If You Could See Me Now

by Peter Straub

  Half an hour later, when the person might have judged me to have returned to sleep (I thought), the telephone rang again. I let it trill three, then four times, then twice more, hearing the noise of the bell spread through the cold farmhouse. Finally I raised my arm and detached the receiver and rose to speak into the horn. But instead of breathing I heard what I had heard once before, a whuffling, beating noise, inhuman, like wings thrashing in the air, and the receiver was as cold as the sweating glass of my martini and I was unable to utter a word, my tongue would not move. I dropped the icy receiver and wrapped the blanket tightly around myself and went upstairs to lie on the bed. The next night, as I have said, following the day which was the first turning point, I entered the same drifting guilt-ridden dream, but I had no anonymous calls, from either living or dead.

  On the day—Monday—which marked my slide into knowledge and was the interregnum between these two awful nights, I came down from my work for lunch and asked a stony-faced Tuta Sunderson how to turn off the gas before it reached the stove. She became even more disapproving, and gruntingly bent over the range and pointed an obese finger down at the pipe descending from the wall. “It’s on this pipe. What for?”

  “So I can turn it off at night.”

  “Ain’t fooling me,” she muttered, or I thought she did, while she turned away to jam her hands into the pockets of her cardigan. More audibly, she said, “Made a big stir in church yesterday.”

  “I wasn’t there to notice. I trust things went well without me.” I bit into a hamburger and discovered that I had no appetite. My relationship with Tuta Sunderson had degenerated into a parody of my marriage.

  “You afraid of what the pastor was saying?”

  “As I recall he made a very sweet comment about my suit,” I said.

  As she began to lump herself toward the door, I said, “Wait. What do you know about a boy named Zack? He lives somewhere in Arden, I think. Tall and skinny, with an Elvis Presley hairdo. Alison’s boyfriend. He calls her ‘Ally.’ ”

  “I don’t know that boy. If you’re going to waste good food, get out of the kitchen so I can do my work.”

  “Good God,” I said, and left the table to stand on the porch. That cold breath of spirit which could only be felt on these twenty square yards was strongly present, and I knew with a certainty for once filled not with joy but resignation that Alison would appear on the date she had set twenty years before. Her release would be mine, I told myself. Only later did I recognize that when Tuta Sunderson said that she did not know that boy, she meant not that the boy was a stranger to her, but that she knew him well and detested him.

  Yet if my release were to be total there were things I needed to know, and a series of bangs and clatters from the long aluminum rectangle of the pole barn suggested an opportunity for learning them. I left Tuta Sunderson’s complaining voice behind me and stepped off the porch and began to walk through the sunshine toward the path.

  The noises increased as I drew nearer, and eventually the sound of Duane grunting with effort joined them. I threaded through the litter of rusting parts and junked equipment at the pole barn’s front end and walked onto the packed powdery brown dust which is the barn’s only floor. Under the high tented metal roof, Duane was working in semidark, slamming a wrench on the base of a tractor’s gearshift. His peaked cap had been thrown off earlier, and lay in the dust near his boots.

  “Duane,” I said.

  He could not hear. The deafness may have been as much internal as caused by the terrific banging clatter he was making, for his face was set into that frustrated angry mask common to men who are single-mindedly, impatiently, making a botch of a job.

  I said it again, and his head twisted toward me. As I stepped toward him, he turned his face away silently and went back to banging on the base of the gearshift.

  “Duane, I have to talk with you.”

  “Get out of here. Just get the hell out.” He still would not look at me. The hammering with the wrench became more frenzied.

  I continued to come toward him. His arm was a blur, and the noise echoed against the metal walls. “God damn,” he breathed after I had taken a half-dozen steps, “I got the son of a bitch off.”

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “The goddamned gearbox, if you really wanna know,” he said, scowling at me. His tan shirt was stained irregularly with perspiration and a black smear of grease bisected his forehead at the white line where his cap stuck. “It’s jammed in first, and on these old Ms you gotta go in from the top here and slide a couple of plates around to get the slots lined up, see, but what the hell am I talking about this with you for anyhow? You wouldn’t know a gearbox if you saw it outside of Shakespeare.”

