If You Could See Me Now

by Peter Straub

  “Nobody living is the one you want,” I said.

  He squinted up his entire face, then let out a disgusted grunt and put his hat back on his head. “Miles, if you go crazy on me you’re gonna ruin all the fun.” On went his sunglasses. He pushed himself off the fender. He looked like something you’d run from on a dark night. “Why don’t you take a little trip with me?”

  “A trip?”

  “A little jaunt. I want to show you something. Get into my car.”

  I just looked at him, trying to figure it out.

  “Get your ass in the car, Miles.”

  I did as I was told.

  He spun the squad car out onto the highway without speaking to me, his face a tight mask of distaste. All of those unhappy odors began to build up. We went toward Arden at a good twenty miles over the speed limit.

  “You’re taking me to her parents,” I said.

  He did not reply.

  “You finally decided to arrest me.”

  “Shut up,” he said.

  But we did not stop at the police station. Polar Bears zoomed straight through Arden, and we picked up more speed as we left town. Restaurants, the bowling alley, fields. The farms and the corn took over again. Now we were in the same country he had driven me through before, the afternoon I had talked to Paul Kant: wide fields green and yellow, and the Blundell River shining through a screen of trees. Eventually Polar Bears took off his hat and sailed it onto the back seat. He ran a palm over his forehead. “Too damn hot,” he said.

  “I still don’t get it. If you were going to work me over you could have done it miles back.”

  “I don’t want to hear your voice,” he said. Then he glanced over at me. “Do you know what’s in Blundell?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, you’re gonna find out.”

  Exhausted-looking cows swung their heads to watch us pass.

  “The state hospital?”

  “Yeah, that’s there.” He would say no more.

  Hovre hit the accelerator even harder, and we sped past the sign at the Blundell town limits. It was a town much like Arden, one main street lined with stores, wooden houses with porches on a small grid of streets. Lightbulbs on a string and a row of banners hung before a used-car lot, the banners too limp to flap. A few men in straw hats and working clothes squatted on the curb.

  Polar Bears took the first road out of town, and then guided the patrol car into what looked like a park. The road turned narrow. It was edged with a long green lawn. “State hospital grounds,” he said noncommittally. “But you and me ain’t going there.”

  I could see the big gray buildings of the hospital complex appearing through the trees to my left. They had a Martian remoteness. Sun umbrellas dotted the lawn, but no one sat beneath them.

  “I’m gonna do you a real favor,” he said. “Most tourists never get to see this feature of our county.”

  The road divided, and Polar Bears turned into the left fork, which soon ended in a gray parking lot before a low gray building like an ice cube. Shrubs around the sides of the cube struggled in the hard clay. I realized where I was a half second before I saw the metal plate staked into the ground in the midst of the shrubs.

  “Welcome to the Furniveau County Morgue,” Polar Bears said, and got out of the car. He went across the tacky asphalt of the lot without looking back at me.

  I reached the door just as it closed behind him. I pushed it open and stepped into a cold white interior. Machinery hummed behind the walls.

  “This here’s my assistant,” Polar Bears was saying. I realized after a moment that he meant me. He had his sunglasses off, and he rested his hands on his hips. In the antiseptic cold interior of the morgue, he smelled like a buffalo. A short dark-complected man in a spotted white coat sat at a battered desk in an alcove and incuriously looked at him. The desk was bare except for a portable radio and an ashtray. “I want him to have a look at the new one.”

  The man glanced at me. It didn’t make any difference to him. Nothing made any difference to him.

  “Which new one?”

  “Michalski.”

  “Uh-huh. She’s back from the autopsy. Didn’t know you had any new deputies.”

  “He’s a volunteer,” said Polar Bears.

  “Well, what the hell,” the man said, and pushed himself away from the desk. He went through green metal doors at the end of the hall. “After you,” said Polar Bears, waving me through.

  It was useless to protest. I followed the attendant down a cold row of metal lockers. Hovre followed, so close that he nearly walked on my heels.

  “You braced for this?” he asked me.

  “I don’t see the point,” I said.

