? Stockton?”
“Now it is. Moved there five months ago, from up north. Eureka. Hell, I don’t even know anybody well enough I can call to come pick me up. How am I going to get home?”
“Don’t look at me,” the guy said.
“No, no. But there must be a bus or something … what’s the nearest town I could catch a bus to Stockton?”
He shrugged, smiling his smug little smile. “I never been on a bus in my life.”
“Sonora? Maybe I could get one in Sonora.”
“Maybe.”
“That’s not too far from here, is it?”
“Far enough.”
“I don’t suppose you’re going anywhere near there … ?”
“Not me. Deer Run’s as far as I’m going.”
Deer Run. That was a wide place on a secondary mountain road ten miles or so north of Murphys; I’d passed through it once, a long time ago, and I remembered a handful of buildings—hardly enough to justify the place being called a hamlet, much less a town. It was where I’d estimated my location, and maybe thirty miles from Sonora.
I said, “I’d be glad to pay you if you’d take me as far as Sonora.”
“Yeah? How much?” But he wasn’t really interested; I could tell by the tone of his voice.
“Forty dollars?”
“Nah. I got things to do this morning.”
“Fifty.”
“Can’t do it, pal,” he said, and paused, and then said, “Could be Mary Alice’d know somebody who will.”
“Mary Alice?”
“She runs the store in Deer Run.”
“That where you’re going, her store?”
“Among other places.”
“Well, would you mind giving me a lift there? I’d appreciate it; I’m tired of walking.”
I put a pleading note in my voice, hating myself for doing it, and it made him laugh. He said, “Sure, why not? I won’t even charge you nothing.”
“Thanks. Thanks a lot.”
“Come on, get in.”
I went on the passenger side, opened the door. He must have said something to the dog; it was sitting all the way back on the rear seat, not drawn up but not relaxed either, watching me with those hard yellow eyes. I could feel the eyes on me as I slid inside and they made my skin crawl, ran the edginess right down into my hands so that I had to clasp them together in my lap to keep them from shaking.
“Dog make you nervous, pal?”
“Well … a little.”
“Makes a lot of people nervous,” the asshole said meaningfully, but with the amusement still in his voice. “That’s because he’s attack-trained. Never know what kind of trouble you’ll run into these days, even way up here.”
“No. No, you sure don’t.”
Neither of us had anything else to say on the drive into Deer Run. It wasn’t much of a drive—less than ten minutes and no more than a mile. The hamlet lay tucked up in a hollow surrounded by timbered hillocks, maybe a dozen buildings, and half a hundred junked cars and trucks poking up out of the snow. It had a primitive aspect, as if the past fifty years or so had passed it by. Only three of the buildings were business establishments: a general store and post office, a se
rvice station, and an out-of-business, boarded-up “antique” store. Those three buildings were located just beyond where the road we were on intersected with another county road. That one must have been the through road to Murphys in one direction, to Highway 49 and San Andreas in the other: It had been cleared by a snowplow crew that was working now at one end of the hollow—two big snowblowers and half a dozen yellow-clad men—and it ran like a snaky black vein through all the sunlight white.
There was a road sign at the intersection, and when the guy braked there I had a quick look at the wooden arrow pointing back up the way we’d come. It read: Indian Hill Road. Okay. Now I knew exactly where my former prison was situated.
We pulled over into a cleared area in front of the store. It was a weathered building made of clapboard and corrugated iron siding, with pitched roof lines to prevent snow from piling up on top. It didn’t have a name, or if it did there was no sign announcing it that I could see. We got out, all three of us, and the guy let the dog nuzzle around my legs as we tramped inside. He liked what it did to me; he laughed in my face, a barking sound like the German shepherd might have made. I thought; Easy, easy, he’s not important, none of this is important, to keep myself from doing something foolish, like knocking the laugh back down his throat.
