by Peter Straub
Memory after memory came flooding back. Partial, fragmentary, patchy as clouds, they brought my own life back to me—they were the missing sections of the puzzle that allowed everything else to find its proper place. I had met Stenmitz in the theater. Slowly, patiently, saying certain things and not saying others, playing on my fear and his adult authority, he had forced me to do what he wanted. I did not know how many days I had met him to kneel down before him and take him in my mouth, but it had gone on for a time that the child-me had experienced as a wretched eternity—four times? Five times? Each occasion had been a separate death.
Around ten, I reeled out to a restaurant where I wouldn’t see anyone I knew, reeled through some kind of dinner, then reeled back to my loft. I realized that I had done exactly what I wished: instead of therapy, I had gone straight to electric shocks. At midnight, I took the usual second shower—not, this time, to get ready for work, but to make myself feel clean. About an hour later, I went to bed and almost immediately dropped into the first good eight-hour sleep in two weeks. When I came awake the next morning, I understood what Paul Fontaine had been trying to tell me on Bob Bandolier’s front lawn.
4
ISPENT MOST OF THE NEXT DAY at my desk, feeling as though I were shifting a pile of gravel with a pair of tweezers—real sentences, not instruction-manual sentences, came out, but no more of them than filled two pages. Around four, I turned off the machine and walked away, figuring that it would take me at least a few weeks to adjust to what I had just learned about myself. Too restless to read a book or sit through a movie, I met the old urge to get on my feet and walk somewhere, but two weeks of wandering in an aimless daze were enough. I needed somewhere to go.
Eventually I picked up the telephone book and started looking for veterans’ organizations. My sixth call turned up information about a veterans’ group that met at six o’clock every night in the basement of a church in the East Thirties—Murray Hill. They took drop-ins. Without being what I wanted, it was what I was looking for, a long walk to an actual destination. I left Grand Street at five-fifteen and turned up at the low, fenced-in brick church ten minutes early. A sign with inset white letters told me to use the vestry door.
5
WHEN I CAME DOWN into the basement, two skinny guys with thinning hair and untrimmed beards and dressed in parts of different uniforms were arranging a dozen folding chairs in a circle. An overweight, heavily mustached priest in a cassock striped with cigarette ash stood in front of a battered table drinking coffee from a paper cup. All three of them glanced at my splint. An old upright piano stood in one corner, and Bible illustrations hung on the cinderblock walls alongside colored maps of the Holy Land. Irregular brown stains discolored the concrete floor. I felt as though I had walked back into the basement of Holy Sepulchre.
The two skinny vets nodded at me and continued setting up the chairs. The priest came up and grabbed my hand. “Welcome. I’m Father Joe Morgan, but everybody usually calls me Father Joe. It’s your first time here, isn’t it? Your name is?”
I told him my name.
“And you were in Nam, of course, like Fred and Harry over there—like me, too. Before I went to the seminary, that was. Ran a riverboat in the Delta.” I agreed that I had been in Nam, and he poured me a coffee from the metal urn. “That’s how we started out, of course, guys like us getting together to see if we could help each other out. These days, you never know who could turn up—we get fellows who were in Grenada, Panama, boys from Desert Storm.”
Fred or Harry sent me a sharp, dismissive look, but it didn’t refer to me.
“Anyhow, make yourself at home. This is all about sharing, about support and understanding, so if you feel like letting it all hang out, feel free. No holds barred. Right, Harry?”
“Not many,” Harry said.
By six, another seven men had come down into the basement, three of them wearing old uniform parts like Harry and Fred, the others in suits or sport jackets. Most of them seemed to know each other. We all seemed to be about the same age. As soon as we took our chairs, five or six men lit cigarettes, including the priest.
“Tonight we have two new faces,” he said, exhaling an enormous cloud of gray smoke, “and I’d like us to go around the circle, giving our names and units. After that, anybody who has something to say, jump right in.”
