I was three-quarters of the way home when the Fevereau woman went past me in her ridiculous mustard-colored Hummer. As always, she had her cell phone in one hand and a cigarette in the other; as always she was going too fast. I barely noticed, and I certainly didn’t see Gandalf dash into the street up ahead, concentrating only on Monica Goldstein, coming down the other side of the street in full Girl Scout uniform. I was concentrating on my reconstructed hip. As always near the end of these short strolls, this so-called medical marvel felt packed with roughly ten thousand tiny points of broken glass. My clearest memory before the scream of the Hummer’s tires was thinking that the Mrs. Fevereaus of the world now lived in a different universe than the one I inhabited, one where all sensations were turned down to half-strength.
Then the tires yowled, and a little girl’s scream joined them: “GANDALF, NO!” For a moment I had a clear and unearthly vision of the crane that had almost killed me filling the right window of my pickup truck, the world I’d always lived in suddenly eaten up by a yellow much brighter than Mrs. Fevereau’s Hummer, and black letters floating in it, swelling, getting larger.
Then Gandalf began to scream, too, and the flashback — what Dr. Kamen would no doubt have called a recovered memory — was gone. Until that afternoon in October four years ago, I hadn’t known dogs could scream.
I broke into a lurching, crabwise run, pounding the sidewalk with my red crutch. I’m sure it would have appeared ludicrous to an onlooker, but no one was paying any attention to me. Monica Goldstein was kneeling in the middle of the street beside her dog, which lay in front of the Hummer’s high, boxy grille. Her face was white above her forest-green uniform, from which a sash of badges and medals hung. The end of this sash was soaking in a spreading pool of Gandalf’s blood. Mrs. Fevereau half-jumped and half-fell from the Hummer’s ridiculously high driver’s seat. Ava Goldstein came running from the front door of the Goldstein house, crying her daughter’s name. Mrs. Goldstein’s blouse was half-buttoned and her feet were bare.
“Don’t touch him, honey, don’t touch him,” Mrs. Fevereau said. She was still holding her cigarette and she puffed nervously at it. “He could bite.”
Monica paid no attention. She touched Gandalf’s side. The dog screamed again when she did — it was a scream — and Monica covered her eyes with the heels of her hands. She began to shake her head. I didn’t blame her.
Mrs. Fevereau reached out for the girl, then changed her mind. She took two steps back, leaned against the high side of her ridiculous yellow mode of transport, and looked up at the sky.
Mrs. Goldstein knelt beside her daughter. “Honey, oh honey please don’t ”
Gandalf began to howl. He lay in the street, in a pool of his spreading blood, howling. And now I could also remember the sound the crane had made. Not the meep-meep-meep it was supposed to make, because its backup warning had been broken, but the juddering stutter of its diesel engine and the sound of its treads eating up the earth.
“Get her inside, Ava,” I said. “Get her in the house.”
Mrs. Goldstein got her arm around her daughter’s shoulders and urged her up. “Come on, honey. Come inside.”
“Not without Gandalf!” Monica screamed. She was eleven, and mature for her age, but in those moments she had regressed to three. “Not without my doggy!” Her sash, the last three inches now sodden with blood, thwapped the side of her skirt and a long line of blood spattered down her calf.
“Go in and call the vet,” I told her. “Say Gandalf’s been hit by a car. Say he has to come right away. I’ll stay with him.”
Monica looked at me with eyes that were more than shocked. They were crazy. I had no trouble holding her gaze, though; I’d seen it often enough in my own mirror. “Do you promise? Big swear? Mother’s name?”
“Big swear, mother’s name,” I said. “Go on, Monica.”
She went, casting one more look back and uttering one more bereft wail before starting up the steps to her house. I knelt beside Gandalf, holding onto the Hummer’s fender and going down as I always did, painfully and listing severely to the left, trying to keep my right knee from bending any more than it absolutely had to. Still, I voiced my own little cry of pain, and I wondered if I’d be able to get up again without help. It might not be forthcoming from Mrs. Fevereau; she walked over to the lefthand side of the street with her legs stiff and wide apart, then bent at the waist as if bowing to royalty, and vomited in the gutter. She held the hand with the cigarette in it off to one side as she did it.
