Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  The Friedgood house was empty and clearly had been that way for some time. The neighbors were unhelpful. They did not know what had become of him and they did not know why they should open their houses to be searched by three strangers. When the General identified himself and explained—with a total lack of graciousness—that the location of Mr. Friedgood was important to national security, the residents of Cannon Road, Charleston Road, and Beach Trail usually opened their doors to the General and his two large mascots. But all of these delays, all of these explanations and hesitations and half-hidden hostilities, had chipped away at the three ex-soldiers.

  It was their failure as much as the repeated explanations and the sour breath of class privilege that bit at them. By the time they had looked through twenty houses, the General and his aides were keyed taut as piano wire. They had begun seeing themselves as essentially military once again, and they were sick of the problems given them by civilians. The aides, whose war had come after the General’s, thought with longing back to the days when they could charge, dripping with weapons, into any hootch they wanted to turn over; and how all the people in the hootch would bow and smile so vigorously they looked like they were simultaneously going to break their backs and their jaws. It is likely that they expected the Hampstead police to act that way—like Vietnamese peasants.

  And that was what caused their trouble—in a way calculated to raise the hackles of any police officer anywhere, General Haugejas and his aides assumed that the officers existed to follow their orders: that they were all in the same army, but the policemen far down the chain of command.

  Sarah Spry’s friend, the desk sergeant Dave Marks, was the first to meet the three of them, and their manner immediately annoyed him. The big old guy with the iron-colored hair tried to stare him down, and the two bozos with him flanked Dave across the desk the way the terrorists did in the police training films. One at each side, about eight or nine feet apart, so that if he looked at one, he wouldn’t be able to see the other. These three looked like trouble and delay, and Dave Marks wanted neither; what he wanted was to end the shift, take a shower, grab some food, and get to the midnight showing of The Choirboys at the Nutmeg Theater, on the other end of the municipal parking area from the station. That was what all the cops on duty that night wanted; all of them felt an extra tension and anticipation, and so they all felt an increased impatience with pushy outsiders.

  The General smoldered at Dave Marks from a point equidistant from the door and the desk, and ordered Dave to get the chief.

  “Chief’s out,” Marks said. The chief was home in bed, but he saw no reason to tell that to his visitor.

  The General approached the desk.

  He placed a card in front of Dave Marks. “I don’t think the chief here would mind if you let us see whatever you might have on the whereabouts of Leo Friedgood.”

  Marks pursed his lips and read the card. “Telpro Corporation,” he said. “Didn’t you used to be his boss?”

  “Mr. Friedgood is an employee of the Telpro Corporation, that is correct. As your chief is out, I am requesting you to get your file on Mr. Friedgood.”

  Marks raised his eyebrows. “The file.”

  “It is not an ordinary matter, Officer. This is a question of security.”

  “Now, wait a second.” Marks bent over the card again.

  “This doesn’t say anywhere on it that you’re still with the government, General. Even if you were, I’d need a special request form before I could let you look at our files. But you’re not. So you’re not even going to get a special request form. So that’s that.”

  “I want to speak to your chief.”

  “Come back tomorrow, General.”

  “And while I am speaking to your chief, I want you or one of your fellow officers to locate Mr. Friedgood’s current address.”

  “You’ll have to talk to the chief about that. But, sir, he isn’t going to give you anything.”

  “I am going to give your chief an unfavorable report on your behavior this afternoon, Officer Marks.”

  Three or four other officers had drifted up toward the desk: the General should have noticed that they moved very quietly, with an almost protective solidarity.

  “I don’t care what you do, General. All I know is that you are a private citizen who thinks he has the right to give commands to police officers and roam through police documents. I think you got a problem there, General.”

  The General’s face had grown even redder than it was normally. Now at last his battle had begun. “I am going to give you a telephone number in the Defense Department. I am going to ask you to call that number and listen to what they tell you. I am going to order you to do those two things. And then I want to see your file on Leo Friedgood.”

