by Peter Straub
“My parents want me to make a lot of money and live eight hundred miles away,” Tom said. “But first they want me to get an engineering degree, so that I can set up a construction business. Mr. Handley wants me to write novels about Mill Walk. My grandfather wants me to keep my mouth shut and join the John Birch society. Brooks-Lowood School wants me to straighten up at last and learn how to play basketball—turn right here, go past the alley, and turn right again onto the next street—Miss Ellinghausen wants me to learn how to tango. Dr. Milton wants me to stop thinking altogether and be a loyal future member of the Founders Club.”
“And what do you want?”
“I want—I want to be what I really am. Whatever that is. Here we are. Let’s stop and get out.”
Sarah gave him an uncertain, questioning look, but pulled over to the side and stopped nearly on the same few feet of roadway where Dennis Handley had parked his Corvette. Both of them got out. In the valley that was Weasel Hollow, the air steamed and stank.
The smell of boiled cabbage that came from the yellow house mingled with the stench of rotting garbage from the fly-encrusted, glistening heap some yards farther down the street. The pile of garbage had grown since Tom had been here with Dennis Handley: several broken chairs and a rolled-up carpet had been added to it, along with five or six stained paper bags. Tinny radios sent conflicting fragments of nearly inaudible music into the air. Far off, a child screeched.
“What was burning around here?” Sarah asked, sniffing.
“A house and a car. The house is a block away, but the car’s just up ahead.”
Sarah stepped out into the empty street and saw it. She turned to look at Tom. “You were here before?”
“The car hadn’t been burned then. The owner abandoned it here because he thought it would be safe. He thought nobody would see it.”
Tom walked into the dusty street and joined her. What was left of Hasselgard’s Corvette looked like a crushed insect left in the sun. The seats, dashboard, and steering wheel had been burned away to metal skeletons; the tires were ashy black chips beneath the rims; the whole body was a blackened shell already turning orange with rust. Someone, probably a child, had hammered at it with a heavy stick and then tossed the stick through the empty windshield.
“Who was the owner?” Sarah said.
Tom did not answer this question. “I wanted to see if they’d really burn it. I was pretty sure they’d burn the house, because it was so destroyed by gunfire that it must have been in danger of collapsing. And they couldn’t be sure of what might be inside it. But I wasn’t really sure about the car. They must have come over on the same night—come right through the lots, carrying their gasoline cans.” He looked up into Sarah’s puzzled face. “It was Hasselgard’s car.”
She frowned, but said nothing.
“You see how they act? How they do things? They don’t even sneak it away on the back of a truck—they just douse it with gasoline and burn the shit out of it. They solve everything with sledgehammers. The people around here certainly aren’t going to say anything, are they? Because they know if they do, their own houses’ll burn up. It wouldn’t even be on the news.”
“Are you saying that the police burned Hasselgard’s car?”
“Didn’t I make that clear?”
“But, Tom, why—”
It seemed, at last, that he had to tell her: the words nearly marched out of his mouth by themselves. “I wrote the letter the police got—the letter was supposed to be about that ex-con, Foxhall Edwardes. Fulton Bishop talked about it at his press conference. It was an anonymous letter, because I didn’t want them to know a kid wrote it. I told them how and why Hasselgard killed his own sister. The next day, all hell broke loose. They killed Hasselgard, they killed this guy Edwardes, they killed a cop named Mendenhall, and injured his partner, Klink, they let loose this huge black cloud—”
He threw up his arms, stopped short by the incongruity of saying these terrible things to a beautiful girl in a blue shirt and white shorts who was thinking about a lost dog. “It’s this whole place,” he said. “Mill Walk! We’re supposed to believe every word they say and keep on taking dancing lessons, we’re supposed to keep on going to Boney Milton when we’re sick, we’re supposed to get excited about a picture book of every house the Redwings ever lived in!”
She took a step nearer to him. “I’m not saying I understand everything, but are you sorry you wrote the letter?”
