Know Your Beholder: A Novel (12 page)

Photos were starting to be shown on the evening news. The famous black-and-white Target surveillance still of Todd and Mary Bunch standing in the stuffed-animals section, almost the same exact looks of abject shock on their faces. Holding a stuffed panda bear, as if Bethany had dropped it in that very aisle and they were summoning her spirit.

Todd Bunch was wearing his navy-blue Pollard Fire Department uniform shirt, with official patches on the shoulders. He had a few days’ growth of a sandpapery beard, fine as mica dust. He seemed tense, ultracontained. I was struck by how small his head was, as if the cavity containing his brain was smaller than most. His hands were fists at his sides. There was a little white bloodless halo around his wedding band.

He said he just wanted to personally thank me for taking care of the front steps. He spoke slowly, deliberately, almost as if delivering a memorized recitation. “The walkway too,” he added. He was having a hard time making eye contact.

I told him it wasn’t a problem, that it was my duty as his landlord.

He opened and closed his mouth in a guppylike fashion, then proceeded to unclench his left fist and drive a knuckle into the meat between his eyes, as though warding off a migraine.

I asked him if he was okay.

He exhaled through his nose, a whistling noise. His eyes, open now, fluttered nystagmically, the pupils contracting to little black pinpricks. I thought he might keel over, but he remained standing. Knees slightly bent, extremely still, shallow of breath, he opened his mouth again, closed it yet again, and then launched in, saying, “Mary and I would really appreciate it if you didn’t go through our garbage.”

It suddenly felt like there was a piece of gravel caught in my throat. I swallowed hard. I think I said, “I” and “uh.” I retched and swallowed again.

“Mary saw you out back by the Dumpsters.” His lower lip was trembling now. When it came to classic man-to-man confrontation, it was clear that we were equals in the discomfort zone.

I coughed again and then cleared my throat. I explained that I’ll occasionally do a garbage check to make sure tenants are recycling properly, that I get fined if the city finds recyclables in the regular trash and vice versa.

He looked down at his feet and said, “Our garbage is not your concern.”

This was obviously the next thing on the list to say. He wasn’t interested in engaging in a dialogue; he was checking off bullet points.

My arms folded now, I said, “But it’s my duty to execute the occasional Dumpster check.”

“We recycle,” he replied quickly, a little too loudly.

Then his lips got really small and taut. His clenched teeth, which were showing now, seemed to radiate a white-hotness behind his dull braces.

In my most soothing FM-radio voice I said, “That very well may be true, Mr. Bunch, but I still have to do the compulsory checks. I do it to Bradley Farnham’s and Harriet Gumm’s garbage too. As a safeguard.”

Then he closed his eyes and breathed through his nose intensely, as if there weren’t enough air in the small space between us. That faint whistling noise again. The tiny head, seemingly shrinking further. The rubbery dome of his skull, visibly pink underneath his crew cut. He turned to the side as if consulting invisible counsel. I realized for the first time that in profile Todd Bunch has almost no nose. This combined with his thick, furrowed brow made him look like the enormous mahimahi trophy that Lyman had had mounted in his office, above the tufted leather sofa in the waiting area. The similarity was almost breathtaking.

Through his rose-tinted orthodontia, Todd Bunch said, “We threw her clothes out because it’s too hard having them around—” He stopped and made a sound like he was choking, then exhaled powerfully and continued. He explained that he had suggested giving Bethany’s things to the Goodwill, but that Mary couldn’t bear the thought of other children wearing their daughter’s clothes.

In that moment I felt this man’s heart breaking. I could almost hear it. Like the smallest pinion snapping in a clock’s delicate machinery.

“Can I ask you a question?” I said.

“Not about Bethany,” he replied. His voice was suddenly small and boyish.

I told him that my question didn’t involve his daughter.

“What, then?”

I asked him if he’d made the snowman.

“What snowman?”

