If You Could See Me Now

by Peter Straub

  “Arrest me,” I said, and heard my voice bubble. “She’ll kill me.” The weave of a hooked rug cushioned my cheek.

  “You want things too easy, Miles.” I heard his feet moving on the floor, and tensed for another kick. Then I heard him going into the kitchen. Water splashed. I opened my eyes. He came back drinking from a glass of water.

  He sat on the old couch. “I want to know something. How did it feel when you saw Paul Kant on the night he died? How did it feel, looking at that miserable little queer and knowing he was in hell because of what you did?”

  “I didn’t do it,” I said. My voice was still bubbling.

  Hovre emitted an enormous sigh. “You’re making me do all this the hard way. What about the blood on your clothes?”

  “What blood?” I found that I could lever myself up to a sitting position.

  “The blood on your clothes. I went through your closet. You got some pants with blood on ’em, a pair of shoes with what could be bloodstains on the uppers.” He put the glass down on the floor. “Now I gotta take those to the lab over in Blundell and see if they come out the blood type of any of the girls. Candace Michalski and Gwen Olson were AB, Jenny Strand was type O.”

  “Blood on my clothes? Oh. Yes. It happened when I cut my hand. The first day I came here. It dripped onto my shoes when I was driving here. Probably on my trousers too.”

  Hovre shook his head.

  “And I’m AB,” I said.

  “How would you happen to know that, Miles?”

  “My wife was a do-gooder. Every year we gave a pint each to the blood center in Long Island City.”

  “Long Island City.” He shook his head again. “And you’re AB?” He pushed himself up from the couch, walked past me to get to the porch.

  “Miles,” he called to me, “if you’re so simon-pure innocent, why are you in such a hurry to be put in jail?”

  “I already told you that,” I said.

  “Kee-rist.” He returned holding my clothes and shoes. I felt the pain in my head jump in anticipation as he came toward me. “Now I’m gonna tell you the facts of life,” he said. “Word is gonna get around. I’m not going to do anything to stop it. I’m not even going to have Dave Lokken sitting on his fat ass down the road. If anyone comes out here to find you, that’s all right with me. A little jungle justice wouldn’t bother me a bit. I’d almost rather have you dead than in jail, old pal. And I don’t think you’re stupid enough to think you can get away from me. Are you? You couldn’t get far in that beat-up car anyhow. Hey?” His foot came toward me, and stopped an inch short of my ribs. “Hey?”

  I nodded.

  “I’ll be hearing from you, Miles. I’ll be hearing from you. We’re both gonna get what we want.”

  —

  After I soaked for an hour in a hot bath, letting the pain seep away into the steam, I sat upstairs and wrote for several hours—until I saw that it had begun to get dark. I heard Duane shouting at his daughter. His voice rose and fell, monotonously, angrily, insisting on some inaudible point. Both Duane’s voice and the oncoming of dark made it impossible to work any longer. To spend another night in the farmhouse was almost impossible: I could still see her, sitting in the chair at the foot of my bed, looking blankly, even dully, at me, as if what I were seeing were only a waxen model of her face and body, a shell a millimeter thick behind which lay spinning stars and gases. I put down the pencil, grabbed a jacket from my plundered closet and went downstairs and outside.

  The night was beginning. The dark shapes of clouds drifted beneath an immense sky. Above them hung a moon nearly washed of color. A single arrow of cool breeze seemed to come straight toward the house from high in the black woods. I shuddered, and climbed into the battered Volkswagen.

  At first I thought of simply driving around the county roads until I was too tired to go further and then sleep the rest of the night in the car; then I thought I might go to Freebo’s and speed oblivion by purchasing it. Oblivion could scarcely cost more than ten dollars, and it was the best buy in Arden. I rattled onto 93, and turned the car toward town. But what sort of reception could I expect in Freebo’s? By this time, everybody would know about the medical examiner’s report. I would be a ghastly pariah. Or an inhuman thing to be hunted down. At that point the car went dead. I cursed Hank Speltz. I did not even begin to have the mechanical competence to fix whatever the boy had done. I pictured driving back to New York at a steady rate of thirty-five miles an hour. I’d need another mechanic, which meant that I would have to commit most of the money remaining in my account. Then I thought of the waxen face concealing stars and gases, and knew that I would be lucky ever to get back to New York.

