by Peter Straub
—
Through the huge magnifying lenses, Tuta Sunderson’s eyes looked like goggling fish. Sulky, she forced her hands into the pockets of her gray cardigan. For the three days following my late-night conversation with Polar Bears, she had sullenly arrived every morning, noisily tramped around the kitchen, wordlessly cooked my breakfast, and then busied herself cleaning the kitchen and the bathroom while I experimented with the placement of the furniture. The old bamboo and fabric couch went against the far wall, to the left of the small shelves. The glass-fronted case (I remembered it holding Bibles and novels by Lloyd C. Douglas) faced into the room from the short wall by the porch door; the only thing resembling an easy chair sat on the other side of that door; but the other chairs and small tables seemed too numerous, impossible to place—a spindly-legged table with a magazine rack? A cane-backed chair? I was not sure I could even remember them in the room, much less where they had been situated. Perhaps a half dozen other small articles of furniture presented the same problem. Tuta Sunderson could not help.
“It wasn’t always the same way. There is no right way.”
“Just think. Try to remember.”
“I think that little table there went sort of alongside that couch.” She was humoring me, half-reluctantly.
“Here?” I moved it under the shelves.
“No. Out more.”
I pulled it forward.
“If I was Du-ane, I’d have your head examined. He spent pretty near his whole rebate on that nice furniture. When he told my boy about it, Red went down and got some real nice bargains for me, too.”
“Duane can move this stuff back downstairs when I leave. That table doesn’t look right.”
“Looks good enough to me.”
“Because you don’t understand.”
“I reckon there’s lots I don’t understand. You’ll never get your writing done if you do this all day long.”
“Why don’t you change my sheets or something? If you can’t help me, at least you could get out of my way.”
Her face seemed to fill with water, like a sack.
“I reckon you left all your good manners in New York, Miles.” With that, she visibly gave up on me for the moment, and turned toward the window. “How long before that little car of yours gonna be ready from the filling station?”
“I’ll try them in a few days.”
“Then will you be leaving the valley?” She cocked her head, watching something on the road.
“No. Polar Bears wants me to stay. He must be bored with his usual company.”
“You and Galen pretty close?”
“We’re like brothers.”
“He never invited anyone to his house before. Galen keeps himself to himself. He’s a smart man. Guess you had a ride in his police car. Folks in Arden told Red.”
I moved a chair to a spot beside the oil heater, then moved it nearer the bedroom door. “You seem to have cars on the brain today.”
“Maybe because I just saw someone stop and put something in your mailbox. Not the mailman. It was a different car. Why don’t you go out there where it’s warm and see what you got?”
“Now you tell me,” I said, and went toward the porch. I stepped outside into the sunlight. For the past two days, Tuta Sunderson had taken to wearing a sweater while she worked, in part to irritate me with the anomaly of a cardigan in hot summer weather, in part because the farmhouse was genuinely cold and damp: it was as if a breeze came slicing down from the woods to pitch camp in the house. Behind me I could hear her saying, just loudly enough for me to hear, “Some more of your fan mail.”
Which, in the event, was what it turned out to be: fan mail. It was a single sheet of cheap lined paper torn from a school exercise book, and printed on it was BASTERD YOURE IN OUR SIGHTS. Yes, a familiar image from the movies; I could almost feel the crosshairs centering on my chest. I looked down the road, saw the nothing I expected to see, and then leaned forward with my arms on the mailbox, making my breathing regular. Twice in the past two days I had received silent telephone calls, bringing me down from my new project to a noise of muffled breathing on which I could smell onions, cheese, beer. Tuta Sunderson said people all talk, and I could guess that there were rumors of the Polish girl’s disappearance. Tuta’s attitude itself, more abrasive since my “suicide attempt,” showed that she had attended to these whispers: she had just thrown back to me my remark about Red’s manners.
As I walked back toward the farmhouse I could see her mooning at me through the window. I slammed the porch door, and she scuttled over to the cupboards and pretended to dust the shelves.
