Know Your Beholder: A Novel (28 page)

I turned left on Geneseo Street and another left on Waverly Lane and I found myself heading toward an open field covered with snow. The field is long and contains a platoon of 500-kilovolt power lines that issue a drifty, somnambulant buzzing not unlike early-summer cicadas. This was where, as young boys, Kent and a few other neighborhood kids and I would play baseball and Smear the Queer and rough-touch football. In later years it became a favorite place to smoke cigarettes and roaches stolen from Kent’s older brother, Harry, and where we’d drink twelvers of Old Style and pints of peach schnapps and Mad Dog 20/20 in addition to whatever we could smuggle out of our parents’ liquor cabinets. The “Radio Trees,” as we called them, seemed blessed with some miraculous Holy Hand of Youth, as the cops never made an appearance.

There is a stand of woods along one side, and I sat there in the snow and stared up at the blue-black sky, which was hung with a smattering of stars and a weak smudge of moon. I was still wearing only the cardigan and plaid flannel shirt. Haggis’s gift slippers weren’t suitable for this kind of adventure, but the cold felt good. The seat of my corduroys was getting soaked. The crisp, aqueous air was almost drinkable and I felt more at ease under the buzz of those power lines than I had in months.

For the briefest moment I thought I might be asleep, perhaps experiencing some sort of lucid dream. I leaned back on my elbows and let my shoulders meet the cold ground. The snow was bracing. My breath plumed above me.

Sheila Anne was well on her way to Decatur by now, and though it wasn’t even a hundred miles away, I had the sense that she was traveling a much greater distance, some epic expanse you read about in frontier novels. I imagined her rental car as a hovering egg, slowly receding into the night until it was merely a speck, then nothing. A fleeting feeling of peace, unaided by drugs, descended upon me, perhaps helped along by the Maker’s Mark, but there nonetheless.

I’m not sure how long I lay there. It might have been twenty minutes, but it also could have been hours. The power lines buzzed hypnotically. A distant dog barked. The breeze periodically rattled the naked trees. I ate a handful of snow. It tasted salty, dirty, earthen.

The first hints of dawn were washing out the moon and I took this as my cue to make my way home. When I got to my feet the back of my sweater was soaked, as was the seat of my corduroys and the back of my head. I walked away from the field, still feeling dreamy, half-expecting to encounter a talking animal, some Pollardian black bear, briefly emerging from hibernation to remark upon the shape of my soul or advise me about the direction of my life.

I turned right onto Waverly, and then another right onto Geneseo. I found myself walking down the middle of the street, passing trees and yards and cars and snow-heaped gables. Telephone poles and ceramic lawn creatures that seemed to follow me with their eyes as I passed them: a deer, a rabbit, a knowing red fox, a stone owl perched on a mailbox. The months-old remains of a Nativity scene, all the characters gone, but the manger, the firewood-quality lean-to, and the scattered hay still there.

There were lights left on in kitchens, garages with initials stenciled on their faces.

Moonlight glowed softly on the windows. My hometown asleep, breathing in unison. I had the sensation that they were dreaming me, that I was a mere figment of their collective slumber. My feet seemed to be moving on their own, slightly ahead of my thoughts.

As I turned onto Oneida Street, I could see my house wedged between the Schefflers’ lesser Victorian and the Coynes’ Tudor, my boyhood home small in the distance, fablelike, a place for dolls and miniature lamps and intricate toy furniture, too tiny to be any man’s entire world, too insubstantial to be stuffed with misery and secrets and lost, rarefied air. I walked toward it, delicately drunk with the predawn air of this long, cold night, treading lightly through the rags of snow still plaguing the pavement, my feet surprisingly warm and dry in my new slippers. Eventually I made my way up to the attic, where I fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

By the end of the first full week in April the snow had thawed and temperatures were consistently staying in the midforties. One day it reached fifty-two degrees and the Coyne children took their bikes out and zoomed up and down the street. The sound of birds broke with the dawn.

At night the stars were out, incredible in their arrangements, along with the soft blue pulsing of a distant planet.

With the warmth I’ve returned to wearing normal clothes. T-shirts and old sweats mostly. Jeans and cords. And Sheila Anne’s slippers.

Two days ago, at long last, the key arrived via FedEx with a note from Lyman:

The lock was a little stiff, so I sprayed some WD-40 into the slot. The door wasn’t as heavy as I’d anticipated. Beneath it, a cement stairwell led to a short cement hallway. With a flashlight I found a light switch and flipped it on. A fluorescent overhead flickered. The small gray hallway, smoothly paved, gave way to a four-hundred-square-foot room covered with gray industrial carpeting. There were three bunks housed in the wall—basically human-sized shelves with mattresses. They were neatly made with bottom and top sheets, generic wool blankets, and pillows. The whole shelter had the feel of a military barracks.

There was an old Sylvania SuperSet on a small stand and, underneath the TV stand, a series of board games from the midseventies: Monopoly, Yahtzee, Parcheesi, Operation. I thought it odd that a VCR was rigged up to the TV, since Lyman said the shelter had been built in the early seventies. In front of the TV stand a coffee table held magazines:
National Geographic
,
Sports Illustrated
,
Golf
,
Mademoiselle
. A small bookcase along one wall contained many of my mother’s favorite paperbacks: John Irving’s
The World According to Garp
, Styron’s
Sophie’s Choice
, Salinger’s
Nine Stories
, Updike’s
Rabbit, Run
, Anne Tyler’s
The Accidental Tourist
, among others.

