Like these past two days, he thought. Like what had happened with this Roy Bannerman, whom he had met at an incredibly sluggish party some friends of Andrea’s had given on Russian Hill. Bannerman was an executive with a large independent cannery in Monterey, and there was a managerial position opening up there shortly that paid twelve thousand per annum. Come on down, he had told Kilduff, I’ll have the brass over for dinner, give them a chance to look you over; hell, a few drinks and some thick steaks under their belts, and you’re in, Steve, I can practically guarantee it. So he had gone down there and met the brass, putting the charm on, smiling at the right time, laughing at the right time, speaking at the right time, lying at the right time, oh Jesus yes, he had impressed the crap out of them, they were calling him Steve and he was calling them Ned and Charley and Forry, and when the evening was over they had said to come around to the cannery in the morning and take a tour of the plant, see what you’ll be handling, eh, Steve, and he had called Andrea from his motel bursting like a goddamned kid with a straight-A report card. She had sounded pleased, in a subdued way, strange now that he thought of it, but he had put it down at the time to the late hour and the fact that he had gotten her out of bed. So he had gone around to the cannery yesterday, Friday, and a fat secretary with bad legs had taken his name and then informed him that Ned and Charley and Forry were all in conference, would he mind waiting for just a little while? He waited for three hours, and then Bannerman came into the anteroom looking very righteous, and said that it had all fallen through, they had run a personnel check into his background as a matter of policy and what the hell, Steve, why didn’t you tell me about all those screw-ups before I went through the trouble of setting everything up, we’ve got to have a solid man in this position, somebody who can step right in and take over, well, I hope you understand.
He understood; he understood all too well.
But it didn’t really matter now, because the money had finally run out—there was exactly three hundred and sixteen dollars in their joint checking account—and because Andrea had run out, too.
Andrea, he thought. He stared blankly through the smoke curling upward from his cigarette. Andrea, why? Why? We had something, didn’t we? We had it all, didn’t we? We had a love that transcended all the failures, all the empty purposes, enduring, unshakable, unkillable, a veritable Rock of Gibraltar ...
Bullshit
It was the money, of course.
Face the truth, Kilduff—no more money, no more Andrea; simple enough, painfully simple enough. He should have seen that, even though they had never discussed the money by tacit agreement; he had told her in the beginning that it was an inheritance from a non-existent granduncle Andrew in Cedar Rapids; Iowa, and she had accepted that. That was where he had made his mistake, taking her unquestioning acceptance of the money and her silence on the subject to mean that it carried no real import for her. But all the time she had been waiting, biding her time, squeezing all but the very last little drop.
And then: Good-bye, Steve. In absentia. It was nice while the money lasted.
Bodega Bay is a small fishing village on the Northern California coast, some sixty-five miles above San Francisco. The village, the goodsized inlet of the same name, and a complex of several buildings called The Tides, achieved a kind of national prominence some years ago when Alfred Hitchcock filmed his suspense movie The Birds there. Since that time, they get a good percentage of tourist business in the spring and summer months—sightseers, vacationers, visitors from outlying towns, self-styled fishermen who boast to the bored party-boat captains about the record king salmon they are going to land but never do. But during the winter, the natives usually have the place pretty much to themselves, and it takes on—falsely—the atmosphere of one of those staid, aloof New England-seacoast hamlets.
At The Tides, inside the Wharf Bar and Restaurant, Jim Conradin sat in solitary silence at the short bar, drinking two fingers of bourbon from a water glass. All of the burnished copper-topped tables in the coffee shop area were empty. Sal, the bartender, was having an animated discussion with the lone waitress, a young girl named Dolly, with hair the color of wheat sheaves and very large breasts which Sal watched hungrily as he spoke. There was no one else present.
Conradin, dressed in a sheepskin jacket and blue denim trousers, turned on his stool to look out through the windows with deep-set, brooding gray eyes. The chiseled, weather-bronzed features of his lean face were grim. A storm was building somewhere out at sea—a day, perhaps two, away; the vague smell of dark rain had been in the air when he arrived at The Tides some two hours earlier. The bay was rough, an oily grayish-black color; whitecaps covered its surface, causing the red-and-white buoys that marked the crossing channel to bob and weave violently, and three or four high-masted fishing boats anchored downwind to rock heavily in the swells. He couldn’t see much of Bodega Head, across the bay, and the narrows that led into the Pacific at the southern end was completely obliterated by swirling fog. Old man Rushing, who had been a sailing master once and had come around Cape Horn in a two-masted schooner in 1923, sat dressed in his perennial faded blue mackinaw and leather deer-hunter’s cap on the edge of the wooden dock, fishing for crappies with a hand line, impervious to the cold and the fog and the wind. It seemed to Conradin, as it always did when he saw him, that the old man had been built, too, when they constructed the dock.
Conradin turned back to his bourbon, staring moodily into the glass. He hated winter, hated it with consummate vehemence. It was a sedentary time, a time of waiting, a time of thinking. God, that was the worst part—the thinking. When the salmon were running, it was a different story altogether. Then you could stand on the solid hardwood deck of your boat in a three-mile-per-hour troll, with the warm sea breeze fresh and heady in your nostrils and the sound of the big Gray Marine loud and vibrant in your ears; you could feel in your hands the power, the resiliency of a thirty-pound hickory-butted Hamell rod with a 4/o reel and a fifty-pound monofilament test line; you could see the big silvers close out on the green-glass ocean, coming out of the water in long graceful jumps to rid themselves of sea lice, the way marlin will do to shake the sucking fish from their gills; you could watch them, feel them hit the Gibbs-Stewart spoons or the live sardines, whichever you were using, leaping end over end and then turning and running toward the boat, broad tails lashing the water to foam, then sounding to take the line out again; you could play them, fight them, pit raw stamina against raw stamina, know the exhilaration of landing them, of winning, of taking them with their shining bluish-silver bellies onto the ice. There was no time for thinking, then, no time for dwelling on a past that refuses to stay buried. But in the winter...
Conradin drained the balance of the amber fluid. He debated having another drink; he had had four already, and he could feel them just a little. It was barely noon, and Trina would have lunch for him before long, in the big white house overlooking the bay from the northern flat. Still, there was time for one more; there was always time for one more.
He glanced toward Sal, the bartender, who now had his face very close to Dolly’s, whispering something in her ear. She giggled girlishly, her face reddening. Conradin said, “How about a refill.”