A Wasteland of Strangers

Harry Richmond

I didn’t like him the minute I laid eyes on him.

He made me nervous as hell, and I don’t mind saying so. Big, mean-looking. Cords in his neck thick as ax blades, eyes like steel balls, pockmarks under his cheekbones, and a T-shaped scar on his chin. The way he talked and acted, too. Cold. Hard. Snotty. Like you were dirt and he was a new broom.

He drove up in front of the resort office about four o’clock. Sports car, one of those old Porsches, all dusty and dented in places. California license plates. I was glad to see the car at first because hadn’t anybody checked in since Sunday night. Used to be around here that in late November we’d get a fair trickle of trade, even though fishing season was over. Overnight and weekend regulars, tourists passing through, route salesmen in hardware and other goods. Not anymore. Whole county’s been on a decline the past twenty years, and not just in the tourist business. Agriculture, too; you don’t see near as many pear and walnut orchards as you once did. Pomo, the county seat on the northwest shore, is still pretty much the same, on account of the large number of county employees and retired geezers who live there. But up here on the north shore, and all along the east shore down to Southport, things are bad. Restaurants, antique and junk stores, other kinds of shops — gone. Long-operating resorts like Nucooee Point Lodge, once the fanciest on this part of the lake, closed down and boarded up. For Sale signs and empty cottages and commercial buildings everywhere you look. Little hamlet of Brush Creek is practically a ghost town.

Me, now, I’ve got simple needs, and summers I still do enough business to keep the wolf from the door. But I can’t do as much as I once did — man turns fifty, his joints don’t want to let him, and that includes the joint hanging between his legs — and I can’t afford to hire things done except when I can get one of the less shiftless Indians to do it cheap. If business doesn’t improve I’ll be forced to put the Lakeside Resort up for sale, too, and move down to San Carlos and live with Ella and my delinquent grandkids and the succession of losers Ella keeps letting into her bed. And if the resort never sells, which it might not, I’ll be stuck down there until the day I die.

Blame what’s happened on a lot of things. But the main one is, Pomo County’s backwater — too far north of San Francisco and the Bay Area where most of our regulars and nonregulars came from in the old days. Lake Pomo and Clear Lake over in Lake County were fine for the lives most people led thirty years ago, but it all changed after Interstate 80 to Tahoe was finished in ’64; these days, with superhighways everywhere and jet planes that can take folks to all sorts of exotic places in a few hours, they expect more for their money than a week or two in a rustic lakefront cabin. That doesn’t necessarily apply to the enclave around Mt. Kahbel on the southwestern shore; quite a few rich people’s summer homes clustered in the little bays and inlets there, fancy boats and a country club and resort that features big-name entertainers in the summer. Closed-off pocket is what Kahbel Shores is. Up here and on most of the rest of the lake, there just aren’t enough attractions to lure visitors and keep ’em happy. Nevada-style casinos on the Indian rancherias have helped some, but not enough: Pomo County’s as far from the Bay Area as Reno and Tahoe. Besides, most of the money the day-trip and weekend gamblers bring in stays in the casinos and goes into Indian pockets. It’s not right or fair that whites should suffer while those buggers get theirs, but that’s the way it is, no thanks to the goddamn government. Anyhow, if something doesn’t happen to turn us around, and soon, this county’s liable to turn into a wasteland full of the homeless and welfare squatters (plenty of those already in Southport) and rich Indians driving fancy cars and old people sitting around waiting to croak.

Well, none of that’s got to do with this stranger drove up in his Porsche. He came into the office, and as soon as I had a good look at him I wasn’t glad any longer that he’d picked my place to stop at. But what can you do? I had to rent him a cabin; I can’t afford to turn down anybody’s business. One thing I could do, though. I told him the rate was sixty-five a night instead of forty-five. Didn’t faze him. He picked up the pen and filled out the card and then laid three twenties and a five down on top.

I turned the card around without touching the money so he wouldn’t get the idea I was hungry for it. He wrote as hard as he looked, but I could read his scrawl plain enough. John C. Faith, Los Angeles. No street address, and you’re supposed to list one, but I wasn’t about to make an issue of it. Not with him.

I said, “How many nights, Mr. Faith?”

“Maybe one, maybe more. Depends.”

“On what?”

He just looked at me with his cold eyes.

My mouth tasted dry; I licked some spit through it. “Business in the area? Or here on pleasure?”

“Could be.”

“Could be... what?”

“Business or pleasure. Or neither one.”

“Guess I don’t quite get that.”

“All right,” he said.

See what I mean? Snotty.

“Going to do some gambling?” I asked.

“Gambling?”

“Brush Creek casino’s a couple of miles down the east shore. You know about the Indian casinos here?”

“No.”

“Oh, sure. Four of ’em in the county. Video slots, poker, keno. Cards, too. Blackjack. Or if you like high-stakes games, they’ve got tournaments — Texas Hold ’Em and Omaha Hi-Lo.”

“That kind of gambling is for suckers.”

“Well, some folks enjoy it—”

“They can have it, then.”

I should’ve kept my mouth shut after that, but it’s just not in my nature. Twenty-plus years in the resort business makes a man talkative. “Wouldn’t be a fisherman, by any chance?”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

“Great sport, fishing. Just as well you’re not, though.”

“You think so? Why?”

“Fishing season ended last week. November fifteenth.”

“That’s a shame.”

“Sure is. Lake’s still full of bass. Bigmouths.”

“Just the lake?”

“... Say again?”

“Full of bigmouths.”

That made me sore, but I didn’t let on. I’m no fool. I said, “I was only making conversation. Trying to be friendly.”

“All right.”

“If you took it the wrong way—”

“What’s a good place to eat around here?”

“You mean for dinner?”

“A good place to eat.”

“Well, there’s the Northlake Cafe. Or you might want to try Gunderson’s, if you like lake bass or seafood. Gunderson’s has a real nice cocktail lounge.”

“Which one do you prefer?”

“Well... Gunderson’s, I guess. Middle of town, block up from the county courthouse.”

“How do I get to the other one?”

“Northlake’s on the north end, just off the highway. Can’t miss it. There’s a big sign—”

“My key,” he said.

“Key? Oh, sure. I’ll put you in number six. That’s one of the lakefront cabins. That okay?”

“Fine.”

I handed him the key and he went out without saying anything else, and I don’t mind admitting I was relieved to be rid of him. I don’t like his kind, not one little bit. I wished I’d charged him seventy-five a night instead of sixty-five. Bet he’d have paid it, too. Must’ve had a thousand dollars or more stuffed into that pigskin wallet of his. Roll of bills fat enough to gag a sixty-pound Doberman.

I said out loud, “What’s he want here, man like that?”

John C. Faith, Los Angeles. Phony name if I ever heard one.

What in hell could he want in a half-dead backwater like Pomo?

Zenna Wilson

He scared me half to death. And not just because he startled me, sneaking up as quiet as an Indian or a thief. My flesh went cold when I saw him looming there. He was a sight to give any decent soul the shudders even in broad daylight.

I was in the hardware store talking to Ken Treynor. I’d just bought a package of coffee filters, about the only thing I ever buy in the hardware store, really, because Howard gave me a Braun two Christmases ago and Braun coffeemakers take a special filter and Safeway doesn’t stock them even though I’ve asked the manager half a dozen times to put them in so I can pick up a package when I do my regular shopping. It’s frustrating and annoying, is what it is, when stores refuse to do simple things to accommodate good customers. Anyhow, I was telling Ken about Stephanie and her school project, the cute little animal faces she was making out of papier-mâché and how lifelike they were. My Stephanie is very talented that way, very artistic. I was describing the giraffe with its one eye closed, as if it were winking, when all of a sudden Ken’s head jerked and his eyes opened wide and he wasn’t looking at me any longer but at something behind me. So I turned around and there he was, the sneaky stranger.

I guess I uttered a sound and recoiled a bit, because he threw me a look of pure loathing. It made my scalp crawl. When I was a little girl about Stephanie’s age, my older brother, Tom, used to terrify me with stories about a bogeyman who hid in dark places waiting for unsuspecting children to come along, and then he’d jump out and grab them and carry them off to his dark lair and bite their heads off. This man looked like he was capable of doing just that, biting someone’s head off. Big and fearsome, with huge hands and a mouth full of sharp teeth. Bogey was the right word for the likes of him, all right.

Ken was also staring at him. He said, “Can I... was there something?”

“I can wait until you’re finished with the lady.” Voice to match his size, deep and rumbly, like thunder before a storm. And the way he said “lady” made it sound like a dirty word.

“Already finished,” Ken told him.

“Battery for an Eveready utility lantern. Six-volt.”

“Aisle three, halfway back.”

I watched him walk into the aisle; I couldn’t seem to take my eyes off him. Treynor’s Hardware is in an old building, and he walked hard enough to make the wood floor shake. Above the items stacked on the top shelves I could see the crown of his head moving — that’s how tall he was. His hair was long and dirty brown, and in the lights it looked greasy, like matted animal fur.

It didn’t take him long to find what he wanted. He came back to the counter and paid Ken in cash — a fifty-dollar bill. Then, “There a bank in town that stays open this late?”

“First Northern, three blocks down Main.”

