by Peter Straub
“Mr. Baxter, this man—”
“This man is a fraud,” Baxter said. He grabbed my arm.
“I came here to give Mrs. Leatherwood a check,” I said. “It represents the death benefit on a small insurance policy.”
“He gave me a check, he did,” Judy Leatherwood said. She extricated it from the tissue and flapped it at Baxter.
He snatched the check away from her, looked at me, back at the check, and then at me again. “This is a personal check.”
“I didn’t see any reason to make Mrs. Leatherwood wait two or three months for our office to issue the payment,” I said, and repeated my statement about reimbursement.
Baxter dropped his arms. I could almost see the question mark floating over his head. “This doesn’t make any sense. Your check is on a New York bank.”
“I’m a troubleshooter for my company. I was in Millhaven when Mrs. Leatherwood’s problem came up.”
“He told me about my nephew—Fee was a major in Vietnam.”
“Special Forces,” I said. “He had quite a career.”
Baxter scowled at the check again. “I think we’ll use your phone to get in touch with Mr. Underhill’s company.”
“Why not call the bank to see if the check is covered?” I asked him. “Isn’t that the main point?”
“You’re giving her this money yourself?”
“You could look at it like that,” I said.
Baxter stewed for a moment and then picked up the telephone and asked for directory assistance in New York. He put the call through the home’s switchboard and asked to speak to the manager of my branch. He spoke for a long time without getting anywhere and finally said, “I’m holding a five-thousand-dollar check this man made out to one of our residents. I want to be assured that he can cover it.”
There was a long pause. Baxter’s face grew red.
“I knew I should have called Jimmy,” said Judy Leatherwood.
“All right,” Baxter said. “Thank you. I’ll personally deposit the check this afternoon.” He hung up and looked at me for a moment before handing the check back to her. The question mark still hung over his head. “Judy, you just got five thousand dollars, but I’m not sure why. When you first talked to this insurance company, did someone tell you the amount you were supposed to get?”
“Five thousand,” she said, with an extra wobble in her voice.
“I’ll walk Mr. Underhill to the door.” He stepped out into the hall and waited for me to follow him.
I said good-bye to Judy Leatherwood and joined Baxter in the hallway. He set off at a quick march toward the big blue doors and the entrance, giving me sharp, inquisitive glances as we went. Betty Crocker waved good-bye to me. Once we got outside, Baxter stuffed his hands into the pockets of his shiny suit. “Are you going to explain what you just did in there?”
“I gave her a check for five thousand dollars.”
“But you don’t work for any insurance company.”
“It’s a little more complicated than that.”
“Was her nephew really a Green Beret major?”
I nodded.
“Does this money come from him?”
“You might say that he owes a lot of people,” I said.
He thought it over. “I think my responsibility ends at this point. I’m going to say good-bye to you, Mr. Underhill.” He didn’t offer to shake hands. I walked to my car, and he stood in the sun on the concrete apron until I drove past the entrance.
5
ITURNED IN THE KEYS to the Chrysler and paid for the gas I had used at the counter. There was still half an hour to fill before boarding, so I went to the telephones to call Glenroy Breakstone. “Tangent?” he asked me. “Tangent, Ohio? Man, that’s a dead place. Back in the fifties, we played a place called the French Quarter there, and the owner used to pay us in one-dollar bills.” I asked if I could come up to see him after I got back to Millhaven. “How soon?” he asked. I told him that I’d be there in about two hours. “As long as you’re here before eight,” he said. “I got a little business to do around then.”
After that I tried Tom Pasmore’s number, on the off-chance that he might be up, and when his machine answered, I began describing what I had learned from Edward Hubbel and Judy Leatherwood. He picked up before I was able to say more than a couple of sentences. “This case is turning my day around,” he said. “I went to bed about an hour after you left, and I got up about noon to play with my machines a little more. So you found out, did you?”
“I found out, all right,” I said, and told him about it in detail.
“Well, that’s that,” he said, “but I still feel like exploring matters for a while, just to see if anything interesting turns up.”
Then I told him about giving Judy Leatherwood a check.
