If You Could See Me Now

by Peter Straub

  “I like the modern way it looks,” said Duane, perhaps a shade defensively. “And it cost less than a secondhand disc.” He glanced at me, then added, “Everybody seems to like it.”

  “It’s great,” I said, “I like it too,” distracted by the throbbing and glowing of Alison’s photograph on the wall. I knew this photograph well. It had been taken in Los Angeles near the end of her childhood, before the Greenings were divorced and Alison and her mother moved to San Francisco. It showed only her face. Even when she was a child, Alison’s face was beautiful and complicated, magic, and her father’s photograph showed it all, the beauty and the magical complications. She looked as though she knew and embraced everything. The thought of that overwhelming expression on her childhood face made my stomach tingle, and to avoid looking at the photograph I said, “I wish you had picked up a desk while you were at it. I need a desk to work at.”

  “That’s no problem,” said Duane. “I got an old panel door and a couple of sawbucks we could lay it across.”

  “Well,” I said, and turned toward him. “You’re a good host, Duane. The place looks clean, too.”

  “Mrs. Sunderson down the road, you remember her? Tuta Sunderson? Her husband died a couple of years back, and she lives up there now with her boy Red and his wife. Red farms pretty near as good as Jerome did. Anyhow, I talked to Tuta and she said she’d come over here every day to cook your breakfast and dinner and clean for you. She was in here yesterday.” He paused, having something further to say. “Said it would be five dollars a week and you’d have to buy your own groceries. She can’t drive since she had her cataract operation. That okay?”

  I said it was fine with me. “Actually, let’s make it seven dollars,” I said. “Otherwise I’d feel like I was stealing from her.”

  “Whatever you say. She said five, though, and you probably remember her. Let’s get that beer into the tank.” He clapped his hands together.

  The two of us went back outside into the hot sun and the farm smells. Duane’s gunpowder odor was stronger in the open air, and to escape it I reached into the car first and pulled out the case of beer. He trudged beside me up the long path past the baking metal of the pole barn, the granary, and well past that, his white clapboarded house, to the tank beside the cattle barn.

  “You said in your letter you were working on a book.”

  “My dissertation.”

  “What’s that on?”

  “An English writer.”

  “Did he write a lot?”

  “A lot,” I said, and laughed. “A hell of a lot.”

  Duane laughed too. “How’d you pick that?”

  “It’s a long story,” I said. “I expect to be pretty busy, but is there still anyone around here that I used to know?”

  He considered that as we passed the brown scar where the summerhouse used to be. “Didn’t you know Polar Bears Hovre? He’s the Police Chief over to Arden now.”

  I almost dropped the case of beer. “Polar Bears? That wildman?” When I was ten and he seventeen, Polar Bears and I had spitballed the congregation from the choir loft at Gethsemane church.

  “He settled down some,” Duane said. “He does a good job.”

  “I ought to call him up. We used to have fun together. Even though he always liked Alison a little too much for my taste.”

  Duane gave me a peculiar, startled look, and contented himself with saying, “Well, he keeps pretty busy now.”

  I remembered another figure from my past—really, the sweetest and most intelligent of all the Arden boys I had met years ago. “What about Paul Kant? Is he still around? I suppose he went off to a university somewhere and never came back.”

  “No, you can see Paul. He works in Arden. He works in that Zumgo department store they got over there. Or so I hear.”

  “I don’t believe it. He works in a department store? Is he manager or something?”

  “Just works there, I guess. He never did much.” Duane looked at me again, a little shyly this time, and said, “He’s a little funny. Or so they say.”

  “Funny?” I was incredulous.

  “Well, you know how some people talk. Nobody would mind if you called him up, I guess.”

  “Yes, I do know how they talk,” I said, remembering Andy’s wife. “They’ve said enough about me. Some of them are still saying it.” Now we were at the tank, and I leaned over the mossy rim and began putting the bottles down into the green water.