“I don’t know. Not exactly. I’m sorry those two men died. I’m sorry Hasselgard wasn’t arrested. I didn’t know enough.”
Then she said something that surprised him. “Maybe you just wrote to the wrong person.”
“You know,” he said, “maybe I did. There’s a detective named Natchez—I used to think he was one of the bad guys, but a friend of mine told me that he was close to Mendenhall. And this morning at the hospital I thought I saw that he and some of his friends …”
“Why don’t you go to him?”
“I need more. I need to have something he doesn’t already know.”
“Who’s this friend? The one who told you about Natchez and Mendenhall?”
“Somebody wonderful,” he said. “A great man. I can’t tell you his name, because you’d laugh at me if I did. But someday I’d like you to meet him. Really meet him.”
“Really meet him? This isn’t Dennis Handley, is it?”
Tom laughed. “No, not Handles. Handles has given up on me.”
“Because he didn’t get you into bed.”
“What!”
She smiled at him. “Well, I’m glad it’s not him anyhow. Are we still going to the old slave quarter?”
“Do you still want to?”
“Of course I do. In spite of what my parents want for me, I still haven’t completely given up hoping I might have an interesting life.” She moved nearer to him, and looked up with an expression that reminded him of the first time Miss Ellinghausen had brought them together. “I really do wonder where you’re going. I wonder where you and I are going too.”
She did not want him to kiss her, he saw—it was just that she saw more of him than he had ever expected her to see. She had not questioned or disbelieved him; he had not shocked her: she had taken every step with him. This girl he had just mentally accused of thinking of nothing more than a lost dog suddenly seemed surpassing, immense. “Me too,” he said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have told you all this stuff.”
“You had to tell somebody, I suppose. Isn’t that why you invited me on this excursion?”
And there she was again: in his very footsteps, this time before he had even made them.
“Are you going to introduce me to this Hattie Bascombe, or not?”
They smiled at each other and turned back to the car.
“I’m glad you’re coming to Eagle Lake,” she said, when they were both in their seats. “I have the feeling you might be safer there.”
He thought of Fulton Bishop’s face, and nodded. “I’m safe now, Sarah. Nothing’s going to happen.”
“Then if you’re this great detective and all, find Bingo for me.” She gunned the engine and shot forward.
Tom had been half-fearing, half-expecting that another spell of illness would overtake him as they approached Goethe Park; by now, he scarcely knew what he expected from a visit to Hattie Bascombe, but was certain at least that he did not want to get sick in front of Sarah Spence. He still had not told her that all he knew of the old nurse’s whereabouts was that she lived in the old slave quarter, and that was embarrassment enough.
The street numbers marched from the twenties into the thirties as they drove down Calle Burleigh, and he was relieved to feel no symptoms of distress. Neither of them spoke much. When the row of houses and shops before them yielded to the great cream-colored façade of a church, and after that to trees and open ground, he told her to turn left at the next block, and Sarah went around the nose of a dray horse and through a cloud of bicycles into 35th Street.
For two blocks past the south end of Goethe Park, where young men in jeans and T-shirts played cricket before an audience of small children and wandering dogs, the houses continued neat and sober, with their porches and dormer windows and borders of bright flowers. Bicycles leaned against the palm trees on the sidewalks. Then Sarah drove up a tiny hill where a clump of cypress trees twisted toward the sun, and down into a different landscape.
Beside the grimy red brick and broken windows of an abandoned factory came a stretch of taverns and leaning edifices much added to at their back ends and connected by ramshackle passages and catwalks. On both sides of the street, handwritten signs in the windows advertised ROOMS T? LET and ALL SORTS OF JUNK PURCHASED AT GOOD PRICES. OLD CLOATHES CHEAP. HUMIN HAIR BOUGHT AND SOLD. The wooden buildings on both sides of the street blotted out the afternoon sun. At intervals, archways and passages cut into the tenements gave Tom glimpses of sunless courtyards in which lounging men passed bottles back and forth. From the windows a few faces stared out as blankly as the signs: BONES. WARES BOUGHT.