  “I am going to ask you to remember where you are, General,” Dave Marks said. “You can’t order me to do anything. I want you and your goons to get out of the station right now.”

  “Hey,” one said. “Hey, all we want is—”

  “Out,” Marks said. “I mean it.”

  “You are being foolish and self-destructive,” General Haugejas said. “I have a right to be here, and I have a right to the information I requested. If you will simply call the Defense Department—”

  “Who the fuck are you, anyhow?” a blond young policeman asked—his face too was red. “You think we’re in your army? You’ve been ordered out of this station, buddy. Don’t you think you ought to get going?”

  Greeley, the aide who resembled a blond ape, stepped toward Johanssen and grabbed his arm.

  “Stop that,” Johanssen said.

  “Hey, nobody wants any trouble,” Greeley said. “We been looking for this AWOL all day, man. We’re gonna find him eventually, and you guys are gonna help us find him.”

  Johanssen turned to the little group of policemen with a do you believe this guy? expression on his face. As he turned, his hand brushed against Greeley’s pistol in its harness. Without thinking, acting out of pure fury and pure reflex, Johanssen kicked Greeley’s legs out from under him, dropped to one knee on astonished Greeley’s chest, and reached inside his jacket for the pistol.

  “Leave my men alone!” General Haugejas shouted.

  A burly young cop named Wiak gripped the General’s arms from behind, and his partner stepped forward to remove the General’s guns, now visible, from his waist. Another pair of policemen had taken the other aide’s pistol in the same fashion.

  “I am ordering you to release me,” the General said. “My name is Henry Haugejas, General Henry Haugejas, and I demand my release and a telephone.”

  “What kind of arsenal do you guys walk around with, General?” asked Dave Marks. “You’re loaded for bear. If I was Leo Friedgood, I’d want to stay upwind of you.”

  “I want a telephone!” Haugejas shouted. “You will permit me to the use of a telephone.”

  Greeley unwisely tried to wriggle out from under Johanssen’s knee, and the young policeman rolled him over with one deft twist of his arm. Mark Johanssen planted a foot in the small of Greeley’s back, then reached down and cuffed Greeley’s hands together behind his back.

  “You idiot!” the General shouted. “Release that man!”

  “I told you, I’m not in your army,” Johanssen said, and stepped over Greeley toward the General.

  “Get them in the cells,” Marks said quickly. “Just get them in the cells, we’ll sort it out tomorrow.”

  “Well, this son of a bitch assaulted me,” Johanssen said, pulling Greeley painfully to his feet. Greeley turned his head and spat on the lapel of Johanssen’s uniform. “Holy shit!” Johanssen said. He slammed his fist into Greeley’s belly, and when the aide doubled over he hit him in the side of the head, knocking him into the first of the row of little cells off the reception area of the station. “Shit!” he repeated at the yellow blob reposing on his lapel. He tore off the uniform jacket, jumped into the cell where Greeley lay panting against the concrete wall beneath the sink,
and wiped the stuff on Greeley’s chin. “I oughta make you eat it, cocksucker,” he said, and left the cell, locking the door behind him.

  Larry Wiak was propelling the General toward the second cell. The General’s face now was utterly distorted by rage and disbelief—it had never occurred to him that when he began the battle he might end it in defeat. “Get your hands off me!” he was screaming. “I’ll cut your nuts off!”

  “I never did like generals much,” Johanssen said, gloating as Wiak pushed the General into the cell.

  “You guys really ought to do yourselves a favor and call one of those numbers,” said the second aide as he was being led toward the third cell. “Tomorrow the shit really hits the fan.”

  “Generals are always willing to take off someone else’s nuts,” Johanssen said.

  Iron Hank continued to rant loudly and furiously—but he had finally recognized that in a town where everyone had been exposed to DRG-16, nothing kept the police from going batty along with everyone else.

  “At least these three turkeys aren’t going to keep us busy tonight,” Larry Wiak said to Johanssen.

  Johanssen listened to the General bellow and threaten. “Not unless the old fart gets to a phone and has the station nuked,” he said.

