The complete short ficti.., p.34
The Complete Short Fiction of Peter Straub, Volume Two, page 34
In the second row from the back, far under the beam of light from the projectionist’s booth, a big man with light hair leaned forward with his hands help up like binoculars. “Peekaboo,” he said. Fee whirled around, his face burning.
“I know who you are,” the man said.
I’m all the soul you need, Lily said from the screen.
Fenton Welles walked in from a round of golf at the Random Lake Country Club, and Charlie Carpenter came sneering out from behind the staircase with a fireplace poker raised in his right hand. He smashed it down onto Welles’s head.
Lily wiped the last trace of blood from Charlie’s face with a tiny handkerchief, and for a second Fee had it, he knew the name of the man behind him, but this knowledge disappeared into the dread taking place on the screen, where Lily and Charlie lay in a shadowy bed talking about the next thing Charlie must do.
Death death death sang the soundtrack.
Charlie hid in the shadowy corner of William Bendix’s office. Slanting shadows of the blinds fell across his suit, his face, his broadbrimmed hat.
A sweet pressure build in Fee’s chest.
William Bendix walked into his office, and suddenly Fee knew the identity of the man behind him. Charlie Carpenter stepped out of the shadow-stripes with a knife in his hands. William Bendix smiled and waggled his fat hands—what’s going on here, Miss Sheehan told him there wouldn’t be any trouble—and Charlie rammed his knife into his chest.
Fee remembered the odor of raw meat, the heavy smell of blood in Mr. Steinmitz’s Blood of the Lamb butcher shop.
Charlie Carpenter scrubbed his hands and face in the company bathroom until the basin was black with blood. Charlie ripped towel after towel from the dispenser, blotted his face, and threw the damp towels on the floor. Impatient Charlie Carpenter rode a train out of the city, and two girls across the aisle peeked at him, wondering Who’s that handsome guy? and Why is he so nervous? The train pulled past the front of an immense Catholic church with stained-glass windows blazing with light.
Fee turned around to see the big head and wide shoulders of Heinz Steinmitz. In the darkness, he could just make out white teeth shining in a smile. Mr. Steinmitz put his hands to his eyes again and pretended to see Fee through binoculars.
Fee giggled.
Mr. Steinmitz motioned for Fee to join him, and Fee got out of his seat and walked up the long aisle toward the back of the theater.
Mr. Steinmitz wound his hand in the air, reeling him in. He patted the seat beside him and leaned over and whispered,” Sit here next to your old friend Heinz.” Fee sat down. Mr. Steinmitz’s hand swallowed his. “I’m very very glad you’re here,” he whispered. “This movie is too scary for me to see alone.”
Charlie Carpenter piloted a motorboat across Random Lake. It was early morning. Drops of foam spattered across his lapels. Charlie was smiling a dark, funny smile.
“Do you know what?” Mr. Stenmitz asked.
“What?”
“Do you know what?” Fee giggled. “No, what?
You have to guess.”
There was blood everywhere on the screen but it was invisible blood, it was the blood scrubbed from the office floor and washed away in the sink.
The boat slid into the reeds, and Charlie jumped out onto marshy ground—the boat will drift away, Charlie doesn’t care about the boat, it’s nothing but a stolen boat, let it go, let it be gone …
An unimaginable time later Fee found himself standing in the dark outside the Beldame Oriental Theater. The last thing he could remember was Lily Sheehan turning away from her stove and saying Decided to stop off on your way to work, Charlie? She wore a long white robe, and her hair looked loose and full. You’re full of surprises. I thought you’d be here last night. His face burned, and his heart was pounding. Smoke and oil filled his stomach.
He felt appallingly, astoundingly dirty.
The world turned spangly and gray. The headlights on Livermore Avenue swung toward him. The smoke in his stomach spilled upward into his throat.
Fee moved a step deeper into the comparative darkness of the street and bent over the curb. Something that looked and tasted like smoke drifted from his mouth. He gagged and wiped his mouth and eyes. It seemed to him that an enormous arm lay across his shoulders, that a deep low voice was saying—was saying—
No.
Fee fled down Livermore Avenue.
part two
1
He turned into his street and saw the neat row of cement blocks bisecting the dead lawn, and the concrete steps leading up to the rosebushes, and the front door.
