Snowbound (10 page)

“All right?” Brodie said.

“Yeah, all right,” Kubion said, and went out into the chill, rarefied air. When he got to the enclosed garage tacked onto the lakeward side of the cabin, he saw that snow had piled up in two-foot drifts against the doors. Shit. He stood staring at it for a moment and then lifted his eyes and looked down a long, gradual slope and across a white meadow at the frozen, snow-coated surface of Mule Deer Lake. Pines and taller firs crowded in close to the southern and western shores, but congregated along the eastern shore, where a row of white-fingered piers reached out into the water, were several other cabins and houses and summer lodges. Most of them were unoccupied now, abandoned-looking beneath canvases of snow.

Some bitching country, he thought. The exact center of nowhere. How anyone could live in a place like this the year round was beyond him. Nothing but snow and ice and bitter wind and maybe an influx of stupid fishermen and hunters in season—no action, nothing to do, a goddamn prison with trees and rocks and snow for bars.

He turned and went into the woodshed—looks like an outhouse, he thought,
some
bitching place—which was situated at the rear of the property. The cabin, a double-tiered A-frame fashioned of bark-stripped redwood siding, sat on a projection of granite at the long slope’s upper edge. Flanked by trees to the north and east, through which its private and currently snowpacked access lane wound upward from Mule Deer Lake Road, it was completely isolated; the nearest dwelling was a fifth of a mile away. The cabin belonged to a man named Brendikian, a long-retired bunco gambler who had amassed a small fortune during and after the Second World War with trimmed and shaded cards and suction-bevel missout dice; then he had gone into score financing and safe housing for the independents working outside the Circle. This was just one of several secluded safe houses he had bought and on which he paid taxes through dummy California and Nevada corporations—totally untraceable should one of them be knocked over. Loxner had once done a job of some sort for Brendikian and had had no difficulty arranging for the cabin’s use at three bills a week.

Kubion found a curve-bladed snow shovel in the woodshed, came back, and cleared the area in front of the doors. Then he threw the shovel to one side and pulled the two halves open. Even though the car had been sheltered overnight, there was a thin film of ice on the windows; the garage felt like the interior of a frozen-food locker. He scraped away the ice, got the car started and out of the garage, and went down to Mule Deer Lake Road.

The village plow had been along there earlier in the morning, clearing it and pushing the snow into windrows at the shoulders; the pavement was slick with ice in parts, and Kubion drove slowly into the village. On Sierra Street, he parked in front of Tribucci Bros. Sport Shop, wedging his car against the long snow mound at the curbing. Music drifted down to him as he stepped out. The hicks always went in for Christmas in a big way—carols and trees and decorations and stockings on the mantel and sleigh rides, all the horse-shit. And this was a hick village if ever there was one. Populated by a bunch of half-witted Eskimos in wooden igloos. Christ!

He went into the shop, and a four-eyed balding guy was behind the counter, wearing a shirt with the name Vince stitched over the left-hand pocket. This Vince smiled at Kubion—friendly, vacuous, sure enough a damned Eskimo. Kubion smiled back at him, playing the game, and bought three packages of cigarettes. Vince wished him a Merry Christmas as he turned to leave, and Kubion said, “Sure, Merry Christmas,” thinking it was anything but, after the bust in Sacramento.

Outside again, he walked toward the overloud singing. Tomato sauce and Veal Milanese, you’d think everything was beautiful and they were having a big celebration. Still —what the hell. You had to eat, and there was no point in creating a hassle with Brodie; let him make his Veal Milanese, let him make anything he wanted as long as he didn’t try to make
him.

Smiling faintly, Kubion entered the Mercantile. The store was fairly crowded, noisy, and smelled of wool and dampness and pitch pine burning in the potbellied stove. Kubion had seen most of the people there at one time or another during the previous week, though he did not know or care to know any of their names. But Pat Garvey was the dumpy blond woman being waited on by Maude Fredericks, and the three men grouped around the potbelly rapping about a forthcoming blizzard were Joe Garvey—big, work-roughened, with fierce black eyes and a sprinkling of pockmarks on his flushed cheeks; stooped and fox-faced Sid Markham, who operated a fix-it shop from his Mule Deer Lake home; and Walt Halliday. Matt Hughes stood inside the Post Office enclosure, sorting the mail which had just come in from Soda Grove.

