If You Could See Me Now

  “You look like you’ve had a hard old life, but it’s nice to see you again,” I said.

  “Yeah, we had some good times together, didn’t we? Some real good times.”

  “I had an especially good time on the way over here. A gang of your citizens chased me with baseball bats. I barely made it.”

  He tilted his head back and pushed his lips out. “Would that be the reason you’re sort of late for our reunion?”

  “Our reunion is the reason I’m here at all, and not broken up in the alley behind Freebo’s. They only stopped chasing me because I made it into your parking lot.”

  “You were at Freebo’s. I’d say you spent quite a time in there.”

  “Does that mean you don’t believe me?”

  “Some of the bucks around town are getting all riled. I can believe you, Miles. I don’t suppose you saw these boys close enough to identify them.”

  “I was trying hard not to get that close.”

  “Simmer down, Miles. They’re not going to get you. You’re going to be safe in here, having a little talk. Just simmer down. Those boys will leave you alone.”

  “Some others of your local boys threw rocks at me this noon when my back was turned.”

  “Is that so? You get hurt any?”

  “It’s so and no, I didn’t. Do you want me to forget about that too? Just because they didn’t dent my skull?”

  “I don’t want you to go getting yourself worked up over a bunch of hotheads. I’d say that some of the good people decided that you’d be better off leaving town.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they don’t know you, Miles. It’s simple as that. You’re the only man in about a century and a half had a sermon preached about him. You weren’t thinking of being run off, were you?”

  “No. I have to stay here. I’m involved in something.”

  “Um hum. Real good. Any idea how long that might take you?”

  “Until the twenty-first. After that I don’t know.”

  “Well, that’s not far away. I want to ask you to consider staying up there at Duane’s until we get some things straightened out around here. Is that all right?”

  “What the hell is this all about, Polar Bears? Don’t leave town until the police give me permission?”

  “I wouldn’t put it like that. I’m asking you for a favor.”

  “Am I being questioned?”

  “Hell no, Miles. We’re having a talk. I want your help on something.”

  I leaned back in the stiff chair. I couldn’t feel the alcohol anymore. Galen Hovre was regarding me with a half-smile which held little warmth. My senses were confirming a theory of mine, that when a man’s nature changes his essential smell changes with it. Polar Bears once had carried a dense, pleasant odor of closely packed earth, strongest when he was racing a jalopy at seventy down the curves of Highway 93 or stuffing a mailbox with rocks; now, like Duane, he smelled of gunpowder.

  “Can I count on your help?”

  I looked at this large square-faced man who had been my friend, and didn’t trust a thing he said. “Sure.”

  “You’ve heard about these girls who were killed. Gwen Olson and Jenny Strand. Your neighbor Red Sunderson found that Strand girl, and she wasn’t a pretty sight. My deputy, Dave Lokken out there, lost his cookies when he saw her.”

  “He’s still upset,” I said.

  “Any normal man would be,” Hovre said amiably. “Truth is, we’re all upset around here. This crazy son of a bitch is still walking around. He could be anybody, and that’s the one that gets them by the nuts, Miles. We pretty well know everybody, and folks don’t know what to think.”

  “Don’t you have any ideas about who it might be?”

  “Oh, we’re sort of keeping an eye on someone, but even he’s not very likely, according to the way I see it. Now I’d like to keep this local. I’ve been Chief here for four years, and I want to get reelected so I can keep my family in hamburgers. Now you’re new around here. You might see things we don’t notice. You had a good education, you’re observant. I wonder if you’ve seen or heard anything that might help me out?”

  “Wait a second,” I said. “Do those people who chased me think I did those things? Those killings?”

  “You’d have to ask them.”

  “Christ,” I said. “I’ve scarcely even thought about them. I’ve been busy with my own problems. I didn’t come here for this.”

  “Seems to me it might help you out too if you could think of anything.”

  “I shouldn’t need that. I shouldn’t have to help myself that way.”

  “Seems to me should doesn’t have much to do with it.”