  PORTION OF STATEMENT BY DUANE UPDAHL:

  July 16

  Sure, I’ll tell you whatever you want to know about Miles. I could tell you lots about that guy. He never fit in up here, you know, when he was nothing but a shrimpy kid, and I could tell right off that he wasn’t going to fit in any better this time. He looked weird, I guess you could term it. He talked like he had a crab hanging on his asshole, city fashion. Like he was making jokes at me. When he said he wanted to see Chief Hovre you coulda knocked me down with a feather. (Laughs.) I guess he got his wish, didn’t he? We were carrying beer to put down into my little tank I got there beside my barn, you know, and he said that about Polar Bears, I mean Galen, and then he said he wanted to see Kant (laughs), and I said, sure, you go ahead, you know (laughs), and then he said something, I don’t know, about people talking about him. Then he damn near popped those beer bottles slamming them against the bottom of the tank. But when he really acted strange was when my daughter came in.

  —

  The cap on one of the last beer bottles caught my handkerchief when I was pulling my hand out of the tank, and the wet cloth separated from my hand and sank down on top of the bottles. Chilly water tingled and ached in the exposed wound, and I gasped. Blood began to come twisting out like smoke or a flag—I thought of sharks.

  “You meet up with something that didn’t like you?” Duane had insinuated himself beside me and was staring heavily down at my hand bleeding into his tank.

  “It’s a little difficult to explain.” I snatched my paw out of the cold water and leaned over the tank and pressed my palm against its far edge, where moss grew nearly an inch thick. The throbbing and stinging immediately lessened, inhibited by application of magic substance. If I could have stayed there all day, pressing my hand against that cool slimy moss, my hand would have healed, millions of new cells would have formed every second.

  “You dizzy?” Duane asked.

  I was looking out across the road to his fields. Alfalfa and tall corn grew in alternate bands on either side of the creek and the line of willows and cottonwoods; a round shoulder of hillside further up was perfectly bisected by the two crops. It was for silage—Duane had years before given up everything but beef cattle. Up from the bifurcated hillside grew the woods climbing to the top of the valley. They seemed impossibly perfect, like a forest by Rousseau. I wanted to take a handful of moss and go up there to camp, forgetting all about teaching and my book and New York.

  “You dizzy?”

  Blood was oozing down through the thick moss into the water. I was still looking at the edge of the field, where the rise of trees began. I thought that I had seen a slim figure duck momentarily out of the trees, glance toward us and then slip back into cover like a fox. It might have been a boy. By the time I was fully aware of it, it had vanished.

  “You okay?” Duane sounded a little impatient.

  “Sure, I’m fine. Do you get many kids wandering around up in those woods?”

  “They’re pretty thick. Nobody goes in them much. Why?”

  “Oh, nothing. Nothing, really.”

  “We still got a few animals up there too. But they’re no good for hunting. Unless you got a rifle can shoot around trees.”

  “Andy’s probably got a few of those.” I lifted my hand from the moss. It immediately began to sting and pulse. Due to removal of magic substance.

  PORTION OF STATEMENT BY DUANE UPDAHL:

  July 16

  He was planning something all along, something that had control of him, you could say. You
should have seen him grab onto the tank with that cut mitt of his. I should have known there’d be trouble up in those woods, just by the way he was staring at ’em and asking funny questions.

  —

  Magic substances are those with a sacred, soothing and healing content. When Duane said, “Let’s go up to the house and I’ll bandage that mitt of yours,” I surprised him by ripping out a handful of the thick moss, exposing a gray, rusting section of the tank, and by gripping the green slippery stuff in my wounded hand. I squeezed it tightly, and the stinging pain lessened a bit.

  “Used to be an old Indian woman around here who’d do that for you,” Duane said, looking at the pulpy mess in my hand. “Make medicine out of herbs and like that. Like Rinn did, too. But what you got there is liable to get pretty dirty. We’ll wash her out before we put on the gauze. How’d you get a thing like that, anyhow?”

  “Oh, it was just a stupid fit of temper.”

  The moss had become dark with blood, an uncomfortably soggy thing to hold, and I dropped the messy handful onto the grass and turned to walk up the drive to Duane’s house. A dog lying panting by the granary looked attentively at the bloody pad.

  “You get into a fight?”

