by Peter Straub
He was a trapped rat. Like something mean backed up into a corner. Man. He blew shit out of everything with that gas can—he didn’t care what happened. He coulda killed himself too!
So when he let me go I just took off, yessir, right off, and I figured, let someone else find that girl. But I did a little something extra to that beat-to-shit VW of his after I got to town. I fixed it real good. I fixed it so’s he couldn’t go but thirty-forty miles an hour, and wouldn’t run very long at any one time too. One thing I am’s a good mechanic.
But I knew that crazy sonofabitch done it. And if you ask me, he was askin’ to get caught. Else why would he put that name Greening on the repair slip? Answer me that.
—
A screaming voice: “Miles, you bastard! You bastard!”: Duane.
“Calm down.” Another voice, deeper, lower.
“Get the shit out here! Now!”
“Just simmer down, Duane. He’ll come.”
“Goddam you! Goddam you! You crazy?”
I cautiously open the door and see that Duane in fury appears to be reduced in size, a small square jigging knot of red-faced anger. “I told you, goddamit! I said, stay the hell away from my girl! And second, what the hell is all this? He whirls around, his rage giving him agility, and the gesture of his arms encompasses, as well as the greasy yellowish and black burns on the ripped lawn and the marks of the explosion—the gaping hole in the screen, twisted pieces of the gas can—the figure of Polar Bears in uniform behind him, and Alison Updahl hurrying up the path toward her home. She glances over her shoulder, nearly there already, sending me a look, half fear, half warning.
“Just sitting in their cars, goddam it—just sitting out there—no goddam trouble—and what the hell did you do? Make a goddam bomb? Look at my lawn!” He stomps heavily, too furious to speak any longer.
“I tried to call you,” I say to Polar Bears.
“You’re lucky I don’t kill you now!” Duane screams.
“I’m lucky they didn’t kill me then.”
Polar Bears firmly positions one hand on Duane’s shoulder. “Hold your horses,” he says. “Dave Lokken told me you called up. I didn’t expect there’d be any trouble, Miles. I figured you could take a bunch of our country boys starin’ at you from the road.”
“Sittin’ there—just sittin’ there,” Duane says, quietly now that Polar Bears is gripping his shoulder.
“I didn’t think you’d declare war on ’em.”
“I didn’t think you’d go crawlin’ around after my girl either,” Duane hisses, and I see Polar Bears’ fingers tighten. “I warned you. I told you, stay off. You’re gonna get it—for sure.”
“They didn’t just sit there. Most of them left when they saw me dialing the telephone, but three of them decided to come for me.”
“See who they were this time, Miles?”
“That boy from the garage, Hank Speltz, a man named Roy, and one I didn’t know. One of those who threw stones at me in Arden.”
“Stones…stones,” hisses Duane, his contempt so great that it is almost despair.
“How d’ya manage all this?” He lifts his chin toward the lawn where tire tracks and brown muddy ruts loop crazily.
“They did most of it themselves. They drove all over it. I guess they were in a hurry to get out before you showed up. The rest I did. I flipped an open gas can from the garage on top of a burning cigarette. I didn’t even think it would work. You knew they were going to be here, didn’t you?”
“You got me again. Sure I knew. I figured they’d just help keep you—”
“Out of trouble. Like Paul Kant.”
“Yeah.” His smile almost expresses pride in me.
“You and Duane were together? With Alison?”
“Keep her name out of your mouth, damn you,” Duane says.
“Just having a beer in the Bowl-A-Rama.”
“Just having a beer. Not working on your story.”
“Even a cop doesn’t work all the time, Miles,” he says, and I think: no. You do work all the time, and that’s why you are dangerous. He takes his paw off Duane’s arm and shrugs his shoulders. “I wanted to explain to Du-ane here that you and me are sort of helpin’ each other out on these killings. That’s a big plus for you, Miles. You shouldn’t want to take that plus away from yourself. Now I hear you been talking to Du-ane about some crazy idea you got. You been talking about just the exact thing I told you not to talk about, Miles. Now that kinda makes me question your judgment. I just wanta be sure you’ve seen the error in your thinking. Old Duane here didn’t tell you you was right, did he? When you hit him with this crazy idea?” He looks at me, his face open and companionable. “Did you, Duane?”
