by Peter Straub
“No,” I lied. “Not a word.”
“I had to go to a hospital. Seven months. Little pills every day. For doing nothing. Stares when I got out. Only job I could get at Zumgo’s. With those leering women. Jesus. Do you know how I got here tonight? Had to sneak out of my own house. Wind through the streets like a dog. Know about my dog, Miles? They killed him. One of them. He came up at night and strangled my dog. I could hear him crying. The dog.” I could imagine the little monkey face contorting. The smell of gin and cigarettes drifted through the dark room. “Jesus.” I thought he might have been crying again.
Then: “So what do you say, Miles Teagarden? Or do you just sit and listen? What do you say?”
I said, “I don’t know.”
“You were rich. You could come here in the summers and then go back to one of your private schools and then go to some expensive university and smoke pipes and join a fraternity and get married and get a Ph.D. and live in apartments in New York and go to Europe and wreck cars and buy Brooks Brothers suits and, I don’t know, do whatever you do. Teach English in a college. I’m going to have some more of your gin.” He bent, and I heard the bottle clinking against the glass. “Oh. I spilled some.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“It wouldn’t to you, would it? I’m getting drunk. Is it you, Miles? Is it you? Come on.”
“Is what me?” But I knew.
“Are you the admirable character? Did you take time off from your Atlantic Monthly life to come out here and rip up a few little girls?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s not me either. So who is it?”
I looked down at the floor. Before I had decided to tell him about Zack, he was speaking again.
“No, it’s not me.”
“I know that,” I said. “I think—”
“It’s not me, no way is it me. They just want it to be me. Or you. But I don’t know about you. Still, you’re being nice to me, aren’t you, Miles? Being so nice. Probably never had someone strangle your dog. Or do people like you have dogs? Borzois, wolfhounds. Or a cute little cheetah on a leash.”
“Paul, I’m trying to help you.” I said. “You have a ludicrous misconception of my life.”
“Oops, sorry, oops, mustn’t be offensive. Just a poor country boy, I know. Poor dumb pitiable country schmuck. I’ll tell you why no way it’s me. This is it, boy. I’d never go after a girl. That’s why. You hear what I’m saying?”
I did, and hoped he would not torture himself by going further.
“You heard that?”
“I heard.”
“You understand?”
“Yes.”
“Yes. Because I’d do it to boys, not girls. Isn’t that funny? That’s why it isn’t me. That’s what I’ve always wanted, but I never did that either. Never even touched one. I wouldn’t hurt any of them, though. Never hurt them.”
He sat there, slumped in the rocking chair, the cigarette glowing in his mouth. “Miles?”
“Yes.”
“Leave me alone.”
“Is it important to you to be alone now?”
“Get the hell out of here, Miles.” He was crying again.
Instead of leaving the room, I got up and walked past his chair and looked through the window facing the porch and the road. I could see nothing but the darker square mass of my own face reflected in the glass and the torn meshes of the screen beyond it. Beyond that, everything was black. His mouth made noises on his glass. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll leave you alone, Paul. I’ll be back though.”
I went upstairs in the dark and sat at my desk. It was three fifteen. There was the morning to worry about. If the men from Arden broke into Paul’s house and found that he had gone, the news, I was certain, would reach Polar Bears almost immediately. And if they were going to break into his house, it could only mean that they had been persuaded somehow that he and not I was responsible for the girls’ deaths. But then they might think of looking for Paul at my house—and I could see nothing but disaster for both of us if a gang of Arden hooligans stormed into the house and found the two of us. A shotgun from Duane’s basement would not rescue me again. I heard the sound of a car starting up outside, and I jumped. It faded.
Fifteen minutes passed. Time enough, I thought, for Paul to have recovered. I stood up, and recognized how weary I was.
I came down the stairs into the dark room. I saw the tip of a cigarette glowing at the edge of the ashtray. The odors of gin and smoke seemed very thick in the air of the cold small room. “Paul?” I said, going toward the rocking chair. “Paul, let me get you a blanket. I have a plan for tomorrow.”