  “You pretty soon will.”

  The dark-complected man stopped before one of the lockers, took a ring of keys from his pocket, and unlocked the door.

  “Belly up,” said Polar Bears.

  The little man pulled the long tray out of the locker. A dead naked girl was lying on the slab. I had thought they covered them with sheets. “God,” I said, seeing her wounds and the scars from the autopsy.

  Polar Bears was waiting, very still. I looked at the girl’s face. Then I began to perspire in the icy room.

  Polar Bears’ voice came: “She remind you of anybody?”

  I tried to swallow. It was more than enough proof, if I needed any more proof. “Did the first two look more or less the same?”

  “Pretty close,” said Polar Bears. “That Strand girl was as close as a sister might be.”

  I remembered the violence of the hatred I had felt when she had seemed to storm inside me. She had come back all right, and she had killed three girls who had an accidental resemblance to her. I would be next.

  “Interesting, isn’t it?” said Hovre. “Close ’er up, Archy.”

  The dark little man, who had been standing with his arms braced against the front of the locker as if asleep on his feet, pushed the tray back into the locker.

  “Now let’s go back to the car,” said Polar Bears.

  I followed him out into the blast of heat and sunlight. He drove me back to the Updahl farm without saying a word.

  After he turned up the drive he cut the patrol car onto the lawn before the porch and got out as I did. He came toward me, a big intimidating physical presence. “Suppose we just agree to stay put until I get the final word from the M.E.”

  “Why don’t you put me in jail?”

  “Why, Miles, you’re my assistant on this case,” he said, and got back into his car. “In the meantime, get some sleep. You look like hell.” As he twirled the car into the drive, I saw the grim, entirely satisfied smile on his lips.

  —

  I woke up late in the night. Alison Greening was seated on the chair at the foot of the bed. I could just distinguish her face and the shape of her body in the moonlight. I feared—I do not know what I feared, but I feared for my life. She did nothing. I sat up in the bed: I felt terribly naked and unprotected. She seemed utterly normal; she looked like an ordinary young woman. She was looking straight at me, her expression placid and unemotional, abstracted. For a moment I thought that she looked too ordinary to have caused all the upheavals in me and in Arden. Her face was waxen. Then my fear came booming back into me, and I opened my mouth to say something. Before I could form words, she was gone.

  I got out of bed, touched the chair, and went across the top of the house to my office. Papers still lay on the floor, papers spilled out of bushel baskets. She was not there.

  —

  In the morning I gulped down a half-pint of milk, thought with distaste of food, and knew that I had to get away. Rinn had been right, all that time ago. I had to leave the valley. The sight of her calmly, emotionlessly sitting on the chair at the foot of the bed, her blank face washed in moonlight, was more frightening than the frantic assault on my room. I could see that face, drained by the pale light, and it held no feeling I recognized; the complications of emotion had been erased
. There was no more life in it than there was in a mask. I set down the bottle, checked my pockets for money and keys, and went outside into the sunlight. Dew lay shining on the grass.

  Highway 93 to Liberty, I thought, then down to where I could pick up the freeway to La Crosse, and then I’d cross the river and head for a small town where I would leave the Nash and telegraph the New York Chemical for money and buy a secondhand car and go to Colorado or Wyoming, where I knew nobody. I backed out into the valley road and picked up speed, heading for the highway.

  When I checked the rearview mirror as I passed the church, I saw another car keeping pace with me. I accelerated, and it kept the distance between us steady. It was like the prelude to that awful night when I had lost her, the night when we had made the vow. As the other car picked up speed and came closer, I saw black and white and knew that it was a police car. If it’s Polar Bears, I thought, I’ll attack him with my bare hands. I pushed the accelerator to the floor, and yanked at the wheel as I went around the curve by the sandstone bluff. The Nash began to vibrate. The patrol car pulled up easily and began to nose in before me, forcing me to the side of the road. I spun into Andy’s and went around the gas pumps. The patrol car anticipated me and moved ahead to block my exit. I looked around, considering backing up and swinging around into the side parking lot, but his car would have caught the old Nash in thirty seconds. I turned off the ignition.

