Mr. X

by Peter Straub

  Do You in Your Otherness even know about The Other Guy? I mean, providing that You do exist, is it possible that You chose Him before me and watched everything go down the tubes? Attend—

  Even the Jesus brainlessly sentimentalized in Canon Reed’s Sunday school exercises had his moments of frustration, doubt, and despair. After all, He was half human too! I bet He stormed around in a black, blinding rage a lot more often than the Gospels let on. What I want to know is, didn’t Jesus sometimes wonder if that Messiah stuff was a delusion? And this: did He have dreams?

  A being in possession of supernatural powers and a world-altering Mission ofttimes finds Himself down in the dumps for weeks on end. More often than any mortal, He endures periods of psychic sludge when the emotional landscape looks like a river-bank at low tide on an overcast day. A few old tires, broken bits of wood, and a couple of beer bottles lay scattered across the mud. All the best sources agree that these bleak periods are necessary to spiritual evolution. It isn’t depression, it’s the Dark Night of the Soul. I’d give you a hundred to one that whoever came up with that convenient equation was figuring out a way to turn his doubts into aspects of belief.

  And if Jesus got it wrong, what about me? I know, but how can I be sure that I really know?

  Until I was well into my twenties, the egotism and arrogance attendant upon the human condition prevented me from being distracted by those aspects of the Master’s work not directly applicable. God knows there was enough to keep me happy. Doubt tiptoed in when I admitted that a number of the Master’s tales did not quite come up to the mark. Some of them refused to get down to business altogether.

  I told myself that sometimes His antennae had garbled the message, that He had kept trying even when He wasn’t on the right wavelength. I told myself that He may have been incapable of distinguishing between truth and fiction in His own work.

  Ah, before me rises the possibility that what I had taken as Sacred Text was all along merely pulp fiction. Night after night of Dark Night, I whisper to myself: Your life is a grotesque error, and you are far, far smaller than you think.

  Misery-laden dreams pollute my sleep. I enter a shabby room where a man toils at a desk. The lantern jaw and cheap suit familiar from a dozen photographs identify the Providence Master, and I move forward. At last I stand before Him. I ask, Who am I? He smiles to Himself, and the pen drifts across the page. He has not seen or heard me—I am not there—I do not exist.

  Only days ago, confident energy sent me loping through the night streets, abuzz with pleasure. The Grand Design swept toward its conclusion, and Star’s wretched brat was to meet an excruciating death. Now … now it’s all I can do to get out of bed. I think I was mistaken. I think I got it wrong.

  If You do not exist—if the Elder Gods did not place me on earth to prepare its destruction—what am I doing here? Who was my true father?

  27

  Faint, oyster-colored light washed through the window, making the chair and the dresser look two-dimensional. The hands on the sheet in front of me also seemed two-dimensional. From the blurry face of my two-dimensional watch I managed to make out that it was a few minutes past five-thirty.

  I didn’t have a prayer of getting back to sleep, so I brushed my teeth, washed, and shaved, telling myself that the money in my jacket pocket had been a part of the nightmare. It had the same unreal quality—it seemed real in the same unreal way—besides, I knew I had not won that money, therefore I had dreamed about finding it. Then I dried my face and looked in the closet.

  The blazer hung evenly, displaying no signs of dream-boodle. I poked my hand into the side pockets and found only Ashleigh Ashton’s business card. Male vanity suggested that she had slipped it into my pocket when I wasn’t looking. Showing off, I even checked the inside pockets.

  See? I told myself. You knew it all along.

  When I pulled a pair of jeans out of the duffel, I caught sight of my knapsack under the bed. Everything inside me stopped moving. I put on my socks and regarded the knapsack. An ominously dreamlike quality suffused my old companion. I got into my shorts, pulled a polo shirt over my head, thrust my legs into the jeans, and yanked the thing onto the bed. Dream-memory singled out one of the buckled pouches. I worked the buckle, raised the flap, and drew the zipper across the top of the pouch. When I reached inside, I touched what felt like currency. My hand came back into view gripping a fat wad of bills.

