by Peter Straub
Here, on the second floor of a rooming house, Otto Bremen, a grade-school crossing guard, slumbers before his television screen with a not quite empty bottle of bourbon nestled in his crotch. The last half inch of a cigarette burns inexorably toward the first two fingers of his right hand. The conjunction of the cigarette and Frenchy’s secondary occupation suggests a possibility, but many things are possible, Otto, and whether or not you are to die in a fire—as I rather think you are—I wish, with the puppet-master’s fondness for his insensate and pliable creatures, that you might know a minute portion of the triumph rushing toward me.
For in my city’s secret corners I already see runners of the blue fire. It hovers over Frenchy and his partner, it travels down the crossing guard’s arm, and it gathers itself for an electrifying moment along the rain gutters on Cherry Street, where the surviving Dunstans eke out their blasted lives. Enormous forces have begun to come into play. Around our tiny illuminated platform suspended in the cosmic darkness, the ancient Gods, my true ancestors, congregate with rustlings of leathery wings and rattlings of filthy claws to witness what their great-grandson shall accomplish.
A most marvelous event has taken place. Star Dunstan has come home to die.
Can you hear me, slug-spittle?
Listen to me, you exhausted bag of skin—
My dearest hope is that your flesh should blister, that you should have to labor for the smallest gulps of air and feel individual organs explode within you, so on and so forth, your eyes to burst, that kind of thing, but though I shall not be able to manage these matters on your behalf, my old sweetheart, I shall do my best to arrange them for our son.
3
Right from the beginning, I had the sense that something crucially significant, something without which I could never be whole, was missing. When I was seven, my mother told me that as soon as I’d learned to sit up by myself, I used to do this funny thing where I turned around and tried to look behind me. Boom, down I’d go, but the second I hit the ground I’d turn my head to check that same spot. According to Star, Aunt Nettie said, “That boy must think the doctor cut off his tail when he was born.” Uncle Clark chimed in with, “He appears to think someone’s sneakin’ up on him.”
“They meant you had something wrong with you,” Star told me, “which was to be expected, me being your mother. I said, ‘My boy Neddie’s smart as a whip, and he’s seeing if his shadow followed him inside the house.’ They shut up, because that was exactly how you looked—like you were trying to find your shadow.”
I can scarcely describe the combination of relief and uncertainty this caused in me. Star had given me proof that my sense of loss was real, for it had been a part of me long before I could have made it up. Even before I could walk, back when my thoughts could have been little more than the recognition of states like hunger, fear, comfort, warmth, I had been aware that it had been missing, whatever it was, and when I tried to look behind me, I was trying to find it. And if at the age of six months I was looking for the absent thing, didn’t that mean that at one time it had not been absent?
A few days later, I resolved to ask her about the difference between me and other children. A couple of things made me hesitate, as I had before. Did everyone else’s claim to a father mean that I had to have one? Or could someone like Uncle Clark or Uncle James have stepped in to sign the papers, or whatever men did to make them fathers? Uncle Clark and Uncle James displayed so little paternal feeling that they had to make an effort merely to tolerate my existence. From the start, I felt welcome in their houses only by virtue of my best behavior. A child knows these things. You know when you have to earn acceptance. On top of that, I already had the caretaker child’s sense of emotional obligation, and my mother was as unpredictable as the weather.
In the summer of my seventh year, Star was comfortable and relaxed with her family. She moved at about half her normal speed. For the first time in my life, I heard stories about her childhood and what I had been like as a baby. She helped Aunt Nettie in the kitchen and let Uncle Clark expound without telling him he was a bigoted ignoramus. Being Star Dunstan, she had signed up for a poetry workshop and a night class in watercolor painting at Albertus, which Uncle Clark called “Albino U.”