“The snowman in the backyard,” I explained. “Someone made a little snowman.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

I searched his bald, alopecian eyes. “Out behind the copper beech?” I said.

Nothing for a moment. It felt like the big wintry wheel in the sky had stopped clicking on its sprocket. I think I even heard the clouds above us skid to a halt.

Then Todd Bunch extended his fist toward me. Not in a threatening way, although it did make me swallow again and quickly find my feet. His fist was very tight and trembling. It was as if he were doing his best to hold a freshly boiled stone. His knuckles were white, his wedding band reflecting the harsh overhead fluorescent light I had installed after Christmas so the tenants wouldn’t feel like they were entering a dark place when knocking on the door of their trusted, down-to-earth landlord.

Todd Bunch opened his fist to reveal a rent check, crumpled to the size of a piece of popcorn. He grabbed it with his other hand and attempted to unkink it. His hands were shaking, and he continued to breathe very slowly through his nose, working at the check, eventually smoothing it between his palms. He handed it to me and said, “The late fee’s included.” Then he turned and descended the back steps.

After I heard him key into his unit—perhaps thirty seconds later—I quietly went downstairs to the back porch and looked for the snowman. Although it was only just past noon, the thick cloud cover weirdly made it almost dark out. I flipped a switch to turn on the spotlight mounted over the front of the garage.

The copper beech lit up monstrously. Like a figure that could chase you down and ruin your life.

And the snowman was gone.

I ran back upstairs, taking two at a time, and called Mansard.

“Hey, Detective,” he said, jokingly, but I had no time for that.

“It’s gone,” I said.

“Slow down,” he said, “take a breath.”

“It’s gone,” I repeated, not taking a breath, not sitting, completely winded from the sprint up the stairs.

“What’s gone?” Mansard said. He was watching a rerun of
The Honeymooners
. I could hear Jackie Gleason railing on his wife. It irked me that Mansard was watching TV on the job.

“The snowman,” I said. “The snowman’s gone.”

“Where did it go?” Mansard asked.

“I don’t know.”

He offered that perhaps it had returned to the North Pole with Rudolph and Santa Claus.

“Very funny,” I replied.

“Well, it couldn’t have melted.”

“Not in this weather, no way.”

“Huh,” he said.

I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or sincere. “Yeah,” I said. “Huh is right.” The live studio audience was howling with laughter. Even through the phone it felt like they were somehow mocking me.

“Are you watching
The Honeymooners
?” I said.

He said that he was on his lunch break.

After a silence I said, “Are you still coming by?”

“Do I really need to?” he asked.

I didn’t know what to say.

“Snowmen tend to crop up during snowstorms, kid.”

“But with pink scarves?” I asked.

“I saw one wearing a sombrero once. It was wearing a sombrero and it had tortilla chips for eyes. Didn’t warrant grounds for an arrest.”

“But the pink scarf matches the mittens. The ones the Bunches threw out.”

He asked me if I was in possession of the scarf.

I told him that I wasn’t.

“What about the mittens?” he said.

I told him that I didn’t have those either. I’d stupidly left them in the garbage. I was too panicked to get back to the house.

“Then there’s not much I can do,” Mansard said. “No scarf, no mittens, nothing to go on.”

Suddenly someone in Mansard’s office was talking to him. He covered the phone. I could hear the muffled sounds of Art Carney making some indecipherable noise. Jackie Gleason was still screaming at his wife.

Mansard uncovered the phone and said, “I gotta go, Francis. If another snowman pops up, give me a call.”

The dark skies persisted for a few hours and then brightened a bit, just in time for dusk. Consequently, it felt like the shortest day of the year.

At around four thirty p.m. my prospective tenant, Baylor Phebe, came by the house. To say that he possesses the largest stomach I’ve ever seen might be an understatement. It is exceptional, perfectly oval-shaped, and protrudes perhaps a full two feet from his waistline. It’s strange because the rest of his body isn’t in any way obese. He’s certainly husky, but his midsection is completely and ludicrously incongruous with his legs, arms, head, and neck. It’s a stomach out of a comic book. It looks almost like a prosthetic, as if it’s been screwed on somehow, a Halloween gimmick.

