by Peter Straub
He looked at me with flat eyes.
I walked slowly past him. All of the men were looking at me now with expressionless faces. One of them edged a contemptuous half inch out of my way so that I could open the door.
“He’s got to pay for that chili,” said Grace-Ellen, coming to life.
“Shut the fuck up,” said her defender. “We don’t need his goddam money.”
I hesitated for a second, wondering whether I dared to drop a dollar on the floor. “Whatever it was,” I said, “I hope it happens again. You deserve it.” Then I wheeled through the door and flipped the little pinwheel catch on its outside and sprinted toward the Volkswagen. Grace-Ellen’s voice was screaming don’t bust that door when I got the car started and drove off.
Five miles out of Plainview, my mind was a stew of fantasies. I imagined retorts witty and threatening, attacks sudden and brutal. I saw a hundred things I might have done, from reasonable discussion to mashing my bowl of chili into Wrinklehead’s face. Eventually, I was trembling so severely that I had to stop the car and get out. I needed release. I slammed the door so hard that the whole car vibrated; then I raced to the back and kicked one of the rear tires until my foot ached. For a while I hammered on the beetle’s engine cover, pounding with my fists, seeing Wrinklehead’s face in my mind. When I was exhausted I half-fell into the dust and grass at the side of the road. Hot sun scored my face. My hands throbbed, and I noticed finally that I had torn a triangular flap of skin from my left hand. The palm was filling with blood. I clumsily wound my handkerchief around it. When I held the handkerchief tightly, the wound throbbed more but hurt less, both satisfactory sensations. A memory hit me and came pulsing out with my slow blood.
This was a memory of marital disharmony. A memory of disorder. Most of my marriage was disordered, in fact, the blame for which was neither Joan’s nor mine but lay in the mismating of two wildly divergent temperaments. It was tomaytos–tomahtos, eether–eyether in every possible sphere. My favorite movies had people shooting guns, hers had people speaking French; I liked to read and listen to records in the evening, she liked parties where she could pick fights with stuffy gents in white shirts and striped ties; I was monogamous by nature, she polyandrous. She was one of those people for whom sexual faithfulness is simply not possible, for whom it would be something like death of imagination. Seven months before Joan died, she had gone through, to my knowledge, five lovers during our marriage, each of them wounding to me: the last of these was one (let’s call him) Dribble. She was swimming with him, drunk, when she drowned. On the occasion I remembered, we had gone for dinner at Dribble’s house. Amidst the usual posters of the time (Che’s iconic face, War Is Unhealthy for Children and Other Living Things) and the paperbacks by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Carlos Castaneda, we ate chili and drank Almaden Mountain Red. Only during the musical part of the evening, while Joan and Dribble were dancing to a Stones record, did I realize that they had become lovers. Once home I became a Mars of the coffee table and the dining room curtains—I had thought we were in a good patch, I felt betrayed. I accused. She denied hotly and then hotly refused to deny. I slapped her. Oh, these errors of an optimistic heart. She gasped, then called me a “pig.” She said that I had never loved her, that I had stopped loving anything but Alison Greening. It was all that could be said, it was a deliberate foray onto my sacred territory. She stormed off to Dribble, I drove to the all-night university library and played clown to students in the corridors. My six years’ marriage was over.
It was the memory of that last messy scene that assaulted me while I sat in the dust beside my car. I almost smiled. It may have been from shame—it makes me blaze with shame, that I struck her—and it may have been in response to an odd and powerful sensation which visited me then. This sensation was, centrally, of freedom: of having a purer vision of myself settling down upon me, of being cast out forever from my old life. It felt like cold air, like blue cold water.
—
The connection between these two scenes, as you will have noticed, is anger—as it was anger, I only now observe, which rebounded back on me to grant the sensation of a central freedom. Anger is an emotion not typical of me. Generally, I mess through life, seeing everybody’s point of view. But the month to come, certainly the strangest of my life, brought as much anger as it did fear. In my normal life, back on Long Island, I was shy and something of a clown, a clown from shyness. Since my adolescence, there seem to have been secrets of competence and knowingness from which I was locked away. Innocently, I had always imagined that anger created its own moral authority.
