“Now what the hell are you doing?” he screamed.
“I’m putting back the old furniture,” I said, my heart sinking and the foolishness of my entire project momentarily clear. “When I go you can change it all back again. I have to do it, Duane.”
“You’re putting back—nothing’s good enough for you, is it, Miles? You have to spoil everything you touch. You know, I think you’re crazy, Miles. And I’m not the only one around here who thinks so. I think you’re dangerous. You oughta be locked up. Pastor Bertilsson was right about you.” He flicked the flashlight on again and shone it into my eyes. “We’re quits, Miles. I’m not gonna throw you off the place, I’m not gonna pound the crap out of you, but I’m sure as hell gonna keep my eye on you. You can’t get away with squat from now on without my knowing it.”
The light came off my face and played on the few items of furniture still dotted around the lawn. “Goddam you, you’re out of your skull. Somebody ought to put you away.” For a moment I thought that he probably was right. He turned away without bothering to look at me. After he had stomped five or six feet away, I got the flashlight treatment again, but this time he was unable to hold it steadily on my face. “And remember, Miles,” he called. “You stay away from my kid. Just keep off of her.”
It was too much like Auntie Rinn.
I wrestled the other couch over to the abyss and savagely pushed it down. It crashed satisfactorily into the one already at the bottom. I thought I heard wood breaking. I kicked the doors over and shut. It took me another half hour to get the old furniture inside the old house. I just let it sit where I dropped it. Then I opened a bottle and took it upstairs.
FIVE
All my life I have been engaged in Sisyphean and hopeless tasks, and given the ache and flutter in my muscles, it may not be odd that I dreamed of pushing my grandmother uphill in a wheelchair through an obscure territory. We were surrounded by brilliant light. My grandmother was surprisingly heavy. I felt great dread. The smell of woodsmoke burned my nostrils. I had committed a murder, a robbery, something, and forces were closing in. They were vague as yet, but they knew about me and they would find me.
—Talk to Rinn, my grandmother said.
She repeated—Talk to Rinn.
And again—Talk to Rinn.
I ceased pushing the wheelchair. My muscles could no longer bear the strain; we seemed to have been going uphill for hours. I placed my hand on her head and bent over. Gramma, I said—I’m tired. I need help. I’m afraid. The woodsmoke smell swarmed up, occupying the spaces within my skull.
When she turned her face to me it was black and rotten.
I heard three bare, cynical handclaps.
My screams woke me up—think of that, a man alone in a white bedroom, screaming on his bed! A man alone, pursued only by himself. My body seemed heavy and incapable of motion. My mouth burned and my head felt stuffed with oily rags. Result of abuse of magic substance. I gently swung my legs out of bed and sat up, bowing my back and holding my forehead in my palms. I touched the place where my hairline used to be, now smooth and oily skin instead of soft hair. My foot encountered the upright bottle. I risked a glance. It was more than half empty. Evidence of mortality lay all about me. I stood on long sensationless legs. Except for the boots, I still wore Sunday’s clothes, now smudged and crusted with dirt from the root cellar. I could taste my screams.
The stairs were navigable as long as I planted my hands on the close walls.
The furniture at first startled me. It was the wrong furniture in the wrong places. Then I remembered the scene of the previous night. Duane and the flashlight stitching into my face. That too seemed to have the quality of drunkenness. Effects can leak backward and forward in time, staining otherwise innocent events. I sat heavily on the old couch. I feared that I could fall straight through it into another dimension. On Sunday I had told myself that I knew the precise, proper location of all my grandmother’s things. Now I saw that was an illusion. I would have to experiment until the room clicked shut like a tumbler in a lock, itself again at last.
The bathroom. Hot water. Drinking water. I pushed off the couch and avoided the haphazard furniture and came into the kitchen.
Alison Updahl was leaning against the counter, chewing something. She wore a T-shirt (yellow) and jeans (brown). Her feet were bare, and I could feel the chill of the floor as if it were penetrating my own feet.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but it’s too early for company.”
