A wasteland of strangers (11 page)

He drained his glass, reached out to the pitcher, and slopped it full again. His hands weren't steady.

"You're disgusting, Doug," I said. "A disgusting, mean-spirited, irresponsible drunk."

My anger kindled anger in him. "You can't talk to me that way—"

"I'll talk to you any way I choose. That editorial gives me the right. You hate yourself and the whole world, but that's not enough so you take it out on everybody else. Some pretty insufferable bastards live in this town, but I thought you were better than most. Kinder, at least. But you're one of the worst. I don't want anything more to do with you."

"You don't mean that, Storm." Whining now.

"Don't I? Get off my porch and off my property. And don't come back, not for any reason. If you do, I'll call the police and have you arrested for trespassing."

For a few seconds he stared at me without moving. The hate in his eyes was for me now, as well as for himself. Then he guzzled his drink, lurched to his feet, and deliberately smashed the glass on the floor before brushing past me to the stairs, muttering, "Slut. Whore of Pomo."

"That's what it all comes down to, isn't it?" I shut my ears to whatever else he had to say, and went inside to soak away my anger and wait for John Faith's call.

Howard Wilson

ZENNA STARTED IN as soon as I walked in the door. Didn't ask how the Redding trip had gone, didn't give me even a minute of peace. Mouth like a snake's, that woman: Half the time when she opens it, venom comes spewing out. There's an old proverb, or maybe a curse—Buddhist or something—that says gossips and troublemakers and hatemongers are doomed to spend eternity hanging by their tongues. If it's true, a force somewhere already has a noose ready with Zenna's name on it.

She wasn't like that when we first started going together. Or if she was, I didn't see it. Too much in love in those days, or maybe too blinded by testosterone. Good-looking woman and I wanted her badly, but she wouldn't give in, made a lot of whispered promises about how it would be after we were married, and finally I was the one who gave in. And it wasn't worth waiting for. I may've thought so back then, but not anymore. Except for Stephanie ... but she'd come along too quick, and when the doctor told Zenna she couldn't have any more, that was when she changed or got worse. Poking her nose in everybody's business, yakking about people behind their backs, hunting dirt every place she went and with everybody she dealt with. Self-righteous, holier-than-thou. The worst kind of hypocrite.

More than ten years I've put up with it, mostly for Stephanie's sake. But I work hard, too hard sometimes, and I don't ask for much or want much out of life, and when I can't even get the little I do ask .. . well, every man has his limits. Is it any wonder I've been driven past mine?

No, it isn't. The wonder is that it didn't happen sooner.

".. . tell you, Howard," she was prattling on now, "that man is one of Satan's own. Something terrible will happen if he's allowed to run loose on our streets. You mark my words." Shrill, that voice of hers, like a razor slicing into my eardrums.

"What makes you so sure?" I asked wearily.

"If you'd seen him you wouldn't have to ask that question. He has an evil face. Pure evil."

"Man can't help how he looks."

"Howard, he's been in Pomo two days now. And all he does is drive around in that old car of his, hardly saying a word to anybody. Just looking."

"Looking at what?"

"Everything. Our house, this morning. Driving by so slowly he was hardly moving and staring right at our house."

"So? Maybe he likes this kind of old-fashioned style—"

"Oh, for heaven's sake, Howard! That's not it at all. I know why he was staring. It gives me chills just thinking about it."

"You figure he's a rapist, I suppose? Hot after housewives?"

"You're not funny, not one little bit. Rape is serious enough, but there are worse crimes."

"Such as?"

"Kidnapping. Child molesting."

"Jesus, Zenna!"

"Blaspheme all you like, but you weren't here and I was. Our house wasn't all he was staring at—he was staring at Stephanie and Kitty Waylon, too. Watching them on their way to school."

She'd been saving that, easing into it for maximum effect; I could tell by the way she said it, with a kind of triumph mixed in with the fearful condemnation. Still, the words gave me a chill. I'd lost all love and respect for my wife, but Stephanie ... I loved that kid more than anything else in the world.

"Are you sure? You weren't just imagining the worst?"

