by Peter Straub
“Anything I can do for you, Mister?” she asked, in her voice the valley’s lilt. For the first time it sounded unfriendly and alien to me.
“Andy in?” I asked, coming closer to the counter through the massed smells of newness.
She wordlessly left her chair and disappeared into the cavernous rear of the store. A door closed, then opened again.
In a moment I saw Andy walking toward me. He had grown fatter and balder, and his pudgy face seemed sexually indeterminate and permanently worried. When he reached the counter he stopped and leaned against it, creasing his belly. “What can I do you for?” he said, the jokiness of the phrase out of key with his rubbery defeated face and his air of country suspicion. I saw that gray had eaten nearly all of the brown in his fringe of hair. “You’re not one of the drummers. Reps, they call themselves now.”
“I wanted to come in and say hello,” I said. “I used to come in here with my parents. I’m Eve Updahl’s boy,” using the shorthand that would identify me in the valley.
He looked at me hard for a moment, then nodded and said, “Miles. You’d be Miles, then. Come back for a visit or just a look-see?” Andy, like his wife, would remember my little errors of judgment of twenty years before.
“Mostly to work,” I said. “I thought the farm would be a peaceful place to work.” An explanation when I had planned to give none—he was making me defensive.
“Don’t think I recall what kind of work you wound up doing.”
“I’m a college teacher,” I said, and the demon of irritation made me take pleasure in his flicker of surprise. “English.”
“Well, you were always supposed to be brainy,” he said. “Our girl takes shorthand and typing over to the business college in Winona. She’s getting on real good up there. Don’t suppose you teach around here anywhere?”
I told him the name of my university.
“That’s back East?”
“It’s on Long Island.”
“Eve always said she was afraid you’d wind up back East. So what’s this work you got to do?”
“I have to write a book—that is, I’m writing a book. On D. H. Lawrence.”
“Uh-huh. What’s that when it’s at home?”
I said, “He wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”
Andy swung his eyes up to mine with a surprisingly roguish gesture which was somehow girlish at the same time. He looked as though he were about to lick his lips. “I guess it’s true what they say about those colleges out East, huh?” But the remark was not the invitation to masculine revelation that it could have been: there was a sly malice in it.
“It’s only one of a lot of books he wrote,” I said.
Again I got the wink of roguishness. “I guess one Book’s good enough for me.” He turned to the side, and I saw his wife lurking in the back of the shop, staring at me. “It’s Miles, Eve’s boy,” he said. “Coulda fooled me. Says he’s here writing a dirty book.”
She came forward, glowering. “We heard you and your wife got divorced. Duane said.”
“We were separated,” I said a bit harshly. “Now she’s dead.”
Surprise showed in both their faces for a second.
“Guess we didn’t hear that,” said Andy’s wife. “Was there something you wanted?”
“Maybe I’ll pick up a case of beer for Duane. What kind does he drink?”
“If it’s beer he’ll drink it,” said Andy. “Blatz, Schlitz or Old Milwaukee? I guess we got some Bud around here too.”
“Any one,” I said, and Andy lumbered away to the back room where he kept his stacked cases of beer.
His wife and I looked uncomfortably at one another. She broke the contact first, darting her eyes away toward the floor and then out to where my car was parked. “You been staying out of trouble?”
“Of course. Yes.”
“But you’re writing filth, he says.”
“He didn’t understand. I came here to write my dissertation.”
She bristled. “And you think Andy’s too dumb to understand you. You were always too good for us up here, weren’t you? You were too good for ordinary folk—too good to follow the law too.”
“Wait, hold on,” I said. “Jesus, that was a long time ago.”
“And so good you don’t think about taking the Lord’s name in vain. You haven’t changed, Miles. Does Duane know you’re coming?”
“Well sure,” I said. “Don’t be so bitchy. Look, I’m sorry. I’ve been driving two days and I’ve had a couple of funny experiences.” I saw her glance at my handkerchief-wrapped left hand. “All I want here is peace and quiet.”
“You always made trouble,” she said. “You and your cousin Alison were just alike that way. I’m glad neither of you was raised in the valley. Your grandparents were our people, Miles, and we all took to your father like he was one of us, but now I think maybe we got enough trouble without having you here too.”
“Good lord,” I said. “What happened to your hospitality?”
She glared at me. “You wore out your welcome here the first time you stole from us. I’ll tell Andy to take your beer down to your motor. You can leave the money on the counter.”
PORTION OF STATEMENT BY MARGARET KASTAD:
July 16
I knew he was Miles Teagarden when he first set foot in our store even though Andy says he didn’t know until he said he was Eve’s boy. He had that same look he always had, like some bad secret was on his mind. I used to feel so sorry for Eve, she was straight as a die all her life, and I guess you don’t know what will happen to your children if you bring them up in funny places. But Eve never was to blame for that boy Miles. Now we know all about him, I’m glad Eve passed away before she could see just how bad he turned out. On that first day I just turned him out of the store. I said Miles, you ain’t fooling none of us here. We know you. Now you just get on out of our store. Andy’ll take that beer of yours down to your motor. I could tell he was in a fight or something—he looked weak or scared, the way they do, and his hand was still bleeding. I told him, and I’d tell him the same again. He never was any good, was he, for all those brains they said he had? He was just funny—just funny. If he was a dog or a horse you’d have penned him up or just shot him. Right off. Him and that sneaky look and that handkerchief around his hand.
