The Complete Short Fiction of Peter Straub Volume Two Page 2

  At parties and other social gatherings in the eighties, I could identify within fifteen minutes which of the other men in the room had been grunts in Vietnam. I could practically smell Harry’s world. I knew how his house was laid out, and what particular junk they put out on the front porch; and I thought I knew his little brother inside out; but above all I knew Harry.

  Despite what I brought to the story, the writing went very slowly.

  While I’d been taking my time-off some of my creative muscles had dried up. However, I was also paying closer attention than ever before to my actual writing. My capacity for focus had increased, and I found I had a better handle on the nuances, such as they were, of my writing. Everything had to be so clear as to be transparent. All the fuzz of casual misperception had to be cut away so that nothing blurred in the reader’s eye. Word repetitions, inadvertent rhymes, unconscious clumsiness, had to be cut or corrected. Words had to be in the right order, or you were forcing yourself between the reader and your imagined world. The process of making sure I did not put the effect before the cause, or begin two consecutive sentences with the same word, or any of a thousand others gaffes, the pleasurable effort of doing things in a way right for me and the reader both, made me love the story, which in turn made it a joy to write, and to rewrite. Conscientious revision is never easy, but it provides the deep satisfaction of seeing oneself truly making something better, cleaner, stronger, straighter.

  I had backed myself into a new esthetic, which I described to myself as “presentational.” Its primary, in fact only, goal was transparency. Ideally, the words were meant to disappear as they passed beneath the reader’s eyes. In my infinitely humbler way, I was following on along behind Conrad’s remark, in an Introduction not much like this one, about wanting “above all to make the reader see.” The prose was to be the medium through which the reader passed, as directly as possible, into the narrative.

  That aesthetic loosened its grip over time, as my ambitions changed—the focus on style deepened, but the presentational insistence gave way to exercises in unreliability (as in “Hunger”), deliberate evasiveness (as in “Donald” and “Mrs. God”), and many other modes of expression: it very often seems to me that what I am writing already exists in its ideal form, and my job is to capture it as well as I can. Yet I know I can never pull it into this world other than imperfectly, most of the time radically imperfectly, and my quirks and idiosyncrasies will shrink and distort whatever I do manage to get my hands on.

  Two of these stories do suggest that in them I might have come closest to matching intent with achievement.” Little Red’s Tango” and

  “The Juniper Tree” seem to chop and combine matters in a way I like, moving sidelong into essence. I’m proud of those stories, particularly.

  They really feel like mine.

  —Peter Straub

  Brooklyn, NY

  Blue Rose

  (for Rosemary Clooney)

  1

  On a stifling summer day the two youngest of the five Beevers children, Harry and Little Eddie, were sitting on cane-backed chairs in the attic of their house on South Sixth Street in Palmyra, New York.

  Their father called it “the upstairs junk room,” as this large irregular space was reserved for the boxes of tablecloths, stacks of diminishingly sized girls’ winter coats, and musty old dresses Maryrose Beevers had mummified as testimony to the superiority of her past to her present.

  A tall mirror that could be tilted in its frame, an artifact of their mother’s onetime glory, now revealed to Harry the rear of Little Eddie’s head. This object, looking more malleable than a head should be, was just peeking above the back of the chair. Even the back of Little Eddie’s head looked tense to Harry.

  “Listen to me,” Harry said. Little Eddie squirmed in his chair, and the wobbly chair squirmed with him. “You think I’m kidding you? I had her last year.”

  “Well, she didn’t kill you,” Little Eddie said.

  “‘Course not, she liked me, you little dummy. She only hit me a couple of times. She hit some of those kids every single day.”

  “But teachers can’t kill people,” Little Eddie said.

  At nine, Little Eddie was only a year younger than he, but Harry knew that his undersized fretful brother saw him as much a part of the world of big people as their older brothers.

  “Most teachers can’t,” Harry said. “But what if they live right in the same building as the principal? What if they won teaching awards, hey, and what if every other teacher in the place is scared stiff of them?

