Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  Bruce accelerated. “One more for tonight—but lemme tell you about what we want to do. You know that parking lot in front of the diner, the one with the big sign that goes around?”

  “Hey, some guy’s running after us,” Dicky called out, amused. “He thinks he’s gonna get the license number. He’s clean out of his gourd.”

  Tabby looked around and saw a man in pajamas pounding after their car.

  “Bye-bye,” Bruce said, and gunned the car around the Beach Trail corner. He reached in back, and Dicky placed the bat in his hand.

  “Hey, I’m almost home,” Tabby said hastily. “Why don’t you—”

  Bruce veered across the road and smacked a mailbox off its post.

  As the mailbox sailed over the driveway, they heard the sound of a police siren coming down Cannon Road.

  “Let me out,” Tabby insisted.

  “Jesus!” Dicky yelled. “Peel!”

  “Hey, it’s like with Skippy, man,” Bruce calmly said to his brother. “Let’s let him out.”

  Dicky quickly pushed Tabby toward the door.

  “Dummy up,” he hissed. “You’ll be okay. Just dummy up.”

  Tabby opened the door and scrambled out thirty seconds before Bobo Farnsworth, siren going and lights flashing, turned into Beach Trail. Behind Bobo, Les McCloud ran up from Charleston Road, waving his gun and screaming obscenities.

  10

  In Greenbank, as in most of Hampstead, few lights burned from the houses. High-voltage yard and security lights lit up the lawns like stage sets. No one awake on the upper end of Charleston Road, though two second-story windows were alight in the McCloud house—Patsy and Les were in different rooms, Bobo Farnsworth deduced with no surprise. Sometime he would be called there to interrupt a fight, and find that tense pretty woman with a bulging eye and a broken jaw. And after Les spent a night in a cell, Patsy would take him back and come up with a story about falling off a ladder. No lights on in Beach Trail. He turned into Cannon Road, and saw from the corner that though the yard lights were off, the living- and dining-room windows in Leo Friedgood’s house were ablaze with light. Insomnia. And he had forgotten to close his curtains. Unless Leo were stinking drunk, the odds were that he would welcome company.

  Bobo pulled his car into the driveway and parked it next to a row of trees. No need to have a neighbor out for a midnight stroll get the idea that Hampstead’s finest were still questioning Leo Friedgood. As he looked up toward the lighted windows he saw a shadow move across the living-room wall. Bobo went up the steps and rang the doorbell.

  Friedgood did not answer, and Bobo rang the bell again.

  “Who’s there?” called a muffled voice from just on the other side of the door.

  “It’s Officer Farnsworth. I was on my patrol, and I thought I’d stop by and see if you needed anything.”

  Friedgood gave no reply.

  “Maybe you just want to talk?”

  “Get away from here,” the voice said.

  “You don’t sound so good. Are you all right, Mr. Friedgood?”

  The curtains on the windows to Bobo’s left slid shut. Friedgood seemed to be uttering panicked, fretful sounds.

  “Open the door, Mr. Friedgood. Let me help you.”

  “You think you can help? Open the door.”

  Bobo turned the knob and pushed open the door. Almost instantly he smelled the odor of burned meat. Friedgood was walking away from him into the living room to his left. Bobo saw with surprise that Friedgood was wearing a hat. Friedgood switched off the living-room lights before he turned around.

  Bobo first saw that the man’s eyes were covered with dark aviator-style glasses. The hat was pulled low on his forehead. His hands were gloved. Half of Friedgood’s face seemed puffy, distorted; the other half, from under the rim of the glasses, and down into the collar of his shirt, was as red as raw steak. The bushy mustache was gone.

  “Stay away,” Friedgood said. His lips were white and looked lipsticked. “I’ve got something. Don’t come any nearer.”

  “Who’s your doctor?” Bobo got out. Friedgood lifted his right hand and drew it over the red side of his face. Even in the darkness, Bobo saw that the glove came away bloody. It looked as though Friedgood had the world’s worst case of acne, and had tried to solve it by cutting off his skin. Or by burning it off.

