by Peter Straub
“Listen to me, Harry. I make pretty good money, and I got nothing to spend it on. I’m not going to get married and have kids, that’s for sure. So I want to make you a proposition. If you keep your nose clean and make it through high school, I’ll help you out with college. Maybe you can get a scholarship—I think you’re smart enough, Harry, and a scholarship would be great. But either way, I’ll see you make it through.” George emptied the first bottle, set it down, and gave Harry a quizzical look. “Let’s get one person in this family off on the right track. What do you say?”
“I guess I better keep reading,” Harry said.
“I hope you’ll read your ass off, little buddy,” George said, and picked up the second bottle of beer.
13
The day after Sonny left, George put all of Eddie’s toys and clothes into a box and squeezed the box into the junk room; two days later, George took a bus to New York so he could get his flight to Munich from Idlewild. An hour before he caught his bus, George walked Harry up to Big John’s and stuffed him full of hamburgers and french fries and said, “You’ll probably miss Eddie a lot, won’t you?” “I guess,” Harry said, but the truth was that Eddie was now only a vacancy, a blank space. Sometimes a door would close and Harry would know that Little Eddie had just come in; but when he turned to look, he saw only emptiness. George’s question, asked a week ago, was the last time Harry had heard anyone pronounce his brother’s name.
In the seven days since the charmed afternoon at Big John’s and the departure on a southbound bus of George Beevers, everything seemed to have gone back to the way it was before, but Harry knew that really everything had changed. They had been a loose, divided family of five, two parents and three sons. Now they seemed to be a family of three, and Harry thought that the actual truth was that the family had shrunk down to two, himself and his mother.
Edgar Beevers had left home—he too was an absence. After two visits from policemen who parked their cars right outside the house, after listening to his mother’s muttered expressions of disgust, after the spectacle of his pale, bleary, but sober and clean-shaven father trying over and over to knot a necktie in front of the bathroom mirror, Harry finally accepted that his father had been caught shop-lifting. His father had to go to court, and he was scared. His hands shook so uncontrollably that he could not shave himself, and in the end Maryrose had to knot his tie—doing it in one, two, three quick movements as brutal as the descent of a knife, never removing the cigarette from her mouth.
GRIEF-STRICKEN AREA MAN FORGIVEN OF SHOPLIFTING CHARGE, read the headline over the little story in the evening newspaper which at last explained his father’s crime. Edgar Beevers had been stopped on the sidewalk outside the Livermore Avenue National Tea, T-bone steaks hidden inside his shirt and a bottle of Rhinegold beer in each of his front pockets. He had stolen two steaks! He had put beer bottles in his pockets! This made Harry feel like he was sweating inside. The judge had sent him home, but home was not where he went. For a short time, Harry thought, his father had hung out on Oldtown Road, Palmyra’s skid row, and slept in vacant lots with winos and bums. (Then a woman was supposed to have taken him in.)
Albert was another mystery. It was as though a creature from outer space had taken him over and was using his body, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Albert looked like he thought somebody was always standing behind him, watching every move he made. He was still carrying around that piece of his tongue, and pretty soon, Harry thought, he’d get so used to it that he would forget he had it.
Three days after George left Palmyra, Albert actually tagged along after Harry on the way to Big John’s. Harry turned around on the sidewalk and saw Albert in his black jeans and grease-blackened T-shirt halfway down the block, shoving his hands in his pockets and looking hard at the ground. That was Albert’s way of pretending to be invisible. The next time he turned around, Albert growled, “Keep walking.”
Harry went to work on the pinball machine as soon as he got inside Big John’s. Albert slunk in a few minutes later and went straight to the counter. He took one of the stained paper menus from a stack squeezed in beside a napkin dispenser and inspected it as if he had never seen it before.
“Hey, let me introduce you guys,” said Big John, leaning against the far side of the counter. Like Albert, he wore black jeans and motorcycle boots but his dark hair, daringly for the nineteen fifties, fell over his ears. Beneath his stained white apron he wore a long-sleeved black shirt with a pattern of tiny azure palm trees.