Three days a week, she clerked at the pawnshop owned by her stepfather, Toby Kraft, who in spite of universal Dunstan disapproval years before had married Star’s mother. Toby Kraft had reinforced the family’s distrust by moving his bride into the apartment above his shop instead of submitting to Cherry Street. Despite their general dislike, he had participated in family gatherings for the rest of Queenie’s life and continued to do so after her death, the occasion for Star’s most recent return to Edgerton and my release from the latest set of foster parents. It did not occur to me until much later that the death of her mother was behind Star’s new ease. She must have experienced an elemental relief at the lifting of Queenie’s everlasting scorn. Her second job involved what she described as “modeling” a couple of nights each week at Albertus. I did not grasp at the time that this meant posing nude for students in a life-drawing class.
Our orderly existence permitted me to ask my question. I waited until we were alone in Aunt Nettie’s kitchen, me drying the dishes she washed while Nettie gabbed on the porch rocker with Aunt May, and Uncle Clark and Uncle James watched a cop show on television. Star handed me a dish, and I rubbed the cloth over its glistening surface while she described a jazz concert she had seen in the Albertus auditorium a month after my conception.
“At first, I wasn’t even sure I liked that group. It was a quartet from the West Coast, and I was never all that crazy about West Coast jazz. Then this alto player who looked like a stork pushed himself off the curve of the piano and stuck his horn in his mouth and started playing ‘These Foolish Things.’ ” The memory still had the power to make her gasp. “And, oh, Neddie, it was like going to some new place you’d never heard about, but where you felt at home right away. He just touched that melody for a second before he lifted off and began climbing and climbing, and everything he played linked up, one step after another, like a story. Neddie! It was like hearing the whole world open up in front of me. It was like going to heaven. If I could sing the way that man played alto, Neddie, I’d stop time forever and just keep on singing.”
She was trying to communicate the importance of music in her life, but at the time I had no idea of the impact these words would have on me. It would certainly never have occurred to me that one day I would find it possible to witness the rapture she was describing. All of that was far ahead of me, and I thought she was trying to keep me from asking my question.
When she stopped talking, I said, “I really want to know something.”
She turned her head to smile at me, warmed by the memory of the music and expecting a question about it. Then the smile clicked off, and her hands stopped moving in the water. She already knew that my question had nothing to do with an alto saxophone solo on “These Foolish Things.”
“Ask away.” She plucked a dish out of the foam with self-conscious gravity.
I knew that whatever she was going to tell me would be a lie, and that I would believe it for as long as I could. “Who’s my dad? He isn’t Uncle Clark, is he?”
She glanced over her shoulder, shook her head, and smiled down at me. “No, honey, he sure isn’t. If Uncle Clark was your daddy, Aunt Nettie would be your mommy, and wouldn’t you be in a pickle?”
“But who is he? What happened to him?”
She seemed to concentrate on scrubbing the plate in her hands. I know now that she sat next to my father during the concert she had been talking about. “Your father went into the army after we got married. Because he was so smart and so strong, it wasn’t long before they made him an officer.”
“He was an army man?”
“One of the best army men ever,” she said, locking into place both my disbelief and the need to deny it. “They sent him places ordinary soldiers couldn’t go. He wasn�
��t allowed to tell me about them. When you’re on a Top Secret mission, you can’t talk about it.” She passed the plate beneath a stream of water and handed it to me. “That’s what your father was doing when he died. He was out on a secret mission. All they could tell me was that he died like a hero. And he’s buried in a special hero’s grave, way up on a mountainside on the other side of the world, overlooking the sea.”
I could see an American flag on a mountainous promontory far above silvery water and endless waves, marking the grave of that without which I would forever be incomplete.
“I wasn’t supposed to tell you, but now you’re old enough to keep it to yourself. Nobody else knows what I just told you, except his superior officers.”
We washed and dried the remaining dishes in a charged but companionable silence. I knew that she was in a rush to change clothes and drive to her modeling job, but she stopped and turned around on her way to the kitchen door. “I want you to know something else, too, Neddie. Your father isn’t the only thing you have to be proud of. Our family used to be important people here in Edgerton. They took most of it away, but folks here remember, and that’s why we’re different from everyone else. You come from a special family.”
