Strangers (20 page)

Ten minutes later, Vern Engelking to pick up Michael. Vern’s flamboyance and his room-illuminating smile were like orange juice for the soul, Beth thought. You felt good just being in the same room with Vern.

Beth realized that what she felt for Vern was far stronger than mere “like” and was in fact the kind of “happy-love” reserved for a special uncle: the uncle who does magic, reaching behind your ear and finding a quarter, and then gives you the quarter. “Could I fix you some breakfast, Vern?” Beth said.

“Ah, far be it from me to impose,” Vern said, “howsomever, before departing my domicile, I had but a cup of coffee, and so…”

“One egg or two?” Beth asked.

“Two, if you please,” Vern said.

Twenty minutes later, she saw the two men off. Michael assured her he’d be back tomorrow afternoon in plenty of time to watch the kids when she went to her class at Lincoln Junior College.

When she went to refill her coffee cup, Beth saw the hesitant rays of the rising sun through the window above the sink. It was a quiet and
good
time, she thought, and she relished having it all to herself. The kids wouldn’t have to be up to
get
ready for school for another forty-five minutes or so. She didn’t even disturb her private sunrise silence time by turning on the radio.

She brought her abnormal psychology book to the table and looked over chapters one and two. She’d already thoroughly studied the material, highlighting important sections with yellow marker and making notes, but she found it a distinct pleasure to look at intellectual data and realized she did indeed have the mental equipment to process it. After years of mental stagnation, nothing more challenging than an occasional
Reader’s Digest
quiz, she had truly feared that she’d no more be able to understand a college level text than she could Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.

That was a foolish fear, she told herself. Then again, weren’t
most
fears foolish, without basis? That’s what she thought, anyway, on a morning that felt as uniquely right as did this one.

But that sense of rightness seeped away from Beth Louden’s morning.

Because when the girls were dressed and ready for school, at the breakfast table, Marcy was unhappy and Kim was quarrelsome. Snowball, Marcy said despairingly, the white guinea pig, wasn’t in the cage, Mom, and he was lost, and she’d looked all over for him, and Kim had been playing with him last night…

Well, Kim protested, she could certainly play with Snowball anytime she wanted to! After all, Snowball wasn’t Marcy’s anymore. Marcy gave Snowball…

But that didn’t mean Kim didn’t have to take good care of Snowball! Just because…

Well, Kim did
so
take good care of the guinea pig and she remembered “for sure” she had put him back in the cage and…

Beth in her sternest, no-nonsense, I-am-not-kidding voice told both children to “Stop it and I do mean now!”

“I just don’t want him to get hurt if he’s out of the cage, Mom,” Marcy said. Beth softened when she saw Marcy’s worried look.

Beth said, “Don’t worry. This isn’t the first time we’ve had a guinea pig decide to take a trot around the house. He’ll be all right. I’ll be house-cleaning today so I’ll bet you I find him real quick.”

“It’s
still
not my fault Snowball’s loose!” Kim insisted, sticking out her tongue at her sister.

Beth sighed. “Kim, put your tongue back in your mouth before that gets lost, too.”

Kissing the girls goodbye as they headed off for the corner to wait for the school bus, Beth again reassured Marcy that Snowball would be found.

An hour later, she did find the guinea pig.

After she showered and slipped on “cleaning day grubbies,” Beth vacuumed the downstairs, taking time out to admire lovingly Michael’s beautiful surprise, the—
her
—antique crystal lamps, then polished the furniture and watered all the indoor plants.

She went upstairs and dusted the girl’s room, wondering how she might in a nonjudgmental manner
suggest
that Kim try a bit more organization, order, and
(ugh!)
cleanliness; dirty underpants did not belong under the bed!

Hanging Kim’s lightweight vinyl jacket in the closet, thinking that all too soon it would be time to get out winter clothing, Beth happened to look down.

Snowball was smashed between the dresser and the wall’s baseboard. Beth knelt. It looked as though the animal had wedged itself into this spot and then had
killed
itself with frantic, futile efforts to escape. Beth touched the guinea pig’s fur. It felt as artificial as the plastic bristles of a hairbrush. She had to move the dresser an inch to free the tiny corpse.

Stiff and cold, the guinea pig lay in her hand.
Marcy loved this furry, innocent thing and now it is dead,
she thought.

And then Beth shuddered and squelched an angry black impulse to throw the guinea pig to the floor, to rid herself not of it but of what it represented—Death!

Death was everywhere! Death was next door,
DustyandBrad,
and Death was stalking the Loudens, the skeletal hand of Death brushing Kim, teasing her when the car had almost… And now…
Death is inside our house. Death surrounds us, hisses at us,
wants
us!

Beth took a deep breath. There were more coincidences in life than there were connections, she told herself, and it was sad that Snowball had needlessly died, but that’s all it was.

She found a shoebox for Snowball. When the girls came home from school, there would have to be a funeral, a small grave by the garden. As sensitive as Marcy was, that would be of comfort to her.
And a lecture about responsibility for Kim as well?
Maybe, Beth decided, although perhaps what had happened was
lesson
enough of itself.

