If a Stranger Approaches You: Stories Read Free

day, and the telephone lines were humming. What was the hell was this—a power surge, a magnetic storm, some sort of cosmic overload? It was two o’clock in the afternoon, a sky clarified as gin, blanched as death, easily a hundred degrees, not a drop of moisture in the air, and the goddamned streetlights were burning, and the telephone lines were humming.
    Tony Harmon had parked two blocks from the house, hoping he could walk off some of this nervous energy before he got to the front door—but the walk wasn’t working. He was grinding his teeth, he realized, something the dentist had warned him not to do. He put a hand to his jaw to force himself to stop.
    Except for the electric droning of telephone wires, the neighborhood was dead quiet. Even a yappy dog tied to a white birch tree in a front yard stood stone still—prim and proper, utterly silent, only its wet little eyes moving inside its white-whiskery head. Like a dog prop. A decoy dog. When he was already halfway down the block from it, Tony thought he heard it make one sharp yelp at his back, but when he turned to look, the dog was standing exactly where it had been, looking exactly the same, still watching him but not seeming capable of having made a sound. He shifted the birthday presents from one arm to the other.
    This was one of the blessings of being in Nowheresville, U.S.A.—of being in a place where no one knew anyone or wanted to know anyone. There was no one to stop him, to say, “Tony! How are you doing, old boy?” He’d lived among these people for years, but they would not have known him from Adam. There were no front porches, which helped. No one would be sitting on his or her front porch wondering who was that man walking down the street with a bunch of boxes wrapped up in Barbie-doll paper. Why, isn’t that Tony Harmon walking down the street on the way to his own house; now, what do you suppose that’s all about? no one would be asking.
    Here, no one had to be reminded to mind his or her own business. Your neighbors could be lying on their front lawn moaning in agony, and you’d just politely pull your curtains closed so you wouldn’t offend them by noticing. It was that kind of suburb in which, every ten years or so, something horrifying might happen. A kiddie-porn ring busted up. A body wrapped in plastic left at the edge of the driveway for the garbage man. Anyone who was asked for the paper, by the police, or on the television would say, “I never noticed anything unusual. They seemed like very nice people.”
    Did you ever talk to them?
    No.
    Tony was grateful for this as he rounded the corner of Periwinkle and Martin where there was a little neighborhood park—almost always empty unless some father, like himself, was pushing his kid, like his own kid, there on a swing on a Sunday afternoon for an obligatory fifteen minutes. Or if some teenagers were slumped stupidly on the teeter-totters.
    But it never filled up. Anyone in the park would move on as soon as someone else came to the park.
    It was hardly even a park. A thousand pounds of sand tossed between two benches—benches with little brass plaques screwed into them, plaques which bore the names of dead people whose families had donated money for benches in their memories. Someone had scratched FUCK with a key or a penknife into one of the plaques. DICK-HEAD over the other, if his memory served him right.
    But this afternoon the swings were hanging completely dead in the breezeless heat, so motionless and sober it took Tony’s breath away to see them, punched him in the gut—and then he was doubled over, presents tumbling out of his arms onto the sidewalk, at his feet, sounding hollow and absurd as they hit the sidewalk.
    He couldn’t breathe. Jesus. He couldn’t breathe.
    He couldn’t breathe.
    But his mouth was open, he was certain of that because a string of spit rolled out of it onto the cement between his shoes (his shiny work shoes, why the hell hadn’t he worn