by Peter Straub
Down the road, her handbag pumping at her side, Tuta Sunderson toiled toward me. I waited, gasping with emotion, as long as I could and then ran toward her.
“Something come for you?”
“No, yes,” I said. “I don’t know. Mrs. Sunderson, you can’t clean the living room yet. I’m not through in there. You might as well go home. I have to go somewhere.” Remembering the phone call of the morning, I added, “If the phone rings, don’t answer it.” I pelted up the road toward my car.
Smashing the gears, making the VW howl in torment, I shot across the lawn, twisting the wheel at the last moment to avoid the walnut trees. I came rocketing out onto the valley road in the direction of Highway 93. Fat Tuta Sunderson still stood where I had left her; mouth open, she dully watched me zoom past.
But this was not how I wanted to meet Polar Bears, I could not be dragged manacled before him by a slack-faced Arden constable, and I slowed to forty descending the hill past the R-D-N motel. By the time I reached the flat near the high school, I was proceeding at an almost-legal thirty. People were visible on the sidewalks, a cat cleaned itself on a windowsill, other cars trolled before mine: Arden did not have the deserted, eerie look it had had on my earlier visit, but was a normal small town in a normal condition of sleepy bustle. I pulled into an empty spot before Zumgo’s and stopped as gently as a dove. I felt like a man poised on an eggshell. The folded envelope distended my pocket. I knew only one sure way to conquer that awful weightless expectant eggshell feeling. Hearing no wingbeats but the sound of voices, I crossed the pavement to enter Zumgo’s.
Happily, the store had a good crowd of women shoppers. Mostly overweight, dressed in obscene halters and skirts excessively short, they would be the audience for my autotherapy. From them rose a mass smell of compost and barren backyards, of dime taps of Leinenkugel beer and soggy pretzels. I began to drift, in an attitude of abstracted busy specific search, through the aisles and around the tables. The women, including the harridan of my previous visit, scarcely noticed me. I was some husband on some errand. I thought and felt myself into this role.
I am no kleptomaniac. I have a letter from an analyst setting that down in black and white, pica type. I took a ten-dollar bill from my wallet and folded it between the second and third fingers of my right hand.
—
Now it is time for two comments. The first is obvious. I thought that I knew the handwriting on that envelope. I thought that Alison Greening had sent it to me. This was crazy. But it was no crazier than that she would return on the twenty-first of July to keep her vow. Perhaps she was signaling to me, telling me to hold out until that day. The second comment has to do with stealing. I do not think of myself as a thief—except perhaps at a gritty subconscious level that pumps guilt up into my dreams. I hate stealing. Except for Maccabee’s book, I had not stolen anything for at least fifteen years. Thinking of the thefts of my boyhood, I once asked an analyst if he thought I was a kleptomaniac. He said, of course not. Put it in writing, I said. He told me it was my fifty minutes and typed it out on a piece of notepaper. Yet at moments of great unease, I know that I can put my mind right—if at all, if at cost of a wider displacement—by only one means. It is like eating—like stuffing food down your throat long after your hunger has died.
So what I intended doing was a repetition of my mime of thievery: I was going to surreptitiously pocket goods and then drop the ten dollars at the cash register on the way out. Temptation struck first in household novelties, where I saw a corkscrew on a table. Next to it lay a rank of clasp knives. I hovered over the table, ignoring a dozen opportunities for palming the corkscrew and one of the knives. The whole business suddenly seemed labored and stupid.
Revulsion for the charade made me turn away. I was too old for these tricks, I could not allow myself to be so foolishly self-indulgent. But still I suffered. I went upstairs where the books were kept.
Slowly I revolved the rack: you will not steal again, I said to myself, you will not even pretend to steal. Romantic novels with jacket pictures of girls running from castles predominated. I could see no more copies of The Enchanted Dream. Finding even one had been fantastic luck. With feigned idleness I scanned the spines side view. Still nothing.