  He had a point. “Okay, I can see that. I don’t think I’ve noticed anything. Just a lot of people acting queer, afraid. Some of them hostile. I met one strange kid, but…” The “but” was that I did not want to say anything that would bring suspicion on Zack or Alison. Zack was just a nutty theorist. Polar Bears lifted his eyebrows in a gesture of uninvolved patient anticipation. “But he was just a kid. I don’t even want to name him. I don’t know what I could say that would help.”

  “Not yet, maybe. But you might remember something. Just keep it in mind, will you, old buddy?”

  I nodded.

  “Yeah. We could have this all on a plate by the twenty-first, so don’t do any unnecessary worrying. Now I got a few other little points to bring up with you.” He put on a pair of thick black glasses, making himself look like a scholarly bald bull of melancholy temperament, and took a sheet of paper off a messy pile. “I guess you got into a little trouble over in Plainview a while ago. I got a report on it just yesterday. A fellow named Frank Drum took the number of your car.”

  “Jesus,” I said, thinking of the slinking little clerk who had been dispatched out of the diner.

  “This was after an incident in Grace’s Restaurant over there. Do you remember it?”

  “Of course I remember. They were like your gang of happy hooligans who tried to beat in my head with bats.”

  “Who chased you.” He looked sharply up from the paper.

  “It’s the same thing. What happened was ridiculous. I saw these guys listening to a radio and they looked like some trouble had happened and I asked what it was. They didn’t like my face. They didn’t like my coming from New York. So they threw me out after they took my license number. That was all. It was around one of the day somebody found the first girl.”

  “Just for the record, do you know where you spent the previous night?”

  “Somewhere. In a motel somewhere. I don’t know.”

  “You don’t have a receipt or a check stub?”

  “It was in a crummy little dive off the freeway. I paid with cash. What the hell do you want to know for?”

  “I don’t want to know. There’s a cop named Larabee over there who wanted me to ask, that’s all.”

  “Well, tell Larabee to shove it up his ass. I was in a crummy motel in Ohio.”

  “Just fine, Miles, that’s fine. Real good. No need to get lathered up all over again. How did you hurt that hand of yours?”

  I looked in surprise down at my bandaged hand. The tape was filthy and beginning to unravel. Loose wispy trails of dirty gauze leaked from beneath the tape. I had nearly forgotten about Duane’s bandage. “I had an accident with my car. On my car. I cut myself.”

  “Dave Lokken can fix you up with a new bandage before you leave. He’s real proud of his first aid skills. When did that accident happen?”

  “That same day. After I left the diner.”

  “According to another fellow in that restaurant, a fellow named Al Service—he’s the official weedcutter in that part of the county—you made a funny remark before you left. According to Service, you said you hoped another girl would be killed.”

  “I didn’t mean that. I was angry. I didn’t even know anyone had been killed then. I just said something like, ‘Whatever it was, you deserve to have it happen again.’ Then I ran like h
ell.”

  He took off the glasses. He rested one jowl in his meaty hand. “I guess that makes sense, Miles. They got you riled. It happens to everybody. Why, you even got old Margaret Kastad worked up, I hear.”

  “Old who?”

  “Andy’s wife. She gave me a call after you left the store. Said you were writing pornography and I should run you off.”

  “I won’t waste time talking about that,” I said. “She holds a few ancient mistakes against me. I’m a different person now.”

  “All of us are, I guess. Guess it doesn’t mean we can’t help each other out. You could do something for me right now, and write out what happened in that restaurant and date it and sign it so’s I can have a copy sent to Larabee. It’s for your own good.” He fished around on his desk and pushed a sheet of paper and a pen across the surface. “Just in general terms, Miles. It doesn’t have to be long.”

  “If I have to.” I took the paper and wrote down what had happened. I returned the paper to him.

  “You’ll give me a call whenever you remember or notice anything?”

  I put my hand in my pocket and felt folded paper. “Wait. Just wait a second. Here’s something you can help me with. Who do you think sent this to me? There was a blank sheet of paper inside it.” I took out the envelope and smoothed it on his desk. My hands were shaking. “It’s the second one. The first was addressed to me.”