Bob, Frank, Lester, Harry, Tim, Jack, Grover, PeeWee, Juan, Buddy, Bo. A crazy quilt of battalions and divisions. The jumpy little man called Buddy said, “Well, like some of you guys know from when I was here a couple of weeks ago, I was a truck driver in Cam Ranh Bay.”
I immediately tuned out. This was what I remembered from the veterans’ meeting I’d attended four or five years before, a description of a war I never saw, a war that hardly sounded like war. Buddy had been fired from his messenger job, and his girlfriend had told him that if he started acting crazy again, she’d leave him.
“So what do you do when you act crazy?” someone asked. “What does that mean, crazy?”
“It gets like I can’t talk. I just lay up in bed and watch TV all day long, but I don’t really see it, you know? I’m like blind and deaf. I’m like in a hole in the ground.”
“When I get crazy, I run,” said Lester. “I just take off, man, no idea what I’m doin’, I get so scared I can’t stop, like there’s something back there comin’ after me.”
Jack, a man in a dark blue suit, said, “When I get scared, I take my rifle and go up on the roof. It’s not loaded, but I aim it at people. I think about what it would be like if I started shooting.”
We all looked at Jack, and he shrugged. “It helps.”
Father Joe talked to Jack for a while, and I tuned out again. I wondered how soon I could leave. Juan told a long story about a friend who had shot himself in the chest after coming back from a long patrol. Father Joe talked for a long time, and Buddy started to twitch. He wanted us to tell him what to do about his girlfriend.
“Tim, you haven’t said anything yet.” I looked up to see Father Joe looking at me with glistening eyes. Whatever he had said to Juan had moved him. “Is there anything you’d like to share with the group?”
I was going to shake my head and pass, but a scene rose up before me, and I said, “When I first got to Nam, I was on this graves registration squad at Camp White Star. One of the men I worked with was called Scoot.” I described Scoot kneeling beside Captain Havens’ body bag, saying He nearly got in and out before I could pay my respects, and told them what he had done to the body.
For a moment no one spoke, and then Bo, one of the men in clothing assembled from old uniforms, said, “There’s this thing, this place I can’t stop thinking about. I didn’t even see what the hell happened there, but it got stuck in my head.”
“Let it out,” said the priest.
“We were in Darlac Province, way out in the boonies, way north.” Bo leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees. “This is gonna sound a little funny.” Before Father Joe could tell him to let it out again, he tilted his head and glanced sideways in the circle at me. “But what, Tim? what Tim said reminded me. I mean, I never saw any American do that kind of junk, and I hate it when people talk like that’s all we ever did. You want to make me crazy, all you gotta do is tell me about so-called atrocities we did over there, right? Because personally, I never saw one. Not one. What I did see, what I saw plenty of times, was Americans doing some good for the people over there. I’m talking about food and medicine, plus helping kids.”
Every man in the circle uttered some form of assent—we had all seen that, too.
“Anyhow, this one time, it was like we walked into this ghost town. The truth is, we got lost, we had this lieutenant fresh out of training, and he just got lost, plain and simple. He had us moving around in a big circle, which he was the only one who didn’t understand what we were doing. The rest of us, we said, fuck it, he thinks he’s a leader, let him lead. We get back to base, let him explain. So we’re out there three-four days, and
the lieutenant is just beginning to get the picture. And then we start smelling this fire.
“Like an old fire, you know? Not like a forest fire, like a burning building. Whenever the wind comes in from the north, we smell ashes and dead meat. And pretty soon, the smell is so strong we know we’re almost on top of it, whatever it is. Now the lieutenant has a mission, he can maybe save his ass if he brings back something good—hell, it doesn’t even have to be good, it just has to be something he can bring back, like he was looking for it all along. So we hump along through the jungle for about another half hour, and the stench gets worse and worse. It smells like a burned-down slaughterhouse. And besides that, there’s no noise around us, no birds, no monkeys, none of that screeching we heard every other single day. The jungle is deserted, man, that fucker’s empty, except for us.