And then I stopped. I could see the top of the rocker against the window, and it was unbroken by the silhouette of his head. The rocker was empty. He was no longer in the room.
Immediately I knew what had happened, but I switched on one of the lights anyway, and confirmed it. The glass and three-fourths empty bottle sat on the floor beside his chair, the cigarette had burned nearly to the rim of the ashtray. I went into the kitchen, and then opened the door to the bathroom. He had left the house shortly after I had gone upstairs. I swore out loud, half in anger at myself for leaving him, half in despair.
I went through the porch and out onto the lawn. He could not have gone far. And I remembered the sound of the car that I thought I’d heard upstairs, and began to run across the lawn.
When I got to the road, I turned right by reflex and pounded down toward the Sunderson farm, in the direction of Arden, for perhaps forty seconds. But he could have gone the other way, deeper into the valley—I didn’t even know what lay in that direction; and I recognized that he could also have gone into the fields, as he had done on the way from Arden earlier that night. I thought of him hiding behind a building or crouching in a field, riven by fear and self-loathing, and told myself that he had nowhere, really nowhere to go. He would come back before daylight.
I turned around on the dark road and began to trudge home. When I reached the drive to my grandmother’s house I hesitated, and then walked a bit further up the road in that direction. It was hopeless. I could see nothing. I could find him only if he allowed me to. I turned back and went up the drive and sat on the porch swing to wait. An hour, I told myself: it won’t be as much as an hour. I would sit and wait. As tired as I was, it was unthinkable that I could fall asleep.
—
But an hour later I was jerked awake by a sound I could not at first identify. A high agitated wailing, the sound of mechanical fury, mechanical panic, it came from somewhere off to my right, but was loud and near enough to distort my sense of place: for a moment I thought I was in New York, awake before dawn in New York. It was a New York sound, and as I gradually located my surroundings I located the sound too. It was the siren of a fire engine.
I found that I was standing up on the porch in the gray light of very early dawn, listening to a fire engine. Fog lay across the fields, and carpeted the valley road. As I listened, trying to position the sound of the fire bell, it abruptly cut off. I wheeled around and banged open the door to the living room. Bottle and glass on the floor, dead cigarette on the rim of the ashtray. Paul Kant was still gone.
Numbly, knowing that I had to hurry, I stepped down the porch’s single step. Fog lay in the ruts on the lawn and concealed its burned patches. I went stumbling toward the drive, completely forgetting the car I must have walked right past, and went out onto the road. Then I began to run. Just visible down the road, in the direction of the highway, red suffused the dark gray air.
By the time I reached the Sunderson house I had to stop running, and I walked as quickly as I could without increasing the pain in my chest until I reached the shell of the schoolhouse; then I jogged as far as the church. The red sandstone bluff hid the redness of the sky. Andy’s, I thought, and forced myself to run again. I heard men moving, machinery working. When I came around the sharp corner of the bluff I began to run harder. The fire engine was drawn up into the
parking lot beside Andy’s and a police car had pulled in slightly ahead of it, to the side of the gas pumps. I heard fire, that terrible raging noise of devouring. But it was not Andy’s that was burning. I could see the flames jumping behind the high white front of the general store.
I thought, remembering: it might have been a motorcycle I heard, not a car. I had been too groggy to tell the difference.
I rushed past the front of Andy’s and around the side.
