by Peter Straub
I said, “What a nice-looking room. I haven’t seen it before.”
“It stinks.” She was still looking at the television, where Fred Astaire was sitting in a racing car. After a second I saw that the car was up on blocks in a closed garage.
“Maybe it just smells new,” I said, and earned a glance. But no more than that. She snorted through her nose and returned to the movie.
“What’s the film?”
Not bothering to look up again, she said, “On the Beach. It’s great.” She waved off a fly which had settled on her leg. “Suppose you let me try and watch it?”
“Whatever you say.” I went to a big comfortable chair at the side of the room and sat. I watched her for a minute or so without either of us speaking. She began to jerk her foot up and down rhythmically, then to toy with her face. After a while she spoke.
“It’s about the end of the world. I think that’s a pretty neat idea. Zack said I should watch it. He saw it before. Do you live in New York?”
“On Long Island.”
“That’s New York. I’d like to go there. That’s where everything is.”
“Oh?”
“You should know. Zack says everything is going to end pretty soon, maybe with people throwing bombs, maybe with earthquakes, it doesn’t matter what, and that everybody thinks it’ll happen in New York first. But it won’t. It’ll happen here first. There’ll be bodies all over the Midwest, Zack says.”
I said that it sounded like Zack was looking forward to it.
She sat up straight, like a wrestler on the mat, and took her attention off the screen for a moment. Her eyes were very pale. “Do you know what they found at the Arden dump a couple of years ago? Just when I was starting high school? Two heads in paper bags. Women’s heads. They never found out who they were. Zack says it was a sign.”
“A sign of what?”
“That it’s beginning. Pretty soon there won’t be any schools, any government, any armies. There won’t be any of that shit. There’ll just be killing. For a long time. Like with Hitler.”
I saw that she wished to shock. “I think I can see why your father doesn’t like Zack.”
She glared at me and returned her gaze sullenly to the screen.
I said, “You must have known that girl who was killed.”
She blinked. “Sure I knew her. That was terrible.”
“I suppose she helps prove your theories.”
“Don’t be creepy.” Another pale-eyed, sullen stare from the little warrior.
“I like your name.” In truth, and despite her foul manners, I was beginning to like her. Lacking her confidence, she had none of her namesake’s awesome charm, but she had her energy.
“Ugh.”
“Were you named after anybody?”
“Look, I don’t know and I don’t care, okay?”
Our conversation seemed to be concluded. With an air which suggested that she would stay in that position for life, Alison had returned to the television set. Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner were strolling across a field arm in arm, looking as if they too thought the end of the world was a neat idea. She spoke again before I could rise and leave the room.
“You’re not married, are you?”
“No.”
“Didn’t you get married? Didn’t you used to be married?”
I reminded her that she had been at my wedding.
Now she was staring at me again, ignoring Gregory Peck’s twitching jaw and Ava Gardner’s trembling breast. “You got divorced? Why?”
“My wife died.”
“Holy cow, she died? Were you upset? Was it suicide?”
“She died by accident,” I said. “Yes, I was upset, but not for the reasons you’re imagining. We hadn’t lived together for some time. I was upset that another human being, one to whom I had been close, had died senselessly.”
She was reacting to me strongly, in an almost sexual way—I could almost see her temperature rising and I thought I could smell blood. “Did you leave her or did she leave you?” She had curled one leg beneath herself and straightened her back on the couch so that she was sitting up and staring at me with those flat seawater eyes. I was better than the movie.
“I’m not sure that’s important. I’m not sure it’s any of your business either.”
“She left you.” Accent on both pronouns.
“Maybe we left each other.”
“Did you think she got what she deserved?”
“Of course not,” I said.
“My father would. He’d think that.” I saw the point of these odd questions finally, and felt an unexpected twinge of pity for her. She had lived all her life within her father’s suspicion of womankind. “So would Zack.”
“Well, people can surprise you sometimes.”
“Hah,” she grunted. It was a proper rejection of my cliché; then she twisted herself back around, almost flouncing on the couch, to watch the movie again. Now my audience was truly over, and this complicated little warrior queen was bidding me leave.
“You needn’t bother to show me the way out,” I said, and left the room. On the other side of the kitchen, in the little vestibule before the door, was the entrance to the basement. I opened this second door and fumbled for the light. When I found the switch and flicked it up, the bulb illuminated only the wooden staircase and a pool of packed earth at its foot. I began carefully to descend.
—
It still bothers me that I did not go to Duane to discuss his daughter’s loony theories. But I have heard proposals more bizarre from my students—many of them my female students. And as I navigated Duane’s basement, stooping over, hands extended, going to what I hoped was the west wall, I considered that he had surely heard it all by now, his daughter’s ventriloquial act: he had said this Zack was a weirdo, and I was inclined to agree. We had presumably judged on the same evidence. And their family problems were secondary to me, or tertiary, or quaternary, if I counted Alison Greening, my work and my well-being as my interlocking priorities. Mea culpa. Also, I would not have given Alison Updahl more problems than daughterhood had.