“Oh, you didn’t! No, no, no.” He was laughing. “Look, I’ll pay you back as soon as I see you.”
“Tom, I’m not criticizing you, but I couldn’t leave her stranded.”
“What do you think I am? I sent her a check for five thousand yesterday.” He started laughing again. “She’s going to love Mid-States Insurance.”
“Oh, hell,” I said.
He offered once again to pay me back.
“One white lie shouldn’t cost you ten thousand dollars,” I said.
“But it was my white lie.” He was still laughing.
We talked for a few more minutes. There was still a lot of fog in Millhaven, and a small-scale riot had begun on Messmer Avenue. No one had been injured, so far.
I asked the cheerful blond person at the airline desk if the flight would be delayed. He said there were no problems.
Twenty minutes after we left the ground, the pilot announced that atmospheric problems in Millhaven meant that our flight was being diverted to Milwaukee, where we could either wait until conditions improved or arrange for connecting flights.
At about a quarter to seven, we touched down at Mitchell Field in Milwaukee, where another cheerful blond person told us that if we remained in the departure lounge, we would be able to reboard and continue on to our original destination in no less than an hour. I had lost faith in cheerful blond persons and walked through the departure lounge, trudged along a series of corridors, took an escalator downstairs, and rented another car. This one was a gunmetal gray Ford Galaxy, and all it smelled of was new leather. They spray it into the cars, like air freshener.
6
SOUTH OF MILWAUKEE, the city flattens out into miles of suburbs and then yields to the open farmland of the original Midwest. After I crossed the border into Illinois, the unlight still fell on the broad green-and-yellow fields, and the billboards advertised high-yield fertilizer and super-effective crop spray. Herds of Holstein cows stood unmoving in vast pastures. Fifteen miles farther, the air darkened; and a little while after that, wisps and tendrils of fog floated between the cars ahead of me. Then the fields disappeared into misty gray. I turned on my fog lights when a Jeep Cherokee two hundred feet down the highway turned into a pair of tiny red eyes. After that, we crawled along at thirty miles an hour. The first Millhaven exit jumped up out of the emptiness barely in time for me to make the turn. After that, the ten-minute drive to the airport took half an hour, and it was seven-thirty before I found the rental parking spaces. I went into the terminal, turned over the keys, and walked back across the access road and down a long stretch of pavement to the long-term parking garage.
On the second floor, twenty or thirty cars stood parked at wide intervals on the gray cement. Overhead bulbs in metal cages shone down on cement pillars and bright yellow lines. The exit signs glowed red across empty space. I turned on the Pontiac’s lights and rolled toward the curving wall before the ramp. Another pair of headlights shot out into the gloom. When I stopped to pay the attendant, long yellow beams elongated on the ramp behind me. The attendant handed back my change without looking at me, and the gate floated up. I sped out of the garage and across the pedestrian walkway, swerved onto th
e circular access road, and got up to forty on the empty drive to the highway. I wanted to vanish into the fog.
I paused at the stop sign long enough to be sure that nothing was coming, cramped the wheel, hit the accelerator and the horn at the same time, and cut into the middle lane. A huge sign flashing FOG WARNING 25MPH burned toward me from the side of the road. As soon as I got up to fifty, the taillights of a station wagon jumped toward me, and I swerved into the fast lane before I rammed into the puzzled face of the Irish retriever staring at me through the wagon’s rear window. I whisked past the wagon. I thought that if I drove Paul Fontaine-style for another mile or two, I could put to rest the fear that Billy Ritz’s replacement was gaining on me, back in the fog. And then I thought that probably no one was following me, cars drove out of the long-term garage night and day, and I slowed to twenty-five miles an hour. Taillights appeared before me in the fast lane, and I moved as slowly as a rowboat back into the center lane. Then I began to imagine a thug creeping toward me out of the sludge in my rearview mirror, and I moved the accelerator down until I was nipping along at forty. It seemed dangerously slow. I swerved around a little powder-blue hatchback that appeared in front of me with vivid, dreamlike suddenness, and ploughed through the drifting lengths and thicknesses of batting, of wool, of white gauze and gray gauze, and whipped past another flashing red FOG WARNING sign. A pain I had not felt in a good five years declared itself in a circle about eight inches in diameter on the upper right side of my back.