“You two are the Beevers boys, Harry and Bucky. Say hello to each other, fellows.”
Bucky Beaver was a toothy rodent in an Ipana television commercial. Albert blushed, still grimly staring at his menu sheet.
“Call me ‘Beans’,” Harry said, and felt Albert’s gaze shift wonderingly to him.
“Beans and Bucky, the Beevers boys,” Big John said. “Well, Buck, what’ll you have?”
“Hamburger, fries, shake,” Albert said.
Big John half-turned and yelled the order through the hatch to Mama Mary’s kitchen. For a time the three of them stood in uneasy silence. Then Big John said, “Heard your old man found a new place to hang his hat. His new girlfriend is a real pistol, I heard. Spent some time in County Hospital. On account of she picked up little messages from outer space on the good old Philco. You hear that?”
“He’s gonna come home real soon,” Harry said. “He doesn’t have any new girlfriend. He’s staying with an old friend. She’s a rich lady and she wants to help him out because she knows he had a lot of trouble and she’s going to get him a real good job, and then he’ll come home, and we’ll be able to move to a better house and everything.”
He never even saw Albert move, but Albert had materialized beside him. Fury, rage, and misery distorted his face. Harry had time to cry out only once, and then Albert slammed a fist into his chest and knocked him backward into the pinball machine.
“I bet that felt real good,” Harry said, unable to keep down his own rage. “I bet you’d like to kill me, huh? Huh, Albert? How about that?”
Albert moved backward two paces and lowered his hands, already looking impassive, locked into himself.
For a second in which his breath failed and dazzling light filled his eyes, Harry saw Little Eddie’s slack, trusting face before him. Then Big John came up from nowhere with a big hamburger and a mound of french fries on a plate and said, “Down, boys. Time for Rocky here to tackle his dinner.”
That night Albert said nothing at all to Harry as they lay in their beds. Neither did he fall asleep. Harry knew that for most of the night Albert just closed his eyes and faked it, like a possum in trouble. Harry tried to stay awake long enough to see when Albert’s fake sleep melted into the real thing, but he sank into dreams long before that.
He was rushing down the stony corridor of a castle past suits of armor and torches guttering in sconces. His bladder was bursting, he had to let go, he could not hold it more than another few seconds. … At last he came to the open bathroom door and ran into that splendid gleaming place. He began to tug at his zipper, and looked around for the butler and the row of marble urinals. Then he froze. Little Eddie was standing before him, not the uniformed butler. Blood ran in a gaudy streak from a gash high on his forehead over his cheek and right down his neck, neat as paint. Little Eddie was waving frantically at Harry, his eyes bright and hysterical, his mouth working soundlessly because he had swallowed his tongue.
Harry sat up straight in bed, about to scream, then realized that the bedroom was all around him and Little Eddie was gone. He hurried downstairs to the bathroom.
14
At two o’clock the next afternoon Harry Beevers had to pee again, and just as badly, but this time he was a long way from the bathroom across from the junk room and his father’s old cubicle. Harry was standing in the humid sunlight across the street from 45 Oldtown Way. This short street connected the bums, transient hotels, bars, and seedy movie theaters of Oldtown Road with the more respect
able hotels, department stores, and restaurants of Palmyra Avenue—the real downtown. Forty-five Oldtown Way was a four-story brick tenement with an exoskeleton of fire escapes. Black iron bars covered the ground-floor windows. On one side of 45 Oldtown Way were the large soap-smeared windows of a bankrupted shoe store, on the other a vacant lot where loose bricks and broken bottles nestled amongst dandelions and tall Queen Anne’s Lace. Harry’s father lived in that building now. Everybody else knew it, and since Big John had told him, now Harry knew it too.
