“If I have to.” I took the paper and wrote down what had happened. I returned the paper to him.
“You’ll give me a call whenever you remember or notice anything?”
I put my hand in my pocket and felt folded paper. “Wait. Just wait a second. Here’s something you can help me with. Who do you think sent this to me? There was a blank sheet of paper inside it.” I took out the envelope and smoothed it on his desk. My hands were shaking. “It’s the second one. The first was addressed to me.”
The glasses went back on, and he bent over the desk to take the envelope. When he saw the name, he glanced up at me. It was the first genuine response I’d had from him. “You got another one of these?”
“Addressed to me. With a blank sheet of paper in it.”
“Would you let me keep this?”
“No. I want it. What you can do is tell me who sent it.” I had the sense of taking a great risk, of making a huge error. It was strong enough to weaken my knees.
“I hate to say this, but it looks like your writing, Miles.”
“What?”
He held up my statement alongside the envelope and then turned them so I could see them together. There was a certain superficial similarity. “It’s not my writing, Polar Bears.”
“Not many people around here remember this particular name any more.”
“All it takes is one,” I said. “Just give me the envelope back.”
“Whatever you say. Only experts can really tell about these handwriting things anyhow. Dave!” He was bellowing at the door. “Get in here with your first aid kit! Pronto!”
“I heard you callin’ him Polar Bears. Not many does that any more.”
Lokken and I were walking down Main Street in the late humid darkness. The few streetlights had come on; I could again hear the buzz of neon signs. Lights burned in the windows of the Angler’s, spilling a rectangle of yellow onto the sidewalk. My hand was encased in gleaming white.
“We’re old friends.”
“You’d have to be. That name Polar Bears just drives him up the wall. Where’s your car at, anyhow? I think you’d be safe now.”
“I’m not taking the chance. He said for you to walk me to my car, and that’s what I want you to do.”
“Shit, there’s nothing to be ascairt of. There ain’t nobody out.”
“That’s what I thought last time. If you don’t call him Polar Bears, what do you call him?”
“Me?” Lokken guffawed. “I call him Sir.”
“What does Larabee call him?”
“Who?”
“Larabee. The chief over in Plainview.”
“Excuse me, but you musta lost some of your marbles, Mr. Teagarden. There ain’t nobody named Larabee over there in Plainview and even if there was he wouldn’t be chief because Plainview ain’t even got a Chief of Police. They got a sheriff named Larson, and he’s my second cousin. Chief Hovre calls in there once or twice a week. It’s his jurisdiction, like all these little towns roundabout, Centerville, Liberty, Blundell. He’s chief of it all. Where’s your car at, now?”
I was standing motionless in the middle of the wide dark street, looking at the VW and trying to assimilate what Lokken had said. The condition of my car made it difficult.
Lokken said, “My God, that’s not yours, is it?”
I nodded, my throat too dry to form words.
The windows were smashed, the top and hood bent and battered. One of the headlights protruded like an eyeball on a thin stalk. I ran to look at the front tires, and then went around in back. They were untouched, but the rear window had been smashed in.
“That’s property damage. You want to come back and tell the Chief about it? You should fill out a report. I gotta make a report too.”
“No. You tell Hovre about it. This time he’ll believe me.” I could feel anger building up in me again, and I gripped Lokken’s arm and squeezed it hard, making him yelp. “Tell him I said I wanted Larabee to handle it.”
“But I just told you my second cousin—”
I was already in the car, torturing the ignition.
The dangling headlight clattered onto the street before I had gone a block, and as I gunned the car up the first of the hills, just past the high school, I heard a hubcap roll off into the weeds beside the road. Through the starred windshield, I could see only a quarter of the road, and even that was fogged and blurred by the condition of the glass. My single headlight veered between illuminating the yellow line and the weeds, and my emotional condition swung wildly about a giant sense of betrayal. Larabee, was it? Was it Larabee who wanted to know how I’d cut my hand? Was it Larabee who wanted to get reelected?
I suspected that it was Larabee who would not push very hard to find the men who had tried to attack me, and who had wrecked my car in their frustration.
Fighting the shuddering car around a tight, ascending curve, I realized that the radio was playing: I had accidentally brushed the button some miles back, and now it was unreeling yards of drivel. “… and for Kathy and Jo and Brownie, from the Hardy Boys, I guess you girls know what that means, a good old good one, ‘Good Vibrations.’” Teenage voices began to squeal. I slammed into a lower gear, trying to watch the turning of the road through the web of the windshield as the announcer inserted a voice-over. “The Hardy Boys, far out.” Headlights raced toward me, then slipped past, flaring like the car’s horn.
The next car flipped its lights up and down twice, and I realized that my single headlight was on bright; I hit the dimming button with my foot.
“Too much, really too much. Those were the good old days talkin’ at ya. Now for Frank from Sally, a real tender one, I guess she loves you, Frank, so give her a call, huh? Something from Johnny Mathis.”
On the rises I could see nothing but black empty air beyond the roadbed; I kept the accelerator to the floor, releasing it only when I had to change gears or when the bolts in the car’s body began to shimmy. I flew past the Community Chest thermometer, seeing it only for a second in the headlight. All the beautiful green distance was one-dimensional dark.
“Hey, Frank, you better watch that little fox, she’s gonna get you, baby. She’s just stone in love with you, so be cool. Little change of pace now — for the junior gym class and Miss Tite, a blast of soulful Tina Turner, from Rosie B — ‘River Deep, Mountain High’. “
My tires complained as I suddenly braked, seeing a high wooded wall of stone before me instead of the black road; I cramped the wheel, and the back end fished out and then righted itself in that way which suggests that an automobile is constructed of a substance far more elastic than metal. The oil light flashed and went dead again. Still going dangerously fast, my mind filled with nothing but the mechanics of driving, I came over the last hill and began the straight slope down to the highway in a deep well of unheard music.
Without bothering to brake I spun out onto the deserted highway. The music pulsed in my ears like blood. Over the low white bridge, past where Red Sunderson must have found the second girl’s body; then a sharp left onto the valley road. I was breathing as hard as if I’d been running.
“Whoo-ee! Tell that to anyone, but don’t tell it to your gym teacher! All the weirdos are out tonight, kiddies, so lock your doors. Here’s something for all the lost ones, I kid you not, that’s what the card says, for all the lost ones, from A and Z. Van Morrison and ‘Listen to the Lion.’ “
At last I became conscious of the radio’s noise. I slowed, passing the narrow drive to Rinn’s house. Dark mounted high on either side — I seemed to be entering a tunnel of darkness. From A and Z? Alison and Zack? “Listen to the Lion” — that was the name of the song. An untrained high baritone glided through words I could not distinguish. The song seemed to have no particular melody. I switched the radio off. I wanted only to be home. The VW sped past the shell of the old school, and a few moments later, the high pompous facade of the church. I heard the motor grinding arhythmically, and pushed the button to bring the headlight back up to bright.