The interior of the store looked and smelled like country groceries everywhere: weak lighting, closely set aisles, rough-hewn floor; mingled odors of damp and dust, brewing coffee, refrigerated meats and overripe cheese and stale bread. A woman sat behind a long counter area, half of it a meat and deli case and the other half a checkout counter, along the right-hand wall. She was in her sixties, grossly fat and encased in a bulging dress much too small for her. A cigarette in a black holder slanted from one corner of her mouth.
The guy said, “Mary Alice, who you think I got here?”
She gave me an impersonal glance, the kind you’d give a side of beef to see how much fat there was on it. “Never saw him before.”
“His name’s Canino, been staying at one of the cabins up on Indian Hill. His wife run off with his car last night and stranded him.”
“Stranded him, eh?”
“Can you beat that?”
“Known it to happen,” Mary Alice said, and shrugged. The aftertremors of the shrug ran down her layers of fat like an earthquake’s along a fault line.
“He lives in Stockton but he don’t know how to get home,” the guy said. “Thinks maybe he can get a bus from Sonora.”
“Suppose he can.”
“Offered me fifty bucks to drive him but I can’t do it. You know somebody?”
“Jed, maybe. Fifty bucks, you say?”
I was getting tired of the two of them talking about me as if I weren’t there. And that damned dog was still poking my legs with his slobbery muzzle. I said to Mary Alice, “Fifty dollars, that’s right. It’s all I’ve got to spare so I won’t haggle.” Then I said to the guy, “You mind calling your dog away from me?”
“What for? He won’t do nothing to you unless I tell him.”
“Get him away from me.”
“Now listen, pal—”
“Get him away from me.”
There was something in my voice or my face that wiped away his amused expression, stiffened him a little. He scowled, seemed to think about taking offense, looked at me in a new way, and then moved a shoulder and said, “What the hell,” and called the dog over to where he was standing.
The fat woman was looking at me in a new way, too, as if she were seeing me for the first time. She probably was. And it was as if the guy’s amusement had lodged in her after it left him, because a faint smile kept tugging at one corner of her mouth. I had the impression then that she didn’t like the asshole any more than I did.
She said to me, “I’ll ring up Jed, see if he can take you. You want anything before I do?”
“I could use some hot coffee.”
The guy said he could use some too, and she went and poured two cups from an urn behind the deli case. She gave me mine first. I drank it standing at the counter; he drank his wandering up and down the aisles, throwing things into a grocery basket, the shepherd following him like a shadow. He caught my eye once but he didn’t hold it. Whatever else he thought of me now, he’d changed his mind about one thing: He didn’t think I was such a schmuck anymore.
AFTERNOON
It was not somebody called Jed who drove me to Sonora; it was a gnarly old geezer named Earl Perkins. Jed was out somewhere, two other people Mary Alice called couldn’t or wouldn’t do the job, even for fifty dollars, and it was almost one o’clock before she rounded up this Perkins character. The asshole and his dog were long gone by then. I was so impatient to get to Sonora, ask my questions at Rite-Way Plumbing and Heating before it closed for the day, that I paced the store aisles to work off some of the nervous tension. Only then I found my thoughts turning to Kerry, to how much I wanted to hear her voice and know that she was all right, and the telephone began to draw my attention, and this just wasn’t the time or place to make that kind of call. So I took myself outside and paced the parking area instead, trying not to think about anything at all.
Perkins showed up in a newish Jeep Cherokee that had snow tires on it but no chains. He was an easy seventy, small and gristled and tough-looking, like a piece of old steak. He looked me up and down, said to my face that I was a damned fool for letting a woman screw me instead of vice versa (Mary Alice laughed at that), and demanded the fifty dollars in advance. I gave him two twenties and two fives. Mary Alice had charged me a dollar for two coffees and a blueberry muffin, so that left me with eighteen dollars cash.
Perkins was a fast driver, even on snow-slick roads; he was also a damned good driver, and once I accepted that, I was grateful for the speed. The impatience was still in me; I sat forward on my seat and touched the .22 in my jacket pocket and thought again about Rite-Way Plumbing and Heating and what I would find out there. A name I would recognize or one I wouldn’t? A lead or a dead end? Either way, I would know soon.