She finally finished chewing, and swallowed. “I have to see you,” she said. Her eyes were large.
I turned away, aware of the presence of a complication I was in no condition to handle. On the table was an untouchable plate of congealed scrambled eggs and shriveled bacon.
“Mrs. Sunderson made that for you, I guess. She took one look in the other room and said she would clean in there after you decided how you wanted the furniture. And she said you busted that old sea chest. She said that was a valuable antique. Her family has one like it and a man from Minneapolis said it was worth two hundred dollars.”
“Please, Alison.” I ventured another look at her. Beneath the tight yellow shirt her large breasts hung heavily, comfortably. They looked like Claes Oldenburg torpedoes. Her feet, surprisingly, were small, white, slightly puffy, beautiful. “I’m too wrecked to go public.”
“I came for two reasons. The first is, I know I did a stupid thing by talking to Daddy about that house. He really blew up. Zack warned me, but I went right ahead and asked him anyhow. That was stupid, all right. What’s the matter with you, anyhow? Are you hungover? And why are you putting all that old furniture and stuff back upstairs?” She was speaking very quickly.
“I’m working on a project.”
That stumped her. I sat down at the table and shoved the cold food away before I could smell it.
“You don’t have to worry about Daddy. He’s real mad, but he doesn’t know I’m here. He’s out in the new fields. That’s way down the road. He doesn’t know about lots of things I do.”
I finally saw that she was being very chatty—too chatty.
The telephone began to shrill. “Shit,” I said, and weakly stood. When I plucked the earpiece off the box, I waited for the caller to say something. Silence. “Who is it?” I got no response. “Hello, hello.” I heard a noise like wings, like the whuffle of a fan, like beating air. The room was cold. I slammed the earpiece down on the metal hook.
“They didn’t say anything? That’s weird. Zack says that telephones can lock you into these waves of energy from outer space, and he said that if everybody took their phones off the hook at exactly the same second all over the world you could get pure outer space energy coming in waves through the receiver. Another idea he had was that if everybody in the world called the same number at exactly the same split second, there’d be some kind of energy explosion. He says that electronics and things like telephones are all making us ready for the apocalypse and the revelations.” There was a doll-like brightness in all of this.
“I need a glass of water,” I said. “And a bath. That’s a hint.” I went to the sink and stood beside her while I watched cool water rush into a glass. I drank it in two or three large inhalations, feeling the water seem to sparkle along veins throughout my chest. A second glass failed to reproduce these sensations.
“Did you ever get any of those calls in the middle of the night?”
“No. I wouldn’t answer it if I did.”
“I’m surprised. It looks like a whole lot of people around here don’t like you very much. They talk about you. Didn’t something bad happen to you once a long time ago? Something did, didn’t it—something all the old people know about?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. My life has been limitless bliss from infancy. Now I’m going to take a bath.”
“Daddy knows about it, doesn’t he? I heard him say something, well he didn’t really say anything, he was talking about it without saying it straight ou
t, on the telephone a couple nights ago. I think he was talking to Zack’s father.”
“It’s hard to think of Zack having parents,” I said. “He’s more the head-of-Zeus type. Now scram. Please.”
She wasn’t going to budge. The water had awakened a sharp floating pain high behind my forehead. I could sense the tension in her, stronger now than my hangover. Alison crossed her arms over her stomach, consciously squeezing her breasts together. I caught her blood smell. “I said I had two reasons. I want you to make love to me.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“He won’t be back for at least two hours. It doesn’t take very long anyhow,” she added, giving me more insight than I wished to have into Zack’s sexual life.
“What would good old Zack think about it?”
“It’s his idea. He said it was so I could learn discipline.”
“Alison,” I said, “I’m going into the bathroom now. We can talk about this later.”
“We could both fit into the bathtub.”
Her voice was light, her face miserable. I was terribly conscious of her thighs in the tight brown jeans, of the large soft breasts, the plump pretty feet on the cold floor. If Zack had been there, I would have shot him.