“I don’t suppose you recognized the car?”
Her flabby upper arms wobbled; her rump bobbed in sympathetic motion. “It wasn’t from the valley. I know all the cars hereabouts.” She peeked at me over her fat shoulder, dying to know what I had found in the mailbox.
“What color was it?”
“It was all dust. I couldn’t see.”
“You know, Mrs. Sunderson,” I said, putting it very slowly so she would not miss a word, “if it was your son or any of his friends that came in here that night and turned on the gas, they were attempting murder. The law takes a hard line on that sort of thing.”
Furious, baffled, she turned around. “My boy’s no sneak!”
“Is that what you’d call it?”
She whirled around again and began to dust the dishes so vigorously that they rattled. After a moment she permitted herself to speak, though not to face me. “People say something else happened. They say Galen Hovre is going to get him soon. They say he sits down there in his office knowing a lot more than he tells.” Then another walleyed peek at me. “And they say Paul Kant is starving himself in his mother’s house. So if it happens again people will know he was inside and didn’t do it.”
“What a field day they’re having,” I said. “What fun they’re all having. I envy them.”
She shook her head maddeningly, and I would gladly have gone on in that vein, but the telephone rang. She glanced at it and then at me, telling me she would not answer it.
I put the sheet of paper down on the table and picked up the receiver. “Hello.” Silence, breathing, the smells of onions and beer. I do not know if these were truly the odors of my caller, or if they were only those I expected from someone who made anonymous telephone calls. Tuta Sunderson pounced on the sheet of paper.
“You miserable boor,” I said into the mouthpiece. “You have pigshit where you should have an imagination.”
My caller hung up; I laughed at that and at the expression on Tuta Sunderson’s face. She put down the misspelled note. She was shocked. I laughed again, tasting something black and sour at the back of my throat.
—
When I heard the porch door slam I waited until I saw her toiling up the road, the lumpy cardigan over one arm and the handbag jigging on its strap. After a long while she moved out of the frame of vision the window gave me, struggling in the sunlight like a white beetle. I put down my pencil and closed the journal. Standing on the cool porch, I looked up toward the woods—all was still, as if life stopped when the sun was so high. Sound told me that it did not: out of sight down the road, Duane’s tractor put-putted from the far field, birds said things to one another. I went down the rutted drive, crossed the road, and jumped the ditch.
On the other side of the creek, I could hear crickets and grasshoppers, and small things whirring in the grass. I went up the bifurcated hill; crows took off from the alfalfa, screeching, their bodies like flak, like ashes in the air. Sweat dripped into my eyebrows, and I felt my shirt clammily adhering to my sides. I thumped down into the dip, and then began to rise again, walking toward the trees.
This was where she had twice led me. Birds twittered, darting through branches far above. Light came down in that streaming way it does only in forests and cathedrals. I watched a gray squirrel race out onto a slender branch, bend it under his weight, and then transfer to a lower, stoute
r branch like a man stepping out of an elevator. When the ground began to alter, so did the trees; I walked on spongy gray mulch between oaks and elms; I skirted pines and conifers and felt thin brown needles skid underfoot. As when I lay on the polished floor, I waded through high leafy beds of ferns. Berries crushed against my trousers. A lightning-blasted old ruin of an oak lay splintered and jagged in my path, and I jumped on top of it, feeling the softness of rotting wood. Filaments of green snagged and caught in the eyelets of my boots.
Going as I had gone in vision that night, I passed the thick unmoving trees until I saw where they seemed to gather like a crowd at an accident: I slid through a gap, and was in the clearing. The sunlight, after the filter of the network of the leaves, seemed violently yellow and intense, lionlike, full of inhuman energy. Tall grass tipped under its own weight. Insect noises hovered in vibrato over the clearing. A chirring unmoving noise.
At the center, in the charred place, the ashes showed a still red core, like the ashes in Rinn’s old woodstove. It had Alison’s warmth. Galen Hovre was wrong about Duane and my cousin. Or Duane, all those years ago, had lied.
