by Peter Straub
* * *
A minute later he was downstairs holding the telephone. “Otto. Are you afraid of the game wardens?”
“Ach, Lewis. They run when they see me. On a day like this you want to go out with the dogs? Come for schnapps instead.”
“Then we go out,” Lewis said. “Please.”
2
Peter walked out of his homeroom when the bell rang and went down the corridor to his locker. While the rest of the school pushed past to various parts of the building and most of his class filed into Miller’s room for history, he pretended to search for a book. Tony Drexler, a friend of his, loitered beside him for unbearable seconds and finally asked, “Heard from Jim Hardie yet?”
“No,” Peter said, burying himself deeper in his locker.
“I bet he’s in Greenwich Village already.”
“Yeah.”
“Time to get to History. You read the chapter?”
“No.”
“Bullshit,” Drexler laughed. “See you there.”
Peter nodded. Not long after he was alone. Leaving his books in his locker but taking his coat, he slammed the metal panel shut and ran down the hall to the bathroom. He shut himself in a toilet and waited for the first period bell to ring.
Ten minutes later he peeked out of the bathroom door. The hallway was empty, and he raced down the corridor. Then he continued unseen down the stairs and out the door.
A hundred yards off to the side, a first-period gym class sweated over calisthenics on the muddy field; two girls were already doing punishment laps around the track. Nobody saw him: school was already deep in its round of self-enclosed activity, marching to the sound of bells.
A block away on School Road, Peter turned off into a sidestreet and from there zigzagged through town, avoiding the square and the shopping district, until he reached Underhill Road, which led to Route 17. He jogged down Underhill Road for half a mile, by now well out of town and in sight only of bare fields ending in stands of trees.
When the highway came in sight, he walked across a squelchy knoll and climbed over a double strip of thick aluminum nailed to a series of white posts. Peter ran across the lanes to the median, climbed another aluminum fence, waited for a break in the traffic and then ran across to the other side of the highway. Then he held out his arm, thumb extended, and began to walk backward down the highway.
He had to see Lewis: he had to talk to Lewis about his mother.
From the bottom of his mind floated the image of himself leaping on Lewis, swinging at him with his fists, battering at the handsome face . . .
But then came the opposite image of Lewis laughing, Lewis telling him not to worry about anything, that he had not come back from Spain to have affairs with people’s mothers.
If Lewis said that, he could tell him about Jim Hardie.
* * *
Peter had been hitchhiking for fifteen minutes when a blue car finally pulled over to the side of the road. The middle-aged man behind the wheel leaned sideways and opened the passenger door. “Where you going, son?” He was a tubby man in a wrinkled gray suit with a green necktie knotted too tightly. Advertising leaflets of some kind littered the back seat. “Just down the road six or seven miles,” Peter said. “I’ll tell you when we get close.” He got in.
“This is against my principles,” the man said, rolling away.
“Pardon?”
“Against my principles. Hitchhiking is pretty dangerous, especially for good-looking kids like you. I don’t think you should do it.”
Peter laughed out loud, startling both the driver and himself.
* * *
The man stopped at the end of Lewis’s drive, but would not leave without giving him more advice. “Listen, son. You never know who you’re going to meet out on these roads. Could be any kind of pervert.” He grabbed Peter’s arm just as the boy was opening the door.
“Promise me you won’t do it again. Promise me, son.”
“Okay, I promise,” Peter said.
“The Lord knows you made that promise.” The man released Peter’s arm, and the boy scrambled out of the car. “Hold on, son, wait up. Just a sec.” Peter fidgeted by the side of the car, shifting on his feet, while the man leaned over and picked up one of the leaflets on the back seat. “This will help you, son. Read it and keep it. It’s got an answer in it.”
“An answer?”
“That’s right. Show it to your friends.” He handed Peter a cheaply printed pamphlet: The Watchtower.
The driver picked up speed on the highway; Peter shoved the little magazine in his pocket and turned around to go up Lewis’s drive.
