Snowbound by Bill Pronzini Read Free Book Online Page B

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....

Six
     
    In the living room of his brother’s Eldorado Street house, John Tribucci sat with his wife, Ann, and played that fine old prospective-parents game known as Choosing a Name for the Baby
    “I still think,” Ann said, “that if it’s a boy, he should be called John Junior.” She was sitting uncomfortably, hugely, on the sofa, one hand resting on the swell of her abdomen; beneath the high elastic waist of the maternity dress she wore even her breasts seemed swollen to twice their normal size. Long-legged and normally slender, she had high cheekbones and rich-toned olive skin and straight, silky black hair parted in the middle—clear testimony to her part-Amerind heritage, her great-grandmother having been a full-blooded Miwoc. Pregnant or not, she was the most beautiful and the most sensual woman Tribucci had ever known.
    He said, “One Johnny around the house is plenty. Besides, I refuse to be prematurely