Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  Bruce got into the van one day while Starbuck must have been asleep. It was as clean inside as its owner kept the exterior: clean and empty. But Bruce looked into the glove compartment and saw that the California registration was in another name than the one under which the trailer had been rented.

  “We got something here, Dicky,” he told his brother. The next night they used one of their spare keys to enter the trailer.

  And that was even better than they expected, filled with television sets, silverware, racks of suits—and half a dozen shoe boxes stacked with money. “Hey, this guy’s the real thing,” Bruce said, so impressed he looked poleaxed.

  After school the next day they visited the trailer again. They rang the bell. The tenant came to the door and looked at them suspiciously. Bruce said, “Mr. Starbuck? Excuse me, I mean Mr. Sutter?”

  When they left, they had a new television set and a Baggie full of good Mexican weed. Gary Starbuck had remembered more of his father’s advice: “When you got partners, even partners you don’t want, treat them right. A partner’s a partner even when he’s no good, and sooner or later a little grease will keep your ass out of the jug.” He was sure he could find a use for the Norman twins.

  7

  Patsy McCloud lived with one big simple fear, and even on the night of her failed dinner party for the Allbees and Ronnie Riggley, it overshadowed all the other little fears. When she was seven her parents had taken her to the mental hospital where her Grandmother Tayler lived—her parents saw Grandmother Tayler two or three times a year, but this was Patsy’s first visit. Her father had been grumpy on the long drive from Hampstead to Hartford, for he opposed allowing his daughter to meet his mother; but Patsy’s mother, who had answered the old woman’s increasingly frequent requests with uncomfortable evasions, had held firm.

  They had been shown into a wide room painted in primary colors, like a nursery school. The nurses beamed at Patsy, who was already uneasy because of the tension between her parents and the odd, damaged people wandering through the ward. People whose heads were too large for their bodies, people whose tongues seemed too large for their heads. One man obsessively pacing off the length of a wall had a shovel-shaped dent two inches deep in his forehead. The locks and bars she had seen on the way up to this room made her feel she was a prisoner in the hospital. Maybe it was a trick, a trick to get her here, and her parents would leave her in this place! Though she was the only child in the room, it seemed appointed for children, with its desks covered with crayons and crude childish pictures taped to the wall.

  Her grandmother appeared through a bright orange door. Two male nurses accompanied her. She was talking to herself. Patsy’s first thought was that her grandmother was the oldest person she had ever seen; then that she belonged here. Her white hair was sparse and dull, her eyes glazed. White whiskers sprouted from her chin. She paid no attention to Patsy’s parents but sat in the chair where the nurses put her and looked down at her lap and muttered.

  “We brought Patsy,” her mother said. “Remember that you were asking for her? We wanted you to meet her, Mother Tayler.”

  Her father made a disgusted noise and turned his back on them.

  Patsy was looking into the old woman’s vague, inward face.

  “Don’t you want to say hello to your granddaughter, Mother Tayler?”

  “A man is hanging in his backyard,” her grandmother startled Patsy by mumbling. “Just swinging on a rope. Too many bills, bills, bills. They’ll find him next week, I guess. You brought Danny’s girl?” The vague pale eyes lifted to meet Patsy’s. “Poor girl,” her grandmother said. “She’s another one. Pretty thing. She doesn’t like it here, does she? She thinks you’ll leave her with me. Poor girl. Will they find him next week, little girl?”

  The pale eyes lost a portion of their vagueness, and Patsy had seen the man hanging from the branch of a tree: through a window she saw a desk covered with paper. “I don’t know,” Patsy said, shocked.

  “I’ll love you, if you’ll live with me,” said Grandmother Tayler, and that had abruptly ended the interview. Her father scooped her up and carried her down to the car. Ten minutes later her mother joined them. Neither of them had ever suggested bringing Patsy to see Mother Tayler again.

  Two days later she asked her father if they had found that man yet. Her father had not known what she meant. She understood that her father felt deep angry shame, both for himself and for her.

