by Peter Straub
“So I’m walking along with my company. Half of us want to throw up. These things, these zombies are watching us go by, most of them too weak to do anything but prop themselves up, and I actually realize what is going on. This is the earth we live on, I say to myself. This is what we call earth. There was no pretending about what was going on in this place. This was it. This was the last stop.”
Bob Bandolier absentmindedly ate a spoonful of oatmeal. His eyes shone. He licked the spoon.
“And why do I say that? Even the Nazis, the most efficient organization on earth, couldn’t move all these people through the gas chambers and into the ovens. Besides the zombies, they had all these dead bodies left over. You can’t imagine. Nobody could. This place, the most horrible place the world has ever seen—it was holy.”
Bob Bandolier noticed he was still holding a spoon and a bowl of oatmeal. He smiled at himself, and began again to feed his wife. Oatmeal bubbled out past her lips.
“Finished, honey? Looks like you had enough for today. Good baby.”
He ran the edges of the spoon over her mouth and scraped off most of the visible oatmeal. He set the bowl down on the bed and turned to Fee, still smiling.
“And then I knew I was exactly right, because we turned into this square where the Germans were waiting for us, and here was this ordinary little house, a fence, a walk to the front door, and in this little lot beside it was the rose garden. With those four bushes full of blue roses.
“I stepped out of the column and went up to the garden. Nobody said anything. I sort of heard what was going on—the captain was taking over from the commandant, and the two of them and some other brass went to the back of the square and into the commandant’s office. What did I care? I was looking at a miracle. In this miserable hell, someone had managed to grow blue roses. It was a sign. I knew one thing, Fee. I was in the only place on earth where a blue rose could grow.
“I wanted to grab people and say, For God’s sake, look at that garden over there, but why waste my time? They were just staring at the zombies or the guards.
“But everybody felt something, Fee.
“I looked each one of those guards in the face. They just stared straight ahead, no expression, nothing in their eyes, no fear. . . . These guys were just doing their jobs like good little cops, they had no more imagination than they were allowed. Except for one man, the one I wanted to find.
“Of course, it was easy. He was the only one who actually looked back at me. He had the moral courage of knowing who he was. Besides that, he saw me standing in front of his roses. Maybe the commandant thought they were his roses, maybe some of the zombies even thought they were their roses, but they belonged to one man only, their gardener. The goddamned genius who was the right man in the right place at the right time. He knew what he had done, and he knew that I knew. He looked straight into my eyes when I stood in front of him.
“You’d never pick him out of a crowd. He was a big bullet-headed guy with a wide nose and little eyes. Big, fat hands and a huge chest. Sort of—sort of like an overgrown dwarf. I would have gone right past him, I almost did go right past him, but then I caught his eye and he caught mine, and I saw that light . . . he was the one. He didn’t give a damn about anything else on earth.
“I stood in front of him and I said, How did you do it? The guys who heard me thought I was asking how he could have treated people that way, but he knew what I meant.
“Our captain and the commandant come out of the office and the captain gets everybody back into formation and tells my platoon to keep watch on the guards. The captain goes away to take care of business. The guys are loading prisoners on trucks, they’re setting up desks and taking down names, I don’t know, my job is to keep an eye on the guards until someone else shows up to take them away.
“Pretty soon it’s just us and the guards in the square. Ten of us; about fifteen, twenty of them. There are Americans running all over the camp by now, the place is organized chaos. I decide to try again, and I go up to the guy, the gardener, and boy oh boy I know I’m right all over again because his eyes light up as soon as I come up to him.
“I ask him again. How did you do it? This time he almost smiles. He shakes his head.
“I want to know about the roses, I say. I point at them, as if he didn’t know what I was talking about.
“Do any of you people speak English?
“A guy off to the left, a tall gray-haired character with a scar on his forehead, sort of looks at me, and I tell him to help me or I’ll blow his head off. He comes up. I say, I want to know about the roses. He can hardly believe that this is what I’m interested in, but he gets the idea, and I hear him say something about blaue rose.
“My guard, the genius, the one man on earth who ever managed to create a blue rose, finally starts talking. He’s bored—he knows this stuff backwards and forwards, he worked it all out by himself and I’m some American private, I don’t deserve to know it. But he’s under arrest, he’ll tell me, all right? He starts spouting this scientific gobbledygook German full of chemical formulas, and not only do I not have any chance of understanding it, neither does the other guy, the other Nazi. The gardener knows we don’t get it.
