by Stephen King
Dear God, I am not a son of a bitch. Please.
That sick happiness at George's retreat was more typical of Denker in the play than of Jack Torrance the playwright.
You hate me because you know ...
Because he knew what?
What could he possibly know about George Hatfield that would make him hate him? That his whole future lay ahead of him? That he looked a little bit like Robert Redford and all conversation among the girls stopped when he did a double gainer from the pool diving board? That he played soccer and baseball with a natural, unlearned grace?
Ridiculous. Absolutely absurd. He envied George Hatfield nothing. If the truth was known, he felt worse about George's unfortunate stutter than George himself, because George really would have made an excellent debater. And if Jack had set the timer ahead--and of course he hadn't--it would have been because both he and the other members of the squad were embarrassed for George's struggle, they had agonized over it the way you agonize when the Class Night speaker forgets some of his lines. If he had set the timer ahead, it would have been just to ... to put George out of his misery.
But he hadn't set the timer ahead. He was quite sure of it.
A week later he had cut him, and that time he had kept his temper. The shouts and the threats had all been on George's side. A week after that he had gone out to the parking lot halfway through practice to get a pile of sourcebooks that he had left in the trunk of the VW and there had been George, down on one knee with his long blond hair swinging in his face, a hunting knife in one hand. He was sawing through the VW's right front tire. The back tires were already shredded, and the bug sat on the flats like a small, tired dog.
Jack had seen red, and remembered very little of the encounter that followed. He remembered a thick growl that seemed to issue from his own throat: "All right, George. If that's how you want it, just come here and take your medicine."
He remembered George looking up, startled and fearful. He had said: "Mr. Torrance--" as if to explain how all this was just a mistake, the tires had been flat when he got there and he was just cleaning dirt out of the front treads with the tip of this gutting knife he just happened to have with him and--
Jack had waded in, his fists held up in front of him, and it seemed that he had been grinning. But he wasn't sure of that.
The last thing he remembered was George holding up the knife and saying: "You better not come any closer--"
And the next thing was Miss Strong, the French teacher, holding Jack's arms, crying, screaming: "Stop it, Jack! Stop it! You're going to kill him!"
He had blinked around stupidly. There was the hunting knife, glittering harmlessly on the parking lot asphalt four yards away. There was his Volkswagen, his poor old battered bug, veteran of many wild midnight drunken rides, sitting on three flat shoes. There was a new dent in the right front fender, he saw, and there was something in the middle of the dent that was either red paint or blood. For a moment he had been confused, his thoughts
(jesus christ al we hit him after all)
of that other night. Then his eyes had shifted to George, George lying dazed and blinking on the asphalt. His debate group had come out and they were huddled together by the door, staring at George. There was blood on his face from a scalp laceration that looked minor, but there was also blood running out of one of George's ears and that probably meant a concussion. When George tried to get up, Jack shook free of Miss Strong and went to him. George cringed.
Jack put his hands on George's chest and pushed him back down. "Lie still," he said. "Don't try to move." He turned to Miss Strong, who was staring at them both with horror.
"Please go call the school doctor, Miss Strong," he told her. She turned and fled toward the office. He looked at his debate class then, looked them right in the eye because he was in charge again, fully himself, and when he was himself there wasn't a nicer guy in the whole state of Vermont. Surely they knew that.
"You can go home now," he told them quietly. "We'll meet again tomorrow."
But by the end of that week six of his debaters had dropped out, two of them the class of the act, but of course it didn't matter much because he had been informed by then that he would be dropping out himself.
Yet somehow he had stayed off the bottle, and he supposed that was something.
And he had not hated George Hatfield. He was sure of that. He had not acted but had been acted upon.
You hate me because you know ...
But he had known nothing. Nothing. He would swear that before the Throne of Almighty God, just as he would swear that he had set the timer ahead no more than a minute. And not out of hate but out of pity.
Two wasps were crawling sluggishly about on the roof beside the hole in the flashing.
He watched them until they spread their aerodynamically unsound but strangely efficient wings and lumbered off into the October sunshine, perchance to sting someone else. God had seen fit to give them stingers and Jack supposed they had to use them on somebody.
How long had he been sitting here, looking at that hole with its unpleasant surprise down inside, raking over old coals? He looked at his watch. Almost half an hour.
He let himself down to the edge of the roof, dropped one leg over, and felt around until his foot found the top rung of the ladder just below the overhang. He would go down to the equipment shed where he had stored the bug bomb on a high shelf out of Danny's reach. He would get it, come back up, and then they would be the ones surprised. You could be stung, but you could also sting back. He believed that sincerely. Two hours from now the nest would be just so much chewed paper and Danny could have it in his room if he wanted to--Jack had had one in his room when he was just a kid, it had always smelled faintly of woodsmoke and gasoline. He could have it right by the head of his bed. It wouldn't hurt him.
"I'm getting better."
The sound of his own voice, confident in the silent afternoon, reassured him even though he hadn't meant to speak aloud. He was getting better. It was possible to graduate from passive to active, to take the thing that had once driven you nearly to madness as a neutral prize of no more than occasional academic interest. And if there was a place where the thing could be done, this was surely it.