  That night I made an appeal to compassion, a second appeal to violence.

  Finally I got the car started again.

  As I sped down one of the Arden backstreets I saw a familiar shape passing a lighted picture window, and I cut over to the curb and jumped out of the car before the motor was dead. I ran on the black asphalt in the middle of the road and crossed his lawn. I pressed Bertilsson’s bell.

  When he opened his door I saw surprise alter his features. His face was as much a mask as hers. He ignored his wife’s calls of “Who is it? Who is it?” behind him.

  “Well,” he said, grinning at me. “Come for my blessing? Or did you have something to confess?”

  “I want you to take me in. I want you to protect me.”

  His wife’s face appeared over his shoulder, at some hidden opening in their house, a corner or a door. She began to march forward.

  “We’ve heard the distressing details of the Michalski girl’s death,” he said. “You have a nice sense of humor, Miles, coming here.”

  I said, “Please take me in. I need your help.”

  “I rather think my help is reserved for those who know how to use it.”

  “I’m in danger. In danger of my life.”

  His wife’s face glared at me now from over his shoulder. “What does he want? Tell him to go away.”

  “I rather think he’s going to ask to be put up for the night.”

  “Don’t you have a duty?” I asked.

  “I have a duty to all Christians,” he said. “You are not a Christian. You are an abomination.”

  “Tell him to go away.”

  “I’m begging you.”

  Mrs. Bertilsson’s head jerked upward, her face cold and hard. “You were too sick to take our advice when we saw you in town, and we’re under no obligation to help you now. Are you asking us to let you stay here?”

  “Just for a night.”

  “Do you think I could sleep with you in my house? Close the door, Elmer.”

  “Wait—”

  “An abomination.” He slammed the door. A second later I saw the drapes meeting in the middle of the window.

  Helpless. Helpless to help, helpless to be helped. This is the story of a man who couldn’t get arrested.

  I drove to Main and stopped the car in the middle of the empty street. I honked the horn once, then twice. For a moment I rested my forehead on the rim of the steering wheel. Then I opened the door. I could hear the buzz of a neon sign, the momentary beating of wings far overhead. I stood beside the car. Nothing around me moved, nothing demonstrated life. All of the shops were dark; on either side of the street, cars pointed their noses at the curb like sleeping cattle. I shouted. Not even an echo answered. Even the two bars seemed deserted, although illuminated beer signs sparkled in their windows. I walked down the middle of the street toward Freebo’s. I felt drifting blue gather around me.

  A stone the size of a potato was caught in the grid of a drain by the curbside. It might have been one they had thrown at me. I tugged it out and hefted it in my hand. Then I hurled it at Freebo’s long rectangular window. I remembered throwing glasses at the wall of my apartment, back in the passionate days of my marriage. There was an appalling noise, and glass shivered down onto the sidewalk.

  And then everything was as it had been. I w
as still on the empty street; the shops were still light; no one was shouting, no one was running toward me. The only noise was the buzzing of the sign. I owed Freebo about fifty dollars, but I would never be able to pay him. I could smell dust and grass, the odors blown in on the wind from the fields. I imagined men inside the bar, backed away from the windows, holding their breath until I left. Inside with the scarred tables and the jukebox and the flashing beer signs, all waiting for me to leave. The last of the last chances.

  —

  On the morning of the twenty-first I woke up in the backseat of the car. I had been permitted to survive the night. Shouts, angry yells from Duane’s house up the path. His problems with his daughter seemed terrifically remote, someone’s else’s problem in someone else’s world. I leaned over the car seat and pulled the door release, pushed the seat forward, and got out. My back ached; I had a sharp, persistent pain behind my eyes. When I looked at my watch I saw that it was thirteen hours to dark: I would not run from it. I could not. The day, my last, was hot and cloudless. Sixty feet away, the chestnut mare leaned its head over the fence of the side field and regarded me with silky eyes. The air was very still. A big horsefly, greenly iridescent, began to bustle across the top of the car, concentrating on the bird droppings. Everything about me seemed a part of Alison’s coming, clues, sections of a puzzle which would lock into place before midnight.