Kubion went to stand near the front counter, close to the trio by the stove. They stopped talking about the weather and were silent for a moment; then Halliday said, “Either of you been over to see McNeil this morning?”

“Yeah, a little while ago,” Garvey said. “The way he’s yelling, everybody in the county knows the cafe was broken into last night.”

“Funny damned thing: nothing stolen, nothing damaged.”

“Don’t make much sense, I’ll grant.”

“Lew Coopersmith find out anything yet, you know?”

“Talked to him just before I came in here,” Markham said. “He hadn’t learned a thing then.”

“He been to see that Zachary Cain?” Garvey asked. “McNeil seems to think Cain might have done it.”

“Didn’t say if he had or not. But you ask me, Cain didn’t have nothing to do with it. Sure, he keeps full to himself, but that don’t make him a criminal. And keeping his own counsel is more than you can say for that fart McNeil, always running off at the mouth the way he does.”

“I don’t know,” Halliday said. “It doesn’t seem natural for a man to live all alone like that, never saying a word to anybody. You—”

He broke off as the door opened and a bearded, faintly bearish man came inside. He moved up to the counter, bloodshot eyes fixed directly in front of him, and stood next to Kubion; the three men at the stove watched him, silent again. This must be Cain, Kubion thought—they act like the poor bastard had leprosy. What a bunch of silly turds. If I were in his shoes, I wouldn’t stop with breaking into their café; I’d burn the whole village to the ground, do them all a favor.

Pat Garvey finished with her purchases, detoured around Cain, and tugged at her husband’s sleeve. “Sure, all right,” Garvey said, nodded to Halliday and Markham, and followed his wife out of the store. Maude Fredericks came down to where Kubion was standing, asked him if she could be of service; he told her he wanted two cans of tomato sauce, and she smiled as if he’d ordered a side of beef and fifty pounds of canned goods and went over to the grocery section.

The door opened again, and Verne Mullins came in briskly. He raised a hand to the three men around the stove, went directly to the Post Office enclosure, and said loudly, “Morning, Matt.” He was fat and had a huge red-veined nose and the bright, darting eyes of a bird; a bluff, somewhat testy exterior masked a soft Irish heart. Like Lew Coopersmith, he did not look his age: sixty-nine, come February.

Hughes turned, smiling. “Morning, Verne.”

“Any mail for me?”

“Couple of things. Wait—here you go.”

Mullins took the envelopes and shuffled through them; then he held one up—thin and brown, with the words “Southern Pacific Retirement Bureau” in the upper left-hand corner—and said, “About time they decided to send my check along. Man works forty-five years for the same company, never late and never sick a day of it, and then when he retires, he’s got to fight for the damned money he paid into the retirement fund all along.”

Hughes winked at him. “That’s big business for you.”

“Now ain’t that the truth?” Mullins said. “Bank open this morning, Matt? Figure I better cash this right off, so it doesn’t bounce on me.”

“Bank’s always open for you, Verne.”

Hughes came out of the enclosure and over to the counter. Mullins tore open the envelope, took the check out, endorsed it, and handed it across. “Put it mostly in twenties if you can,” he said. “Got to send a few off to my grandkids for the holidays.”

“Sure thing.”

Hughes took the check into his office, closed the door. Maude Fredericks said to Kubion, “Will there be anything else, sir?”

“What?”

“I have your tomato sauce. Was there something else?”

“No,” Kubion said. “No, that’s it.”

He gave her a dollar bill, and she rang up the purchase on the old-fashioned, crank-type register. She handed him his change, put the two cans into a paper sack. Hughes came out of his office with a sheaf of bills in his hand and counted them out to Verne Mullins—four hundred and fifty dollars. Mullins tucked them into a warn leather billfold, said, “Thanks, Matt, you’re a good lad,” and started for the door.