He jigged from leg to leg, waiting for a woman to come out through the front door. It was as chipped and peeling as his own, and a broken fanlight sat drunkenly atop it. Harry had checked the row of dented mailboxes on the brick wall just outside the door for his father’s name, but none bore any names at all. Big John hadn’t know the name of the woman who had taken Harry’s father, but he said that she was large, black-haired, and crazy, and that she had two children in foster care. About half an hour ago a dark-haired woman had come through the door, but Harry had not followed her because she had not looked especially large to him. Now he was beginning to have doubts. What did Big John mean by “large,” anyhow? As big as he was? And how could you tell if someone was crazy? Did it show? Maybe he should have followed that woman. This thought made him even more anxious, and he squeezed his legs together.
His father was in that building now, he thought. Harry thought of his father lying on an unmade bed, his brown winter coat around him, his hat pulled low on his forehead like Lepke Buchalter’s, drawing on a cigarette, looking moodily out the window.
Then he had to pee so urgently that he could not have held it in for more than a few seconds, and trotted across the street and into the vacant lot. Near the back fence the tall weeds gave him some shelter from the street. He frantically unzipped and let the braided yellow stream splash into a nest of broken bricks. Harry looked up at the side of the building beside him. It looked very tall, and seemed to be tilting slightly toward him. The four blank windows on each floor looked back down at him. Just as he was tugging at his zipper, he heard the front door of the building slam shut.
His heart slammed too. Harry hunkered down behind the tall white weeds. Anxiety that she might walk the other way, toward downtown, made him twine his fingers together and bend his fingers back. If he waited about five seconds, he figured, he’d know she was going toward Palmyra Avenue and would be able to get across the lot in time to see which way she turned. His knuckles cracked. He felt like a soldier hiding in a forest, like a murder weapon.
He raised up on his toes and got ready to dash back across the street, because an empty grocery cart closely followed by a moving belly with a tiny head and basketball shoes, a cigar tilted in its mouth like a flag, appeared past the front of the building. He could go back and wait across the street. Harry settled down and watched the stomach go down the sidewalk past him. Then a shadow separated itself from the street side of the fat man, and the shadow became a black-haired woman in a long loose dress now striding past the grocery cart. She shook back her head, and Harry saw that she was tall as a queen and that her skin was darker than olive. Deep lines cut through her cheeks. It had to be the woman who had taken his father. Her long rapid strides had taken her well past .the fat man’s grocery cart. Harry ran across the rubble of the lot and began to follow her up the sidewalk.
His father’s woman walked in a hard, determined way. She stepped down into the street to get around groups too slow for her. At the Oldtown Road corner she wove her way through a group of saggy-bottomed men passing around a bottle in a paper bag and cut in front of two black children dribbling a basketball up the street. She was on the move, and Harry had to hurry along to keep her in sight.
“I bet you don’t believe me,” he said to himself, practicing, and skirted the group of winos on the corner. He picked up his speed until he was nearly trotting. The two black kids with the basketball ignored him as he kept pace with them, then went on ahead. Far up the block, the tall woman with bouncing black hair marched right past a flashing neon sign in a bar window. Her bottom moved back and forth in the loose dress, surprisingly big whenever it bulged out the fabric of the dress; her back seemed as long as a lion’s. “What would you say if I told you,” Harry said to himself.
A block and a half ahead, the woman turned on her heel and went through the door of the A & P store. Harry sprinted the rest of the way, pushed the yellow wooden door marked enter, and walked into the dense, humid air of the grocery store. Other A & P stores may have been air-conditioned, but not the little shop on Oldtown Road.
What was foster care, anyway? Did you get money if you gave away your children?
A good person’s children would never be in foster care, Harry thought. He saw the woman turning into the third aisle past the cash register. He took in with a small shock that she was taller than his father. If I told you, you might not believe me. He went slowly around the corner of the aisle. She was standing on the pale wooden floor about fifteen feet in front of him, carrying a wire basket in one hand. He stepped forward. What I have to say might seem. For good luck, he touched the hat pin inserted into the bottom of his collar. She was staring at a row of brightly colored bags of potato chips. Harry cleared his throat. The woman reached down and picked up a big bag and put it in the basket.
