by Peter Straub
They returned to the car. She drove them back across town, and he cried the whole way, too deep inside the feeling to understand it or even identify it. When they left the city, he felt for the first time in his life that he was leaving his hometown, leaving home.
The Buffalo Hunter
For Rona Pondick
1
At the peasant’s words…undefined but significant ideas seemed to burst out as though they had been locked up, and all striving toward one goal, they thronged whirling through his head, blinding him with their light.
—LEO TOLSTOY, Anna Karenina
Bob Bunting’s parents surprised him with a telephone call on the Sunday that was his thirty-fifth birthday. It was his first conversation with his parents in three years, though he had received a monthly letter from them during this period, along with cards on his birthdays. These usually reflected his father’s abrasive comic style. Bunting had written back with the same frequency, and it seemed to him that he had achieved a perfect relationship with his parents. Separation was health; independence was health.
During his twenties, when he was sometimes between jobs and was usually short of money, he had flown from New York to spend Christmases with his parents in Michigan—Battle Creek, Michigan. Thanksgiving disappeared first, when Bunting finally got a job he liked, and in his thirtieth year Bunting had realized how he could avoid making the dreary Christmas journey into the dark and frigid Midwest. It was to his inspiration that his father referred after wishing him what sounded to Bunting like a perfunctory and insincere Happy Birthday and alluding to the rarity of their telephone conversations.
“I suppose Veronica keeps you pretty busy, huh? You guys go out a lot?”
“Oh, you know,” Bunting said. “About the usual.”
Veronica was entirely fictional. Bunting had not had a date with a member of the opposite sex since certain disastrous experiments in high school. Over the course of a great many letters, Veronica had evolved from a vaguely defined “friend” into a tall, black-haired, Swiss-born executive of DataComCorp, Bunting’s employer. Still somewhat vague, she looked a little like Sigourney Weaver and a little like a woman in horn-rimmed eyeglasses he had twice seen on the M104 bus. “Well something’s keeping you pretty busy, because you never answer your phone.”
“Oh, Robert,” said Bunting’s mother, addressing her husband’s implication more than his actual words. Bunting, who also had been named Robert, was supposed to be scattering some previously unsuspected wild oats.
“Sometimes I think you just lie there and listen to the phone ring,” his father said, mollifying and critical at once.
“He’s busy,” his mother breathed. “You know how they are in New York.”
“Do I?” his father asked. “So you went to see Cats, hey, Bobby? You liked it?”
Bunting sighed. “We left at the intermission.” This is what he had intended to write when the next letter came due. “I liked it okay, but Veronica thought it was terrible. Anyhow, some Swiss friends of hers were in town, and we had to go downtown to meet them.”
His father asked, “Girls or boys?”
“A couple, a very good-looking young couple,” Bunting said. “We went to a nice new restaurant called the Blue Goose.”
“Is that a Swiss restaurant, Bobby?” his mother asked, and he glanced across the room to the mantel above the unusable fireplace of his single room, where the old glass baby bottle he had used in his childhood stood beside a thrift-shop mirror. He was used to inventing details about imaginary restaurants on paper, and improvisation made him uneasy.
“No, just an American sort of place,” he said.
“While we’re on the subject of Veronica, is there any chance you could bring her back here this Christmas? We’d sure like to meet the gal.”
“No—no—no, Christmas is no good, you know that. She has to get back to Switzerland to see her family, it’s a really big deal for her, they all troop down to the church in the snow—”
“Well, it’s kind of a big deal for us, too,” his father said.
Bunting’s scalp grew sweaty. He unbuttoned his shirt collar and pulled down his tie, wondering why he had answered the telephone. “I know, but…”
None of them spoke for a moment.
“We’re just grateful you write so often,” his mother finally said.
“I’ll get back home one of these days, you know I will. I’m just waiting for the right time.”
“Well, I suggest you make it snappy,” his father said. “We’re both getting older.”