  “Probably not.”

  “Anyhow, on this one here, I have to take off the whole shift mechanism because everything’s rusted shut, but in order to do that, you have to get the nuts off first, see?”

  “I think so.”

  “And then I’ll probably find out the battery’s dead anyhow, and my jumper cables got burned to shit the last time I used them on the pickup and the plastic melted all over the terminals, so it probably won’t work anyhow.”

  “But at least you got the nuts off.”

  “Yeah. So why don’t you go break up some more furniture or something and leave me work?” He jumped up on the side of the tractor and began to twiddle the burring on the wrench down to the size of the nut.

  “I have to talk with you about some things.”

  “We don’t have anything to talk about. After that act of yours in church, nobody around here has anything to talk with you about.” He glared down at me. “At least not for the present.”

  I stood and watched as he removed the troublesome nut, dropped it on a greasy sheet of newspaper by the tractor’s rear wheels, and, grunting on the seat, lifted the shift levers and an attached plate up out of the body of the machine. Then he bent down and knelt before the seat. “Shit.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s all grease in there, and I can’t see the slots, that’s what’s wrong.” His pudgy face revolved toward me again. “And after I fix this damn thing, the same thing will happen next week, and I’ll have to do it all over again.” He began to scrape oily sludge out with the point of a long screwdriver. “Shouldn’t even be grease like that in here.” He impatiently took a rag from the hip pocket of his coveralls and began to work it around in the hole he had opened up.

  “I want to ask you about—” I was going to say, about Zack, but he interrupted me.

  “Not what you said at the church. There’s nothing to say about that.”

  “Alison Greening?”

  His face hardened.

  “You never slept with her, did you?” Looking at him kneeling like a squat filthy toad on the tractor, it seemed an impossibility. He began to scrub harder, his face frozen. “Did you?”

  “Yeah. Okay.” He plucked the rag out and threw it aside. “So what if I did? I didn’t hurt anybody. Except myself, I guess. That little whore treated it like it was a new comic book or something. And she only did it once. Whenever I wanted to do it afterward, she laughed at me.” He looked at me, hard. “You were the golden boy, anyhow. What do you care? She made me feel like shit. She liked making me feel like shit.”

  “Then why did you name your daughter after her?”

  He began to tug at something within the body of the tractor. He was trembling.

  Of course. I had known it yesterday, when I had looked up at the dying bushes and seen a white shirt flitting in memory between them. “You followed us out to the quarry, didn’t you? I know that that story about the driver hearing screams was a lie. I proved that you can’t hear screams from up there down on the road.”

  His face, even the white parts, was turning red.

  “So someone else was there, someone surprised us. It was you. Then you ran away and called the police when you knew she was dead.”

  “No. No.” He sla
mmed his fist into the tractor’s seat, making a million small metal parts jangle. “Goddam you, you had to come back here, didn’t you? You and your stories.”

  “Twenty years ago, somebody told a story all right. And has been telling it ever since.”

  “Wait.” He glared at me, his face still massively red. “Who told you about me and Alison, anyhow?” I did not speak, and saw comprehension battle fury in his face.

  “You know who told me. The only person you told. Polar Bears.”

  “What else did Hovre say?”

  “That you hated her. But I knew that. I just didn’t understand the reason.”

  Then he said too much. “Hovre talked about her?”

  “Not really,” I said. “He just let it slip that…” I looked at Duane’s face, full of sly questions and frightened questions, and I understood. Understood at least part of it. I heard the cough from one side of the quarry’s top, the whistle from the other.

  “You try to go and prove anything,” Duane said. “You can’t prove a thing.”

  “Polar Bears was with you,” I said, almost not believing it. “Both of you came to the quarry. And you both jumped us. You both wanted her. I can remember Polar Bears coming around day after day, staring at her…”

  “I gotta fix my tractor. You get the hell out.”

