by Stephen King
But a night knocker doesn’t load or unload, Tim thought. He just walks and knocks. That is, Grandpa would have said, the beauty part.
He fell asleep, waking only at midnight, when another freight went rumbling through. He used the bathroom and, before going back to bed, took down the crooked picture and leaned the crew of grinning black men facing the wall.
Damn thing gave him the willies.
8
When the phone in his room rang the next morning, Tim was showered and sitting in the lawn chair again, watching the shadows that had covered the road at sunset melt back the other way. It was Sheriff John. He didn’t waste time.
“Didn’t think your Chief would be in this early, so I looked you up online, Mr. Jamieson. Seems like you failed to note a couple of things on your application. Didn’t bring them up in our conversation, either. You got a lifesaving commendation in 2017, and nabbed Sarasota PD’s Sworn Officer of the Year in 2018. Did you just forget?”
“No,” Tim said. “I applied for the job on the spur of the moment. If I’d had more time to think, I’d have put those things down.”
“Tell me about the alligator. I grew up on the edge of Little Pee Dee Swamp, and I love a good gator story.”
“It’s not a very good one, because it wasn’t a very big gator. And I didn’t save the kid’s life, but the story does have its funny side.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“Call came in from the Highlands, which is a private golf course. I was the closest officer. The kid was up a tree near one of the water hazards. He was eleven, twelve, something like that, and yelling his head off. The gator was down below.”
“Sounds like Little Black Sambo,” Sheriff John said. “Only as I recollect, there were tigers instead of a gator in that story, and if it was a private golf course, I bet the kid up that tree wadn’t black.”
“No, and the gator was more asleep than awake,” Tim said. “Just a five-footer. Six at most. I borrowed a five-iron from the kid’s father—he was the one who put me in for the commendation—and whacked him a couple of times.”
“Whacked the gator, I’m thinking, not the dad.”
Tim laughed. “Right. The gator went back to the water hazard, the kid climbed down, and that was it.” He paused. “Except I got on the evening news. Waving a golf club. The newscaster joked about how I ‘drove’ it off. Golf humor, you know.”
“Uh-huh, uh-huh, and the Officer of the Year thing?”
“Well,” Tim said, “I always showed up on time, never called in sick, and they had to give it to somebody.”
There was silence for several moments on the other end of the line. Then Sheriff John said, “I don’t know if you call that becomin modesty or low self-esteem, but I don’t much care for the sound of it either way. I know that’s a lot to put out there on short acquaintance, but I’m a man who speaks his mind. I shoot from the lip, some folks say. My wife, for one.”
Tim looked at the road, looked at the railroad tracks, looked at the retreating shadows. Spared a glance for the town water tower, looming like a robot invader in a science fiction movie. It was going to be another hot day, he judged. He judged something else, as well. He could have this job or lose it right here and now. It all depended on what he said next. The question was, did he really want it, or had it just been a whim born of a family story about Grandpa Tom?
“Mr. Jamieson? Are you still there?”
“I earned that award. There were other cops it could have gone to, I worked with some fine officers, but yeah, I earned it. I didn’t bring a whole lot with me when I left Sarasota—meant to have the rest shipped if I caught on to something in New York—but I brought the citation. It’s in my duffel. I’ll show you, if you want.”
“I do,” Sheriff John said, “but not because I don’t believe you. I’d just like to see it. You’re ridiculously overqualified for the job of night knocker, but if you really want it, you start at eleven tonight. Eleven to six, that’s the deal.”
“I want it,” Tim said.
“All right.”
“Just like that?”
“I’m also a man who trusts his instincts, and I’m hiring a night knocker, not a Brinks guard, so yeah, just like that. No need to come in at ten. You catch a little more sleep and drop by around noon. Officer Gullickson will give you the rundown. Won’t take long. It ain’t rocket science, as they say, although you’re apt to see some road rockets on Main Street Saturday nights after the bars close.”
“All right. And thank you.”
“Let’s see how thankful you are after your first weekend. One more thing. You are not a sheriff’s deputy, and you are not authorized to carry a firearm. You run into a situation you can’t handle, or you consider dangerous, you radio back to the house. We good on that?”