  I thought: if I get back into this car and try to drive off, she will stop me. Leaves and branches would block the windshield, vines would trap the accelerator. My visual sense of this was too powerful—for an instant I saw the homely interior of the VW choked with a struggling profusion of foliage, and I gagged on the spermy odor of sap—and I snatched my hand away from the top of the car.

  I did not see how I could endure the tension of the intervening hours. Where would I be when she came?

  With the desperate foolhardiness of a soldier who knows that the battle will come whether or not he is prepared for it, I decided what I would do at nightfall. Really, there was only one place for me to be when it happened. I had waited twenty years for it, and I knew where I would go to await the final moment, where I had to go, had to be when the noise of rushing wind came and the woods opened to release her for my own violent release. There were no more last chances.

  —

  Time passed. I moved dazedly around the house, at times wondering vaguely why Tuta Sunderson had not appeared, and then remembering that I had fired her. I sat on the old furniture, and fell bodily into the past. My grandmother slid a pan into the oven, Oral Roberts declaimed from the radio, Duane slapped his hands together from a chair in a dark corner. He was twenty, and his hair swept upward from his forehead in a pompadour. Alison Greening, fourteen years old, magically vibrant, appeared in the doorway (man’s button-down shirt, fawn trousers, sexual promise making the air snap about her), and glided through on sneakered feet. My mother, hers, talked on the porch. Their voices were bored and peaceful. I saw Duane look at my cousin with a look of hatred.

  Then I found myself in the bedroom with no memory of having climbed the stairs. I was staring at the bed. I remembered the feeling of breasts against my chest, first small, then cushiony, how I had fit myself into a ghost’s body. She was still moving downstairs; I heard her light footsteps crossing the living room, heard her slam the porch door.

  You got into trouble again last year. My face had blazed. Summer’s lease is fading, dear one. I went across into my office and saw papers spilling out of bushel baskets. Do birds cough? I saw only one conclusion. I was in check. Still, in memory, she glided downstairs. I felt as though absorbent cotton encased me, as though I were moving through treacle, thick dust…

  I went back to the bedroom and sat in the chair which faced the bed. I had lost everything. My face felt masklike, as if I could peel it off like Rinn’s balm. Even as I began to weep, I recognized that my features had become as blank and empty as her own, the night I had seen her gazing carelessly at me from this chair. She has entered me again, she is downstairs drinking Kool-Aid in the bubble of time that is 1955, she is waiting.

  —

  Some hours later, I am sitting at my desk and looking out the window when I hear Alison Updahl scream. A moment later, my senses awakening from their fog, I see her tearing down the path to the barn. In the back her shirt is ripped, as though someone had tried to swing her around by it, and it flaps as she pelts away. When she reaches the barn she does not stop, but races around the side and goes over a barbed wire fence to get into the back field and run in its declivities and grassy rises up toward the blanketing of woods on that side of the valley. These are the woods where Alison Greening and I, each carrying a shovel, had climbed to look for Indian mounds. When the Woodsman reaches a little rise and begins to run down into a hollow packed with massed yellow blossoms, she tears off the flapping T-shirt and throws it behind her. I know at that second that she is crying.

  Then a secondary, nearer motion: I see Duane, dressed in his working clothes, coming indecisively down the path. He carries a shotgun under one arm, but he seems in an uneasy relationship to it. He marches forward ten feet, the shotgun pointing the way, and then he pauses, looks at it, and turns his back on me. A few paces up the path, then another turn and the resumption of the march in my direction. Then he looks at the shotgun again. He takes another three steps forward. Then he sighs—I see his shoulders lift and depress—and tosses the gun into the weeds by the garage. I see his mouth form the word bitch. He glances at the old farmhouse for a moment as if he is wishing that he might see it too in flames. Then he looks up at the window and sees me. I immediately smell gunpowder and burning flesh. He says something, jerking his body, but the words do not carry through the glass, and I thrust open the window.