—
Oddly, perhaps predictably, when I had dreamed about walking up into the woods the journey had a direct, palpable actuality, and when I actually went up there it felt like dreaming. I thought, almost fearing it, that I would sense some deeper closeness to Alison Greening if I approached the clearing where I had met her dreadful apparition in my vision; that space was hers, and I thought of it as the source of the chill which penetrated the old farmhouse. If there is another world, a world of Spirit, who is to say that its touch may not shake us to our boots, that its heat may not come to us as the cold of quarry water? But discounting that nightmare vision of Alison as a creature stitched together from leaves and bark, indirection brought me closer to her, evoked her more satisfactorily, than a crude search through the woods and clearing. I had begun a memoir, a task she had motivated (I could remember her telling me, one high summer day when we climbed the hill behind the valley and, carrying shovels, searched for Indian mounds, that she was going to be a painter, and I a writer), and it seemed to cement us even further, since—at the most obvious level—it meant that I thought about her even more than I might otherwise. She was the ground bass of what I wrote. It was as though I were reeling her in, sentence by sentence. And then, one morning after suffering through a breakfast presided over by a Tuta Sunderson who had accepted seven one-dollar bills from me and then wordlessly handed back two as if they represented an immoral suggestion, I had driven the Nash loaner over the Mississippi bridge on Highway 35—a wonderful American sight, those islands showing their wooded backs like green water buffaloes in the brown river—to Winona, Minnesota, looking for the records necessary to the Alison-environment. If I’d had to, I would have gone all the way to Minneapolis. Albums on the Pacific label from the fifties are rare items. An initial glance through the racks in a Winona record store unearthed none, but then I saw the sign saying Second Hand Department Downstairs, and went down to flip through, in a basement illuminated by a single bulb, crate after crate of albums with worn sleeves and crumbled spines. Surrounded by cast-off Perry Comos and Roy Acuffs and Roger Williamses, two records shone like gold, and I grunted with such loud approval that the owner appeared at the top of the stairs to ask if I were all right. One was an old Dave Brubeck record I remembered Alison telling me she had loved (Jazz at Oberlin) and the other—well, the other was a true find. It was the Gerry Mulligan quartet album on Pacific which Alison had urged me to buy, the one with a cover painting by Keith Finch. Finding that record was like finding a message from her scrawled on a page of my manuscript. It was the record, above all others, which evoked her, the one she had most cherished. The owner of the record store charged me five dollars for the two records, but I would have paid twenty times that. As much as my writing, they brought Alison nearer.
“What is that stuff you play all the time?” asked the Tin Woodsman. She was standing on the porch on Saturday night, peering in through the screen door. “Is that jazz?” I put my pencil into my manuscript and closed it. I was sitting on the old couch downstairs, and the kerosene lamps shed a muted orange glow which softened her features, blurred already by the mesh of the screen. She wore a denim shirt and trousers, and looked more feminine, in that soft light, than I had ever seen her. “Look,” she said, “it’s okay. I mean, Dad’s in Arden for some kind of meeting. Red Sunderson called him just before dinner. All the men are talking about something. They’ll probably be at it for hours. I heard you playing that record the other day. Is that the kind of music you like? Can I come in?”
She entered the room and sat facing me from a wooden rocker. On her bare feet were tan clogs. “What is it, anyhow?”
“Do you like it?” I really was curious.
She lifted her shoulders. “Doesn’t it all sound sort of the same?”
“No.”
“What’s that instrument playing now?”
“A guitar.”
“A guitar? That’s a guitar? Come on. It’s a…um, a whatsit. Some kind of horn. A sax. Right?”
“Yes. It’s a baritone saxophone.”
“So why did you say it was a guitar?” Then she smiled, seeing the joke.
I shrugged, smiling back.
“Shit, Miles, it’s cold in here.”
“That’s because it’s damp.”