“I said he should talk to you.”
“Well, you see, you got him all suspicious and worked up.”
“I knew it out at the quarry, really. I had the girl shout. You couldn’t hear her on the road.”
Duane stamps in a furious muttering half circle. “Undressed. You were undressed.”
“Hold on, Duane, you’ll make it worse. Old Miles will just go on drawing the wrong conclusions if you get sidetracked. Now, Miles, Duane says he never said you was right in your ideas. Now let’s ask him. Were you out there that night?”
Duane shakes his head, looking angrily at the ground.
“Of course you weren’t. It’s all in the records my father made. You went out on 93 and turned the other way, toward Liberty. Right?”
Duane nods.
“You were mad at that little Greening girl, and you just wanted to get the hell away from her. Right? Sure,” as Duane nods again. “See, Miles, if you just tell a girl to yell without her knowing anything about why, she’s not liable to really give her best, like a girl would if she’s bein’ attacked. You see the error there? Now, I don’t want you to go on talking about this, because you’ll just dig yourself into a deep hole, Miles.”
There is no point in prolonging this charade. “That little Greening girl,” the figure of lean intensity I have seen leveling her muzzle toward the house? That little Greening girl, the fire in the woods and the blast of freezing wind? I can smell cold water about me.
I think that which I do not wish to think; and remember Rinn’s words. My guilt drowns me.
Duane, for different reasons, also does not wish to continue. “To hell with this,” he says. Then he straightens up and his pudgy red-and-white face flames at me. “But I warned you about seeing my daughter again.”
“She asked me to come with her.”
“Did she? Did she? That’s what you say. I suppose you say you didn’t take off your clothes in front of her.”
“It was just for swimming. She took hers off first. The boy undressed too.”
In front of Duane, I cannot tell Polar Bears my fears about Zack. I have already said too much, for Duane looks ready to flail out again.
I am trembling. I feel cold wind.
“Yeah, okay,” Duane says. “Sure. Whatever you say.” He turns his upper body toward me. “If you fool around with her, Miles, I won’t wait for anyone else to get you. I’ll get you myself.” Yet there is no real conviction in this threat, he does not care enough; treachery is what he expects from women.
Polar Bears and I watch him tramping up the path. Then he turns to me. “Say, you look kind of peaked, Miles. Must be all that skinny-dipping you do.”
“Which one of you raped her?”
“Hold on.”
“Or did you take turns?”
“I’m beginning to question your judgment again, Miles.”
“I’m beginning to question everything.”
“You heard me mention that hole you could be digging for yourself?” Polar Bears steps toward me, big and solid and full of serious concern, and I see dark blue blotches of perspiration on his uniform shirt, dark blue smudges beneath his eyes. “Jesus, boy, you gotta be crazy, throwing bombs at the citizens here, gettin’ yourself in trouble…” He is moving with a cautious, war
y slowness and I think this is it: he’s going to break, he’s going to fight me. But he stops and rubs a hand over his face. “Pretty soon this is all gonna be over, Miles. Pretty soon.” He steps back, and the sour combination of sweat and gunpowder engulfing me like smoke recedes with him. “Miles. Jesus Christ. What was that you were telling Dave Lokken about something like a doorknob?”
I cannot answer.
—
That night and every night afterward I turned off the gas where Tuta Sunderson had shown me. In the mornings, when she heaved herself into the kitchen and began to cough and stamp her feet and shuffle around and clear her throat and produce the entire array of noises expressive of sullen discontent with which I had become familiar, among them was always the sharp grunt of suspicious disapproval—and contempt?—that accompanied her discovery that I had done so. I would have fired her but for my certainty that, like Bartleby, she would have come anyhow. The day after the visitation by Hank Speltz and the others, I heard the coughing, feet stamping, etc., and went downstairs to ask her if she had known what was going to happen. Foolish me. “Did I know what? What was going to happen? So what happened?” She had made no comment on the condition of the lawn or the hole in the porch screen. I told her that I imagined her son had been involved. “Red? Red doesn’t get messed up in anything. Now how many eggs do you want to throw away today?”