The drive had been pointed out to him, but he had never seen Lewis’s house—never seen more of it than the gray peaks which could be glimpsed from the highway. As he began to walk up the drive, these peaks disappeared. The drifted snow had melted, and the drive shone, catching the sun at a hundred mirrorlike points. Seeing the top of the house from the road, Peter had never recognized how far the house sat from the highway, how enclosed it was by trees. When he reached the first curve of the drive, he was able partially to see the house between their trunks, and for the first time he began to question what he was doing.
He came closer. A smaller extension of the drive curved off to the front of the house, which looked as long as a city block. Faceted windows threw back the light. The major section of the drive trailed around the side of the house and ended at a brick courtyard flanked by what looked to Peter like stables—he saw only a corner of these. He could not imagine himself entering such an imposing place: it looked like you could wander a week in it without finding your way out. This evidence of Lewis’s separateness, his otherness, put all of Peter’s plans in doubt.
Going in there seemed ominously like going into the silent house on Montgomery Street.
Peter walked around to the rear of the building, trying to relate this massive grandeur to what he thought of Lewis. For Peter, who knew nothing of the house’s history, it seemed regal: it demanded a different conception of its owner. Still, the rear of the house was better: a door on a brick court, the homely wooden fronts of the stables, this was at a level with which he was more comfortable. He had just noticed the paths leading into the woods when he heard a voice speaking in his mind.
Imagine Lewis in bed with your mother, Peter. Imagine him lying on top of her.
“No,” he whispered.
Imagine how she looks moving under him naked, Peter. Imagine—
Peter froze and the voice ceased simultaneously. A car had turned into the drive from the highway. Lewis had come home. Peter thought for a second if he should wait exposed in the courtyard for Lewis to see him as he drove in, and then the car shifted up and was too near the house and he could not bear to see Lewis while the echo of the voice still hung in his mind, and he ran to the side of the stables and crouched down. His mother’s station wagon rolled into the courtyard behind the house.
Peter groaned softly, and heard laughter whispering along the painted boards of the old stables.
He flattened himself out on the snow and looked through the gnarled stalks of a rosebush as his mother got out of the station wagon. Her face was drawn, pale with concentrated feeling—a taut angry expression he had never seen. As he watched from beside the stables, she leaned back into the car and tapped the horn twice. Then she straightened up, walked around the front of the car, skirted the puddles on the flat red bricks and went up to the little door in the rear of the house. He thought she would knock, but she dug in her bag for a moment, took out a key and let herself in. He heard her call Lewis’s name.
3
Lewis steered the Morgan around a black pool on the rutted drive which led to the back of the cheese factory. This was a bungalow-sized square wooden building Otto had built himself in a valley outside Afton, below a range of wooded hills. Dogs yapped in the kennels t
o the side of the factory. Lewis parked his car just outside the platform that served as Otto’s loading bay, jumped up onto the platform, swung open the metal doors and went into the factory. He inhaled the pervasive odor of curdled milk.
“Lew-iss!” Otto stood in diffuse light on the other side of the little factory surrounded by white machinery, supervising while cheese was poured into round flat wooden molds. As each mold was filled, Otto’s son, Karl, took it to the weighing machine, recorded its weight and the mold number, and then stacked it in a corner. Otto said something to Karl and then came across the wooden floor to grasp Lewis’s hand. “How good to see you, my friend. But Lew-iss, you look so got-awful tired! You need some of my homemade schnapps.”
“And you look busy,” Lewis said. “But I’d be grateful for the schnapps.”
“Busy, don’t worry about busy. Karl is handling everything now, I should worry about Karl? He is a good cheesemaker. Almost as good as me.”
Lewis smiled and Otto slapped him on the back and lumbered off to his office, a small enclosure near the loading bay. Otto sank down in his ancient chair behind the desk, making the springs creak; Lewis across the desk from him. “Now, my friend.” Otto bent over and removed a decanter and two thimble glasses from a drawer. “Now we have a good drink. To make your cheeks red again.” He tipped liquid from the decanter into the glasses.