And then I saw a natural second choice. There, crammed in one of the bottom divisions, was a novel written by Lamont Withers, who had been the gabbiest, most annoying member of my Joyce seminar at Columbia and now taught at Bennington—A Vision of Fish, an experimental novel disguised by its jacket drawing of two embracing androgynes as a romance. I extracted the book and examined the back of the cover. “A sensitive tour de force…Cleveland Plain Dealer. Stunning, witty advance…Library Journal. Withers is the coming man…Saturday Review.” My facial muscles contracted; it was even worse than Maccabee. Temptation reared up, and I nearly tucked the book between arm and elbow. But I would not give in to this gluttony; I could not be ruled by the responses of twenty years past. I gripped the book in my hand. I went down the stairs. At the cash register, an orderly man, I paid for the book and accepted my change.
Breathing hard, flushed of face, at peace, I sat in my car. Not stealing was so much a better feeling than stealing, or mime-stealing. Not stealing, as I had in fact known for years, was the only way to shop. I felt like an alcoholic who has just turned down a drink. It was still too early to see Polar Bears, so I touched the folded letter in my pocket and decided to go—where else?—to Freebo’s, to celebrate. In the midst of death and breakdown, a successful mission.
—
As I walked across the street, a sharp atom neatly bisected my back between the shoulder blades. I heard a stone clatter on the surface of the road. Stupidly, I watched it roll and come to rest before I looked at the sidewalk. People were there, still simulating that sleepy small-town bustle, walking from Zumgo’s to the Coast To Coast Store, looking in the bread-filled windows of Myer’s bakery. They seemed to be avoiding looking at me, avoiding even looking in my direction. A second later I saw the men who had probably thrown the stone. Five or six burly middle-aged men, two or three in dungarees and the others in shabby business suits, stood in front of the Angler’s Bar. These men were watching me, a general smile flickering between them. I could not stare them down—it was like the Plainview diner. I recognized none of them. When I turned away, a second stone flew past my head. Another struck my right leg.
Friends of Duane’s, I thought, and then realized I was wrong. If they were merely that, they would be laughing. This business-like silence was more ominous than stone throwing. I looked over my shoulder: they still stood, bunched together and hands in pockets, before the dark bar window. They were watching me. I fled into Freebo’s.
“Who are those men?” I asked him. He came hurriedly down the bar, wiping his hands on a rag.
“You look a little shook up, Mr. Teagarden,” he said.
“Tell me who those men are. I want their names.”
I saw the drinkers at the bar, two thin old men, pick up their glasses and move quietly off.
“What men, Mr. Teagarden?”
“The ones across the street, standing in front of a bar.”
“You mean the Angler’s. Gee, I don’t see anybody there, Mr. Teagarden, I’m sorry.”
I went up to the long narrow window overlooking the street and stood beside him. The men had vanished. A woman with her hair in curlers pushed a baby carriage in the direction of the bakery.
“They were just there,” I insisted. “Five, maybe six, a couple of farmers and a few others. They threw rocks at me.”
“I dunno, Mr. Teagarden, it could have been some kind of accident.”
I glared at him.
“Let me get you a drink on the house,” he said. He turned away and put a shot glass beneath one of the upended bottles. “There. Put that inside you.” Meekly, I drank it in one gulp. “You see, we’re still all upset around here, Mr. Teagarden. It was probably because they didn’t know who you were.”
“It was pr
obably because they did know who I am,” I said. “Friendly town, isn’t it? Don’t answer, just get me another drink. I have to see Polar Bears, Galen I mean, in a little while but I’m going to stay in here until everybody goes home.”
He blinked. “Whatever you say.”
I drank six whiskies, taking my time over them. Several hours passed. Then I had a cup of coffee, and after that another drink. The other men in the bar regarded me surreptitiously, shifting their eyes toward the mirror when I raised my glass or leaned on the bar. After an unendurable time of this, I took Withers’s book out of my jacket pocket and began to read it on the bar. I switched from whisky to beer and remembered that I’d had nothing to eat.
