Snowstorms in a Hot Climate

by Sarah Dunant

  By 2:00 P.M. the car was better, if not well. We took it easy, pootling the back roads and chugging our way up the hills toward home. An hour and a half later we reached the mailboxes, and although I would not have admitted it, I was glad to arrive back in daylight. From the summit of the ridge we looked down onto the J.T. homestead, still uninhabited, the truck nowhere to be seen. We left the VW in the drive and walked back across the meadow.

  We were perhaps fifteen yards from the house when the telephone began to ring. Before I could quicken my pace, Elly had made a run for it. By the time I stepped in through the glass door, she was talking animatedly, her back turned away from me. I didn’t need to hear the words to know that this was no death’s voice intoning platitudes. Her body language gave away the identity of the caller. Inside the house, the air was stale from a day’s baking, but otherwise everything felt just as we had left it. Outside, the canyon seemed empty in the heat. Just bad dreams?

  She came out and joined me, squatting on the floor next to me and wrapping her arms around her knees. She looked uneasy.

  “Lenny,” I said, to save her the trouble.

  She nodded. “He’s been ringing since yesterday. Both here and J.T.’s. Trying to get in touch urgently.” She hesitated.

  “When’s he coming?” I said evenly.

  “Tonight.” She pulled a face. “I’m sorry. Nothing I could do. He’d made all the arrangements, was just walking out the door. He gets into San Francisco at nine P.M. Wants us to meet him at the airport and go into town for the night. There’s someone he has to see tomorrow. It means we have to book a cab to pick us up, then hire a car in Santa Cruz—”

  “You have to book a cab, you mean,” I said deliberately. “I’m not going.”

  “Don’t be stupid, Marla, you—”

  “I’m not going.” This time more firmly. “You need to see him on your own. If you have things to say to each other, you can’t say them when I’m there.”

  She frowned. “What we have to say can wait. I’ll talk to him later. I don’t want to leave you here on your own.”

  “Elly,” I said quietly. “You should talk to him now. It won’t get any easier tomorrow or the day after.”

  “I know that, but—”

  “But nothing. What are you waiting for?”

  “I don’t want to leave you alone,” she said again, this time with what I recognized to be a note of Elly stubbornness in her voice.

  “And I don’t want to come with you. I want to stay here.”

  “And what will you do?”

  “Oh, read a book, eat a steak, drink a bottle of wine, watch the sunset. It’ll be hell, but I’ll manage somehow.”

  “Seriously.”

  “Seriously, I’ll be fine, Elly, don’t use me as an excuse. You have to tell him, and you have to do it alone. Now is the perfect opportunity. We’ve spent the last two years at opposite ends of the earth. Eighty miles for a night won’t destroy us. If I feel like company I can always go and spend the evening with the chickens.”

  “And what if J.T. doesn’t come back?”

  “Of course he’ll come back. Even if he’s drunk and incapable in some Santa Cruz brothel, he’s not the kind of man to neglect his animals. I’ll be all right. I promise.”

  She gave me one last look, to which I steadfastly lied. Then she nodded. “OK. You win. I’ll go alone.”

  It was just after 7:00 P.M. when the taxi arrived. The time of day when the light is drunk on its own beauty and generous to everything and everyone. Elly looked magical, her skin warm with the sun and her eyes bright with the prospect of conflict. Were I Lenny, I would treasure her more than cocaine, I thought, and told her as much as we walked together to the car. She laughed and climbed in, holding my hand through the open window. “Don’t worry, I’m stronger than I look.”

  “I know. It’s him I’m worried about.”

  “I’ll call you tomorrow evening. Take care. And remember, if you feel at all—”

  “I know. Give a little whistle. If you don’t leave now, you’re not going to make it in time.”

  I stood and waved until I could no longer make out her hand held in salute out the window, and all I could see was the cloud of dust as the wheels churned up dry earth crossing the ridge. Then I went back to the house, poured myself a stiff drink, and thought about how anxious I really was.