“Thanks.” He picked up his purchase and walked out, one side of his mouth bent upward in a ghastly sort of smile that wasn’t a smile at all.

I blew out my breath and said to Ken, “My God! Did you ever see such a wicked-looking man?”

“No, and I hope I never see him again.”

“Amen to that. You don’t suppose he’ll be here long?”

“Probably just passing through.”

“Lord, I hope so.”

I stayed there with Ken for another five minutes or so. I wanted to be certain the bogey was gone before I went out to the car. In my mind’s eye I could still see him, that scarred face and those awful eyes and enormous hands. Animal paws that could crush the life out of a person, that may well have blood on them already for all I know.

Up to the devil’s work, I thought, whoever he is and wherever he goes. If he stays in Pomo long enough, something terrible will happen.

I wished Howard wasn’t away traveling for his job until tomorrow night. With a man like that one in town, a woman and her little girl weren’t safe alone in their own home.

Richard Novak

I might not’ve even noticed the old red Porsche being illegally parked on the southeast corner of Main and Fifth if it hadn’t been for the fact that Storm’s silver-gray BMW was curbed in the legal space just behind. The BMW, like Storm herself, would have stood out in a crowd of a thousand and, like her, it had a magnetic attraction for my eye. Still carrying the torch after all these months. Not as large and hot a torch as the one for Eva, but still a long ways from burning itself out.

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred I would’ve let the violation go unchallenged. For one thing, it was minor, and the way things were, the Porsche’s driver wasn’t really at fault. For another, the car was unfamiliar and the city council has a general go-easy policy where visitors are concerned. And for a third, this sort of routine parking matter wasn’t part of the police chief’s duties, particularly when he happened to be tired and on his way home for the day. But I didn’t let it slide, and I’m not sure why. To get Storm off my mind, maybe. Or maybe because this hadn’t been much of a day and on off days I’m more inclined to enforce the strict letter of the law.

In any case, I swung the cruiser around onto Fifth and got out. The Porsche’s driver was coming up onto the sidewalk when he saw me approaching; he stopped and stood waiting. I’m not small at six feet and two hundred pounds, but I felt dwarfed in this one’s massive shadow. Rough-looking, too, with a hammered-down face and hard, bunched features. But there was nothing furtive or suspicious about him, nothing to put me on my guard.

He said in a flat, neutral voice, “Something wrong, Officer?”

“You can’t park there.”

“No? Why is that?”

“No-parking zone. Trucks have to swing too wide to get around the corner with another vehicle at the curb.”

“Curb’s not marked. No sign, either.”

“The curb is marked, you just have to look closely to spot it this time of day. White paint and lettering are mostly worn off — long overdue for remarking. There was a sign, too, up until a couple of weeks ago when a drunk driver knocked it down; we’re still waiting for a replacement. You can see what’s left of the pole there.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Things don’t get done as fast as they should sometimes.” Rule of thumb in Pomo County nowadays, it seemed, no matter what needed doing or what had been requisitioned or how much prodding and cajoling public servants like myself were forced to indulge in. “You know how it is.”

“Oh yeah, I know how it is. Do I get a ticket?”

“Not if you move your car to a legal space.”

One corner of his mouth lifted. If it was a smile, it had little humor and a bitter edge. He could tell from my uniform and badge what my rank was, and he thought he was being hassled. A man used to hassles, I thought. The official kind and probably the personal kind, too.

“You don’t have a problem with that, do you?” I asked him.

“No problem at all.”

“Good. We appreciate cooperation.”

He went around the Porsche and opened the driver’s door. “You have a nice evening now, Officer,” he said, not quite snottily, and folded himself inside before I could answer. I stayed put until he’d pulled out onto Main, driving neither fast nor slow. He was maneuvering into a legal space halfway into the next block when I returned to the cruiser.

Ordinarily I’d have forgotten the incident then and there, as trivial and easily resolved as it’d been. But the stranger stayed on my mind all the way home. Something about him, an indefinable quality, made me uneasy. I couldn’t put my finger on it and so it kept bothering me, a nagging little irritation like a splinter under a fingernail.

George Petrie

He came into the bank fifteen minutes before closing. There aren’t many individuals who can take my attention away from Storm Carey for more than a few seconds, but he was one. At first it was his size and ugliness that held my gaze; then it was his actions. Instead of going directly to one of the tellers’ windows, he walked around looking at things — walls, ceiling, floor, the arrangement of desks and tellers’ cages, the location of the vault. And at Fred and Arlene in the cages, and me behind my desk, and Storm seated across from me with her long beautiful legs crossed and part of one stockinged thigh showing. But no more than a brief glance at each of us; his eyes didn’t even linger on Storm. First Northern is an old bank as well as a small one, built in the twenties: rococo styling, black-veined marble columns and floors, dark, polished wood. That may have been what interested him. But the one thing he seemed to focus on longest was the open vault.

My God, what if he’s planning to rob us?

The thought prickled the hairs on my neck. I tried to dismiss it. There hadn’t been a holdup at First Northern in the sixteen years I’d been manager; as far as I knew, the bank had been held up only once in its seventy-two years of continuous operation — in 1936, by a hay grower who had lost his farm on a foreclosure. Armed robberies of any kind seldom happen in Pomo; we’re too far off a major highway to attract roaming urban criminals, and the local ones have so far confined themselves to drug-dealing, car theft, and burglary. Still, I was sure I hadn’t mistaken the stranger’s interest in the open vault. Plus, there was the fact that he projected an aura of restrained violence. It was in his eyes, in the set of his shoulders and the bunching of his hands, in the way he moved. A violent and dangerous man...

He went at last to Fred’s window. I tensed when he reached for his pocket, but the only thing he took out was his wallet. He was so wide he filled the window and I couldn’t tell what he was doing or saying to Fred. Nothing sinister, though, because the transaction took less than a minute and when he turned away Fred wore his usual weary, dull expression.

As he passed my desk the stranger glanced again at Storm. She smiled slightly at him, the wet, tongue-tip-showing smile she reserves for too many males over the age of twenty. He didn’t smile back. A few seconds later he was gone.

I realized my forehead was damp. I used my handkerchief to dry it. Storm had swung around to face me; she still wore the wet smile, but it was crooked now, faintly mocking in that infuriating way of hers.

“He make you nervous, George?”

“Of course not. It’s warm in here.”

She laughed. “I wonder who he is.”

“I have no idea. I’ve never seen him before.”

“So big,” she said. Speculatively. “And so ugly.”

“Don’t tell me he attracted you.”

“As a matter of fact, yes.”

“For God’s sake, Storm.”

“Ugliness can be very appealing. The right kind of ugliness.”

“Whatever that means.”

“You’re not a woman. You wouldn’t understand.”

“He looked dangerous,” I said. “Violent.”

“Did he?”

“To me he did.”

“Maybe that’s part of his appeal.” She ran her hands through her hair — thick and rich brown like milk chocolate, soft as cat fur. Characteristic gesture, full of animal sexuality; it exposed the long, smooth lines of her neck, lifted her breasts high. But her brown eyes and red mouth spoiled the effect: mocking me again. “You’re not jealous, are you, George?”

I didn’t answer that. She knew how much I wanted her — how much of a fool I was willing to be to have her just once more. One night with Storm was better than a thousand nights of tepid passion with my darling, half-frigid wife; it put her in your blood forever. And it didn’t matter that she’d slept with half the men in Pomo County since her husband dropped dead of a massive coronary six years ago. Perfect wife to Neal Carey the whole time he was buying and selling county real estate, building up his fortune, building the finest house on the north shore on prime lakefront property; never a hint of infidelity. But once he was dead... it was as though she’d been transformed somehow into an entirely different person. One lover after another, sometimes two and three at once, parading them in and out of the big white Carey house at all hours. Married men as well as single — she didn’t care. Couldn’t get enough. Couldn’t give enough. I hadn’t been able to touch Ramona for weeks after the night Storm and I spent together, not that Ramona minded very much, of course. All her juices, what there’d been of them, had dried up before she turned forty. Her whispers in the dark were like slaps: “Don’t touch me there, George. You’re hurting me, George. Can’t you hurry up, George?” Storm’s bed sounds were shrieks, moans, four-letter words wrapped in silk and velvet. Storm... God, how I wanted her! But for some perverse reason she wouldn’t let me near her again. Presents, promises, pleadings, phone calls, furtive visits... none of it did any good. Did she treat her other lovers that way, too? Probably. There were times, like today, like now, when I was sure she came to the bank two or three times a month not to talk over her accounts and investments but to devil me. Wanton temptress, tease, slut — she’d been called all of those things and she was all of those things...

“... about me, George?”

“What did you say?”

“I asked if you were thinking about me.”

“No. Just woolgathering.”

The mocking smile again. “Is there anything else we need to discuss?”

“Not about financial matters, no.”

“What else, then?”

“You know what else. Storm—”

“I’ve got to run. I’m meeting Doug Kent at Gunderson’s for cocktails.”

“Kent? Don’t tell me you’re sleeping with him now...”

“Green’s not a good color on you, George. Really.”

“Goddamn it—”

“Don’t curse at me. You know I don’t like it.”

“I’m sorry. But can’t you have a little pity?”

“Is that what you’ll settle for?”

