Peter Straub - If You Could See Me Now

I found that I was standing up on the porch in the gray light of very early dawn, listening to a fire engine. Fog lay across the fields, and carpeted the valley road. As I listened, trying to position the sound of the fire bell, it abruptly cut off. I wheeled around and banged open the door to the living room. Bottle and glass on the floor, dead cigarette on the rim of the ashtray. Paul Kant was still gone.

Numbly, knowing that I had to hurry, I stepped down the porch’s single step. Fog lay in the ruts on the lawn and concealed its burned patches. I went stumbling toward the drive, completely forgetting the car I must have walked right past, and went out onto the road. Then I began to run. Just visible down the road, in the direction of the highway, red suffused the dark gray air.

By the time I reached the Sunderson house I had to stop running, and I walked as quickly as I could without increasing the pain in my chest until I reached the shell of the schoolhouse; then I jogged as far as the church. The red sandstone bluff and the redness of the sky. Andy’s , I thought, and forced myself to run again. I heard men moving, machinery working. When I came around the sharp corner of the bluff I began to run harder. The fire engine was drawn up into the parking lot beside Andy’s and a police car had pulled in slightly ahead of it, to the side of the gaspumps. I heard fire, that terrible raging noise of destroying. But it was not Andy’s that was burning. I could see the flames jumping behind the high white front of the general store.

I thought, remembering: it might have been a motorcycle I heard, not a car. I had been too groggy to tell the difference.

I rushed past the front of Andy’s and around the side.

At first I saw only the blazing facade of the Dream House, rushing into extinction as Duane must so of have wished it to do. It looked transparent, skeletal. The frames of the doors and windows hung darkly, like bones suspended in the red-orange flames. Three firemen in rubber boots and iron hats played a useless hose on the blaze. Steam rose with the smoke. Then I saw Polar Bears calmly watching me from beside the fire-truck; he was out of uniform, dressed in a shapeless sports jacket and brown trousers, and I could tell by looking at him that he had not been to bed. his insomnia had kept him up, working at his bottle of Wild Turkey until the call from the fire department had come. It was still dark enough for the flames to redden the ground and the sky and the back of Andy’s store, and as I walked nearer, I felt the heat. Dave Lokken, in uniform, stood talking to Andy and his wife, both wearing bathrobes and shocked unmoving faces, directly at the back of the store. The fire stained their faces peach. All three noticed me at the same time and stared at me as if I were a ghoul.

Polar Bears motioned me to him. I kept watching the fire; the first boards collapsed inward, sending up a huge shower of sparks.

“Fire bells wake you up?” he asked.

I nodded.

“You got here in a hell of a hurry. Sleeping in your clothes?”

“I wasn’t in bed.”

“Me neither,” he said, and gave me one of his sad paternal smiles. “Care to hear the story? I’ll have to tell you anyhow. You’ll be interested.”

I was looking dumbly at a mess of gray army blankets thrown in a heap halfway between the burning Dream House and the back of Andy’s, and I nodded.

“Of course these boys aren’t really going to do anything with that hose,” he said, “but they might keep the flames from jumping to Andy Kastad’s store. That’ll be the best they could do. The call came too late for them to save that little abortion of Duane’s, but I reckon nobody’ll be too sorry to see that go, least of all Duane. It should of been pulled down long before this. What happened was, Andy and his wife woke up in time to save themselves — claim they heard a noise and then they heard the fire. Both jumped out of bed. They look through the window. Get the scare of their lives.”

I glanced back at Andy and his wife, and thought it was probably true.

“So old Margaret calls the volunteers while Andy runs out the back to do something — he doesn’t know what. Piss on it, maybe. And he sees something. Can you guess what?”

“No.” Polar Bears was using his favorite trick of building up suspense.

“No. No indeed. Say, by the way, Miles, I don’t suppose you happened to see your friend Paul Kant tonight?” his head was cocked, his eyebrows raised, his manner entirely unembarrassed by the digression. Another favorite trick.

“No.”

“Uh huh. Real good. Anyhow, like I was saying, Andy comes boiling out of his back door, all set to pour beer or something all over the fire, and he sees this object in the doorway of the house. Now he’s like you. He can’t guess what it is either. But he thinks he’d better have a closer look. So he runs up, takes a grab and pulls it away. Half of it’s on fire. And when he sees it good and plain, he runs back inside and calls me up too, only Dave and I are already rarin’ out here.”

“What’s the point of all this folksy crap, Polar Bears?” The heat of the fire seemed to be intensifying, grilling the side of my face.

“I thought you mighta guessed.” He put a big hand on my bicep and began to lead me toward the store. “The point is that you got nothing more to worry about, Miles. Everything’s over. I picked the wrong horse, but you’re out in the free and clear as of this moment. It’s like I told you. I missed him, but he missed me too.”

I stopped and looked up into his massive face and saw, operating far beneath the confidential tone and manner, bafflement and anger. He jerked me forward, commanding me to join his charade. I stumbled, and he gripped my arm more tightly. “We’re at the sixteenth of July, old buddy, so if you got nothing holding you here after the twenty-first, I guess you’ll be leaving us. That’s less than a week. Long enough to keep your mouth shut, I guess.”

“Polar Bears,” I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I think I know who you’re looking for.”

“Who I was looking for,” he said.

We were nearly at the heap of blankets, and I was aware of Lokken shooing Andy and Margaret Kastad away. They bustled off somewhere behind me, seemingly glad to leave.

“That was a man he found in there,” Polar Bears said, and bent over like a man about to pick a coin off the sidewalk.

“A man?”

Wordlessly Polar Bears folded back the edge of the blanket.

I was looking at his face. Part of his hair was burned away and his cheek was bloody. His eyes were still open. I felt my knees try to vanish, and I remained standing up only by great effort. Polar Bears touched me across the line of my shoulder blades and I again felt his suppressed anger. It came out of him like the touch of a branding iron. I heard him say, “That’s your ticket out of here, Miles,” and glanced at his fire-reddened features and then back at Paul’s body.

“What’s that on the side of his head?” I asked, and heard my voice tremble. “It looks like he was clubbed.”

“Falling board.”

“They didn’t start to fall until I got here.”

“Then he fell down.”

I turned away.

“One more thing, Miles,” said Polar Bears beside me. He bent over again, flipped back the edge of blanket, straightened up, and used his foot to kick over another section of gray wool. “Look. Something else Andy pulled out.” He took my arm and revolved me like a toy. It took me a moment to recognize what lay exposed beside the kicked-back gray blanket, because the metal had been blackened by the fire. It was the second -gallon gascan from the garage beside the farmhouse.

“How he started the fire,” said Polar Bears. “Plain as day.”