Floater

by Gary Brandner

  Although it must have taken longer, it seemed like only a few seconds until the girl stopped breathing. Frazier, exhausted by the effort and the battle with the aroused mind of the Indian, carried the limp little form to the millpond and dropped it in. The girl’s body rolled gently in the water so the dead little face looked up at him with milky eyes, evoking memories of another body that had floated years before in Wolf Lake.

  Frazier/Roy ran and ran until the powerful body was as exhausted as the astral mind. Exhaustion was part of the reason Frazier didn’t take his usual precaution of leaving the host body at a time of peril. Instead he let the body of the Indian instinctively carry him to a stone quarry where Roy had been in the habit of sleeping on fair nights. The sun, out now and hot following the rain, drew steam from the raw, wet granite. Frazier/Roy lay down in the shade of a Caterpillar earth mover.

  The anguish in the deposed mind of the Indian over the little girl’s death prevented Frazier from fully relaxing to restore his energies. That disturbance also saved him from oblivion.

  The operator of the earth mover returned from his lunch break and climbed into the saddle with not the faintest hint that anyone might have entered the quarry and approached his machine while he was away. He started the mighty engine.

  The awareness for Frazier began with a heavy vibration of the earth under his head. He was instantly awake, but just in time to feel an explosive, bursting sensation that seemed to come from within him. With a mighty effort he sucked his astral self from the body of the Indian and left the poor stunted brain to be crushed to jelly and ground into the gravel under the tread of the Caterpillar.

  • • •

  The experience taught Frazier two things. He could feel pain, or something very much like it, when the host body was in dire jeopardy. And he was not invulnerable. He knew, he absolutely knew that had he remained in the Indian’s mind a moment longer he would have been squashed out of existence like one of those frogs under a boot. Never again, he vowed, would he be caught off guard like that.

  But by now he was ready to get to his real task. He knew the extent and the limits of his power, and he was anxious to take his revenge on the three people who had stolen his life.

  Strong-minded people, each of them; Frazier knew it would be too difficult for him to enter and control them in their own surroundings, far from Wolf River. But if he could get them back here, all at the same time, he would deal with them where his power was greatest.

  Payback time.

  CHAPTER 20

  LINDY

  The dining room at the Wolf River Inn lay beyond a double doorway leading from the lobby. A menu under a glassed frame was affixed to the wall. From the curled edges of the card, it appeared not to have been changed for many weeks.

  Lindy walked over and took a look into the room.

  The appearance of the dining room was not encouraging. The lighting was uneven — too dim in the corners and overbright in the center of the room. The white plaster of the beamed ceiling was laced with cracks. Brownish stains were visible in the corners.

  A pair of young waitresses, one blond, one a redhead, gossiped near the cash register. Probably high school girls, Lindy thought. Picking up spending money with summer jobs.

  The scattering of early diners ate silently, without enthusiasm.

  The overall impression of the dining room added to Lindy’s gloom. It was not a place to forget her troubles. Still, she had to eat somewhere, and she had seen nothing better on her quick tour of Main Street. She decided one meal in the mausoleum wouldn’t kill her.

  After the message brought to her at the bar by old Jed of the brown teeth, she had gone to her room, grabbed her bag, and started to leave. She could be back in Milwaukee in three hours and on the first flight back to L.A.

  The idea was appealing. She wanted to go, she started to go, but finally she couldn’t. The threat to Nicole in the messages that had brought her here was very much alive in her mind. Now there was the nagging sense of being watched, the uneasy feeling of business unfinished.

  She turned on the television to whatever channel the last person had left it on, went into the bathroom, and showered with the door open. That way she could fill at least part of her mind with the whoops of game show contestants and the manic patter of the emcee.

  She lathered her body as thoroughly as was possible with the tiny hotel soap, stretching the shower time to postpone going downstairs to the gloomy dining room. When the little soap was down to a sliver, she stepped out to dry herself with the rough towel.

  She caught sight of her nude body in the bathroom mirror, and some buried memory made her walk out and check to be sure the heavy curtains were drawn over the window that looked out on Main Street.

  The room was empty, of course, and the curtains were tightly drawn. Nevertheless, Lindy seemed to feel eyes crawling over her flesh. She dressed quickly and sat down before the mirror to apply her makeup.

  Was this, she wondered, where she had been headed during the past twenty tears? All of that just to come back home to Wolf River?

  No, not home, she corrected herself. Not anymore. Not since the terrible Halloween Ball. She had no one here anymore. Her father lived in Madison now, presumably comfortable in the work he did for the legislature. The last Lindy had heard, Judge Grant was sharing a suburban home there with his young wife. Lindy’s relationship with the new Mrs. Grant had started out cool, and it had not warmed noticeably in correspondence over the years. It had been a vast relief for Lindy in the fall of 1968 to move out of the house where she no longer felt she belonged.

  Lindy’s grades and the judge’s political connections had got her into Northwestern’s prestigious drama school after her graduation. There she showed enough promise in school productions to take seriously an acting teacher’s recommendation that she try to make it professionally in New York. The fact that the teacher was sleeping with her at the time didn’t seem to Lindy to be a factor in his praise until much later.