I sat on the living room rug and tried to see what was special in my aunts and uncles. The detectives had solved the weekly murder, and the aunts had come inside to sit on the green davenport and enjoy their favorite program. From my low, sidelong perspective, Nettie and May resembled monuments of Egyptian statuary. Their massive bodies in shapeless print dresses reared up side by side above four hugely stationary legs. In a sleeveless mesh T-shirt, his suspenders clipped to the waistband of tan gabardine trousers, Uncle Clark was canted back in his easy chair, his wide mouth twisted into a sneer. Eyes closed, arms folded over his chest, Uncle James filled the high-backed rocker. A man with wavy blond hair and an aristocratic profile was sawing away at a violin.
“Mr. Florian Zabach has a gift which comes straight from God,” said Aunt Nettie. “I never heard prettier sounds in all my life.”
“Remember the time we went up to Chicago and saw Eddie South?” said Uncle Clark.
“Eddie South brought a beautiful tone out of his fiddle,” said Aunt May. “I have wondered if he might have been one of our category. A number of musicians are, I believe.”
“Little pitchers,” Nettie said. “Mind what you say.”
Uncle James snorted and stirred, and the other three looked at him until his chin dropped as far as his redwood neck would permit.
“That tone was why they called Eddie South ‘The Dark Angel of the Violin,’ ” Uncle Clark said. “But if Stuff Smith got up there, he’d gobble your Florsheim Swayback down in one bite.”
“Nettie,” said Aunt May, “I believe Mr. Welk is putting on some weight.”
My eyelids sagged, and I pushed myself upright before I fell asleep in the living room, like Uncle James.
My mother woke me up when she let herself into our room. I waited while she took off her clothes, put on her nightshirt, and found her way to bed. I heard her yank up the sheet and wrestle her pillow into shape. She had carried into the room an odor of smoke and beer mingled with fresh air and summer rainfall, and I tried to sort out these traces of her evening’s history as she relaxed into sleep. Her breathing stretched out and slowed down. When I heard it catch in her throat and release itself in what was almost a snore, I crept across and crawled in beside her. Star seemed enormous, a huge female animal still wrapped in the atmosphere of the adventures through which she had passed on her way home. I nestled my back against hers. My body instantly doubled in weight and began to slip toward the center of the earth, where my hero father lay buried. Star shuddered and spoke a single word I trapped in my hands as I plummeted out of consciousness. Rinehart.
4
At the whispery pop of a seam I looked over my shoulder, saw a shadow fleeing down sunny Cherry Street, and fell bang on my bottom in surprise. At least once a week during my childhood and adolescence, this happened the moment my head hit the pillow. My shadow elongated over the white sidewalk and bent sideways to slip around the corner. The terror of an irredeemable loss immobilized me on the warm pavement. I got up, ran to the corner, and saw my shadow floating like a solid substance above the sidewalk ahead. When I pounded forward, the sidewalk tilted like a slide, and the familiar houses and dark porches softened in the heat.
Edgerton was gone.
I ran down a beaten track leading to a narrow river and an arched wooden bridge. The upright shadow scampered on. On the far side of the bridge, a line of stunted trees marked the beginning of a forest. I glimpsed the peaked roof and broken upper windows of an abandoned house above the treetops. My shadow moved up the arch of the bridge, leaned on the curved iron railing, and crossed one foot over the other. It faced me without having turned around.
Like an optical illusion, the mocking shadow receded with every stride I took. When finally I stood on the bridge, the shadow regarded me from fifty feet away and a point well above my head.
“You seem to be trying to catch me,” my shadow said.
“I need you,” I said.
“Then you’d better come along.” The shadow did its trick of switching front and back and moved on.
By the time I reached the top of the arch, the shadow was far down the descending slope. The iron handrails had become slim and delicate, and the planks bent beneath my weight.
