Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  * * *

  He and his father had lived in single rooms, beer-fragrant apartments above roughhouse taverns, in transient hotels where they had to cook on a hot plate and swat roaches off tables; in a bad time they had spent a week living in Clark’s old car. He had known many boys who promised to grow up just like the Norman twins—violence, stupidity, and craftiness were nothing new to Tabby. He had seen his father swim perilously into alcoholism and most of the way out; he had seen his father briefly go to jail, for what crime he never knew; by the time he was ten, he had finished only one year in the same school where he had begun it. Once he had seen his father come home flushed and triumphant and spread out on the kitchen table three thousand dollars he had won playing tennis. He had seen two men die, one knifed in a bar where Clark was working, one shot to death during a fight in the street. And once when he had opened the bathroom door without first knocking, he had seen a friend of his father’s, a skinny ghostly Key West transvestite named Poche or Poach, sitting on the toilet and shooting heroin into his arm.

  When he was fourteen he wrote down all the addresses he could remember of the places he and his father had lived, beginning with the house on Mount Avenue: without even hesitating, he listed nine addresses, including three places that called themselves hotels, one boardinghouse, and one foster home. After thinking for a few minutes, he was able to list three more.

  Sherri Stillwell eventually changed all that. She was a hard-bitten loyal blond woman, half Cuban, five years younger than Clark. An earlier husband had walked out on her and she had become a regular at the bar, the No Name, where Clark worked in Key West. Sherri’s father had been a Texas oil rigger, often away from home for long periods, and she had helped raise three smaller brothers: she liked children. There was still a lot of Texas in Sherri. When she moved in with Clark, she insisted that Tabby stay home with her at night and do his homework instead of messing around in the streets all night or sitting mascotlike in a corner of the bar. Sherri filled out Clark’s tax returns, noisily got rid of worthless and criminal hangers-on like Poche, and made Clark promise that he would never lie to her.

  “Honey, my first husband filled me so full of lies I thought the sky was red. Once is enough. If you fool around, you tell me who it is and I’ll straighten it out fast. I want one thing, you being straight with me. Tell me one lie—one—and I cut out.” With her peroxide hair and black eyes, Sherri looked like no one who had ever set foot in the house on Mount Avenue, but Monty Smithfield would have recognized her goals for her lover and his son. She encouraged Clark’s occasional hustling because it could bring in immediate money, but she wanted him to stop tending bar and get into some business. She circled want ads. She made appointments for him. Finally it was because of Sherri that Clark got a job as a salesman. By this time they were in Orlando, in a little two-bedroom house with a scrubby sandy lawn, and they had begun to save some money. With the check Monty had sent them as a wedding present, they bought a new car and some furniture. It was Sherri who ultimately talked Clark around to telephoning his father.

  During these years Tabby had successfully managed to repress nearly all the traces of the misfortunes which had preceded and accompanied his departure from Connecticut. He thought about his mother, but carefully avoided thinking about the vision of the interior of her coffin which had assaulted him just before her funeral; the odd visions he’d had in the airport, part of a general and numbing panic, were more difficult to suppress. Of his life in Connecticut he could remember chiefly things so opulent they seemed invented—the front of their house, his pony and a profusion of mechanical toys, the way his grandfather had looked and dressed. Just when he was trembling on the edge of puberty, he was hit in the head with a Louisville Slugger and knocked unconscious while he played catcher in a school baseball game—coming to on the coarse grass of the diamond with everybody bending over him, he momentarily remembered seeing a man cutting into a woman with a knife, a vision that had the taste of nostalgia. A teacher kneeling beside him kept saying, oh my God, oh my God. He did not recognize the teacher for a moment, nor any of the boys above him. Two naked people on a bed, one of them thrashing in her own blood? In the middle of his awesome headache, he saw the scene freshly again, as if it had filled his mind while he was unconscious, and again it seemed as though he had been there and watched it happen.

  “Oh, my God,” the teacher said again, and suddenly he remembered her name. The odd and potent vision left him. His eyes focused.

  “How do you feel?” the teacher asked.

  Tabby told her, “My dad said there are no bad men.”