I remembered this pain, a combination of burn and puncture, though it is neither. Generally speaking, it is the legacy of the metal fragments embedded in my back, and specifically, the result of some flesh-encrusted screw, some rusty bolt, working its way toward the air like a restless corpse. I felt it now exactly in the place where Edward Hubbel, who had never understood why he had been mesmerized by lines of seminaked boys, had breathed on me while he scrutinized my scars. Edward Hubbel’s breath had seeped through my skin and awakened the sleeping bolt. Now it was moving around, crawling toward the surface like Lazarus, where first a sharp edge, then a blunt curl, would emerge. For a week, I’d print spotty bloodstains on my shirts and sheets.
I slowed down before I slammed into the back of a truck and puttered along behind it while I tried rubbing my back on the seat. The truck picked up a little speed. I could feel the exact dimension of the little hatchet buried at the bottom of my shoulder blade. Pressing it against the seat seemed to calm it. The painful circle on my back shrank by half an inch. I looked into the rearview mirror, saw nothing, and moved out to get around the truck.
A horn blared; brakes shrieked. I jammed the accelerator. The Pontiac wavered ahead, and the massive wheels of the truck filled my side window. The horn blasted again. The Pontiac made up its mind and shot forward. The rear end of another car jumped into the windshield, and I hauled the Pontiac into the fast lane with my heart skipping and my mind in the clear empty space of panic. I never even ticked it. When I saw red lights ahead of me, I slowed down and waited for my heart to get back to normal. The screw in my back declared itself again. A few other little knots and bumps began to throb. Hubbel had breathed them all into wakefulness. Headlights appeared in my rearview mirror, and I sped up by another five miles an hour. The headlights grew larger and sharper. I swung back into the middle lane.
The car behind me came up alongside me and stuck with me for a long time. I thought it must have been someone I had irritated or frightened during my Fontaine phase. The other car drifted toward my lane, and I swerved right far enough to put my tires on the yellow line. The other car swerved with me. It was dark blue, pocked with brown primer, with crumpled corrugations behind the headlight. I sped up; he sped up. I slowed down; he slowed down. Now he was only inches from the side of my car, and my heart began to trip again. I looked sideways at a curly dark head, heavy bare shoulders, and a flash of gold. The other driver was watching the front of the Pontiac. He moved his wheel, and his car whapped into mine just above the left front tire.
I slammed down the accelerator, and the Pontiac zoomed into the slow lane. There was a screech of metal as he dug a long strip down my side. The Pontiac jumped ahead. The other man raced up alongside to hit me again, and I zagged sideways. The rows of warning lights at the back of another semi zoomed toward me. When I saw its mudflaps, I swerved off the road and shuddered onto gravel. I kept pace with the semi for half a mile, telling myself that the other driver would think I had driven off the road. The truck driver blasted his air horn. I was glad I didn’t have to hear what he was saying. Sooner or later, I was going to run into an exit sign or a stalled car, so I edged forward until I could see past the front of the cab, gunned the Pontiac, and scrambled back onto the road. The truck driver gave another enraged blast of his air horn.
The dark blue car swam up beside me again. This time he hit me hard enough to jolt my hands off the wheel. The semi’s headlights filled my rearview mirror. The blue car veered away and then came back and ground against the side of the Pontiac. If he got me to slow down, or if he jarred me into an angle, the semi would flatten me. A calm little voice in the midst of my panic said that Fontaine had learned that I had tickets to Tangent and had someone watch the Pontiac until I came back. The same voice told me that a couple of witnesses would testify that I had been driving recklessly. The thug in the blue car would just disappear.
