Floating Dragon by Peter Straub
But Billy Bentley . . . that was painful to remember, even more painful than seeing Ruth Branden again. In the days of Daddy’s Here, Richard Allbee had been a boy without a father, without brothers or sisters—his father had apparently vanished days after baby Richard’s arrival home from the hospital. Richard had idolized Billy Bentley. There was something of James Dean in him, something sensitive and rebellious. Ten years old to Richard’s eight, fourteen to his twelve, he had looked five years older, with his dark broad face and fall of hair over his forehead. Billy had been a great, though an unschooled, dancer and had a small but real talent for music. Billy drank beer, smoked cigarettes, drove his own car around the studio lot, and shouted comic things at script girls. At twelve and fourteen, he had been innocently wild. Drugs had ruined him. And that had ruined Daddy’s Here. On a street corner in West Los Angeles, he had tried to buy two nickle bags of heroin from a narcotics detective—he was seventeen and he looked at least twenty-five. The publicity had scuttled the series, scuttled Billy Bentley too.
Billy had disappeared into penal institutions for two years. In his absence he had been like a large unpaid bill, a nagging guilty center of awareness. He had written three times to his “brother.” You still gettin’ high on Seven-Up, Spunky? Walkin’ through “fields of flowers”? In here we got the whole elite of junior dope fiends and life ain’t too bad, Spunks, not too bad. We ain’t finished yet. We’ll see the old red, red robin again someday. In his sophomore year in college, Richard had read that Billy, now twenty-two, had been arrested again on a drug charge. He was still Billy Bentley, actor and former child star of Daddy’s Here. Four years later, out again, he had called Richard in New York—he wanted to do a film about drug addiction, and he was looking for money. Richard had sent him a couple of thousand dollars against Laura’s opposition. Chances were, it went straight into Billy’s arm.
Richard had not cared—he felt he owed him at least that much. He had loved Billy, loved him just as if he had been a real brother. But he had refused to work with him.
That had come up first in Paris, where Richard and Laura were living for six months. Billy had called up in the middle of the night, full of an idea for his resurrection. “Hey man, there are all these dinner theaters out there now—all over the East Coast, man. We’re naturals. They’d drop dead to get us. We just find the right play, and we’re in. And we get on pretty good—hell, I practically raised you.” Richard thought of the last time he had seen Billy: he had looked into the window of Horn and Hardart’s on East Forty-second Street and seen him at a table, his face still broad and dark but all the innocence burned out of it. He wore the clothes of the hip urban poor, corduroy jeans and a Salvation Army suit jacket too large for him. His face was oddly pocked, full of small shadowy scars. Billy looked dangerous, sitting at the table in Horn and Hardart’s; he looked like he did not belong in daylight. “Are you clean now?” Richard asked him.
“Hey, don’t be a drag. I’m on the methadone program, I can get clean anytime I want. I’m ready for work, Spunks. Let’s get something together. People want to see all that old stuff again.”
Richard had said no and felt it like a betrayal. In the second year in London, there had been another midnight phone call—Billy was still thinking about dinner theater. “Billy,” Richard had said, “I was an actor because my mother wanted to see my footprints outside the Chinese Theater. It was fun, but that’s over for me. I’m sorry.”
“I need you, man,” Billy had told him. “Like you needed a dad in the red, red robin days.”
“I’ll send you some money,” Richard had said. “That’s the best I can do.”
“Money ain’t Spunks,” Billy said, and hung up before Richard could ask for his address. Not long after, Richard read of his death in Newsweek. He had been shot to death in what the magazine called “an altercation over drugs.”
Richard thought of all this while watching the innocuous twenty minutes of Daddy’s Here. In the morning, he knew, Laura would listen sympathetically and then say, “Billy didn’t belong to you, lunkhead. You didn’t wreck his life, he did.” That was true—but Laura had not heard Billy Bentley’s half-whispered I need you, and responded with an offer of money. Sorry, Billy, I can’t save your life right now, how about a nice fat check instead?
Welcome home, Richard.
He switched off the set as soon as “When The Red, Red Robin Goes Bob, Bob, Bobbin Along,” the theme song, began to swing joyously beneath the credits.
2
It must have been because of the accident of unexpectedly seeing himself and Billy Bentley as the children they had been that Richard dreamed of being back in the series on his second night in Hampstead. Richard and Laura spent the Sunday unpacking their clothes—the summer clothes only, for all the rest could wait until they had their own place. The house on Fairytale Lane was theirs for two months only. Already they knew that this was a blessing. Hampstead was even now very humid, and the rented house was not air-conditioned: the attic fan cooled the bedroom floor, but it roared like a jet engine. The huge fireplace in the living room, though spotless, stank of ashes. The kitchen had only a few feet of counter space. What could have been a useful spot beneath some of the upper cabinetry was occupied by a microwave oven, the first one the Allbees had seen. The four bedrooms were small and dark, the stairs ominously steep. Whenever he rolled over on the hated water bed, the resulting wave threatened to knock Laura onto the floor. In the vest-pocket dining room, a large water stain announced that the ceiling would one day introduce itself to the table. All the wiring, to Richard’s experienced eye, had been installed before the second war. A third of the window frames had rotted, leaving a papery, waferlike layer of paint. All in all, the house was a good candidate for Richard’s professional services. He was a restorer of such rotting beauties.