  Lindy found breaking into the New York theater scene to be a far cry from trying out for college productions. She stuck it out, however, for three years until she finally understood that her talent was not large enough for her to compete in the major acting leagues.

  Although her career never got off the ground, two things happened to Lindy in New York that determined the course of the rest of her life.

  The first thing was when, with much time on her hands between auditions, she started to write. Little dialogue scenes at first. Then playlets. Character sketches, anecdotes, vignettes, short stories. She eventually sold a little 1,500-worder to Woman’s Day and knew the thrill of being paid for something created whole from her own mind.

  The second thing was that she moved in with a handsome young actor named Barry Paul. Barry had done some Off-Off Broadway and received a good review in the Village Voice. Lindy enjoyed his company, but she was not in love with him, nor he with her.

  All the same, her Midwest roots made her expect that when she told him about the pregnancy he would “do the right thing.” What he actually did was give her fifty dollars to use toward an abortion and move out. The last she heard of Barry, he was sharing a loft with two male dancers from Grease.

  Lindy thought about getting an abortion, but only briefly. She wrote to her father, who offered to let her come and live with him and his new wife, or to send her money to sustain her in New York until the birth of the child. She could sense his relief when she chose the second alternative.

  Nicole was born on a blustery day in March at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. Lindy had finally made it to Broadway.

  As soon as the little girl was able to travel, mother and daughter flew to California, where the climate was gentler and raising a child was less hectic. Over the years Lindy had wondered sometimes what her life might have been like if she had stayed in New York. Or if she had accepted her father’s halfhearted invitation and returned to the Middle West to have her child.

&nbs
p; But it was useless speculating about the World of If. Lindy had made her choice, and on the whole she was happy with it ….

  She tried again to call Brendan Jordan in Los Angeles. This time the line was too full of static for her to hear if any connection was made on the other end. Wolf River, she decided, could use an overhaul of its long-distance telephone system.

  She snapped off the television set, gave herself a last look in the mirror, and headed for the dining room.

  ROMAN

  Some sonofabitch was out to get him.

  Roman did not know who was after him or why, but he sure as hell knew he was a target. Roman was no coward, but how the hell could he fight something he couldn’t see?

  Whoever or whatever was after him was for sure no patsy. Roman well remembered the flaming rash on his private parts for which there was no medical explanation. And the invitation back to Wolf River, the weird behavior of his mother-in-law, the message that didn’t belong on the prescription blank, and now the voice on the telephone were not the work of any punk. But whoever it was, Roman vowed he would find the sonofabitch and make him sorry as hell that he’d started fucking around with Roman Dixon.

  In the meantime, he was apparently stuck back here in Wolf River for at least another day. The prospect did not make him happy. When he left twenty years before, he thought he had left for good.

  After the business at the lake that terrible Halloween, nothing seemed to go right for Roman Dixon. Nobody had actually ever connected him with what happened, not really; but there were whispers. Lots of them. Some of them heard by Roman’s father.

  Howard Dixon didn’t say anything to his son, not about Frazier Nunley and the lake, but from that day on their relationship changed. The old man started drinking more heavily and lapsing into sullen silences from the time he got home to the time the family went to bed. At night Roman could hear low, ugly arguments from his parents’ bedroom. Before, they used to yell at each other sometimes but then it was over and they’d be all kissy-face again. Not anymore. The atmosphere at home grew heavy with unspoken anger.

  Things were different at school, too. He was still the Star, but the other kids acted like they didn’t want to get too close to him. Like he had some kind of disease. Little groups would stop talking as he approached. His friends suddenly had other pressing things to do and even turned down rides in his Chevy. Lindy Grant went totally cold and acted as if they’d never done it that night in the cabin. Alec McDowell still came sucking around, but he was the last one Roman wanted to hang out with after the Frazier business.

  About two weeks after the thing happened at the lake, Roman made some little mistake at home like losing one of his father’s tools. It was all the old man was waiting for. He started screaming at Roman and pounding him with his fists, and didn’t stop until he had beat the shit out of the boy. Howard Dixon had not struck his son since Roman was eleven, and then it was just a regular spanking with his belt. This time the old man, ugly drunk, battered the boy unmercifully as he would have another man.

  Roman did not defend himself, even when every instinct cried out for him to hit him back. He knew he could take the old man, but in his heart he knew the punishment was just. He was being beaten not for misplacing some stupid tool, but for killing Frazier Nunley. The irony was that he could hurt his father more by taking his blows than he would have by fighting back.

  Finally Howard Dixon stopped hitting him. He stepped back, breathing hard, and looked at his son’s bloodied face. Roman could still hear the tortured groan that rumbled deep in his father’s chest. There was a moment when Roman thought the old man was going to take him in his arms, but he just turned and walked away. They never again exchanged more than a dozen words at a time.