  “Not really. I just had a little accident.”

  “Remember that time you totaled that car just outside Arden?”

  “I don’t think I could forget it,” I said. “I just about bought it.”

  “Wasn’t that after that time out at the—”

  “It was, yes,” I broke in, not wanting him to utter the word “quarry.”

  “That was a hell of a time,” he said. “I was in my truck going down the road right after you, but when you turned right on 93, I went the other way toward Liberty. I just drove around. After about an hour—”

  “Okay, that’s enough.”

  “Well, you know, I was going to—”

  “That’s enough. It’s all in the past.” I wanted to shut him up and was desperately sorry we had ever got on this topic. Several steps behind me, the dog began growling and whining. Duane bent down and picked up a stone and threw it at the animal; I kept walking straight ahead. I was holding my hand out from my side, letting my blood drip steadily down my fingers, and I imagined that skulking creeping black-and-white beast crawling toward me. The stone connected; the dog yelped, and I could hear it pelting off to a safe distance. I looked around and saw a trail of bright drops on the grass.

  “You gonna call Auntie Rinn today?” Duane had reached the cement steps to his house, and was standing down there, his head tilted up at me. “I told her you were coming, Miles, and I guess she understood. I think she wants to see you.”

  “Rinn?” I asked, incredulous. “Is she still alive? I was just thinking that she must have died years ago.”

  He smiled—the infuriating disbelief of an insider. “Dead? That old bird? Nothing can kill her.”

  He came up the stairs and I followed him into his house. The door opened onto a hallway off the kitchen, which was much as it had been when Uncle Gilbert had been alive: patterned linoleum on the floor, a long Formica-topped dining table, the same porcelain stove. But the walls looked yellowish, and the entire room had an air of dirt and neglect only partially explained by the greasy handprints on the refrigerator and the stack of dishes by the sink. There was dust even on the mirror. It looked like the sort of room where an army of ants and mice are poised behind the walls, waiting for the lights to go off.

  He saw me gazing around. “The damn kid’s supposed to keep the kitchen clean, but she’s about as responsible as a…” He shrugged. “A cowflop.”

  “Imagine what your mother would say if she could see it.”

  “Oh, I’m used to it this way,” he said, blinking. “Besides, it don’t do to hold to the past like that.”

  I thought he was wrong. I have always held to the past, I thought that it could, would, should be repeated indefinitely, that it was the breathing life in the heart of the present. But I couldn’t speak of this to Duane. I said, “Tell me about Auntie Rinn. Were you hinting that she’s deaf?” I went to the sink and held my dripping hand over it.

  “Hang on while I get the gauze and tape,” he said, and lumbered away toward the bathroom. When he returned he took my hand and held it under a stream of cold water from the tap. “You couldn’t say she was deaf. You couldn’t say she was blind. The way I make it out, she sees what she wants to see and hears what she wants to hear. But don’t mess around with her. If she wants to hear it, she’ll hear. She’s sharp. She knows everything that’s going on.”

  “Can she get around?”

  “She doesn’t leave her place much. Neighbors buy her groceries, the little she needs, but she still has her egg business. And she rents out her little field to Oscar Johnstad. I reckon she gets by. But now she’s in her eighties, we don’t even see her at church.”

  Surprisingly, Duane was a good nurse. As he talked, he quickly dried my hand with a dishtowel, pressed a big pad of absorbent cotton onto the wound and wrapped a broad strip of tape around the base of my hand, winding it around both sides of my thumb. “Now,” he said when he was finishing. “We’re gonna make you look like a farmer.”

  Farms are notorious for accidents: slings, bandages and amputated limbs are commonplaces in rural communities, as are suicides, mental instability and sullen temperaments. In the latter particulars, but not the former, they resemble academic communities. Both are usually thought of as havens of serenity. I entertained myself with these reflections while Duane made his final pass with the roll of tape, tore it with his blunt fingers, and anchored the loose end firmly at the base of my hand. I looked like a farmer: a good omen for the completion of my dreadful work.