  3

  At only two other times during his life in Florida did Tabby Smithfield demonstrate that he might be something other than the quiet normal boy, the son of an itinerant bartender, that he appeared to be.

  The first occurred just after Clark had bought the little house in Orlando. They had moved in that morning, and Sherri was fussing from living room to kitchen and back again, trying to pretend that she was not ecstatic. The U-Haul trailer was still in the driveway, unhitched because Clark was at work, and boxes full of dishes and clothes were all over the floors. Sherri was waiting for the delivery truck from Sears—a new bed was on the way. Tabby had found his Monopoly game in one of the boxes, and was playing it by himself on the bare floor of his new bedroom. There were four Tabbys, and when one of them rolled the dice, the others hoped he’d land on one of their hotels. Tabby II was winning so far, and Tabby III had had nothing but penalties. Sherri had buzzed into the room, seen what he was doing, said, “You’re the craziest kid, I swear,” buzzed out again. Sounds of drawers opening, boxes being ripped apart.

  “Damn,” Sherri shouted from the living room. “I can’t find it!”

  He was Tabby IV then, a good cautious Tabby, not as reckless as Tabby II or as unlucky as Tabby III, with a good chance to overtake II and eventually win the game, and he yelled out, “Can I help?”

  “I can’t find it!” Sherri squalled, pushed over the edge by frustration. Tabby understood—moving house was hard on the nerves. And then he—or, to be precise, the part of him that was unlucky Tabby III—understood even more. Sherri had misplaced her wallet, and she was going crazy because she was afraid she’d have to tip the men bringing the bed and would not have any money. He understood all this in an instant, and then, just as if Tabby III across the table with his diminishing supply of funny money leaned over to whisper in his ear, an instant later he saw it: he saw Sherri take the wallet out of her oversized bag and absentmindedly put it on top of the refrigerator.

  Tabby never stopped to question this vision or to wonder where it came from. He put down the dice and went into the living room, where Sherri was pacing around with her hands stuck in her hair. “Your wallet’s on top of the ‘frigerator,” he said. “You kidding me?” Sherri said, and went off to the kitchen at a trot. A moment later she returned, wallet in her hand, with a grateful look on her face. “You’re a genius, kid,” she said. “Now, tell me what happened to the charm bracelet I lost when I was sixteen.”

  “Okay,” Tabby said. “It fell down behind the backseat of your cousin Hector’s car. That was a ’49 Dodge. It stayed there a long time, but when Hector sold the car for junk the guy in the junkyard found it after they took the seats out.” All this information was coming from Tabby III. “He gave it to his little girl, but then she lost it at a party, and somehow it went down a storm drain. . . .” He stopped because Tabby III had just given him a very clear picture of Sherri, sixteen years old, with her shirt and bra off. Her hair was as black as her eyes.

  Sherri was staring at him with her mouth open. “My cousin Hector? My sweet Jesus. Did I ever say anything about him to you?”

  The bell rang. “They’re here. Hey, thanks, Tabby. I was going nuts.” She turned away, but not before giving him a puzzled, almost frightened look out of her black eyes.

  The second event happened three years later, in March of 1980, just a month before the
y moved back to Hampstead. Monty Smithfield had died of a stroke, and his lawyer had written Clark that he was now owner of “Four Hearths.” Clark wanted to leave immediately; Sherri did not want to leave at all, and they were fighting about it. Besides the house, there was an amount of money that seemed fabulous to them all, hundreds of thousands of dollars. “What about your job?” “They can stuff my job. I’ll get another job there. Sherri, I won’t even need a job for a long time.” “I don’t want to move up North.” “You want to stay here? In this crackerbox?” “I won’t know how to act. I won’t fit in. I won’t have any friends. I want to stay here where I belong.”

  Clark had now swung part of the way back into alcoholism, and he was drunk. As in the old days on Mount Avenue, he skipped work two days every week. Clark and Sherri had begun to fight about these matters. “Where you belong is wherever I take you,” Clark yelled.

  “So I am like something you pack in a suitcase?” Whenever Sherri got mad, her voice became much more Spanish.

  Tabby slipped out the door, wanting only to get away from the sounds of their fight. He scuffed across the weedy lawn. Sherri’s voice rose up like a flag from the house behind him. A glass shattered.