Once we passed through Murphys, the stark winter landscape began to disappear. What had been snowfields and snow-laden spruce and fir became, in these lower elevations, a mosaic of patchy white, dry brown, the dark green of oak as well as evergreen, and hints of spring verdure. When we turned onto Highway 49 at Angels Camp, Perkins drove even faster. There weren’t many cars on the road and he zoomed around most of the ones we came up behind, as if he were trying to win some kind of high-speed rally. It put a little of the edginess back into me then because I was worried about us getting stopped by a county cop or a highway patrolman, of my having to show ID. But I didn’t say anything to him. He would have resented it and probably driven even faster.
It was two-fifteen when we came into the outskirts of Sonora. I knew the town a little, or had a few years ago, but my memories of it weren’t pleasant. An old friend named Harry Burroughs used to live near there and he had hired me to do a job for him and it had turned out badly, very badly. That had been my last visit to this area. It had been summer then and the town had been teeming with tourists come to gawk at “an authentic Mother Lode gold town.” Now, in early March, it was all but deserted—oddly so, I thought. A few cars creeping along the main drag, no pedestrians on the steep sidewalks, most of the stores wearing Closed signs. It might have been dying—a venerable relic rescued and born again for the tourist trade, now enfeebled once more and ready to take its place beside all the other ghosts of the California Gold Rush.
I said as much to Perkins: “Looks like a ghost town.”
“Well?” he growled. He wasn’t much of a talker—he hadn’t spoken a dozen words to me on the drive—and he seemed to resent my wanting to start a conversation now that we had arrived. “Why shouldn’t it be?”
“I don’t know. I was just commenting.”
“What’d you expect on a weekend this time of year? A parade?”
“Weekend?”
“Well?”
“What da
y is this?”
He gave me a sideways glare, as if he thought I might be joking. When he saw that I wasn’t, the look changed shape, as if now he thought maybe I wasn’t quite right in the head. “Mean to tell me you don’t know?”
“No. What day is it?”
“Sunday. What day’d you think it was?”
Sunday! The guy in the Bronco hadn’t mentioned the fact; neither had Mary Alice nor any of her customers. And it had been so many days since I’d looked at the calendar, I had lost track of which day it was. I’d done all that pacing in and around the Deer Run store, I’d been sitting on the edge of the seat all the way here … and it was Sunday, and most places were closed and Rite-Way Plumbing and Heating was sure to be one of them. Two-fifteen now—eighteen or nineteen hours before I could ask my questions, maybe learn some of the right answers….
“Say,” Perkins said, “what’s the matter with you? You havin’ some kind of seizure?”
“No, no, I’m all right.”
“Don’t look it to me.”
Sunday, Sunday. It was almost funny in a crazy way and I wanted to laugh, but I didn’t do it. I was afraid that if I let the laughter come out I wouldn’t be able to stop it.
Perkins said, “Well?”
“Well what?”
“Where you want me to let you off? Bus station’s closed on Sundays, or didn’t you know that either?”
“… A motel, I guess.”
“Which one?”
“I don’t know any motels here. The first one you see.”
Perkins shook his head. “Mister,” he said in his irascible way, “you got fog in your head, you know that? How do you get along in this world, anyhow? How’d you live so many years?”
Eighteen or nineteen hours …
EVENING
I sat in my room at the Pine Rest Motel on Highway 49 near the fairgrounds, staring at the TV without really seeing it. The only reason I’d put it on was for noise. A while ago, after twenty minutes under a steamy shower, I had gone down to the restaurant adjoining the motel and eaten an early steak dinner with all the trimmings. I had put away all of it, though it might have been Spam and canned fruit cocktail for all I’d tasted and enjoyed it, and I had been full when I came back up here. I was still full, but I was also empty. Full and empty at the same time. The impatience had drained out of me, leaving a temporary emotional cavity. Tomorrow it would fill up again. Tomorrow, when the hunt officially began.
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