Peter Straub - If You Could See Me Now

“What time was this?”

“About six. This morning. Maybe earlier.”

“You were still up at six o’clock?” She tilted her head again. “I just got home. From a date. Anyhow, I just waited to see if you were alive, and then Mrs. Sunderson showed up. She went straight to the phone and called the police. She thought you did it on purpose. Tried to kill yourself. She’ll be back tomorrow, she says. If you want her today, you’re supposed to call her up, In the meantime, I told old man Hovre you’d call him when you felt better.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Thanks for saving my life, I guess I mean.”

She shrugged, then smiled. “If anyone did, it was old man Hovre. He was the one who called me. And if I hadn’t found you, Tuta Sunderson would have. Eventually. You weren’t ready to die.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“You were moving all over the place. And making noises. You knew who I was.”

“What do you mean?”

“You were saying my name. At least that’s what it sounded like.”

“Do you really think I tried to kill myself?”

“No. I really don’t.” She sounded surprised. She stood up and tucked the book beneath her elbow. “I think you’re too smart to do anything like that. Oh. I almost forgot. Zack says thanks for the books. He wants to see you again soon.”

I nodded.

“Are you sure you’re okay now?”

“I’m sure, Alison.”

At the door she paused and turned toward me. She opened her mouth, closed it, and then decided to speak after all. “I’m really happy you’re okay now.”

The telephone began to trill again. “Don’t worry about answering the phone,” I said. “Sooner or later I’ll get it. Polar Bears wants to invite me to dinner. And Alison — I’m very happy you were around.”

“Wait until we’re comfortable before you start asking the serious questions,” said Galen Hovre two nights later, cracking ice cubes from a tray into a bowl. My intuition had been at least partially correct. I was seated in a large overstuffed chair in Polar Bears’ living room, in that part of Arden where I had parked the Nash. Havre’s was a family house without a family. Newspapers several weeks old were piled on one of the chairs, and the red fabric of the couch had become greasy with age; the coffee table supported a rank of empty beer cans. Polar Bears’ pistol hung in its holster from the wing of an old chair. The green carpet showed several darker patches where he had apparently made half-hearted stabs at washing out stains. On end tables on either side of the couch, two big lamps with stands shaped like wildfowl cast murky yellowish light. The walls were dark brown — Havre’s wife, whoever she had been, had fought for unconventionality. On them hung two pictures not, I was willing to bet, of her choosing: a framed photograph of Polar Bears in plaid shirt and fisherman’s hat, holding up a string of trout, and a reproduction of Van Gogh’s sunflowers. “I generally have a little drink after dinner. Do you want bourbon, bourbon or bourbon?”

“Fine,” I said.

“Helps tamp down the grease,” he said, though in fact he had surprised me by being an adequate cook. Pot roast, reasonably well made, may not be notably elegant, but it was not what I had expected from a two hundred and seventy-five pound man in a wrinkled police uniform. Burned venison steaks were more like it, I had thought: virile, but badly executed.

One reason for the invitation had been immediately clear: Polar Bears was a lonely man, and he kept up a tide of chatter all during the meal. Not a word about my supposed suicide attempt, nor about the girls’ deaths — he had talked about fishing. Tackle and equipment, bait, seawater vs. freshwater fishing, fishing then vs. fishing now, boats and “People on Lake Michigan claim those coho salmon taste pretty good, but give me a river trout any day,” and “Course there’s nothing like dry fly fishing for sport, but sometimes I like to take my old spinning rod and just sit by the shallows and wait for that wily old grandad down there.” It was the talk of a man deprived by circumstances or profession of normal social conversation and who misses it badly, and I had chewed my way through several slices of juicy beef and a mound of vegetables in thick sauce while he let the tap flow and the pressure decrease.

I heard him tip a stack of plates into the sink and run water over them; a moment later he came back into the living room carrying a bottle of Wild Turkey under his arm, a porcelain bowl of ice cubes in one hand, and two glasses in the other.

“Something just occurred to me,” I said as he grunted, bending down over the table, and set down glasses, ice, and then the bottle with a deliberate thump.

“What’s that?”

“That we’re all men alone — single men. The four of us that used to know each other. Duane, Paul Kant, you and me. You were married once, weren’t you?” The furnishings and the brown walls made it obvious, even the ducks mounting up one of the side walls; Polar Bears’ house existed, it occurred to me, in symmetry with Paul’s, except that Polar Bears’ bore the traces of a younger woman’s taste, a wife, not a mother.

“I was,” he said, and poured bourbon over ice and leaned back on the couch and put his feet on the coffee table. “Like you. She ran off a long time ago. Left me with a kid. Our son.”

“I didn’t know you had a son, Polar Bears.”

“Oh, yeah. Raised him myself. He lives here in Arden.”

“How old is he?”

“Round about twenty. His mother left when he was just a little runt. She was no good. My boy never had much education, but he’s smart and he works around town on a kind of handyman basis. Got his own place too. I’d like him to join the police, but he’s got his own ideas. Good kid, though. He believes in the law, not like some of them now.”

“Why didn’t you or Duane remarry?” I helped myself to a good dose of bourbon.

“You could say I learned my lesson. Police work is hard on a wife. You never really stop worrying, if you see what I mean. And then, I never found another woman I could trust. As for good old Du-ane, I don’t think he ever really did like women. He’s got his girl to cook and keep house, and I reckon that’s about all he wants.”

I recognized that Polar Bears was making me feel very relaxed, giving me the spurious sense that this was nothing more than a casual evening between two old friends, and I looked at him from, my chair. Light silvered the thick flesh on the top of his head. His eyes were half closed.

“I think you’re right. I think he hates women. Maybe he’s your killer.”

Polar Bears gave a genuine laugh. “Ah, Miles, Miles. Well, he didn’t always hate women. There was one that got to him, once upon a time.”

“That Polish girl.”

“Not quite. Why do you think his daughter’s got that name of hers?”

I gaped at him, and found that his slitted eyes were watching me anything but sleepily.

“Truth,” he said. “I think he even lost his cherry to that little Alison Greening. You weren’t around every summer she was, you know. He was stuck on her, and I mean stuck. Course she mighta gone to bed with him, or done it standing up beside a haystack more likely, but she was too young for that to be public, and she treated him like shit most of the time anyhow. She just tore him up. I always thought that’s why he went and engaged himself to that Polish girl.”

The shock was still ringing in my chest. “You said he lost his virginity to Alison?”

“Yep. He told me himself.”

“But she could have been no older than thirteen.”

“That’s right. He said she knew a lot more about it than he did.”

I remembered the art teacher. “I don’t believe it. He was lying. She used to laugh at him.”