“Yes.”
“We better be, Mr. Jamieson. If I find out you’re packing a gun, you’ll be packing your bags.”
“Understood.”
“Then get some rest. You’re about to become a creature of the night.”
Like Count Dracula, Tim thought. He hung up, put the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door, drew the thin and dispirited curtain over the window, set his phone, and went back to sleep.
9
Deputy Wendy Gullickson, one of the Sheriff’s Department part-timers, was ten years younger than Ronnie Gibson and a knockout, even with her blond hair pulled back in a bun so tight it seemed to scream. Tim made no attempt to charm her; it was clear her charm shield was up and fully powered. He wondered briefly if she’d had someone else in mind for the night knocker job, maybe a brother or a boyfriend.
She gave him a map of DuPray’s not-much-to-it business district, a handheld belt radio, and a time clock that also went on his belt. There were no batteries, Deputy Gullickson explained; he wound it up at the start of each shift.
“I bet this was state of the art back in 1946,” Tim said. “It’s actually sort of cool. Retro.”
She didn’t smile. “You punch your clock at Fromie’s Small Engine Sales and Service, and again at the rail depot at the west end of Main. That’s one-point-six miles each way. Ed Whitlock used to make four circuits each shift.”
Which came to almost thirteen miles. “I won’t need Weight Watchers, that’s for sure.”
Still no smile. “Ronnie Gibson and I will work out a schedule. You’ll have two nights a week off, probably Mondays and Tuesdays. The town’s pretty quiet after the weekend, but sometimes we may have to shift you. If you stick around, that is.”
Tim folded his hands in his lap and regarded her with a half-smile. “Do you have a problem with me, Deputy Gullickson? If you do, speak up now or hold your peace.”
Her complexion was Nordic fair, and there was no hiding the flush when it rose in her cheeks. It only added to her good looks, but he supposed she hated it, just the same.
“I don’t know if I do or not. Only time will tell. We’re a good crew. Small but good. We all pull together. You’re just some guy who walked in off the street and landed a job. People in town joke about the night knocker, and Ed was a real good sport about all the ribbing, but it’s important, especially in a town with a policing force as small as ours.”
“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” Tim said. “My grandpa used to say that. He was a night knocker, Officer Gullickson. That’s why I applied for the job.”
Maybe she thawed a little at that. “As for the time clock, I agree that it’s archaic. All I can say is get used to it. Night knocker is an analog job in a digital age. At least in DuPray, it is.”
10
Tim discovered what she meant soon enough. He was basically a beat cop circa 1954, only without a gun or even a nightstick. He had no power to arrest. A few of the larger town businesses were equipped with security devices, but most of the smaller shops had no such technology. At places like DuPray Mercantile and Oberg’s Drug, he checked to make sure the green security lights were burning and there was no sign of intruders. For t
he smaller ones, he shook doorknobs and doorhandles, peered through the glass, and gave the traditional triple knock. Occasionally this brought a response—a wave or a few words—but mostly it didn’t, which was fine. He made a chalk mark and moved on. He followed the same procedure on his return trip, this time erasing the marks as he went. The process reminded him of an old Irish joke: If you get there first, Paddy, chalk a mark on the door. If I get there first, I’ll rub it out. There seemed no practical reason for the marks; it was simply tradition, perhaps dating all the way back, through a long chain of night knockers, to reconstruction days.
Thanks to one of the part-time deputies, Tim found a decent place to stay. George Burkett told him that his mother had a small furnished apartment over her garage and she’d rent it to him cheap if he was interested. “Only two rooms, but pretty nice. My brother lived there a couple of years before he moved down to Florida. Caught on at that Universal theme park in Orlando. Makes a decent wage.”
“Good for him.”
“Yeah, but the prices they charge for things in Florida . . . whoo, out of sight. Got to warn you, Tim, if you take the place, you can’t play music loud late at night. Mom don’t like music. She didn’t even like Floyd’s banjo, which he could play like a house on fire. They used to argue about it something awful.”
“George, I’m rarely home at night.”