The liquor burned Lewis’s throat, but tasted like a distillation of massed flowers. “Delicious.”
“Of course it is delicious. I make it myself. I suppose you brought your gun, Lew-iss?”
Lewis nodded.
“So. I thought you were the kind of friend who comes into my office and drinks my schnapps and eats my beautiful new cheese”—Otto pushed himself out of his chair and went the short distance to a low refrigerator—“but all the time thinks only about going out and shooting something.” He placed a block of cheese veined with wine down before Lewis and cut off sections with his knife. This was one of the speciality cheeses Otto made to sell under his own name; the wheels of cheddar went to a combine. “Now tell me. Am I right?”
“You’re right.”
“I thought so. But it is fine, Lew-iss. I bought a new dog. Very good dog. This dog can see two-three miles—can smell for ten! Pretty soon I think I give this dog Karl’s job.”
The winy cheese was as good as Otto’s schnapps. “Do you think it might be too wet to take a dog out?”
“No, no. Under those big trees it won’t be so wet. You and me, we’ll find some animal. Maybe even a fox, huh?”
“And you’re not afraid of the game warden?”
“No! They run when they see me. They say, uh uh, here is that crazy old German—with a gun yet!”
Listening to Otto Gruebe’s buffoonery, sitting in his office with a fresh glass of the powerful brandy and his mouth full of intricate tastes, Lewis thought that Otto represented a kind of alternative Chowder Society—a less complicated, but equally valuable friendship.
“Let’s go out and see that dog,” he said.
“Let’s see the dog, hey? Lew-iss, when you see my new dog, you will go down on your knees and propose marriage to her.”
Both men put on their coats and left the office. Outside, Lewis noticed a tall skinny boy of roughly Peter Barnes’s age up on the loading bay. He wore a purple shirt and tight jeans, and he was piling up the heavy molds for pickup. He stared at Lewis for a moment, than ducked his head and smiled.
As they walked toward the kennels Lewis said, “You hired a new boy?”
“Yes. You saw him? He was the poor boy who found the body of the old lady who kept the horses. She lived near you.”
“Rea Dedham,” Lewis said. When he glanced over his shoulder, the boy was still looking at him, half-smiling; Lewis swallowed and turned away.
“Ya. He was very disturbed, and he could not stand to live near there anymore, he is a very sensitive boy, Lew-iss, and so he asked me for a job and got a room in Afton. So I gave him a broom and let him clean the machinery and stack the cheese. It is good until after Christmas, then we cannot afford him so much anymore.”
Rea Dedham; Edward and John; it pursued him even here.
Otto let the new dog out of its kennel, and was hunkering down beside it, rubbing his hands up and down its coat. It was a hound, lean and gray with muscular shoulders and haunches; the bitch did not yip like the other dogs or leap around with joy to be out of the kennel, but stood attentively beside Otto, looking about with alert blue eyes. Lewis too bent to pet it, and the hound accepted his hand and sniffed his boots. “This is Flossie,” Otto said. “What a dog, hey? What a beauty you are, my Flossie. Shall we take you out now for a liddle while, my Flossie?”
For the first time the bitch showed animation, tilting its head and swishing its tail. The well-schooled animal, Otto jug-eared and happy beside it, the nearness of the trees and the pervasive odors of cheese-making, all of this seemed to swing Lewis in an arc away from the blue-jeaned boy behind him and the Chowder Society which lurked behind the boy, and he said, “Otto, I want to tell you a story.”
“Ya? Good. Tell me, Lew-iss.”
“I want to tell you about how my wife died.”
Otto cocked his head and for a moment absurdly resembled the hound kneeling before him. “Ya. Good.” He nodded, and reflectively ran a finger around the base of the hound’s ears. “You can tell me when we go up in the woods for an hour or two, hey? I’m glad, Lew-iss. I’m glad.”
