Snowbound (8 page)

He’d decided finally that he would just have to take care of it on his own—control himself when the headaches came on, work it out the same way he worked out a difficult score. He hadn’t been able to do it yet, but he would because he had to in order to keep on working and keep on balling. Things would smooth out all right. Hadn’t they always smoothed out for him in the past?

Kubion did not think of any of this as they drove along the snowswept and deserted main street of the village. There was only the throbbing pain in his head, and the jangling of his nerves, and the bitter frustration of the ripoff that had gone sour in Sacramento, and the overpowering, irrational need to smash something or somebody. He lit another cigarette, staring out through the windshield at the Christmas lights which still burned above the street, the buildings all unlighted save for more Christmas bulbs decorating the façade of the Valley Inn and two squares of yellow which came through its misted front windows. The red and blue and green glow of the bulbs limned his dark face surrealistically—a lean face fashioned of hard, vertical lines that gave it a somehow unfinished appearance, as if it had never been properly planed off and you could, if you looked closely enough, see the marks of a sculptor’s chisel. In normal light the darkness of his skin coloring, the sooty black of his hair and eyebrows, the heavy beard shadow combined to create about him a charred look, like a man recently emerged from a coal fire.

Beside him Brodie said the first words any of them had spoken in thirty minutes: “Not even eight thirty and they’ve rolled up the sidewalks already.”

Kubion said nothing, sucking at the filter of his cigarette.

There were rustling sounds in the rear seat, and Loxner said, “Jesus, we finally here?” His voice was thick; Brodie had bought him a pint of gin when they stopped to put on the chains in Nevada City—antiseptic for his arm and anesthesia for the pain, not wanting to chance buying bandages or pharmaceuticals with the word out that one of them was wounded.

“Finally here,” Brodie answered.

“All right if I sit up now?”

“Come ahead. There’s nobody on the streets.”

Loxner sat up, blinking. He was the same age as Kubion, running to fat in the middle from too much ale and food; he had thinning hair the color of tarnished copper and the beginnings of bulldog jowls. “My arm feels kind of numb now,” he said. “But I got to get something on it as soon as we get to the cabin, iodine or something. You don’t treat a gunshot wound and take care of it, you get infection. Gangrene, maybe.”

“Shut up with your whining,” Kubion said.

“Hey, I’m not whining. It’s just that I—”

“Shut up! I’ve been smelling your blood for five hours now, and I don’t need to listen to you shit at the mouth.”

“Take it easy, Earl,” Brodie said.

“Stop telling me to take it easy, you son of a bitch!”

Brodie took his foot off the gas and turned his head and looked at Kubion. He was tall, fair-haired, narrow-hipped, and looked like one of those smiling pretty-boy types Kubion had seen around the Miami resort hotels, looking for middle-aged and moneyed pussy; he had violet-blue eyes that were normally soft but which could harden until they resembled chunks of amethyst quartz—and they were like that now. “I’m no son of a bitch,” he said slowly, “and I don’t like being called one.”

“Fuck you, Brodie. You hear that? Fuck you!”

Brodie stared at him a moment longer, his hands tight on the wheel. Then he seemed to shake himself slightly, and his fingers relaxed; he put his foot back on the accelerator and his eyes fully on the road again. They were beyond the village now, at the junction of Macklin Lake Road and Mule Deer Lake Road. Silently he swung the car right, the tire chains making thin crunching sounds on the packed snow which covered the roadway, and almost immediately they began to wind through thick stands of lodgepole pine. The car’s headlights, made furry by the falling snow, tunneled through the darkness.

Kubion said, “Well, Brodie?”

Leaning over the back seat, establishing a small barrier between the two men in front, Loxner said, “You remember if there’s bandages and iodine at the cabin, Vic?”

“Yeah, I think so,” Brodie answered. “The place is stocked up with everything else.”

“We haven’t eaten anything since breakfast, you know that? Once I do something about this arm, it’s maybe a good idea to put some food on my gut.”

“We could all do with a little food. Steaks, maybe.”

“The hell with it,” Kubion said. Ice crackled loudly as he wound down his window and threw the cigarette out; the chill mountain wind blew snow against the side of his face, put an edge on the heater warmth inside the car. “The hell with it, the hell with both of you.”

They rode the rest of the way to the Mule Deer Lake cabin in heavy silence.

Shortly past nine o’clock, in the familiar darkness of a Whitewater motel room, Peggy Tyler sighed and rested her cheek against Matt Hughes’ hairless stomach. “Did you like that?” she asked. “Did I please you, Matt?”

“Oh my God!” he said.

Smiling, she moved up into the fold of his right arm. Tawny blond hair, tangled now, flowed over his chest and shoulders; her amber-colored eyes contained an expression, tinged with amusement, that was completely contrary to their normally demure one. Statuesque and heavy-breasted, her body shone like finely veined marble in the darkness.

She was twenty-one years old and had for four years known exactly what she wanted from life. And when the boy she had been dating at age seventeen offered to buy her a new ski sweater if she would take off her clothes and let him play with her, she had known exactly how to go about getting it.

Her goal was twofold: to get as far away from Hidden Valley, California, as it was possible to get; and to marry a man with position, wealth, and a passion for warm places, snowless places where you could lie at the foot of a clear blue ocean in the middle of January and let the sun bake away all the cold, cold memories. But she was not impatient as so many of her school friends had been. She saw no point in leaving immediately, prematurely, after high school graduation for San Francisco or Hollywood or Las Vegas or New York, as some of them had done. Once you were there, you had to play the game because everyone else played it—and all the while some of the excitement and some of the glitter were just around the corner, look but don’t touch.

