A wasteland of strangers (8 page)

Before I showered I wadded up the sheets and pillowcases and the bathroom towel he'd used and took them out to the garbage. The girl would be in to clean today and she would remake the bed, but I didn't want her to have to handle the Hunger's dirty leavings. Some more residue of propriety, I supposed. And a pathetic residue at that: I seem to care more about a cleaning woman's feelings than I do about my own.

So I sat alone on the porch and watched the clouds race across the sky, creating patterns of light and shadow on the lake's surface, on the brown and dark-green hills, and drank more coffee to ease the dull hangover pain behind my eyes, and thought about Neal. The first night we'd met, at the party to celebrate the opening of a new winery in the Alexander Valley: the shy daughter of a Ukiah farmer and the handsome real-estate developer with hair that was already starting to silver even though he was only a dozen years older than my twenty-three. The first time we went to bed, and how patient he was with me ... the evening at the Top of the Mark in San Francisco when he asked me to marry him ... the month-long honeymoon cruise in the Caribbean ... the day this house he'd built for us was finished and the way we'd celebrated, naked in bed, drinking Mumm's, pouring it on each other's body and then licking it off. . .

Those, and so many more memories. But I wasn't allowed to be alone with them this morning. Other thoughts intruded, another face appeared in my mind's eye—not the face of last night's incubus but the ugly visage of John Faith. An effort to block it out did no good; instead it was Neal's image that blurred and turned to shadow and faded away.

The Hunger wasn't satisfied. I'd known it in the shower earlier, when the mouth began to stir again inside me. For some reason it still wanted John Faith. Another surrogate like all the others, another incubus . . . or was he? The Hunger seemed to sense a difference, something to do with the part that remained hidden from me. It wanted Faith—that was enough for me to know now.

It wanted him and so I would have to find a way to feed it what it craved.

I left the porch, the lordly view, the warm memories of Neal, everything that had once meant something, and went to do the Hunger's bidding.

Audrey Sixkiller

I KEPT BLANKING out on my class notes, on what the kids were saying and doing. Usually I have no problem maintaining order in my classes; today I couldn't even maintain order in my own mind. The prowler last night had shaken me more than I cared to admit. That, and not being able to reach Dick until after three, and then not being able to sleep again after he left. Zombie woman. I probably shouldn't have come to school at all, but at dawn it had seemed more important not to give in to the anxiety, to plunge right back into my normal routine. Now I wasn't so sure.

Well, I could still take the afternoon off. Hang on until noon, then go home and regroup in private.

I wondered if Dick had found out anything. Chances were he hadn't. He'd said he would have a talk with John Faith, but if the man was guilty he would hardly admit it; all Dick could do, really, was to try to scare him into leaving Pomo County and not coming back. And if he was innocent, there was nothing to point to anyone else. Dick had come back this morning, a while before I left for school, and searched my yard and the neighboring yard and hadn't found even a scrap of evidence. He'd tried to convince me that the shot I fired would keep the intruder, whoever he was, from trying it again, but we both knew that wasn't necessarily true. Being shot at could just as well make a would-be rapist even more determined to finish what he'd started.

Dick worried me, too. His concern had been genuine but he'd seemed remote, as if other things were weighing heavily on his mind. All he'd say when I asked where he'd been so late was that he couldn't sleep and had gone for a long drive around the lake. He suffered from insomnia—Verne Erickson once told me it started after his wife left him—and quite a few insomniacs are night riders, but he'd never admitted before to being one of those. There was so much about him I knew little or nothing about.

Yes, and a few things I did know and wished I didn't. I couldn't help wondering if he was seeing Storm Carey again, if that was where he'd really been last night...

Giggle. Giggle, giggle.

The sounds penetrated, and all at once I realized the entire class— my ten o'clock, California History II—was staring at me. I'd been sitting there God knew how long, lost inside myself. The expressions on their faces told me what they'd be saying to their friends later on. "Wow, Ms. Sixkiller went brain-dead for a little while this morning." Or "It was, like, you know, she lapsed into some kind of Indian trance thing."

I cleared my throat. "Okay. Where were we?"