"I was there, wasn't I? I know what I saw. If I hadn't stepped out on the porch just then, the Lord knows what might've happened."

"What did you do?"

"Ran out and got the girls and drove them to school."

"Did he say anything to them? Try to get them into his car?"

"No. They didn't even know he was there."

"What'd he do when you ran out?"

"Drove away. He saw me, that's why."

"Has he been back?"

"No, thank the good Lord. But the police haven't seen fit to do their duty; he's still in town, up to the devil knows what. Claire Bishop saw him less than an hour ago—"

"You called the police?"

"Well, of course I called the police."

"And they said what?"

"What they always say. They'll look into it. But I told you, they haven't done anything—he's still roaming around free."

The edge was off my concern now. I'd been through this kind of thing too often with her—too damn often. Another false alarm, another pot of trouble stirred and boiled for little or no reason. The only danger Stephanie was likely in was from too much exposure to her mother.

I snapped open a beer, drank half before I lowered the can. It didn't take away the sour taste in my mouth. "Made a bunch of other calls, too, I'll bet. All your cronies."

"Cronies? What kind of word is that to use?"

"The mayor? You call him, too?"

"No, I didn't call Mayor Seeley."

"The newspaper?"

That produced one of her tight little smiles. "Yes, I called the Advocate. I spoke to Douglas Kent himself. He listened to what I had to say. And he did something, at least."

"What did he do?"

"Wrote an editorial," she said, and the triumph was in her voice again—sharper this time, almost savage in its self-satisfaction. She pushed today's issue under my nose. "Right there on the front page. Read it, Howard, then you'll see. Go ahead and read it."

I read it. When I was done, I didn't say a word. Zenna was waiting for me to make some comment, but if I'd opened my mouth I'd have said what I was thinking, and I wasn't ready to do that yet. Soon, but not yet.

I'd have said, "This is why, Zenna, exactly why I've been driven way past my limits." And then, with the same savage triumph in my voice, I'd have told her where I really was and what I was really doing last night when she thought I was sitting alone in a Redding motel room.

Audrey Sixkiller

DICK SAID, "I'M worried about you, Audrey. You sure you're all right?"

It was what I wanted to hear. But I couldn't help thinking: If you're so worried, why didn't you stop by instead of calling? Or at least call earlier?

"Don't I sound all right?" I said. "I'm fine, really."

"Maybe you'd better not stay there alone tonight."

"Where would I go?" Your house?

"Stay with a friend."

"I won't be driven out of my home, not even for one night."

"Then ask someone to come and stay with you."

How about you? I almost said it. And at that, what came out was a variation: "Why don't you come over after you're off duty? I'll make something to eat, and we can talk."

"... I don't know, Audrey. I'd like to, but I'm pretty tired and likely to be here late as it is. You know how Friday nights can be. I don't want to make any promises I can't keep."

Oh, I knew how Friday nights could be. Lonely. And I knew excuses when I heard them, too. I had an impulse to ask him if he was too tired to accept an invitation from Storm Carey, but that would have been senseless and catty. I didn't know he was seeing her again. Didn't want to know if he was, not right now.

"Try to make it if you can," I said. "For supper or... anytime."

"All right. In any case, I'll have one of the patrols keep an eye on your house."

"Please, Dick, I really do want to see you ... I need you tonight." Shameless. How much plainer did I have to make it? Four-letter words? Storm Carey plain?

All he said was, "I'll try."

I went into the kitchen and brewed a pot of tea. The old, bitter Elem variety made from pepperwood leaves. William Sixkiller's favorite cure-all for colds, fevers, sores, boils, and general malaise. When it was ready I carried a cup back into the living room. But instead of sitting down, I stood, sipping the tea in front of my memory cabinet.