  * * *

  But she remembered Grandmother Tayler’s acceptance. Poor girl. She’s another one. When the old woman’s eyes had finally met hers, she had felt as transparent as glass. In those eyes had been a matter-of-fact despair and an understanding beyond death. The only difference between Patsy and her grandmother was that Grandmother Tayler was better at it. Before she reached puberty, Patsy was able to move small objects across a table, to switch on lights and open doors, just by seeing these occurrences in her mind and surrounding them with a yellow glow of intention. This ability was her secret, her best secret. She had known instantly that Grandmother Tayler could do much more than that—that if she’d wanted, Grandmother Tayler could have brought down the hospital on all sides of her and walked away free and unharmed. But Grandmother Tayler didn’t want. For Patsy, the old woman with her deliberately vague face and fractured mind was an inexorable image of her own future.

  When she had her first period, the ability to shift objects at will left her. It simply was not there anymore: womanhood had taken it away and left cramps and blood in its place. For almost a year she was like every other girl she knew, and she was grateful.

  Then a new girl had come into their class. Marilyn Foreman, a mousy creature with glasses, dull hair, and an implacable mouth. The minute Marilyn Foreman had appeared in the door, Patsy had known. And Marilyn had recognized her in the same way. The other girl had been an unavoidable fact: Marilyn was her destiny, as her grandmother had been. At recess, the other girl had come up to her and claimed her. “What do you do? I can see things, and they always happen.” “Get away from me,” Patsy said, but halfheartedly, and Marilyn stayed. Patsy was passive before her knowledge that Marilyn Foreman was to drive away all her other friends, and the two of them were to belong to each other. “It’ll happen,” Marilyn said in her grating, drawling voice. “It’ll happen to you too. I know.” Even without affection between them, for the other girl did not require affection, she and Marilyn became so close that they began to look alike, in a middle ground between Patsy’s prettiness and Marilyn’s plainness. Sometimes Patsy caught herself speaking in Marilyn’s voice. The Taylers never understood why their popular, attractive daughter allowed herself to be so influenced by nondescript Marilyn Foreman.

  Together they traveled: their word, Marilyn’s idea. They sat side by side, nights when they were supposed to be doing homework, linked hands, and closed their eyes. Patsy invariably felt a sick thrill of fear, half-enjoyable, as their minds seemed to join and float upward. Traveling, they saw strange landscapes, hot molten colors—they never knew what they would see. It might just be people eating in a restaurant, or a boy in their class taking a walk along Sawtell Beach. Once they saw two of their teachers, not married to each other, making love on the floor of an empty room. Another time, they saw a man they recognized as the shop teacher at J. S. Mill deep in a green wood, lying naked over a boy who was on the high-school football team. “That’s filthy dirty,” Marilyn said. But in general, Marilyn never cared what they saw while they traveled. She was as happy watching strangers eat a meal she could not taste in a restaurant she could not recognize as with their more colorful visions.

  Another vision seemed to be located in the past, and would have been unusual for that reason alone. The two girls saw a street that was obviously Riverfront Avenue, but the oil company and office buildings were gone. Short chunky fishing boats were docked at piers; snub-nosed old cars had been pulled up on a grassy bank long since turned into parking lots. On one of the boats a bearded man in a kni
t cap was pouring wine into a coffee cup and a wineglass. A woman in a silk dress lolled against the boat’s railing. “This is wrong,” Marilyn said. “I don’t like this.” She had tried to extricate her hand, but Patsy gripped harder: this was for her, and Marilyn Foreman was not going to take it from her even if it was terrible. For it would be terrible, she knew. The bearded man smiled at the woman and started his engines. The boat putted out into the river and went slowly seaward. The man grasped the woman and pretended to dance. He swayed, shuffled his feet; the woman held to him and laughed. Patsy saw that the fisherman was handsome as a bull is handsome, uncaringly. “Nasty,” Marilyn said. Smiling, the man stroked the woman’s neck with his blunt fingers. Then he closed his hands and pressed into the soft flesh of her neck with his thumbs. His eyes glittered. He leaned into the woman and toppled her to the shiny deck. Their bodies struggled and rolled until the man lifted the woman’s head and battered it against the deck. All his movements were concentrated and intent. Marilyn began to shake. After the woman stopped moving, the man fetched a roll of oilcloth from a locker and tied her into it. When he had thrown the wrapped, still-living body into the Nowhatan, he finished the wine. Patsy tingled with revulsion: as soon as the picture of the fisherman standing alone on his boat melted into that of another strange man, this one in a double-breasted suit and standing on what Patsy recognized as the country club beach, she dropped Marilyn’s hand. She felt as if these scenes of death and violence would cynically unreel as long as she invited them.