“Yes, if I have to.”

“I don’t give pity fucks,” she said.

“Jesus! Not so loud...”

“Good night, George. Give my best to Ramona.”

I was angry and bitter and frustrated after she left, the way I always seemed to be when I saw her. Wanting her and hating her at the same time. Hating Ramona, too. Hating myself most of all. Almost a year since that one night in Storm’s bed, and it was as if it had happened twenty-four hours ago. I couldn’t go on like this much longer. And yet what else could I do, where else could I go? I had no options, not anymore. Not since Harvey Patterson’s real-estate scheme blew up in both our faces.

To take my mind off Storm I got up and crossed to Fred’s window. He was just finishing up his accounting; he always had it done by closing unless he had customers. I asked him about the stranger’s transaction. Change for a hundred-dollar bill: five twenties. That was all. Businesses in Pomo cater to tourists even in the off-season, and with the two Indian-owned casinos operating on the north and south shores, hundred-dollar bills were common enough. He could have spent a portion of his to get change or changed it outright in a dozen places without raising an eyebrow. Why come into the bank for his five twenties?

I returned to my desk, and now what was bothering me was the stranger. What if he came back? What if he really was planning to rob us?

Audrey Sixkiller

He was standing alone on the pier when I brought the Chris-Craft into the downtown marina. At a distance, from his size, I thought he was Dick; I couldn’t see him clearly because he was in shadow between two of the pale pier lamps. Pleasure stirred in me. Dick waiting for me like that would’ve been an omen — a good omen, for a change. He was mostly what I’d been thinking about the past two hours, cruising from Barrelhouse Slough on the north shore down past Nucooee Point and the Bluffs to Indian Head Bay near Southport. Late afternoon, twilight, nightfall are the best times on the lake, especially at this time of year when you can have all eighty-eight square miles of it to yourself; the water softens and changes color as the light fades, the surrounding hills blur gently and lose definition, the lights wink on all around the twisting shorelines. You’re alone but not lonely. It’s the best place and the best time for hoping.

I cut the throttle again as I came in past the marker buoys. Now that darkness had fallen, the wind was up and making the water choppy; I had to do some maneuvering and reversing to swing in next to the long board float that paralleled the pier. When I looked up again the man had moved, was walking toward the ramp through the fan of light from one of the lamps. I saw then that he wasn’t Dick and some of the good feeling went away. He came down the ramp as I cut the power and the boat’s port side brushed against the rubber float bumper; he caught hold of the bow cleat and steadied her. I shut off the engine and the running lights, took the stern line, and climbed up and made it fast. He tied off the bowline before I could do it.

“Thanks,” I said. “Not necessary, but thanks.”

He nodded. He was quite a bit bigger than Dick, I saw now — massive, like a professional football lineman. A stranger. And not dressed for the weather: light windbreaker and no hat or hand coverings. I could feel the cold even though I was bundled up in sweater, pea jacket, gloves, and William Sixkiller’s old wool cap.

“Nice boat,” he said. “When was it built?”

“My father bought it in fifty-two.”

“He keeps it in good shape.”

“He died seven years ago.”

“Sorry. You keep it in good shape.”

“He taught me well.”

“I’ve been watching your lights,” he said. “Only boat out tonight as far as I could see.”

“I had the lake to myself. Mostly do, this time of year.”

“You go out often by yourself at night?”

“Not often. Sometimes.”

“Kind of lonesome, isn’t it?”

“No. Peaceful.”

He was silent for a little time. The wind gusted and I heard it whispering and rattling in the sycamores and incense cedars that grew in nearby Municipal Park. The ducks and loons were making a racket over there, too; there are always flocks of them foraging around the bandstand and along the shore walk in late fall and winter.

“I’ve always wanted a boat,” the big man said, and there was an odd, wistful note in his voice. “Maybe I’ll buy one someday.”

“You won’t regret it. Even if you don’t live on a lake like Ka-ba-tin.”

“I thought this was Lake Pomo.”

“Ka-ba-tin is its Pomo Indian name.”

“Oh.”

“Visiting here, Mr. — ?”

“Faith. John Faith. Yeah, visiting.”

“John Faith. That sounds as if it could be Native American.”

“It’s not. Lot of Indians live around here, I understand.”

“Several colonies, yes. Rancherias, we call them. Mainly Pomos — big surprise, right? Some Lake Miwok and Lileek Wappo. At one time, a hundred years ago, there were fifteen thousand Native Americans in Pomo County. Now... less than a thousand.”

“You seem to know a lot about them.”

I smiled. “I’m one myself.”

“Is that right?”

“Southeastern Pomo — Elem. Not quite pureblood. One of my ancestors got seduced by a white man, but they still let me sit on the tribal council. My name is Audrey Sixkiller, by the way.”

He didn’t react to the name, as some whites do. Or make any attempt to come forward and shake hands; his were tucked into the pockets of his windbreaker. He just nodded.

“Aren’t you cold, dressed like that?” I asked him.

“Forgot to bring my coat. It’s back at the resort.”

“Which one are you staying at?”

“Lakeside.”

“Oh. Harry Richmond’s place.”

“Sounds like you don’t much care for it. Or him.”

Harry Richmond was neither a friend to Indians nor completely honest. But I don’t believe in carrying tales, to people I know much less to strangers. “It’s as comfortable as any on this end of the lake,” I said. “Too bad fishing season is over. Barrelhouse Slough up that way is full of catfish. If you like catfish.”

“Cooked on a plate by somebody else,” he said. “I’m not a fisherman.”

The wind gusted again. “Well, I’d better get my shopping done. The later it gets, the colder it’ll be on the lake.”

“Back out on the water tonight?”

“Unless I want to walk two miles home and another two miles back again tomorrow morning.” I smiled again. “My ancestors had it a lot rougher. They used to go night fishing in balsa boats made of tules, dressed in not much more than animal hides.”

“Hardy people, huh?”

“Very.”

“So you’re going to just leave your boat here?”

“Nobody will bother it. I’ve left it overnight before.”

“Nice boat like this? Must not be much crime in Pomo.”

“No serious crime, no. We have an aggressive chief of police.” Where crime is concerned, anyway.

“What about kids? Vandalism?”

“We don’t have much of that, either. And all the teenagers know this is my boat. Besides, I don’t know if you noticed or not, but that lighted building across Park Street over there is the city police station.”

“I noticed,” he said. “You a teacher?”

“Yes. How did you guess that?”

He shrugged. “The way you said teenagers, I guess.”

“History and social studies.” I pulled the cap down tighter around my ears. “I do have to go. I’ve enjoyed talking to you, Mr. Faith.”

“Same here. I didn’t mean to hold you up.”

“You haven’t.”

He hesitated. “Grocery store close by?”

“Safeway in the next block.”

“If you’d like some company...”

“No, thanks.” I smiled again to take the sting out of the rejection. “Enjoy your stay in Pomo.”

He had no answering smile. All he said was “Sure.” But he didn’t sound put off or disappointed; his voice was without inflection, without even a ghost of the wistfulness that had been there earlier. He’d expected me to say no, as if he’d asked without any real hope.

I walked up the ramp to the pier and a ways along it before I glanced back. He was still standing on the float, not watching me but looking again at the Chris-Craft. The thought occurred to me that he might still be there when I returned with the groceries. Well, what if he was? Despite his size, he hadn’t given me any cause to be wary of him. And as I’d pointed out to him, the police station was two hundred yards away across Park Street.

You’re too trusting, Audrey.

Dick had said that more than once, and he wasn’t the only one. It’s true, I suppose; I’ve always believed that people are inherently good, even if some try hard enough to disprove it, and I have never been a fearful person. There’s too much fear in the world. Too much blind judgment.

You know, sometimes I think you’re a white-man Indian. You love everybody. One of these days some damn white eyes ain’t gonna love you back.

Jimmy. My brother, Jimmy, who’d been just the opposite of me, who hadn’t trusted anyone and judged blindly and didn’t love enough. Dead at twenty-three, and with no one to blame but himself. Drunk and driving too fast on a country road near Petaluma, where he’d been working on a dairy ranch; took a turn too fast and rolled his pickup down an embankment into a ditch. Short, sad, empty life. I didn’t want to die that way, with hate in my heart and nothing to show for my years on this earth, not even a legacy of smiles.

Still, he’d been right about one thing. There was a white eyes who didn’t love me back. Prejudice had nothing to do with it; no one could ever fault Dick Novak for racial bias of any kind. It was his ex-wife. And Storm Carey. And me — something about me that I couldn’t change, couldn’t make right, because I didn’t understand what it was and perhaps he didn’t either.

Just as I reached the end of the pier I looked back again, and John Faith was still standing, motionless, next to the boat. Solitary figure, bent slightly against the wind. Alone in the dark.

Like you, Audrey Sixkiller, I thought. Pining away for a white eyes and spending too many nights alone in the dark.

Lori Banner

I noticed him right away when he walked into the Northlake Cafe. We were pretty busy for a Thursday night, but you don’t miss seeing a guy like that — not even if you wanted to. I mean, he was big. And he had one of those craggy, scarred faces that turn a lot of people off but that I’d always kind of liked. Pretty men of any size turn me off and I don’t like skimpy types with so-called normal looks. That was what first attracted me to Earle. I thought that man I married had character, but all it was was hard-rock meanness covered with a layer of bullshit.