  Then it happened again. He was somewhere else. For the first time he understood that he was seeing forward, seeing what would happen. It was night, a few degrees cooler than the actual night. The noises of the fight had vanished, and Tabby knew without looking back that his house had vanished too. Tall dark trees stood all about him: before him was a meeting of two roads. Light from a number of large houses shone steadily through and around the trees. He knew that this was not the countryside it appeared to be, but a rich neighborhood that imitated northern country. Once he had known this place. A bad thing had happened here. Lights from a car, set low to the ground, swept toward him. In a moment they were on him, dazzling his eyes.

  4

  So he stood there, in real time, six weeks later, on the night of May 17. His father claimed he had already found a job: when he got home at night he talked about the “accounts” he was getting, the commissions he was earning, all the while drinking steadily. Sherri had grown puffy with misery. She hated Connecticut. Tabby knew that Hampstead felt entirely snooty and unforgiving to her. He wandered the streets, looking for something. Twice he found himself in front of the gates on Mount Avenue, staring at his grandfather’s old house. Still unaccustomed to the spaciousness of his new home, he could scarcely believe that he and his father had once lived in such a mansion. It was twice the size of “Four Hearths.” Wondering, he turned away. A feeling of immanence drove him. Something, he knew not what, was due: some contract was to be sealed. He was silent and inconspicuous at school, half-thinking that his real life lay elsewhere, out on the quiet Greenbank streets at night where it was.

  On that Saturday, Tabby was tormented by the certainty that it was about to happen. He still had no idea what it was, but it lay over Hampstead like a thundercloud. His anxiety kept him from eating his French toast at breakfast, would not permit him to read a book or watch Spaced-Out Films on Channel 9. Clark said, “Such a nice day, why don’t we go out and play catch?” and Tabby’s feeling of coming doom stripped half his skills from him. He dropped balls, threw them wildly. “Pay attention!” his father yelled, and finally gave up in anger and disgust. Tabby walked for miles—all the way down to Sawtell Beach, where he bought a chili dog at the concession stand and looked at the faces of the people lazing in the sun. Will it happen to you? Will you do it? He trudged back up Greenbank Road, looking at the faces in the cars that passed.

  At one o’clock he sat on Gravesend Beach and fell asleep: vivid, clamorous dreams, filled with cries for help, chased themselves through his mind. When he awakened, he was looking at the Van Horne house, shining whitely up on its bluff above a concrete seawall. He groaned. It would come, and he would not be able to stop it. Seagulls wheeling over the little combers mocked the cries he had heard in his sleep.

  He dragged himself home.

  After dinner Tabby let himself out again. This time he turned not toward Mount Avenue, but into the little maze of streets inland from it. Charleston Road, Hermitage, Beach Trail, Gravesend Avenue, Cannon Road. He stared into windows and scrutinized faces. A patrol car passed him, then swung around for another look. A woman jogged past, and he managed to say hello. Imperceptibly the light died.

  While he walked up Charleston Road for the third time, a wave of dizziness and nausea struck him. He smelled death, as clearly as if he stood over a body, and for a second remembered a scuffle in a Fort Myers tavern, one man punching a blade into another: it had happened, he knew, and then was swept by a series of images too rushed and incoherent to be understood. A sweatshirt that read KEEP ON TRUCKIN’, a boy falling from a bicycle into a heap of gravel, a huge truck canted on its side. A woman screaming for help in a bird’s voice.

  It, it was going on or had gone on behind him. Tabby staggered, turned around, ran back down Charleston Road—and found himself on a corner in a stand of old oak trees with headlights set low to the ground reaching toward him. He looked sideways up Cannon Road. There was the house: its windows black: it had happened in there. The headlights of the car fixed him for a moment, and then the Corvette sped by around the corner. For a moment he saw the frozen, desperate look on the face of the man driving. He was where the sense of immanence had led him, in the place where he had seen himself weeks before.

  Tabby could not move until the police cars roared past him. Then he recoiled backward as if stung, and ran between the trees and houses until he came out on the next street. He ran uphill to the far end of Hermitage Road; home. Once inside, he could hear his father and Sherri in their bedroom. They were noisily, frantically making love.