No, that wasn’t the way to do it at all. There was a better way, a much better way. It required a large sum of money and a long period of self-sacrifice, but in the meantime you could mature, you could become well read and acquire a certain polish. You put every spare dollar into a special bank account until you had accumulated a minimum of twenty-five thousand dollars, and
then
you left. Then you went to Europe instead of to the mundane cities of America; you went to Paris and Rome and Monte Carlo, and you outfitted yourself in fashionably expensive clothes, and you stayed at the best hotels and frequented only those theaters and restaurants and clubs which catered to the whims of the select; you ingratiated yourself into the lives of the wealthy and the sophisticated, fitting in perfectly because you were perfectly prepared. That was where you would meet the kind of man you wanted, in his milieu, on exactly the right terms. It would not take long, with her looks and her sexual prowess. It would not take long at all.

So she remained in Hidden Valley, living with her mother in the family home on Shasta Street—her father, a county maintenance foreman, having died of a heart attack when she was eleven. She had taken the job with Grange Electric in Soda Grove, and assiduously, she had sought out the right men with whom to sleep—the men with a little money who did not mind making small loans or cash gifts in exchange for the use of her body. Men like Hidden Valley Mayor Matt Hughes.

She had always believed Matt Hughes to be something of a puritan: righteous, religious, happily married, certainly not inclined to extramarital affairs. As a result, and despite the fact that he was the most well-to-do man in the area, she had never really considered him a possible stepping-stone. But then she had gone into the Mercantile one afternoon more than a month ago to buy some groceries for her mother, and he had been there alone; he kept looking at her, she could feel his eyes on her as she moved along the aisles, and when she had gone up to the counter to pay for her purchases, he made overtures that were at once carefully veiled and, to her, altogether obvious.

Concealing her surprise, accepting him immediately because of who and what he was, she had hinted that she found him attractive too, and that she would be willing to see him in more casual surroundings. Nothing more had been said that afternoon, but Peggy knew that she would not have to wait long until Hughes followed through; in point of fact, she was half expecting his call to her at work the ensuing Monday.

He said then that he was planning to be in Whitewater that evening, would she like to have dinner with him? She pretended to think it over and eventually allowed that she supposed it would be all right. He suggested she meet him, if she didn’t mind the short drive, at a place called The Mill—a small restaurant on the outskirts of Whitewater; she said that was fine, and met him that night, and responded to his flattery and to his physical presence just enough to let him know she was definitely interested. After dinner, however, she demurely declined his suggestion that they go somewhere alone; she made it a practice never to seem too eager, which invariably made men like Matt Hughes want her that much more. When he asked if he could see her again, she feigned reluctance and then told him that even though it was probably wrong, dating him when he was a married man and all, she really couldn’t bring herself to say no.

They had three other dinner engagements at The Mill before she finally allowed him to kiss her, to fondle her, to maneuver her to the small motel on the outskirts of Whitewater—one which did not ask questions or care to what exact purpose their units’ beds were put, this being the middle of the winter off-season. He had been almost laughably excited when she accepted his proposal, as if he were an overeager teen-ager who’d never had a woman before, and she had thought he would probably be totally unsatisfactory as a lover. But he had surprised her in that respect, he was really very accomplished. Sex for Peggy had been a source of intense physical pleasure from the very first, and Matt Hughes was as proficient as any she had gone to bed with in the past four years. It made the arrangement with him all the more satisfying . . . .

They lay without speaking for a time, and the only sound was the penetrating voice of the wind as it whipped through the pine and hemlock outside the motel. Finally, Hughes stirred and rolled onto his side and said, “You’re fantastic, Peggy, do you know that?” in a voice still thick with desire.

She smiled again. “Am I, Matt?”

“Yes. Oh yes. Peggy—can I see you again tomorrow night?”

“We still have more of tonight, baby.”

“I know, but I want to see you tomorrow too.”

“Well, I’m not sure if I can . . . .”

“Please? I’ll have something for you then.”

“Oh?”

“A Christmas present, a very nice Christmas present.”

Peggy lifted herself onto one elbow, looking at him closely now in the darkness. “That’s sweet of you,” she said. “You’re awfully sweet, Matt. What is it?”

“That would spoil the surprise.”

“Couldn’t you give me a hint?”

“Well. . . .” He thought for a moment. “It’s something small in size but not in stature.”

“Jewelry?” she asked immediately.

“No, not jewelry.”

“Something to wear, then?”

“No. No, you can’t wear it.”

“Matt, don’t tease me like this. What is it?”

“I’ll give you a broader hint. I’m not very good at buying presents; I mean, I’m always afraid I’ll pick out something that won’t be quite right. So I don’t really buy
anything,
I leave that up to the individual person.”

Money, Peggy thought—and said it aloud, “Money?”

Hughes misinterpreted the inflection in her voice. “You’re not offended, are you?”

God! “No, I’m not offended, baby. I . . . just didn’t expect anything like that. You’ve been so generous already.”

Which was true enough. Peggy had waited until their fourth evening together at the motel before bringing up the subject of money; she had done it very casually and very deftly, as always, saying that her dentist had told her she needed some work on her wisdom teeth but that she really couldn’t afford it and she supposed she could endure the minor toothache discomfort a while longer. . . . As she had anticipated, he had been sympathetic and had readily offered to pay for the dental work, a token of his affection for her, wouldn’t even think of it as a loan; she had told him she couldn’t possibly, and then allowed him to talk her into accepting. And when she said that her dentist would not accept credit from her, that she would need cash, he gave her a hundred dollars that same night and insisted that she tell him when she needed more. She had needed more two weeks later, another hundred dollars, and tonight she had been going to ask him for an additional fifty—proceeding cautiously—and here he was telling her that he was going to make her a cash gift for Christmas. Wonderfully beneficent, wonderfully pliable Matt Hughes!