Peter Straub - If You Could See Me Now

He was watching my reflection in the window glass. I glanced at his revolver hanging in its holster from the side wing of a chair.

I said, “What did you mean the other day when you said something about the killer’s not just being an ordinary rapist? That he might be impotent?”

“Well, you take rape, Miles,” Polar Bears said, moving heavily across the room to lean on the back of the couch. “I can understand rape. It’s always been with us. I’ll tell you what I couldn’t say to a woman. These cases didn’t have anything to do with rape. These things were done by somebody with a bad head problem. Rape isn’t perverted, the way I look at it — it’s almost a normal thing. A girl gets a fellow all heated up so he can’t control himself, and then she hollers rape. The way these girls dress is almost incitement to rape. Hell, the way some girls look is an incitement to rape. A fellow might misunderstand what some bottom-swinging little critter is all about, what she wants. He gets all steamed up and can’t help himself. Fault? Both parties! That’s not exactly a popular point of view these days, but it’s sure enough the truth. I’ve been a cop long enough to see a hundred cases of it. Power, they say. Of course it’s about power. All life is about power. But these cases now weren’t done by any normal man. See Miles, these girls didn’t have any form of intercourse at all — the examiner at the state hospital in Blundell, Dr. Hampton, didn’t find any traces of semen. They were violated by other means.”

“Other means?” I asked, not really sure I waned to hear any more.

“A bottle. A Coke bottle. We found one smashed up beside both Gwen Olson and Jenny Strand. On Strand, something else was used too. A broomhandle, something like that. We’re still looking for it in the field off 93. Then there was some knife work. And they were both beaten up pretty badly before the real fun started.”

“Christ,” I said.

“So it might even be a woman, but that’s pretty farfetched. It’s hard to see a woman being strong enough, for one thing, and it doesn’t really sound like a woman, does it? Well.” He smiled at me from his position behind the couch, leaning forward on his arms. “Now you know as much as we do.”

“You don’t really think Paul Kant did these things, do you? That’s impossible.”

“What’s impossible, Miles? Maybe I did it. Maybe you did, or Duane. Paul’s all right as long as he stays inside and keeps out of trouble.” He pushed himself off the couch and went into the kitchen. I heard an explosive bubbling sound and realized that he was gargling. When he came back into the living room his blue uniform shirt was unbuttoned, revealing a sleeveless undershirt straining over his immense belly. “You want some sleep, Miles. Take care you don’t run off the road on your way home. It was a nice evening. We know each other better. Now scat.”

Through the huge magnifying lenses, Tuta Sunderson’s eyes looked like goggling fish. Sulky, she forced her hands into the pockets of her gray cardigan. For the three days following my late-night conversation with Polar Bears, she had sullenly arrived every morning, noisily tramped around the kitchen, wordlessly cooked my breakfast, and then busied herself cleaning the kitchen and the bathroom while I experimented with the placement of the furniture. The old bamboo and fabric couch went against the far wall, to the left of the small shelves. The glass-fronted case (I remembered it holding Bibles and novels by Lloyd C. Douglas) faced into the room from the short wall by the porch door; the only thing resembling an easy chair sat on the other side of that door; but the other chairs and small tables seemed too numerous, impossible to place — a spindly-legged table with a magazine rack? A cane-backed chair? I was not sure I could even remember them in the room, much less where they had been situated. Perhaps a half dozen other small articles of furniture presented the same problem. Tuta Sunderson could not help.

“It wasn’t always the same way. There is no right way.”

“Just think. Try to remember.”

“I think that little table there went sort of alongside that couch.” She was humoring me, half-reluctantly.

“Here?” I moved it under the shelves.

“No. Out more.”

I pulled it forward.

“If I was Duane, I’d have your head examined. He spent pretty near his whole rebate on that nice furniture. When he told my boy about it, Red went down and got some real nice bargains for me, too.”

“Duane can move this stuff back downstairs when I leave. That table doesn’t look right.”

“Looks good enough to me.”

“Because you don’t understand.”

“I reckon there’s lots I don’t understand. You’ll never get your writing done if you do this all day long.”

“Why don’t you change my sheets or something? If you can’t help me, at least you could get out of my way.”

Her face seemed to fill with water, like a sack.

“I reckon you left all your good manners in New York, Miles.” With that, she visibly gave up on me for the moment, and turned toward the window. “How long before that little car of yours gonna be ready from the filling station?”

“I’ll try them in a few days.”

“Then will you be leaving the valley?” She cocked her head, watching something on the road.

“No. Polar Bears wants me to stay. He must be bored with his usual company.”

“You and Galen pretty close?”

“We’re like brothers.”

“He never invited anyone to his house before. Galen keeps himself to himself. He’s a smart man. Guess you had a ride in his police car. Folks in Arden told Red.”

I moved a chair to a spot beside the oil heater, then moved it nearer the bedroom door. “You seem to have cars on the brain today.”

“Maybe because I just saw someone stop and put something in your mailbox. Not the mailman, It was a different car. Why don’t you go out there where it’s warm and see what you got?”

“Now you tell me,” I said, and went toward the porch. I stepped outside into the sunlight. For the past two days, Tuta Sanderson had taken to wearing a sweater while she worked, in part to irritate me with the anomaly of a cardigan in hot summer weather, in part because the farmhouse was genuinely cold and damp: it was as if a breeze came slicing down from the woods to pitch camp in the house. Behind me I could hear her saying, just loudly enough for me to hear, “Some more of your fan mail.”

Which, in the event, was what it turned out to be: fan mail. It was a single sheet of cheap lined paper torn from a school exercise book, and printed on it was BASTERD YOURE IN OUR SIGHTS. Yes, a familiar image from the movies; I could almost feel the cross-hairs centering on my chest. I looked down the road, saw the nothing I expected to see, and then leaned forward with my arms on the mailbox, making my breathing regular. Twice in the past two days I had received silent telephone calls, bringing me down from my new project to a noise of muffled breathing on which I could smell onions, cheese, beer. Tuta Sunderson said people all talk, and I could guess that there were rumors of the Polish girl’s disappearance. Tuta’s attitude itself, more abrasive since my “suicide attempt,” showed that she had attended to these whispers: she had just thrown back to me my remark about Red’s manners.

As I walked back toward the farmhouse I could see her mooning at me through the window. I slammed the porch door, and she scuttled over to the cupboards and pretended to dust the shelves.

“I don’t suppose you recognized the car?”

Her flabby upper arms wobbled; her rump bobbed in sympathetic motion. “It wasn’t from the valley. I know all the cars hereabouts.” She peeked at me over her fat shoulder, dying to know what I had found in the mailbox.