He had worked on a dozen large houses in London, starting with his own, and had built a reputation based on care, exactness, and hard work. He took a deep satisfaction in bringing these abused Victorian and Edwardian structures back to life. What showed in his work was that the man behind it understood where the beauty in such houses lay and knew how to make it shine again. Richard had put himself to school to the buildings an earlier generation had dismissed as monstrosities, and in a short time, guided by an instinct he had not known was his, had learned their secrets. In a few years, he had even a small kind of fame—two magazines had done features about his houses, he was offered more work than he could accept. This would happen, he fervently hoped, in America too. Two couples, one in Rhode Island and the other in Hillhaven, had already contracted for his services. The commissions had given him the impetus to move back to America—that and the impending birth of his child. His son or daughter would be American, and would sound like one. Before he conceived a child, he had not imagined that to be important, but important it was. The child of Laura and himself would not have a Kensington accent—it would have the accent of Connecticut, where both his parents and Laura’s had been born: where he and Laura too had been born, on the same day a year apart. Richard also felt easier about enrolling Lump—the only name they had yet—in a Patchin County school than sending her/him to a London comprehensive.
Her/him? Lump would be a girl, Richard secretly knew, and loved the knowledge.
Shortly before the packers had come, while the London house was still recognizable, Richard had dreamed that he was walking in Kensington Gardens. It was a day five or six years in the future. The sunshine which fell on the lovely broad lawn was sunlight still far out in space; the grass and flowers were the grandchildren of the grass and flowers he knew. The trees were slightly though noticeably taller. This atmosphere of futurity extended to Richard, who in the dream was slightly heavier than his actual hundred and sixty pounds. A child was tugging at his hand. He was taking this future child out to play in the future park, and all was well. Dream-Richard dared not look down at his child, for fear of weeping with joy. Lump was tugging him along toward the R
He had never told Laura about seeing their child in the dream.
* * *
Neither did he tell her of the other dream. Husbands and wives divide psychic responsibilities, and Richard’s duty was to represent the optimistic side of the wrenching move; it was Laura who could express their joint fears and doubts.
So it was Laura who asked, “Is this really going to work?” They were taking a walk, that first Sunday, plunging off into unknown territory. The Allbees had gone down to the steep end of Fairytale Lane and wandered across a bridge, gone past immense trees entangled with creeping vines, been briefly joined by an amiable scurry of rotund dogs. All the houses seemed huge, set at vast distances from each other. A chain saw burped and spat from behind a screen of trees.
“Sure it is,” he said. He put his arm around her shoulders. “It might be a little tough at the start, but good things are going to happen to us here. I already have two customers. That’s a good start.”
“I’m in culture shock.” Laura said.
“We grew up here,” Richard pointed out.
“You grew up in Los Angeles. I grew up in Chicago. This whole state looks like Lake Forest.”
“Can’t be bad.” He caught the flash of her eye and said, “Oh, I know what you mean.”
They had been born here, but it was strange to them: Laura’s father had been transferred to Illinois and she had grown up in a town house similar to their London house; he had grown up in a series of apartments and small rented houses. His first house had been the one he and Laura had bought together. They were used to terraces—row houses—and shops close enough to walk to, they were used to traffic and pubs and parks. Hampstead, neither city nor country, had a dissociated, unreal quality. The name conjured up pictures of the Everyman Cinema and Holly Hill, Galsworthy’s serene white house and brick walks, for both of them.
“I think it will take a year or two,” he said, “but we’ll adjust to this funny place.”
“I’m not sure I want to adjust,” Laura said, and he silently applauded.
At that point a pack of men in short pants and sweat-stained T-shirts burst from around a corner and pounded toward them. “Hey!” shouted the leader, a Viking with flowing hair and a blond bouncing beard. Richard, who was wearing a tweed jacket and a necktie, suddenly felt overdressed for this sunny May morning.
One of the things they had noticed already was that Patchin County was resolutely healthy. Not only did joggers come down Fairytale Lane at all hours, but the stupefyingly lavish grocery stores were filled with people returning from or going to tennis matches. The local drugstore was stocked with an amazing array of cigarettes, but he had been the only person buying them.