  Logically, I knew I had nothing to fear. Two stargazers and a disembodied voice on the other end of a telephone. Both separate, innocent facts. Only paranoia made them threatening. I understood that in many ways I was infinitely safer here, in the middle of nowhere, then I would ever have been in the center of a town. Anyway, I am lucky. Unlike Elly’s, my fantasies of evil are not of the Brian De Palma kind. I live alone in one of the biggest cities in the world; I walk its dark streets late at night, take shortcuts down its alleys. People do not challenge me—if anything they steer clear of me. I do not smell vulnerable. And if sometimes I lie awake at night, it is not because I hear noises on the stairs. No. I would treat this night as any other, wrap myself in a little history and enjoy the quiet. And if I did look over my shoulder once or twice, it would be in the almost certain knowledge that there was nothing to be seen.

  It was less than an hour later, when the sun was halfway through its flashy nosedive into the ocean, that I found the Santa Monica parking ticket in the undergrowth and my anxiety became more concrete.

  ten

  I certainly wasn’t looking for it. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the animal, whatever it was, I would never have spotted it. But when I heard the bright, crackling sound of dead grasses rustling near the edge of the deck, and saw the undergrowth shiver, it was simple curiosity—a town girl’s fascination with nature—that made me want to discover what it was. It had sounded too loud and too careless to be any kind of lizard, and my immediate thought had been one of J.T.’s gophers coming up for air. I had a vision of a wide-eyed cartoon-type rodent with Bugs Bunny teeth and a “What’s up, Doc?” kind of mischief. Maybe they were taking time off from the lengthy process of gnawing through steel coating. I was interested to make the acquaintance of one of the “little bastards.”

  I got up from my chair and lowered myself from the deck to the spot where the noise had come from. Nothing. Of course. I pushed aside the grass in the hope of coming across some telltale mound of fresh earth. It was then that the flash of orange caught my eye: a piece of soft cardboard no bigger than a calling card but fierce in color. I picked it up, curious to know what remnant of California history I had excavated. I didn’t notice the date at first, although I remember thinking that it looked newish. For those few moments it seemed I had chanced upon a common or garden-variety parking ticket from a Santa Monica car park. It was not until I had carried my spoils back up to the deck and there indulged my historian’s mania for tidiness and accuracy that I deciphered the date. The ticket had been punched out at 1:45 P.M. on August 2. It took the teleprinter in my brain about thirty seconds to assess the significance and start spewing out conclusions.

  Today was the eighth. That made the second a Saturday, the day we had arrived from New York. We had reached the house in the late afternoon. The ticket could not possibly have been dropped before then. Santa Monica was in Los Angeles, which in a fast car was five or six hours from here. Even substituting planes for cars, by the time airports had been reached and schedules allowed for, the owner of the ticket could hardly have arrived here before we did. Which meant they must have arrived after. But apart from J.T. (could he have been in Los Angeles that morning?), the only visitor we had had was Sir Frank Galahad, and his story had not included Santa Monica. He had not seemed the kind of man to lie. That left the thirty hours while we had been away on the coast. At some point during that time someone had been here, someone who had, perhaps, walked up from a campsite down below?

  In the canyon, twilight was chipping away at the definition of the landscape. There must be a rational explanation. It was 8:00 P.M. The day was
living on borrowed time. Elly was eighty miles away. J.T., for all I knew, was unconscious in some Santa Cruz bar. I was alone in a house that was totally isolated, with no transport and no one to call. There had to be a rational explanation. I set about constructing one. While we were away, someone—a hiker, maybe even a visitor for J.T., who not finding him at home had tried the guesthouse instead—someone had stood on or near the deck. Maybe they had reached in their pocket for a cigarette and the ticket had tumbled out, obscured immediately by the undergrowth. What could be more innocent than that? They had stood smoking, admiring the view—I would have done the same—then gone their way. Why not?