He went down the ladder to get the bug bomb. They would pay. They would pay for stinging him.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
DOWN IN THE FRONT YARD
Jack had found a huge white-painted wicker chair in the back of the equipment shed two weeks ago, and had dragged it around to the porch over Wendy's objections that it was really the ugliest thing she had ever seen in her whole life. He was sitting in it now, amusing himself with a copy of E. L. Doctorow's Welcome to Hard Times, when his wife and son rattled up the driveway in the hotel truck.
Wendy parked it in the turnaround, raced the engine sportily, and then turned it off. The truck's single taillight died. The engine rumbled grumpily with post-ignition and finally stopped. Jack got out of his chair and ambled down to meet them.
"Hi, Dad!" Danny called, and raced up the hill. He had a box in one hand. "Look what Mommy bought me!"
Jack picked his son up, swung him around twice, and kissed him heartily on the mouth.
"Jack Torrance, the Eugene O'Neill of his generation, the American Shakespeare!" Wendy said, smiling. "Fancy meeting you here, so far up in the mountains."
"The common ruck became too much for me, dear lady," he said, and slipped his arms around her. They kissed. "How was your trip?"
"Very good. Danny complains that I keep jerking him but I didn't stall the truck once and ... oh, Jack, you finished it!"
She was looking at the roof, and Danny followed her gaze. A faint frown touched his face as he looked at the wide swatch of fresh shingles atop the Overlook's west wing, a lighter green than the rest of the roof. Then he looked down at the box in his hand and his face cleared again. At night the pictures Tony had showed him came back to haunt in all their original clarity, but in sunny daylight they were
easier to disregard.
"Look, Daddy, look!"
Jack took the box from his son. It was a model car, one of the Big Daddy Roth caricatures that Danny had expressed an admiration for in the past. This one was the Violent Violet Volkswagen, and the picture on the box showed a huge purple VW with long '59 Cadillac Coupe de Ville taillights burning up a dirt track. The VW had a sunroof, and poking up through it, clawed hands on the wheel down below, was a gigantic warty monster with popping bloodshot eyes, a maniacal grin, and a gigantic English racing cap turned around backward.
Wendy was smiling at him, and Jack winked at her.
"That's what I like about you, doc," Jack said, handing the box back. "Your taste runs to the quiet, the sober, the introspective. You are definitely the child of my loins."
"Mommy said you'd help me put it together as soon as I could read all of the first Dick and Jane."
"That ought to be by the end of the week," Jack said. "What else have you got in that fine-looking truck, ma'am?"
"Uh-uh." She grabbed his arm and pulled him back. "No peeking. Some of that stuff is for you. Danny and I will take it in. You can get the milk. It's on the floor of the cab."
"That's all I am to you," Jack cried, clapping a hand to his forehead. "Just a dray horse, a common beast of the field. Dray here, dray there, dray everywhere."
"Just dray that milk right into the kitchen, mister."
"It's too much!" he cried, and threw himself on the ground while Danny stood over him and giggled.
"Get up, you ox," Wendy said, and prodded him with the toe of her sneaker.
"See?" he said to Danny. "She called me an ox. You're a witness."
"Witness, witness!" Danny concurred gleefully, and broad-jumped his prone father.
Jack sat up. "That reminds me, chumly. I've got something for you, too. On the porch by my ashtray."
"What is it?"
"Forgot. Go and see."
Jack got up and the two of them stood together, watching Danny charge up the lawn and then take the steps to the porch two by two. He put an arm around Wendy's waist.
"You happy, babe?"
She looked up at him solemnly. "This is the happiest I've been since we were married."
"Is that the truth?"
"God's honest."
He squeezed her tightly. "I love you."
She squeezed him back, touched. Those had never been cheap words with John Torrance; she could count the number of times he had said them to her, both before and after marriage, on both her hands.
"I love you too."
"Mommy! Mommy!" Danny was on the porch now, shrill and excited. "Come and see! Wow! It's neat!"
"What is it?" Wendy asked him as they walked up from the parking lot, hand in hand.
"Forgot," Jack said.
"Oh, you'll get yours," she said, and elbowed him. "See if you don't."
"I was hoping I'd get it tonight," he remarked, and she laughed. A moment later he asked, "Is Danny happy, do you think?"
"You ought to know. You're the one who has a long talk with him every night before bed."
"That's usually about what he wants to be when he grows up or if Santa Claus is really real. That's getting to be a big thing with him. I think his old buddy Scott let some pennies drop on that one. No, he hasn't said much of anything about the Overlook to me."
"Me either," she said. They were climbing the porch steps now. "But he's very quiet a lot of the time. And I think he's lost weight, Jack, I really do."
"He's just getting tall."
Danny's back was to them. He was examining something on the table by Jack's chair, but Wendy couldn't see what it was.
"He's not eating as well, either. He used to be the original steam shovel. Remember last year?"
"They taper off," he said vaguely. "I think I read that in Spock. He'll be using two forks again by the time he's seven."
They had stopped on the top step.
"He's pushing awfully hard on those readers, too," she said. "I know he wants to learn how, to please us ... to please you," she added reluctantly.