Nothing around him was real. The moon had been painted, and the houses had no backs, and everything he saw was a fraction of an inch thick, like paint.
He watched himself sit down on the front steps. The night darkened. Footsteps came down the stairs from the Sunchanas’ apartment, and the relief of dread focused his attention. The lock turned, and the door opened.
“Fee, poor child,” said Mrs. Sunchana. “I thought I heard you crying.”
“I wasn’t crying,” Fee said in a wobbly voice, but he felt cold tears on his cheeks.
“Won’t your mother let you in?” Mrs. Sunchana stepped around him, and he scooted aside to let her pass.
He wiped his face on his sleeve. She was still waiting for an answer. “My mother’s sick,” he said. “I’m waiting for my daddy to come back.”
Pretty, dark-haired Mrs. Sunchana wrapped her arms about herself. “It’s almost seven,” she said. “Why don’t you come upstairs? Have some hot chocolate. Maybe you want a bowl of soup? Vegetables, chicken, good thick soup for you. Delicious. I know, I made it myself.”
Fee’s reason began to slip away beneath the barrage of these seductive words. He saw himself at the Sunchanas’ table, raising a spoon of intoxicating soup to his mouth. Saliva poured into his mouth, and his stomach growled.
By itself, a sob flexed wide black wings in his throat and flew from his mouth.
And then, like salvation, came his father’s voice. “Leave my son alone! Get away from him!” Fee opened his eyes.
Mrs. Sunchana pressed her hands together so tightly her fingers looked flat. Fee saw that she was frightened, and understood that he was safe again—back in the movie of his life.
And here came Bob Bandolier up the walk, his face glowing, his eyes glowing, his mustache riding confidently above his mouth, his coat billowing out behind him.
“Fee was sitting here alone in the cold,” Mrs. Sunchana said. “You will go upstairs, please, Mrs. Sunchana.”
“I was just trying to help,” persisted Mrs. Sunchana. Only her flattened-out hands betrayed her.
“Well, we don’t need your help,” bellowed Fee’s glorious dad. “Go away and leave us alone.”
“There is no need to give me orders.
Shut up!”
“Or to yell at me.”
“LEAVE MY SON ALONE!” Bob Bandolier raised his arms like a madman and stamped his foot. “Go!” He rushed toward the front steps, and Mrs. Sunchana went quickly past Fee into the building.
Bob Bandolier grasped Fee’s hand, yanked him upright, and pulled him through the front door. Fee cried out in pain. Mrs. Sunchana had retreated halfway up the stairs, and her husband’s face hung like a balloon in the cracked-open door to their apartment. In front of their own door, Bob Bandolier let go of Fee’s hand to reach for his key.
“I think you must be crazy,” said Mrs. Sunchana. “I was being nice to your little boy. He was locked out of the house in the cold.” Bob Bandolier unlocked the door and turned sideways toward her. “We live right above you, you know,” said Mrs. Sunchana. “We know what you do.”
Fee’s father pushed him into their apartment, and the smell from the bedroom announced itself like the boom of a bass drum. Fee thought that Mrs. Sunchana must have been able to smell it, too.
“And what do I do?” his father asked. His voice was dangerously calm.
Fee knew that his father was smiling.
He heard Mrs. Sunchana move one step up.
“You know what you do. It is not right.”
Her husband whispered her name from the top of the stairs.
“On the contrary,” his father said. “Everything I do, Mrs. Sunchana, is precisely right. Everything I do, I do for a reason.” He moved away from the door, and Mrs. Sunchana moved two steps up.
Fee watched his father with absolute admiration. He had won. He had said the brave right things, and the enemy had fled.
Bob Bandolier came scowling toward him.
Fee backed into the living room. His father strode through the doorway and pushed the door shut. He gave Fee one flat, black-eyed glare, removed his topcoat, and hung it carefully in the closet without seeming to notice the smell from the bedroom. He unbuttoned his suit jacket and the top of his shirt and pulled his necktie down a precise half inch.
“I’m going to tell you something very important. You are never to talk to them again, do you hear me? They might try to get information out of you, but if you say one word to those snoops, I’ll whale the stuffing out of you.” He patted Fee’s cheek. “You won’t say anything to them, I know.”
Fee shook his head.
“They think they know things—ten generations of keyhole listeners.”