  I looked back at the house, with its elegant frontage, crimson in the last flush of sunset. It would have looked inviting to the curious visitor. Such an unusual building, after all. Wouldn’t they, perhaps, have been tempted to go inside? As it happened, the door wasn’t locked. We had expected to be away for only a few hours. If I had been them I might have sneaked a look.

  I justified the second search by the fact that the lights needed to be put on anyway, and I could tidy up a little of the debris left by Elly’s sudden departure. I found an empty wine bottle by the cushion and a book on the telephone table. Surely Elly had left them there? Upstairs in the bedroom, clothes were strewn all around—Elly had had some trouble deciding what to wear. I folded them up and put them back into her suitcase. The place became normal again. No one had been there. Out on the verandah, the mattresses lay side by side, the bedclothes disheveled and unmade. I would not sleep outside tonight. I bent down to pull one of the mattresses indoors—the action saved my life.

  I saw the footprint first. There it was, right in front of me on a piece of sheet trailing across the floor, the faint but distinct imprint of a large boot with a ridge of patterned grooves across the sole. It did not belong to either Elly or me. She had Cinderella feet, while mine, big boned and solid as I am, do not reach such circus proportions.

  It was then that I saw it move: out of the corner of my eye, a stream of mercury slithering under the sheet. This time my reflexes worked faster than my brain. I was already up and moving when the rattle-hiss hit the air and a black shimmerhead broke cover, reared up, and lunged in the direction of flesh. It missed the bare skin of my legs by a breath—I could feel the rush of air it disturbed. It reared back to strike again, but I was out of range, across the no-man’s-land of the verandah into the bedroom, slamming the door behind me and registering as I did so the thud of snake head against wood. I felt its rage as it recoiled from the blow and imagined it slithering back on itself, gliding along the edge of the verandah and curling itself around the pole that connected the balcony with the deck below. Elly’s dream flashed through my mind, and I flung myself downstairs. The glass door was open an inch or two. I rammed it shut and locked it. In the back of my head, a pulse was pounding. I sat on the bottom step of the spiral staircase and took deep breaths. The thumping receded, and my brain started functioning again. A simple cause and effect equation. Town girl I may be, but it didn’t take Desmond Morris to recognize the death rattle from the room above. Someone had just tried to kill me. I congratulated myself on my continuing survival. Then I began to think about all the other snakes in the house.

  That decided it. I suppose I could just have barricaded myself in and slugged it out with the fear and the darkness, but who was I to say they wouldn’t come back? For the first time I began to appreciate the power of Brian De Palma. Outside there was twilight enough to make the journey to J.T.’s. If I left it any later, I would have to face the path at night. At J.T.’s there were animals. And a car—ill certainly, but technically still alive. There might even be J.T. by now, broad shouldered and calm, sitting at his table cutting up kohlrabi and studying his star map. The picture was absurd and comforting at the same time. J.T., up until now as much a contender for mistrust as anyone else, reborn as a symbol of sanctuary. I had no other choice.

  Stuffing a few books into my bag and liberating the rest of a bottle of Scotch, I switched off every light in the place and, hawkeyed for snake movement, slid out of the door and crossed the deck. A gleam of light winked up at me from the bottom of the canyon. It could well have been just the headlight of a passing car; I didn’t stop to check. Striding out toward the brow of the hill, I did not look back.

  I reached J.T.’s breathless, to be greeted by a cacophony of animal voices raised more in hunger than in welcome. The walk had restored a measure of sanity, and I even contemplated stopping to feed the chickens before continuing my flight. But the chicken pen was at the edge of the trees, where the air was already thickening into night. If the roles had been reversed, would they have fed me? Survival first, charity later. I headed for the car.

  Inside I muttered a few incantations, slid the key into the ignition, and turned. The engine coughed politely and died. I tried again. So did the engine. Again it failed. I sat back and closed my eyes. This time it caught. I put my foot on the gas, and the engine roared into life. Now the real problem began. It was almost three years since a Ford transit van had written off my Deux Chevaux and given me the perfect excuse to stop driving. Three years for someone to whom mechanical skills do not come easily. They say that in emergencies people remember things they thought they had forgotten. But who are “they,” and how can they be so sure?