  The glasses went back on, and he bent over the desk to take the envelope. When he saw the name, he glanced up at me. It was the first genuine response I’d had from him. “You got another one of these?”

  “Addressed to me. With a blank sheet of paper in it.”

  “Would you let me keep this?”

  “No. I want it. What you can do is tell me who sent it.” I had the sense of taking a great risk, of making a huge error. It was strong enough to weaken my knees.

  “I hate to say this, but it looks like your writing, Miles.”

  “What?”

  He held up my statement alongside the envelope and then turned them so I could see them together. There was a certain superficial similarity. “It’s not my writing, Polar Bears.”

  “Not many people around here remember this particular name anymore.”

  “All it takes is one,” I said. “Just give me the envelope back.”

  “Whatever you say. Only experts can really tell about these handwriting things anyhow. Dave!” He was bellowing at the door. “Get in here with your first aid kit! Pronto!”

  —

  “I heard you callin’ him Polar Bears. Not many does that anymore.”

  Lokken and I were walking down Main Street in the late humid darkness. The few streetlights had come on; I could again hear the buzz of neon signs. Lights burned in the windows of the Angler’s, spilling a rectangle of yellow onto the sidewalk. My hand was encased in gleaming white.

  “We’re old friends.”

  “You’d have to be. That name Polar Bears just drives him up the wall. Where’s your car at, anyhow? I think you’d be safe now.”

  “I’m not taking the chance. He said for you to walk me to my car, and that’s what I want you to do.”

  “Shit, there’s nothing to be ascairt of. There ain’t nobody out.”

  “That’s what I thought last time. If you don’t call him Polar Bears, what do you call him?”

  “Me?” Lokken guffawed. “I call him Sir.”

  “What does Larabee call him?”

  “Who?”

  “Larabee. The chief over in Plainview.”

  “Excuse me, but you musta lost some of your marbles, Mr. Teagarden. There ain’t nobody named Larabee over there in Plainview and even if there was he wouldn’t be chief because Plainview ain’t even got a Chief of Police. They got a sheriff named Larson, and he’s my second cousin. Chief Hovre calls in there once or twice a week. It’s his jurisdiction, like all these little towns roundabout, Centerville, Liberty, Blundell. He’s chief of it all. Where’s your car at, now?”

  I was standing motionless in the middle of the wide dark street, looking at the VW and trying to assimilate what Lokken had said. The condition of my car made it difficult.

  Lokken said, “My God, that’s not yours, is it?”

  I nodded, my throat too dry to form words.

  The windows were smashed, the top and hood bent and battered. One of the headlights protruded like an eyeball on a thin stalk. I ran to look at the front tires, and then went around in back. They were untouched, but the rear window had been smashed in.

  “That’s property damage. You want to come back and tell the Chief about it? You should fill out a report. I gotta make a report too.”

  “No. You tell Hovre about it. This time he’ll believe me.” I could feel anger building up in me again, and I gripped Lokken’s arm and squeezed it hard, making him yelp. “Tell him I said I wanted Larabee to handle it.”

  “But I just told you my second cousin—”

  I was already in the car, torturing the ignition.

  —

  The dangling headlight clattered onto the street before I had gone a block, and as I gunned the car up the first of the hills, just past the high school, I heard a hubcap roll off into the weeds beside the road. Through the starred windshield, I could see only a quarter of the road, and even that was fogged and blurred by the condition of the glass. My single headlight veered between illuminating the yellow line and the weeds, and my emotional condition swung wildly about a giant sense of betrayal. Larabee, was it? Was it Larabee who wanted to know how I’d cut my hand? Was it Larabee who wanted to get reelected?

  I suspected that it was Larabee who would not push very hard to find the men who had tried to attack me, and who had wrecked my car in their frustration.