The pad of my bandage bumped a clean flat surface and sent it rocking. With my right hand I reached to steady it, and grasped by accident a smooth long wooden handle. It too was swinging. The object, I realized after a moment’s further groping, was an ax. I saw that I could have jostled it off its peg and severed my foot. I swore aloud, and felt gently around for more axes in the air. My hand brushed another long depending handle, then another, and after it a fourth. By this time my eyes had begun to adjust to the cellar’s darkness, and I could discern the four shadowy handles hanging down in a row from one of the ceiling supports; rakes and garden hoes hung beside them. I worked my way around them, threading through bags of cement and Qwik-Ferm. I stepped over a stack of equipment catalogs. Beyond them a row of things like skinny dwarf mummies leaned against the wall. After a second I knew they were rifles and shotguns in soft cases. Shell boxes were stacked up at one end of the row. Like most farmers, Duane did not find it necessary to put his guns on display. Then I saw what I was looking for. Leaning against the wall, just as Duane had described it, was an old white paneled door, a perfect flat surface for a desk. It had odd doorknobs, but they could easily be taken off. Perhaps Duane would want them—as I got closer to the door, I saw that the knobs were glass, thousand-sided. Beside the door were stacked two trestles, Duane’s sawbucks, like insects in the act of copulation. And beside these was a case of empty Coke bottles, the old eight-ounce variety. The top had been ripped off to expose the open, sucking mouths of the bottles.
I thought of calling for Alison Updahl’s help, but decided not to. It had been a morning of mistakes, and I did not wish to commit another and upset the delicate peace between us. So I took the trestles up first and put them on the grass outside Duane’s back door, and then went back down for what would be my desktop.
The long heavy wooden rectangle was far more awkward to handle, but I managed to get
it up the stairs without knocking down a shotgun or dislodging an ax or shattering the old cello-hipped Coke bottles. After I had muscled it up the steep wooden steps, I was sorry I had not called for Alison’s help, for my chest leaped and pounded as though a trout were dying in it. My torn hand ached. I slid the door across the linoleum, crumpling several small hooked rugs, and then banged the screen door open with my elbow and wrestled the door outside and down the concrete steps. I was sweating and breathing hard. Mopping my forehead with my sleeve, I propped the door against the trestles and looked at it in dismay. Spider webs, dust and insects made scurrying lacy patterns over the white paint.
The solution, a garden hose, lay at my feet. I twisted the knob set into the base of the house and played the hose over the door until all the filth had been sluiced away. I was tempted to run it over myself. My hands were black and my shirt was ruined, and sweat poured out of my scalp. But I merely held my hands one after the other in the jet of cold water, wetting the bandage as little as possible. Application of magical substance.
Cold water!
I dropped the still-spurting hose and went across Duane’s patchy lawn in the direction of the barn. When I looked to the right I could see my cousin’s head and upper body grinding along atop the invisible tractor, as if he were floated by a perverse, bumpy wind. I went over the gravel and dust of the drive. The dog began to curse me with big windy arrogant curses. I reached the tank and plunged my good hand into the greenish water and closed it over a beer bottle to which clung my bloody handkerchief. This I threw into the weeds. I extracted the dripping bottle. I had just twisted off the cap and begun to pour into me the tingling liquid when I saw the blond-fringed face of the Tin Woodsman staring at me from the kitchen window. She winked. Suddenly we were grinning at each other, and I felt the snarl of emotion which the day had caused in me begin to loosen. It was as though I had found an ally. Really, it could not have been easy for a high-spirited girl to have my cousin Duane for a father.
THREE
After I had stripped it of the knobs and set it up in the empty upstairs bedroom of my grandmother’s house, the desk looked sturdy and serviceable, a present-day echo of all the desks I have known and used. The room itself, small, white and pine-floored, was a perfect place for literary work, since the bare walls offered vistas for contemplation and the single window which faced the barn and the path to Duane’s house, opportunity for distraction. Soon I had all my paraphernalia arranged on the desk—typewriter, paper, notes, the beginning of my draft and my outline. Typex, pens, pencils, paper clips. The novels I placed in several neat piles beside the chair. For a moment I felt that spirit lay in labor, in hard work, the more recondite and irrelevant the better. My dogged dissertation would be my linkage with Alison Greening; my work would summon her.
—
But that day I did no work. I sat at my desk and looked out of the window, watching my cousin’s daughter cross and recross the grass and the path as she went to the equipment shed or down to the barn, glancing curiously at my window, and then watching Duane ride up from the road on his giant tractor. He put it in the pole barn and then lumbered back across to his house, scratching himself on the bottom. I felt—I suppose I felt—lonely and elated, primed for an event and still flat and hollow at the same time, as though I were not what I was pretending to be, but were merely an actor waiting for the role to begin. It is a feeling I often have.