  I put down the clutch and fumbled for reverse. We backed out of the drive a good deal faster than anticipated, but at least we were moving. First gear took us onto the path, slower and with a judder that was not entirely my incompetence. The headlights, when I located them, were not strong. But they picked up the contours of the path sufficiently for me to follow it over the ridge toward the line of trees which marked the beginning of the path to the world outside.

  We were halfway down the avenue, with the trees arching overhead cutting out the remainder of the light, when the engine began its death throes. Whoever had been up there watching over me when the snake’s head missed its target had evidently been called away on more urgent business. I was on my own now. I pumped the gas frantically. The car whimpered softly, then expired. I turned the key. Nothing. This time there would be no raising from the dead. Outside, the darkness rubbed itself up against the windows and the silence howled. What next? Leave the car and walk the rest of the road until I found a lift? On the entire drive in daylight we had passed only two cars. What chance was there at night? Or stay where I was until morning? Or till J.T. came home, taking the corner in memory of racing drivers, speeding straight into the tender frame of the VW? My stomach starting producing ice chips. I sent a message ordering it to stop, but it didn’t seem to get through.

  It got me out of the car, though, pushing and shoving the tin lump off the path. It was useless. The lane was wide enough for only one vehicle; however hard I tried, I wouldn’t clear the path. In reverse we got ten, maybe fifteen yards back. Then the rear wheel hit a rut and wouldn’t budge. Back inside the car, sweating, I strapped myself into the passenger seat near to the horn and turned on every light I could find. The path in front leapt into muddy yellow focus, catching a moth flitting in search of food. It wasn’t great, but it would have to do. I took more than a few mouthfuls of Scotch and, getting out a book, prepared to sit it out.

  I have no idea when the lights finally died. Or when I fell asleep. I know only that the last time I looked at my watch it was 12:54 A.M. and both myself and the lights seemed to be fading. I remember turning off the inside lamp to conserve energy and snapping myself back into life. I was feeling almost alert as I began my introductory lecture on monastic life in early Christian Britain. I couldn’t tell you how far I got, though I have a dim recollection of starting to slide around the time of the Vikings’ destruction of Lindisfarne.

  The Ford truck’s destruction of the VW came twelve centuries later, at exactly 3:06 A.M. A fact I know for certain because it was the moment my watch stopped on propelled contact with the dashboard. I was lucky. As J.T. put it later, if it hadn’t been
for the skunk which nipped between his wheels just as he turned the corner by the mailboxes, he might have been traveling a good deal faster than the thirty miles an hour he was doing when his headlights picked up the sudden gleam of tin and glass in the middle of the path and he slammed on his brakes, bracing himself against impact.

  The blow lifted me out of sleep and my seat at the same instant, picking me up to fling me backward and then forward. The seat belt and my rag-doll limbs saved me from real injury, but I registered a sharp pain as my chest and the belt welded themselves together temporarily. Out through the windscreen I saw the nose of the truck rutting itself into the bonnet of the VW and, beyond, a door flung open, with a large figure staggering out. I remember thinking that it wasn’t quite J.T., but I couldn’t work out what was different. The whole scene seemed to be taking place somewhere else, somewhere where I was not. The illusion was destroyed when the driver’s door was wrenched open and the great bear’s head pushed in.

  “Elly, are you all right?” it roared. It was then that I realized the deliberate mistake. The Bear did not have its glasses on.

  “It’s not Elly. It’s me,” I shouted but couldn’t be sure if I had opened my mouth to let the sound out. “Marla,” I tried again. I pulled myself free from the seat belt and made an attempt to get out of the open door. But it wasn’t just my mouth that didn’t work. My legs seemed to be giving trouble too. I found myself sprawled on the ground with J.T. towering above me like some monstrous high-rise building. I could feel a violence in him, and the sense that once released it would not be controlled. He took my hand and began hauling me up from the ground. I thought for a moment he was going to hit me, and I flinched away from him.