—
I rose from the dust and got back into the car, breathing hard. Blood had seeped through to the outer layers of the handkerchief, and I was vaguely aware of blood on my shoes, which I scuffed against the backs of my trouser legs. An echo of a dream caught in my mind, dislocating and severe. This I shook off by attempting to start the car. My assault on the engine must have offended the touchy little motor, because it sputtered and tut-tutted a long time and then eventually flooded. I sat, still breathing noisily, for a while and then tried it again: it chuffed, and went back to work.
When I had gone about half of the distance to Arden I turned on the radio and twisted the knob until I found the Arden station. Then I discovered what the peculiar scene in the diner had been all about. My up-to-date reporter, Michael Moose (so it sounded), was coming to me with the news and all the news on the hour and the half hour with a full five minutes of local roundup and world events. In his deep hollow announcer’s voice, he said, “Police report no progress yet toward discovery of the perpetrator of the most shocking crime in Arden’s history, the sex-murder of Gwen Olson. The discovery of the body of the twelve-year-old sixth-grader was made early this morning by fishermen crossing a deserted area of waste ground near the Blundell River. Chief Hovre reports that he and his team will be working on this case full time until it is solved. A bare eight hours since…” I turned it off.
Though any urban American gets this story with most of his breakfasts, it was not callousness that made me switch off the radio, but the flicker of a penetrating certainty—the certainty that I would be seeing Alison Greening again, that she would honor a pact we had made twenty years before. My cousin, Alison Greening—I had not seen her since that night, when the consequence of a nude swim had been our total separation.
I cannot explain this sudden half conviction that Alison would keep her vow, but I believe it had its birth in that earlier flood of wonderful high feeling, that grip of freedom as I bled into my handkerchief. When I knew and loved her, she embodied freedom to me, freedom and strength of will—she obeyed only her own rules. Anyhow, I savored this sensation for a moment, my hand still on the knob of the radio, and then I packed it away in my mind, thinking that what would happen, would. I knew that the keeping of my half of our vow was an equal part of my return to Arden.
Eventually the four-lane highway ascended a hill I knew, and then, going sharply down, traversed a high metal bridge which was the first true landmark. Going down the hill, my father would say, “We’ll fly over it this time,” and pull back on the wheel while accelerating. I would scream with expectation, and even as we raced past the bolts and girders of the bridge it was as though we had for a moment taken flight. From here I could have jogged to the farmhouse, bad heart, thick waistline, suitcases and cartons and all, and I glanced at the long flat cornfields on both sides with spirits momentarily high.
—
But between the bridge and my grandmother’s farmhouse were many more landmarks—I knew the roads, the few buildings, even the trees by rote from my childhood, when they had been all washed in the glow of being on vacation—all of them important, but at least three of them vital. At the first crossroads past the bridge I left the highway, which continued, going over another, low metal bridge, on to Arden, and joined the narrower road into the valley. At the very edge of the entrance to the valley, when one first becomes aware of the wooded
hills sloping up from the far side of the fields, was the yet narrower and rougher road to Auntie Rinn’s house. I wondered what had happened to that sturdy little wooden structure now that the old woman was surely dead. Of course children have no proper idea of the ages of adults, forty to a ten-year-old is only a blink away from seventy, but Auntie Rinn, my grandmother’s sister, had always been old to me—she was not one of the fat vital shouting farm women conspicuous at church picnics in the valley, but of the other common physical type, drawn and thin, almost stringy from youth on. In old age, these women seem weightless, transparencies held together by wrinkles, though many of them work small farms with only the most necessary assistance. But Rinn’s day had long passed, I was sure: my grandmother had died six years before, aged seventy-nine, and Rinn had been older than her sister.
Rinn had owned a considerable reputation for eccentricity in the valley, and visiting her always partook a bit of the adventurous—even now, knowing that the old wraith’s home was probably inhabited by a red-faced young farmer who would prove to be my cousin at several removes, even now the little road up the hill to her house looked eerie, winding up past the fields to the trees. Her house had been so thickly surrounded by trees that little sunlight had ever fought through to her windows.
