He crossed to the closed drapes, drew them open, and unlocked the sliding glass window-doors. He stepped out onto the wide cement floor of the balcony—bare, save for the webbed aluminum summer furniture folded and stacked in one corner. A wind laced with ice particles numbed his face and neck almost immediately, but he stood with his hands on the cold metal of the welded iron railing.
The fog was coming in. It sat off to the west in great folding gray billows, like tainted cotton candy at a carnival. Kilduff watched it for a long moment—moving closer, inexorably closer, an advancing army with ephemeral wisps drifting ahead of it like the spirits of long-dead and long-forgotten generals. He moved his eyes slowly to look at what lay spread out before him: the gray close-set buildings of a big city, some hillside-clinging, some extending in long identical rows as if they had spewn forth from a gigantic duplicating machine, some jutting skyward with long, thin, beseeching spires; straight ahead to the Golden Gate Bridge, heavy with weekend traffic, the crests of its red spans already consumed by the approaching fog; across to Marin County and the brown and white and pastel cottages clinging to the side of the hill above Sausalito, where the would-be artists and the would-be writers and the hippies and the rebels and the fruiters lived; dipping lower, coming back to the ugly dead gray rock of Alcatraz, a toad’s wart in the leaden surface of the bay; to the right and the cantilever span of the Bay Bridge and along it, halfway to Oakland and the East Bay, where it touches Yerba Buena Island; down and over to the naval base on the long finger, obscene finger, of Treasure Island. A sweeping panorama, Kilduff thought, beautiful San Francisco, enchanting San Francisco, but only when the sun shines, baby, because when you saw it like this, on an overcast Saturday morning in early November with the vague promise of rain and the chill of winter and the smell of acrid brine in the air, when you saw it like this it was lonely and remote and hoary-old and not very beautiful or enchanting at all.
He turned from the railing, then, and went back inside the apartment, relocking the window-doors and drawing the drapes closed again. He sank wearily onto the pliant cushions of one of the chairs and fumbled a cigarette from the pocket of his shirt. He was a big man, tall, muscular; at thirty-two, his belly was still washboard- taut and he still moved with the easy, natural grace of his youth. But his thick black hair had begun to gray prematurely at the temples, and his green and brown hawk’s eyes had an almost imperceptible dullness to them, as if the fires which had once burned there were now little more than rapidly cooling embers; his cheeks were sunken hollowly, giving him an anomalous, slightly satanic look. It was a strange face that stared back at him from the mirror in the bathroom every morning, a face he no longer felt at ease with after eight years of almost-but-not- quite, eight years of failure compounded upon failure, eight years of knowing that the money would run out some day and trying to look ahead to that time, trying to prepare for it in advance, and never accomplishing that objective—or any other.
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,
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.
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
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,