“But thank God, you’re both healthy.”
“Your mother fainted in the Red Owl parking lot last week. Passed right out and banged her head. Racked up her knee, too.”
“Fainted? Why did you faint?” Bunting said. He pictured his mother swaddled in bandages.
“Oh, I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. “It’s not really serious. I can still get around, what with my cane.”
“What do you mean, ‘not really serious’?”
“I get a headache when I think of all those eggs I broke,” she said. “You’re not to worry about me, Bobby.”
“You didn’t even go to a doctor, did you?”
“Oh, hell, we don’t need any doctors,” said his father. “Charge you an arm and a leg for nothing. Neither one of us has been to a doctor in twenty years.”
There was a silence during which Bunting could hear his father compute the cost of the call. “Well, let’s wrap this up, all right?” his father said at last.
This conversation, with its unspoken insinuations, suspicions, and judgments, left Bunting feeling jittery and exhausted. He set down the telephone, rubbed his hands over his face, and stood up to pick his way through his crowded, untidy room to the mantel of the useless fireplace. He bent to look at himself in the mirror. His thinning hair stood up in little tufts where he had tortured it while talking to his parents. He pulled a comb from his jacket pocket and flattened the tufts over his scalp. His pink, inquisitive face looked reassuringly back at him from above the collar of his crisp white shirt. In honor of his birthday, he had put on a new tie and one of his best suits, a gray nail-head worsted that instantly made its wearer look like the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. He posed for a moment before the mirror, bending his knees to consult the image of his torso, neck, and boyish, balding head. Then he straightened up and looked at his watch. It was four-thirty, not too early for a birthday drink.
Bunting took his old baby bottle from the mantel and stepped over a pile of magazines to enter his tiny kitchen area and open the freezer compartment of his refrigerator. He set the baby bottle down on the meager counter beside the sink and removed a quart bottle of Popov vodka from the freezer, which he placed beside the baby bottle. Bunting unscrewed the nipple from the bottle, inspected the pink, chewed-looking nipple and the interior of the bottle for dust and foreign substances, blew into each, and then set down the bottle and the nipple. He removed the cap from the vodka and tilted it over the baby bottle. A stream of liquid like silvery treacle poured from one container into the other. Bunting half-filled the baby bottle with the frigid vodka, and then, because it was his birthday, added another celebratory gurgle that made it nearly three-quarters full. He capped the vodka bottle and put it back in the otherwise empty freezer. From the refrigerator he removed a plastic bottle of Schweppes tonic water, opened it, and added tonic until the baby bottle was full. He screwed the nipple back onto the neck of the bottle and gave it two hard shakes. A little of the mixture squirted through the opening of the nipple, which Bunting had enlarged with the tip of a silver pocketknife. The glass bottle grew cold in his hand.
Bunting skirted the wing chair that marked the boundary of his kitchen, stepped back over the mound of old newspapers, dropped the bottle on his hastily made bed, and shrugged off his suit jacket. He hung the jacket over the back of a wooden chair and sat down on the bed. There was a Luke Short novel on the rush seat of the wooden chair, and he pi
cked it up and swung his legs onto the bed. When he leaned back into the pillows, the bottle tilted and expressed a transparent drop of vodka and tonic onto the rumpled blue coverlet. Bunting snatched up the bottle, awkwardly opened the book, and grunted with satisfaction as the words lifted, full of consolation and excitement, from the page. He brought the bottle to his mouth and began to suck cold vodka through the hole in the spongy pink nipple.
On one of his Christmas visits home, Bunting had unearthed the bottle while rummaging through boxes in the attic of his parents’ house. He had not even seen it at first—a long glass shape at the bottom of a paper bag containing an empty wartime ration book, two small, worn pairs of moccasins, and a stuffed monkey, partially dismembered. He had gone upstairs to escape his father’s questions and his mother’s look of worry—Bunting at the time being employed in the mail room of a magazine devoted to masturbatory fantasies—and had become absorbed in the record of his family’s past life which the attic contained. Here were piles of old winter coats, boxed photograph albums containing tiny pictures of strangers and empty streets and long-dead dogs, stacks of yellowed newspapers with giant wartime headlines (ROMMEL SMASHED! and VICTORY IN EUROPE!), paperback novels in rows against a slanting wall, bags of things swept from the backs of closets.