"To please himself most of all," Jack said. "I haven't been pushing him on that at all. In fact, I do wish he wouldn't go quite so hard."
"Would you think I was foolish if I made an appointment for him to have a physical? There's a G.P. in Sidewinder, a young man from what the checker in the market said--"
"You're a little nervous about the snow coming, aren't you?"
She shrugged. "I suppose. If you think it's foolish--"
"I don't. In fact, you can make appointments for all three of us. We'll get our clean bills of health and then we can sleep easy at night."
"I'll make the appointments this afternoon," she said.
"Mom! Look, Mommy!"
He came running to her with a large gray thing in his hands, and for one comic-horrible moment Wendy thought it was a brain. She saw what it really was and recoiled instinctively.
Jack put an arm around her. "It's all right. The tenants who didn't fly away have been shaken out. I used the bug bomb."
She looked at the large wasps' nest her son was holding but would not touch it. "Are you sure it's safe?"
"Positive. I had one in my room when I was a kid. My dad gave it to me. Want to put it in your room, Danny?"
"Yeah! Right now!"
He turned around and raced through the double doors. They could hear his muffled, running feet on the main stairs.
"There were wasps up there," she said. "Did you get stung?"
"Where's my purple heart?" he asked, and displayed his finger. The swelling had already begun to go down, but she ooohed over it satisfyingly and gave it a small, gentle kiss.
"Did you pull the stinger out?"
"Wasps don't leave them in. That's bees. They have barbed stingers. Wasp stingers are smooth. That's what makes them so dangerous. They can sting again and again."
"Jack, are you sure that's safe for him to have?"
"I followed the directions on the bomb. The stuff is guaranteed to kill every single bug in two hours' time and then dissipate with no residue."
"I hate them," she said.
"What ... wasps?"
"Anything that stings," she said. Her hands went to her elbows and cupped them, her arms crossed over her breasts.
"I do too," he said, and hugged her.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
DANNY
Down the hall, in the bedroom, Wendy could hear the typewriter Jack had carried up from downstairs burst into life for thirty seconds, fall silent for a minute or two, and then rattle briefly again. It was like listening to machine-gun fire from an isolated pillbox. The sound was music to her ears; Jack had not been writing so steadily since the second year of their marriage, when he wrote the story that Esquire had purchased. He said he thought the play would be done by the end of the year, for better or worse, and he would be moving on to something new. He said he didn't care if The Little School stirred any excitement when Phyllis showed it around, didn't care if it sank without a trace, and Wendy believed that, too. The actual act of his writing made her immensely hopeful, not because she expected great things from the play but because her husband seemed to be slowly closing a huge door on a roomful of monsters. He had had his shoulder to that door for a long time now, but at last it was swinging shut.
Every key typed closed it a little more.
"Look, Dick, look."
Danny was hunched over the first of the five battered primers Jack had dug up by culling mercilessly through Boulder's myriad secondhand bookshops. They would take Danny right up to the second-grade reading level, a program she had told Jack she thought was much too ambitious. Their son was intelligent, they knew that, but it would be a mistake to push him too far too fast. Jack had agreed. There would be no pushing involved. But if the kid caught on fast, they would be prepared. And now she wondered if Jack hadn't been right about that, too.
Danny, prepared by four years of Sesame Street and three years of Electr
ic Company, seemed to be catching on with almost scary speed. It bothered her. He hunched over the innocuous little books, his crystal radio and balsa glider on the shelf above him, as though his life depended on learning to read. His small face was more tense and paler than she liked in the close and cozy glow of the goosenecked lamp they had put in his room. He was taking it very seriously, both the reading and the workbook pages his father made up for him every afternoon. Picture of an apple and a peach. The word apple written beneath in Jack's large, neatly made printing. Circle the right picture, the one that went with the word. And their son would stare from the word to the pictures, his lips moving, sounding out, actually sweating it out. And with his double-sized red pencil curled into his pudgy right fist, he could now write about three dozen words on his own.
His finger traced slowly under the words in the reader. Above them was a picture Wendy half-remembered from her own grammar school days, nineteen years before. A laughing boy with brown curly hair. A girl in a short dress, her hair in blond ringlets, one hand holding a jump rope. A prancing dog running after a large red rubber ball. The first-grade trinity. Dick, Jane, and Jip.
"See Jip run," Danny read slowly. "Run, Jip, run. Run, run, run." He paused, dropping his finger down a line. "See the ..." He bent closer, his nose almost touching the page now. "See the ..."
"Not so close, doc," Wendy said quietly. "You'll hurt your eyes. It's--"
"Don't tell me!" he said, sitting up with a jerk. His voice was alarmed. "Don't tell me, Mommy, I can get it!"
"All right, honey," she said. "But it's not a big thing. Really it's not."
Unheeding, Danny bent forward again. On his face was an expression that might be more commonly seen hovering over a graduate record exam in a college gym somewhere. She liked it less and less.
"See the ... buh. Aw. El. El. See the buhaw-el-el? See the buhawl. Ball!" Suddenly triumphant. Fierce. The fierceness in his voice scared her. "See the ball!"