“Excuse me,” Harry said.
She turned her head to look at him. Her face was as wide as it was long, and in the mellow light from the store’s low-wattage bulbs her skin seemed a very light shade of brown. Harry knew he was meeting an equal. She looked like she could do magic, as if she could shoot fire and sparks out of her fierce black eyes.
“I bet you don’t believe me,” he said, “but a kid can hypnotize people just as good as an adult.”
“What’s that?”
His rehearsed words now sounded crazy to him, but he stuck to his script.
“A kid can hypnotize people. I can hypnotize people. Do you believe that?”
“I don’t think I even care,” she said, and wheeled away toward the rear of the aisle.
“I bet you don’t think I could hypnotize you,” Harry said.
“Kid, get lost.”
Harry suddenly knew that if he kept talking about hypnotism the woman would turn down the next aisle and ignore him no matter what he said, or else begin to speak in a very loud voice about seeing the manager. “My name is Harry Beevers,” he said to her back. “Edgar Beevers is my dad.”
She stopped and turned around and looked expressionlessly into his face.
Harry dizzyingly saw a wall of barbed wire before him, a dark green wall of trees at the other end of a barren field.
“I wonder if you maybe you call him Beans,” Harry said.
“Oh, great,” she said. “That’s just great. So you’re one of his boys. Terrific. Beans wants potato chips, what do you want?”
“I want you to fall down and bang your head and swallow your tongue and die and get buried and have people drop dirt on you,” Harry said. The woman’s mouth fell open. “Then I want you to puff up with gas. I want you to rot. I want you to turn green and black. I want your skin to slide off your bones.”
“You’re crazy!” the woman shouted at him. “Your whole family’s crazy! Do you think your mother wants him anymore?”
“My father shot us in the back,” Harry said, and turned and bolted down the aisle for the door.
Outside, he began to trot down seedy Oldtown Road. At Old-town Way he turned left. When he ran past number 45, he looked at every blank window. His face, his hands, his whole body felt hot and wet. Soon he had a stitch in his side. Harry blinked, and saw a dark line of trees, a wall of barbed wire before him. At the top of Oldtown Way he turned into Palmyra Avenue. From there he could continue running past Allouette’s boarded-up windows, past all the stores old and new, to the corner of Livermore, and from there, he only now realized, to the little house that belonged to Mr. Petrosian.
15
On
a sweltering mid-afternoon eleven years later at a camp in the central highlands of Vietnam, Lieutenant Harry Beevers closed the flap of his tent against the mosquitos and sat on the edge of his temporary bunk to write a long-delayed letter back to Pat Caldwell, the young woman he wanted to marry—and to whom he would be married for a time, after his return from the war to New York State. This is what he wrote, after frequent crossings-out and hesitations. Harry later destroyed this letter.
Dear Pat:
First of all I want you to know how much I miss you, my darling, and that if I ever get out of this beautiful and terrible country, which I am going to do, that I am going to chase you mercilessly and unrelentingly until you say that you’11 marry me. Maybe in the euphoria of relief (YES!!!), I have the future all worked out, Pat, and you’re a big part of it. I have eighty-six days until DEROS, when they pat me on the head and put me on that big bird out of here. Now that my record is clear again, I have no doubts that Columbia Law School will take me in. As you know, my law board scores were pretty respectable (modest me!) when I took them at Adelphi. I’m pretty sure I could even get into Harvard Law, but I settled on Columbia because then we could both be in New York.
My brother George has already told me that he will help out with whatever money I—you and I—will need. George put me through Adelphi. I don’t think you knew this. In fact, nobody knew this. When I look back, in college! was such a jerk. I wanted everybody to think my family was well-to-do, or at least middle-class. The truth is, we were damn poor, which I think makes my accomplishments all the more noteworthy, all the more loveworthy!