“So in about half an hour we come up to this place, and we all freeze—it isn’t a hamlet, it isn’t a ville, it’s out in the jungle, right? But it looks like some kind of town or something, except most of it’s burned down, and the rest of it is still burning. You could tell from the charred stakes that there used to be a big stockade fence around it—some of it’s still sticking up. But we can see this goddamn grid, with little tiny lots and everything, where these people had their huts all lined up on these narrow streets. All this was straw, I guess, and it’s gone—there’s nothing left but holes in the ground, and some flooring here and there. And the bodies.
“Lots of bodies, lots and lots of bodies. Someone pulled a lot of them into a big pile and tried to burn them, but all that happened was they split open. These were all women and children, and a couple old men. Yards—the first Yards I ever saw, and they’re all dead. It looked like that Jonestown, that Jim Jones thing, except these bodies had bullet holes. The stink was incredible, it made your eyes water. It looked like someone had all these people stand in a big ring and then just blasted them to pieces. We didn’t say a word. You can’t talk about what you don’t understand.
“At the far end of this place, there’s part of a mud wall and a lot of blood on the ground. I saw a busted-up M-16 lying next to a big iron cookpot hung up over a burned-out fire. Somebody had did a job on that M-16. They busted the stock right off, and the barrel was all bent out of true. I looked into the cookpot and wished I hadn’t even thought of it. Through the froth on top, I could see bones floating down in this kind of jelly, this soupy jelly. Long bones, like leg bones. And a rib cage.
“And then I saw what I really didn’t want to see. Next to the pot was a baby. Cut in half—just sliced in half, right across the belly. There was maybe a foot of ground between the top half and the bottom half, where his guts were. It was a boy. Maybe a year old. And he wasn’t any ordinary Yard baby, because he had blue eyes. And his nose was different—straight, like ours.”
Bo knotted his hands together and stared at them. “It was like we were killing our own, you know? Like we were killing our own. I couldn’t take it anymore. I said to myself, This is too weird, all I’m doing from now on is concentrating on getting out of this place. I said, I’m through with seeing things. This right here is it. I said, From now on, all I’m doing is following orders—man, I’m already done.”
Father Joe waited a second, nodding like a sage. “Do you feel better about this incident, now that you’ve told the group about it?”
“I don’t know.” Bo retreated into himself. “Maybe.”
Jack hesitantly raised his hand a couple of inches off his lap. “I don’t want to keep going up on my roof. Could we talk about that some more?”
“You never heard of willpower?” Lester asked.
The meeting broke up a little while later, and Bo disappeared almost instantly. I helped Harry and Frank stack the chairs while Father Joe told me how much I’d gotten out of the meeting. “These feelings are hard to let go of. Lots of times I’ve seen men experience things they couldn’t even grasp until a couple of days went by.” He put a hand on my shoulder. “You might not believe this, Tim, but something happened to you while Bo was sharing with us. He reached you. Come back soon, will you, and let the others help you get through it?”
I said I’d think about it.
6
WHEN I OPENED THE DOOR to my loft, the red light on the answering machine flashed like a beacon in the darkness, but I ignored it and went into the kitchen, turning on lights along the way. I couldn’t even imagine wanting to talk to anyone. I wondered if I would ever know the truth about anything at all, if the actual shape of my life, of other lives too, would ever remain constant. What had really happened in Bachelor’s encampment? What had John met there and what had he done? I made myself a cup of herbal tea, carried it back into the main part of the loft, and sat down in front of the paintings that had been shipped from Millhaven. I had looked at them during the long nights of work, been pleased and delighted by them, but until this moment I had never really seen them—seen them together.