His father gave his cheek another astounding pat. He snapped his fingers. At the code for cat food, Jude stalked out from beneath the chaise. Fee followed both of them into the kitchen. His father spooned half a can of cat food into Jude’s dish and put the remainder of the can into the refrigerator.
Bob Bandolier was an amazing man, for even now he went whirling and dancing across the kitchen floor, startling even Jude. Amazing Bob spun through the living room, not forgetting to smile up at the ceiling and toss a cheery wave to the Sunchanas, clicked open the bedroom door with his hip, and called Hello, honeybunch to his wife. Fee followed, wondering at him. His father supped from a brown bottle of Pforzheimer beer, Millhaven’s own, winked at Sleeping Beauty, and said, Darling, don’t give up yet.
“Here she is, Fee,” his father said. “She knows, she knows, you know she knows.”
Fee nodded: that was right. He mother knew exactly what it was that he himself had forgotten.
“This lady right here, she never doubted.” He kissed her yellow cheek. “Let’s rustle up some grub, what do you say?” Fee was in the presence of a miracle.
2
After dinner his father washed the dishes, now and then taking a soapy hand from the foam to pick up his beer bottle. Fee marveled at the speed with which his father drank—three long swallows, and the bottle was empty, like a magic trick.
Bob Bandolier filled a plastic bucket with warm tap water, put some dishwashing powder in the bucket, swirled it around with his hand, and dropped in a sponge.
“Well, here goes.” He winked at Fee. “The dirty part of the day.
Your mother is one of the decent people in this world, and that’s why we take care of her.” He was swirling the water around in the bucket again, raising a white lather. “Let me tell you something. There’s a guy who is not one of the decent people of the world, who thinks all he has to do is sit behind a desk all day and count his money. He even thinks he knows the hotel business.” Bob Bandolier laughed out loud. “I have a little plan, and we’ll see how fine and dandy Mr. Fine and Dandy really is, when he starts to sweat.” His face was red as an apple.
Fee understood—his father was talking about the St. Alwyn.
He squeezed the sponge twice, and water drizzled into the bucket. “Tonight I’m going to tell you about the blue rose of Dachau. Which was the bottom of the world. That was where you saw the things that are real in this world. You come along while I wash your mother.”
“Not all the way in,” his father said. “You don’t have to see the whole thing, just stay in the door. I just want you to be able to hear me.”
Bob Bandolier put a hand on Fee’s shoulder and showed him where to stand.
“This one’s going to be messy,” he said.
The smell of the bedroom took root in Fee’s nose and invaded the back of his throat. Bob Bandolier set down the bucket, grasped the blanket near his wife’s chin, and flipped it down to the end of the bed. As the blanket moved, his mother’s arms jerked up and snapped back into place, elbows bent and the hands curled toward the wrists. Beneath the blanket lay a sheet molded around his mother’s body. Watery brown stains covered the parts of the sheet clinging to her waist and hips.
“Anyway,” Bob said, and grabbed the sheet with one hand and walked down the length of the bed, pulling it away from his wife’s body. At the bottom of the bed, he yanked the end of the sheet from under the mattress and carefully wadded it up.
From his place in the doorway, Fee saw the yellow soles of his mother’s feet, from which her long toenails twisted away; the starved undersides of her legs, peaking at her slightly raised knees; her bony thighs, which disappeared like sticks into the big St. Alwyn towel his father had folded around her groin. Once white, this towel was now stained the same watery brown that had leaked through to the sheet. Above the towel was her small swollen belly, two distinct, high-arched rows of ribs; her small flat breasts and brown nipples; shoulders with sunken flesh from which thin straight bones seemed to want to escape; a lined, deeply hollowed neck; and above all these, propped on a pillow in the limp nest of her hair, his mother’s familiar and untroubled face.
“How does stuff still come out, hey, when so damn little goes in?
Hold on, honey, we gotta get this thing off of you.”
Dedicated Bob Bandolier tugged at the folds of the wet towel, managing with the use of only two fingers to pull it free, exposing Anna Bandolier’s knifelike hipbones and her astonishingly thick pubic bush—astonishingly, that is, to Fee, who had expected only a smooth pink passage of flesh, like the region between the legs of a doll. Where all the rest of his mother’s skin was the color of yellowing milk, the area uncovered by the towel was a riot of color: milk chocolate flecks and smears distributed over the blazing red of the thighs, and the actual crumbling or shredding of blue and green flesh disappearing into the wound where her buttocks should have been. From this wound surrounded by evaporating flesh came the smell that flooded their apartment.