"We were right here," Anthony Munoz said. "Where were you?"

That broke them up. I laughed with them; you don't get anywhere with kids nowadays by being either authoritarian or humorless, a lesson a couple of Pomo High's other teachers have yet to learn. And Anthony was the class clown, a leader the others followed. A poor student, barely passing, and a sometime troublemaker, particularly when he was around his older brother. Mateo was a bad influence—drugs, antiauthority behavior, Attitude with a capital A. He'd been expelled two years ago when another teacher and I caught him using cocaine inside the school. Anthony looked up to him; it troubled me that he might be led in the same direction, drop out or get himself expelled, too, one of these days. Underneath, Anthony wasn't a bad kid. All he needed was to use common sense and develop a purpose in his life, one that would settle him down. Meanwhile, you had to walk a very careful line with him.

I glanced at my notes. "Upper California under Spanish rule, right? Established as a province of the newly established Mexican republic. What year was that, Anthony?"

"What year was what?"

"That California became a province of Mexico."

"Who knows, man?"

"And who cares, right?"

A little more laughter.

"Well, I do," I said. "And you should too, un poco. Come on, Anthony. What year did California become a Mexican province?"

"I dunno."

Better, not quite as smart-ass. "I'll give you a hint. It was twenty years after it became a province of Spain."

"Yeah? What year was that?"

"1804. You can add twenty and four, can't you?"

He scowled at me. But then his girlfriend, Trisha Marx, leaned over and poked his arm and said, "Yeah, Anthony, twenty plus four equals fifty-three, right?" Everybody laughed again. Anthony decided to laugh with them. He said, "No, fifty-seven, you dumb Angla," and there was more laughter and then they settled down.

I treated them to a five-minute monologue on the period 1824 to 1844, the political turbulence that sprang up then and its root causes: anticlericalism, separatist sentiment, dissatisfaction with Mexican rule, demands for secularization of the missions. I was defining secularization for them—the smarter ones were taking notes, those like Anthony looking bored and getting ready to bolt—when the bell rang.

I reminded them of the reading assignment for next week and let them go. The room emptied in the usual jostling, noisy rush. I was arranging my notes for my next class when a tentative voice spoke my name.

Trisha Marx, alone and looking nervous. A bright girl, Trisha; if she applied herself, her grades would be much better and she'd have a more promising future than most kids in Pomo. But she'd fallen under Anthony Munoz's spell, begun hanging out with him and his brother and their crowd, skirting the edges of real trouble. She needed the same thing Anthony did: a settling purpose in her life. I liked her and I hoped for her. In some ways she reminded me of myself at her age.

"Yes, Trisha?"

"You suppose I could ... well..."

"Yes?"

"... Like, talk to you about something?"

"Class work?"

"No. It's, you know, personal."

"Important?"

"Kind of, yeah."

"Of course we can talk. But I have another class ..."

"I don't mean now. Later. I've got something to do first."

"Well, I'm thinking of playing hooky this afternoon. And you know where I live. Why don't you come by my house and we can talk there?"

"Um, when?"

"After school. Say around four?"

"I don't know," she said, "maybe it'd be better if I do what I have to tonight, instead of. .. um, yeah, it would be." She nibbled dark-red lipstick off her lower lip. "Would it be okay . . . tomorrow morning? Could I come by then?"

"If it's early, by nine. I have a tribal council meeting at the Elem rancheria at eleven."

"I'll be there before nine. I . . . thanks, Ms. Sixkiller." And she hurried out, clutching her books.

Now, what was that all about?

But even as other kids began to drift in for my next class, my mind shifted back to Dick's absence last night. I wanted to believe he wouldn't be foolish enough to take up with Storm Carey again, but I knew men well enough to understand that once bitten, twice shy was an axiom that didn't always apply. If she crooked her finger in the right way, waggled her tail on a night when he was feeling lonesome . . . yes, it was very possible he'd go running to her. If he was seeing her again, how could I hope to compete? I could be just as good in bed, but a man couldn't tell it by looking at me. One sideways glance at Storm Carey and he'd know it instantly.