The Vuillard was a much greater painting than Byron Dorian’s, but by whose standards? John Ransom’s? April’s? By mine, at least at this moment, they had so much in common that they spoke in the same voice. For all their differences, each seemed crammed with possibility, with utterance, like Glenroy Breakstone’s saxophone or like the human throat—overflowing with expression. It occurred to me that for me, both paintings concerned the same man. The isolated boy who stared out of Vuillard’s deceptively comfortable world would grow into the man turned toward Byron Dorian’s despairing little bar. Bill Damrosch in childhood, Bill Damrosch near the end of his life—the painted figures seemed to have leapt onto the wall from the pages of my manuscript, as if where Fee Bandolier went, Damrosch trailed after. Heinz Stenmitz meant that I was part of that procession, too.
The red light blinked at my elbow, and I finished the tea, set down the cup, and pushed the playback button.
“It’s Tom,” said his voice. “Are you home? Are you going to answer? Well, why aren’t you home? I wanted to talk to you about something kind of interesting that turned up yesterday. Maybe I’m crazy. But do you remember talking about Lenny Valentine? Turns out he’s not fictional, he’s real after all. Do we care? Does it matter? Call me back. If you don’t, I’ll try you again. This is a threat.”
I rewound the tape, looking across the room at the paintings, trying to remember where I had heard or read the name Lenny Valentine—it had the oddly unreal “period” atmosphere of an old paperback with a tawdry cover. Then I remembered that Tom had used Lenny Valentine as one of the possible sources for the name Elvee Holdings. How could this hypothetical character be “real after all”? I didn’t think I wanted to know, but I picked up the receiver and dialed.
7
IWAITED THROUGH HIS MESSAGE, and said, “Hi, it’s Tim. What are you trying to say? There is no Lenny—”
Tom picked up and started talking. “Oh, good. You got my message. You can deal with it or not, that’s up to you, but I think this time I’m going to have to do something, for once in my life.”
“Slow down,” I said, slightly alarmed and even more puzzled than before. Tom’s words had flown past so quickly that I could now barely retain them. “We have to decide about what?”
“Let me tell you what I’ve been doing lately,” Tom said. For a week or so, he had busied himself with the two or three other cases he had mentioned to me in the hospital, but without shedding the depression I had seen there. “I was just going through the motions. Two of them turned out all right, but I can’t take much credit for that. Anyhow, I decided to take another look through all those Allentowns, and any other town with a name that seemed possible, to see if I could find anything I missed the first time.”
“And you found Lenny Valentine?”
“Well, first I found Jane Wright,” he said. “Remember Jane? Twenty-six, divorced, murdered in May 1977?”
“Oh, no,” I said.
“Exactly. Jane Wright lived in Allerton, Ohio, a town of about fifteen thousand people on the Ohio Riv
er. Nice little place, I’m sure. From 1973 to 1979, they had a few random murders—well, twelve actually, two a year, bodies in fields, that kind of thing—and about half of them went unsolved, but I gather from the local paper that most people assumed that the killer, if there was one single killer, was some kind of businessman whose work took him through town every now and then. And then they stopped.”
“Jane Wright,” I said. “In Allerton, Ohio. I don’t get it.”
“Try this. The name of the homicide detective in charge of the case was Leonard Valentine.”
“It can’t be,” I said. “This is impossible. We had this all worked out. Paul Fontaine was in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in May of ’seventy-seven.”
“Precisely. He was in Pennsylvania.”
“That old man I talked to, Hubbel, pointed right at Fontaine’s picture.”
“Maybe his eyesight isn’t too good.”
“His eyesight is terrible,” I said, remembering him pushing his beak into the photograph.
Tom said nothing for a moment, and I groaned. “You know what this means? Paul Fontaine is the only detective in Millhaven, as far as we know, who could not have killed Jane Wright. So what was he doing at that house?”
“I suppose he was beginning a private little investigation of his own,” Tom said. “Could it be a coincidence that a woman named Jane Wright is killed in a town with the right sort of name in the right month of the right year? And that the detective in charge of the case has the initials LV, as in Elvee? Is there any way you can see that as coincidental?”
“No,” I said.
“Me, neither,” Tom said. “But I don’t understand this LV business anymore. Would someone call himself Lenny Valentine because it starts with the same letters as Lang Vo? That just doesn’t sound right.”