  I got out of the car and stood up. The man behind the wheel of the patrol car opened his door and rose up into the sunshine. It was Dave Lokken. Walking toward me, he kept his right hand on his holster.

  “Nice little race.” He was imitating Polar Bears, even in his slow walk. “Where do you think you were going?”

  I slumped against the hot metal of the Nash. “Shopping.”

  “You wasn’t thinking about leaving, I hope. Because that’s why I been sittin’ out near your place for two days, to make sure you don’t even think about it.”

  “You were watching me?”

  “For your own good,” he said, grinning. “The Chief says you need a lot of help. I’m gonna help you stick around where we can keep an eye on you. The medical examiner is supposed to call the Chief real soon now.”

  “I’m not the one you’re looking for,” I said. “I’m telling you the truth.”

  “I guess you’re gonna tell me it was Chief Hovre’s boy Zack. I heard you say that a couple of nights back. You might just as well of put a gun to your head. His boy is all the family the Chief’s got. Now get back and get home.”

  I remembered the pale mask looking at me from the foot of the bed; and then I looked up toward the windows of Andy’s store. Andy and his wife were standing up there looking down at us, one face showing horror, the other contempt.

  “Come on and help me get my car back,” I said and turned my back on him.

  After a couple of steps I stopped walking. “What would you say if I told you your Chief raped and killed a girl?” I asked. “Twenty years ago.”

  “I’d say you was lookin’ to get your head blown off. Just like you been doin’ since you got here.”

  “What would you say if I told you that the girl he raped—” I turned back around, looked at his angry yokel’s face and gave up. He smelled like burning rubber. “I’m going into Arden,” I said. “Tag along.”

  —

  I saw him driving along behind me all the way to Arden, at times speaking into his radio microphone, and when I haggled with the boy Hank Speltz, he stayed in the car and parked across the street from the garage. The boy at first told me that the “repairs” to the VW would cost me five hundred dollars, and I refused to pay it. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his coveralls and looked at me with sullen hatred. I asked him what he had done. “Had to rebuild most of the motor. Patch what I couldn’t rebuild. Lots of stuff. New belts.”

  “I imagine you’re being funny,” I said. “I don’t think you could rebuild a cigarette.”

  “Pay up or no car. You want me to get the police?”

  “I’ll give you fifty dollars and that’s it. You haven’t even shown me a worksheet.”

  “Five hundred. We don’t use worksheets. People around here trust us.”

  It was my day for being reckless. I went across the street and opened Lokken’s door and made him follow me back to the garage. Hank Speltz looked as though he regretted his remark about getting the police.

  “Well,” Speltz said after I had forced Lokken to listen to an account of our interchange, “I was chargin’ you in advance for the body work.”

  Lokken looked at him disgustedly.

  “I’ll give you thirty bucks,” I said.

  Speltz howled, “You said fifty!”

  “I changed my mind.”

  “Make out a bill for thirty,” said Lokken. The boy went inside to the garage’s office.

  “It’s funny,” I told Lokken, “you can’t do any wrong in this country if you’ve got a cop beside you.”

  Lokken waddled away without replying, and Speltz reappeared, grumbling that the new windows had cost more than thirty dollars.

  “Now fill it up,” I said. “It’s on my credit card.”

  “We don’t take out-of-state credit cards.”

  “Deputy!” I yelled, and Lokken glowered at us from behind the wheel of his car.

  “Shee-ut,” the boy said. When I pulled the battered car up to the pumps, he filled the tank and returned with the credit card apparatus.

  Out on the street, Lokken pulled his car up beside mine and leaned toward me. “I had some news on my radio a while back. I probably won’t be watching you anymore.” Then he reversed, turned around, and sped away down Main Street, going in the direction of the police headquarters.

  I discovered what Hank Speltz had meant about rebuilding the engine when I pressed the accelerator going up the hill past the R-D-N motel. The car died, and I had to coast over to the curb and wait several minutes before it would start again. This was repeated when I went up the hill toward the Community Chest thermometer and the Italian distance, and again when I was coming down the last hill toward the highway. It cut out a fourth time when I pulled into the drive, and I let the car coast to a stop on the lawn.