“When he’s done talking he shuts up, he came to the end and he stopped, like he read the whole thing off a card. Nobody has the faintest idea what he said. Some of the other guys are giving me funny looks, because the zombies get all worked up, they can’t hear what the guard is saying but they’re excited anyhow.
“Picture this. There’s us and them, and then there’s the freak show behind us. On the other side of the guards are the camp offices, two wooden buildings about ten feet apart. Between the offices, you can see walls of barbed wire and an empty guardhouse, maybe fifty yards away. Way off to the left are those chimneys. There’s just a muddy field between the offices and the fence.
“So the gardener spits on the ground and starts walking away. He just walks right through the other guards. Now the zombies are going crazy. The guard is going toward the space between the buildings. The other guards sort of watch him out of the corners of their eyes. I figure he’s going to take a leak, come back.
“One of our guys says, Hey, that Kraut’s getting away.
“I tell him to shut up.
“But he doesn’t stop when he gets to the offices, he just keeps walking on through.
“The rabble is screaming the place down. Some guy says, What do we do, what are we supposed to do?
“The gardener just keeps on walking until he’s in the field. Then he turns around and looks at me. He’s one ugly fucker. He doesn’t smile, he doesn’t blink, he just gives me a look. Then he starts running for the fence.
“You know what he thinks? He thinks I’ll let him get away, on account of I know how great he is. This is what I know—this bastard is taking advantage of me, and I do know how great he is, but nobody takes advantage of me, Fee.
“I raise my rifle and take aim. I pull the trigger, and I shoot him right in the back. Down he goes, boom. One shot. That’s all she wrote. We left him where he dropped. None of the rest of those assholes made a move until the truck came for them, you can bet on that.”
His father picked up the bowl of oatmeal and smiled. “I never even knew his name. For two weeks, me and my platoon, all we did was identify corpses. I mean, that’s what we tried to do. The survivors who could still get around made the identifications and we wrote them down. In the end, the Corps of Engineers dug these big trenches and we just plowed ’em in there. Men, women, and children. Poured lime over them and covered them up with dirt. When I went back to see those roses again, the bushes were all pulled up and chopped to pieces. The colonel came in, and he thought they were the ugliest things he’d ever seen in his life. The colonel said: Rip these ugly goddamned blue nightmares out of the ground and chop ’em up, pronto. The guy who cut them down told me that. You know what else he said? He said they gave him the creeps, too. We’re in a concentration camp, and roses gave him th
e creeps.”
Bob Bandolier shook his head. He leaned over and kissed his wife’s waxy forehead.
“We’ll let her get some rest.”
They returned the bowl and spoon to the kitchen. “I have to go back to the Hepton tomorrow. So you’ll get another day at the movies.” He was mellow and slow; tonight Bob Bandolier was a satisfied man.
Fee could not remember having seen a movie.
“You know what you are? You’re a little blue rose, that’s what you are.”
Fee brushed his teeth and put himself to bed while his father leaned against the wall with an impatient hand on the light switch. Fee’s breathing lengthened; his body seemed to grow mysteriously heavy. The noises of the house, the creaking of boards, the wind moving past his window, the slow chugging of the washing machine carried him to a boat with a prow like an eagle’s head before the similarly proud and upright head of his mother, whose silken hair stirred in the sea air. They sailed far and away for many a day, and he found himself bobbing and blooming in a garden. Bob Bandolier moved his hand toward the pocket of his gray suit and took out a pair of shears.
4
Fee came awake with no memory of what had happened in the night. His father was leaning against the wall, flipping the light on and off and saying, “Come on, come on.” His face was blotchy and white. “If you make me one minute late for work at the Hepton, you are going to be one sorry little boy, is that understood?”
He walked out of the room. Fee’s body seemed to be made of ice, of lead, of a substance impossible to move.
“Don’t you understand?” His father leaned back into the room. “This is the Hepton. You get out of bed, little boy.”
His father’s breath still smelled like beer. Fee pushed back his covers and swung his legs over the side of the bed.
“You want oatmeal?”
He nearly threw up on Bob Bandolier’s perfect black shoes.
“No? Then that’s it, I’m not your personal short-order cook. You can go hungry until you get to the show.”
Fee struggled into underpants, socks, yesterday’s shirt and pants. His father stood over him, snapping his fingers like a metronome.