I wasn’t the only one who stared when the big stranger came in. Everybody did. It got kind of quiet for as long as it took him to glance around and then settle himself into the last available booth, which happened to be on the side of the room I was working. Customers kept giving him looks, mostly out of the corners of their eyes, but he didn’t pay any attention. He sat there with his scoop-shovel hands on the table, waiting.

I had an order to pick up but instead I grabbed a menu and took it over to him. “Hi there,” I said, and I showed him my best smile. I have a nice smile, if I do say so myself. My best feature. Third-best feature, Earle says. Mr. Crude. “Welcome to the number-one restaurant in Pomo.”

He didn’t smile back, at least not much, but there wasn’t anything cold about the way he looked at me. Whoo, those eyes of his. They’d scare the pants off you if he was in a temper — scare most people just sitting here the way he was. Not me, though. Not once I looked straight into them. They weren’t as hard as they seemed on the surface, all shiny and bright like polished silver. There was a gentleness in them, way back deep. Just the opposite of Earle’s eyes, which look gentle on the surface but aren’t. Earle doesn’t even know what the word means.

“What’s good tonight?” he asked without picking up the menu. I liked his voice, too. Real deep, like it came from the bottom of his chest.

“Well, everybody seems to like the special. Meat loaf, mashed potatoes, cream gravy.”

“That what you had for dinner?”

“I haven’t eaten yet. When I do... the venison stew, probably. But not everybody likes venison.”

“I like it fine. That’s what I’ll have.”

“Good choice. Something from the bar first?”

“Bud Light.”

I went and put in his order and picked up the one that was waiting. Even as busy as I was the next few minutes, I couldn’t keep from glancing over at him three or four times. He really interested me. Not that I wanted to do anything about it. Well, maybe I wanted to, a little, but I wasn’t going to.

When I brought him his beer and a basket of French bread and butter I said, “You’re from a big city, I’ll bet. San Francisco?”

“L.A., recently. How’d you know?”

“You have kind of a big-city look about you.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“I don’t know. Only big city I’ve ever been in is San Francisco. You on vacation?”

“No.”

“Just passing through?”

He shrugged. “I might stay for a while.”

“Well,” I said. Then I said, “This is the best place on the lake to eat, no kidding. Lunch or dinner.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

Darlene came over as I was pouring coffee to take to the couple in booth nine. She tucked up a piece of her red hair and said, “That’s some hunk over there. He looks like a refugee from a slasher movie.”

“Looks can be deceiving.”

“Yeah? You can’t help liking ’em big and nasty, I guess.”

“What’s that mean?”

“You know what I mean, Lori. New bruise on your chin there, isn’t it?”

“No.”

“Makeup doesn’t quite hide it. It wasn’t there yesterday.”

“Mind your own business, Darlene, okay?”

“I just hate the way that man treats you.”

“Earle’s got a temper. He can’t help it.”

“He doesn’t have to take it out on you.”

“He’s getting better. He’s trying.”

“Sure he is.”

“He is. He promised me he’ll stop drinking.”

“For what, the hundredth time?”

“I mean it, that’s enough.”

She said, “It’s your life,” and went back into the kitchen.

Well? It is, isn’t it? My life?

The venison stew came out and I brought it to the big guy. I leaned low when I set the plate on the table and those silvery eyes went right where I knew they would. I let him look a few seconds before I straightened up. I’ve got nice boobs, firmer than most women in their midthirties; I don’t mind men looking at them. There’s no harm in looking, or being looked at. I think it’s a compliment.

“Anything else you’d like?”

“Not right now,” he said.

“Just wave if there is. My name’s Lori.”

He nodded.

“What’s yours, if you don’t mind my asking?”

I thought he wasn’t going to tell me. Then he said, “John.”

“John what?”

“Faith. John Faith.”

“No kidding? You don’t look like somebody with a name like that. No offense.”

“None taken.”

“What do you do? I mean, for a living.”

“Does it matter?”

“I’m just curious.”

“I work with my hands.”

“I’ll bet you do.”

“I’m not married, if that’s your next question.”

“Huh?” It wasn’t going to be.

“But you are,” he said.

His eyes were on the gold band on my left hand. I glanced at it, too, before I said, “Yep, I sure am.” But right then I wished I weren’t.

“I don’t play around with married women.”

“Well, that puts you in the minority, John. Most men don’t care who they play around with.” Some women, too. Like Storm Carey, for instance.

“I’m not most men.”

Lord, no. “Truth is, I don’t play around either.”

“Come on like you might.”

“But I don’t. See, I’m a friendly person,” I said, because I didn’t want him to keep thinking what he was thinking about me. “Naturally friendly. I like men and I guess I can’t help flirting, but that’s as far as it goes. Really, I mean it.”

He stared at me like he was trying to see inside my skin. Then he smiled, slow — a genuine smile this time. “Okay,” he said.

“You know, John, you ought to use that smile more often. It’s a real nice one.”

It was, too. He didn’t seem as ugly when he smiled, and it made those silver eyes look a lot softer. He likes me, I thought, and I felt good that he’d changed his opinion. I want people to like me, the ones I like in particular.

“I’ll keep that in mind, too,” he said. He finished what was left of his beer. “How about getting me a refill and letting me eat my dinner before it gets cold?”

He said it like a joke, and I laughed. “Sure thing.” I touched his arm, you know the way you do, just being friendly, and picked up his empty and turned away. But I hadn’t taken more than about three steps when I happened to look over at the entrance, and all at once I lost my smile and the good feeling I had. If I’d eaten anything before coming on shift, I might’ve lost that, too.

Earle was standing inside the door.

Standing there with his hands on his hips, glaring at me and past me at big John Faith.

Trisha Marx

We were at Northlake Chevron, where Anthony’s brother, Mateo, works, when the guy in the Porsche drove in. Just hanging, that’s all, Anthony and Mateo talking cars cars cars the way they usually did when they were together. Major boring on a good night, and this one wasn’t good. The whole week hadn’t been good. Maybe the last couple of months — maybe my whole life. I was afraid it was gonna turn into total crap and I didn’t know what to do to keep that from happening.

Talk to Anthony, sure. Pretty soon I’d have to. And he’d probably go ballistic, same as Daddy would when he found out. All Anthony cared about was cars, fast cars, and going down to Sears Point to watch the Formula One races and getting high and getting into my pants whenever I’d let him. It was his fault as much as mine, but would that matter to him? Would he want to marry me? And if he didn’t, what was I gonna do then?

Total crap at seventeen. If I was really pregnant.

Two missed periods now, and throwing-up sick two mornings this week. Sure I was pregnant.

That’s what I was thinking when the Porsche pulled in and this huge guy got out of it. I mean, really huge. Pretty old, around forty, with pocks and a scar on his chin and a head like a carved rock. Anthony and Mateo were staring at him, too, and it was plain they didn’t like what they saw. As if he was there to give them a hassle or something, when all he wanted was to buy some gas. He wasn’t paying any attention to any of us as he unhooked the hose and stuck the nozzle into the tank.

Anthony said, “Man, will you look at him.”

“Ugly fucker,” Mateo said. “Wonder if he’s tough as he looks.”

“Why don’t you go find out, man?”

“Yeah.”

“So why don’t you?”

“Shit, man, I can’t just go pop the dude, can I?”

“Think you could take him?”

“If I had to. Yeah, sure, I’m big enough. Look at that face, man. Makes you want to bust it up some more, don’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“Face like that... man, you just want to smash it. You know what I’m saying?”

“Like that Cisneros dude down in Southport.”

“Yeah, like him. Ugly puto like that... what’s he doing around here?”

“Go ask him, man.”

“Freak him. I don’t care what he’s doing here, man.”

I quit listening to them. Stupid talk. I don’t know what’s the matter with guys sometimes. Wanting to beat up somebody just because of the way they look. A person can’t help it if they’re ugly or deformed or something, can they? And don’t they have the right not to be hassled, same as everybody else?

Anthony isn’t always such a macho jerk. Only when he’s with his buddies, and worst of all when he’s with Mateo. His brother’s three years older and a total asshole. Always strutting around and starting trouble. Once, when a bunch of us were partying at Nucooee Point, he put his hand up my skirt and tried to tear my panties off — he was drunk on Green Death, that ale from up in Washington, and he’s even more of a pig when he’s ripped — and I practically had to scream rape before he let me alone. I told Anthony about it and he just laughed. As far as he’s concerned, Mateo never does anything wrong. Mateo could blow up the courthouse and Anthony would probably think it was a cool thing to do.

So the huge guy finished pumping his gas and came over to pay Mateo for it. Mateo gave his badass sneer and said something I didn’t hear and Anthony laughed. The huge guy looked at them, one and then the other, not saying a word. Anthony stopped laughing and Mateo stopped sneering, just like that. So then the huge guy reached out and tucked a ten-dollar bill into Mateo’s shirt pocket, hard and with a sneer of his own, and Mateo didn’t move or say a word. Not then and not until the Porsche’s engine roared and its tires laid rubber as it went zooming out of the station.

