Glimpses: The Best Short Stories of Rick Hautala (29 page)

Because it was Clean-Up Week, there were piles of trash on the curbs in front of many houses in the town of
Northbrook, Maine. Calling it “Clean-up Week” was a bit of a misnomer because it usually took the town workers closer to a month to go around, sort through everything, and haul off the used and broken TVs and kitchen appliances, the construction and destruction debris, the rusted lawn mowers and snow blowers, and all the other unwanted junk people dragged down to the street from attics, basements, garages, and work sheds. And like they say: “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” so a lot of people—mostly in pickup trucks—make the rounds and paw through whatever their neighbors are throwing away in hopes of finding something they can either use or fix up to re-sell.

Jeremy McCough wasn’t one of those people. In fact, every spring he made fun of what he called the “rednecks,” who drove around and scavenged the piles of junk. He wondered if they ever found anything useful, or if the junk they collected just made its way back out to the curb during next year’s Clean-up Week. But one unseasonably warm April afternoon, Jeremy and his wife, Lisa, were out for a walk after supper when he noticed that someone was throwing away a perfectly good window frame with the glass intact. It was leaning against a stack of cardboard boxes, overflowing with old magazines and paperback books. Jeremy made a mental note to come back and check those out, too, but for now, he paused and pointed at the discarded window.

“When I was a kid … if we saw something like this? We would have smashed it to pieces.” He looked up and down the street. “I’m surprised some of the neighborhood kids haven’t broken it already.”

“Probably all inside, playing video games,” Lisa said with a faint sneer.

She had gone a few paces beyond Jeremy and was looking back with a hint of impatience in her expression. He knew she wanted to keep walking. They’d already gone more than a mile, and it wouldn’t pay now to lose their “burn.”

“Yeah,” Jeremy said, stroking his chin as he regarded the window. “But I’m thinking of rebuilding the tool shed this summer, and . … maybe I should grab this before someone else does.”

The flash of impatience in Lisa’s eyes should have warned him to let it drop right then and there, and when she said, “What, you’re gonna carry that all the way back home?” he definitely should have gotten the warning.

But he didn’t.

The more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea of having an extra window in the shed. The more light the better. It’d make finding things a lot easier without running electricity to it. Best of all, the window looked like it was the right size and in perfect shape.

Plus, it was free for the taking.

“Do me a favor, would you?” he asked as he bent down and lifted the window so it was perpendicular to the ground. Lisa sighed and cocked her hip to one side as she folded her arms across her chest and glared at him. Her face was shiny with sweat, and her hair was plastered in damp curls to her forehead and neck.

He got the message now, but it was too late to turn back.

“Can you wait with it while I go back and get the car?”

“Come’on, Jer.
Now
who’s the redneck?”

Jeremy smiled and shrugged.

“But it’s free,” he said as he glanced down the street again. “And it’d suck if some kids found it and broke it … or some redneck scooped it up while we both went to get the car.”

“I don’t want to go back for the car,” Lisa said. “I want to finish our walk.” She patted the slight bulge above her belt. “I’m not gonna get rid of this ‘muffin top’ hanging around, pawing through other people’s junk.”

“I’ll be back in fifteen minutes,” Jeremy said. “If you want to keep moving, just walk up and down the street here. As long as you keep an eye on the window so no one steals or breaks it.”

“Steals? You make it sound like it’s already yours.”

Jeremy smiled and said, “It is now.”

He gripped the window frame with both hands and lifted it to move it away from the pile of boxes, but when he happened to look through the glass, he saw something that surprised him. He let out a little shout of surprise and almost dropped the window. In that instant, he hadn’t been able to tell how close or far away what he was seeing was, but he could see a large, gray cat, sitting on the sidewalk.

The window frame made a loud thump when he dropped it to the curb and started backing away from it with quick, stumbling steps. The glass rattled in the pane when it pitched back and hit the stack of cardboard boxes, but Jeremy barely noticed that as he looked down the street.

No cat. Just his wife, standing there with her hips cocked to one side and her arms folded as she gave him “the look.”

“Jesus! Don’t break it!” she shouted, but Jeremy didn’t respond. He couldn’t. He was trying to figure out what had just happened. His first thought was that a cat had been hiding in the pile of trash and ran out when he started moving the window frame. He had been so startled seeing it that it had only
looked
like it was far away.

When he checked more closely, he saw that the window was positioned so he was looking down the street … toward Lisa. The perspective had been skewed because he had been straining to pick up the window. He wanted to believe what he had seen was just a trick of the eye, a shift in focus, but a chill ran up his back when he realized what he had seen was Lisa, not a cat.

“Something wrong?” Lisa asked with just a hint of concern in her voice.

Her words almost didn’t make sense to Jeremy, but he shook his head and mumbled, “Ahh, no … I mean yeah, I’m fine. It’s just …”

Moving slowly and all the while preparing himself mentally for what he might see through the glass, he scooched down to pick up the window again. At first, he shifted his gaze to one side, afraid of what he might see through the glass. But then, feeling more confident he’d just imagined what he’d seen, he raised the window again, this time looking straight at his wife.

He had thought he was ready for what he would see, but he wasn’t. A small grunt of surprise escaped him when, instead of seeing his wife, he found himself staring at a large, gray cat that squatted on the sidewalk, staring at him with wide, yellow eyes that didn’t blink.

I must be having some kind of breakdown or else … What?