  Five hundred and eighty-one dollars. Two fives had been plastered together with beer.

  I rammed the money back into the pouch, zipped it shut, and shoved the knapsack under the bed.

  28

  A purple shirt hung from Uncle Clark’s shoulders, and a turquoise bracelet swam on one of his wrists. He looked like a conga player awaiting the summons onstage, but what he was waiting for was breakfast. I got coffee going and started opening cabinet doors.

  “Cereal is down at the end, bowls are right in front of you. I take Bran Buds and Grape-Nuts, fifty-fifty, with a spoonful of honey and some milk. It could be you’re too young to handle Bran Buds.”

  He monitored the buckshot rattle of the cereal into the bowl and nodded when it was half filled. “Don’t go light on the honey, and level the milk right up so I can give it a good stir. Keep your eye on that coffee.”

  I covered everything with milk and placed the bowl on the table. He dumped in three scoops of sugar. After I joined him at the table, he slid his ivory eyes toward me. “From all that racket you made last night, I’d guess you had a grade-A nightmare. Some will tell you that’s a sign of a bad conscience.”

  “I’m sorry if I woke you up.”

  He ate down to the bottom of the bowl and pushed his spoon around, roping in stray pellets. “What was your nightmare about?”

  “I was in a big storm.”

  “They say a dream of heavy rainfall indicates unexpected money.”

  “What about almost being struck by lightning?”

  “That’s supposed to mean a change of fortune. Could be a whole lot of money coming your way. Better hold your umbrella upside down and steer clear of Mr. Toby Kraft. Money has a way of winding up in that man’s pocket.”

  I had an uneasy vision of the bills folded into my knapsack.

  “Rainstorms, now,” he said. “We used to get us some doozies in the old days. The river rolled right into town. Picked up anything it could get along the way. Cars. Livestock. Full-grown men. In the water a corpse will turn blue. It will swell up with gas and float on the current. The hands will look like catcher’s mitts. I’ve lived next to the Mississippi all my life. People think rivers are pretty things, but those with common sense won’t trust one any wider than you can jump across.”

  I told him that until yesterday, when I had seen the river from St. Ann’s, I had nearly forgotten that Edgerton was built along the Mississippi. He gave me a frown-sneer and then perked up again. “You didn’t remember about the river?”

  “Not until I saw it yesterday afternoon.”

  “Best part of a river is when it lets you forget it. Way back, we needed the river, and history tells you towns like this got built because of it. And a river town is a different kind of place.”

  “Different how?”

  “A river town is irregular,” Clark said. “You get your gamblers and your sharpies before you get your preachers, and it might be some considerable time before any of ’em find an advantage in turning respectable. There’s a different mentality, you understand me?”

  What he was describing sounded more like the Barbary Coast than southern Illinois, but I nodded anyhow.

  “And maybe you go twenty years without a flood. If one comes, you build everything back up afterwards. The river needs the town, and the town needs the river. A month or two later, even the smell is gone.”

  “The smell?”

  Clark gave me a prolonged smirk-sneer. “I have pondered the question of why a river will smell fresh and clean when it runs between its banks and will leave behind such a
stink after it floods. I believe the answer is that a flood will turn a river upside down and bring the bottom to the top. When it runs off, you will have river-bottom everywhere you look. Not mud—mud is just dirt that got too wet for its own good. River-bottom is what is supposed to be kept out of sight. River-bottom is the ugly part of nature, where everything gets broken down and turned into something else. It has a lot of death in it, and death carries a powerful charge of smell. Death is a lively business, when you think about it.”

  “Must be hard to clean up.”

  “That stuff will cling. I figure Edgerton rebuilt itself three times between the 1870s and the start of the century. Every time they built it up, it got bigger. There was a full-time circus in a full-time fairground, you could find two saloons and two gambling houses on every block. It had that same old mentality, you know what I’m saying?”

  “Wide open,” I said.

