Peter Straub - If You Could See Me Now

I said it was fine with me. “Actually, let’s make it seven dollars,” I said. “Otherwise I’d feel like I was stealing from her.”

“Whatever you say. She said five, though, and you probably remember her. Let’s get that beer into the tank.” He clapped his hands together.

The two of us went back outside into the hot sun and the farm smells. Duane’s gunpowder odor was stronger in the open air, and to escape it I reached into the car first and pulled out the case of beer. He trudged beside me up the long path past the baking metal of the pole barn, the granary, and well past that, his white clap-boarded house, to the tank beside the cattle barn.

“You said in your letter you were working on a book.”

“My dissertation.”

“What’s that on?”

“An English writer.”

“Did he write a lot?”

“A lot,” I said, and laughed. “A hell of a lot.”

Duane laughed too. “How’d you pick that?”

“It’s a long story,” I said. “I expect to be pretty busy, but is there still anyone around here that I used to know?”

He considered that as we passed the brown scar where the summerhouse used to be. “Didn’t you know Polar Bears Hovre? He’s the Police Chief over to Arden now.”

I almost dropped the case of beer. “Polar Bears? That wildman?” When I was ten and he seventeen, Polar Bears and I had spitballed the congregation from the choir loft at Gethsemane church.

“He settled down some,” Duane said. “He does a good job.”

“I ought to call him up. We used to have fun together. Even though he always liked Alison a little too much for my taste.”

Duane gave me a peculiar, startled look, and contented himself with saying, “Well, he keeps pretty busy now.”

I remembered another figure from my past — really, the sweetest and most intelligent of all the Arden boys I had met years ago. “What about Paul Kant? Is he still around? I suppose he went off to a university somewhere and never came back.”

“No, you can see Paul. He works in Arden. He works in that Zumgo department store they got over there. Or so I hear.”

“I don’t believe it. He works in a. department store? Is he manager or something?”

“Just works there, I guess. He never did much.” Duane looked at me again, a little shyly this time., and said, “He’s a little funny. Or so they say.”

“Funny?” I was incredulous.

“Well, you know how some people talk. Nobody would mind if you called him up, I guess.”

“Yes, I do know how they talk,” I said, remembering Andy’s wife. “They’ve said enough about me. Some of them are still saying it.” Now we were at the tank, and I leaned over the mossy rim and began putting the bottles down into the green water.

July 16

Sure, I’ll tell you whatever you want to know about Miles. I could tell you lots about that guy. He never fit in up here, you know, when he was nothing but a shrimpy kid, and I could tell right off that he wasn’t going to fit in any better this time. He looked weird, I guess you could term it. He talked like he had a crab hanging on his asshole, city fashion. Like he was making jokes at me. When he said he wanted to see Chief Havre you coulda knocked me down with a feather. (Laughs.) I guess he got his wish, didn’t he? We were carrying beer to put down into my little tank I got there beside my barn, you know, and he said that about Polar Bears, I mean Galen, and then he said he wanted to see Kant (laughs), and I said, sure, you go ahead, you know (laughs), and then he said something, I don’t know, about people talking about him. Then he damn near popped those beer bottles slamming them against the bottom of the tank. But when he really acted strange was when my daughter came in.

The cap on one of the last beer bottles caught my handkerchief when I was pulling my hand out of the tank, and the wet cloth separated from my hand and sank down on top of the bottles. Chilly water tingled and ached in the exposed wound, and I gasped. Blood began to come twisting out like smoke or a flag — I thought of sharks.

“You meet up with something that didn’t like you?” Duane had insinuated himself beside me and was staring heavily down at my hand bleeding into his tank.

“It’s a little difficult to explain.” I snatched my paw out of the cold water and leaned over the tank and pressed my palm against its far edge, where moss grew nearly an inch thick. The throbbing and stinging immediately lessened, inhibited by application of magic substance. If I could have stayed there all day, pressing my hand against that cool slimy moss, my hand would have healed, millions of new cells would have formed every second.

“You dizzy?” Duane asked.

I was looking out across the road to his fields. Alfalfa and tall corn grew in alternate bands on either side of the creek and the line of willows and cottonwoods; a round shoulder of hillside further up was perfectly bisected by the two crops. It was for silage- — Duane had years before given up everything but beef cattle. Up from the bifurcated hillside grew the woods climbing to the top of the valley. They seemed impossibly perfect, like a forest by Rousseau. I wanted to take a handful of moss and go up there to camp, forgetting all about teaching and my book and New York.

“You dizzy?”

Blood was oozing down through the thick moss into the water. I was still looking at the edge of the field, where the rise of trees began. I thought that I had seen a slim figure duck momentarily out of the trees, glance toward us and then slip back into cover like a fox. It might have been a boy. By the time I was fully aware of it, it had vanished.

“You okay?” Duane sounded a little impatient.

“Sure, I’m fine. Do you get many kids wandering around up in those woods?”

“They’re pretty thick. Nobody goes in them much. Why?”

“Oh, nothing. Nothing, really.”

“We still got a few animals up there too. But they’re no good for hunting. Unless you got a rifle can shoot around trees.”

“Andy’s probably got a few of those.” I lifted my hand from the moss. It immediately began to sting and pulse. Due to removal of magic substance.

July 16

He was planning something all along, something that had control of him, you could say. You should have seen him grab onto the tank with that cut mitt of his. I should have known there’d be trouble up in those woods, just by the way he was staring at ‘em and asking funny questions.

Magic substances are those with a sacred, soothing and healing content. When Duane said, “Let’s go up to the house and I’ll bandage that mitt of yours,” I surprised him by ripping out a handful of the thick moss, exposing a gray, rusting section of the lank, and by gripping the green slippery stuff in my wounded hand. I squeezed it tightly, and the stinging pain lessened a bit.

“Used to be an old Indian woman around here who’d do that for you,” Duane said, looking at the pulpy mess in my hand. “Make medicine out of herbs and like that. Like Rinn did, too. But what you got there is liable to get pretty dirty. We’ll wash her out before we put on the gauze. How’d you get a thing like that, anyhow?”

“Oh, it was just a stupid fit of temper.”

The moss had become dark with blood, an uncomfortably soggy thing to hold, and I dropped the messy handful onto the grass and turned to walk up the drive to Duane’s house. A dog lying panting by the granary looked attentively at the bloody pad.

“You get into a fight?”

“Not really. I just had a little accident.”

“Remember that time you totaled that car just outside Arden?”