The monkey came firmly into this category, as did the shoes, though Bunting was not certain about the ration book. Wedged beneath the moccasins, the tubular glass bottle glinted up from the bottom of the bag. Bunting discarded the monkey, a barely remembered toy, and fished out the thick, surprisingly weighty baby bottle. An ivory-colored ring of plastic with a wide opening for a rubber nipple had been screwed down over the bottle’s top. Bunting examined the bottle, realizing that once, in true helplessness, he had clutched this object to his infant chest. Once his own tiny fingers had spread over the thick glass while he had nursed. This proxy, this imitation and simulated breast had kept him alive; it was a period piece, it was something like an object of everyday folk art, and it had survived when his childhood—visible now only as a small series of static moments that seemed plucked from vast darkness—had not. Above all, it made him smile. He held on to it as he walked around the little attic—he did not want to let go of it—and when he came back downstairs, he hid it in his suitcase. And then he forgot it was there.
When he got home, the baby bottle’s presence in his suitcase, wrapped in a coil of dirty shirts, startled him: it was as if the glass tube had followed him from Battle Creek to Manhattan by itself. Then he remembered wrapping it in the shirts on the night before his departure, a night when his father got drunk during dinner and said three times in succession, each time louder than the last, “I don’t think you’re ever going to amount to anything in the world, Bobby,” and his mother started crying, and his father got disgusted with them and stomped outside to lurch around in the snow. His mother had gone upstairs to the bedroom, and Bunting had switched on the television and sat without feeling before depictions of other people’s Christmases. Eventually his father had come back inside and joined him in front of the television without speaking to him or even looking at him. At the airport the next morning, his father had scratched his face in a whiskery embrace and said that it had been good to see him again, and his mother looked brave and stricken. They were two old people, and working-class Michigan seemed unbearably ugly, with an ugliness he remembered.
—
He put the bottle away in a cupboard on a high shelf and forgot about it again.
Over the following years, Bunting saw the bottle only on the few occasions he had to reach for something on its shelf. He either ate most of his meals in inexpensive neighborhood restaurants or ordered them from Empire Szechuan, so he had little use for the pots and pans that stood there. During these years he found the job in the mail room of DataComCorp, invented Veronica for his parents’ pleasure and his own, reduced and then finally terminated his visits to Michigan, moved into his early thirties, and settled into what he imagined were the habits of his adult life.
He saved his money, having little to spend it on apart from his rent. Every autumn and every spring, he went to a good men’s clothing store and bought two suits, several new shirts, and three or four neckties: these excursions were great adventures, and he prepared for them carefully, examining advertisements and comparing the merits of the goods displayed at Barneys, Paul Stuart, Polo, Armani, and two or three other shops he considered to be in their class. He read the same Westerns and mystery novels his father had once read. He ate his two meals a day in the fashion described. His hair was cut once every two weeks by a Japanese barber around the corner who remarked on the smoothness of his collar as he tucked the protective sheet next to his neck. He washed his dishes only when they were all used up, and once a month or so he swept the floor and put things into piles. He set out roach killer and mousetraps and closed his eyes when he disposed of the corpses. No one but himself ever entered his apartment, but at work he sometimes talked with Frank Herko, the man at the next word processor. Frank envied Bunting’s wardrobe, and swapped tales of his own sex life, conducted in bars and discos, for Bunting’s more sedate accounts of evenings with Veronica.