I think Rinn’s oddness had been rooted in her spinsterhood, always something of an anomaly in farm country where fertility is a sign of grace. Where my grandmother had married a neighboring young farmer, Einar Updahl, and prospered, Rinn had been tenuously engaged to a young Norwegian she never met. The match was arranged by aunts and uncles in Norway. It is the only sort of engagement I can imagine Rinn accepting—to a man thousands of miles away, a man in no danger of impinging upon her life. The story, as I remember it, was that the young man ceased to threaten Rinn’s independence at the very time he drew nearest to it: he died on board the boat bringing him to America. Everyone in the family, save Rinn, thought this was a tragedy. She’d had a house built for her by her brother-in-law, my grandfather, and she insisted on moving into it. Years later, when my mother was a child, my grandmother had visited Rinn and come upon her talking volubly in the kitchen. Are you talking to yourself now, asked my grandmother. Of course not, said Rinn. I’m talking to my young man. I never saw any sign that she was on excessively familiar terms with the departed, but she did look as though she were capable of tricks not available to most of us. I knew two versions of the story of Rinn and the heifer: in the first, Rinn was walking past a neighbor’s farm when she looked at his livestock, wheeled around and marched up the track to his house. She took him down to the road and pointed to a heifer in the pen and said that animal will die tomorrow, and it did. This is the predictive version. In the causal version, the neighboring farmer had offended Rinn somehow, and she took him into the road and said, that heifer will die tomorrow unless you stop—what? Crossing my land? Diverting my water? Whatever it was, the farmer laughed at her, and the heifer died. The causal version was certainly mine. As a child I was scared to death of her—I had half-suspected that one glance of those washed-out Norwegian blue eyes could turn me into a toad if it was a toad she thought I deserved to be.
She must be imagined as a small hunched thin old woman, her abundant white hair loosely bound by a scarf, wearing nondescript farm dresses—working dresses, often covered by various amazing coats, for she had kept poultry in an immense barnlike structure just down the hill from her house, and she sold eggs to the Co-op. Her land never was much good for farming, being too hilly and forested. If her young man had come, he would have had a hard time of it, and maybe when she talked to him she told him that he was better off wherever he was than trying to plant corn or alfalfa on a heavily wooded hillside.
To me she had chiefly spoken of Alison, whom she had not liked. (But few adults had liked Alison.)
Six minutes from the narrow road to Rinn’s old house, set off the main valley road on a little dogleg behind the valley’s only store, was the second of my landmarks. I spun the VW into the dirt parking area before Andy’s and walked around in back to have another look at it. As comic and sad as ever, but with all of the windows broken now and its original slight listing become a decided sprawl of the whole structure, it sat in a wilderness of ropy weeds and high grass at the edge of a vacant field. I see now that these first two landmarks have both to do with marriages frustrated, with lives bent and altered by sexual disappointment. And both of them are touched with strangeness, with a definitive peculiarity. I was sure that in the past fifteen years, Duane’s monstrous little house had acquired among the valley children a reputation for being haunted.
This was the house that Duane built—my father’s apposite joke—the house he had singlehandedly built for his first love, a Polish girl from Arden detested by my grandmother. In those days, the Norwegian farmers and the Polish townsmen mingled very little. “Duane’s Dream House,” my parents had said, though only to one another: his parents pretended that nothing was wrong with the house, and any jocularity about the subject met with insulted incomprehension. Duane had worked to plans in his head, and they had evidently been stunted there, for the house he had lovingly built for his fiancée was about the size of a small granary—or, say, a big dollhouse, a dollhouse you could stand up in if you were under five foot seven. It had two stories, four equal tiny rooms, as if he had forgotten that people had to cook and eat and shit, and all of this weird construction now leaned decidedly to the right, as if the boards were stretching—I suppose it was about as substantial as a house of straw.