  “Nuked!” the General yelled. “You’ll think that’s a pat on the behind!”

  5

  “You want to go. I know you do.”

  “I did want to go, sure. That was before you got sick. Jesus, Ronnie.”

  “All your friends are going to be there.”

  “I see all my friends at the station anyhow. Seeing them get tanked up in a movie isn’t any big treat.”

  “And you had such a good time last year.”

  “Last year you were healthy. For God’s sake, Ronnie. You didn’t even touch the food.”

  “Well, part of the reason I’m not hungry is that I’m worried about you. I don’t want you to be any big martyr, you know. I’m still going to feel crappy if you go to the movie or not. So I think you ought to go.”

  “Jesus, Ronnie. I’d feel terrible if I went tonight. It’s just a movie. I want to stay home and take care of you.”

  “Take care of a sick old lady,” Ronnie said, and turned her face sideways into the pillow. A sick old lady was just what she looked like, Bobo thought—he could see how her skin had dried out in the weeks of her illness, how her cheeks were sinking in past the line of her jaw like those of a toothless mountain woman. At nine o’clock that night, Bobo sat beside Ronnie’s bed in a darkened room, randomly moving her untouched plate back and forth, an inch at a time, on the aluminum tray. Ronnie had closed her eyes, and her lids lay against her face like veined gray stones. She sighed; shifted her face deeper into the pillow. Lines cut deeply into her forehead, sank into the flesh at the corners of her mouth. For a fugitive and disloyal second Bobo regarded Ronnie Riggley with utter dismay—for himself, not his lover. Could he really tie himself for the rest of his life to a woman so much older? Live with this woman and watch this ghastly worn face slowly overtake the face he knew? A web of lines and faint wrinkles seemed to lurk just beneath her skin, sucking her face into it. For a moment Bobo wanted to flee: he felt like an orderly at a nursing home. In the next instant these thoughts rebounded. He pressed her hand, feeling a shameful guilt; yet the thoughts which had given rise to the guilt lingered.

  “Go,” Ronnie said. “Don’t let me hold you back.”

  “We’ll see,” Bobo said, and the words reverberated with a double meaning for him. He picked up the tray and carried it out into the kitchen. Behind him Ronnie sighed again, in pain he thought.

  The problem was—and now Bobo had to restrain himself from slamming his fist into one of Ronnie’s cupboard doors— —the problem was that his murder case, all these murder cases, had somehow mushroomed out, spilled out of themselves in some way he could not define, and poisoned the town. That was how it seemed to Bobo: as though the sickness in the killings had in some way gotten out of the killings themselves and begun to blossom on the walls and sidewalks. Now Bobo never enjoyed his nightly rides through Hampstead. He saw too many crazy things, and the fun had forever gone out of madness for him. A couple of times a night he had to break up mysterious brawls; when he talked to the bleeding fighters after pulling them apart, they could not, exactly, remember why they had been fighting. Another commonplace now was a perfectly ordinary person—who might have shown some signs of depression in the past few days, but this was not always so—suddenly frozen in an inexplicable mania. So many people had decided that window breaking was socially acceptable that Main Street looked permanently boarded up. Bobo himself had answered the call when Teddy Olson, a druggist on Main Street, had driven his Camaro right into a group of high-school boys and killed four of them—Bobo wasn’t sure how he knew this, but he was positive that if the killer hadn’t come to Hampstead Teddy would still be measuring out Valium behind his counter instead of waiting out his trial date in the Bridgeport jail.

