If You Could See Me Now (14 page)

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 hell.”

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 road. 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.

“I see you!” the man shouted.

I didn't bother to turn around: the vanishing of the figure into the woods made me run even harder, even more clumsily, forgetting the technique I had learned in the police parking lot. The ground was hard and dry, covered with a light stubble, and I pounded along, keeping in view the place where the figure had last been. Beside me, the corn was higher than my head, a solid dark mass beyond the first rows.

The boundary of the first row of fields, from the highway to the farm just beyond Duane's, is formed by a small creek, and it was this that gave me my first difficulty. The plowed and farmed land ended about eight feet on either side of the creek; when I reached the end of the corn planting, I looked to my left and saw an area of beaten-down tall grass and flattened weeds where apparently Duane customarily drove the tractor through to the upper fields. When I ran there and began to approach the creek, I saw that the ground had been churned by the tractor so that the whole area was a muddy swamp. There the creek was four or five feet wider than anywhere else, spilling out into the depression the tractor had made. I walked back along the bank; birds and frogs announced themselves, joining the cricket noises that had surrounded me since I had left the road. My boots were encased in soft mud.

I pushed tall fibrous weeds apart with my arms and saw a narrowing of the creek. Two hairy grassy bulges of earth made an interrupted bridge over the water; the bulges, about a yard and a half apart, were supported by the root systems of two of the cottonwood trees which grew all along the creek's length. I circled one of the trees and edged out on the root-hump and jumped across, banging my forehead and nose into the trunk of the tree on the opposite side. Crows took off in noisy alarm. Still clutching the tree with both arms, I looked back over the
cornfield and saw the VW parked on the valley road before the Sunderson house up on its hill. Light came beaming out from both house and car—I had forgotten to turn off the engine. Worse, I had left the key in the ignition. Mrs. Sunderson and Red were standing at one of the windows, cupping their hands to their eyes and staring out.

I jumped down from the humped tangle of roots and, after struggling through another area of thick weeds, began to jog up through the next field. I could see the place where I thought the figure had slipped into the woods, and pushed myself up over a rise where alfalfa gave way to corn again. In a few minutes I was at the beginning of the trees.

They seemed sparser, less a thick homogeneous mass than they had appeared from the road. Moonlight made it possible for me to see where I was going once I had begun to run through the widely spaced trees. My feet encountered the edges of large rocks and the yielding softness of mold and beds of pine needles. As I ran deeper into the trees the impression of sparseness quickly diminished: the ghostly pines and birches slipped behind me, and I was moving between oaks and elms, veterans with rivered barks which blocked out nearly all the light. I came to a jog and then stopped, hearing an excited rustle of movement off to my left.