Mildly, I said, “I don’t think Zack is very fair to you.” She abruptly turned and wheeled out, slamming the door.
—
After my bath I remembered what my conversation with Duane on Sunday had resolved me to do, and I went immediately to the telephone book jacketed with the two small boys suspended over cold water. Paul Kant lived on Madison Street in Arden, but when he picked up the telephone his voice was so faraway and small that he might have been in Tibet.
“Paul, this is Miles Teagarden. I’ve been around for a week or so, and I tried to see you a few days ago.”
“The women told me,” he said. “I heard you were in town.”
“Well, I heard you were in town,” I said. “I thought you would have been off long ago.”
“Things didn’t happen that way, Miles.”
“Do you ever see Polar Bears anymore?”
He gave an odd, bitter laugh. “As little as possible. Look, Miles, it might be better…it might be better if you didn’t try to see me. It’s for your own good, Miles. Mine too, probably.”
“What the hell? Are you in trouble?”
“I don’t know how to answer that.” His voice was strained and very small.
“Do you need help? I can’t figure out what’s going on, Paul.”
“That’s two of us. Don’t make things worse, Miles. I’m saying that for your own good.”
“Christ, I don’t understand what all the mystery is about. Didn’t we used to be friends?” Even through the telephone I could detect an emotion I had begun to recognize as fear. I said, “If you need any help, Paul, I’ll try to help. All you have to do is ask. You should have been out of that burg years ago. It’s not the right place for you. Paul, I’ll be coming into Arden later today. Could I drop in to see you at the store?”
“I’m not working at Zumgo’s anymore.”
“That’s good.” I don’t know why, but I thought of the Woodsman.
“I was fired.” His voice was flat and hopeless.
“Then we’re both out of a job. And I’d think it’s an honor to be fired from a mausoleum like Zumgo’s. I’m not going to force myself on you, Paul, I’ve gotten involved in something that will probably take up nearly all of my time, but I think I should see you. We were friends, way back then.”
“I can’t stop you from doing what you’re determined to do,” he said. “But if you’re going to come, it’d be better to come at night.”
“Why do you—”
I heard a click, a second of the silence Zack had told my cousin’s daughter was laden with waves of energy from outer space, and then the noncommittal buzz of the dial tone.
—
While I was pushing the old wooden furniture around, trying to reconstruct the sitting room as it had been twenty years before, I heard from the second of my two old Arden friends. I set down the chair I had been moving across the room and answered the telephone.
A man asked, “Is this Miles Teagarden?”
“That’s me.”
“One moment, please.”
In a few seconds another telephone lifted. “Hello, Miles. This is Chief Hovre.”
“Polar Bears!”
He laughed. “Not many folks remember that anymore. Mostly people call me Galen.” I had never heard his real name before. I preferred Polar Bears.
“Doesn’t anyone dare call you Polar Bears anymore?”
“Oh, your cousin Du-ane might. I hear that you’ve been making a few waves around here since you came in.”
“Nothing serious.”
“No, nothing at all serious. Freebo says if you went in every day he wouldn’t have to be thinking of selling his bar. Are you workin’ on another book now, Miles?”
So Freebo had passed on my impromptu story about Maccabee’s book. “That’s right,” I said. “I came up here for the peace and quiet.”
“And walked smack into all our troubles. Miles, I was wondering if I could arrange to see you sometime soon.”
“How soon?”
“Like today?”
“What’s it about?”
“Just for a friendly talk, you could say. Were you going to make it in here today?”
I had the disturbing feeling that he had telepathically overheard my conversation with Paul Kant. “I thought you’d be pretty busy these days, Polar Bears.”
“Always time to spare for an old buddy, Miles. How about it? Could you drop in for a talk sometime this afternoon? We’re still around the back of the courthouse.”
“I guess I can make it.”
“Looking forward to it, Miles.”
“But I wonder what would happen if I said I couldn’t.”
“Why do you think something would happen, Miles?”
