If You Could See Me Now (11 page)

Then I looked around at the room. Most of it was going to have to go. I was going to make an Alison-environment: I was going to re-create, as nearly as possible and with a few added embellishments, the room of twenty years before. Duane's office furniture could go down into the root cellar where my grandmother's old furniture now sat. I wasn't sure that I could single-handedly manage some of the heavier pieces down the rough steps of the root cellar, but there was no other choice. It was what I was going to do.

The doors to the root cellar were set into the ground at a slightly elevated angle just at the end of the porch. You swung them up and let them drop open to the sides—it was the most old-fashioned and rural of arrangements, and I suspected that Duane's dark cellar, though modernized by the introduction of a staircase leading down from the body of the house, was originally of similar construction. With some effort I pulled one of the doors up and open, nearly straining my back; time had cemented the two doors together.

The earthen stairs looked treacherous, half-crumbled away and very steep. Some of the damage was old, but Duane had shredded some of the steps when he had taken the old furniture down. I put one foot on the first of the stairs and tested my weight. The earth was reassuringly resilient and firm. After trying a few more steps I became careless and put my foot down without looking, and the earth gave way beneath it, sending me sliding three or four feet down across a terrace of crumbling dirt. When I was steady again I put my feet solidly on a thick step and braced my shoulder under the other door and pushed with my body and legs. The door strained and flew open on complaining hinges. Now light entered nearly the whole of the root cellar. That wonderful old furniture lay in heaps and piles like stew bones. Like the garage, the cellar smelled like a grave. I began to pull my grandmother's furniture out of the dark hole of the root cellar and up into the sunlight.

I worked at this task of reclamation until my shoulders and legs ached and my clothes were covered with dirt. There was more furniture in the cellar than I had thought, all of it essential. I needed every footstool and end table, every lamp and bookcase. Too exhausted to continue, I went inside and made sandwiches from Saturday's groceries. When I had pushed
down the food, I went back out with a pail of soapy warm water and washed off what was on the lawn; that completed, I went back down the crumbled steps and began to wrestle out more things. I could remember where every stick of it had been placed, I could see the room as it had been twenty years before and would be again. She had touched every bit of this furniture.

By the time the light had begun to fail, I had it all out on the lawn and washed. The fabrics were worn, but the wood was clean and shining. Even on the lawn beside the white house in the fading light, it all looked magically appropriate—that is to say no more than that it had the rightness of all things made and used with care. That beautiful worn old stuff could make you weep. The past was enshrined in it. Just sitting out there on the lawn in the dusk, it evoked the entire history of my family in America. Like them, it was solid, it was right.

Unlike Duane's office furniture, which merely looked naked and stunned and stupid when dragged outside. There was less of it than there had seemed. It had a negative relation to spirit.

I made the mistake of taking the lighter pieces, the dreadful pictures and lamps and chairs, down into the root cellar first. Under one of the lamps I found two neatly folded dollar bills. Under different circumstances, I might have admired the gesture, but it was proof of how badly I had acted. I finished with the light things in a disproportionately bad temper. That left me with the job of handling the heavy couches and the two heavier chairs when I was almost too tired to move them further, and in the dark. I had only the light from the porch and pale early moonlight, and the battered earthen steps, in many places now worn to a continuous pitted incline, were visible only at their top. The first chair went down easily; I carried it in my trembling
arms and felt my way slowly along the ruined steps. But when I tried it with the second chair, I lost my footing on an incline of dirt and fell all the way to the bottom.

To complete that Buster Keatonish stunt I should have landed on the dirt floor seated comfortably in the embrace of the chair; but I landed sprawled half over, half under it, with pain radiating out from all of my left leg, ankle to thigh. It did not feel broken, but one of the chair's legs was, dangling from ripped fabric like a dead tooth. Cursing, I ripped it off and threw it into a corner. I disposed of the chair in much the same way.

After that, I had no patience with the couches. I was not going to baby them down the slope. I shoved the first up to the lip of the cellar, nudged it over until it was set, and let go of the arm. It crashed down to the bottom. I grunted with satisfaction and was turning to the second when I became aware of a flashlight bobbing toward me.

“Goddam you, Miles,” Duane said. The flashlight was held on my face. In a moment he had moved into the area of light from the porch.

“You don't need a flashlight to see it's me.”

“No, even on a dark night I'd know it was you.” He flicked off the flashlight and stepped closer to me. His face was savage. “Goddam you. I wish you'd never come back here. What the hell were you thinking of anyhow? You fucking bastard.”

“Look,” I said, “I know it looks funny, but—” I realized that as far as anger was concerned I was an amateur. Duane's face seemed to be inflating.

“Is that what you think? You think it
looks
funny? Now
you
look. If you had to go and talk about that goddam house, why did you have to talk about it with my daughter?”

I was too stunned to reply.

He glared at me for another long moment, and then whirled to the side and banged his hand against one of the porch supports.

That was when I should have started to worry—when I was given special dispensation.

“Don't you have an answer? You shit, Miles. Everybody's forgotten about that house by now. Alison was never going to find out. In a little while, the goddam thing was going to fall over anyhow. She'd never know. Then you come along and tell her it was my ‘dream house,' huh? Then she can get one of the drunken bums in Arden to tell her all about it, can't she? I suppose you wanted to get her to laugh at me, just the way you and your cousin used to do.”

“It was a mistake, Duane. I'm sorry. I thought she knew already.”

“Bullshit, Miles, bull
shit
. My dream house, isn't that what you called it? You wanted to make her laugh at me. You wanted to humiliate me. I should pound you into the ground.”

“Maybe you should,” I said. “But if you're not going to, then listen to me. It was an accident. I thought it was something everybody knew.”

“Yeah, that makes me feel real good. I should break you up.”

“If you want a fight, give it a try. But I'm apologizing to you.”

“You can't apologize for that, Miles. I want you to stay away from my daughter, hear that? Stay away from her, Miles.”

He might not ever have noticed the furniture around us if he hadn't thumped his hand into the couch. Pure furious astonishment replaced the rage in his face.

“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.

A
ll 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 out, 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.”