Snowbound

Five

Lying not-quite-drunk in the darkened cabin bedroom, Cain felt a sense of acute loneliness that was for the first time disassociated from Angie and Lindy and Steve.

The day had been another of the bad ones, filled with painful memories of his family that deepened what was an already mordant despair. But with the coming of darkness, those were not the only memories which had plagued him. Inexplicably, he found himself thinking of things he had locked away in a corner of his mind for the past six months.

There was his work, his abandoned profession. He had been an architect-a good one, a dedicated craftsman-and he recalled how it had been and how you could lose yourself in mathematics and blueprints and sheer creativity, and the way you felt when you saw one of your designs taking shape in wood and glass and stone, standing complete, an entity you alone had conceived.

There were the friends with whom he had willfully severed all relations, by disappearing from San Francisco without word shortly after the accident: Don Collins, another senior employee of the architectural firm for which he had worked and his closest friend; Bert Rhymer, whom he had known since their collegiate days at Stanford; Barry Kells, Fred Gaines, Walt Yamaguchi. And all the easy confidences they had exchanged, the interests they had shared, the laughter they had known.

There were the simple pleasures and relaxations, the little things that rounded out and made complete a man’s life: the look of San Francisco, the multifaceted jewel of lights that was The City on a warm spring or summer night; drinking ice-chilled beer and fishing languidly for bass beneath the cottonwoods and willows on the narrow waterways of the San Joaquin Delta; sailing on the Bay on bright windy afternoons, venturing under the Golden Gate Bridge and out onto the Pacific beyond Land’s End for a glimpse of San Francisco as the seafarers saw it; reading books and viewing old movies on television and listening to the immortal threads of sound woven long ago by Bix and Kid Ory and Satchmo and W. C. Handy. These, yes, and a dozen more.

The memories flooded his mind unbidden, unwanted, and he could not seem to consume enough alcohol to drive them back into that mental corner. The loneliness was born then, selfish pathos, and because he didn’t want it and could not reconcile it, he was angry with himself and almost desperately uneasy. The normality of his past life was dead and buried-he too was dead, inside where it counted-and even at Christmas, even if miracles were possible and the effort was worth making, you could not resurrect the dead. But the loneliness persisted, creating a senseless paradox: hollow man who wants and needs to be alone, and is lonely.

Cain lay motionless on the bed, with his face turned toward the closed door-vaguely aware of the thin strip of light filtering in beneath it, aware that he had not shut off the lamps when he’d quit the front room a few minutes earlier. The hell with it, he thought. The hell with the lamps. He moved his head in a quadrant then and stared at the closet door opposite. Inside, the 30.06 Savage was propped against the back wall, fully loaded, where he’d put it when he first came to Hidden Valley. He could not get up and go over there tonight any more than he had been able to do it any of the other nights. He simply did not have the guts to kill himself, the fact of that was inescapable; he had found it out on the evening three days after the accident, when he had left the hotel room in downtown San Francisco, driven out to Oyster Point, got the rifle from the trunk and loaded it and put the muzzle into his mouth, finger stiff on the trigger, and sat there for thirty minutes that way, sweat drenching him, trying to pull that trigger and not being able to do it. It would always be as it had been on that night-but that did not stop him from thinking about it, the single shot that would end all the suffering and allow him the same oblivion which he had through his carelessness inflicted on Angie, on Lindy, on Steve…

“Christ!” Cain said aloud, and reached over to drag the bourbon bottle and an empty glass from the nightstand. He poured the glass half-full, drank all of it in two convulsive swallows, gagged, felt the liquor churning hot and acrid in his stomach.

Lonely. Lonely!

He swung his feet off the bed and went shakily into the bathroom and knelt in front of the toilet and vomited a half dozen times, painfully. When there was nothing left, he stood up and rinsed his mouth from the sink tap, washed his face and neck in the icy mountain water. Then he returned to the bed and sprawled out prone, breathing thickly.

Angie and the kids, gone, gone.

But not architecture, not San Francisco, not Don Collins and Bert Rhymer-not me.

Lonely.

No!

Lonely, lonely, lonely…