“I feel like a tourist here,” Tom said.
“I do too. It’s because we’re never supposed to see this part of the island. We’re not supposed to know about Elysian Courts, so it’s kind of invisible.”
Sarah drove around a hole in the middle of the narrow street.
“Is that what this is called?”
“Didn’t you know about the Elysian Courts? They were built to get people out of the old slave quarter—because the quarter was built on a marsh, and it turned out to be unhealthy. Cholera, influenza, I don’t know what. These tenements were put up in a hurry, and pretty soon they were even worse than the slave quarter.”
“Where did you hear about them?”
“They were one of Maxwell Redwing’s first projects, around 1920 or so. Not one of his most successful. Except financially, of course. I guess the people who live there call it Maxwell’s Heaven.”
Tom turned around on the seat to look back at the leaning tenements: their outer walls formed a kind of fortress, and through the arches and passages he could see dim figures moving within the mazelike interior.
They were out in the sun again, and the harsh light fell on the poor structures between the walls of Elysian Courts and the old slave quarter—tarpaper shacks and shanties jammed hip to hip on both sides of the narrow descending street. Hopeless-looking men lolled here and there in doorways, and a drunk swung back and forth on a lamppost with a shattered bulb, revolving south-east, east-south, like a broken compass.
The shanties came to an end at the bottom of the hill. Tiny wooden houses, each exactly alike with a minuscule roofed porch and a single window beside the door, stood on lots scarcely bigger than themselves. The whole of the small area, no more than four or five square blocks, seemed oppressively damp. At the far end of the old slave quarter, visible between the neat rows of houses, was an abandoned cane field that had evolved into a vast, crowded dump; beyond the chainlink fence enclosing the dump was the bright sea.
“So that’s the old slave quarter,” Sarah said. “After you’ve seen Maxwell’s Heaven I suppose you’re ready for anything. Where do we go? You have her address, don’t you?”
“Turn right,” Tom said, having seen something between the shacks.
“Aye-aye,” Sarah said, and turned into the road that ran along the northern edge of the quarter. Before them was an isolated shack, two or three times the size of the others and in noticeably better condition, with a large handpainted sign propped on its roof.
“Go behind that store,” Tom said. “Fast. He’s coming out of her door.”
She looked over to see if he were serious, and Tom pointed to the back of the store. Sarah jerked the car into low and stepped hard on the accelerator. The Mercedes flew over the mud and stones of the road, and skidded to a stop behind the store. It seemed to Tom that only a second had passed since he had spoken. His stomach was still back on the road.
“That fast enough for you?” Sarah said.
The face of a little girl with braids and an open mouth popped into a window at the back of the building.
“Yep.”
“Now will you tell me what’s going on?”
“Listen,” he said.
In a few seconds they heard the clopping of hooves and the creaking of leather.
“Now watch the road,” Tom said, and nodded back toward the way they had come. For a long time, the sound of the horse and its carriage came nearer the shop; then the sound subtly changed, and began going away from them. After a minute or two, a pony trap appeared retreating down the track, driven by a man in a black coat and black Homburg hat.
“That’s Dr. Milton!” Sarah said. “What would he—”
A small scurrying shape hurtled around the side of the building and jumped into Sarah’s arms. When it stopped whirling and began licking Sarah’s face, Tom saw that it was Bingo.
She held the dog in both her arms and looked at Tom, amazed.
“I think Dr. Milton must have seen him somewhere near the hospital, recognized him, and decided to take him on his errand before bringing him back,” he said.
“His errand? In the old slave quarter?” Sarah lifted her chin away from Bingo’s tongue.
“He decided that he told me too much,” Tom said. “But now I know where Hattie Bascombe lives.”