—
I silently watched Andy load the beer into the back seat of the Volkswagen, shoving in the case beside the paper boxes full of notes and books. “Hurt your wing, huh?” he said. “Wife says you paid up there. Well, give my regards to Duane, and I hope your mitt gets better.” He backed away from the car, wiping his hands on his trousers as if he’d dirtied them, and I wordlessly got in behind the wheel. “Bye now,” he said, and I looked at him and then took off out of the dusty little lot. In the rearview mirror I saw him shrugging. When the curve in the road by the red sandstone cliff took him out of sight I snapped the radio on, hoping for music, but Michael Moose was droning on again about Gwen Olson’s death and I impatiently turned it off.
When I had got as far down the valley as the shell of the school where my grandmother had taught all eight grades I pulled over and tried to relax. There is a special feeling in the mind that represents the creation of alpha waves, and I deliberately sought that mild state. This time I failed, and I merely sat in the car, staring alternately at the road, the long green field of corn to my right, and the shell of the schoolhouse. I began to hear the buzz of a motorcycle, and soon I saw it flying down the road toward me, growing in size from the dimensions of a horsefly to the point where I could see the black-jacketed, helmeted rider and the blond passenger behind him, her hair whipping out in the wake and her thick thighs gripping him. At the curve by the sandstone cliff the sound altered, and then it died away altogether.
Why should your old sins be permanently pinned to your jacket? For all to read aloud? It was stupidly unfair. I would do my shopping in Arden, despite the inconvenience of making a ten-mile drive whenever I wanted anything. T
he making of this decision helped to dispel my temper and after a minute or two of further brooding I began to feel as though I might be producing an at least feeble tranquility.
—
Where, you might ask, was the clown, the reluctant wag I have proclaimed myself to be? My own abrasiveness surprised me. A woman like Andy’s wife would think the word “bitch” scandalous applied to any sphere but the canine. It was an emotional morning. My former thefts! Yet I supposed that it was too much to expect anyone to have forgotten them.
—
A hundred yards past the deserted school was the church: Gethsemane Lutheran church is a redbrick building with quite a sturdy, pompous, peaceful air to it, probably conferred by the Palladian columns at the top of the stairs. For the sake of my grandmother, who was already very weak, Joan and I had been married in this church. (My mother’s idea.)
After the church the land seems to open up, and the corn takes over. I passed the Sunderson farmhouse—two pickup trucks parked on the high sloping lawn, a rooster strutting in the red dust of the driveway—and saw a burly man in overalls and a cap just coming out of the house. He stared at me and then decided to wave, but I had not generated sufficient alpha waves to return his greeting.
Half a mile past the Sunderson farm I could see my grandmother’s old house and the Updahl land. The row of walnut trees at the edge of the lawn had put on weight, and now they looked like a row of heavy old farmers standing in the sun. I drove by the front of the property and swung into the driveway, passing the trees and feeling the car jounce on the ruts. I expected to feel some strong upwelling of feeling, looking at the long white house again, but my emotions seemed flat and dull. It was just a two-story house with a screen porch, an ordinary farmhouse. Yet when I got out of the car I smelled all the old odors of the farm, a rich compound of cows and horses and fertilizer and milk and sunshine. This pervades everything: when people from the farm had visited my family in Fort Lauderdale, it hung on their clothes and hands and shoes. Smelling all this again made me momentarily feel thirteen years old, and I lifted my head, straightening out the kinks in my neck and back, and saw a heavy form moving down the screen porch. By his shovelhanded, lumbering walk I knew it was Duane, who had been sitting invisible in the corner of the porch just as he had been on that terrible night twenty years before. When Duane came out of the porch into the sun I tried to smile at him. What the first sight of my cousin had brought back to me was how much hostility there had always been between us, how little we had liked one another. It would be different now, I hoped.
TWO
“Have a case of beer, Duane,” I said, mistakenly trying for a bluff friendliness.
He appeared to be confused—really, confusion was stamped all over his big plain face—but his mechanism was set for holding out his hand and saying hello, and that was what he did. His hand was huge, a true farmer’s hand, and so rough it felt made of a substance less vulnerable than skin. Duane was a short barrel-like man, but his extremities might have come from someone a foot taller. As we clasped hands and he blinked at me, half smiling, trying to figure out what I meant about the beer, I noticed that he had obviously come in from a morning’s work: he wore heavy stained denim coveralls and workboots crusted with mud and excrement. He radiated all of the usual farm odors, compounded with sweat and underlain by his true odor, his inner smell, which is of gunpowder.
Finally he released my hand. “Did you have a good drive?”