Of course there was a culture shock. When Laura went to the grocery store where the customers all seemed to be modeling tennis clothes, she did not recognize the cuts of meat. Most of the breakfast cereals were pap coated with sugar. And strangers spoke to you with astounding directness. “My sister died,” a woman said to Laura over the frozen yogurt. “She just fell over and died, and of course her husband never changed a diaper in his life.” “What a shame,” Laura replied, backpedaling. The men, like the Viking jogger, looked you in the eye and beamed, showing a million white teeth—they looked like talk-show hosts. There was an assumption of intimacy in that glad dopey gaze.
They would get used to all these things—which were finally unimportant—because they had to. And Richard knew that their first days in America were particularly strained because they were supposed to be at home with everything here. That was another expectation, one they had of themselves.
* * *
The Allbees went early to bed that night. While Richard read aloud from their current project, Madame Bovary, they from time to time stroked each other’s thighs, caresses full of comfortable marital tenderness. Laura occasionally smiled to herself as the baby moved, which it had only lately begun to do. Tonight the baby was active, and she wanted Richard to feel it steeplechasing. He fell asleep with his hand on the rising loaf of her belly.
Sometime in the night, he dreamed of being back on the set of Daddy’s Here.
He was not ten years old: he was his own thirty-six. He was saying the line. Billy Bentley, likewise adult, smirked from out of his shadowy, pitted face. “Not tonight, darling,” Ruth Branden said, bustling onto the set through the door from the kitchen. “Don’t you remember? There was an awful murder. There’s something terrible outside. I couldn’t make cookies with that on my mind.”
“Oh, sure, Mom,” he said. “I remember now. No, cookies sure would be a bad idea.”
“Booga-booga-booga,” Billy Bentley said. “There’s a big bad killer and he’s going to get you.”
An episode about a killer? Surely that was wrong. The sponsors would never have . . .
“He’s gonna pounce on you outta the closet.” Billy Bentley grinned at him. “The door is going to swi-i-i-ng open, and he’s gonna crawl on out, coming to get you, babe.”
“Now, David,” said Ruth Branden. “That’s not nice.”
“Dad’s been looking a little weird lately,” Billy said. “The old juicer needs a jolt. About time Dr. Feelgood gave him a happy pill. We’ll be lucky if he makes it to the end of the season.”
“I won’t have you saying such things about your father,” said Ruth Branden, still imperturbably in character.
They were not on the set, Richard finally noticed. They were eating in the vest-pocket dining room. There were no cameras and no crowds of stagehands and studio people looking on.
“Hey, Mom,” he said.
“I want you to go to your bedroom now,” Ruth said. “Lock your door. And make sure the windows are locked too.”
“This isn’t the—”
“Get upstairs,” Ruth Branden shouted, and for a second her face was cronelike, raddled and drawn. “Get up there and lock your door!”
The room had four walls, but somewhere a camera was recording all this. “Scene Two,” called a voice. “Places.”
He was up in the bedroom: pajamas: night. Model airplanes covered the desk, a college pennant was tacked to the wall over the bed. APHOOLIE. (Arhoolie?) This was the set bedroom, and he was now truly Spunky Jameson, for he was in his ten-year-old body. A pair of skis leaned against the wall by the closet. A tennis racket in its zippered case; all the old boyish clutter. He touched his face, ran his hand over his crewcut. Yes. All was right.
He knew what the script called for. SPUNKY walks to window, looks out anxiously, turns back to DAVID. Richard went to the window. He remembered that view. The back wall of the studio, unused flats, dangling ropes. He looked out. What he saw was not the view of the studio, but a street, grass, a neighbor’s picket fence. In moonlight, streetlamps marched down Maple Lane, a street which had never existed. A 1954 Chevy went by, its headlights making lines of tar in the road blackly shine.
He turned around, his mouth dry. “Hey,” he said.
SPUNKY: Hey.
Laura lay asleep on the water bed, her hair spilling over the pillow. Billy Bentley, his face barely visible in the darkness, lay beside her, grinning at him. Richard knew that Billy was naked under the sheets.
“Booga-booga-booga,” Billy said in an evil voice. “Bad stuff coming your way.”
FRONT DOOR SLAMS.
The front door slammed.
DAVID: Guess it’s here now, bro.
“Guess it’s here now, bro,” Billy said. “You sure you got the door locked?”
In shock, Richard gaped at the spectacle of Billy Bentley naked i
“The door?”
“The bedroom door, Spunks. Bad ole thing a-comin’.”
Richard could hear terrible noises coming from downstairs. A heavy object fell to the ground, accompanied by the sound of breaking glass and china. Ruth Branden screamed. A heavy vicious splintering sound, as of an ax repeatedly striking wood. Ruth screamed once more: there came a series of heavy thuds, and Ruth’s screams abruptly stopped.