  Will they find him next week, little girl?

  After the Foremans moved to Tulsa, Patsy never tried to travel on her own. She and Les both went to Connecticut State College: they watched the days-long drama of the Kennedy assassination on the television set in Les’s fraternity house. Sometimes she would amaze Les by correctly predicting the grades he would earn on his exams. If she had prophetic dreams, she kept them to herself. Les was already calling her a “swamp Yankee.” After they married in 1964, they lived in Hartford, New York City, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, and were transferred back to New York. They bought their house in Hampstead, and Les commuted to New York to, as he put it, “burn ass.” Now they never spoke of anything personal. Les in fact rarely spoke to her at all. He had started to beat her in Chicago, after his first really significant promotion had followed the best efficiency reports of his life.

  8

  Les did not beat Patsy that Sunday night; he sourly and drunkenly told her that compared to Ronnie Riggley and Laura Allbee she was not a woman. He roamed around the house, finishing a bottle, while Patsy retreated to the bedroom. Now and then she heard him muttering about “pansy actors.” When she heard him come up the stairs to go to bed, Patsy fled into the spare bedroom next to theirs, where she had set up some bookshelves, a desk, and a couch that folded out into a double bed. A black-and-white Sony with a six-inch screen sat on top of the bookshelf, and she switched it on to watch a movie until Les was safely asleep.

  At twelve-thirty a noise of crashing and splintering from outside jolted her out of a doze. Les too had been awakened by the noises from the street, and she heard him thrashing around in the dark bedroom. The door banged. She called out his name, but instead of an answer heard the front door slam shut.

  Patsy looked out the window of her hideaway. In the yellow glow from the security lights angling out from most of the houses, she saw a rusty black car speeding around the corner of Charleston Road. A second later she saw Les chasing after the car in his bathrobe and slippers. He was carrying a gun in his hand.

  She knew Les well enough to know that if Richard Allbee and Bobo Farnsworth had not been in their house Les would have left the gun behind. But the youth and strength of one, and the fame, however meaningless, of the other, had provoked him. Patsy looked down the stairs to the landing, opened the door and ran down the street after her husband.

  A dying sparrow fluttered pathetically on the grate of a storm drain beneath a lamp. Ordinarily she would have stopped, but she heard the crowing of a police siren around the corner ahead of her and ran toward it past the trembling sparrow.

  At the corner where Charleston Road swung into Beach Trail stood a second streetlamp, and a child, a little girl with glasses and limp brown hair, stood directly beneath it, looking at her. Patsy at first thought that it was very late for a child to be outside, then that the child looked familiar. Her anxiety for Les kept her running until she was directly abreast of the streetlamp. She could see a patrol car nosed in toward a driveway on Beach Trail, that of the house which backed directly onto hers. A policeman stood beside a hunched old man and a slight teenage boy, and Les was crouched down before them, holding his pistol out in the firing position.

  “Oh, my God,” Patsy breathed. Les had gone crazy and was about to shoot someone, unless the policeman shot him first.

  Then she realized that the child beneath the streetlamp was Marilyn Foreman. She involuntarily turned from the sight of her husband aiming his pistol at a policeman, and looked sideways at the child. Marilyn Foreman, with her ribbon bow tie and rolled white socks and pale indomitable face. Marilyn stood in the light and cast no shadow. “No,” Patsy said. “It’s not . . .” Marilyn opened her mouth and spoke, but no words issued from her mouth. Patsy heard the sound of a shot, very loud in the quiet street.

  9

  “Gary Starbuck is a pro,” Dicky Norman told Tabby as they turned onto the Bridge Road and crossed the Nowhatan. “He’s the real thing. Nobody even knows his real name besides us. Boy, does he have his shit together.”

  “What do you mean, a pro?”

  Both brothers laughed. They were speeding up Greenbank Road, the Olds’s rebuilt engine doing everything but shooting flames out the exhaust.