“Do you have sandwiches in here?”
“I’ll get one for you, Mr. Teagarden. And another cup of coffee?”
“And a cup of coffee and another beer.”
Withers’s book was unreadable. It was unbearably trivial. I began to tear out pages. If you find a pattern, you should stick to it. Now the other men in the bar no longer bothered to conceal their stares. I recognized in myself the buzzing frontal lobes of intoxication. “Do you have a wastebasket, Freebo?” I asked.
He held up a green plastic bucket. “Is that another one you wrote?”
“No, I never wrote anything worth publishing,” I said. I pitched the ripped pages into the green bucket. The men were staring at me as they would at a circus ape.
“You’re shook up, Mr. Teagarden,” Freebo said. “See, it won’t help any. You’ve had a few too many, Mr. Teagarden, and you’re kinda upset. I think you ought to go out in the fresh air for a little bit. You’re all paid up in here, see, and I can’t serve you anymore. You oughta go home and have a rest.” He was walking me toward the front of the bar, talking in a low, calming voice.
“I want to buy a record player,” I said. “Can I do that now or is it too late?”
“I think the stores just closed, Mr. Teagarden.”
“I’ll do it tomorrow. Now I have to see Polar Bears Galen Hovre.”
“That’s a good idea.” The door closed behind me. I was standing alone on a deserted Main Street; the sky and the light were darkening, though it would not be dusk for at least two hours. I realized that I had spent most of the day in the bar. Signs on the bakery and department store doors read CLOSED. I glanced at the Angler’s Bar, which seemed from the outside to be as empty as Freebo’s. A single car went past in the direction of the courthouse. Once again, I could hear the beating of pigeons’ wings, circling way up above.
At that moment the town seemed haunted. The Midwest is the place for ghosts, I realized, the truest place for them; they could throng up these wide empty Main Streets and populate the fields. I could almost feel them around me.
With these thoughts in my mind, I started when I heard footsteps behind me. I looked over my shoulder and saw only an empty street lined with cars like the deserted hulls of insects. When I turned my neck, I again heard the footsteps, a crowd of them. I began to walk quickly, and heard them follow. The street lay wide and deserted before me, lined with empty cars and blank deserted shops. I heard the electric buzz of a neon sign in the window of a kitchen supplier’s. Reality’s veneer seemed on the verge of dissolution, even the pavement and the brick storefronts were stretched taut over a drumming void. I began to run, and heard them running behind me. I turned my head again, and was almost relieved to see a crowd of thick-waisted men making down the street toward me.
The courthouse was four blocks away, in a straight line up Main Street, but I didn’t have a chance of getting there before they caught me. In the brief glimpse I had, some of them seemed to be carrying sticks. I pumped around the next corner and doubled back into an alley. When I reached the rear of Freebo’s I hunched down beside a group of large silver garbage cans; I did not have time to reach the end of the alley. The group of men had clearly divided; two of them appeared at the alley’s entrance and began to half-trot toward me. I crouched as low as I could get behind the big silver cans. Their footsteps approached, and I heard them breathing hard. They were even less accustomed to running than I was.
One of them distinctly exclaimed, “Shit.”
I waited until I heard them returning; they passed my hole, and then clattered toward the alley’s entrance. When I peeked out, I saw them turning right to follow the rest of the group. My back to the buildings, legs ready to spring, I edged down the alley’s length. I looked cautiously out at Madison Street. Two blocks down, they were rocking an old car parked before a peeling, shabby house. One of them swung at the car with a long stick, ax handle or baseball bat. Glass popped and exploded.