“Get in the bathroom and wash up, for God’s sake.”
Fee scampered down the hall.
“You made a lot of noise last night. What the hell was the matter?”
He looked up from the sink and saw, behind his own dripping face, his father’s powerful, scowling face. Pouches of dark flesh hung beneath his eyes.
Into his yellow towel, Fee mumbled that he did not remember. His father batted the side of his head.
“What was wrong with you?”
“I don’t know,” Fee cried. “I don’t remember.”
“There will be no more screaming and shouting in the middle of the night. You will make no noise at all from the time you enter your bedroom until the time you leave it in the morning. Is that understood?” His father was pointing at him. “Or else there will be punishment.”
“Yes, sir.”
His father straightened up. “Okay, we understand each other. Get set to go, and I’ll get you a glass of milk or something. You have to have something in your stomach.”
When Fee had dried his face and pulled on his coat and zipped it up, when he went down the hall and into the kitchen with Jude winding in and out of his feet, his father, also enclosed in his coat, held out a tall white glass of milk.
“Drink up, drink up.”
Fee took the glass from his hand.
“I’ll say good-bye to your mother.”
His father hurried out of the kitchen, and Fee looked at the glass in his hand. He raised it to his mouth. An image blazed in his mind and was banished before he had even a glimpse of it. His hand started shaking. In order to keep from spilling the milk, Fee swung the glass toward the counter with both hands and set it down. He moaned to see a pattern of little white drops on the counter.
“God damn, God damn, GOD DAMN,” his father shouted.
Fee wiped the dots of milk with his hand. They turned to white streaks, then smears, then nothing. He was panting, and his face was hot.
Bob Bandolier raged back into the kitchen, and Fee quailed back against the cabinets. His father seemed hardly to notice him as he turned on the water and passed a dish towel back and forth beneath the stream. His face was tight with impatience and disgust.
“Go outside and wait for me.”
He hurried back toward the bedroom. Fee poured the milk into the sink, his heart beating as if he had committed a crime.
Jude followed him to the front door, crying for food. He bent over to stroke the cat, and Jude arched her back and made a noise like fat sizzling in a pan. Still hissing, she moved back several steps. Her huge eyes gleamed, but not at Fee.
Fee groped for the doorknob. Through the open bedroom door, he saw his father’s back, bent over the bed. He turned around and pulled the door open.
Standing before him were the Sunchanas, he in a suit, she two steps behind him in a checked robe. Both of them looked startled.
“Oh!” said Mr. Sunchana. His wife clasped both hands in front of her chest. “Fee,” she said, and then looked past her husband into the apartment. The cat sizzled and spat.
“David,” said Mrs. Sunchana.
David took his eyes from Fee and looked over his head toward whatever his wife had seen. His eyes changed.
Slowly, Fee turned around.
Bob Bandolier was stepping away from the bed, holding stretched out between his hands a dish towel blotched with brilliant red. The usual odor floated from the bedroom.
Something black and wet covered his mother’s chin.
Bob Bandolier dropped one end of the cloth and began moving toward the bedroom door. He did not shout, although he looked as though he wanted to yell the house down. He slammed the door.
“Last night—” said Mr. Sunchana.
“We heard you last night,” said Mrs. Sunchana.
“You were making a lot of noise.”
“And we were worried for you. Are you all right, Fee?”
Fee swallowed and nodded.
“Really?”
“Yes,” he said. “Really.”
The bedroom door burst open, and Bob Bandolier stepped out and immediately closed the door behind him. He was not holding the dish towel. “Haven’t we had enough violations of our privacy from you two? Get away from our apartment or I’ll throw you out of this house. I mean it.”
Mr. Sunchana backed away and bumped into his wife.
“Out, out, out.”
“What is wrong with your wife?” asked Mrs. Sunchana.
Fee’s father stopped moving a few feet from the door. “My wife had a nosebleed. She has been unwell. I am in danger of being late for work, and I cannot allow you to delay me any longer.”
“You call that a nosebleed?” Mrs. Sunchana’s wide face had grown pale. Her hands were shaking.
Bob Bandolier shut the door and waited for them to retreat up the stairs.
Outside, white breath steamed from his father’s mouth. “You’ll need money.” He gave Fee a dollar bill. “This is for today and tomorrow. I hope I don’t have to tell you not to talk to the Sunchanas. If they won’t leave you alone, just tell them to go away.”
