“Don’t,” he pleaded.
“You don’t have to protect me. I just waited to prepare you. If you want people to draw conclusions from the sight of me banging on your front door, then let me bang away. But I want to find out what’s going on.”
“You’ll come even if I say not to.”
“That’s right.”
“In that case, don’t park near my house. And don’t come to the front door. Pull into the alley between Commercial Street and Madison, and then walk up through the alley so you can come around to the back. I’ll let you in the back door.”
And now, in a dark shabby living room, he was telling me that he was a notorious character. He looked the way you’d expect one of Freud’s case studies to look — frightened, his body a little shrunken and bent, his face prematurely aged. His white shirt had been worn too many days; his face was small and monkey-like. When we had been boys, Paul Kant had radiated intelligence and confidence, and I thought that he was the person my age in Arden whom I most respected. On summers when Alison was not at the farm, I had divided my time between raising hell with Polar Bears and talking with Paul. He had been a great reader. His mother was an invalid, and Paul had the grown-up, responsible, rather bookish demeanor of children who must care for their parents. Or parent, in his case — his father was dead. Another of my assumptions had been that Paul would get a good scholarship and shake the traces of Arden from him forever. But here he was, trapped in a shabby musty house and a body that looked ten years older than it was. If he radiated anything, it was bitterness and a fearful incompetence.
“Take a look out the window,” he said. “Try to do it without being seen.”
“You’re being watched?”
“Just look.” He stubbed out his cigarette and immediately lit another.
I peeked around the edge of a curtain.
Halfway down the block a big man who looked like he could have been one of the party which had shied stones at me was sitting on the fender of a red pickup, directing his eyes at Paul’s house.
“Is he there all the time?”
“It’s not always him. They do it in shifts. There; are five, maybe six of them.”
“Do you know their names?”
“Of course I know their names. I live here.”
“Can’t you do anything about it?”
“What do you suggest? Telephoning our benevolent Chief? They’re his friends. They know him better than I do.”
“What do they do when you go out?”
“I don’t go out very often.” His face worked, and ironic lines tugged deeply into his skin. “I suppose they follow me. They don’t care if I see them. They want me to see them.”
“Did you report that they wrecked your car?”
“Why should I? Hovre knows all about it.”
“Well, why, for Christ’s sake?” I burst out. “Why all this fire in your direction?” He shrugged, and smiled nervously.
But of course I thought I knew. It was what had occurred to me when Duane had first suggested that Paul Kant was better left alone: a man with Duane’s history of sexual suppression would be quick to react to any hint of sexual abnormality. And a town like Arden would maintain a strict nineteenth-century point of view about inversion.
“Let’s just say I’m a little different, Miles.”
“Christ,” I blustered, “nobody’s different any more. If you’re saying that you’re gay, it’s only in a backwater like Arden that you’d have problems because of it. You shouldn’t allow yourself to be terrorized. You should have been out of here years ago.”
I think for the first time I understood what a wan smile was. “I’m not a very brave man, Miles,” he said. “I could never live anywhere but Arden. I had to drop out of life to take care of my mother, and after she died she left me this house.” It smelled of dust and decay and damp — Paul had no smell at all. He was like something not there, or there in only one dimension. He said, “I’ve never really been… what you’re implying. I thought I was, I guess, and I guess other people thought I was. But the opportunities here are rather limited.” Again I got that pale, self-mocking half-smile that was only a lifting of the edges of the mouth. He was like something in a cage.
“So you just sat here and put up with Zumgo’s and what your neighbors whispered about you?”
“You’re not me, Miles. You don’t understand.”
I looked around at the dim room filled with old lady’s furniture. Lumpy uncomfortable chairs with anti-macassars. Cheap china figurines: shepherdesses and dogs, Mr. Pickwick and Mrs. Gamp. But there weren’t any books.
“No,” I said.
“You don’t even really want me to confide in you, do you? We haven’t seen each other since we grew up.” He stubbed out the cigarette and scratched his fingers in his tight black curly hair.
“Not unless you’re guilty,” I said, beginning to be affected by the air of despairing hopelessness which surrounded him.
I suppose the sound he uttered was a laugh.
“What are you going to do? Just wait until they break in and do whatever it is they have in mind?”
“What I’m going to do is wait it out,” he said. “It’s what I’m best at, after all. When they finally catch whoever it is, maybe I’ll get my job back. What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I thought we might be able to help each other. If I were you I’d scram out of the back door in the middle of the night and go to Chicago or someplace until it’s all over.”
“My car won’t move. And even if it did, I’d be picked up in a day or two.” He sent me that ghastly smile again. “You know, Miles, I almost envy that man. The killer. I’m almost jealous of him. Because he wasn’t too afraid to do what he had to do. Of course he is a beast, a fiend I suppose, but he just went ahead and did what he had to do. Didn’t he?” The small monkey’s face was pointing at me, still wearing that dead smile. Mixed in with the smells of dust and old lady’s possessions was the odor of long-dead flowers.
“Like Hitler. You sound like you should talk to Zack.”
His expression altered. “You know him?”
“I’ve met him.”
“I’d keep away from him.”
“What for?”
“He can hurt you. He could hurt you, Miles.”
“He’s my biggest fan,” I said. “He wants to be just like me.”
Paul shrugged; the topic no longer interested him.
I said, “I think I’m wasting my time.”
“Of course you are.”
“If you ever need help, Paul, you can come out to the Updahl farm. I’ll do whatever I can.”
“Neither one of us can help the other.” He looked at me blankly, wishing I would leave. After a moment he spoke again. “Miles, how old was your cousin when she died?”
“Fourteen.”
“Poor Miles.”
“Poor Miles, bullshit,” I said, and left him sitting there with the cigarette smoke curling around him.
Outside the warm air smelled unbelievably fresh, and I recognized that my chest was tight, clamped by an emotion too complex to identify. I inhaled deeply, going down Paul’s wooden steps to his tiny yard. It seemed to me that I could almost hear the paint peeling off that hopeless house. I looked both ways, knowing that if anyone spotted me I was in trouble, and saw something I hadn’t noticed when I had come in. In a corner of the yard beside Paul’s low fence was a doghouse, empty and as in need of paint as the house. A chain staked to the front of the doghouse trailed off into the weeds and bushes beside the fence. The chain seemed taut. The hairs on the back of my neck rose, and I was aware of the texture of the shirt next to my skin. I did not want to look, but I had to. I took two steps across the dying lawn. It was lying in the weeds with the chain around what was left of its neck. Maggots swarmed over it like a dirty blanket.