As was his engagement. The Polish girl had fulfilled my grandmother’s worst expectations of those whose parents did not work with their hands, and had run off one winter day with a mechanic at an Arden garage—“another shiftless Pole without the brains God gave him,” my grandmother said to my mother. “When Einar was trading horses—Miles, your grandfather was a great horse trader here in the valley, and there never was a lazy or a stupid man yet who could see what a horse was made of—when he was going off for a few days with a string, he always used to say that the only thing an Arden Pole knew about a horse was he was supposed to look at its teeth. And that he didn’t know which end to find them at. And that if he found them he didn’t know what he was supposed to see. That girl of Duane’s was just like the rest of them, running off into damnation because a boy had a fancy car.”
She had not even seen the house he had just finished building for her. As the story gradually came to me, Duane had wanted the girl’s first sight of her house to be as he was carrying her into it after the ceremony. Had she come out with her mechanic one night for a look and run off on the spot? Duane had gone into Arden to see her, the week before Christmas in 1955, and her parents had been weepy and hostile. It was a long time before he learned from them that she had never come home the night before—they blamed him, a Lutheran and a Norskie and a farmer, for the loss of their daughter. He ran up to her room and found everything gone: all her clothes, everything she had cared for. From there he raced down to the five-and-dime where she clerked and heard that she had told the supervisor that she wasn’t going to come in anymore. And from the store he went to the filling station to meet the boy whose existence had never exactly been confirmed. He too had disappeared: “Run off last night in that new Stude,” the owner said. “Musta been with your girl, I spoze.”
Like a character in a parody of a Gothic novel, he had never spoken of the girl again, nor had he ever visited this terrible little house. It was never mentioned before him: he was pretending that his engagement had never happened. Four years later he met another girl, the daughter of a farmer in the next valley. He married her and had a child, but that too turned out badly for him.
The absurd frame structure was leaning as though a giant had brushed against it, in a hurry to get somewhere else; even the window frames had become trapezoidal. I walked across the dust and into the thick high weeds and grass. Burrs and bits of fluff adhered to my trousers. I looked in through the two windows
facing the rear of Andy’s store and the valley road. The room was, to be straightforward, a mess, a mess of desolation. The floorboards had warped and rotted so that weeds thrust up at various places into the room, and bird and animal droppings littered the floor—it looked like a filthy vacant coffin. One corner held a tangle of blankets from which radiated a semicircle of dead cigarette butts. On the walls I could distinguish the scrawls left by felt-tip pens. My spirits began to dwindle as I looked in at my cousin’s folly, and I turned away, snaring my left foot in a thick fist of weeds. It was as though that malignant dwarf of a house had snatched at me, and I kicked out with all my force. A thorn stabbed my ankle as decisively as a wasp. Swearing, suddenly cold, I walked away from Duane’s little house and went through the dust around to the front of Andy’s.
This, the third of my landmarks, was much more comfortable, much more touched with the grace of normality. My family had always made a ritual stop at Andy’s before continuing on to the farm, and there we invariably loaded up with bottles of Dr Pepper for me and a case of beer for my father and Uncle Gilbert, Duane’s father. Andy’s was what people used to mean when they said general store, a place where you could buy almost anything, workshirts and trousers, caps, ax handles and heads, meal, clocks, soap, boots, candy, blankets, magazines, toys, suitcases, drills and punches, dog food, paper, hoes and rakes, chicken feed, gasoline cans, silage formula, flashlights, bread…all of this ranked and packed and piled into a long white wooden building raised up on thick stilts of brick. Before it, three white gas pumps faced the road. I reached the steps and went up through the screen door to the dark cool interior.
It smelled as it always had, a wonderful composite odor of various newnesses. When the screen door banged behind me Andy’s wife (I could not remember her name) looked up at me from where she was sitting behind the counter, reading a newspaper. She frowned, glanced back at her paper, and when I began to thread my way through the aisles of things, turned her head and muttered something toward the rear of the store. She was a small dark haired aggressive-looking woman, and her appearance had become dryer and tougher with age. As she glanced suspiciously back, I remembered that we had never been friendly, and that I had given her reason for her dislike of me. Yet I did not think that she recognized me: I have changed greatly in appearance since my early youth. The chemistry of the moment was wrong, I knew this; my earlier elation had ebbed away, leaving me flat and depressed, and I should have left the store at that moment.