I sat there watching the sky darken over the barn as the path lost its definition and the tops of Duane’s house and the barn first stood out with greater clarity against a background of darkening blue and then were absorbed into the sky, as if bites were taken out of them. Lights appeared in Duane’s house in series, each window lighting up as though it were timed to go on a moment after its neighbor. I thought Alison might appear on the path, her T-shirt shining in moonlight as she sulkily walked toward me, the lank ends of her hair swinging in rhythm with her heavy thighs. After a time I fell asleep. I could have been out no more than an hour, but when I opened my eyes only one light was on in Duane’s house and the territory between our two dwellings seemed as dark and pathless as a jungle. Hungry, I groped my way downstairs and into the kitchen. The house was clammy and musty, and everything was cold to my touch. When I opened the refrigerator I found that either Duane or Mrs. Sunderson had stocked it with enough food for that night and the following morning—butter, bread, eggs, potatoes, two lamb chops, cheese. I fried the chops and wolfed them down with slices of bread and butter. A meal without wine is not a meal for a grown man. I gnawed at the block of cheddar for dessert. Then I dumped the dishes in the sink for the cleaning woman and went burping back upstairs to the bedroom. When I looked in at my workroom I saw a single light still on in Duane’s house, but at its far end. Alison’s bedroom, presumably. As I stood looking at it I heard the buzz of a motorcycle going up the road. It increased in volume until it came about level with my position and then it abruptly shut off. My desk looked malevolent, like the fat black center of a spider web.
—
My bedroom, of course, had been my grandmother’s. Yet I see that it is not of course, for she had moved to the chillier, smaller bedroom upstairs only after the death of my grandfather; for this reason it had a newer bed, and for that reason I chose it. It was as far as you could get from the old bedroom and still be in the house—on the opposite side and up the narrow stairs. My grandfather had died when I was a small child, so all my memories of my grandmother are of her as a widow, a wrinkled old woman who climbed the narrow stairs to go to bed. As some old women do, she swung in size between extremes of heaviness and thinness, alternating every three or four years, and finally settled on being thin, and died like that. Given that the narrow little room had this history, it is unsurprising that I had a dream about my grandmother; but I found the emotional violence of the dream shocking.
I was in the sitting room, which was furnished not with Duane’s office contraptions but in the old way. My grandmother was seated on her wooden-backed sofa, nervously looking at her hands.—Why did you have to come back?
—What?
—You’re a fool.
—I don’t understand.
—Haven’t enough people died already?
Then she abruptly stood up and walked out of the room onto the porch, where she sat in the rusty old swing.—Miles, you’re an innocent. She raised her fists to me and her face contorted in a way I had never seen.—Fool, fool, fool! Fool innocent!
I sat beside her. She began to beat me around my head and shoulders, and I bent my neck to receive her blows. I wished for death.
She said—You put it in motion and it will destroy you.
All the life went out of me, and the setting receded until I was suspended in a blue fluid, far away. The distance was important. I was in a far blue drifting place, still weeping. Then I understood that it was death. Distant conversation, distant laughter filtered to me, as though through walls. When I became aware of other bodies floating as mine was, hundreds of them, thousands of bodies spinning as if from trees in that blue horror, I heard the sound of loud handclaps. Three of them. Three widely spaced loud claps, unutterably cynical. That was the sound of death, and it held no dignity. It was the end of a poor performance.
Sweating, I rolled over on the bed, gasping. The dream seemed to have lasted for hours—I seemed to have been caught in it from the first moments of sleep. I lay panting under the great weight of guilt and panic. I was held responsible for many deaths; I had caused these deaths, and everybody knew.
Only gradually, as I saw light begin to crawl through the window, did rationality appear. I had never killed anyone. My grandmother was dead; I was in the valley to get work done. Easy, I said out loud. Only a dream. I tried to produce alpha waves, and began to breathe deeply and evenly. It took a long time for the enormous sense of guilt to dissipate.
I have always been a person with an enormous excess of guilt. My true vocation is that of guilt expert.
&n
bsp; For three-fourths of an hour I tried to fall asleep again, but my system would not permit it, my nerves felt as though doused in caffeine, and I got out of bed just past five. Through the bedroom window I could see dawn slowly beginning. Dew lay silvery over the old huge black iron pig trough in the field near the house where my grandfather had kept hogs. The field was now used for grazing a horse and a neighbor’s cows. Beside humped cows, the tall chestnut mare was still asleep, standing with its long neck drooping down. Further up began a sandstone hill, pocked with shallow caves and overgrown with small trees and intensely curling vines and weeds. It looked much as it had during my childhood. A very light gray fog, more like a stationary mist than fog, hung in the lowest parts of the field. As I stood by the window, absorbing peace from that long green landscape edged with fog, two things happened which made me momentarily and at first without realizing it hold my breath. I had let my eye travel up across the road and the fields—the colors of Duane’s corn were beautifully muted by the gray light, and the woods seemed blacker than in the sunlight. Light foglike smoke came curling out of the mass of trees. Then I unmistakably saw a figure emerge, embraced by the fog, and hover for a moment at the boundary between wood and field. I remembered my mother telling me of seeing a wolf come from those woods forty years before—of seeing a wolf pause perhaps at that exact spot and stand tense with hunger, leveling its muzzle at the house and barn. It was, I was almost certain, the same person I had seen the previous afternoon. Like the wolf, it too stood and paused and looked toward the house. My heart froze. I thought: a hunter. No. Not a hunter. I didn’t know why not, but not. In the same second I heard the bee noise of a motorcycle.