The Santaroga Barrier (3 page)

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Authors: Frank Herbert

BOOK: The Santaroga Barrier
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“Jaspers,” Dasein said. “I thought it was just the cheese.”
Burdeaux pursed his lips, looked thoughtful. “Oh, no, sir. Jaspers, that's in all the products from the Co-op. Didn't Jenny ever tell you?” He frowned. “Haven't you ever been up here in the valley with her, sir?”
“No.” Dasein shook his head from side to side.
“You
are
Dr. Dasein—Gilbert Dasein?”
“Yes.”
“You're the fellow Jenny's sweet on, then.” He grinned, said: “Eat up, sir. It's
good
food.”
Before Dasein could collect his thoughts, Burdeaux turned, hurried away.
“You're the fellow Jenny's sweet on,”
Dasein thought. Present tense … not past tense. He felt his heart hammering,
cursed himself for an idiot. It was just Burdeaux's way of talking. That was all it could be.
Confused, he bent to his food.
The roast beef in his first bite lived up to Burdeaux's prediction—tender, juicy. The cheese sauce on the potatoes had a flowing tang reminiscent of the beer and the sour cream.
The fellow Jenny's sweet on.
Burdeaux's words gripped Dasein's mind as he ate, filled him with turmoil.
Dasein looked up from his food, seeking Burdeaux. The waiter was nowhere in sight.
Jaspers.
It was this rich tang, this new flavor. His attention went to the bottle of beer, the non-Jaspers beer.
Not as good?
He sampled it directly from the bottle, found it left a bitter metallic aftertaste. A sip of the first beer from the mug—smooth, soothing. Dasein felt it cleared his head as it cleared his tongue of the other flavor.
He put down the mug, looked across the room, caught the bartender staring at him, scowling. The man looked away.
They were small things—two beers, an argument between a waiter and a bartender, a watchful bartender—nothing but clock ticks in a lifetime, but Dasein sensed danger in them. He reminded himself that two investigators had met fatal accidents in the Santaroga Valley—
death by misadventure …
a car going too fast around a corner, off the road into a ravine … a fall from a rocky ledge into a river—drowned.
Natural
accidents, so certified by state investigation.
Thoughtful, Dasein returned to his food.
Presently, Burdeaux brought the strawberries, hovered as Dasein sampled them.
“Good, sir?”
“Very good. Better than that bottle of beer.”
“My fault, sir. Perhaps another time.” He coughed discreetly. “Does Jenny know you're here?”
Dasein put down his spoon, looked into his dish of strawberries as though trying to find his reflection there. His mind suddenly produced a memory picture of Jenny in a red dress, vital, laughing, bubbling with energy. “No … not yet,” he said.
“You know Jenny's still a single girl, sir?”
Dasein glanced across to the card game. How leathery tan
the players' skin looked.
Jenny not married
? Dr. Piaget looked up from the card game, said something to the man on his left. They laughed.
“Has … is she in the telephone directory, Mr. Burdeaux?” Dasein asked.
“She lives with Dr. Piaget, sir. And why don't you call me Win?”
Dasein looked up at Burdeaux's sharp Moorish face, wondering suddenly about the man. There was just a hint of southern accent in his voice. The probing friendliness, the volunteered information about Jenny—it was all faintly southern, intimate, kindly … but there were undertones of something else: a questing awareness, harsh and direct. The psychologist in Dasein was fully alert now.
“Have you lived very long here in the valley, Win?” Dasein asked.
“'Bout twelve years, sir.”
“How'd you come to settle here?”
Burdeaux shook his head. A rueful half-smile touched his lips. “Oh, you wouldn't like to hear about that, sir.”
“But I would.” Dasein stared up at Burdeaux, waiting. Somewhere there was a wedge that would open this valley's mysteries to him.
Jenny not married?
Perhaps Burdeaux was that wedge. There was an open shyness about his own manner, Dasein knew, that invited confidences. He relied upon this now.
“Well, if you really want to know, sir,” Burdeaux said. “I was in the N‘Orleans jailhouse for cuttin' up.” (Dasein noted a sudden richening of the southern accent.) “We was doin' our numbers, usin' dirty language that'd make your neck hair walk. I suddenly heard myself doin' that, sir. It made me review my thinkin' and I saw it was kid stuff. Juvenile.” Burdeaux mouthed the word, proud of it. “Juvenile, sir. Well, when I got out of that jailhouse, the high sheriff tellin' me never to come back, I went me home to my woman and I tol' Annie, I tol' her we was leavin'. That's when we left to come here, sir.”
“Just like that, you left?”
“We hit the road on our feet, sir. It wasn't easy an' there
was some places made us wish we'd never left. When we come here, though, we knew it was worth it.”
“You just wandered until you came here?”
“It was like God was leadin' us, sir. This place, well, sir, it's hard to explain. But … well, they insist I go to school to better myself. That's one thing. I can speak good standard English when I want … when I think about it.” (The accent began to fade.)
Dasein smiled encouragingly. “These must be very nice people here in the valley.”
“I'm going to tell you something, sir,” Burdeaux said. “Maybe you can understand if I tell you about something happened to me here. It's a thing would've hurt me pretty bad one time, but here … We were at a Jaspers party, sir. It was right after Willa, my girl, announced her engagement to Cal Nis. And George, Cal's daddy, came over and put his arm across my shoulder. ‘Well there, Win, you old nigger bastard,' he said, ‘we better have us a good drink and a talk together because our kids are going to make us related.' That was it, Mr. Dasein. He didn't mean a thing calling me nigger. It was just like … like the way we call a pale blonde fellow here Whitey. It was like saying my skin's black for identification the way you might come into a room and ask for Al Marden and I'd say: ‘He's that red-headed fellow over there playing cards.' As he was saying it I knew that's all he meant. It just came over me. It was being accepted for what I am. It was the friendliest thing George could do and that's why he did it.”
Dasein scowled trying to follow the train of Burdeaux's meaning. Friendly to call him nigger?