  “Get out here,” he says. “God damn you, get out here.”

  I go downstairs and out onto the porch. He is pacing over the ruin of the front lawn, his hands deep in the coverall pockets, his head bent. When he sees me, he gives a powerful sideways kick to a ridge of dirt left by a skidding tire. He glares at me, then bends his head again, and swivels his foot in the ridge of dirt. “I knew it,” he says. His voice is hoarse and choking. “Damn women. Damn you.”

  His face seems to be flying apart. His condition is unlike the fury I had seen earlier, and more like the suppressed dull rage I had witnessed in the equipment barn, when he flailed the tractor with a hammer. “You’re filth. Filth. You made her filthy. You and Zack.”

  I come out of the porch into waning sunlight. Duane seems nearly to be steaming. To touch him would be to burn your hands. Even in my foggy state, concentrated on what will happen four or five hours later, I am impressed by the high charge of Duane’s emotional confusion. His hatred is nearly visible, but as if suffocated, like a fire under a blanket.

  “I saw you drop the gun,” I say.

  “You saw me drop the gun,” he mimics. “You saw me drop the gun. Big fucking deal. You think I couldn’t kill you with my bare hands?” With ten percent more pressure behind it, his face would explode and go sailing away in a hundred pieces. “Hey? You think you’re gonna get away that easy?”

  Get away with what, I could ask, but I am riveted by his despair.

  “Well, you ain’t,” he says. He cannot control his voice, and it spirals up into falsetto. “I know what happens to you sex creeps in jail. They’ll make hash out of you down there. You’ll wish you were dead. Or maybe you’ll be in a nuthouse. Huh? Either way, you’re gonna rot. Rot. Every day you’ll be a little sorrier you’re still alive. And that’s good. Because you don’t deserve to die.”

  The quantity of his hatred awes me.

  “Oh, it’s gonna happen, Miles. It’s gonna happen. You had to come back here, didn’t you? Wave your goddamned face, your goddamned education, in front of me? You bastard. I had to beat it out of her, but she told me. She admitted it.” Duane brings himself forward toward me, and I see the colors alternating on his face. “Guys like you think you can get
away with anything, don’t you? You think the girls will never talk about it.”

  “There was no ‘it,’ ” I say, finally understanding.

  “Tuta saw her. Tuta saw her come out. She told Red, and my friend Red told me. So I know, Miles, I know. You made her filthy. I can’t even stand to look at you.”

  “I didn’t rape your daughter, Duane,” I say, scarcely believing that this scene is happening.

  “You say. So tell me what happened, shithead. You’re good with words, you gotta command of the language, tell me what happened.”

  “She came to me. I didn’t ask her to. I didn’t even want her to. She climbed into my bed. She was used by someone else.”

  Of course Duane misunderstands me. “Someone else—”

  “She was used by Alison Greening.”

  “Goddam, goddam, goddam,” and he jerks his hands out of his pockets and strikes himself on either side of his head. “When they got you locked up to rot, I’m gonna burn this place to the ground, I’m gonna bulldoze it over, all you city people can go to hell, I’m—” He is calmer. He takes his fists from his temples, and his eyes blaze at me. They are, I notice for the first time, the same color as his daughter’s, but as filled with abstract light as Zack’s.

  “Why did you decide not to shoot me?”

  “Because that’s too easy on you. You didn’t come back here, stir it all up, just to get shot. The worst things in the world are gonna happen to you.” His eyes blaze again. “You don’t have to think I don’t know about that little fucker Zack. I know about how she sneaks out. You don’t know anything I don’t, even if you buy ’em drinks and that. I got ears. I hear her crawling back into her room in the mornings—she’s just dirt, like all the others. Starting with the one I named her after. They’re all dirt. Animals. A dozen of ’em wouldn’t make one good man. I don’t know why I ever got married. After that Polish bitch I knew all about women. Dirty, like you. I knew I couldn’t keep her and you apart. Women are all the same. But you’re going to pay.”