  Don’t you think they can get away with murder? Do you think anybody really misses a snot-faced little brat—a little brat like you? Mrs.

  Franken took this kid, this runty little Tommy Golz, into the cloak-room, and she killed him right there. I heard him scream. At the end, it sounded just like bubbles. He was trying to yell, but there was too much blood in his throat. He never came back, and nobody ever said boo about it. She killed him, and next year she’s going to be your teacher. I hope you’re afraid, Little Eddie, because you ought to be.”

  Harry leaned forward. “Tommy Golz even looked sort of like you, Little Eddie.”

  Little Eddie’s entire face twitched as if a lightning bolt had crossed it.

  In fact, the Golz boy had suffered an epileptic fit and been removed from school, as Harry knew.

  “Mrs. Franken especially hates selfish little brats that don’t share their toys.”

  “I do share my toys,” Little Eddie wailed, tears beginning to run down through the delicate smears of dust on his cheeks. Everybody takes my toys, that’s why.”

  “So give me your Ultraglide Roadster,” Harry said. This had been Little Eddie’s birthday present, given three days previous by a beaming father and a scowling mother. “Or I’ll tell Mrs. Franken as soon as I get inside that school, this fall.”

  Under its layer of grime, Little Eddie’s face went nearly the same white-gray shade as his hair.

  An ominous slamming sound came up the stairs.

  “Children? Are you messing around up there in the attic? Get down here!”

  “We’re just sitting in the chairs, Mom,” Harry called out.

  “Don’t you bust those chairs! Get down here this minute!”

  Little Eddie slid out of his chair and prepared to bolt.

  “I want that car,” Harry whispered. “And if you don’t give it to me, I’ll tell Mom you were foolin’ around with her old clothes.”

  “I didn’t do nothin’!” Little Eddie wailed, and broke for the stairs.

  “Hey, Mom, we didn’t break any stuff, honest!” Harry yelled.

  He bought a few minutes more by adding, “I’m coming right now,” and stood up and went toward a cardboard box filled with interesting books he had noticed the day before his brother’s birthday, and which had been his goal before he had remembered the Roadster and coaxed Little Eddie upstairs.

  When, a short time later, Harry came through the door to the attic steps, he was carrying a tattered paperback book. Little Eddie stood quivering with misery and rage just outside the bedroom the two boys shared with their older brother Albert. He held out a small blue metal car, which Harry instantly took and eased into the front pocket of his jeans.

  “When do I get it back?” Little Eddie asked.

  “Never,” Harry said. “Only selfish people want to get presents back. Don’t you know anything at all?” When Eddie pursed his face up to wail, Harry tapped the book in his hands and said, “I got something here that’s going to help you with Mrs. Franken, so don’t complain.”

  His mother intercepted him as he came down the stairs to the main floor of the little house—here were the kitchen and living room, both floored with faded linoleum, the actual “junk room” separated by a stiff brown woolen curtain from the little makeshift room where Edgar Beevers slept, and the larger bedroom reserved for Maryrose. Children were never permitted more than a few steps within this awful chamber, for they might d
isarrange Maryrose’s mysterious “papers” or interfere with the rows of antique dolls on the window seat which was the sole, much-revered architectural distinction of the Beevers house.

  Maryrose Beevers stood at the bottom of the stairs, glaring suspiciously up at her fourth son. She did not ever look like a woman who played with dolls, and she did not look that way now. Her hair was twisted into a knot at the back of her head. Smoke from her cigarette curled up past the big glasses like bird’s wings, which magnified her eyes. Harry thrust his hand into his pocket and curled his fingers protectively around the Ultraglide Roadster.

  “Those things up there are the possessions of my family,” she said. “Show me what you took.”

  Harry shrugged and held out the paperback as he came down within striking range.

  His mother snatched it form him, and tilted her head to see its cover through the cigarette smoke. “Oh. This is from that little box of books up there. Your father used to pretend to read books.” She squinted at the print on the cover. “Hypnosis Made Easy. Some drugstore trash. You want to read this?”