After William Sixkiller died I gave most of the native artifacts he'd collected—woven sedge baskets, beadwork, bows and arrows, spear points—to the Pomo County museum. But I'd kept a few special items, favorites of mine and his. Looking at them, touching them, made me feel close to him. I slid the glass door open, ran fingers over the blackened bowl of the long pipe he'd carved from wild mahogany and smoked for forty years. He had helped to make the baby basket, too, that had been mine when I was an infant; the beads and bird feathers and other sleep-inducing charms attached to the hoop above the head were still bright after nearly three decades. The elderberry-shoot flute he'd played so sweetly had belonged to his grandfather. Even older was the musical bow made of a willow branch two feet long, with its twin sinew strings and the small stick you struck against the strings while you blew into the hollowed end of the bow; it dated to the days before the white man came, when, according to legend, the People were giants and the blood of the young warrior Kah-bel, slain in a battle over his beloved Lupi-yoma, daughter of powerful Chief Konocti, painted the hills red and Lupiyoma's tears of grief formed the mineral spring called Oma-racharbe.

Wise Father, I thought, what am I going to do?

Well, I knew what he would say if he were beside me now. "Stop this foolish mooning over a white man," he'd say. "Stop your white-acting ways. An Indian woman belongs with her own kind. If you wish to marry, choose a Pomo for your husband, or at least a man from another tribe."

A man like Hector Toms, Father? Handsome young Hector, my first lover. Simple, gentle, one of the finest woodworkers in Pomo County until prejudice cost him three good jobs, one after the other, and bitterness and weakness made him turn—as brother Jimmy and so many others had—to alcohol and drugs. When I went away to school at UC Berkeley, Hector had left too, drifted to Sonoma County to pick fruit and then to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas. A string of small and large cities, the new Trail of Tears. By then Native Americans were no longer being relocated to large urban centers by the Bureau of Indian Affairs— a well-intentioned (or was it?) program sponsored by the Eisenhower administration that was supposed to "mainstream" the Indian, end his reliance on Federal aid and benefits by providing employment training and housing in a more "acculturated" environment. Instead it succeeded only in uprooting 200,000 men, women, and children from their cultural and spiritual homes, dropping them into uncaring, alien cities and ultimately forcing some into menial jobs, the unintegrated majority into even more dependence on the government. The new Trail of Tears remained after the mainstreaming program was finally ruled a failure in the mid-seventies; it still remained today. And Hector had drifted onto it and was lost. The last I heard of him, years ago, he was said to be homeless in Chicago, a simple, gentle Elem woodworker with an alcohol and drug dependency living and dying alone on the cold, accul-turated streets of a white man's city.

Better off with my own kind? None of us is any better off with our own kind than we are with the white man's kind, it seems. None of us.

And to that William Sixkiller might say, "Then don't marry and bear children of any blood. Spend more time educating the white man's children. Spend more time helping the cause of our people." Yes, Father, except that I want a husband, children, and I already spend so much time teaching and in volunteer work I have little enough left for myself. Five days a week at the high school, adult education courses two evenings, graduate studies toward my master's at Berkeley in the summer; the tribal council, aid and counseling service on the rancheria, one Saturday a month at the Indian Health Center in Santa Rosa. What more can I do?

My tea had cooled. I finished it, put the cup into the kitchen sink, and wandered into the back bedroom that had once belonged to Jimmy, that I had turned into my study. There were themes on the California missions to be corrected; I'd been doing that, with half my mind, when Dick called. I sat down and looked at the top one on the stack. The computer-generated type seemed blurred even after I rubbed at my eyes with a tissue.

Dick Novak isn't the answer, I thought, more teaching and volunteer services aren't the answers. What's the answer?

Maybe there is none, at least not in this life. Live today, live tomorrow when it comes and not before. Events will happen, certain things will change—that's inevitable. Some will be good; some will make you happy, if only for a while. Live for those.

William Sixkiller would approve of that philosophy. His daughter approved of it, too. But William Sixkiller was one of the spirits now and his daughter was still among the living, and the simple truth was, she wanted the white eyes so badly he was an ache in her heart and a fever in her soul...

I made an effort to concentrate on the themes. It took an hour to grade them all. Only three were worth more than a generous C, and half a dozen deserved F's and received D's instead. F grades were discouraged by Pomo's civic-minded school board.

Time, then, to take the boat out. I'd been cooped up too long; alone on open water was much better than alone in a box. I was shrugging into my pea jacket when something smacked against the front door. I tensed until I remembered that this was Friday. Paper delivery, later than usual. I went and got it.