  “My doctor can’t help,” Friedgood backed farther into the gloom. “Satisfied? Now get out. I don’t want your company.”

  Bobo peered at Friedgood hanging back in the dark—the left side of his face, the puffy side, was as white as his lips. The cheek on that side, either the bone or the pad of skin over it, appeared to be moving independently, like a mouse twitching in its sleep. “Take off your hat and glasses,” Bobo said. “Jesus, I never saw anything like it.”

  He heard what sounded like an explosion from somewhere outside, and his heart nearly stopped.

  Friedgood giggled. A car roared away.

  “I’d better get going,” Bobo said. “That’s another one of those damned mailboxes. But if I can get anything, help anyhow . . .”

  “Leave me alone,” Friedgood said. “You can’t do anything for me, just get out.”

  Bobo turned and half-ran out the door, his skin creeping. When he got to his car he saw that Friedgood had turned off all his lights. Bobo had a momentary image of the man in that big dark house, his ruined skin phosphorescently shining . . . and gunned his car into the street, scattering gravel.

  * * *

  He was looking for the speeding taillights of a car as he swung round the corner into Charleston Road, but noticed out of the side of his eye that Les McCloud’s mailbox had been pounded in on one side. As he went by the house, the front door swung open, releasing a shaft of light—Les going out to inspect the damage. Bobo cruised by, looking quickly up and down the intersections for a flash of red light. The vandals could have circled around the little maze of streets in this section of Greenbank, or they could have turned down Beach Trail to get to Mount Avenue. That, he bet himself, was what they would have done.

  Then he heard again the popping, banging sound of a mailbox being destroyed, and he switched on his siren and swung into Beach Trail.

  A block down he saw movement, but no car. In front of a weathered old house a dented mailbox had rolled halfway across the street, and a boy was stooping to pick it up. When the boy heard the siren, he looked in Bobo’s direction but did not run. He carried the box back toward its stump.

  Bobo swung onto the side of the road, cut the lights and the siren, and got out of his car. “Hold it, son,” he said to the boy. “You see any car going by—you see who did that?”

  The boy shook his head, and Bobo stepped nearer. “Hey, I just saw you. You were with the Normans.”

  “Yes,” Tabby said. “I live up on Hermitage Road. I saw this mailbox in the street.”

  “Don’t even bother nailing the box to the stump anymore,” came a resonant voice from up on the lawn. Both Tabby and Bobo turned their heads to see a bent old man in a gray sweatshirt and voluminous white trousers slowly making his way toward them through the darkness. “If I did, some harebrain would come along and make it even worse—see, they gave it a pretty good knock, last time they killed it they didn’t even knock its head off.”

  Bobo saw the boy give the old man a wild, startled look of recognition: as if, Bobo thought, the old man was someone famous, some kind of movie star. Bobo looked at the old man more closely. He was no movie star. A silvery, gossamer fur clung to his neck and the underside of his chin. The face was deeply seamed, the cheeks sunken. Eyes bright under bristling, straggly eyebrows. White hair fell from the back of the man’s bald, freckled crown and floated around his large ears. The face was withered but powerful. The old man was somebody, Bobo knew instantly, even if he didn’t recognize him, and he altered the tone he would otherwise have taken.

  The old man took in the boy’s astonished stare, which seemed to Bobo to be widening out with every second, and
then turned a humorous glance on Bobo. “The name is Graham Williams. I don’t suppose this boy is the famous mailbox killer, do you? Are you, boy? You the Ramon Mercador of mailboxes?”

  Neither Bobo nor Tabby recognized the name of Leon Trotsky’s assassin, but Bobo’s ear was caught by the old man’s name. “Williams—I heard of you.”

  “Ask Turtle about me,” the old man said. “He’ll tell you a pack of lies. Thirty, forty years ago, I got into trouble with a couple of polecats named Nixon and McCarthy. A whole other bunch of polecats wanted me to testify before a committee. And I almost—”

  Shouts from down the street stopped Bobo from saying that the only reason he recognized the man’s name was that he had heard it from the Emergency Medical Services team.