  Oh, for it was dreadful, an insult to spirit. As the fingers of my left hand began to tingle, suggesting the possibility that Duane might have wound the tape overtightly, I realized how much I disliked writing academic criticism. I decided that once I had finished my book and had made my job secure, I’d never write another word of it.

  “Anyhow,” Duane said, “you could call her up or just go over.”

  I would. I thought I would drive over to her farm in the next day or two, after I had settled in at the old farmhouse. Auntie Rinn, I thought, was inhabited by spirit, she was spirit in one of its forms, like the girl whose photograph could make my tongue a stone. I heard the door open and close behind me.

  “Alison,” Duane said matter-of-factly but with an undertone of anger. “Cousin Miles has been wondering where you were.”

  I turned around, aware that I did not look normal. Gazing sardonically, even contemptuously at me, though with a trace of interest—the contempt seemed defensive and automatic—was a rather thickset, thoroughly Nordic blond girl of seventeen or eighteen. His daughter. Of course. “Big deal,” she said. She was the girl I had seen that morning, clinging to the rider of the motorcycle. “He looks sick. You threaten him or something?”

  I shook my head, still trembling but beginning to recover. It had been stupid of me not to remember her name. Heavy-breasted in her T-shirt, large in hip and thigh, she was still an attractive girl, and I was aware of what an odd figure I appeared to her.

  Duane looked over at me, then looked again, observing that I was shaken. “This is my girl Alison, Miles. You wanta sit down?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m fine, thanks.”

  “Where were you?” asked Duane.

  “Why is it your business?” said this stocky warrior with lank blond hair. “I went out.”

  “Alone?”

  “Well, if it’s any of your business, I was with Zack.” Again, that flat glass-breaking glare. “We passed him on the road. He’d probably tell you anyhow, so I might as well.”

  “I didn’t hear the bike.”

  “Jesus,” she groaned, her face an ugly mask of disdain. “Okay. He stopped down by the other house so you wouldn’t hear. I walked up the road. You satisfied? Okay?”

  Her face twitched, an
d I saw that what I had taken for disdain was only embarrassment. It was that torturing embarrassment of the teens, and aggression was her weapon against it.

  “I don’t like you seeing him.”

  “Suppose you try and stop me.” She strode past the two of us into another part of the house. A television set went on a moment later; then she called from another room, “You ought to be out working anyhow.”

  “She’s right,” Duane said. “What do you want to do? You look a little funny.”

  “I just felt a little faint. What’s wrong with Zack? Your daughter—” I was not yet ready to call that surly warrior Alison; she seemed, in my imagination, to be stalking and slashing through a forest, lopping trees off at their knees. “She seems to know her own mind.”

  “Yeah.” He managed to smile. “That’s one thing she really does know. She’s a good girl though. As good as you can expect anything built female to be, anyhow.”

  “Sure,” I agreed, though the qualification made me uneasy. “What’s wrong with Zack?”

  “He’s no good. He’s a weirdo. Listen, Alison’s right, I ought to be out doing some work, but we still should set up your desk. Or I could just tell you where everything is and you could set it up yourself. It’s no work.”

  Over the noise of the television set, Duane told me where to find the door and the trestles in his basement and then said, “Make yourself at home,” and went outside. I watched him through the side windows of the kitchen as he lumbered toward the pole barn and emerged from it atop a giant tractor. He looked comfortable and at ease, as some men look natural on a horse. Somewhere he had acquired a peaked cap which I could see when the tractor had taken him behind the tall rows of corn up in the far field.

  The sound of the television drew me into the unexpected room where Alison Updahl had gone. When I was a child this room had been cramped, linoleum-tiled like the kitchen, and occupied chiefly by a sprung davenport and an inefficient television. Duane had evidently rebuilt it; his skills had grown since the days of the Dream House. Now it was three times its former size, thickly and luxuriously carpeted, and furnished in a manner which suggested a great deal of expense. My cousin’s daughter, sprawled on a brown couch and watching a color television, looked, in her T-shirt and jeans and bare feet, like a teenager in an affluent suburb of Chicago or Detroit. She did not look up when I entered. She was rigid with self-consciousness.