Bunting liked to read lying down, and liked to drink while he read. His little apartment was cold in the winter, and the only place to lie down in it was the bed, so for four months of every year, Bunting spent much of every weekend and most of his evenings wrapped up fully clothed in his blankets, a glass of cold vodka (without tonic, for this was after Labor Day) in one hand, a paperback book in the other. The only difficulty with this system, otherwise perfectly adapted to Bunting’s desires and needs, had been the occasional spillage. There had been technical problems concerning the uprightness of the glass during the turning of the pages. One solution was to prop the glass against the side of his body as he turned the page, but this method met with frequent failure, as did the technique of balancing the glass on his chest. Had he cleared all the books, wads of Kleenex used and unused, pill bottles, cotton balls, ear cleaners, jars of Vaseline, and the hand mirror from the chair beside his bed, he could have placed the glass on the seat between sips; but he did not want to have to reach for his drink. Bunting wanted his satisfactions prompt and ready to hand.
Depending on the time of the day, the drink Bunting might choose to go with New Gun in Town or Saddles and Sagebrush could be herbal tea, orange juice, warm milk, Tab or Pepsi-Cola, mineral water; should he not be enabled to take in such pleasurable and harmless liquids without removing his eye from the page? Every other area of his life was filled with difficulty and compromise; this—bed and a book—should be pristine.
The solution came to him one November after a mysterious and terrifying experience that occurred as he was writing his monthly letter home.
Dear Mom and Dad,
Everything is still going so well I sometimes think I must be dreaming. Veronica says she has never seen any employee anywhere come so far so fast. We went dancing at the Rainbow Room last night following dinner at Quaglino’s, a new restaurant all the critics are raving about. As I walked her back to Park Avenue through the well-dressed crowds on Fifth Avenue, she told me that she felt she would once again really need me by her side in Switzerland this Christmas, it’s hard for her to defend herself against her brother’s charges that she has sold out her native country, and the local aristocracy is all against her too…
The mention of Christmas caused him to see, as if printed on a postcard, the image of the dingy white house in Battle Creek, with his parents standing before the front steps, his father scowling beneath the bill of his plaid cap and his mother blinking with apprehension. They faced forward, like the couple in American Gothic. He stopped writing and his mind spun past them up the steps, through the door, up the stairs into a terrifying void. For a moment he thought he was going to faint, or that he had fainted. Distant white lights wheeled above him, and he was falling through space. Some massive knowledge moved within him, thrusting powerfully upward f
rom the darkness where it had been jailed, and he understood that his life depended on keeping this knowledge locked inside him, in a golden casket within a silver casket within a leaden casket. It was a wild beast with claws and teeth, a tiger, and this tiger had threatened to surge into his conscious mind and destroy him. Bunting was panting from both the force and the threat of the tiger locked up within him, and he was looking at the white paper where his pen had made a little scratchy scrawl after the word too, aware that he had not fainted—but it was, just then and only for a second, as if his body had been hurled through some dark barrier.
Drained, he lay back against the headboard and tried to remember what had just happened. It was already blurred by distance. He had seen his parents and flown…? He remembered the expression on his mother’s face, the blinking, almost simian eyes and the deep parallel lines in her forehead, and felt his heart beating with the relief that he had escaped whatever it was that had surged up from within him. So thoroughly had he escaped that he now wondered about the reality of his experience. A thick shield had slammed back into place, where it emphatically belonged.
And then came Bunting’s revelation.
He thought of the old baby bottle on its shelf and saw how he could use it. He set aside the letter and went across his room to take down the bottle from its high shelf. It came away from the shelf with a faint kissing sound.
The bottle was covered with fluffy gray dust, and a sticky brown substance from the shelf circled its base. Bunting squeezed dishwashing liquid into the bottle and held it under a stream of hot water. He scrubbed the bottom clean, unscrewed the plastic cap, and washed the grooves on the cap and neck of the bottle. As he dried the warm bottle with his clean dish towel, he saw his mother bent over the sink in her dark little kitchen, her arms sunk into soapy water and steam rising past her head.