  “He takes things,” Bruce said. “Out of people’s houses. Man, when he’s done with a house, there’s nothing left but termites. I bet Gary Starbuck makes more money in a year than anybody around here, I bet he’s a fuckin’ millionaire, man, the stuff he’s got.”

  “Oh,” Tabby said.

  “And we’re gonna hook up with him,” Dicky crowed.

  “That’s not for me,” Tabby quickly put in.

  “Oh, not tonight. Tonight we’re just going to exercise the Devastator. In Greenbank. We’ve got it all timed. We’ll get in Greenbank just about ten minutes after that twink Bobo the Clown pulls out on his way toward the Post Road. We got that sucker down, man. We know his every move. And he’s gonna look like a real asshole.”

  “Didn’t you just get a few mailboxes in Greenbank?” asked Tabby, who had seen the evidence of the twins’ enthusiasms.

  “Yeah, but this is specially for Bobo,” said Dicky, rapping the bat against the palm of his hand. “And afterward, maybe we can hook up with Gary Starbuck for a little talk. Unless you think you got to get home, little buddy.”

  “I think I do.”

  “We’ll settle that later,” Bruce said from the front seat.

  “I don’t steal from people’s houses, and I don’t want to meet anybody who does,” Tabby said, his nervousness making him sound prissy. “I don’t even especially want to cave in my neighbors’ mailboxes.”

  Dicky patted him on the head. “Hey, man.”

  “It’s my neighborhood.”

  “Hey, it’s his neighborhood, man,” Bruce said.

  Dicky cranked his window down all the way and stuck out the bat just as they sped around a corner. A mailbox separated from its post with a crack like the breaking of a neck. Dicky shouted with glee, “Got that suckah!”

  “Hey, we don’t want you to do anything special,” Bruce said. “We’re just friends, okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t know, you don’t sound too friendly,” Dicky said, slapping the bat against his palm again.

  “Burglary’s out of my league,” Tabby said. “That’s all I meant.”

  “Hey, but this guy takes all the risks,” Bruce told him. “We ain’t as dumb as we look.”

  Ta
bby said nothing.

  “Here comes another one,” Dicky said. They were driving near to the gates of Greenbank Academy. He stuck the bat out the window as Bruce slowed the car. One-handed, Dicky raised the bat and swung it hard toward the Academy mailbox. There was a loud flat crumpling sound, and Dicky whooped again as Bruce sped off.

  When Bruce turned up Beach Trail, Tabby protested, “This is right where I live, you guys.”

  “Tabs, you’re starting to piss me off,” Dicky said.

  Why am I here? Tabby suddenly wondered. Because these two lumps bought me a Whopper and a Coke? “This might sound crazy,” he said, “but have you two guys ever thought about becoming cops? I bet you’d be a couple of great cops.”

  “Shit,” Dicky said, and Bruce simultaneously. “Ain’t no mon-ee, Tabs, no mon-ee. Hampstead cops all live in Norrington, man, you know that?”

  “You get the next one, Tabs,” Dicky said. They were circling aimlessly up Cannon Road, and did not see Bobo Farnsworth’s patrol car, which was parked beside trees on Leo Friedgood’s driveway. Leo had stopped turning on his yard lights.

  “You know what I’d really like to do?” Bruce offered. “I’d like to off somebody really big someday—like the president, man, or John Denver. I’d like to be the first guy that actually tried to off John Denver.”

  Dicky pushed the bat into Tabby’s chest. “Get on the other side of the road, Bruce.”

  “Not my own,” Tabby said, seeing where Bruce was going. “I won’t do it.”

  “Pisses me off.”

  “Hey, okay.”

  Bruce swung into Charleston Road and swerved across to the wrong side of the street. “You better do this one, Tabs.”

  In anger and despair Tabby thrust the bat out the window, holding the taped handle with both hands. He had never wanted to do anything less. The bat met the mailbox with what seemed terrific force, and almost jolted out of Tabby’s hands. “All right,” Bruce sighed. “You’re blooded, man.” Dicky pounded him on the back. His arms ached from the impact, which seemed to have traveled undiminished up the bat and registered in his biceps and shoulders.