For days I did nothing but work; and I worked undisturbed, for it seemed that no one would talk to me. Apart from her morning demonstrations of how much noise she could produce, Tuta Sunderson was silent; Duane kept away, even turning his head so he would not have to look at me on the infrequent times he passed the old farmhouse. His daughter, presumably beaten or warned off in a less physical manner, also avoided me. Sometimes, from my bedroom window I could see her crisscrossing the path to go to the equipment barn or the granary, her body looking rushed and inexpressive, but she never appeared downstairs in the kitchen or on the porch, chewing something from my larder. At night, I was often awakened from dozing at my desk, the martini glass beside me and the pencil still in my hand, by the sound of Zack’s motorcycle cutting off when it came parallel to me. I wrote. I dozed. I drank. I accumulated guilt. I hoped that soon the Michalskis would get a postcard from their vanished daughter. I hoped that Polar Bears was right, and that it would soon be over. I often wanted to leave.
At night, I experienced fear.
Rinn had given up answering her telephone, and I kept telling myself that I would visit her tomorrow. But that too I feared. The anonymous calls ceased, both from Onion Breath and from the—whatever the other thing was. Perhaps there was a fault in the old telephone.
I received no more blank letters, and only one more bit of fan mail. It was printed on lined paper with torn perforations along one side, and it read WE’LL GET YOU KILLER. I put it in an envelope and mailed it with a note to Polar Bears.
It seemed to me that I had died.
Many times, I thought: you were wrong, back at the quarry. That he had Coke bottles in his truck is no proof; the doorknob taken from wherever I had put it is no proof. And then I thought of him slicing open his hand.
I said: it is not your problem. And then thought of his dedicating a record “to the lost ones.”
And thought of Alison Greening coming toward me, a creature of sewn leaves and bark. But the thoughts which followed this could not be true.
It was impossible to talk with Polar Bears. He did not respond to my note or to the printed threat.
When the telephone finally rang on a Monday afternoon, I thought it would be Hovre, but when I was greeted by another voice pronouncing my name, I thought of a bent hungry man with tight curling black hair and aging face. “Miles,” he said. “You told me to call you if I ever wanted help.” His voice was dry and papery.
“Yes.”
“I have to get out of here. I’m out of food. I lied to you that day—I said I went out, but I hadn’t in a long time.”
“I know.”
“Who told you?” Fear made his voice trill.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“No. No, it probably doesn’t. But I can’t stay in town anymore. I think they’re going to do something. Now even more of them are watching my house, and sometimes I see them talking, planning. I think they’re planning to break in. I’m afraid they’ll kill me. And I haven’t had anything to eat for two days. If—if I can get away can I come there?”
“Of course. You can stay here. I can get a gun.”
“They all have guns, guns are no use…I just have to get away from them.” During the pauses I could hear him gasping.
“Your car doesn’t work. How can you get here?”
“I’ll walk. I’ll hide in the ditches or the fields if I see anyone. Tonight.”
“It’s ten miles!”
“It’s the only way I can do it.” Then, with that ghastly wanness, that dead humor in his voice, “I don’t think anyone will give me a ride.”
About nine thirty, when the light began to fail, I started to expect him, though I knew that he could not possibly arrive for many hours. I walked around the old house, peering from the upstairs windows for the sight of him working his way across the fields. At ten, when it was fully dark, I turned on only one light—in my study—so that he would not be seen crossing the lawn. Then I sat on the porch swing and waited.
It took him four hours. At two o’clock I heard something rustle in the ditch behind the walnut trees, and my head jerked up and I saw him moving across the ripped lawn. “I’m on the porch,” I whispered, and opened the door for him.