Also on the coffee table, which was set in front of a convertible oatmeal-colored sofa, was an electric daisy wheel typewriter, plugged into an outlet but powered off. There was no paper in it. Beside the sofa was a floor lamp, which contained an old fifty-watt bulb. I turned on the lamp and miraculously it worked.

The room smelled surprisingly fresh. I’d expected dust and mold. The ceiling joists were visible. The raw, unstained lumber looked freshly cut. The ceiling itself was perhaps seven feet high. It made you want to sit on the floor. The shelter had obviously been made well, airtight. Uncle Corbit and his crew didn’t cut any corners.

Against another wall was a small refrigerator and a series of cabinets. In the cabinets, a huge assortment of canned goods, enough to last months. One cabinet contained four standard-issue military gas masks. Beside the gas masks, a sleeve of iodine tablets and a first-aid kit. There were a half-dozen office-cooler jugs of water lined up against the back wall, with a rectangular dispenser unit set beside them. A coffeemaker on a countertop, beside it an electric double-burner stovetop.

The bathroom, complete with a shower, sink, and toilet, was so small you had to draw your knees up to your chest just to be able to sit. I flushed the toilet, and it worked perfectly. On the top of the tank was a copy of Dostoyevsky’s
Crime and Punishment
, half-opened, facing down. In the margins, my mother’s tiny handwriting. Little notes in blue ink. Perfect as frost. She’d been underlining passages. It was a Penguin Classics edition, from 2003. It suddenly dawned on me that Cornelia had been using the bomb shelter as some sort of private sanctuary.

The shelter was powered by a dynamo generator that was outfitted with a car battery and a hand crank. There were three additional car batteries stacked beside it, still in their boxes. I cranked the generator several times. An orange light flickered and it whined to life. Beside it, on the cement floor, was a ham radio, which was plugged into the generator. It crackled to life. I felt like I was slipping into another time. I turned the dial on the ham radio, tuned in to what sounded like a traffic report. There was road construction on Interstate 55, thirty-minute delays on the outskirts of St. Louis. I turned off the ham radio, powered down the generator.

I was struck by the three bunks, each perfectly made in that hyperneat angular crispness of the Polish. My grandparents’ home in Chicago had been as clean as a museum, everything in its place. My mother’s folding of clothes fresh out of the dryer was a thing of military precision. She took pride in proper creases and sharp corners. There was careful consideration of the family unit. If something were to happen, she wanted our beds to be right.

One of the bunks had a slight depression in it. Perhaps this was where my mother took her naps, dozing off while reading? I inhaled deeply into the pillow, but it revealed nothing. It smelled mostly of camphor. Underneath this bunk was a cardboard stationery box. I opened it. Inside was a manuscript. The cover sheet read:

I turned the cover page over to reveal a dedication:

The long story, or novella, too long to reproduce verbatim here, concerns a young man, home from his first semester at an elite college in the Northeast. He sneaks into a neighbor’s home and brutally murders a young couple with a hammer and then abducts their three-year-old daughter, all while she’s sleeping.

He takes her in a car and they drive hundreds of miles away, through a blizzard, until they happen upon an abandoned farmhouse, which has suffered some terrible calamity. It still has furniture, pots and pans on the stove, canned goods in the cupboards, but everything is in disarray. The furniture has been toppled, flung every which way; things have been strewn from shelves. In one room, a grandfather clock has been driven through the wall.

The young man’s name is Francis.

The little girl is simply referred to as “the Girl” or occasionally “the Young Girl.”

Francis uses the hammer—the actual murder weapon—to fix up the house. He drives nails into the walls to hang fallen pictures. He repairs a broken section of the staircase so they can go up to the second floor, where things are in similar disarray. There he fixes up a bedroom, reuniting a mattress and box spring, lifting a bureau and pushing it against the wall, picking up the shards of a broken mirror. This is the room where they will sleep.

On one wall hangs a crucifix; opposite this wall, a framed painting of a clown with balloons in its cheeks. It used to be a child’s room. The wallpaper—bear cubs on tricycles—suggests as much. The little girl opens a drawer to the bureau, removes a knit scarf, claims it as her own.

They go into the other rooms and take the blankets off the beds. They know they will have to endure the winter.

There is the sense that Francis is leaving the life that he knew; that he is leaving it forever. Francis never tells the little girl what he did to her parents and she never asks about them.

The little girl is happy.

It eventually becomes clear that the farmhouse has been damaged by a terrible storm. A part of the house, the back porch, had been ripped away. They find it hundreds of feet from the property, sitting in a frozen field like some kind of strange boat at the bottom of a dry riverbed. They find three bodies there as well, splayed a great distance from each other, a boy and two older people, perhaps the boy’s parents, but it’s impossible to tell because animals have eaten the flesh off their faces. Birds have pecked away the eyes. Their limbs are twisted in odd, inhuman ways. Were they the owners of the house?

Francis and the little girl decide not to venture outside until the spring.

There is a fireplace in the living room, a huge pile of wood beside the hearth. Francis opens the flue and builds a fire and warms them.

They discover canned goods in the cupboards. Jars of preserves. Cases of oatmeal and powdered milk. They will have food to last the winter.

Francis finds a rifle in the basement and a box of shells. They will be safe.

At night, despite his age, they sleep together in the same bed, but it’s innocent. It’s as if they are both young children.

Slowly, over a period of days, they clean up the house, right all the toppled furniture, put things back in the cupboards, restore each item to its proper place. Francis manages to pull the grandfather clock out of the wall. Once upright, it starts to work again. He sets the time to his liking, disinterested in it matching the world outside. He and the Young Girl are making their own time now, creating their own private history.

They start to wear the clothes of the dead family. Francis teaches the little girl to read and write.