Hughes called after him. “Don’t forget church on Sunday, Verne.”

“Now would a good Irish Protestant like me be forgetting church on the Sunday before Christmas? I’ll be there, don’t you worry; somebody’s got to put a dime in the collection plate.”

Hughes laughed, and Mullins went out as Maude Fredericks said to Cain, “Yes, please?”

“Bottle of Old Grandad,” Cain said.

Kubion picked up his paper sack and left the store. Bank, he was thinking. Safe in that office. Four hundred and fifty dollars without even looking at the check first. If this Hughes operates a kind of unofficial banking service, if he regularly cashes checks for the people who live here, how much does he keep on hand?

Hell, Kubion told himself then, you’re starting to think like a punk. A hick village like this, for Christ’s sake, the amount in that safe
has
to be penny-ante. We need a score, sure, but something big, something damned big now. And you don’t crap on safe ground to begin with, especially not with the kind of heat we’re carrying. Forget it.

He went up the snow-tracked sidewalk to his car.

When the telephone rang at four o’clock, Rebecca knew immediately that it was Matt and that he was calling to tell her he wouldn’t be home again that night. She put her book aside and stared across the living room to where the unit sat on a pigskin-topped table. Ring. Silence. Ring. Silence. Ring. I won’t answer it, she thought—and then stood up slowly and walked over to the table and picked up the handset.

“Yes, Matt,” she said.

“Hello, dear. How did you know it was me?”

“I’m psychic, how else?”

He laughed softly. “I just called to tell you I won’t be home again until late tonight. Neal Walker wants me to go to the City Council meeting in Coldville, and I—”

“All right,” she said.

“I’ll try not to be too late.”

“All right.”

“Rebecca—is something the matter?”

“Now what could possibly be the matter?”

“Well, you sound tired. Are you feeling well?”

“Lovely,” she said. “Have a nice time, won’t you?”

“Yes. Don’t wait up.”

“I wouldn’t think of it. Good-bye, Matt.”

Rebecca put the receiver down without waiting to hear if he had anything further to say. She stood there stiffly, thinking: How many times have we played that same little scene? Fifty, a hundred? And such trite dialogue, like something written by a third-rate playwright. Rebecca Hughes: character in a pointless drama. Reciting her lines, going through the motions, while the unseen audience watches in boredom and suppresses snickers because the entire episode is so totally and ridiculously conventional.

She went to the main hall and along it into the kitchen. Earlier in the day she had gone down to the Mercantile to get coffee, and she had had the percolator on ever since she returned; she poured another cup—did that make ten for the day, or was it fifteen?—and stood drinking it by the table. Through the window over the sink, she could see white-flecked darkness: snowing again, a whipping veil of snow. Beginnings of a heavy storm. She could remember a time when she relished one of these mountain winter blizzards —curled up with Matt on the rug in front of the fireplace, insulated against the turbulence without, drinking hot eggnog and perhaps making a little love in the crackling glow of the fir-log fire. Soft, shared warmth and soft, shared love.

And wasn’t that, too, as trite as the rest of it?

I don’t want to be alone tonight, she thought. I don’t think I can stand being alone again tonight. But where could she go? The Valley Inn? No, there would be friendly, probing questions as to Matt’s whereabouts, and she would have to repeat his lie and then listen to them talk about what a fine, upstanding man he was, and all in all it would be worse than being alone. Ann Tribucci? Ann was her closest friend in the valley, though Rebecca had at no time been able to talk to her about personal matters; she had wanted to often enough, to purge herself woman to woman, but she could never quite manage the courage. Tonight would be no different. If anything, seeing Ann tonight would make things worse: the previous weekend, she and Johnny had moved temporarily from their home near Mule Deer Lake to Vince and Judy Tribucci’s house—Ann hadn’t wanted to be alone out there with the baby coming—and Rebecca would have to face all four of them; she would have to witness the solicitous way Johnny looked at his wife and the happiness that was theirs with the baby due so soon now. . . .