  “And everybody up here thinks it was me. Even my wife thought it was me.”

  Duane stolidly replaced the gear levers and plate and started to tighten the nuts. He looked shaken, and he would not meet my eyes. “You better talk to Hovre,” he said. “I ain’t sayin’ no more.”

  I felt, in the big dim dusty interior of the pole barn, as I had when the Woodsman and Zack had held me under water, and I made it to an oil drum before my legs gave out. Duane was not bright enough to be a good liar, and his stolid stupid refusal to talk was as good as a confession. “Jesus,” I breathed, and heard my voice tremble.

  Duane had opened up the engine of the tractor; his back was to me. His ears flamed. As in the Plainview diner, I could sense violence gathering between us. At the same time, I was aware of the force with which sensory impressions were packing into my mind, and I clung to them for sanity: the big dim space open at either end, the thick powder of brown dust on the floor, fluffy and grainy at once, the litter of machinery lying around, discs and harrows and things I could not identify, most of it in need of paint, with rusty edges; in a corner, the high tractor; a sparrow darting through as I sat on the oil drum; my throat constricted and my hands shaking and my chest inflamed; the searing metal walls and high empty space above us, as though for a jury of observers; the man in front of me, hitting something deep inside the smaller tractor he was bent before, sweat darkening his shirt, dirt and grease all over his coveralls and the smell of gunpowder overtaking all other odors. The knowledge that I was looking at Alison’s murderer.

  “It’s crazy,” I said. “I didn’t even come here to talk to you about this. Not really.”

  He dropped the wrench and leaned forward on the tractor’s engine block, supporting himself with his arms.

  “And it doesn’t matter anymore,” I said. “Soon it won’t matter anymore at all.”

  He would not move.

  “God, this is strange,” I said. “I really came here to talk to you about Zack. When you brought up the other thing I thought I’d ask you about what Polar Bears said…” He pushed himself back from the tractor and for the space of a taut second I thought he would come for me. But he went to the side of the barn and returned with a hammer. And began to pound savagely, as if he did not care what he was battering or saw something besides the tractor beneath the hammer.

  From down the path at my grandmother’s house I faintly heard a screen door slam. Tuta Sunderson was going home.

  Duane heard it too, and the sound seemed to release him. “All right, you son of a bitch, ask me about Zack. Hey? Ask me about him.” He gave the tractor a thwacking, ringing blow with the hammer.

  He turned to face me at last, his feet stirring up dust like smoke. His face was inflamed and explosive. “What do you want to know about that no good bastard? He’s as crazy as you are.”

  I heard the calls and whistles of that terrible night, saw the white shirt flitting behind the screen of bushes, heard the coughing of a boy hidden behind those bushes. As they watched with the hunger of twenty-year-old manhood the naked girl flashing like a star in the black water. The quick, quiet removal of clothes, the leap upon her and the boy. Then knocking him out before he even saw what had happened and hauling up his body onto the rock shelf before turning to the girl.

  “Do you want to know what’s funny about people like you, Miles?” Duane half-screamed. “You always think that what you want to talk about is important. You think that what you want to say is like some kind of goddamned present—huh?—to people like me. You think people like me are just goons, don’t you, Miles?” He spat thickly into the dust and gave the tractor another ringing blow. “I hate you goddamned professors, Miles. You fucking writers. You people with your fifty-cent words and your ‘What I wanted to say was really this, not this.’ ” He turned furiously away and reached inside the tractor to draw out a clamped pipe. This he rapped twice with the hammer, and I understood that something had broken off inside the clamp. He stamped, puffing up dust, his frustration growing. “I have half a dozen punches around here, and do you think I can find one of them?” Duane stamped over to the darkest section of the barn and rooted in a pile of loose equipment. “So you want to know about Zack, hey? What do you want to know about him? About the time he barricaded himself in his house and they had to go in with axes to get him out? That’s when he was nine. About the time he beat up an old woman in Arden because she looked at him funny? That’s when he was thirteen. About all the stealing he did, all along? Then there’s the fires he used to go for, yeah, he went for ’em so much he sometimes didn’t wait for other people to start ’em, and then there’s—” He dipped forward suddenly, like a heron after a frog, and said, “God damn, I found one. Then there’s Hitler, I thought we won that war and it was all over, but no, I guess if you’re real smart, smarter than a dumb shitkicker like me anyhow, you know Hitler was the good guy and he really won because he provided this and that, I don’t know. Understanding. Then there’s the social worker he had once, said because he didn’t have a mother he grew up mean as a snake—” Now he was approaching the tractor again, taking up the clamped pipe—

