Snowbound

Twenty

Compulsively, Cain put on his coat at six fifty and went out of the cabin and started down into the village.

He walked at a desultory pace, only superficially aware of the cold night and the snow-hazed lights below. His destination was the Valley Inn, and his purpose was to buy himself another bottle of bourbon-he kept telling himself that this was his purpose. There was an unopened quart in the cabin’s kitchen that he had purchased in the Mercantile that morning-enough to last him through the long Sunday ahead-but the desolation in him had become so acute the ache was almost physical.

The past two days had been interminable. After returning from the village Wednesday afternoon, where he had learned with indifference of the avalanche and the fact that the valley was snowbound until after Christmas, he had been completely exhausted. Sleep came immediately that night; but it had been restless and shallow, and he had awakened from it gritty-eyed and stiff-muscled and despondent. He’d thought again of Frank McNeil’s accusations, and the threat of arrest for something he had not done, and the imminent arrival of probing county police. All right then, he’d decided, let them come and let them ask their questions, and when the episode was concluded, he damned well would get out of this Hidden Valley where people persisted in pushing their way into his privacy; he would go somewhere else, he would find a place where the people would leave him utterly alone.

Then he’d thought: But was there such a place? Was there anywhere in the world where people would leave you utterly alone? Or would it always be as it had become here: intrusions, invasions, interference? And would. the loneliness, the ambivalence continue to plague him wherever he went? It had seemed so simple in the beginning: just go to a small mountain village where no one knew you and no one cared to know you, and live apart, and die by degrees. For six months he had managed to do that, but now it had all started to collapse; it was no longer simple at all.

And tonight, he was going to the inn to buy a bottle he did not need, because he might need it and because it was Saturday night and he was desperately lonely for companionship that he wanted but did not want.

When he reached Sierra Street, he crossed directly toward the inn. Two and a half stories high, and a full block wide, it was the largest building in Hidden Valley. It had a double-balconied, redwood-shingled facade designed to give the impression of comfortable rusticity-alight now with its Christmas decorations-and two separate entrances: one to the small lobby and one to the restaurant-and-lounge that constituted most of its interior at street level. The upper floors were divided into eleven rooms, including the large apartment in which the Hallidays lived.

Cain hesitated in front of the restaurant-and-lounge entrance. Light glowed behind a large frosted window, and there was the sound of soft music and muted conversation from within. Apprehension fluttered in his stomach, but he went woodenly to the door and opened it and stepped inside.

The interior had a low, beamed ceiling and was bisected by square redwood supports. Waist-high partitions, topped with planter boxes of wood ferns, had been erected between the posts. The restaurant area to the right was empty and dark, chairs stacked on tables, closed for the winter season. Only the lounge on the left side was open, dimly lit by two electrically wired wagonwheel chandeliers suspended from the rafters. Eight booths with high, varnished wood backs were set along the partitions; dark leather stools flanked a leather-fronted bar against the far left wall. The rear wall and part of that behind the bar were adorned with deer antlers and glass-eyed deer heads; a glass-fronted case containing two matching and ornate shotguns, replete with boxes of shells; fishing creels and rods and corkboard displays of colored trout flies. Some fifteen people occupied the lounge, most of those in the booths. Only one man-Joe Garvey-sat at the bar, at the upper end, talking with Walt Halliday.

Cain brushed snow from his coat and stamped it soft-footed from his boots. Then he walked slowly and directly to the bar, not looking at the people in the booths, and sat on the end stool staring straight ahead. A full minute passed before Halliday came down to him.

“Can I get a bottle off-sale?” Cain asked him.

A frown creased Halliday’s plump face; he hesitated. “We don’t usually sell off-sale,” he said finally.

“I’ll pay extra for it.”

“No need for that. Okay-what brand?”

“Old Grandad.”

“Set you up a drink too?”

“No, I don’t… yes. Grandad straight up.”

“Chaser of some kind?”

“Nothing, just the shot.”