I turned my attention to Gandalf. He had been struck in the hindquarters. His spine was crushed. Blood and shit oozed sluggishly from between his broken rear legs. His eyes turned up to me and in them I saw a horrible expression of hope. His tongue crept out and licked my inner left wrist. His tongue was dry as carpet, and cold. Gandalf was going to die, but maybe not soon enough. Monica would come out again soon, and I didn’t want him alive to lick her wrist when she did.
I understood what I had to do. There was no one to see me do it. Monica and her mother were inside. Mrs. Fevereau’s back was still turned. If others on this little stub of a street had come to their windows (or out on their lawns), the Hummer blocked their view of me sitting beside the dog with my bad right leg awkwardly outstretched. I had a few moments, but only a few, and if I stopped to consider, my chance would be lost.
So I took Gandalf’s upper body in my good arm and without a pause I’m back at the Sutton Avenue site, where The Freemantle Company is getting ready to build a forty-story bank building. I’m in my pickup truck. Pat Green’s on the radio, singing “Wave on Wave.” I suddenly realize the crane’s too loud even though I haven’t heard any backup beeper and when I look to my right the world in that window is gone. The world on that side has been replaced by yellow. Black letters float there: LINK-BELT. They’re swelling. I spin the Ram’s wheel to the left, all the way to the stop, knowing I’m already too late as the scream of crumpling metal starts, drowning out the song on the radio and shrinking the inside of the cab right to left because the crane’s invading my space, stealing my space, and the pickup is tipping. I’m trying for the driver’s side door but it’s no good. I should have done that right away but it got too late real early. The world in front of me disappears as the windshield turns to milk shot through with a million cracks. Then the building site is back, still turning on a hinge as the windshield pops out, flies out bent in the middle like a playing-card, and I’m laying on the horn with the points of both elbows, my right arm doing its last job. I can barely hear the horn over the crane’s engine. LINK-BELT is still moving in, pushing the passenger-side door, closing the passenger-side footwell, eating up the dashboard, splintering it in jagged hunks of plastic. The shit from the glove-compartment floats around like confetti, the radio goes dead, my lunchbucket is tanging against my clipboard, and here comes LINK-BELT. LINK-BELT is right on top of me, I could stick out my tongue and lick that fucking hyphen. I start screaming because that’s when the pressure starts. The pressure is my right arm first pushing against my side, then spreading, then splitting open. Blood douses my lap like a bucket of hot water and I hear something breaking. Probably my ribs. It sounds like chickenbones under a bootheel.
I held Gandalf against me and thought Bring the friend, sit in the friend, sit in the fucking PAL, you dump bitch!
Now I’m in sitting in the chum, sitting in the fucking pal, it’s at home but all the clocks of the world are still ringing inside my cracked head and I can’t remember the name of the doll Kamen gave me, all I can remember are boy names: Randall, Russell, Rudolph, even River-fucking-Phoenix. I tell her to leave me alone when she comes in with the lunch I don’t want, to give me five minutes to get myself under control. I can do this, I say, because it’s the phrase Kamen has given me, it’s the out, it’s the meep-meep-meep that says watch out, Pamela, I’m backing up. But instead of leaving she takes the napkin from the lunch tray to wipe the sweat off my forehead and while she’s doing that I grab
her by the throat because in that moment it seems to me it’s her fault I can’t remember my doll’s name, everything is her fault, including LINK-BELT. I grab her with my good left hand, caught a break there, muchacho. For a few seconds I want to kill her, and who knows, maybe I almost do. What I do know is I’d rather remember all the accidents in the world than the look in her eyes as she struggles in my grip like a fish stuck on a gaff. Then I think It was RED! and let her go.