  Fighting the shuddering car around a tight, ascending curve, I realized that the radio was playing: I had accidentally brushed the button some miles back, and now it was unreeling yards of drivel. “…and for Kathy and Jo and Brownie, from the Hardy Boys, I guess you girls know what that means, a good old good one, ‘Good Vibrations.’ ” Teenage voices began to squeal. I slammed into a lower gear, trying to watch the turning of the road through the web of the windshield as the announcer inserted a voice-over. “The Hardy Boys, far out.” Headlights raced toward me, then slipped past, flaring like the car’s horn.

  The next car flipped its lights up and down twice, and I realized that my single headlight was on bright; I hit the dimming button with my foot.

  “Too much, really too much. Those were the good old days talkin’ at ya. Now for Frank from Sally, a real tender one, I guess she loves you, Frank, so give her a call, huh? Something from Johnny Mathis.”

  On the rises I could see nothing but black empty air beyond the roadbed; I kept the accelerator to the floor, releasing it only when I had to change gears or when the bolts in the car’s body began to shimmy. I flew past the Community Chest thermometer, seeing it only for a second in the headlight. All the beautiful green distance was one-dimensional dark.

  “Hey, Frank, you better watch that little fox, she’s gonna get you, baby. She’s just stone in love with you, so be cool. Little change of pace now—for the junior gym class and Miss Tite, a blast of soulful Tina Turner, from Rosie B—‘River Deep, Mountain High.’ ”

  My tires complained as I suddenly braked, seeing a high wooded wall of stone before me instead of the black road; I cramped the wheel, and the back end fished out and then righted itself in that way which suggests that an automobile is constructed of a substance far more elastic than metal. The oil light flashed and went dead again. Still going dangerously fast, my mind filled with nothing but the mechanics of driving, I came over the last hill and began the straight slope down to the highway in a deep well of unheard music.

  Without bothering to brake I spun out onto the deserted highway. The music pulsed in my ears like blood. Over the low white bridge, past where Red Sunderson must have found the second girl’s body; then a sharp left onto the valley roa
d. I was breathing as hard as if I’d been running.

  “Whoo-ee! Tell that to anyone, but don’t tell it to your gym teacher! All the weirdos are out tonight, kiddies, so lock your doors. Here’s something for all the lost ones, I kid you not, that’s what the card says, for all the lost ones, from A and Z. Van Morrison and ‘Listen to the Lion.’ ”

  At last I became conscious of the radio’s noise. I slowed, passing the narrow drive to Rinn’s house. Dark mounted high on either side—I seemed to be entering a tunnel of darkness. From A and Z? Alison and Zack? “Listen to the Lion”—that was the name of the song. An untrained high baritone glided through words I could not distinguish. The song seemed to have no particular melody. I switched the radio off. I wanted only to be home. The VW sped past the shell of the old school, and a few moments later, the high pompous façade of the church. I heard the motor grinding arrhythmically, and pushed the button to bring the headlight back up to bright.

  Before the Sunderson farm the road makes a tight bend around a red outcropping of sandstone, and I leaned forward over the wheel, putting all my attention onto the two square inches of clear glass. The beam of yellow light flew over the corn. Then I saw something that made me slew the car over to the side of the road and brake. I hurriedly got out and stood on the ridge beside the seat so that I could look over the top of the car to the end of the fields.

  It had not been a mistake: the slight figure was there again, between the field and the black rise of the wood.

  I heard a screen door bang shut behind me and looked up over my shoulder, startled. Lights in the Sunderson home showed a tall husky man in outline on the high sloping lawn. I looked back across the fields, and it was still there. The choice was simple because it was not a choice at all.

  I jumped down onto the road and ran around the front of the car.

  “Hey!” a man shouted.

  In the next second I was over the ditch and already running down the side of the cornfield, going toward the woods. Whoever was up there was watching me, I thought, letting me approach.

  “Stop! Miles! Wait up!”

  I ignored him. The woods were a quarter of a mile away. I could almost hear music. The voice behind me ceased to shout. As I ran toward it, the figure went backward into the woods and disappeared.