—
But why? It sounded almost as though Polar Bears (Galen, if I must) had been monitoring my movements since I had come to the valley. Had one of Paul’s enemies seen me pocket Maccabee’s fraudulent book? If so, they would surely have stopped me before I left the store.
Still thinking of this, a little upset by the seriousness of Polar Bears’ tone, I went upstairs and into the workroom and sat before the panel desk. It all felt unbelievably remote, as though another man had removed those diamond-faceted doorknobs and set the flat door upon the trestles. My pitiful notes, my pitiful drafts. I flipped open a folder and read a sentence. “Recurrent in Lawrence’s work is a moment of sexual choice which is the choosing of death (or of half-life) over fully engaged, personalizing life.” Had I actually written this sentence? Uttered stuff like this before students? I bent down and scraped a random lot of books off the floor. I tied them into a bundle with twine and went out of the house and up the path.
“I’ll never read these,” Alison Updahl told me. “You don’t have to give me anything.”
“I know. You don’t have to give me anything either.” She looked at me unhappily. “But at least this was my own idea.”
“Would you mind—would you mind if I gave them to Zack? He’s the big intellectual, not me.”
“Do anything you want with them,” I said. “You’re just saving me the trouble of throwing them away.” I started to turn away.
“Miles,” she said.
“It’s not that I wasn’t tempted,” I said. “I find you extremely tempting. But I’m too old for you, and I’m still your father’s guest. And I do think that you ought to get away from Zack. He’s screwy. He’ll never do anything but injure you.”
She said, “You don’t understand.” She looked terribly unhappy, standing just outside the door on the concrete steps and holding the little heap of books.
“No, I guess I don’t,” I said.
“There isn’t anyone else like him around here. Just like there isn’t anyone like you aroun
d here either.”
I wiped my hand over my face. I was sweating like a band drummer on a hot night. “I won’t be here long, Alison. Don’t make me into something I’m not.”
“Miles,” she said, and stopped, embarrassed. Her habit of assertion saw her through. “Is something wrong?”
“It’s too complicated to explain.” She did not reply, and when I looked into her blunt face I saw the expression of another person whose problems were too complex to be fit easily into verbal patterns. I wanted to take her hand, and nearly did. But I could not lay claim to the spurious authority of age which that would imply.
“Ah…” she said as I turned to go again.
“Yes?”
“It was partly my own idea. But you probably won’t believe me.”
“Alison, be careful,” I said, meaning it as much as I have ever meant anything in my life.
I went back to the old house through the sunlight. My hangover had receded to a not unpleasant sensation of light emptiness. By the time I reached the VW parked before the frame garage I realized that the sun was warming my face and shoulders. Twenty yards to my right, the mare grazed in the torn uprooted field, pretending for the sake of a full belly that it was a cow like its neighbors. The walnut trees ahead of me were thick and burly, emblems of long health. I wished the same for Alison Updahl and myself. I could feel her back there on the concrete porch, watching me go. I wished that I could do something, something strong and direct, to help her. A hawk swung far above the hills across the valley. Down the drive and across the road stood the birdhouse mailbox on its metal stalk. Tuta S. had probably left before the arrival of the mailman in his dusty Ford.
At the box I pulled out a thick pad of folders and envelopes. One after the other I sailed into the ditch letters addressed to Occupant. The last of the letters came in the same envelope as the one addressed to me, and it was written over in the same flowing handwriting. For a moment I thought I read my name on it. Like the previous letter, it had been posted in Arden.
When I finally saw what the envelope said I glanced across the cornfields to the beginning of the woods. No figure stood there gazing with waiting aloof Olympian calm. My hands were trembling. I looked again at the envelope—I was not mistaken. It was addressed to Alison Greening. Care of (my name), RFD 2, Norway Valley, Arden. The sun seemed to penetrate behind my pupils and give me a searing touch. Clumsily, still trembling, I inserted a finger beneath the flap and tore it open. I knew what I would find. The single sheet unfolded itself in my hands. Of course. It was blank. Neither a heart pierced by an arrow nor a black spot nor anything but creamy paper.