  Another police car was drawn up in my usual place before the garage. I saw the Chief’s star on the door.

  I began to walk toward the figure sitting on the porch swing. “Everything work out okay at the filling station?” asked Polar Bears.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Good question. Suppose you come inside and talk about it.” Part of the façade had been put aside: his voice was level and weary.

  When I came up inside the porch I saw that Polar Bears was sitting beside a pile of my clothing. “That’s a brilliant idea,” I said. “Take away a man’s clothes and he can’t go anywhere. The riverbank school of detection.”

  “I’ll get to the clothes in a minute. Sit down.” It was an order. I went to a chair at the end of the porch and sat facing him.

  “The medical examiner phoned in his report a couple hours ago. He thinks the Michalski girl died on Thursday. Might have been as long as twenty-four hours after Paul Kant meatballed himself.”

  “A day before you found her.”

  “That’s right.” Now he was having difficulty concealing his anger. “We were a day late. We might not have found her at all if someone hadn’t decided to tell us that you liked to go up into those woods. Maybe Paul Kant would still be alive too if we’d been there earlier.”

  “You mean maybe one of your vigilantes wouldn’t have killed him.”

  “Okay.” He stood up and walked toward me, his feet making the boards squeak. “Okay, Miles. You’ve been having lots of fun. You’ve been making a lot of wild accusations. But the fun’s almost over. Why don’t you wrap it all up and give me a confession?” He smiled. “It’s my job, Miles. I’m being real nice and careful with you. I don’t want any sharp Jew lawyer from New York coming out here and saying I
walked all over your rights.”

  “I want you to put me in jail,” I said.

  “I know you do. I told you that a long time ago. There’s only one little thing you gotta do before your conscience gets a nice rest.”

  “I think—” I said, and my throat went as tight as Galen Hovre’s face. “I know it sounds crazy, but I think Alison Greening killed those girls.”

  His neck was swelling. “She wrote, I mean she sent, those blank letters. The one I showed you and the other one. I’ve seen her, Polar Bears. She’s back. The night she died we made a vow that we’d meet in 1975, and I came back here because of that, and…and she’s here. I’ve seen her. She wants to take me with her. She hates life. Rinn knew. She’d…”

  I realized with shock that Polar Bears was enraged. In the next second, he moved with more rapidity than I would have thought possible in a man of his size, and kicked the chair out from under me. I went over sideways and rolled into the screen. He kicked out, and his shoe connected with my hip.

  “You goddamned idiot,” he said. The smell of gunpowder poured over me. He kicked me in the pit of the stomach, and I jackknifed over. Splinters from the boards dug into my cheek. As on the night of Paul’s death, Polar Bears bent over me. “You think you’re gonna get out of this by playing crazy? I’ll tell you about your tramp cousin, Miles. Sure I was there, that night. We were both there. Duane and me. But Duane didn’t rape her. I did. Du-ane was too busy knockin’ you out.” I was struggling to breathe. “I hit her on the head just after Duane clubbed you with a rock. Then I had her. It was just what she wanted—she was only fighting because you were there.” He picked up my head by my hair and slammed it down onto the boards. “I didn’t even know she was out until it was all over. That little bitch was teasing me all summer, the little cunt. Maybe I even meant to kill her. I don’t even know anymore. But I know that every time you said that little bitch’s name I could have killed you, Miles. You shouldn’t have gone messing around with what’s past, Miles.” He banged my head on the boards once again. “Shouldn’t have gone messing.” He took his hand off my head and inhaled noisily. “It’s no good your tryin’ to tell this to anybody, because nobody’ll believe you. You know that, don’t you?” I could hear his breathing. “Don’t you?” His hand came back and slammed my head down again. Then he said, “We’re moving inside. I don’t want anybody to see this.” He picked me up and dragged me inside and dropped me onto the floor. I felt a sharp, bursting pain in my nose and ears. I was still having trouble breathing.