  —coughing, up behind the bushes, impatiently unbuttoning the white shirt and unlacing his boots, hearing the signal of a whistle that now, in two minutes, five minutes, they would jump on the girl and stop her contempt in the simplest way they knew, hearing her voice saying Do birds cough?—

  I heard him make a noise in his throat. The pounding stopped. The hammer thudded to the ground, the pipe sprang back. Duane hopped away from the tractor, gripping the wrist of his splayed left hand with his right, and moved with surprising speed past me and out into the sun. I went after him; his body seemed compressed, under a suddenly increased gravity. He was standing spread-legged beside the rusted hooks and curls of metal, examining his hand, turning it over. He had sliced the skin at the base of his thumb. “Not so bad,” he said, and pressed the wound against his coveralls.

  I did not know then why I chose that moment to say “Last night the gas went on again,” but now I see that his accident reminded me of mine.

  “Everything’s fouled up in that house,” he said, holding his hand tightly against the filthy coveralls. “I oughta tear it down.”

  “Someone told me it might be a warning.”

  He said, “You’re liable to get all the warnings you can use,” and stepped off toward his house, having given me another as useless as the rest.

  —

  I went back to my grandmother’s house and called the Arden police station. What I wanted was not to accuse Polar Bears or to seek a futile revenge by cursing at him, but simply to hear his voice again, with what
I now knew or thought I knew in my mind while I listened to it. I felt as bottomless as the quarry was said to be, as directionless as still water, and I do not believe that I felt any anger at all. I could remember Polar Bears striking his steering wheel, enraged, saying, “Don’t you know better than to use that Greening name? That’s what you don’t want to remind people of, boy. I’m trying to keep all that in the background.” That was Larabee at work, keeping things out of sight—he would say, using his Larabee-side as he had while defending it, for my own good. But Hovre was not in his office, and Dave Lokken greeted me with a cold reluctance which barely permitted him to say that he would tell the Chief that I had called.

  Upstairs, my workroom looked very little as it had on the day I had set it up. The books once piled on the floor were either given away or stacked in a far corner to gather dust. The typewriter was in its case on the floor, and I had thrown away all the typist’s paraphernalia. I was writing my memoir in pencil, being too clumsy a typist to be able to work at the speed required. All of the thick folders of notes and drafts, along with my laboriously compiled packs of file cards, I had burned a week and a half before. I read somewhere that birds shit before they fly, and I was engaged in a parallel process, stripping myself down for takeoff, making myself lighter.

  I often worked until I fell asleep at my desk. That was what I did Monday night, and I must have come awake about the time the men from Arden and the valley thrust their way into Roman Michalski’s house and ruined Galen Hovre’s plans by giving flesh to the rumors they had all heard. My eyes burned, and my stomach felt as though I had been swallowing cigars, a sensation precisely reproduced in my mouth. The room was icy, my fingers were cold and stiff. I stood up and turned to the window. I realized that Polar Bears had not called back. In half-light the mare tossed her head in the field. When I looked across the far fields I saw her again, standing in that vulpine way, not bothering with the shield of the trees, and staring directly at the house. I could not take my eyes from her, and stood in the blast of cold, feeling her energy come streaming toward me, and then I blinked and she was gone.