  After that things just got worse. In the Thanksgiving Day game with Pulaski, Roman took one bad step avoiding a tackier and heard something pop in his knee. A second later he felt the pain. A couple of linemen helped him off the field to the cheers of the fans — the last cheers he was ever to hear. The next Friday he tried to play but couldn’t accelerate, couldn’t cut, couldn’t keep up with the slowest of his blockers.

  The college scouts vanished overnight. There were no scholarship offers from the big colleges. Not much interest even from the small schools. Roman did get a call from Northern Michigan, but his scholarship there was contingent on his making the team. He couldn’t do it, and dropped out to be drafted after a frustrating failure in practice.

  In the years since he went into the Army, mustered out at Fort Lewis, and settled in Seattle, Roman had lost contact with his parents. The letters from his mother stopped when she divorced his father three years after Roman left home. She had remarried and moved to Florida. Howard Dixon stayed on in Wolf River. Roman had visited him twice, and that was plenty. The old man’s drinking finally cost him his job at Allis Chalmers, and the last Roman heard he was living in some flophouse on the South Side ….

  Remembering Wolf River and what it had done to him and his parents was depressing. Roman took a last pull on his bottle of Jack Daniel’s and headed out of the room to get something to eat.

  ALEC

  The room they gave him at the Wolf River Inn was faded and depressing. It smelled of pine oil disinfectant. And now his stomach was bothering him. The old ulcer that had been dormant in recent years was making itself felt in a persistent prodding just below his breastbone. Alec belched and made a face at the sour taste.

  It was this damn town and what it meant to him that was doing it. The circumstances under which he was here now were hardly reassuring. The message with its reference to “clown” and “monkey” could only refer to that long-ago fiasco on the lake that he had worked for years to put out of his mind. No point in denying it any longer. Somebody had brought him here to account for what had happened to Frazier Nunley.

  But could somebody speak to him through a gypsy hag in Manhattan? Make his tongue swell up like an overripe blutwurst? Something very bad was going on here.

  Alec’s instinct, as it had been all his life when real danger threatened, was to flee. Pack up and get the hell out of here. Right now. But what if he did that and his tongue blew up in his mouth and finally choked him? No, this time he would have to stay and see it out to the end.

  More immediately, he would have to put something soothing in his burning stomach.

  The ulcer had begun sometime in that last year of high school. First there was the terrible fear that he would be caught and punished for his part in what had happened to the Nunley kid. Every time the phone rang or there was a knock at the door Alec’s nerves contracted into tiny knots.

  His parents became unusually silent around him. His father continued to go to work every day at the Chronicle, but the old joy in his job was gone. Alec’s lovely mother, with whom he had always had a special close relationship, became cold and distant. He was never asked to help out at the paper anymore.

  And at school his life changed drastically. Roman Dixon was having problems of his own and brushed off Alec’s attempts to renew their relationship. The other kids, who had pretended to accept him because he was the Friend of the Star, immediately dumped him. Alone and frightened, Alec began to wish ardently for the end of the school year so he could get the hell away from there.

  Graduation came at last. There was not much in the way of a celebration for this ill-favored Class of ’67, but Alec McDowell found himself even more isolated than most. He walked across the stage and received his diploma to no applause. He walked alone off the stage and out of Wolf River forever. Or so he thought.

  His grades were good enough to get him into the University of Missouri, which he chose for their excellent school of journalism. He became editor of the school paper in his senior year, but he discovered his real talent was for campus politics. Not in personally running for office, but steering others to election. He was pleased to see himself as a “power behind the throne,” and decided then that that was what he would eventually do with his life
.

  Ironically, in the same year Alec graduated from Missouri with a B. A. in journalism, the Wolf River Chronicle shut down forever. Not long after that, Alec’s father went out into their garage, spread a painter’s drop cloth over the floor, put the muzzle of a deer rifle into his mouth, and blew his brains all over the ceiling.

  Alec went home to Wolf River for the funeral. It was the last time he had been back.

  His mother moved away to Arizona less than a year after Phelan’s suicide. She got a job there as assistant to the editor-publisher of a desert weekly, and there she stayed for the next ten years.

  During those years Alec got Christmas cards and an occasional letter from his mother. The letters were cordial and newsy, but not intimate. There was never an invitation for him to visit. He never suggested it. Then, six years ago, Trudy McDowell died quietly in her sleep.

  His mother had expressed a wish to be buried beside her husband. Alec made the arrangements without having to personally return to Wolf River.

  With no ties left in the town, Alec never expected to be back here. Certainly not to commemorate the darkest year of his life. Yet here he was, summoned by persons unknown, ulcer hurting, and, let’s admit it, scared.

  He pushed away thoughts of the past and left his room. He rode down alone in the elevator, crossed the deserted lobby, walked into the dining room, and froze.

  CHAPTER 21

  When Lindy entered the dining room, the only other customers were a young couple at one of the far tables and a family of four. No one looked up when she came in. The couple was too engrossed in each other, and the family too busy arguing about the menu.

  “Just one of you?” the hostess said. She wore a black sheath gown that was at least a size too small. Her hair was frizzed out in an approximation of the style affected by some of the younger movie stars.