  All three of them looked toward the source of the shouting. A man in a flapping bathrobe was running toward them up the street. His bedroom slippers made a clapping noise on the surface of the road. “Hold it right there!” he yelled. “I gotcha now!”

  Tabby’s widening gaze went back to the old man. He whispered something Bobo did not catch, but which seemed to startle Williams.

  The old man reared back and inspected the boy. “You’re Monty Smithfield’s grandson? The one they call Tabby?”

  “On a boat,” Tabby said.

  “Hold it yourself, Les,” said Bobo, who did not bother trying to make sense of this exchange. “There’s nothing to get excited about.” Then Bobo saw Les’s pistol, and he held out his left hand to distract Les while he unclipped the strap on his holster with his right. “Did you see a car, Les?” Bobo asked quietly.

  “Get out of the way and leave your gun in the holster,” Les shouted. Now he was walking, puffing from his run.

  “You’re drunk, Les. Put that gun away.”

  “To hell with you,” Les said, and braced himself in the firing position, both arms out straight and knees slightly bent. “That kid just destroyed my property.”

  “You got the wrong boy,” Bobo said. Over Les’s shoulder he could see Patsy rounding the corner from Charleston Road. She seemed to be moving in a daze, and stopped to stare at a lamppost almost as raptly as the kid was staring at Graham Williams.

  “And that’s Patsy Tayler,” the old man said. “She’s got that bony Tayler face. Can’t you get that man to drop his gun?”

  “You’re shielding a vandal!” Les screamed.

  “Les,” Bobo said quietly, “are you crazy? If you don’t put that gun down, I’ll have to drop you.”

  “Get out of the way!”

  Graham Williams stepped in front of Tabby. “I suppose that’s your wife back there,” he said in a carrying voice.

  The muzzle flashed, the pistol made a sound louder than a cough, softer than a thunderclap. Les whirled around after firing, and let the pistol dangle in his fingers. Patsy had begun to race toward him.

  Bobo had his .44 in his hand, aiming it at Les McCloud’s back. He realized with gratitude that this would not be the first time he had to fire his revolver on duty. Les McCloud was tottering like a man on stilts. “Don’t! Don’t!” Patsy was shouting as she ran. The pistol dropped from Les’s hand and clattered on the ground. A second later Les sat down like an infant, his legs bowing out. Bobo heard old Williams exhaling, and quickly checked to see that he and the boy were unharmed. Williams had his arm around the boy’s shoulders. “Stay there,” he ordered, and walked toward Les and Patsy.

  As he went he could hear Les sobbing with rage. Bobo bent and picked up the gun, which was a short-barreled .22.

  “I aimed over your head, you bastard,” Les told him. Then he turned his red, bloated face to his wife. “Get the hell out of here, Patsy. I don’t want to see you.”

  “Jesus, I ought to take you in and lock you up,” Bobo said. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? You could be put away for this. What do you suppose you’d get for attempted murder? Fifteen years? Twenty?”

  “I was protecting my property.” He was still crying, and he clamped his eyes shut.

  “You dumb ass,” Bobo said. Then, to Patsy: “You going to be okay? You want me to take him in for tonight?”

  Patsy shook her head. She looked stricken and half-dead with shock, but determined. A good lady, Bobo thought to himself, too good for this jerk here.

  “I’ll take him home, Bobo,” she whispered. “Please.”

  “No, you won’t,” Les said, still sitting in the middle of the street with his legs out before him.

  Patsy reached out to him, but he swatted her hand away.

  “You’re getting your tail home,” Bobo said, and put his hands under Les’s arms and lifted him to his feet. “You come around to the station in a couple of days for this twenty-two. And I want to see your permit.”

  “I got a permit,” Les grumped.

  “If I hadn’t just eaten dinner with you, you’d be facing at least reckless use of a firearm. That’s the least.”

  “I aimed over your head.” Les reeled sideways, then straightened himself with the aplomb of a long-term drinker.

  “With this shitty gun, that’s more dangerous than aiming at me,” Bobo said. “Get home.”

  Les took a few staggering steps up the street. When Patsy tried to take his arm to steady him, he batted at her.