I couldn’t make sense of it. Were they just rowdy drunks looking for the nearest target? Hoping that the noise they were making while destroying the car would keep them from hearing me, I ran across Madison Street into the alley on the other side. Shouts and yells told me that they had seen me. I nearly fell down in terror. I pelted through the alley and came out on Monroe Street, turned right with the thick boiling noise gathering behind me, and wheeled around the corner back onto Main. At the last possible second, I yanked at the door handle of a car and rolled inside. Then I scrambled over the seat and lay, heart pounding, in the well before the back seat. A candy wrapper fluttered before my nose; dust seemed to pour dryly up from the floor, acrid and foul. I closed my nostrils with my fingers, and after a time the impulse to sneeze left me. I could hear them coming quickly up the street, banging with fists or clubs on cars in frustration.
The edge of a greasy shirt passed the window I could see. A hand pressed against it, flattened and white like a dead starfish. Then I saw only darkening sky. I thought: what if I die here? If my machinery fails and dumps my corpse into this odorous car? Who would find me? It was an image of utter hopelessness. After a while I was strong enough to sneak a look over the top of the seat. They were not far down the block, evidently confounded by my disappearance. There were only four of them, fewer than I had thought; they did not look like the men who had stoned me. They were younger. They ran ahead a few steps. Then they began to walk up Main, looking from side to side, rapping their bats on the sidewalk. They were the only people on the street. When a car passed, they bent to examine the driver’s face. I waited until they had gone several blocks past the courthouse and then I crawled over the seat and came crouching out onto the sidewalk.
The four men were across the street now, far up ahead, nearly to the bridge over the Blundell River. The courthouse lay about halfway between us. I began to walk toward it. The men had reached the bridge, and I saw them leaning on it, talking, lighting cigarettes. Bent over, moving as quickly as possible without running, I gained another fifty feet. Then one of the men threw down his cigarette and pointed at me.
I lifted my elbows and knees and discovered for the first time in my life what running was. It is rhythm, all rhythm, long easy beats made by coordinating every muscle. They were confused that I ran toward them, but when I reached the courthouse and turned easily on one leg and pounded, stepping high, to the back, they flew shouting after me. I fisted my hands and made arcs in the air with them, my chest bowed out and my legs sailing across the asphalt parking lot. I reached the police cars just as they came into the lot. I heard them slow down, scuffling, calling out to me.
The words were inaudible. A roaring sound kicked to life in the corner of the parking lot, and I saw a black-jacketed man tear off on a motorcycle. It looked as though it could have been Zack; I wasn’t sure. The sudden noise made my followers panic. By the time I reached the yellow door with thick glass inset above the word POLICE, they had scattered. My throat felt like burning paper.
The uniformed man rolling a sheet of paper into a typewriter turned his chubby face toward me. I closed the door and leaned back against it, breathing hard. Still holding the paper in his hands, he half-rose, and I saw the stumpy pistol strapped to his hip. “My name is Teagarden,” I said, “and I have an appointment with the Chief.”
“Oh yeah,” he said, and lowered the paper with deliberate slowness on top of the typewriter. My chest was heaving.
“I just won a race. Try not to shoot.”
“Just hold it right there.” He came around to the front of the desk, not taking his eyes from me nor removing his hand from within panic distance of the revolver. His left hand found the telephone; when he had the receiver to his ear, he glanced at the row of buttons at the base of the phone and punched one and then dialed a single number. “Teagarden’s here.” He set the phone down.
“You can go right in. He’s been waiting for you. Take that door right there, and then it’s the door marked Chief.”
I nodded, and moved toward the door “right there.” Polar Bears’ office was at the end of the hall; it was about ten by twelve, mostly filled with green filing cabinets and a worn old desk. Most of the rest of it was filled by Polar Bears.
“Sit down, for God’s sake, Miles,” he said, waving at the chair before his desk. “You look like you had a hard old day.” Looking at him, I could see the difference in our ages more clearly than I ever had before—he had been nearly Duane’s age, though his cheerful rowdiness had made him younger in my eyes. In this solidly massive man with a serious square face I could see few traces of the boy who had spitballed Bertilsson’s sheep. Even the reason for his name had vanished: his furry cap of astonishingly white hair had darkened and receded to a brownish dusting from his ears to his rubbery-looking scalp.