“Yeah? Hey Miles, did you steal out of Zumgo’s? Pastor Bertilsson’s telling everyone you did.”
“Then I must have.”
“I don’t get it.” She looked around the room, shaking her head, her jaws working on a piece of gum. “Hey, you know this room looks really neat this way. It’s just like it used to be. When I was a little kid and Great-Gramma was still alive.”
“I know.”
“It’s neat,” she said, still examining the room. “Didn’t there used to be more pictures? Like of you and Dad?” When I nodded, she asked, “So where are they?”
“I didn’t need them.”
The gum snapped. “Boy, Miles, I don’t know about you. You’re really superstrange. Sometimes you remind me of Zack, and sometimes you just talk crazy. How did you know where everything went in here?”
“I had to work at it.”
“It’s sort of like a museum, isn’t it? I mean, I almost expect to see Great-Gramma!”
“She probably wouldn’t like the music.”
She giggled. “Hey, did you really steal from Zumgo’s?”
“Does Zack steal?”
“Sure.” She made her seawater eyes very wide. “All the time. He says you have to liberate things. And he says if you can take things without being caught, then you have a right to them.”
“Where does he steal from?”
“Places where he works. You know. Stuff from people’s houses, if he’s working for them. Stuff from the gas station, if he’s working there. You mean, you’re a college professor and all and you steal things?”
“If you say so.”
“I can see why Zack likes you. That would really turn him on. Some big Establishment guy ripping off stores. He thinks he might be able to trust you.”
“I really think you’re too good for Zack,” I said.
“You’re wrong, Miles. You don’t know Zack. You don’t know what he’s into.” She leaned forward, putting each hand on the opposite shoulder. The gesture was surprisingly womanly.
“What’s the meeting in Arden about? The one Red and your father went to.”
“Who cares? Listen, Miles, are you going to church tomorrow?”
“Of course not. I have my reputation to think of.”
“Then try not to get stinko again tonight, huh? We gotta plan. We’re gonna take you somewhere.”
PORTION OF STATEMENT OF TUTA SUNDERSON:
July 18
Well, what my boy thought was that there was some kind of coverup. That was the word he used to me, Galen Hovre, like it or not. Coverup. ’Course it
wasn’t, we know that now, but look at what we had then—nothing! After those two murders, there’s poor Paul Kant holed up in his mother’s house, there’s Miles batching it in his grandmother’s house and riding around in police cars and who knows what all, turning that house into something Duane didn’t want it to be, and people just thought something had to be done. And we all thought you were hiding something from us. And you were!
Anyhow, one of Red’s friends had the car idea, and Red told him, let’s wait until we know for sure what’s going on, and let’s have a general meeting to talk about it. All the men. They’d get together, see? To sort of piece out the rumors.
So they met in the back of the Angler’s. Red says they had thirty-forty men at the meeting. They all looked up to Red, on account of his finding Jenny Strand.
Now, who’s heard what? says Red. Let’s get it all out. Let’s get it where we can see it and not just gossip about it. Now, a few of the men had heard that the police were sitting on something. Let me see. Did one of the deputies tell his girlfriend? Something like that. I’m not saying it was that, mind. So one of the men says, who knows about anybody hiding away—not acting normal and neighborly.
And someone says, Roman Michalski hasn’t been to work this week.
Sick? they ask.
No, nobody heard of him being sick. He’s just holed up. Him and his wife.
Now, if we’re talking about people being holed up, I could have told them about Miles. You bet. He just set there after he got all the furniture just the way he wanted it, the way his Gramma had it. He was real white, sitting there in that damp old house, drinking himself to sleep every night, and playing those goofy records all day. He looked like he was in a trance or something all the time. A big man like that, and he looked like he’d jump out of his skin if you said boo. And his language! Oh, he knew he wasn’t going to get away with anything.
When I found out he’d had a girl in his bed I told Red right away.
Anyhow, like you know, Monday night some of the men paid a call on Roman Michalski.