I thought wryly of the old Pomo stories about the bear people, men and women who had the power to transform themselves and to go prowling at night in their hides and cloaks of feathers. They were fierce defenders of their territory; when they encountered interlopers, others like them or spooks such as the walepurg tremendous battles were fought using magic powers, great leaps into the air, bellows so loud they caused landslides, eardrum-shattering shrieks and whistles—whatever it took to intimidate and then to vanquish or destroy their rivals.

Too bad I couldn't be one of the bear people and have their powers for just one night. . .

Zenna Wilson

NO MORE THAN a minute after Stephanie and Kitty Waylon left for school I happened to walk out onto the front porch, to trim the hanging fern as I'd been meaning to do for days. If I hadn't gone out there . . . well, I don't dare let myself think about that. Thank the Lord I did go out.

He was there on the street, the bogey who'd scared me half to death in Treynor's Hardware. Driving by our house in a disreputable old sports car, the window rolled down, inching along with his ugly face turned my way, staring first at the house, and then, as he passed it, staring at the girls skipping along the sidewalk, Steffie bundled in her cute fur-trimmed parka and Kitty wearing that tattered old brown thing her mother lets her out in public in. And the smile on his dirty mouth was nothing short of lewd.

I nearly had a seizure. By the time I raced down the steps and across the lawn I was gasping for breath and all I could manage was a weak shout that not even the girls heard. I don't know if he saw me or not. He probably did, because he kept on going into the next block, though he didn't bother to speed up so much as a hair. And he was still watching Stephanie and Kitty in his mirror—I swear I could see the tilt of his head through the back window.

The girls didn't know what was going on, poor things, when I ran up all excited and out of breath and hugged them both. I didn't want to scare them, so I made myself calm down before I asked, "Did that man say anything to you? Anything at all?"

They both said, "What man?" They hadn't even noticed him!

I made them come back to the house with me and get in the car, and I drove them to school. It would've been sheer madness to let them walk with that intruder still around somewhere. He may not have said anything, but the way he'd been looking, and that lewd smile on his wicked face... well. I warned Stephanie again to beware of strangers, to never, ever, under any circumstances, let any strange man come near her and especially not a big ugly one driving an old red sports car. I warned Kitty, too, no doubt the first time the child had ever had such good sense put into her head, Linda Waylon being the kind of woman she is, off in a fog half the time and forever chattering nonsense the whole time she does my hair.

Well, I was still in a state when I got back from the school. There was no sign oihim, but I didn't let that stop me, not after what I'd seen, what might've happened if I hadn't gone out on the porch when I did. I called the police right away. Chief Novak wasn't in, so I had to talk to a female officer, Delia Feldman, and I didn't mince words with her. The police weren't the only ones I called, either. People have a right to know when there's a threat in their midst. I'd be a sorry soldier in God's Christian army if I kept silent, wouldn't I?

Richard Novak

I FINALLY TRACKED down John Faith a little after ten o'clock. At the one place in Pomo I least expected to find him—Cypress Hill Cemetery.

I'd been all through town, half around the lake, and just missed him twice—once at the Northlake Cafe, where he'd had a late breakfast while I was out talking to Harry Richmond, and once on Redbud Street. Delia Feldman, the day sergeant in charge, had had a frantic call from Zenna Wilson, who claimed Faith had been stalking her daughter and a playmate on their way to school. The Wilson woman was a nuisance and a wolf-crier, and the claim was likely another of her hysterical fantasies; still, after the prowler at Audrey's home last night, I wasn't about to treat any report of suspicious activity lightly.

But there was no sign of Faith or his Porsche in the Redbud neighborhood, and that frustrated me even more. I had no real reason to suspect the man of any wrongdoing, just the vague uneasiness he'd stirred in me yesterday, but there was a slippery, secretive quality to the way he kept moving around town, one place to another with no apparent motive. I should've gone out to Lakeside Resort as soon as I left Audrey's the first time, rousted him out of bed, and to hell with protocol and a natural reluctance to hassle a man without provocation. But instead I'd gone to the station, given Verne Erickson the Porsche's license number, and had him start a computer background check on Faith—find out if he was wanted for anything, if he had a criminal record of any kind.