Officer Burkett—mid-twenties, goodhearted and cheerful, not overburdened with native intelligence—brightened at this. “Right, forgot about that. Anyway, there’s a little Carrier up there, not much, but it keeps the place cool enough so you can sleep—Floyd could, at least. You indrested?”
Tim was, and although the window-shaker unit really wasn’t up to much, the bed was comfortable, the living room was cozy, and the shower didn’t drip. The kitchen was nothing but a microwave and a hotplate, but he was taking most of his meals at Bev’s Eatery anyway, so that was all right. And the rent couldn’t be beat: seventy a week. George had described his mother as something of a dragon, but Mrs. Burkett turned out to be a good old soul with a southern drawl so thick he could only understand half of what she said. Sometimes she left a piece of cornbread or a slice of cake wrapped in waxed paper outside his door. It was like having a Dixie elf for a landlady.
Norbert Hollister, the rat-faced motel owner, had been right about DuPray Storage & Warehousing; they were chronically short-staffed and always hiring. Tim guessed that in places where the work was manual labor recompensed by the smallest per-hour wage allowed by law (in South Carolina, that came to seven and a quarter an hour), high turnover was typical. He went to see the foreman, Val Jarrett, who was willing to put him on for three hours a day, starting at eight in the morning. That gave Tim time to get cleaned up and eat a meal after he finished his night knocker shift. And so, in addition to his nocturnal duties, he once more found himself loading and unloading.
The way of the world, he told himself. The way of the world. And just for now.
11
As his time in the little southern town passed, Tim Jamieson fell into a soothing routine. He had no intention of staying in DuPray for the rest of his life, but he could see himself still hanging around at Christmas (perhaps putting up a tiny artificial tree in his tiny over-the-garage apartment), maybe even until next summer. It was no cultural oasis, and he understood why the kids were mostly wild to escape its monochrome boringness, but Tim luxuriated in it. He was sure that would change in time, but for now it was okay.
Up at six in the evening; dinner at Bev’s, sometimes alone, sometimes with one of the deputies; night knocker tours for the next seven hours; breakfast at Bev’s; running a forklift at DuPray Storage & Warehousing until eleven; a sandwich and a Coke or sweet tea for lunch in the shade of the rail depot; back to Mrs. Burkett’s; sleep until six. On his days off, he sometimes slept for twelve hours at a stretch. He read legal thrillers by John Grisham and the entire Song of Ice and Fire series. He was a big fan of Tyrion Lannister. Tim knew there was a TV show based on the Martin books, but felt no need to watch it; his imagination provided all the dragons he needed.
As a cop, he had become familiar with Sarasota’s night side, as different from that vacation town’s surf-and-sun days as Mr. Hyde was from Dr. Jekyll. The night side was often disgusting and sometimes dangerous, and although he had never sunk to using that odious cop slang for dead addicts and abused prostitutes—NHI, no humans involved—ten years on the force had made him cynical. Sometimes he brought those feelings home (try often, he told himself when he was willing to be honest), and they had become part of the acid that had eaten away at his marriage. Those feelings were also, he supposed, one of the reasons he had remained so closed off to the idea of having a kid. There was too much bad stuff out there. Too many things that could go wrong. An alligator on a golf course was the very least of it.
When he took the night knocker job, he would not have believed that a township of fifty-four hundred (much of it in the outlying rural areas) could have a night side, but DuPray did, and Tim discovered he liked it. The people he met on the night side were actually the best part of the job.
There was Mrs. Goolsby, with whom he exchanged waves and quiet hellos on most nights as he started his first tour. She sat out on her porch glider, moving gently back and forth, sipping from a cup that might have contained whiskey, soda pop, or chamomile tea. Sometimes she was still there on his second return swing. It was Frank Potter, one of the deputies with whom he sometimes ate dinner at Bev’s, who told him that Mrs. G. had lost her husband the year before. Wendell Goolsby’s big rig had slid off the side of a Wisconsin highway during a blizzard.