Sarah deposited Bingo in the well behind the seats. “You mean, he came out here to tell her not to talk to you? To threaten her or something?”
“If I remember Hattie Bascombe right,” Tom said, “it’s not going to work.”
Sarah parked behind a pile of fresh horse droppings, and Tom got out of the car. “What if he was just calling on a patient?” she said. “Isn’t that at least a little bit possible?”
“Do you want to come with me and find out?”
Sarah gave him another long look, then patted Bingo on the head and said, “Stay here,” and got out of the car. She looked around at the rows of shacks, at the chain-link fence and the long expanse of garbage. Gulls circled and dove; a faint but definite odor of human excrement and rot came to them.
“Maybe I should have brought my gat after all,” Sarah said. “I’m afraid the rats will come out to get Bingo.” But she came around the front of the car to join him, and together they walked up on the porch. Tom knocked twice.
“Get away from here,” said a voice from within the shack. “Git! Had enough—don’t want any more of you.”
Sarah backed down off the porch and looked toward her car.
“Hattie—”
“You said it all! Now you want to say it all again?” They heard her moving slowly toward the door. In a quieter voice: “I looked at you thirty years, Boney, I don’t have to see you one day more.”
“Hattie, it’s not Boney,” Tom said.
“No? Then I guess it must be Santa Claus.”
“Open the door and find out.”
She cracked the door and peered out. Alert black eyes in a suspicious face took in Tom’s tall figure, then moved to Sarah. She opened the door a notch wider. Her white hair was skimmed back from her forehead, and the lines on her face that had seemed bitter now expressed a surprisingly youthful curiosity. “Well, you’re a big one anyhow, aren’t you? You people lost? How you know my name?” She looked hard at Tom, and her whole face softened. “Oh, my goodness.”
“I was hoping you would recognize me,” Tom said.
“If you hadn’t turned into a giant, I would’ve recognized you right away.”
Tom turned and introduced Sarah, who was lingering awkwardly in the little yard, her hands in the pockets of her shorts.
“Sarah Spence?” Hattie said. “Didn’t I hear from Nancy Vetiver, all that time ago, t
hat you visited our boy here in the hospital?”
Tom laughed at her perfect recall, and Sarah said, “I guess you did. But how could you remember …?”
“I remember about everybody came to visit Tom Pasmore. I believe he was the most left-alone little boy I ever saw, all the time I worked at Shady Mount—you were, you know,” she said directly to Tom. “I hope you two fine young people didn’t plan on spending your whole visit here standing on my porch. You’ll come in, won’t you?”
Hattie smiled and stepped out to hold her door open, and Tom and Sarah went into the little interior.
“Oh, it’s so pretty,” Sarah said, a second before Tom could say the same thing. Threadbare but clean patterned rugs covered the floor, and every inch of the walls had been decorated with framed pictures of every kind—portraits and landscapes, photographs of children and animals and couples and houses. After a second, Tom saw that most of them had been clipped from magazines. Hattie had also framed postcards, newspaper articles, letters, hand-printed poems, and pages from books. She had brought the bent-back chairs and her table to a high shine which was increased by her brass lamps. Her bed was a burnished walnut platform softened by many pillows covered in fabrics; her table looked as though George Washington might have owned it. In one corner a huge birdcage held a stuffed hawk. The whole effect was of profusion and abundance. A dented kettle painted fire-engine red steamed on the gas hob beside the small white refrigerator against the back wall, covered like the others with photographs in frames. Tom saw Martin Luther King, John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Paul Robeson, Duke Ellington, and a self-portrait in a golden robe of Rembrandt that gazed out with the wisest and most disconcerting expression Tom had ever seen on any face.
“I do my best,” Hattie said. “I live next to the biggest furniture store in all Mill Walk, and I’m a little bit handy, you know. Seems like rich people would rather throw things away than give ’em away, lots of times. I even know the houses a lot of my things came from.”