Fee’s heart froze, and the breath in his lungs turned to ice.
Deep within the hole of ragged flesh that was his mother’s bottom was a stripe of white bone.
His father slid the dripping sponge beneath her arms, over the pubic tangle and the drooping, reddish-gray flesh between her legs. After every few passes he squeezed the sponge into the bucket. He dabbed at the enormous bedsores. “This started happening a while ago—figured it would take care of itself as long as I kept her clean, but … well, I just do what I can do.” He touched the oddly still bottom sheet. “See this? Rubber. Sponge it off, it’s good as new. Weren’t for this baby, we’d have gone through a lot of mattresses by now. Right, honey?”
His father knew he was in a movie.
“Get me another sheet and towel from the linen cabinet.”
His father was wiping the rubber sheet with a clean section of the old towel when Fee came back into the bedroom. He dropped the towel on top of the wadded sheet and took the new linen out of Fee’s arms.
“Teamwork, that’s what we got.”
He set the linen on the end of the bed and bent to squeeze out the sponge before lightly, quickly passing it over the rubber sheet.
“I don’t know if I ever told you much about my war,” he said, “You’re old enough now to begin to understand things.”
It seemed to Fee that he had no heartbeat at all. His mouth was a desert. Everything around him, even the dust in the air, saw what he himself was seeing.
“This war was no damn picnic.” Bob Bandolier tilted his wife’s body up to wipe beneath her, and Fee raised his eyes to the top of the bedstead.
Bob wiped the fresh towel over the damp sheet, straightened it out, and turned his wife over onto the towel. Her toenails clicked together. “But I want to tell you about this one thing I did, and it has to do with roses.” He gave Fee a humorous look. “You know how I feel about roses.”
Fee knew how he felt about roses.
From the bottom of the bed, his father snapped open the clean sheet and sent it sailing over Anna Bandolier’s body. “I was crazy about roses even way back then. But the kind of guy I am, I didn’t just grow them, I got interested in them. I did research.” He tucked the sheet beneath the mattress.
Bob Bandolier smoothed the sheet over his wife’s body, and Fee saw him taking a mental picture of the tunnel behind the St. Alwyn hotel.
“There’s one kind, one color, of rose no one has ever managed to grow. There has never been a true-blue rose. You could call it a Holy Grail.”
He lifted first one arm, then the other, to slide the sheet beneath them.
He moved back to appraise the sheet. He gave it a sharp tug, snapping it into alignment. Then he stepped back again, with the air of a painter stepping back from a finished canvas.
“What it is, is an enzyme. An enzyme controls the color of a rose. Over the years, I’ve managed to teach myself a little bit about enzymes. Basically, an enzyme is a biological catalyst. It speeds up chemical changes without going through any changes itself. Believe it or not, Millhaven, this city right here, is one of the enzyme centers of the world—because of the breweries. You need enzymes to get fermentation, and without fermentation you don’t get beer. When they managed to crystallize an enzyme, they discovered that it was protein.” He pointed at Fee. “Okay so far, but here’s your big problem. Enzymes are picky. They react with only a tiny little group of molecules. Some of them only work with one molecule!”
He pointed a forefinger at the ceiling. “Now what does that say about roses? It says that you have to be a pretty damn good chemist to create your blue rose. Which is the reason that no one has ever done it.” He paused for effect.
“Except for one man. I met him in Germany in 1945, and I saw his rose garden. He had four blue rosebushes in that garden. The ones on the first bush were deep, dark blue, the color of the ink in fountain pens. On the second bush the roses grew a rich navy blue; on the third bus, they were the most beautiful pale blue—the color of a nigger’s Cadillac. All of these roses were beautiful, but the most beautiful roses grew on the fourth bush. They were all the other shades in stripes and feathers, dark blue against that heaven-sky blue, little brush strokes of heaven-sky blue against that velvety black-blue. The man who grew them was the greatest gardener in the history of rose cultivation. And there are two other things you should know about him. He grew these roses in ten square empty feet of ground in a concentration camp during the war. He was a guard there. And the second thing is, I shot him dead.”