  “But you had your banks and your businesses, and you had your fine ladies along with your fancy ladies.” He sneered at me with what looked like pride. “It was at that time your people arrived in Edgerton, you know. The famous Dunstan brothers, Omar and Sylvan. 1874.”

  “Omar and Sylvan?” I said. “I never heard of them before.”

  “The Dunstan brothers rode into town on the back of a hay wagon and jumped off with a couple of valises and two hundred dollars in gold coins. Don’t let that hay wagon give you the wrong idea. The Dunstans had a big-city style about them. Smart, good-looking gentlemen who spoke the King’s English, knew the best manners, and dressed in the latest fashions. After they found temporary lodgings, Omar and Sylvan walked into a gambling establishment and tripled their grubstake in a single afternoon.”

  “They were gamblers?”

  “Their livelihoods were in commerce and finance. Nobody ever found out what they did before they came to Edgerton, though there was considerable talk. Some said they’d been bounty hunters. One or both of them was rumored to have been in prison.”

  “What did they do when they got here?”

  “Everything they touched prospered. When the floods came along, Omar and Sylvan wound up better off than before. Bought properties cheap off those who left town. Bought land where they figured the town would grow. Fifteen, twenty years later, they held the leases on a lot of important buildings. Naturally, they were as catnip to the ladies.”

  Clark loved the story of the Dunstan brothers. The arc from the hay wagon to wealth thrilled his imagination. By now, he all but considered Omar and Sylvan blood relatives whose achievements added to his own merit.

  “I bet they were,” I said.

  “Handsome as the Devil, they say.” The glorious sneer declared that despite the ravages of age, Clark Rutledge knew himself to be no less handsome. “You couldn’t tell ’em apart. They say, from time to time their high spirits led them to give the ladies the impression that they were having a good time with someone other than they thought, if you catch my drift. You can put your money on one thing, they were let into a lot of nice houses when the Mister wasn’t at home.” He hesitated for a moment. “Howard fell pretty close to the same tree, from what I hear. And so did a couple of the other sons, but they either passed away early in life or ran off.”

  “There must have been a lot of resentment.”

  Clark hesitated again. “You know how it goes. Get too high, they slap you down. Omar married a woman from New Orleans name of Ethel Bridges and settled down a bit. Still and all, one morning he left the house we’re sitting in right now, and someone shot him dead while he was walking to his carriage. Sylvan heard the shot and got outside just in time to see a man on horseback galloping down the street. That man was never brought to justice. Don’t you think he could have been identified? If it was supposed to go that way?”

  I nodded.

  “Sylvan married his brother’s widow, built a house outside of town, and moved in. He and Ethel had some kids, three, four, nobody knows for sure.”

  “There must be records.”

  “You’re forgetting the time, and you’re forgetting the place. Those babies were all born at home, and the Dunstans didn’t care to use midwives or medical men.”

  “Why not?”

  Clark momentarily lost his sneer, but his natural garrulousness won out over discretion. “A long time ago, an old-timer told me the Dunstan brothers never knew if their babies were going to come out deformed in some way medicine never heard about. Like with a huge big head and a body no bigger than a pin. Or a thing with gills under its ears and no arms and legs. Or worse than that. Nearly all those babies died, he told me, but the few that lived were kept in the attic.”

  He glanced at me. “If you ask me, one or two of Ethel’s babies took a wrong turn in the oven, and Howard, the oldest child in the family, overheard more than was good for a little boy. Which could explain why the man became so wild and squandered his money. Howard did considerable damage, all in all. Toward the end, I believe he was plumb out of his head. You’d have to say he was in a kind of dream world.”

  I thought all of it had come from the dream world, specifically the dream world invented in the rumor mills of a small town. “Which brother was my great-great-grandfather? If Howard was the oldest child of the next generation, I guess it was Omar.”

  “What I heard was, the brothers shared everything. I don’t think they knew which one was Howard’s father.”

  I said something, but I couldn’t tell you what it was.