Then Macho Man gave the finger, jabbing it into the air half a dozen times, and yelled, “¡Carajo! Vete al carajo! Tu madre!” at the top of his voice.

“You should’ve popped him, man,” Anthony said.

“Yeah. Next time I see him I’ll break his ugly fuckin’ head with a fuckin’ tire iron.”

I said, “Only if you sneak up behind him in a dark alley.”

He raked me with his eyes. “What’d you say?”

“He didn’t do anything to you.”

“Came in here with a chip on. Tough guy.”

“No, he didn’t.”

Anthony said, “You saw the way the dude looked at us. Mean, man, like he wanted to break our heads.”

“Why don’t you grow up, Anthony.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“Say that again, Trish, I’ll bust your lip.”

“Now who’s being mean?”

“I’m telling you, man. Go bitch on me and I’ll pop you.”

I’m pregnant! I’m gonna have your kid!

I felt like screaming the words at him. But I didn’t, because then maybe he really would smack me. He’d never laid a hand on me before, but there’s always a first time. His eyes were hot and squinty, his face all scrunched up like a little boy getting ready to throw a tantrum. I’ve always thought Anthony’s the handsomest hunk in Pomo and that I was, like, beyond lucky when he first asked me out; I practically wet my pants the first time he kissed me. But he didn’t look handsome now. He looked mean, like he’d accused the Porsche guy of being. And a lot uglier, somehow.

Funny, but all of a sudden I wasn’t so sure I wanted him to marry me. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to keep on being with him, whether or not I had his damn baby.

Douglas Kent

Storm’s eyes were all over the strange beast as soon as it lumbered into Gunderson’s Lounge. When it settled its hairy bulk at the other end of the bar, she shifted slightly on her stool so she could keep watching it without turning her head. Large, the way she liked ’em. Large and unsightly and endowed, no doubt, with no more than two active brain cells. What did she talk to them about afterward? Or were her postcoital conversations limited to contented sighs on her part, satisfied animal grunts and purrs on theirs?

You’ll never know, Kent.

No Stormy nights for you, bucko — past, present, or future.

I lit a weed and studied my glass through the smoke. One more swallow to savor and on to the next. Dry martinis, the universal salve. The good folks at AA tell you that if you can’t imagine a world without booze, you’re a major-league alcoholic. I couldn’t imagine a universe without booze. So what did that make me?

I knew what it made me, yes indeedy. My own brain cells pickled and expiring in daily droves. Ah, but there were still plenty left — too many, as a matter of fact. And the too many too active.

“How about another?” I asked Storm.

“No, I don’t think so.” Still staring at the Incredible Hulk who had wandered in out of the cold. “You go ahead, Doug.”

“Don’t mind if I do.”

I took the last swallow and signaled to Mike for a refill. He brought it dutifully and quickly; Mike and I have an understanding based on mutual need. His, of course, being filthy lucre.

When I had it cozily in hand and a third of the salve working its warm way into the Kent depths I said, “Bigfoot lives.”

“What?”

“Him. Humongous, isn’t he?”

“Mmm. He came into the bank today while I was there.”

“Did he now.”

“I wonder who he is.”

“Why don’t you go ask him?”

Out came the tongue to slick her lips. The tip of it stayed out at one corner. I knew that gesture and the sultry expression that went with it; I’d seen them aimed at a dozen different men in the past three years. Never at me, however. The gesture and expression I knew well, but the moist lips and tongue themselves I didn’t know at all and never would. Kent the deprived.

“I’ll bet he’s hung like a horse,” I said.

“Don’t be vulgar.”

I applied more salve. “Sure you won’t have another, pal?”

“I’m sure.” Then, delayed reaction: “Why did you say that?”

“Say what?”

“Call me pal.”

“Why not? We’re drinking buddies, aren’t we?”

“I suppose we are.” Eyes on the fresh meat again.

“Aloof drinking buddies,” I said. “Martinis and chaste good-night handshakes.”

No answer this time. She wasn’t even listening.

I gave my glass closer scrutiny, holding it up so the back-bar lights reflected in tiny distorted glints off the salve’s oily surface. Time once again to ponder the oft-pondered question: Was I in love with Storm Carey, or was she just another whip-hard unit in the Kent bag of sticks? Tonight I felt more philosophical than usual. Tonight I decided it was a mixture of the two. Long ago I’d come to the conclusion that I was incapable of real love, the selfless, giving kind; but I was capable of a pallid, selfish version and within its boundaries, yes, I loved her. Ah, but was it Storm the woman that I loved pallidly and selfishly, or was it the insoluble mystery of her, her hidden eye that I couldn’t reach or ever possess? A little of both, I decided again. Which was what made the stick that was Storm whip hard, the pain more exquisite when it was applied to the tender portions of the Kent psyche.

Not a new insight, but a sharper one than usual. Very good. I rewarded myself with more salve.

How long has it been that I’ve been gathering sticks for the old bag? Long time. Long, long time. The first few had been picked up in the bosom of Pa Kent’s dysfunctional family. One or two more in Philly, fresh out of Penn State’s redoubtable journalism school, suffering through graveyard shifts on the AP rewrite desk. None in Pasadena that I could recall; my first job on a real newspaper, brash and eager and confident and still harboring a few of what I laughably considered ideals. Santa Monica? Yep, I’d gathered quite a few in good old Santa Monica after the promise of a freehand daily think piece became instead a restricted twice-weekly Pap smear and then, after four months, evolved into a reason to quit when the bastard city editor arbitrarily determined that I wasn’t columnist material after all and kicked me back onto the City Hall beat.

They came fast and often after that, all the sticks on the twenty-year ride to the bottom. One more large-city daily (never a big-city daily where Kent could strut his stuff) and on to a couple of small-city dailies, a succession of small-town dailies, and small-town twice weeklies, and finally all the way down, plunk, to the tiny-town, once-a-week sheets. How many papers and towns altogether in twenty years? A score? Two dozen? They were all pasted together in my memory, a gray blur like the booze-soaked remnants of a cheap montage. The only things from each stop along the route that I remembered clearly were the sticks: missed deadlines, broken promises, bitter firings, random rants and clashes. But those weren’t the only mementos of the past two decades; there were plenty of other sticks, too, courtesy of one ex-wife (I wonder who’s laying her now?), a gaggle of ex-girlfriends, more than one episode involving the nonperformance of a once dependable pecker, a clutch of drunk-driving charges, two or three sodden fistfights. Kent used them all, one by one (often, with certain favorites like the Storm stick), in the grand sport of Kent-bashing. And still the bag wasn’t full nor the psyche fully flayed, nor would they ever be even if my liver and lungs held out for another ten years or more. Which was about as likely as a black lesbian with AIDS being elected to the White House.

Spend the rest of my short unhappy life in Pomo? Nope. Definitely not. The tiniest town yet, true, but there were tinier ones; tinier weeklies, too, than the Pomo Advocate, whose owners could be persuaded to tolerate the fine, ink-stained hand of Douglas Kent, crusading editor. The truth was, Pomo was wearing thin on me after three years. I wasn’t used to holding a job that long, staying in one place that long. I should have been fired long ago. Instead, I was still enjoying undeserved freedom, the largesse of a large-assed absentee owner whose only interest in the Advocate was a modest annual profit gleaned from its advertisers. He cared not a whit for the contents of the paper. Neither, for that matter, did its subscribers; their primary interest lay in a weekly search for the correct wording and spacing of their ads, the mention and correct spelling of their names and those of friends and relatives, ad nauseam.

Perfect case in point: the long Kent-generated article last spring on alcoholism and its root causes in Porno County. Isolation, alienation, high poverty level on and off the Indian rancherias, high jobless rate, high density of the homeless and elderly retirees and welfare recipients, lack of adequate social services — all the usual crap, reshat and recycled. A temperance tract, in content and tone, on the insidious, long-range effects of John Barleycorn and his various spirited cousins.

I wrote it drunk, of course.

Blind drunk.

Kent was amazed when he read the piece in print. About a quarter of it was borderline brilliant, some of the best writing I’d done in years, drunk or sober. The other three quarters was mostly incoherent. Sentences that made no sense, paragraphs that had little or no continuity, logic that was illogical, misquotes, even a couple of dangling participles. A shameful mess, in sum, from the first word to the final period.

And the magnificent irony was, nobody noticed.

We received not a single phone call or letter of protest. One of the city councilmen, by God, stopped me on the street the day it ran and actually congratulated me on a “hard-hitting and thought-provoking article.” If I’d been drunk at the time I would have laughed in his face. Riotously.

The humor struck me again now, and a sound burst from my larynx that had a tonal quality similar to the famous baying outside Baskerville Hall. Storm swiveled her head toward me. Others, too, including Mike and the Hulk, but I had eyes only for Storm.

“What’s so funny?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing’s funny.”

“Poor Doug,” she said, and immediately resumed her optical foreplay with the brute.

I swallowed the dregs from my glass, ate the olive, fired up another cancer stick, and got quietly off the stool and wove my way to the can. Where I took a leak and, of course, managed to dribble on myself before I got the shriveled-up, uncooperative old soldier safely tucked away again inside his Fruit of the Loom bunker. When I turned on the sink tap, water splashed up out of the bowl and wet my shirtfront. Naturally.