  Harry nodded.

  “I don’t suppose it can hurt you much.” She negligently passed the book back to him. “People in society read books, you know—I used to read a lot, back before I got stuck here with a bunch of dummies. My father had a lot of books.”

  Maryrose nearly touched the top of Harry’s head, then snatched back her hand. “You’re my scholar, Harry. You’re the one who’s going places.”

  “I’m gonna do good in school next year,” he said.

  “Well. You’re going to do well. As long as you don’t ruin every chance you have by speaking like your father.”

  Harry felt that particular pain composed of scorn, shame, and terror that filled him when Maryrose spoke of his father in this way. He mumbled something that sounded like acquiescence, and moved a few steps sideways and around her.

  2

  The porch of the Beevers house extended six feet on either side of the front door, and was the repository for furniture either too large to be crammed into the junk room or too humble to be enshrined in the attic. A sagging porch swing sat beneath the living room window, to the left of an ancient couch whose imitation green leather had been repaired with black duct tape; on the other side of the front door through which Harry Beevers now emerged stood a useless icebox dating from the earliest days of the Beevers’ marriage and two unsteady camp chairs Edgar Beevers had won in a card game. These had never been allowed into the house. Unofficially, this side of the porch was Harry’s father’s, and thereby had an entirely different atmosphere—defeated, lawless, and shameful—from the side with the swing and the couch.

  Harry knelt down in the neutral territory directly before the front door and fished the Ultraglide Roadster from his pocket. His placed the hypnotism book on the porch and rolled the little metal car across its top. Then he gave the car a hard shove and watched it clunk nose-down onto the wood. He repeated this several times before moving the book aside, flattening himself out on his stomach, and giving the little car a decisive push toward the swing and the couch.

  The Roadster rolled a few feet before an irregular board tilted it over on its side and stopped it.

  “You dumb car,” Harry said, and retrieved it. He gave it another push deeper into his mother’s realm. A stiff, brittle section of paint which had separated from its board cracked in half and rested atop the stalled Roadster like a miniature mattress.

  Harry knocked off the chip of paint and sent the car backward down the porch, where it flipped over again and skidded into the side of the icebox. The boy ran down the porch and this time simply hurled the little car back in the direction of the swing. It bounced off the swing’s padding and fell heavily to the wood. Harry knelt before the icebox, panting.

  His whole head felt funny, as if wet hot towels had been stuffed inside it. Harry picked himself up and walked to where the car lay before the swing. He hated the way it looked, small and helpless. He experimentally stepped on the car and felt it pressing into the under-sole of his moccasin. Harry raised his other foot and stood on the car, but nothing happened. He jumped on the car, but the moccasin was no better than his bare foot. Harry bent down to pick up the Roadster.

  “You dumb little car,” he said. “You’re no good anyhow, you low-class little jerky thing.” He turned it over in his hands. Then he inserted his thumbs between the frame and one of the little tires. When he pushed, the tire moved. His face heated. He mashed his thumbs against the tire, and the little black doughnut popped into the tall thick weeds in front of the porch. Breathing hard more from emotion than exertion, Harry popped the other front tire into the weeds. Harry whirled around, and ground the car into the wall beside his father’s bedroom window. Long deep scratches appeared in the paint. When Harry peered at the top of the car, it too was scratched. He found a nail head which protruded a quarter of an inch out from the front of the house, and scraped a long paring of blue paint off the driver’s side of the Roadster. Gray metal shone through. Harry slammed the car several times against the edge of the nail head, chipping off small quantities of paint. Panting, he popped off the two small rear tires and put them in his pocket because he liked the way they looked.

  Without tires, well-scratched and dented, the Ultraglide Roadster had lost most of its power. Harry looked it over with a bitter, deep satisfaction and walked across the porch and shoved it far into the nest of weeds. Gray metal and blue paint shone at him from within the stalks and leaves.