He swallowed hard and continued to stare at the cat—his wife—waiting for something to happen … something to change. The cat stared back at him, perfectly motionless except for a slight twitch of the tip of its tail that betrayed its impatience.

Very slowly, Jeremy angled the window frame down so he could look over the top. As soon as he did, Lisa was herself again. No cat. He could read the impatience in her expression, but he caught an element of detachment in the way she looked at him.

Just like a cat
, he thought as a shiver ran up his back.

He was keenly aware of the emotional distance, the cool, self-contained aloofness that pretty much captured the way his wife often regarded him. She was, in many ways, very cat-like.

What he couldn’t understand was, how did the glass in this window frame make him see something that wasn’t really there … or
was
there but wasn’t immediately obvious?

“Could you …” His voice caught, and he had to swallow before he could continue. “Would you take a look at this?”

Before Lisa could reply, he dragged the window frame away from the pile of boxes and angled it so she could look through the glass. He knelt on the other side.

“Does the glass look like it’s—I don’t know, distorted or something?”

Supporting the frame with both hands, he looked at her through the glass … or, more to the point, at the cat she had become. Fascinated, he watched as his wife twitched her whiskers and flicked her tail before taking a few sinuous steps toward him.

“What do you mean … distorted?” Lisa asked.

He caught the purring tone in her voice.

“It looks like there’s a bubble in the glass, like what they used to call ‘bullet glass?’”

“Hmm … No … I dunno … Maybe,” Lisa said, sounding confused by what he was doing.

It was disorienting to try to carry on a conversation with a huge cat as if this was perfectly ordinary. When Lisa spoke, her cat mouth moved in synch with her words, but her voice seemed to be coming from someplace else. The cold, cruel gleam in her green eyes made Jeremy realize with what distance, almost disregard his wife must view him, as if after more than fifteen years of marriage, she had become completely detached, emotionally.

Like a cat,
he thought
. She can spend time with me, but she doesn’t really need me … not the way I thought … or hoped … she did, anyway.

“No,” the gray cat said. “It all looks fine to me.”

Jeremy brought his face close to the window, so close his breath fogged the glass. There was no way she could see him except through the window. So why didn’t it change
her
view of
him
?

“My face doesn’t look … different to you?”

He watched as the gray cat blinked once and licked its lips and then slowly shook its head from side to side. He stood up quickly and was looking at his real wife again when she said, “What are you talking about? It looks perfectly fine to me.”

This is really fucked up
, Jeremy thought.
How can this be happening?

He was trying to process all of this as fast as he could without giving himself away. Maybe she knew something he didn’t, and she was keeping it from him. But even without seeing his wife as a cat, he could read the impatience that was building up, no matter how much she tried to conceal it.

“How about you go back and get the car, and I’ll stay here, then?”

“Christ. Does it
really
mean that much to you?” Lisa asked.

“Think of the money I’ll save.”

Jeremy wished he could tell her how relieved he was to see her back as herself, not as a cat, but he was sure if he told her what he had seen, she would be convinced he was having a mental breakdown.

Am I?

Is that what’s going on here?

What other explanation can there be?

How else do I explain a window that turns a person into an animal?

“Yeah,” he finally said. “It’d be a shame to let something this valuable go to waste, you know?”

Lisa hesitated for a second or two and then nodded and said, “Aw’right. Fine.”

Without another word, she started jogging down the street, back to the house. As soon as her back was to him, Jeremy dropped to a crouch and watched her go through the glass. What he saw was a large, gray cat, sprinting down the street away from him in long, loping strides.

Once Lisa was gone, he leaned the window against the boxes again and sat down to try to sort this out.

It didn’t make a lick of sense. He took a quick mental and physical inventory, but everything seemed fine … nothing unusual. He felt as mentally clear as he usually did. He hadn’t had any alcohol to drink today—not even a beer at lunch—and it had been years since he’d smoked pot or done any other drugs, other than his blood pressure medication.

As far as he could see, there was no rational explanation for what had just happened. As crazy and irrational as it was, he simply had to accept what had happened. Somehow, the window had made it so when he looked at Lisa, he saw—not the person, but some kind of animal essence … what she really was.

While he waited for Lisa to get back with the car, he thought it through as best he could. Unless he was going crazy—which he had to leave open as a distinct possibility—this had to be real even though, right then and there, the feeling came over him that if he wasn’t dreaming, this had to be some kind of mental aberration that—hopefully—wouldn’t happen again.

When he heard a car coming up the street, he decided to put his idea to the test. Angling the window so it was facing down the street, he crouched down low and watched as the car rounded the corner and sped toward him.

At first, he couldn’t see the driver because sunlight was glinting off the windshield. But when the car passed by, he caught a glimpse of the driver through the side window. It was just enough to make him catch his breath, as if an icy hand was squeezing his throat.

It wasn’t a man or a woman driving the car.

The driver was or, at least,
appeared
to be a thin, mangy wolf or a German shepherd. One paw was draped loosely over the steering wheel, and one arm was resting on the edge of the opened side window. As the car passed by, the driver turned and looked at him. Jeremy shivered at the animal’s cruel snarl and the predatory gleam in the animal’s eyes. Quickly raising his head above the window frame, he saw that the driver was, in fact, a young man in his late twenties or early thirties, but even his human form had a wolfish quality that was disturbing.

“Okay. So
that’s
what you really are.” Jeremy’s voice was a strangled croak that came from deep inside his throat. As he waited for the car to disappear down the street, he took a few shuddering breaths and wondered—