“You’re pathetic, Kent,” somebody said.

I looked up. In the mirror a bleary-eyed, smoke-haloed gent was giving me the eye. Looked just like me, poor bugger, poor Doug. I winked at him; he winked right back.

“A cliché,” he said, “that’s what you are. The cynical, drunken newspaperman. A bloody cliché.”

“Right,” I said. “Absolutely right.”

“You were born a cliché,” the face said. “From the moment you popped out of the old lady with the umbilical cord wrapped around your scrawny neck and your wizened little puss blue from cyanosis, you were doomed to lead the kind of miserable life you’ve led. A cliché using a series of clichés to grow into an even bigger cliché, and never once rising above the sum of your parts. You’re a self-fulfilled prophecy, Kent, that’s what you are.”

“You bet,” I said. “Fucking A.”

“That’s why you ended up here — in Pomo, in Gunderson’s, in this smelly crapper talking to your fuzzy, clichéd image in the mirror. You couldn’t have ended up anywhere else. You’ll sink lower, too, and when you finally die it will be in the most clichéd way possible. You pathetic schmuck, you.”

Squinting, I saluted the son of a bitch. Squinting, the son of a bitch saluted me.

I wove back out to the bar. Storm, as expected, had moved in on the strange beast; she was sitting on the stool next to him, her head close to his, her hand already on his thigh. Kent, I thought, you ought to be a weather forecaster. You can predict a Storm with the best of ’em.

I kept on weaving to the door. Nobody noticed, of course. Nobody paid the slightest attention as the crusading editor, the self-pitying gutter philosopher, the cliché supreme stumbled out into the night in search of more salve and another stick for his heavy, heavy bag.

Storm Carey

The Hunger wanted so badly to fuck him, this new one in town. He’d been on the edge of my mind since the bank, and when he walked into the lounge I thought it must be fated for the Hunger to get its wish. It thought so, too. Its demands were immediate. As I watched the stranger hunched over the bar sipping his beer, the demands grew feverish. Never satisfied, wanting more, wanting new, wanting... what? What else besides what I kept feeding it?

Almost from my first awareness of the Hunger, two months after Neal’s fatal coronary, I thought of it as a mouth, a thick-lipped, nibbling mouth deep within my body. Shrunken at first, the nibbles tiny, then expanding as its need grew, opening wider, nibbling more insistently, probing with something like a tongue as it moved down through my chest, hardening my nipples, down, tightening my stomach and groin, down, fiery breath making me wet, fiery tongue licking...

Cunnilingus from within. That was the sensation and that was how I described it to the shrink I visited for a while in San Francisco. She was very interested in the concept; what woman wouldn’t be? Her interpretation was that the Hunger was grief-born, grief-sustained. Neal and I had been deeply, passionately in love, had enjoyed fabulous sex together throughout our marriage; his sudden death not only left an enormous gap in my life, but in my sex life as well, and so psychologically I had created the Hunger in an effort to fill the emptiness for brief periods. All the men were substitutes, surrogates: Through them I was trying to resurrect both Neal and the powerful physical intimacy we’d shared. But, of course, that was impossible, which was why the sex with them was never satisfying (and why it left me feeling cheap and disgusted with myself), why the Hunger renewed its hot, nibbling demands again so soon afterward.

All well and good — a reasonable analysis as far as it went. But the Hunger was more than just sexual need, more than a yearning for Neal and what we’d had for nine years, more than a gap filler and a psychological desire for love and intense human connection. The Hunger was something dark, too, hidden behind the mouth’s thick lips and searching tongue. Something I couldn’t reach or understand, and until I did, something I couldn’t hope to satisfy. The Hunger’s purely sexual demands frightened me, but not half so much as its unknown dark part. I tried to explain this to the shrink, and she seemed sympathetic, but her opinion was that it was, in fact, sexual: the so-called dark side of sex, childhood fears, religious and societal taboos, all that. When she kept trying to convince me of this, I ended our sessions. She was wrong; whatever the dark element was, it was not sexually related. And not she nor anyone else could help me find out what it really was. I was the only one who could do that, and someday I would.

But not tonight. Tonight the Hunger was all sex, raging sex, with no hint of anything else.

I couldn’t sit still any longer. When Doug Kent got up and lurched away to the men’s room, it was like a release. I slid off the stool, smoothed the tight skirt down over my hips. It was an effort not to seem too eager as I walked over and sat next to the Hunger’s new target.

He knew I was there — he couldn’t help knowing — but he neither moved nor looked at me until I said, “Don’t you like my scent?” His sideways glance then was without apparent interest, and there was no change in his expression even after he’d examined my face and the hollow between my breasts. Not even the faintest spark of lust that usually flares in men’s eyes. His were so pale in the dim light that the irises blended into the whites, to the point of invisibility; it was like meeting the gaze of a blind man. They gave me a small frisson.

“It’s very expensive,” I said.

“What is?”

“My perfume. It’s called Paris Nights.”

“Your husband give it to you?”

“I don’t have a husband.”

“Boyfriend, then.”

“I don’t have a boyfriend.”

“Guy you’re with’s a relative, is that it?”

“No. A casual acquaintance. You didn’t answer my question.”

“I don’t remember what it was.”

“I asked if you liked my scent.”

“Perfume’s okay. It’s the other one I don’t like.”

“Other one?”

“Gin. Smell of gin on a woman’s breath turns me off.”

“I have a bottle of Listerine in my bathroom.”

“I’d still smell the gin.”

“There are other ways to keep that from happening.”

“Direct as hell, aren’t you?”

“Yes. When I see something I want.”

“Something. Uh-huh.”

“I meant someone.”

“Sure you did. Do I look like a necrophiliac?”

“... Now, what is that supposed to mean?”

“I like my women active, not passed out.”

“I won’t pass out. I haven’t had that much to drink.”

“Your eyes and your voice say different.”

I put my hand on his thigh, stroked it gently. “I promise to be alert and very active.”

“Give it up, lady.” He pushed my hand away.

“Oh, now. You’re not even a little interested?”

“Not even a little.”

“Why not? Don’t you find me attractive?”

“Too attractive.”

“Another cryptic statement. This one meaning?”

“Why me? I’m no prize.”

“I find big men exciting.”

“Big men with run-over faces. Yeah.”

“I like your face.” I didn’t, though; it was ugly. But the Hunger didn’t care. His ugliness, the animal power he projected, only made the Hunger want him more.

He tilted the bottle to his mouth. It seemed dwarfed in the circle of his thick-furred fingers. “Slumming,” he said then.

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me. Rich bitch out slumming.”

“If you’re trying to insult me...”

“Trying? I’ve been doing it ever since you sat down.”

“I’m not slumming,” I said. “And I’m not exactly rich.”

“What about the bitch part?”

“Have it your way.”

“Paris Nights perfume, expensive clothes, expensive hairdo... you’ve got money, all right. I know your type.”

“Not as well as you think you do.”

“Don’t bet on it.”

“My name is Storm. What’s yours?”

“Storm. Yeah, right.”

“I was born during one, and my parents had a fanciful streak. Would you like to see my driver’s license?”

“No. I don’t want to see anything of yours.”

“Now who’s being direct? You didn’t tell me your name.”

“No, and I’m not going to.” This time, when he tilted the bottle, he took a long, deep swallow. His throat and the line of his neck and jaw were massive; they made me think of a grizzly bear I once saw at the San Francisco zoo. “I’ve had about enough of this game.”

“I’m not playing a game,” I said. “Would you like to leave now?”

“Not with you.”

“You won’t be sorry if you do.”

“Sure I would. So would you. You wouldn’t like it with me and I wouldn’t like it with you and we’d both hate ourselves afterward.”

“You’re wrong. I’d enjoy it with you very much. And I guarantee you’d enjoy it with me. It won’t take long to find out. My house is only about three miles from here.”

“Your house. Uh-huh. You live alone?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re willing to take me there, a complete stranger — just like that. No worries I might tie you up and steal the silverware? Or cut you up into little pieces, maybe?”

I felt another frisson. “I don’t believe you’re that kind of man.”

“But you don’t know that I’m not, do you?”

“Are you trying to frighten me?”

“No, lady,” he said slowly and distinctly, as if he were attempting to reason with a child, “I’m trying to get rid of you.” He put the bottle down and swung away from me, onto his feet. “Good night and happy hunting.”

“Wait...”

He didn’t wait. He went away into the dark.

I nearly chased after him. But it wouldn’t have done any good and I didn’t care to make a public scene; I have very little pride left, but there is just enough to dictate a certain decorum. Neal taught me so many things; a sense of propriety was one of them.

I took a moment to compose myself and then returned to my original seat. Mike Gunderson smirked at me dourly as I sat down. He’d been watching the stranger and me, but at a discreet distance; eavesdropping wasn’t one of his faults. He had been a friend of Neal’s and he neither liked the widow nor approved of her behavior. One of many Storm-haters in Pomo, not that I or the Hunger cared. If he hadn’t had an inordinate fondness for the almighty dollar he would have declared me persona non grata long ago.

“No luck tonight, Mrs. Carey?” he said. He refused any longer to call me by my first name. “Too bad.”

“I’ll have another martini, please.”

“Yes, ma’am. I guess you need it.”