At first I saw only the blazing façade of the Dream House, rushing into extinction as Duane must so often have wished it to do. It looked transparent, skeletal. The frames of the doors and windows hung darkly, like bones suspended in the red-orange flames. Three firemen in rubber boots and iron hats played a useless hose on the blaze. Steam rose with the smoke. Then I saw Polar Bears calmly watching me from beside the firetruck; he was out of uniform, dressed in a shapeless sports jacket and brown trousers, and I could tell by looking at him that he had not been to bed. His insomnia had kept him up, working at his bottle of Wild Turkey until the call from the fire department had come. It was still dark enough for the flames to redden the ground and the sky and the back of Andy’s store, and as I walked nearer, I felt the heat. Dave Lokken, in uniform, stood talking to Andy and his wife, both wearing bathrobes and shocked unmoving faces, directly at the back of the store. The fire stained their faces peach. All three noticed me at the same time and stared at me as if I were a ghoul.
Polar Bears motioned me to him. I kept watching the fire; the first boards collapsed inward, sending up a huge shower of sparks.
“Fire bells wake you up?” he asked.
I nodded.
“You got here in a hell of a hurry. Sleeping in your clothes?”
“I wasn’t in bed.”
“Me neither,” he said, and gave me one of his sad paternal smiles. “Care to hear the story? I’ll have to tell you anyhow. You’ll be interested.”
I was looking dumbly at a mess of gray army blankets thrown in a heap halfway between the burning Dream House and the back of Andy’s, and I nodded.
“Of course these boys aren’t really going to do anything with that hose,” he said, “but they might keep the flames from jumping to Andy Kastad’s store. That’ll be the best they could do. The call came too late for them to save that little abortion of Du-ane’s, but I reckon nobody’ll be too sorry to see that go, least of all Du-ane. It should of been pulled down long before this. What happened was, Andy and his wife woke up in time to save themselves—claim they heard a noise and then they heard the fire. Both jumped out of bed. They look through the window. Get the scare of their lives.”
I glanced back at Andy and his wife, and thought it was probably true.
“So old Margaret calls the volunteers while Andy runs out the back to do something—he doesn’t know what. Piss on it, maybe. And he sees something. Can you guess what?”
“No.” Polar Bears was using his favorite trick of building up suspense.
“No. No indeed. Say, by the way, Miles, I don’t suppose you happened to see your friend Paul Kant tonight?” His head was cocked, his eyebrows raised, his manner entirely unembarrassed by the digression. Another favorite trick.
“No.”
“Uh-huh. Real good. Anyhow, like I was saying, Andy comes boiling out of his back door, all set to pour beer or something all over the fire, and he sees this object in the doorway of the house. Now he’s like you. He can’t guess what it is either. But he thinks he’d better have a closer look. So he runs up, takes a grab and pulls it away. Half of it’s on fire. And when he sees it good and plain, he runs back inside and calls me up too, only Dave and I are already rarin’ out here.”
“What’s the point of all this folksy crap, Polar Bears?” The heat of the fire seemed to be intensifying, grilling the side of my face.
“I thought you mighta guessed.” He put a big hand on my bicep and began to lead me toward the store. “The point is that you got nothing more to worry about, Miles. Everything’s over. I picked the wrong horse, but you’re out in the free and clear as of this moment. It’s like I told you. I missed him, but he missed me too.”
I stopped and looked up into his massive face and saw, operating far beneath the confidential tone and manner, bafflement and anger. He jerked me forward, commanding me to join his charade. I stumbled, and he gripped my arm more tightly. “We’re at the sixteenth of July, old buddy, so if you got nothing holding you here after the twenty-first, I guess you’ll be leaving us. That’s less than a week. Long enough to keep your mouth shut, I guess.”
“Polar Bears,” I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I think I know who you’re looking for.”
“Who I was looking for,” he said.
We were nearly at the heap of blankets, and I was aware of Lokken shooing Andy and Margaret Kastad away. They bustled off somewhere behind me, seemingly glad to leave.
“That was a man he found in there,” Polar Bears said, and bent over like a man about to pick a coin off the sidewalk.
“A man?”
Wordlessly Polar Bears folded back the edge of the blanket.