“She ain’t fifty yet, but Wen n Addie were married a long, long time, just the same,” Frank said. “Got hitched back when neither of em was old enough to vote or buy a legal drink. Like that Chuck Berry song, the one about the teenage wedding. That kind of hook-up usually doesn’t last long, but theirs did.”
Tim also made the acquaintance of Orphan Annie, a homeless woman who many nights slept on an air mattress in the alley running between the sheriff’s office and the DuPray Mercantile. She also had a little tent in a field behind the rail depot, and when it rained, she slept there.
“Annie Ledoux is her real name,” Bill Wicklow said when Tim asked. Bill was the oldest of the DuPray deputies, a part-timer who seemed to know everyone in town. “She’s been sleepin back in that alley for years. Prefers it to the tent.”
“What does she do when the weather turns cold?” Tim asked.
“Goes up to Yemassee. Ronnie Gibson takes her most times. They’re related somehow, third cousins or something. There’s a homeless shelter there. Annie says she doesn’t use it unless she has to, on account of it’s full of crazy people. I tell her look who’s talkin, girlfriend.”
Tim checked her alley hideaway once a night, and visited her tent one day after his warehouse shift, mostly out of simple curiosity. Planted in the dirt out front were three flags on bamboo poles: a stars and stripes, a stars and bars, and one Tim didn’t recognize.
“That’s the flag of Guiana,” she said when he asked. “Found it in the trash barrel behind the Zoney’s. Pretty, ennit?”
She was sitting in an easy chair covered with clear plastic and knitting a scarf that looked long enough for one of George R. R. Martin’s giants. She was friendly enough, exhibiting no sign of what one of Tim’s fellow Sarasota officers had named “homeless paranoid syndrome,” but she was a fan of late-night talk radio on WMDK, and her conversation sometimes wandered off into strange byroads that had to do with flying saucers, walk-ins, and demonic possession.
One night when he found her reclining on her air mattress in the alley, listening to her little radio, he asked her why she stayed there when she had a tent that looked to be in tip-top condition. Orphan Annie—perhaps sixty, perhaps eighty—looked at him as though he were mad. “Back here I’m close to the po-lice. You know what’s behind the depot and them warehouses, Mr. J.?”
“Woods, I
guess.”
“Woods and bog. Miles of slash and muck and deadfalls that go on all the way to Georgia. There’s critters out there, and some bad human beings, too. When it’s pissing down and I have to stay in my tent, I tell myself nothing’s likely to come out in a rainstorm, but I still don’t sleep good. I got a knife and I keep it handy, but I don’t think it’d be much help against some swamp rat hopped up on crank.”
Annie was thin to the point of emaciation, and Tim took to bringing her small treats from Bev’s before punching in for his short shift of loading and unloading at the warehouse complex. Sometimes it was a bag of boiled peanuts or Mac’s Cracklins, sometimes a moon pie or a cherry tart. Once it was a jar of Wickles that she grabbed and held between her scrawny breasts, laughing with pleasure.
“Wickies! I ain’t had a Wicky since Hector was a pup! Why are you so good to me, Mr. J.?”
“I don’t know,” Tim said. “I guess I just like you, Annie. Can I try one of those?”
She held out the jar. “Sure. You got to open it, anyway, my hands too sore with the arthritis.” She held them out, displaying fingers so badly twisted that they looked like pieces of driftwood. “I can still knit n sew, but Lord knows how much longer that’ll keep up.”
He opened the jar, winced a little at the strong smell of vinegar, and fished out one of the pickle chips. It was dripping with something that could have been formaldehyde, for all he knew.
“Gi’me back, gi’me back!”
He handed her the jar and ate the Wickle. “Jesus, Annie, my mouth may never unpucker.”
She laughed, displaying her few remaining teeth. “They best with bread n butter n a nice cold RC. Or a beer, but I don’t drink that anymore.”
“What’s that you’re knitting? Is it a scarf?”
“The Lord shall not come in His own raiment,” Annie said. “You go on now, Mr. J., and do your duty. Watch out for men in black cars. George Allman on the radio talks about them all the time. You know where they come from, don’t you?” She cocked a knowing glance at him. She might have been joking. Or not. With Orphan Annie it was hard to tell.