* * *
Lewis and Otto called what they did when they went out with rifles and a dog coon-hunting, and Otto chortled about the possibility of seeing a fox, but it had been at least a year since they had shot anything. The rifles and the dog were chiefly an excuse to go rambling through the long wood which lay above the cheese factory—for Lewis, it was a sportier version of his morning runs. Sometimes they shot off their guns, sometimes one of the dogs treed something: Lewis might have tried to shoot it, but at least half the time Otto looked at the banded, angry animal up on the branch of a tree and laughed. “Come on, Lew-iss, this one is too pretty. Let’s find an ugly one.”
Lewis suspected that if they tried anything like that this time, they’d have to clear it with Flossie first. The sleek little animal was wholly businesslike. She did not go after birds or squirrels like half the other dogs, but padded along in front of them, tilting her head from side to side, her tail switching. “Flossie is going to make us work,” he said.
“Ya. I paid two hundred dollars to look like a fool in front of a dog, hey?”
Once they were up the valley and into the trees Lewis felt his tension begin to leave him. Otto was showing off the dog, whistling to make it go out on a wide tangent, whistling again to call it back.
Now they were moving through thick woods. As Otto had predicted, it was colder and dryer up here than in the valley. In exposed territory melting snow made rivulets, and marshy ground beneath the remaining snow sucked at their boots, but under a curtain of conifers it was as if the thaw had never come. Lewis lost sight of Otto for ten minutes at a time, then caught flashes of his red jacket between green fir needles and heard him communicating with the dog. Lewis lifted his Remington to his shoulder and sighted down on a pine cone; the dog switched and skirmished up ahead, looking for a scent.
Half an hour later, when she found one, Otto was too tired to follow it. The dog began baying, and streaked off to their right. Otto lowered his blunderbuss and said, “Ach, let it go, Flossie.” The dog whimpered, turned around to stare disbelievingly at the two men: What are you clowns doing, anyhow? Then it lowered its tail and walked back. Ten yards off, it sat down and began licking its hindquarters.
“Flossie has given up on us,” Otto said. “We are not in her class. Have a liddle drink.” He offered Lewis a flask. “I think we need to be warm, hey, Lewis?”
“Can you build a fire around here?”
/> “Sure I can. I saw a liddle deadfall back a teeny bit—lots of dry wood in there. You just scoop a hole in the snow, get your tinder and presto. Fire.”
Seeing that the hill came to its rise only twenty yards above them, Lewis climbed up while Otto went back to the deadfall to collect dry wood and tinder. Flossie, no longer interested, watched him stumble upward toward the ridge.
He did not expect what he found: they had come farther than he had thought and below him, down a long forested slope, was a streak of highway. On the other side of the highway the woods resumed again, but the few cars traveling the highway were a despoilation. They ruined his fragile mood of well-being.
And then it was as if Milburn had reached out even here, to point at him on the crest of a wooded hill: one of the cars moving rapidly down the highway was Stella Hawthorne’s. “Oh, God,” Lewis muttered, watching Stella’s Volvo cross through the space directly before him. It, and the woman driving it, brought the night and the morning back to him. He might as well have pitched a tent on the square; even out in the woods, Milburn whispered behind him. Stella’s car traveled up the road; her turn indicator flashed, and she pulled onto the shoulder. A moment later another car pulled in beside her. A man got out and went around to Stella’s window and rapped until she opened her door.
Lewis turned away and went back down the slippery hill to Otto.
He had already started a little fire. At the bottom of a hole scooped in the snow, on a bed of stones, a flame licked at tinder. Otto fed it a larger twig, then another, then a handful, and the single flame grew into a dozen. Above this Otto built a foot-high tepee of sticks. “Now, Lew-iss,” he said, “warm your hands.”
“Any schnapps left?” Lewis took the flask and joined Otto on a fallen log dusted of its snow. Otto dug in his pockets and withdrew a homemade sausage sliced neatly in half. He gave half to Lewis, and bit into his own half. The fire leaped up into the tepee and warmed Lewis’s ankles through his boots. He extended his hands and feet and around a bit of sausage said, “One night Linda and I went to a dinner in one of the suites of the hotel I owned. Linda didn’t live through the night. Otto, I think the same thing that got my wife is after me.”