Snowbound

Six

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.

Startled, they broke apart, and Charlene fumbled for her clothing and made the mistake of standing up to put it on. The moonlight had been bright, and as clearly as he could see the cycles approaching, the two riders could see him and Charlene and Charlene’s nakedness. The bikes swerved toward them. He had an instant premonition of danger; he grabbed her arm, tried to pull her away in a run toward the bluff path. But the cycles swung in hard turns, cut them off, forced them back to the overhang.

He saw, as the bikes pulled up in front of them and stopped, that the two riders were young, in their late twenties or early thirties, dressed in black metal-studded denim and heavy boots, one bearded, the other wearing a gold hoop earring. Charlene was crying, terrified; she had most of her clothing on again, but it was much too late-he knew it had been too late from the moment they’d been seen. He tried to talk to the two cyclists, and it was useless; they were either very drunk or flying on drugs. The bearded one told him to move away from Charlene, and he said no, he wasn’t going to do that, and the one wearing the earring dropped a hand to his boot and came up with a long, thin-bladed knife.

“Move now, boyfriend,” the bearded one said, “or both of you going to get cut. And we don’t want to cut nobody, really.”

Charlene screamed, clinging to him. The bearded one grabbed her wrist, spun her to him and held her. Instinctively he started to move to help her, but the knife jabbed forward, darting, pushing him back against the dirt and rock of the bluff. Charlene’s cries then were near hysterical.

“Soggy seconds for you, man,” the bearded one said to the other. “Watch boyfriend here until I’m done.” And turned to Charlene and slapped her several times and pulled her over to the blanket and threw her down on it; tore her clothes off again, dragged his own trousers down. She kept on shrieking, and he kept on hitting her, trying to force her legs apart to get himself inside her. The one with the knife divided his attention between them and Tribucci, giggling softly.

He stood it as long as he could, held at bay by the knife and by fear. And then he simply forgot about the knife and forgot about being afraid and waited until the earringed one’s attention had drifted once more to the struggle on the blanket, pushed out from the bluff at that moment, and kicked him between the legs with all his strength. The earringed man screamed louder than Charlene, dropped the knife, and bent over double. He kicked him in the face, kicked him in the head once he was down, turned. The bearded one had released Charlene and was trying to stand, trying to pull his pants up from around his ankles. He ran toward him, shouting, “Run, Charlene, run!” and saw her fleeing half-naked toward the path, and reached the bearded one and kicked him three times in the head and upper body and then threw himself on top of the man and hit him with his fists, rolled his face in the sand, hit him and hit him and hit him and hit him And stopped suddenly, because he had become aware of the man’s blood spattered warm over his hand and forearm. He struggled to his feet, gasping. The bearded cyclist did not move. He turned to look at the other one: not moving either. One or both of them might have been dead, but he did not care one way or the other then; he just did not care. He walked to where the surf frothed whitely over the sand, knelt and washed the blood off himself; then he found his shirt, put it on, and went slowly up the path to the road. Charlene and the car were gone. He walked along the road for a mile or so to where three teen-agers in a raked station wagon responded to his outthrust thumb and gave him a lift down the coast to Fort Ord. He had been very calm the entire time; reaction did not set in until he was in bed in his barracks.

When it did, he could not seem to stop trembling. He lay there the entire night trembling and thinking about what had happened on the beach and asking himself over and over why he had done what he had. He was not heroic or even particularly brave. He had no strong feelings for Charlene. The two riders very likely had had rape and nothing else on their minds. Why, then? Why?

He had had no answer that night, and he had none thirteen years later; he had done it, and that was all.

The next morning he had called Charlene, and she’d asked him briefly if he was all right and how he’d got away and for God’s sake he hadn’t called the police, had he? Because she didn’t want to get involved; if the police came around to her house, her father would-throw her out on the street. She did not thank him, and she did not tell him she was sorry for having left him maybe hurt or dying, for not having summoned help. He hadn’t seen her or spoken to her again.

For a week he combed every local newspaper he could find, and there was no mention of anyone answering the description of the cyclists having been found dead on the beach or anywhere else near Santa Cruz. So he hadn’t killed one or both of them, and that knowledge had taken away some of the haunting immediacy of the incident and he had been able to begin to forget; he’d told no one-not Ann, not Vince, not his parents-about that night, and he never would…

“… Johnny, what is it? What’s come over you?”

Ann had gotten up and crossed to stand beside him, and she was tugging at the sleeve of his shirt. Tribucci blinked and pivoted to her, saw the concern in her eyes-and the dark recollection faded immediately. He smiled and kissed her. “Nothing,” he said, “just one of those brooding spells a man gets from time to time. It’s finished with, now.”

“Well, I hope so.”

He put his arm around her and walked her back to the sofa. “I didn’t mean to upset you, honey; I’m sorry, I won’t let it happen again.”

“You had the oddest look on your face,” she said. “What could you possibly have begun brooding about when we-”

And the door to the adjoining family room opened, and Vince appeared, sparing him. Heavier and three years older, Vince wore thick glasses owing to a mild case of myopic astigmatism and was just beginning to lose his hair; for the past hour he and his wife, Judy, had been watching television, or what passed for television on a winter night in the Sierra.

“Just saw an early weathercast from Sacramento,” he said. “There’s a heavy stormfront moving in from the west, coming right at us. We’ll likely be hit with one and maybe two blizzards this week.”

“Oh fine,” Tribucci said. “Great. A few more heavy storms without a long letup, and we’ll sure as hell have slides before the end of winter.”

“Yeah, and I’m afraid at least one of them is liable to be major.”

“You two sound like prophets of doom,” Ann said. “Where’s your Christmas spirit? This is supposed to be the jolly season, you know.”

“Ho-ho-ho,” Vince said, and grinned. “You people decide on names for your offspring yet?”

“We sort of like Stephen if it’s a boy.”

“And if it’s a girl?”

Tribucci looked at Ann. “Henrietta Lou,” he said.

She threw a sofa pillow at him.