  5

  “Skippy used to stick his head in the mailboxes sometimes,” Bruce Norman said. “To see if the cherry bombs were duds. Man, he liked to have blown his head off a couple of times. What a crazy dude.”

  Tabby Smithfield, lately an intimate of the Norman twins, was seated between them in the backseat of their rusted old car in the Blue Tern’s parking lot. Dicky Norman had pushed bills into the hands of a suddenly nervous crewneck-sweatered college boy, placed his order, and now the three of them were mildly high, Tabby less so than the twins, on beer. It was ten-thirty on Sunday night, the thirty-first of May. Dicky and Bruce had scarcely let Tabby out of their sight since the previous Friday. At first a little frightened by them, Tabby had come to see that though the twins were obviously destined for inglorious ends, they were still just childish troublemakers. Their size and their menacing faces led the world to expect much worse. They shoplifted, vandalized, smoked dope, and loved heavy metal music. Tabby had known lots like them. He preferred the music of Ben Sidran and Steve Miller, but was not about to announce it.

  “Anyhow, we gave up on cherry bombs,” Bruce said. “Now we get ‘em with the Devastator.” He fondled the taped handle of a baseball bat. This had been lacquered black, but splintery white showed through all the nicks and dents. “Even makes a better sound, sort of a more honest sound. You cruise along, take a good swing with the Devastator, and the whole goddamned side of the box caves in. Ba-joing! How about going out on a run with us a little later, hey?”

  “Okay,” Tabby said. “I’ll come along for the ride.”

  Dicky sat up, looked in the rearview mirror, and groaned. “Bobo the Clown.” All three boys put their cans of beer on the floor behind their legs.

  A moment later a police car pulled up beside them. A grinning Bobo got out and ambled over to their window. “Well, the Bobbsey Twins. Shouldn’t you be home in bed?”

  “Whatever you say, Officer Farnsworth.”

  “Who’s your playmate? He looks too normal to be a friend of yours.”

  Tabby gave his name, and the officer looked him over with a friendly and distant regard.

  “Well, kids, time for you to go. I’m going to check out the bar, and when I come back I don’t want to
see your car here. I’ll tell you something. I’m sorry you guys ever turned sixteen.”

  “It’s a bitch, getting old,” Bruce said.

  “I don’t think you’ll ever get that far, Brucie.” Bobo slapped the top of their car and turned away.

  As soon as Bobo had gone inside the Blue Tern, Bruce drained his beer and opened his door to get into the front seat. “That twink,” he said as he turned the key. “Callin’ me Brucie. Fuckhead clown.” He loudly belched. “Let’s drive around a little bit. Dicky, why don’t you sort of set things up for Tabs?”

  “You ever hear of a guy named Gary Starbuck?” Dicky asked.

  6

  It was barely possible that Clark Smithfield, if not Tabby, might have actually met Gary Starbuck in Key West in the early seventies. Gary Starbuck had been told by his father that the only way to keep out of jail was to keep moving—work a town for a while, then pick up and go at least five hundred miles away. Following his father’s trade as Clark Smithfield had refused to do, Starbuck had lived off the pickings in Key West while Clark worked at the No Name Bar. In Key West, Starbuck was Delbert Tory; in Houston, Charles Beard; in Springfield, Illinois, Lawrence Ringler; in Cleveland, Keith Pepper. When he rented the Frazier Peters house on Beach Trail he called himself Nelson Sutter. From his father he had also learned to avoid meeting people; to sit alone in bars; to cultivate a professional politeness. This Starbuck was a squat youngish fellow, dark-haired and broad-shouldered, beardless. His face was solemn and large of nose, out of key with his top-heavy body. Off duty he wore pastel polo shirts and chinos; drove an anonymous gray van. When he worked he carried a pistol.

  When he had first come to Hampstead, he had rented a trailer in the lot off the Post Road. The twins had seen his van parked beside the trailer day after day; sometimes it was gone on weekends, most often at night. Eventually—just about the time Starbuck found a house to rent—Bruce and Dicky decided to take a look inside both the trailer and the van.