For the first time I noticed that Doug was still absent, his place at the bar cleared away. “Did Mr. Kent leave?”

“While you were having your... conversation.”

“Did he say where he was going?”

“No. He just left.”

Poor Doug. I liked him, I truly did, and I felt sorry for him. Not a day or night goes by now that I don’t despise myself, but my self-loathing is nothing compared to his. His is long-nurtured and has to do with weakness and failure — part of the reason he wants me so desperately, because he knows he can’t have me and the knowledge fuels his destructive impulses. If it were up to me I’d take him to bed, but it’s not up to me. The Hunger doesn’t want him. Many men, yes, some men, no, and I’m not involved in the selection process. No mercy fucks for the Hunger. It knows exactly what it craves, and what it craved tonight was the hulking animal presence that had rejected it, me, both of us.

The demands of the mouth, lips, tongue, fire breath were still intense. Feed me, feed me... like the plant creature in Little Shop of Horrors. And I would have to feed it, and soon, or it would give me no peace through the long, long night. In my mind we opened the file of men the Hunger had chosen in the past; one of them would have to do. We flipped through the names, looking for one the Hunger considered suitable, one who could be induced to come to us on short notice. No. No. No. No. No. No.

Yes.

Mike set the fresh martini in front of me, turned away without speaking. One sip, another, a third. Then, with the Hunger prodding me, I went to the public telephone near the rest rooms and made my siren’s call.

Richard Novak

I couldn’t seem to sit still tonight. No particular reason, unless it was a residue of the uneasiness the stranger in the Porsche had built in me. A combination of things piling up over a period of time. Tonight wasn’t the first that I’d felt restless, dissatisfied; too often lately my life seemed empty on the one hand, overburdened and loaded with frustrations on the other. It needed something, some kind of shift or change or sense of purpose. But I couldn’t seem to make up my mind what it could or should be.

Part of the problem was the daily grind of my job. There was little enough felony crime in Pomo, but as if to make up for that we had more than our fair share of the other kinds, particularly those that plague economically depressed rural towns with a population in the ten-thousand range — domestic violence and abuse, belligerent drunks and drunk driving, kids on drugs, adults on drugs, automobile theft, and vandalism. All of this on a continuing basis, and just me and ten full-time and four part-time male and female officers to handle it. The county sheriff’s office is supposed to provide assistance and backup, but they have their hands full elsewhere; the Southport area, which is loaded with welfare cases and homeless people, has the highest crime rate in the county. Besides, Sheriff Leo Thayer is a political hack who doesn’t know his ass from a tree stump, and more often than not we ended up at loggerheads on even petty law-enforcement issues. There was no money in the city or county treasuries for more manpower or modern equipment or new patrol cars; we had to make do with what we had, and with underpaid civilians in dispatcher and clerk and other positions that should’ve been filed by professionals. Even absolute necessities such as weapons and shortwave-radio repairs couldn’t be gotten or gotten done without a hassle. I spent too much time playing politics — Pomo’s mayor, Burton Seeley, is also top dog in the machine that runs the county — and begging favors. And on top of that I had to indulge Seeley and the city council by attending civic functions at an average of one a week in order to “maintain a high standard of community relations,” one of the top dog’s pet policies. Half the time I was in uniform I felt harried, bullied, short-tempered, and hamstrung — and wishing I’d stayed in law enforcement in Monterey County and worked my way up through the ranks toward a captaincy, instead of jumping at the first police chief’s job that was offered to me seven years ago. If I had, maybe Eva and I—

No. Moving to Pomo hadn’t finished us. The miscarriage had done that. The miscarriage and the part of Eva I’d never been able to reach.

The women in and out of my life — that was another reason for the restlessness, the dissatisfaction. Eva. And Storm after Eva was gone. And the hollow series of brief flings and one-night stands after it ended with Storm. And now Audrey and the uncertain feelings I had for her. Once I’d been so sure of what I wanted from a woman and a relationship. Not anymore. I wasn’t sure of much of anything anymore.

Midlife crisis? Call it that, or whatever. At thirty-seven I was starting to drift, to go through the motions. If I didn’t do something about it, get down inside myself and find some direction again, I’d wind up a nonalcoholic version of Douglas Kent — a scooped-out, burned-out mass filling up time and space while he waited for the hearse to come and haul him away.

After supper I tried reading and I tried watching TV. Mack whining to go out gave me something else to do for a while. I put the leash on him and walked him down by the lake, a good, long, brisk walk even though the temperature had dropped into the forties. Mack liked the cold; it made him frisky. Big old black Lab with a sweet disposition — a better friend than any human I knew in Pomo, with the possible exception of Audrey. I’d bought him for Eva after the miscarriage, a misguided attempt to fill some of the emptiness. Instead, she’d resented him — he was alive and her baby wasn’t — and had refused to have anything to do with him. Tried to get me to give him away, and when I wouldn’t do it, because I needed Mack even if she didn’t, she withdrew even more.

Withdrawal was her way of coping. From me, from the life we’d had, from the fact that she couldn’t have any more children. When her body was healed she wouldn’t let me touch her. Couldn’t stand to have me touch her anymore, she said. She’d always been religious; she withdrew into religion. Hours spent reading the Bible, praying aloud. Two, three, four days a week away from home doing church work. Six months of this, and then one day she was gone — moved out, moved back to Monterey to live with her mother. Saved herself and left me alone to find some other way to save myself. It hurt then and it still hurt now, after four years — a dull ache that came and went, came and went. The last I’d heard, five months ago through an old family friend, she was in a religious retreat somewhere near San Luis Obispo. One of us, at least, had found an answer.

The long walk tired me but did nothing for the restlessness. I called the station to see how things were. Verne Erickson, the night man in charge — actually, he’s a lieutenant and second in command; he works nights by choice — said things were relatively quiet. One D&D arrest, one minor traffic accident out on the Northlake Cutoff, nothing else so far. So I didn’t even have an excuse to go back to work.

I made a cup of cocoa, sprinkled nutmeg on top the way Eva had in the early days of our marriage. One of our little rituals: a cup of cocoa before bed every night that I managed to make it home by bedtime. It’d been good with us in those days... hadn’t it? Good, yes, but even then there’d been a distance between us. Less passion, sexual and otherwise, than I would’ve liked. Less connection on important issues. She wanted children, and her job at a day-care center in Carmel Valley only made her want them more. I was ambivalent, and at some level I think she blamed me for the fact that she wasn’t able to conceive. She didn’t like my work; it kept me away from home too much and there was too much danger, too much violence involved in it. She believed in thou shalt not kill, turn the other cheek, the meek shall inherit. In her mind it would’ve been almost as bad if I’d shot someone in the line of duty as if someone had shot me. Friction there, friction over the inability to conceive, little frictions on other fronts, too. Then she’d gotten pregnant, and she was so happy she glowed. Things really had been good until the sixth month, the sudden pains and bleeding, the miscarriage...

Christ, Novak, I thought, what’s the point of living it all again? Why beat yourself up like this?

I sat in the living room of my nice, comfortable, two-bedroom, rent-free home — one of the perks that had induced me to accept the otherwise low-paying chief’s job seven years ago — and drank my cocoa and stared at the blank TV screen. Mack came in and laid his head on my knee, looked up at me with his dark, liquid eyes. He knew how I was feeling tonight. Dogs are sensitive that way. I patted him, switched on the tube, switched it off again.

Get out of here, go do something, I told myself, before the walls start closing in.

Go get laid. It’s been a while — maybe that’s what you need.

Storm?

No, no way. Over and done with, and except for the sex, not so good while it lasted. Too many frictions there, too; too many angry words. And don’t forget the flap it caused. The chief of police and the once respected, now vilified Mrs. Carey — tongues had really wagged and there’d been no mistaking the serious warning behind Burt Seeley’s private lecture about public image and civic responsibility. Take up with Storm again and I’d be even more strung out, and out of a job to boot. And then what would I do?

God, though, she was amazing in bed. The best ever.

Yeah, well, she’d had plenty of practice, hadn’t she? A hundred, two hundred others before and since. A wonder she hadn’t contracted AIDS or some other sexually transmitted disease — one of the things we’d argued about when she’d admitted to sleeping with others while she was sleeping with me. Hell, for all I knew maybe she did have a disease by now.

Stay away from her. No ifs, ands, or buts.

Out to the kitchen again, Mack padding along behind. I started to make another cup of cocoa, but I didn’t want any more goddamn cocoa. What did I want?

Audrey?

She wanted me; she’d made that plain enough. Smart, attractive, caring, funny, undemanding — everything a man could want in a woman. Casual, our relationship so far; a few dates, a couple of passionate clinches, nothing else, but I could sleep with her if I wanted to. She’d made that plain, too. Only if I did, then it wouldn’t be casual any longer because the one thing she wasn’t was a casual lay. It’d be a commitment, at least on her part, and then if I couldn’t follow through she’d be hurt badly. And I didn’t think I would be able to follow through. And I didn’t want to hurt her.