His voice was deeper than it had been on the phone. “I shoulda worn snowshoes,” he bellowed, stomping his boots on the porch, shaking my hand.

His paw is enormous. I noticed that he still wears his wedding band. After Sheila Anne divorced me, I continued to wear mine for almost a year. Now it lives in a matchbox on my writing desk. I like to think it’s sleeping. Baylor Phebe has a vigorous, warm handshake and huge mountain-peak knuckles. This man could clear a bar, I thought. A bar and a smorgasbord. He stands a hulking six-three. His head is the size of a cinder block.

His broad Nordic face is marked with little broken blood vessels; purple and blue and pink spider legs drift across his nose and are faintly embedded in the yellow oysters under his eyes. Speaking of his eyes, there is an unmistakable kindness living there. Grief softens some people, distorts others.

After my mother died Lyman got weird and mechanical and emotionally distant. Cornelia’s death turned him into the used-car-salesman version of himself. He got his teeth whitened and told more jokes and hung out at restaurant bars and started wearing Paco Rabanne. He brilliantined his hair and compulsively fiddled with the change in his pocket. And he bought a bunch of shit. Like a Rolex watch. And a nine-hundred-dollar Montblanc pen.

But back to Baylor Phebe’s stomach, which has the same effect as a great Frenchman’s nose—it somehow makes him more epic. I wondered what his students called him behind his back, whether the protuberance was the stuff of preteen mockery or legend. Songs could be written about Baylor Phebe’s stomach. It could be the subject of a Roald Dahl story. And it also makes you think about diabetes.

He wore an augmented one-piece snowmobile suit. Augmented meaning an entirely different winter garment had been fashioned for the area covering his belly. A kind of torso shell of down-filled tufted nylon. It was sophisticated, festooned with snaps and a little marsupial-looking pouch, which had its own snap. There had even been an attempt, though unsuccessful, to match the color to the original one-piece. The patched stomach panel was a sort of hickory brown, whereas the one-piece was more straight-up chocolate. I wondered whether his dead wife had made the piece for him. Under a red-and-black-plaid wool hunting hat complete with earflaps, his hair was a thick yellowy silver, sprouting in all directions. His eyes were bright blue, the whites a bit dull but still white nevertheless.

I showed him the available basement unit—the small kitchen with its marble-top eatery nook, the bedroom, the living room/dining area, the bathroom where I had imperfectly set the base of the toilet, so that it’s a hair cockeyed—and he immediately said he’d take it. He didn’t ask questions, didn’t even give me a chance to talk up the heating system or the amazing lack of substory mold or the necessity for the dropped gypsum ceiling or the pleasures of the house’s lone true eco-friendly refrigerator.

“Is the size okay?” I asked. “I realize it’s a little small.”

“I don’t need much space. Only enough for the couch to pull out.”

I told him he could easily have a bed in the bedroom. “You can fit a king in there.”

“The pullout’s for when my daughter comes to visit,” he explained.

I nodded. He seemed larger in the apartment than he did upstairs, as if he were slowly expanding.

“You don’t mind the lack of sunlight?” I said.

“That won’t make a difference. I’m mostly an outside guy.”

Outside
.

The word itself caused me to briefly relive my anxiety at the Dumpsters. The mad dash to the back porch, slogging through the depths of snow, everything speeding up on the inside but eerily slowing down on the outside, my limbs turning to lead. I could feel the cottonmouth coming on. I swallowed hard.

“I get plenty of sunlight,” Baylor said.

I told him the apartment was his and he asked when he could move in.

“As soon as you’d like,” I said. I added that we could even prorate the days for January.

“Great!” Baylor beamed.