  Harry thrust his hands into their midst and swept his arms back and forth. The car tumbled into invisibility.

  When Maryrose appeared scowling on the porch, Harry was seated serenely on the squeaking swing, looking at the first few pages of the paperback book.

  “What are you doing? What was all that banging?”

  “I’m just reading, I didn’t hear anything,” Harry said.

  3

  “Well, if it isn’t the shitbird,” Albert said, jumping up the porch steps thirty minutes later. His face and T-shirt bore broad black stripes of grease. A short, muscular thirteen-year-old, Albert spent every possible minute hanging around the gas station two blocks from their house. Harry knew that Albert despised him. Albert raised a fist and made a jerky, threatening motion toward Harry, who flinched. Albert had often beaten him bloody, as had their two older brothers, Sonny and George, now at Army bases in Oklahoma and Germany. Like Albert, his two oldest brothers had seriously disappointed their mother.

  Albert laughed, and this time swung his fist within a couple of inches of Harry’s face. On the backswing he knocked the book from Harry’s hands.

  “Thanks,” Harry said.

  Albert smirked and disappeared around the front door. Almost immediately Harry could hear his mother beginning to shout about the grease on Albert’s face and clothes. Albert thumped up the stairs.

  Harry opened his clenched fingers and spread them wide, closed his hands into fists, then spread them wide again. When he heard the bedroom door slam shut upstairs, he was able to get off the swing and pick up the book. Being around Albert made him feel like a spring coiled up in a box. From the upper rear of the house, Little Eddie emitted a ghostly wail. Maryrose screamed that she was going to start smacking him if he didn’t shut up, and that was that. The three unhappy lives within the house fell back into silence. Harry sat down, found his page, and began reading again.

  A man named Dr. Roland Mentaine had written Hypnosis Made Easy, and his vocabulary was much larger than Harry’s. Dr. Mentaine used words like “orchestrate” and “ineffable” and “enhance,” and some of his sentences wound their way through so many subordinate clauses that Harry lost his way. Yet Harry, who had begun the book only half-expecting that he would comprehend anything in it at all, found it a wonderful book. He had made it most of the way through the chapter called “Mind Power.”

  Harry thought it was neat the hypnosis could cure smoking, stuttering, and bed-wetting. (He
himself had wet the bed almost nightly until months before his ninth birthday. The bed-wetting stopped the night a certain lovely dream came to Harry. In the dream he had to urinate terribly, and was hurrying down a stony castle corridor past suits of armor and guttering torches. At last Harry reached an open door, through which he saw the most splendid bathroom of his life. The floors were of polished marble, the walls white-tiled. As soon as he entered the gleaming bathroom, a uniformed butler waved him toward the rank of urinals. Harry began pulling down his zipper, fumbled with himself, and got his penis out of his underpants just in time. As the dream-urine gushed out of him, Harry had blessedly awakened.)

  Hypnotism could get you right inside someone’s mind and let you do things there. You could make a person speak in any foreign language they’d ever heard, even if they’d only heard it once, and you could make them act like a baby. Harry considered how pleasurable it would be to make his brother Albert lie squalling and red-faced on the floor, unable to walk or speak as he pissed all over himself.

  Also, and this was a new thought to Harry, you could take a person back to a whole row of lives they had led before they were born as the person they were now. This process of rebirth was called reincarnation. Some of Dr. Mentaine’s patients had been kings in Egypt and pirates in the Caribbean, some had been murderers, novelists, and artists. They remembered the houses they’d lived in, the names of their mothers and servants and children, the locations of shops where they’d bought cake and wine. Neat stuff, Harry thought. He wondered if someone who had been a famous murderer a long time ago could remember pushing in the knife or bringing down the hammer. A lot of the books remaining in the little cardboard box upstairs, Harry had noticed, seemed to be about murderers. It would not be any use to take Albert back to a previous life, however. If Albert had any previous lives, he had spent them as inanimate objects on the order of boulders and anvils.