Fee put the bill in his jacket pocket.
His father patted his head before striding down South Seventh Street to Livermore Avenue and the bus to the Hotel Hepton.
5
Fee paused again on his way to the Beldame Oriental, feeling dazed, as if caught between two worlds, and stared down into the moving water.
A huge man with warm hands was waiting to pull him into a movie.
6
Most of the seats are empty. The big man with kind eyes and a flaring mustache looms beside you. He puts his arm around your shoulders. A Negro boxer knits his forehead and batters another man. Mrs. Sunchana accepts her crown. She looks at him, and he whispers nosebleed. God’s arm tightens arou
nd his shoulders and God whispers nice boy. The cat chased the mouse on whirling legs. I know you’re glad to see me. God’s hand is huge and hot, and the gray slab of his face weighs a thousand pounds. You came back to see me. With Robert Ryan, Ida Lupino, and William Bendix. You could hear Jerry’s ghost sobbing in the black-and-white shadows. Charlie Carpenter sat in a long quiet church and turned his attention to God, who chuckled and took your hand. Candles flared and sputtered. Mrs. Sunchana bowed her head at the edge of the frame. You don’t remember what we did? You liked it, and I liked it. Why did God make lonely people? Answer: He was lonely, too. Some of my special friends come to visit and we go into my basement. You’re the special friend I go to visit, so you’re the most special of all the special friends. There is a toy you have to play with now. Lily Sheehan takes Charlie Carpenter’s hand. Here it is, here’s the toy. Lily smiles and places Charlie’s hand on her toy. Unzip it, God says. Come on. Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco. I’d Walk a Mile for a Camel. You see it, here it is, it’s all yours. You know what to do with it. Little dear one. God is so stern and tender. Have a cigarette, Charlie. It likes you, can’t you see how much it likes you? Random Lake is a pretty nice lake. I need you to help me. Here we are, on Fenton Welles’s long lawn. If you stop now, I’ll kill you. Hah hah. That’s a joke. I’ll cut you up and turn you into lamb chops, sweetie-pie, I know how to do that. But here is the envelope marked ELIJAH, here are the photographs. Every one of those soldiers has one like mine, a big thick one that likes to come out and play. The dog jumps up from Fenton Welles’s lawn and you smash its head in with a stick. You are kissing a long kiss. Smoke from his mouth fills the air. God placed both hands on the sides of your head and pushed your head down toward the other little mouth. Hello, Duffy’s Tavern, Duffy speaking. Jack Armstrong, the all-American boy. Welcome to the Adventures of. The roaring in his ears. He pushed the big thing into his cheek so he would not gag, but God’s hands raised his head and lowered it again. Charlie and Lily kissed and Lily’s penis threshed out like a snake. A woman should put your mouth on her breast, and milk should flow. I’m all the soul you need. The second you take it in your mouth, it moves—it twitches and shoves itself upward. God’s pleasure makes Him sigh. His hand around yours. Now kiss. They are burning photographs, the smell is harsh. The taste is sour burning. Wait for it, the music says. Mrs. Sunchana covers her face. The world bursts into flame. From up out of that long thing, all the way up from its bottom, from the deep bottom of the well, it rushes. God presses His hands against your head. You open your mouth and smoke and drool leak out. If he wanted, God could drown the world. Maxwell House Coffee Is Good to the Very Last Drop. The tiny Arab man on the lip of the huge tilted cup. What is in your mouth is the taste of bread. The taste of bread is warm and silky. To be loved. Charlie in his good suit rides the train, and the girls stare. Bunny is good bread. A normal girl is attracted by a handsome man. Invisible blood, God’s blood, washes through the world. Charlie Carpenter rides across the lake and water mists his lapels. You can lean back against God’s giant chest. His hand strokes your cheek. Jack Armstrong eats Wheaties every day. The boat slides into the reeds. Water-music, death-music. God rubs your chest, and His hand is rough. Make big money selling Christmas cards to all your neighbors. The hotel business is America’s business. Don’t you think that they all take towels, the big guys? The best hamburgers come with the works. Charlie shoved the boat into the reeds, and now he strides across the lawn to Lily’s house. Oh the face of Charlie Carpenter, oh the anger in his stride. You could be crushed to death. This man is holding on. The little Arab clings to his giant cup. What grows out of him is not human, that thing is not human. His arms surrounding you, blue rose, little blue rose.