Even in the darkness, I could see that he was exhausted. “Stay away from the windows,” I said, and led him into the kitchen. I turned on the light. He was slumped at the table, panting, his clothing covered with smears of dirt and bits of adhering straw. “Did anyone see you?” He shook his head. “Let me get you some food.” “Please,” he whispered.
While I fried bacon and eggs, he stayed in that beaten position, his eyes fluttering, his back bent and his knees splayed out. I gave him a glass of water. “My feet hurt so much,” he said. “And my side. I fell into a rock.”
“Did anyone see you leave?”
“I wouldn’t be here if they did.”
I let him recover while the eggs fried.
“Do you have any cigarettes? I ran out six days ago.”
I tossed him my pack. “Jesus, Miles…” he said, and could go no further. “Jesus…”
“Save it,” I said. “Your food’s about ready. Eat some bread in the meantime.” He had been too tired to notice the loaf set squarely in the middle of the table. “Jesus…” he repeated, and began to tear at the loaf. When I put the food down before him, he ate greedily, silently, like an escaped convict.
When he had finished I turned off the light and we went into the living room and felt our way to chairs. I could see the tip of his cigarette burning in the dark room, tilting back and forth as he moved in the rocker. “Do you have anything to drink? Excuse me, Miles. You’re saving my life.” I think he began to cry, and I was glad the lights were off. I went back to the kitchen and returned with a bottle and two glasses.
“That’s good,” he said when he had taken his. “What is it?”
“Gin.”
“I never had it before. My mother wouldn’t let alcohol in the house, and I never wanted to go to the bars. We never had anything stronger than beer. And that was only once or twice. She died of lung cancer. She was a chain-smoker. Like me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“What are you going to do now, Paul?”
“I don’t know. Go somewhere. Hide. Try to get to a city somewhere. Come back when it’s over.” Cigarette glowing with his inhalations, dipping forward and back as he rocked. “There was another one, another girl. She disappeared.”
“I know.”
“That’s why they were going to come for me. She’s been missing more than a
week. I heard about it on the radio.”
“Michael Moose.”
“That’s it.” He gave a crackly humorless laugh. “You probably don’t know Michael Moose. He’s about three hundred and fifty pounds and he chews peppermints. He’s grotesque. He’s got flat slicked-down hair and pig’s eyes and a little moustache like Oliver Hardy’s. He’s right out of Babbitt. He imitates Walter Cronkite’s voice, and he’d never get a job anywhere but Arden, and kids laugh at him on the street, but he’s better than I am. To Arden. They think he’s funny-looking, and they make jokes about him, but they respect him too. Maybe that’s too strong. What it is, they take him as one of them. And do you know why that is?”
“Why?”
His voice was flat and bitter. “Because when he was growing up they knew he went out on dates, they know the girls, and because he got married. Because they know, or say, that he’s got a woman over in Blundell who’s a telephone operator. Red hair.” The cigarette waved in the air, and I could dimly see Paul Kant raising the glass of gin to his lips. “That’s it. He’s one of them. You know what my crime is?” I held my breath. “I never had a date. I never had a girl. I never told a dirty joke. I never even had a dead girl, like you, Miles. So they thought I was—what they thought. Different. Not like them. Like something bad they knew about.”
We sat there in silence for a long time, each of us only a vague form to the other. “It didn’t start that way, you know. It didn’t matter that I was less, shall we say robust, when we were all little kids. In grade school. Grade school was paradise—when I think about it, it was paradise. It got bad only in high school. I wasn’t cute. I wasn’t like Polar Bears. No athlete. I didn’t chase the girls. So they started to talk about me. I noticed that people didn’t want me around their kids about the time I had to leave school.” He bent, and felt for something on the floor. “Would you mind if I had another drink?”
“It’s right on the floor beside your chair.”
“So now when this admirable character goes around ripping up little girls, they assume it’s me. Oh yes, Paul Kant. He’s never been quite right, has he? A momma’s boy. Not quite normal, in a society that makes being normal the most virtuous quality of them all. And then there was another thing—some trouble I had. Stupid scum. They put me in a police station. They hit me. For doing nothing. Did they tell you about that?”