“Sure,” I said. “This country isn’t as big as we think it is. People zip back and forth on it all the time.” The persistence of habit: although he was nearly a decade older, I had always taken this tone with Duane.
“I’m glad you had a good drive. You sure surprised me when you said you wanted to come out here again.”
“You thought I was lost among the fleshpots of the East.”
He distrusted the word “fleshpots,” being not quite sure what it meant. That was twice I had taken him off balance. “I was just kind of surprised,” he said. “Say, Miles, I was sorry about your wife. Maybe you wanted to get away?”
“That’s it,” I said. “I did want to get away. Did you take time off from your work to greet me?”
“Well, I didn’t want you to come in and find nobody to home. The kid’s gone out somewhere, and you know kids, you can’t count on them for anything. So I thought I’d wait around after lunch and say hi. Make you feel welcome. And I thought I might listen to the radio in the porch there, see if anything new happened on that terrible business. My kid knew that Olson girl.”
“Will you help me get these bags and things inside?” I said.
“Huh? Oh, sure,” and he reached in, bending over the seat, and lifted out two heavy boxes of books and notes. Upright again, he asked, “Is that beer in there for me?”
“I hope it’s your brand.”
“It’s wet, ain’t it?” He grinned. “I’ll put it in the tank when we got you squared away.” Before we went toward the porch, Duane twisted his head and looked at me with a surprisingly embarrassed expression on his face. “Say, Miles, maybe I shouldn’t have said that about your wife. Because I only met her that once.”
“It’s all right.”
“No. I should never open my mouth about anyone else’s woman troubles.”
—
He was referring, I knew, to his own history of marital disaster and to something else as well. Duane was suspicious of women—he was one of those men, sexually normal in every other respect, who are at ease only in male company. I think that he had a radical dislike of women. For him they primarily had been sources of pain, with the exception of his mother and grandmother (about his daughter I could not then speak). After his first disappointment, he had married a girl from one of the farms in French Valley, and this girl had died giving birth to their child. He’d had one numbing humiliation at the hands of a girl (the humiliation not salved by his grandmother’s evident satisfaction in it) followed by four years of being between women, his romantic life joked about in Arden bars, then eleven months of marriage and the rest of his life without adult feminine companionship. I suspected that his suspicion of women contained a fair portion of hate. For Duane they had approached and then abruptly withdrawn, still holding whatever mysterious sexual secret they possessed. In the old days, when the Polish girl had been giving him trouble, I had often sensed that his attitude toward Alison Greening was edged with something darker than mere desire. I think he hated her, hated her for evoking desire in him and for finding his desire laughable, a thing of no consequence or value. Alison had found him absurd.
Of course Duane was physically vigorous, and his celibacy must at times have been a torment: yet I suspected him of being the kind of man who is shocked and upset by his own fantasies, and is comfortable with women only when they are safely married to his acquaintances. He had submerged his sexuality in work for so long that he expected other men to do the same, habit had become transformed into principle, and he had his success to justify him. Duane had purchased two hundred neighboring acres, and was now at the limit of what a man could farm by himself if he worked ten hours a day; as if to demonstrate the physical law that actions have equal reactions, sexual starvation had fattened his bank account.
The immediate evidence of his prosperity struck me when we carried the boxes and suitcases into my grandmother’s old house. “My God, Duane,” I said, “you bought new furniture for the place!” Instead of my grandmother’s spare old wooden furniture, her threadbare old sofa, the room held what I suppose could be called nineteen-fifties lounge furniture: heavy patterned chairs and matching couch, a blond coffee table, starkly functional table lamps instead of kerosene lamps, even framed reproductions of mediocre paintings. In the setting of the old house, the nondescript new furniture had a tactless chic. The effect of all this on the austere farmhouse living room was to make it resemble a freeway motel bedroom. But there was another resemblance I did not immediately identify.
“I sup
pose you think it’s funny to get new stuff for an empty house, don’t you?” he asked me. “The thing is, I get people stopping up here more often than you’d think. In April, George and Ethel were here, and in May Nella from St. Paul, and—” He went on to enumerate a lengthy list of cousins and their children who had stayed in the house for a week or more at a time. “Sometimes this place is like a regular hotel. I guess all these city folks want to show their kids what a farm looks like.”
While he talked I noticed that the old photographs of the grandchildren still hung on the walls, as they always had. I knew them all: I identified a picture of myself at nine, my hair in a cowlick like a ruff, and one of Duane at fifteen, scowling suspiciously at the camera as if it were about to tell him something he wouldn’t like. Below this was a photograph of Alison which I sensed glowing at me but lacked the courage to look at directly. The sight of that beautiful wild face would have knocked the wind out of me. And then I noticed that the house was immaculately clean.
“Anyhow,” Duane was saying, “up over to Arden, a warehouse full of office furniture had a clearance sale just when I got my rebate. So I thought I’d do the old place up since all the furniture was going pretty cheap. Took the truck down and just humped all this stuff back with me.”
This was the resemblance I had been unable to name: the room looked like an office in a down-at-heels concern.