  “Let him go,” Bobo said. “Jesus, that’s the first time anybody took a shot at me, and I don’t even get the satisfaction of an arrest.” He looked at Patsy’s drawn face. “How are you?”

  “Not so good,” Patsy said. “Do you have to ask?”

  “Give him half an hour. Maybe you better sleep in the spare room tonight.”

  Patsy nodded. “Does anybody around here have a cup of coffee?”

  6

  Graham Again

  1

  “You killed a man,” was what Tabby had whispered to me as crazy Les McCloud was yelling at us to hold it. Luckily, the big cop didn’t catch the words, but even if he had, I don’t suppose he would have run me in. I took my first good look at the kid. Up until then, I’d been thinking that he was just some kind of rich juvenile delinquent. He was old Monty’s grandson, the one he had lost after having such hope for him. Losing him had been at least half Monty’s fault, I knew—he’d always been too rough on Clark. All the old faces are dying out, they’re all turning into the same round bland American potato-face, but in this kid I could see some Tabb, that’s where he got the big wide eyes and fair hair, and a lot more Smithfield. Monty and Clark had once had the same sensible chin and generous forehead, but they had turned flinty in Monty and self-pitying in Clark.

  “On a boat,” the boy said.

  And I knew.

  He had the gift—that gift that never makes anybody happy, that bitches up lives right and left. The boy had seen me and Bates Krell out on the lobster boat that night in 1924, it had just unrolled behind his eyes like some kind of movie, and he was starting to shake. The last time I’d seen anybody with the gift so strong it was old Josephine Tayler, and she’d been shut away before she was forty.

  Some people have the gift only for a minute or two, and then spend the rest of their lives wondering if it really happened—as I wondered after I met Bates Krell—and other people have it hung around their necks all their lives. I wouldn’t want to be one of them. I can remember damn near everything that happened to me, but there are some things it makes me dizzy and short of breath to bring back. The first time I saw Bates Krell, in pure fact everything that has to do with Bates Krell, is in that category. And part of that package is the afternoon on his boat. That this kid with the matter-of-fact Smithfield chin could see it when he looked at me scared me a lot worse than Les McCloud’s pistol, which he started waving around at about this point.

  Right then I saw Patsy Tayler, Les’s wife, kind of wandering toward us. At first I thought she was drunk, since her husband was obviously stinko. But she was not drunk. I knew that a second later. I knew that she was sober, and seeing something the rest of us could not see. She was another like th
e Smithfield boy. The gift had skipped a generation in the Tayler family and gone straight from Josephine to her granddaughter. I’d seen this wispy girl grow up pretty near, not counting the years I was in California and the three years I spent abroad, and I’d never seen before that she’d inherited something besides Josephine’s endearing good looks.

  And that rocked me too. Maybe if Tabby hadn’t said what he did about me killing a man on a boat, I would have gone on thinking that the Tayler girl was just a drunk like her husband. But he had said it, you see, and that took me back into the one time in my life when I was at least a little bit like those two. I looked back at Tabby and then at Patsy again, and they were alike. For a second it was like looking at two photographic negatives, two people light where they should have been dark and dark where they should have been light. I felt pity and love and fear: fear because even then I knew that the appearance of two such people—no, these two people—in this one particular square mile of earth meant the coming of awful things, that we were all going to be shaken up as if by an earthquake, by a volcano, by an old-time Kansas twister. I didn’t have to know anything about Ted Wise and DRG-16 to foresee that.

  And then right on cue, the world told me I was right. None of the others saw it, they were all looking at poor drunk Les and his peashooter, but I looked up and saw a bird falling right out of the sky. Dead. It landed on my lawn not far from the stump where I set my mailbox, a little squashy puffball of feathers.

  “Get out of the way!” Les screamed, and I got myself moving. I put myself right in front of Tabby. Because if things were going to be so bad, I’d rather be dead myself, as dead as the fallen bird, than live to see it. Certainly better me than the Smithfield boy, who knew nothing of what I knew, or had known, or had suspected anyhow, since 1924. This act of mine was one of sheer cowardice and I make no bones about it. I even goaded Les by telling him his wife was there in back of him.