The shadow patted the railing. “The longer it gets, the thinner it becomes. Like toffee. In the end, it disappears.”
“Can I get to the other end?”
“Maybe, if you get into some fancy sliding, use your momentum.”
“We need each other,” I said. “We’re the same thing.”
“You are me, and I am you, yes,” said the shadow. “But only in the sense that we each have qualities the other lacks. Unfortunately, your qualities are boring.”
“Boring?”
“Dear me, am I doing the right thing? What do other people think of me? Why don’t they like me?” The shadow flicked its hands in the air, as if to scatter a cloud of gnats. “I don’t give a damn what people think of me.”
“You’re a shadow,” I said. “People don’t think about you at all.”
“Then why care about getting me back?”
I had no answer for that.
“You won’t even be able to go out by yourself at night for another six or seven years. When do we have our first cigarette? Our first drink? When do we get to have actual sex?” He shook his head in disgust. “I want darkness, I want night. I want to see a big steak in front of me and a glass of whiskey beside the plate. I want cards in my hand and a cigar in my mouth and a little grown-up fun, and, kid, with you, it’s going to be too much work to get them.”
“Without me, you can’t get them at all,” I said.
“On the contrary. Without you, I can do whatever I like. If you catch me, I have to come back, but I won’t be easy to catch, and you’ll be in considerable danger during the pursuit.”
“What kind of danger?” I asked.
“That kind, for one.” He swept his arm toward the forest. Imaginary blue fire flickered from branch to branch. My heart went cold and my mind became a stone.
5
Four years before the dream I just described started wrecking my sleep two or three nights every month, my aunts and uncles had seen conclusive proof of their doubts that Star could produce an undamaged child. I hope they were gratified. I was not. I had been looking forward to my third birthday.
I can remember the balloons bobbing on the clotheslines and the big ladder between the house and the picnic table, and I know what I was wearing. Among the few of my mother’s possessions I retain is a photograph of me in the striped T-shirt and new dungarees given me by Queenie. I have to tell the truth: I was an angelic child. If I saw a kid like that, I’d tuck a dollar into his hand for sheer good luck. Mine, I mean, not his. But when I look at his cherub face I hav
e to wonder what this little smiling boy is concealing.
That is:
I wonder if he has begun to feel a mild, increasing tingle like an electric current pass up his arms and into his chest. I wonder if his mouth feels dry, if the colors striped across his shirt and the vibrant reds and yellows of the balloons have begun to glow. That angelic boy in his birthday-boy clothes may have felt the tightening of the screws at the heart of the world, but he has no idea of the misery speeding toward him. He has not yet seen the first sly tongues of the blue fire.
The aunts and uncles, my grandmother, and my mother must have spent much of the morning preparing the scene. Someone had blown up the balloons and used the ladder to fasten them to the clotheslines. A paper tablecloth printed with birthday cakes and candles had been stretched out across the picnic table and arrayed with paper plates, plastic cups, and cutlery. (Now that I know how they managed to get all this stuff, I pity the owner of the local five-and-dime.) Jugs of fresh lemonade and cherry Kool-Aid and the containers of food held down the tablecloth. Aunt Nettie had made a tuna casserole, Aunt May brought over a tray of fried chicken, and Queenie had baked her legendary sweet-potato pie. Reclusive Uncle Clarence and Aunt Joy had consented to emerge from their house across the street, a building so forbidding and funny smelling I dreaded entering it. Clarence brought along his banjo. Joy contributed a loaf of her blackolive bread. Star made lime Jell-O and the birthday cake, angel food with chocolate frosting. I can remember Toby Kraft, his face so white he reminded me of Casper the Friendly Ghost, strutting around the table and patting people on the back.
They must have gossiped, they must have told stories and teased one another as they dug into the fried chicken. I can’t remember that any more than I can remember the actual disaster itself. What I can remember—the most commanding mental photograph I retain from my third birthday—is an image so dissonant that it sank indelibly into me.