One strike against us: She was twenty-seven, ten years younger than me. Another: I liked her, more than a little, but I didn’t love her. No feelings of almost desperate yearning, the way it’d been when I first met Eva. No hammering lust, the way it’d been with Storm. Another: Audrey loved kids, wanted children of her own; she was quiet domesticity, traditional family values. I’d had all that, or a taste of it, with Eva, and it hadn’t led to anything but pain; I couldn’t stand to live that kind of life again even if the person and the outcome were different. I was better off unmarried. I functioned better when the only responsibility I had was to myself.

Right. And how about the other two strikes you don’t want to admit to: Audrey’s heritage and your job security. Seeley and the city council and the rest of the town didn’t like you making it with Storm and they wouldn’t like it any better if you took a Native American wife, now would they? Ask Burt Seeley if there was prejudice against Pomos in Pomo and he’d look appalled and vehemently deny it. But it was there, all right, in him and plenty of others, crawling like worms beneath the surface, so goddamn subtle sometimes you could barely see it or smell it for what it was. The Pomos and Lake Miwoks and Lileek Wappos were here a century or more before white settlers, the town and lake and county and a dozen other places and businesses were named for them, but the whites ran things and had ever since they’d shown up. Their word was law, and their laws were meant to protect their own. The natives were tolerated as long as they kept their place, stayed for the most part on their handout reservation lands, and didn’t try to change the status quo. It was all right for an Indian woman to teach at a mainly white high school, as long as it was subjects that didn’t matter too much in their way of thinking, like American history; and it was all right for a white man to date an Indian woman, and lay her if he felt like it, but when it came to taking one for his wife, particularly if he happened to be an appointed member of the white power structure and she happened to be the daughter of an uppity free spirit who’d had the gall to buy a piece of nonreservation land and build a home on it in their midst, well, that just wasn’t acceptable. No sir, not acceptable at all.

Screw them, I thought. I don’t care that much about the frigging job, and Audrey being Pomo has nothing one way or another to do with my feelings toward her. Do I think Native Americans or any other nonwhite race is inferior? Hell, no. I treat everybody as an individual, some good, some bad, whites or blacks or reds or browns. If I wanted to marry Audrey I’d damned well marry her. I’m—

What?

What the hell am I?

What do I want?

Mack whined and nuzzled my leg. My head was pounding, the ache sharp behind my eyes as I reached down to pat him.

And that was when the telephone rang.

Audrey Sixkiller

Someone was trying to break into my house.

I knew it as soon as I came awake. I’m a light sleeper, but I don’t wake up to normal night sounds, even loud ones. I lay very still, listening. The wind, the flutter of a loose shingle on the roof, and then the sound that wasn’t normal — a slow scraping, faint and stealthy. Where? Somewhere in back. It came again, followed by a different noise that might have been metal slipping on metal and digging into wood. The back porch, either the window there or the rear door: some kind of tool being used to force the lock on one or the other.

It made me angry, not afraid. In the heavy darkness I lifted my legs out from under the covers, sat up, slid open the nightstand drawer. Whoever was out there must be white; Indians know how to function in complete silence even in the dead of night. Just as I’d kept William Sixkiller’s house and boat, I’d kept his hunting rifle and shotgun and handgun. I lifted the .32 Ruger automatic out of the drawer, eased off the safety with my thumb. Its clip was always kept fully loaded; he’d taught me that when he’d taught me how to shoot.

Scrape. Scrape.

Up from the bed with the gun cold in my fingers. The sleep was out of my eyes now; I could make out the familiar bedroom shapes as I crept across it and into the hall.

Snap!

I knew that sound: the push-button lock on the back door releasing. I’d been foolish not to listen to Dick and have a dead-bolt lock installed instead.

Down the hall to the kitchen. Into the kitchen. I keep the swing door that leads to the enclosed porch propped open; it’s easier that way to carry in groceries, laundry back and forth to the washer and dryer. Through the opening I could tell that the prowler had the back door pulled all the way open, but I couldn’t see him clearly; he was behind the screen door and the cloudy night at his back was only a shade or two lighter than he was. Big, that much I could make out: He filled the doorway. Otherwise he was a shapeless mass of black.

He was pushing on the screen door; I heard it and the eye hook creak. Not trying to break the hook loose from the wood — that would’ve made too much noise — but creating a slit at the jamb so he could wedge something through to lift the hook free. More scraping, metal on metal, as I detoured around the dinette table, past the stove to the open swing door. My bare feet made the softest of whispers on the cold linoleum. But he wouldn’t have heard me in any case because of the sounds he was making.

It would have been easy to reach through the doorway, around to the porch light switch. But if I did that, with my eyes dilated as they were, the sudden flare would half blind me for two or three seconds; and if the light triggered him to break through instead of run away, he might have enough time to overpower me before I could get off a shot to stop him. I would shoot him only as a last resort. So I braced my left shoulder against the door edge, spread my feet, extended the automatic in a two-handed grip. It was steadied and aimed when the hook popped free, making a thin, jangling sound as it dropped. The screen door started to creak inward.

“Don’t come any farther. I have a gun and I’ll use it.”

My voice rising so suddenly out of the darkness froze him. Four or five seconds passed; then the door creaked again, louder, and the lumpy shapes of his head and shoulders appeared around its edge.

“One more step, I’ll shoot.”

Creak.

He didn’t believe I was armed, so I made him believe it. I raised the Ruger slightly and to the left and squeezed the trigger.

The report, magnified by the closed space and low ceiling, was a heavy pressure against my eardrums. The bullet went into the wall alongside the jamb, and in the muzzle flash I saw him duck his head below an upraised arm. That brief glimpse caused me to suck in my breath. I saw his eyes, bulging, wild, but that was all I saw.

He was wearing a ski mask.

In the darkness the screen door banged shut as he let go of it and backed off on the landing. Then he was thumping down the steps, off onto the brick path that angles down to the dock. It was a few seconds before my legs would work; then I was at the screen, yanking it open and rushing outside. By then he was off the path, running toward the low fence that separates my property from the closed-up cottage on the north that belongs to summer people. The absence of any nearby lights and the low, thick cloud cover made him little more than a moving shadow; his clothing was dark, too, so I couldn’t even tell what he was wearing. He vaulted the fence, stumbled, righted himself, and disappeared behind the junipers that grew at the rear of the cottage.

The wind off the lake was icy; I was aware of it all of a sudden, stabbing through the thin cotton of my pajamas, prickling my bare feet and arms. Back inside, quickly. I put the porch light on, and when my eyes adjusted I peered at the door lock. Scratched, the wood around the plate gouged; but it still worked all right. I set the button, closed the door, then rehooked the screen door. The splintered hole in the wall was about twelve inches from the jamb, at head height — exactly where I’d intended the bullet to go.

I switched on the kitchen light, entered the front room, and turned on a lamp in there. The clock over the fireplace said that it was one-thirty. The gunshot had seemed explosively loud, but the house on the south side of me was also empty — up for sale — and the noise hadn’t carried far enough to arouse any neighbors farther away on this side or across the street. When I drew back an edge of the front-window curtain, Lakeshore Road was deserted and all the houses I could see were dark. Everything looked normal, peaceful, as if the entire incident might have been a dream.

Goose bumps still covered my arms; there was a crawly sensation up and down my back. In the bedroom I put on my woolly slippers, the terry-cloth robe that was the heaviest I owned. The chill didn’t go away. I turned the furnace up over seventy and stood in front of the heat register until warm and then hot air began to pulse out.

I kept seeing his image in the muzzle flash, the upflung arm, the wild eyes bulging in the holes of the ski mask. Burglar? There hadn’t been a nighttime break-in of an occupied house — what Dick calls a “hot prowl” — in Pomo in as long as I could remember. The penalties were much more severe for that kind of crime than they were for daylight burglaries. Besides, thieves weren’t likely to wear ski masks.

Rapists wore ski masks.

Rape wasn’t uncommon in Pomo County. The home invasion kind was, but still, it happened elsewhere — it could happen here, too. Young woman living alone, a man with a sick sexual bent decides to take advantage—

If you’d like some company...

My God. The stranger on the pier tonight?

Big, and a little odd. And I’d told him we didn’t have much serious crime in Pomo. I hadn’t told him I lived alone, but when I’d said I had to take the boat home or walk two miles and another two back in the morning, the inference had been there. He’d been gone when I returned from Safeway with my groceries, but he could’ve been lurking somewhere, watching; he could’ve followed the running lights on the Chris-Craft — Lakeshore Road does what its name implies, follows the water-line all along the northwest shore — and seen where I docked and that the house was dark; he could’ve watched the house and when no one else came he’d have known for sure I was alone...

But I was jumping to conclusions. It didn’t have to be the stranger; it could be anyone, a resident as well as an outsider. And what if I hadn’t scared him off permanently? What if he came back, tonight or some other night?

I was still angry, angrier than before, because whoever he was, he’d made me afraid. That was the one thing William Sixkiller had never let me be, that I hated being more than anything else. Afraid.

In the front room I peeked out again through the drapes. Lakeshore Road was as deserted as before. I sat on the couch and picked up the phone. If I called the police station to report what had happened, it would mean patrol cars, questions, neighbors being woken up... people knowing I was afraid. But I had to tell someone, and that meant Dick. He was the only one I could talk to right now.

I tapped out his number. And it rang and rang and rang without answer.

Where was he, for heaven’s sake? Why wasn’t Dick home at 1:40 in the morning?