  In fact, right now in Hampstead, Bobo reckoned, there were about a hundred people of all ages and both sexes who looked crazy enough to be the killer. Some of them were cops: and that was another part of the problem that made Bobo want to start punching Ronnie’s kitchen cabinets. The whole department was going bughouse because they had not been able to nail the man; the state police were also looking angry and desperate as they chased around the same diminishing circle of unhelpful leads. Worse for Bobo was the look he saw in the eyes of cops like young Mark Johanssen and his friend Larry Wiak—a look that said they wouldn’t mind really pounding the crap out of the next guy who crossed them. This was more than just a look in the eyes. Wiak had savagely flattened two people he had separated in a brawl in the parking lot behind Main Street that morning. One man was lucky to have escaped concussion, and the other had lost three teeth. But even worse than Wiak’s delight in having pounded these citizens and the approval the other officers gave Wiak for it was the sense Bobo had that Larry Wiak really wished he had been able to shoot those two men instead of merely hitting them.

  He tipped the uneaten food into Ronnie’s garbage disposal, rinsed the dish, and placed it in the machine. He leaned on the sink with both arms outstretched and looked at the blurry reflection of his face in the window. And for the first time, perhaps since the murders began, the midnight showing at the Nutmeg Theater caused him a little thrill of apprehension: while everybody else was shouting and chugging beer, it might be better if Johanssen and Wiak and a few others just went out to a quiet bar by themselves.

  6

  The policemen who survived the Second Annual All-Police Midnight Screening were never able properly to explain how things went wrong so quickly. They, like Bobo, had an excellent grasp of the reasons why the screening had turned into a disaster; they were as aware of their frustrations as he; but what they could never quite get straight was the actual sequence of events which turned a hundred exuberant cops in something under half an hour to a hundred hysterics waving pistols. There were a few things all the survivors agreed upon—shortly before the carnage began, Larry Wiak had taken off all his clothes and jumped on the stage in front of the screen; and an old patrolman named Rod Fratney had begun yelling in a high-pitched squealing voice that he had seen Dicky Norman. And the thirty-two survivors of the Nutmeg Theater also agreed that a man seated on the far right of the theater had screeched as soon as Fratney uttered Dicky’s name. They agreed that Larry Wiak was the first to die: but eleven of them swore that Fratney had killed Wiak, sixteen said the unidentified cop who had screeched shot naked Larry Wiak, four said that both of the men simultaneously put bullets into Wiak’s chest; and one man swore to Graham Williams that while both Rod Fratney and the unidentified man had their guns out and were firing, their bullets hit the screen—what killed Wiak, the man swore, was a lightning bolt that began just beneath the ceiling of the theater and angled lazily and surely toward the big naked man standing in front of the screen. “When it hit him,” the po
liceman told Graham, “it was like nothing else you ever saw in your life. A BAR wouldn’t do so much to a guy. It just tore that big fucker apart. He went off like Old Faithful, and that’s when all the guys went stone crazy.”

  That sounded right to Graham, it sounded in the Dragon’s key; and so he went back and asked some of the others if they were sure about either of the two policemen shooting Wiak. In a Bridgeport police bar named Billy O’s, a forty-three-year-old sergeant named Jerry Jerome gave him a weary look and said, “You mean the lights? Somebody told you about the lights?”

  “You tell me about the lights,” Graham said.

  “Right as soon as we all got in there. As soon as we all had a couple of beers apiece—those guys, it was like they were chugging right out of the can, I never saw ‘em drink so fast before—and right when we were ready for the movie. Everybody stopped yelling the way they were doing, and the lights went down. Johanssen and a couple of other guys, Maloney and Will and I don’t know who else, were still farting around in the aisles, but everybody else was sitting down. You could sort of hear everybody sigh—because this was it now, this was what everybody’d been waiting for all week. When that curtain started moving away, folding up, a few guys clapped, but most of us—hell, I could feel it!—sort of mentally came to attention, you know what I mean?”

  Jerry Jerome took a big swallow of his Jack Daniel’s, blinked at Graham Williams, and asked, “Do you know about ‘Spigger’? Did anyone tell you about ‘Spigger’?” When Graham shook his head, Jerry Jerome smiled a pale little ghost-smile and said, “That came a little later, and that was how come I thought maybe the lights were just my eyes. Because if the guy who shouted it saw what I saw, I didn’t think he’d be able to make a joke right away. I was still trying to figure out if my head was screwed on right.”