Beth thought she was all right; she really did. But in the kitchen, pouring a cup of coffee, her hand shook. She looked out the window. The sun was shining.

The sun shone but the day was
wrong.

There really was a business meeting set for 3:30 that afternoon with the St. Louis supplier of paper towels and so, after leaving Park Estates and swinging south onto 1-57, they talked about that. Yes, they were getting the best wholesale price possible; even with a standard eighty percent mark-up, Superior Chemical was able to undercut the price of competing janitorial supply firms. But quality control wasn’t all that it could be; towels sometimes jammed in dispensers. Worse, too often the supplier felt free to make substitutions and maybe there was no difference in the feel of “Pure White,” stock number 34057 and “Creme,” number 34059, but customers did complain, and so the president of Superior Chemical and the national sales manager were going to “iron things out.”

Of course the ironing out could have been as easily accomplished with a letter or telephone call. This trip’s real business was Herb Cantlon.

Herb Cantlon!
Michael thought.
That goddamned bloated piece of meat!
Uh-huh, the
important
meeting—Su
rprise, Herby, you fat fucker—
wasn’t in
St. Louis; it was about an hour and a half back on up the road to Mt. Claron, Illinois. Eddie Markell was arranging it. No severance pay for Cantlon. No meaningless, euphemistically worded letters of reference. Herb’s association with Superior Chemical was going to be painfully terminated.

Goddamn!
Michael felt a surge of power within him, electrical in its intensity. It was as though the human shell he was forced to wear was far too small and confining for the reality of his being, The Stranger who walked through the world, his invisible aura glowing with the red promise of blood.

A promise soon to know fulfillment!
Michael thought, as he gazed out the Buick Regal’s window at the endlessly flat landscape of central Illinois that whizzed by. He could picture these drab, quiet farmlands flooded with gore, the, United States, the entire world awash in a unifying ocean of blood—the Time of the Stranger.

That was what Jan Pretre had vowed.

Seeing Jan last Saturday had given him renewed hope in The Strangers’ destiny of death. It had shaken him as well, caught him off-guard and left him with question.

“Vern?” Michael said

 
“Yes, Michael?”

“I want to ask you something.

Vern turned his head to smile benignly at Michael. “One inquires and one learns, Michael. Isn’t that American folk wisdom?”

“I’m serious, Vern.” Michael said.

“All right.”

“Did you know Jan Pretre and I knew each other, that we met a long time back?”

Now Vern was staring straight ahead, his brows set as though he were peering through a misty drizzle and not looking out through the windshield on a remarkably clear day. In a voice devoid of his typical theatrical enunciation, Vern said, “Yes, Michael. I know all about Jan and you. I’ve known for a long time.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me he was going to be at your place, Vern? Is there something I’m being left out of?”

Vern didn’t answer for over a mile and when he did respond, he did not look at Michael. “There have been things I’ve been told
not
to tell you, Michael.” Vern spoke quietly but without any note of apology.

“Told by whom?” Michael said.

“Jan,” Vern said.

Michael frowned. “I don’t understand.”

Vern chuckled humorously. “And I’m sure there are things happening that I don’t understand, either. That’s not important. What is important,
Michael,
is that
Jan
understands. He’s been in contact with me for a long time. Oh, years would pass when I wouldn’t hear from him, and then there’d be a letter or a phone call and he’d tell me to do something and I would. We have to trust Jan, Michael. Of all of us, he is the one with the clearest vision, the greatest power.”

Vern paused and another flat Illinois mile went by. Then Vern said, “There’s something I can tell you now, Michael, that I couldn’t before. Years ago Jan told me to hire you because you were one of us. Do you remember that?”

Michael’s memory was sharp and vivid. There’d been a letter from Superior Chemical Company, informing him that the firm was seeking a new salesman for the south suburban territory and that…
blah-blah-blah
. Mr. Engelking, the president of the corporation, invited Michael to dinner and they’d discussed floor mats and urinal deodorant blocks and waterless head-cleaners and then, over dessert—Vern had had a Napoleon, Michael recalled, and he himself had ordered cheesecake—Vern had said, “I do think you ought to give my offer serious consideration. You see, you are a Stranger and so am I!”

Later, that evening, Michael had proof of what Vern Engelking had said. They went to Chicago’s Rush Street, found a prostitute, and cut her throat, cut it raggedly but so completely that her head was attached to her neck by only stringy tendons and a flap of skin. “I knew you were
our
kind of man, Michael,” Vern had said. “Welcome to the company.”

But
how
had Vern known? Michael had asked.

“I’m not at liberty to reveal that now, Michael. Can you simply trust me?” Vern Engelking had offered his hand.

Michael could trust him, did trust him then as now. It was enough to know that, condemned as he was to walk among the sickening, weak, and whimpering
normals,
he would have another who understood him, who was, indeed, a brother.

It was enough to know that now, all these years later. Yet he had to ask, “Vern, why are you telling me this now when you couldn’t
before.
You’ve…”