The semi’s enormous radiator filled my rearview mirror. It looked carnivorous. The blue car swung into me again, and I fastened onto the wheel and slammed into him, just for the satisfaction. Sparks flew up between us. I could taste adrenaline. The big green rectangle of an exit sign took shape in the fog ahead of me. I took my foot off the accelerator, yanked the wheel to the right, and took off over the gravel. In seconds, I was shuddering over bumpy ground. The steel posts of the sign flew past the sides of the Pontiac, and the blue car sailed away into the fog only feet away from the cab of the semi. I went bumping through weeds. The bottom of the Pontiac scraped rock. Then a curb led down to the off ramp, and I thumped down onto the roadbed, drove without seeing or thinking for thirty seconds, pulled up at the stop sign, and started to shake.
7
IWIPED MY FACE with a handkerchief and got out to look at the damage. The man in the blue car would be swept along until the next exit, at least a mile away. He had put three long silver slashes down the side, buckled in the metal between the wheel and the door, and punched a lot of dents along the entire length of the car. I leaned against the car and breathed hard for a while, watching the ghostly traffic move along the highway in the fog. After a while I realized that I was on the off ramp to the south side of Millhaven, twenty minutes from Livermore Avenue. In all the excitement, I had reached the exit I wanted in the first place. I think I had forgotten that I had a destination.
I got back into the car and pointed it toward Pigtown. The uneasy thought came to me that the man in the blue car would already be traveling back toward me.
8
IDIDN’T LOOK AT MY WATCH until I saw the vague shape of the St. Alwyn towering over Livermore Avenue, and then I was surprised to see that it was ten to eight. Time seemed to have simultaneously speeded up and slowed down. The little hooks and ratchets in my back pulsed and burned, and I kept hearing air horns and seeing the blue car slamming toward me. As soon as I saw a parking spot, I moved up and reversed in. The right front tire rubbed against the dented shell, and the entire body of the Pontiac shuddered and moaned.
I paid the meter an hour’s worth of quarters. Maybe Glenroy’s appointment had been called off; maybe his visitor was delayed by the fog. I had a feeling I knew what kind of appointment it was, anyhow. Meetings like that don’t take long. I locked the car, shivering a little in the fog.
The hotel was two blocks away. I hugged myself against the cold, walking through the thin layers of gauze. The street lamps cast feeble yellow orbs, like Japanese lanterns. All of the shops were closed, and there was no one else on the street. The St. Alwy
n receded as I walked toward it, as a mountain backs away when you approach it. Behind me, a distant, momentary crackle tugged at my subconscious, then died. I took another couple of steps and heard it again. This time I recognized the sound of gunfire. I turned around, and there came another rattling burst from off on the other side of the valley and a little way south. The sky held a faint orange tinge. If I’d been closer to Messmer Avenue, I would have heard fire gobbling up stores and houses.
The hot circle below my right shoulder blade began to sing more loudly, but that was a phantom, like the pain in a severed leg. It was just memory, brought back by the sound of small arms’ fire. I crossed the next street in the fog, and then I couldn’t take it anymore. Directly to my side, rising up two stories of solid darkened brick, was the old annex of the St. Alwyn, now a Valu-Rite pharmacy. I went over to the wall, bent my knees, and pressed my back against the cold brick. After a couple of seconds, the heat and pressure began to shrink. Real relief from phantom pain, as good as a Percodan. If I could press my back against the cold wall for an hour, I thought, all the bolts and fish hooks could go back to their rusty sleep.
I was standing half-crouched against the wall when a curly-haired young character in a black sleeveless T-shirt and baggy black pants came hurrying out of the arched little alleyway. He took a quick, automatic glance in my direction, turned away, then gave me a double take. He stopped moving with a kind of indolent, theatrical slowness. I pushed myself away from the wall. He was going to say something about the rattle of gunfire coming to us from the ghetto at that moment.
He grinned. That was disconcerting. He said, “You stupid fuck,” even more disconcerting. Then he took a step near me, and I recognized him. Somewhere on the other end of the brick alley, tucked behind a dumpster or nestled in at the back of a liquor store, was a dark blue car with a lot of dents and scratches on its left side. He laughed at the recognition in my face. “This is beautiful,” he said. “I don’t believe it, but it’s beautiful.” He looked up and spread out his hands, as if thanking the god of lowlifes.