Know Your Beholder: A Novel (23 page)

“You two close?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “Not really. When I was a kid we might’ve been. He used to take me bowling. He was an excellent bowler. Probably could’ve gone pro. So we’d bowl. And there was a period we’d go metal-detecting up in Starved Rock State Park, but that didn’t last for very long. When I got older, we didn’t have many common interests and sort of drifted apart.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Baylor said. “Were you close with your mom?”

“Pretty close, yeah,” I said. “Especially toward the end when she was in hospice.”

Baylor nodded respectfully.

All the things we must survive. The list just keeps growing. The deaths of others and heartbreak and taxes and the slow, deliberate failure of the body. I realized that Baylor Phebe might be eating himself to death, pound by doleful pound. Perhaps he thought that soon he would be with Ellen, their ghost selves reunited in the spirit world. Or is the truth more plainly stated in Baylor’s taxidermy? We are beings who simply expire. Creatures who are killed or die freakishly, without warning, and become blue-faced objects. Things. The only remains our skulls, our teeth, our bones. Calcium and marrow. Some two hundred interlocked artifacts. Left to clatter in a casket or to be anonymously fed to a conflagration, transformed into gray silt, and flung into a dull, disinterested wind.

Hopefully those left behind memorialize us by mounting our bust on a piece of thick, sturdy wood, by keeping an eight-by-ten photograph next to the bowling trophies, by visiting the hunk of chiseled marble marking our grave, by lightly grazing a brass urn with their fingertips.

The following afternoon, Bob Blubaugh knocked on my door.

“Bob,” I said.

He told me that morning there had been a strange man sleeping on the floor of the laundry room, in front of the washing machines. He said that the man told him he knew me. “He seemed nice enough, but I thought I should tell you,” Bob added.

“Was he sort of hairy?” I asked.

Bob said that he was wrapped in some kind of animal skin.

I went down to the laundry room. Glose wasn’t there but I could smell that he had been. I checked the storage room, then the boiler room. No sign. I went up to the porch, half-expecting to find him sprawled on the wicker furniture. But he was nowhere to be found.

The next day, Monday, a piece of Baylor Phebe’s mail was accidentally placed in my mailbox. The return address said it was from Emily Phebe, who I assumed was his daughter in Milwaukee.

I went down to the basement and knocked on Baylor’s door, through which I could hear the ice-fishing video game music.

Glose answered the door. He was holding a Wii controller, and the game was on pause in the background.

“Glose,” I said.

“Hey, Francis.”

I asked him what he was doing in Baylor’s apartment.

“Just hangin’ out,” he replied.

“Just hangin’ out,” I echoed.

“Yeah, just hangin’ out,” he echoed my echo.

I asked him if Baylor knew he was there.

“Uh-huh,” Glose answered. His mouth was a wolflike rictus, his tongue a chalky gray lump. He spoke through soft, lazy consonants.

I asked Glose where Baylor was, and he said, “Rehearsal. First day. You want me to give him a message?”

“No,” I said. “No message.”

Finally, he closed his mouth.

“How did this happen?” I said.

“What?” Glose asked indignantly, almost naively.

“You cohabiting with Baylor.”

“He likes me,” Glose replied.

“Did you knock on his door?”

“He saw me under the tree.”

“What tree?”

“The one in the backyard.”

“The copper beech?” I said.

“Yeah, that big tree. He saw me sleeping under it and invited me in.”

“And then one thing led to another,” I said.

“One thing led to another,” Glose confirmed, “yep.”

I decided against leaving the letter from Baylor’s daughter with Glose. I considered calling the police and pressing charges, but for what? He wasn’t loitering. And Baylor clearly trusted him enough to leave him to his own devices. Technically there was no lease infraction.

“Do you want to do some ice fishing?” Glose asked.

“No,” I said. “No thanks.”

He told me that Baylor said I was pretty good at it.

Before I turned to leave, I noticed the bearskin perfectly centered on the floor, in front of Baylor’s flat-screen.

Glose clocked me looking at it. “Blends in pretty well, don’t it?” he said.

I was furious.

When I got up to the attic I reconsidered calling the police. I even dialed Mansard but hung up, figuring it was a lost cause. Glose was clearly taking advantage of the KINDEST MAN ON EARTH, but until I spoke with Baylor about it, there was really nothing to be done.

I poured two fingers of bourbon and downed it.

And then two more.

And then two more.

Once I was good and silly drunk, for some reason I became overwhelmed with the desire to read Emily Phebe’s letter to her father. I had never opened another person’s mail before and I was well aware of the consequences—mail theft is a federal crime, after all—but the bourbon had obviously gotten my courage up. Why a piece of Baylor Phebe’s familial correspondence was so intriguing to me is anyone’s guess. The man had just opened up to me about his wife, and I’d reciprocated, telling him about my relationship with Lyman and my mother. There was nothing sneaky or duplicitous about Baylor. As far as I could tell he was about as mysterious as a box of baking soda. Perhaps breaking into the Bunches’ unit had unlocked some creepy need to collect more secrets about my tenants.

I steam-opened Emily Phebe’s letter to her father. It was handwritten, maybe four pages, front and back. She had composed it in blue ink and her penmanship was a thing of cursive beauty. I typed it out, adding it to these pages.

She had included a strip of photos taken at one of those instant booths that produce a series of four vertically stacked color snapshots. She was more attractive than I expected, with a pretty, pixie-ish face, dark hair, and warm, round, deep-brown eyes. Doe-eyed, you could say. I guess I’d assumed that she would’ve inherited her father’s considerable size, but unless she is pear-shaped or possesses some sort of unexpected, magnificently large ass, this didn’t appear to be the case.

Somewhat sickened by violating Baylor’s privacy, I carefully returned the pages of the letter and the photo strip to the envelope. I could feel the guilt settling heavily in my bowels. Shame loves the alimentary canal. I used a large blob of Scotch tape, dabbing it along the enclosure line to create some adhesive gum, and resealed the envelope. Then I went down to the front porch and used the master postal key to open the mailboxes and dropped the envelope into Baylor’s slot.

That night I found a bug in my pubes.

I was pissing into the toilet and I screamed like a woman. It appeared to be a small black aphid. And then I found two more in my beard. I combed through it, looking into the bathroom mirror, and saw red bites, fine as pinpricks, then found bites on the backs of my arms too.

I noted my alarmingly dwindling food supply. (Glose.) And the leftover breath and body smell. (Glose.). I recalled all the unflushed contorted turds in the toilet bowl, the foul turbid water, the long black body hairs that had collected in drifts on the bathroom floor. (Glose again.) And Kent’s vandalized bass.

I shampooed my beard and body with the Calming Cleanse delousing system. I lathered up three times, waiting until I was dry and then getting right back in the shower. I scrubbed myself raw. I clawed deep into the whorls of my beard.