“I don't think you understand it,” Burdeaux said. “Maybe you'd have to be black to understand. But … well, perhaps this'll make you see it. A few minutes later, George said to me: ‘Hey, Win, I wonder what kind of grandchildren we're going to have—light, dark or in between?' It was just a kind of wonderment to him, that he might have black grandchildren. He didn't care, really. He was curious. He found it interesting. You know, when I told Annie about that afterward, I cried. I was so happy I cried.”
It was a long colloquy. Dasein could see realization of this
fact come over Burdeaux. The man shook his head, muttered: “I talk too much. Guess I'd better …”
He broke off at a sudden eruption of shouting at the bar near the card players. A red-faced fat man had stepped back from the bar and was flailing it with a briefcase as he shouted at the bartender.
“You sons of bitches!” he screamed. “You think you're too goddamn' good to buy from me! My line isn't good enough for you! You can make better …”
The bartender grabbed the briefcase.
“Leggo of that, you son of a bitch!” the fat man yelled. “You all think you're so goddamn' good like you're some foreign country! An
outsider
am I? Let me tell you, you pack of foreigners! This is America! This is a free …”
The red-headed highway patrol captain, Al Marden, had risen at the first sign of trouble. Now, he put a large hand on the screamer's shoulder, shook the man once.
The screaming stopped. The angry man whirled, raised the briefcase to hit Marden. In one long, drawn-out second, the man focused on Marden's glaring eyes, the commanding face, hesitated.
“I'm Captain Marden of the Highway Patrol,” Marden said. “And I'm telling you we won't have any more of this.” His voice was calm, stern … and, Dasein thought, faintly amused.
The angry man lowered the briefcase, swallowed.
“You can go out and get in your car and leave Santaroga,” Marden said. “Now. And don't come back. We'll be watching for you, and we'll run you in if we ever catch you in the valley again.”
Anger drained from the fat man. His shoulders slumped. He swallowed, looked around at the room of staring eyes. “I'm glad to go,” he muttered. “Nothing'd make me happier. It'll be a cold day in hell when I ever come back to your dirty little valley. You stink. All of you stink.” He jerked his shoulder from Marden's grasp, stalked out through the passage to the lobby.
Marden returned to the card game shaking his head.
Slowly, the room returned to its previous sounds of eating and conversation. Dasein could feel a difference, though. The salesman's outburst had separated Santarogans and transients.
An invisible wall had gone up. The transient families at their tables were hurrying their children, anxious to leave.
Dasein felt the same urgency. There was a pack feeling about the room now—hunters and hunted. He smelled his own perspiration. His palms were sweaty. He noted that Burdeaux had gone.
This is stupid!
he thought.
Jenny not married?
He reminded himself that he was a psychologist, an observer. But the observer had to observe himself.
Why am I reacting this way?
he wondered.
Jenny not married?
Two of the transient families already were leaving, herding their young ahead of them, voices brittle, talking about going “on to the next town.”
Why can't they stay here?
he asked himself.
The rates are reasonable.
He pictured the area in his mind: Porterville was twenty-five miles away, ten miles outside the valley on the road he had taken. The other direction led over a winding, twisting mountain road some forty miles before connecting with Highway 395. The closest communities were to the south along 395, at least seventy miles. This was an area of National Forests, lakes, fire roads, moonscape ridges of lava rock—all of it sparsely inhabited except for the Santaroga Valley. Why would people want to travel through such an area at night rather than stay at this inn?
Dasein finished his meal, left the rest of the beer. He had to talk this place over with his department head, Dr. Chami Selador, before making another move. Burdeaux had left the check on a discreet brown tray—three dollars and eighty-six cents. Dasein put a five dollar bill on the tray, glanced once more around the room. The surface appeared so damn' normal! The card players were intent on their game. The bartender was hunched over, chatting with two customers. A child at a table off to the right was complaining that she didn't want to drink her milk.
It wasn't normal, though, and Dasein's senses screamed this fact at him. The brittle surface of this room was prepared to shatter once more and Dasein didn't think he would like what
might be revealed. He wiped his lips on his napkin, took his briefcase and headed for the lobby.
His suitcase stood atop the desk beside the register. There was a buzzing and murmurous sound of a switchboard being operated in the room through the doors at the rear corner. He took the suitcase, fingered the brass room key in his pocket—two fifty-one. If there was no phone in the room, he decided he'd come down and place his call to Chami from a booth.
Feeling somewhat foolish and letdown after his reaction to the scene in the dining room, Dasein headed for the stairs. A few eyes peered at him over the tops of newspapers from the lobby chairs. The eyes looked alert, inquisitive.
The stairs led to a shadowy mezzanine—desks, patches of white paper. A fire door directly ahead bore the sign: “To Second Floor. Keep this door closed.”
The next flight curved left, dim overhead light, wide panels of dark wood. It led through another fire door into a hall with an emergency exit sign off to the left. An illuminated board opposite the door indicated room two fifty-one down the hall to the right. Widely spaced overhead lights, the heavy pile of a maroon carpet underfoot, wide heavy doors with brass handles and holes for old-fashioned passkeys gave the place an aura of the Nineteenth Century. Dasein half expected to see a maid in ruffled cap, apron with a bow at the back, long skirt and black stockings, sensible shoes—or a portly banker type with tight vest and high collar, an expanse of gold chain at the waist. He felt out of place, out of style here.

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