I was looking at his face. Part of his hair was burned away and his cheek was bloody. His eyes were still open. I felt my knees try to vanish, and I remained standing up only by great effort. Polar Bears touched me across the line of my shoulder blades and I again felt his suppressed anger. It came out of him like the touch of a branding iron. I heard him say, “That’s your ticket out of here, Miles,” and glanced at his fire-reddened features and then back at Paul’s body.
“What’s that on the side of his head?” I asked, and heard my voice tremble. “It looks like he was clubbed.”
“Falling board.”
“They didn’t start to fall until I got here.”
“Then he fell down.”
I turned away.
“One more thing, Miles,” said Polar Bears beside me. He bent over again, flipped back the edge of the blanket, straightened up, and used his foot to kick over another section of gray wool. “Look. Something else Andy pulled out.” He took my arm and revolved me like a toy. It took me a moment to recognize what lay exposed beside the kicked-back gray blanket, because the metal had been blackened by the fire. It was the second ten-gallon gas can from the garage beside the farmhouse.
“How he started the fire,” said Polar Bears. “Plain as day.”
“What is? That gas can’s from my home.”
“Sure it is. He snuck out, stole that can of gas, came back here, spilled it around and set it alight. He might as well have confessed. He couldn’t take it anymore.”
“No, no, no,” I said, “Polar Bears, he was at my place earlier. He was trying to escape before that gang of thugs beat him up or killed him. He wasn’t guilty, he didn’t have anything to confess.”
“Give it up, Miles,” Hovre said. “You already told me you hadn’t seen him. It’s too late to lie about it.”
“I’m not lying now.”
“You were before, but you’re not now.” His voice was toneless and disbelieving.
“He left my house a little after three. Somebody must have been following him all the time. Somebody killed him. That’s what he was afraid of. That’s why he ran. I even heard the car.” My voice was rising.
Polar Bears scuffled a few paces away. I saw that he was struggling to keep himself under control. “Now, Miles,” he said, turning around to face me again, “it seems to me, just to get back to reality here, that the coroner might go one of two ways on this one. You listening? He might judge this as suicide or accidental death in the commission of a crime, depending on how much he wanted to protect the reputation of Paul Kant. Either way he’s got to weigh in the evidence of that gas can.”
“Those are the only two verdicts you think he might consider?”
“Yep.”
“Not if I can help it.”
“You won’t be able to do anything here, Miles. You better finish off that resear
ch of yours and get out.”
“Who’s the coroner here?”
Polar Bears gave me a flat angry triumphant glare. “I am.”
I could only stare at him.
“In a county of this size, it didn’t make much sense to have two men both drawing public salaries.”
I turned wordlessly to look at the fire. It was much lower now and the doorframe and all of the roof had collapsed into the roaring heart of the building. My skin felt half-roasted, face and hands. My trousers were hot where they brushed my legs. I sensed the Kastads shying away from both me and the fire.
“He was at my house,” I said. I could not bear it any longer. I started to walk toward him. “He was at my house, and you raped my cousin. You and Duane. You killed her. Probably accidentally. But this makes two deaths you want to shovel dirt over. This time it won’t happen.”
His fury was more frightening than Duane’s because it was quieter. “Dave,” he said, looking over my shoulder.
“You can’t pin it all on an innocent man because he’s conveniently dead,” I said. “I know who it is.”
“Dave.” Lokken came up behind me. I could hear him walking over the gravel.
“It’s that boy Zack,” I said. “There’s one other possibility, but it’s too crazy…so it has to be Zack.” I heard Lokken whisper something in surprise behind me. “He had those Coke bottles in his truck, and a doorknob…”
“Do you know who Zachary is, Miles?” interrupted Polar Bears, his voice flat as a tombstone.
“He likes fires too, doesn’t he?” I said. “Duane said he liked them so much sometimes he didn’t wait for someone else to start them.”
Dave Lokken grabbed my arms. “Hold him, Dave,” said Polar Bears. “Hold him good.” He came up close to me, and Lokken pinned my arms back, holding me so tightly I could not move. “You know who Zachary is?”