  Clark displayed a sneer of magnificent worldliness. “I’d pick Sylvan. Omar was the steadier of the two. Sylvan kept on romancing the ladies even when he was living in that house with Ethel and their kids. When Howard came of age, he acted the same way, except more so. Which counted against him, because by that time Edgerton wasn’t the way it used to be.”

  “It got respectable,” I said.

  “What happened was, Howard needed an Omar of his own, and because he didn’t have one, he ran to seed. The Hatches and the Miltons took advantage of his weakness.”

  The stairs creaked, and Clark straightened up in his chair. “Best not go into this around Nettie.”

  29

  Registering suspicion at a change in the daily pattern, Nettie lowered her eyebrows at Clark. “Surprised to see you up so soon.” She turned her attention to me. “How was your night’s sleep?”

  “Good enough.”

  “From what I heard, you thought the Devil was after you. All of us are so worried, it’s a wonder we can sleep at all.” Nettie billowed to the stove and turned on the gas flame beneath a cast-iron skillet. She took a carton of eggs and a package of bacon out of the refrigerator, slapped the bacon into the skillet, and, like a chef, neatly broke five eggs into a glass bowl with her right hand. “My feeling is that we are going to see some improvement in your mother.”

  “I hope so,” I said.

  Nettie whisked the eggs, turned the bacon over in the pan, and took a transparent bag filled with okra from the refrigerator. Soon, about a third of the okra was simmering in another skillet. When the bacon turned brown and crisp, she arrayed the strips on a thick length of paper toweling. She poured the eggs into the skillet and gave them another whisk. The toast had been slathered with butter, sliced diagonally in half, and set at the edges of the plates. She sprinkled pepper and dried parsley into the skillet, gave the eggs another stir, and divided the okra between the plates.

  “Do you eat this kind of breakfast every day?”

  “Sometimes we add home-fried potatoes, and sometimes we have chicken livers, but today I don’t want to take the time. Is the coffee still hot?”

  “I’ll warm it up,” I said, and turned on the flame under the percolator.

  The doorbell chimed. “There’s May,” Nettie said. “Would you let her in, son?”

  A UPS driver in a summer uniform stood on the porch, holding a box wrapped in butcher paper. “Delivery for …” He looked at the name above the address. “Ms. Star Dunstan?”

  I saw an
East Cicero return address in the top left-hand corner of the box. After I signed the pad, I carried the package into the kitchen. “UPS,” I said. “Star must have sent some of her things before she came here.”

  Nettie flapped her hand at the package. “Put that on the floor.” I placed it against the wainscoting. Nettie divided the scrambled eggs with a spatula and slid them out onto the plates. The doorbell rang again.

  I went back through the living room and opened the door. Resplendent in a flowered hat, Aunt May extended a gnarled paw. “Help me over the doorstep, Neddie. I’m on the late side, but I thought I’d say good morning to Joy. Any chicken livers today?”

  “Aunt Nettie thought they would take too much time.”

  “Chicken livers take only a little bitty time.”

  May clung to me on the way to the kitchen. I held her arm as she lowered herself into her chair. She made a show of admiring the overflowing plate before her. “Truthfully, chicken livers would have been too much for me today.” She handed me her cane.

  I sat down between May and Nettie under Clark’s ripe gaze. The sisters pitched into their breakfasts. The telephone rang. May dabbed her mouth with a napkin and said, “Perhaps Joy has had another vision.”

  Shaking her head, Nettie got up from the table and lifted the receiver. “All right,” she said. She put her hand over the mouthpiece. “It’s that doctor with the big head and the little red mouth.”

  Within my skull I felt a lightness like a reduction of gravity. I leaned against the counter and said, “Dr. Barnhill? This is Ned Dunstan.”

  Dr. Barnhill informed me that my mother had experienced another stroke thirty minutes earlier and that the efforts to revive her had been unsuccessful. He also said a lot of other things. It sounded as though he were reading them off a sheet of paper.

  I hung up and saw their faces staring at me, suspended between hope and what they already knew to be the truth.