Halliday hesitated again, as if he wanted to say something further. Then he shrugged and poured the drink and set the shot glass in front of Cain, took a full bottle from the backbar display, put that down, made change from the twenty Cain slid across the polished surface, and went back to the other end of the plank. When Cain lifted the glass, he was peripherally conscious of Halliday and Garvey looking at him and talking in low voices. He turned slightly on his stool, so that he could see nothing but the rimed front window, and tasted his bourbon. It burned in his mouth, his throat, the hollow of his belly. He put the glass down again and lit a cigarette.

Some of the conversation seemed to have abated behind him, and he sensed that others in the room were also looking at him. He felt conspicuous, like something curious on display. Get out of here, he thought urgently, they don’t want you and you don’t want them, you don’t want any of this; go back to the cabin, be alone.

He swallowed his drink, dropped the cigarette into an ashtray, caught the bottle off the bar with his left hand, and moved hurriedly to the door. Turning out of it, he walked with rapid steps and head down to the corner-and ran into the woman just coming out of Lassen Drive from the west. The left side of his body bumped hard against her and threw her off-balance, so that she seemed about to fall into the packed snow at the curbing. Automatically Cain flung out his right hand and caught her arm, steadying her.

It was Rebecca Hughes.

She stared at him through the lightly falling flakes, and her mouth crooked into a bitter smile. “Well,” she said, “we do seem to keep running into each other, don’t we, Mr. Cain? Literally, this time.” She shrugged off his hand and started away from him.

The shame he had experienced on Wednesday returned all at once, the loneliness made a plaintive cry, and he heard himself say impetuously, “Wait Mrs. Hughes, wait, listen I’m sorry, I’m sorry I ran into you just now and I’m sorry for the way I acted the other night, I had no right to do that.”

It stopped her. Slowly, she turned to face him again. Her features smoothed somewhat, and the bitterness was tempered now with surprise and a wary puzzlement. She did not say anything, looking at him.

The act of speaking seemed to have had a strangely cathartic effect on Cain. He said again, heavy-voiced, “I’m sorry.”

Rebecca continued to look at him in steady silence. At length the wariness faded, and she sighed softly and said, “All right. I’m hardly blameless myself for the other night; it was foolish of me to have gone in the first place.”

“You only wanted what you said-some simple companionship; I suppose I knew that all along. But it’s not the same for me, can you understand that? I don’t need it. ”

“Everyone needs it, Mr. Cain.”

“All I need is to be alone-that’s all.”

Rebecca asked quietly, “Why did you all of a sudden decide to apologize to me? You just… looked at me on Wednesday afternoon. You didn’t say anything at all then.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Why couldn’t you?”

“I don’t want to talk to anybody.”

“You’re talking to me now, on your initiative.”

“Yes,” Cain said. And then, abruptly and without prior thought: “Maybe… maybe you do have to have conversations with somebody once in a while, maybe you can’t help yourself. It’s all a matter of words.”

“Words?”

“They pile up inside you,” Cain said. He felt vaguely lightheaded, now. “Thousands of words piling up and piling up until there are so many of them you can’t hold them in anymore; they just come spilling out.”

“I’ve never thought of it that way before, but yes, I can understand what you mean.” She paused. “And I guess the same is true of emotions and needs and frustrations, isn’t it? You can’t bottle them up forever either; they have to find an outlet of some kind.”

“No. No, just words. Too many unspoken words.”

Rebecca studied him for a time. “I was on my way home,” she said. “Are you going back to the cabin now?”

“Yes.”

“We could walk together as far as my house.”

No, Cain thought. And said, “All right.”

They went across Sierra Street and started up Lassen. In a sporadic way they talked of the slide, only that and nothing of a more personal nature. The spontaneity was gone; the flow of words from within him had ebbed into a trickle of words. Cain felt himself retreating again-wanted it that way, did not want it that way. When they reached the drive of the Hughes’ house, he said immediately, awkwardly, “Good night, Mrs. Hughes,” waited long enough to glimpse the small, brief smile she gave him and to hear her say, “Good night, Mr. Cain,” and then turned away. He sensed, as he continued rapidly along the road, that she was watching him; but he did not look back.

All the way up to the cabin he was aware of the sound of the wind in the surrounding trees-the lonely, lonely sound of the wind…