I held Gandalf against my chest as I once held my infant daughters and thought, I can do this. I can do this. I can do this. I felt Gandalf’s blood soak through my pants like hot water and thought, Go on, you sad fuck, get out of Dodge.
I held Gandalf and thought of how it felt to be crushed alive as the cab of your truck ate the air around you and the breath left your body and the blood blew out of your nose and mouth and those snapping sounds as consciousness fled, those were the bones breaking inside your own body: your ribs, your arm, your hip, your leg, your cheek, your fucking skull.
I held Monica’s dog and thought, in a kind of miserable triumph: It was RED!
For a moment I was in a darkness shot with that red, and I held Gandalf’s neck in the crook of my left arm, which was now doing the work of two and very strong. I flexed that arm as hard as I could, flexed the way I did when I was doing my curls with the ten-pound weight. Then I opened my eyes. Gandalf was silent, staring past my face and past the sky beyond.
“Edgar?” It was Hastings, the old guy who lived two houses up from the Goldsteins. There was an expression of dismay on his face. “You can let go now. That dog is dead.”
“Yes,” I said, relaxing my grip on Gandalf. “Would you help me get up?”
“I’m not sure I can,” Hastings said. “I’d be more apt to pull us both down.”
“Then go in and see the Goldsteins,” I said.
“It is her dog,” he said. “I wasn’t sure. I was hoping ” He shook his head.
“It’s hers. And I don’t want her to see him like this.”
“Of course not, but—”
“I’ll help him,” Mrs. Fevereau said. She looked a little better, and she had ditched the cigarette. She reached for my right armpit, then hesitated. “Will that hurt you?”
It would, but less than staying the way I was. As Hastings went up the Goldsteins’ walk, I took hold of the Hummer’s bumper. Together we managed to get me on my feet.
“I don’t supposed you’ve got anything to cover the dog with?” I asked.
“As a matter of fact, there’s a rug remnant in the back.” She started around to the rear — it would be a long trek, given the Hummer’s size — then turned back. “Thank God it died before the little girl got back.”
“Yes,” I said. “Thank God.”
“Still — she’ll never forget it, will she?”
“Well,” I said, “you’re asking the wrong person about that, Mrs. Fevereau. I’m just a retired general contractor.” But when I asked Kamen, he was surprisingly optimistic. He says it’s the bad memories that wear thin first. Then, he says, they tear open and let the light through. I told him he was full of shit and he just laughed.
Maybe sí, he says. Maybe no.
Footnotes
1
In saying this, I assume you’re like me and rarely sit down to a meal — or even a lowly snack — without your current book near at hand.
(<< back)
2
With this exception: Bachman, writing under the pseudonym of John Swithen, sold a single hard-crime story, “The Fifth Quarter.”
(<< back)
3
Now out of print, and a good thing.
(<< back)
4
The Bachman novel following these was Thinner, and it was no wonder I got outed, since that one was actually written by Stephen King — the bogus author photo on the back flap fooled no one.
(<< back)
5
I believe I am the only writer in the history of English story-telling whose career was based on sanitary napkins; that part of my literary legacy seems secure.
(<< back)
6
I have had the same reaction to Everyman, by Philip Roth, Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, and The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, by Kim Edwards — at some point while reading these books, I just start to laugh, wave my hands, and shout: “Bring on the cancer! Bring on the blindness! We haven’t had those yet!”
(<< back)
7
Not in an actual trunk, though; in a cardboard carton.
(<< back)
8
A dame with trouble in her eyes. And ecstasy, presumably, in her pants.
(<< back)
9
Also a throwback to the bad old paperback days, now that I think of it.
(<< back)
10
In my career I have managed to lose not one but two pretty good novels-in-progress. Under the Dome was only 50 pages long at the time it disappeared, but The Cannibals was over 200 pages at the time it went MIA. No copies of either. That was before computers, and I never used carbons for first drafts — it felt haughty, somehow.
(<< back)
11
And, of course, it’s an homage to Of Mice and Men — kinda hard to miss that.
(<< back)
12
Purple, pulsing, and panting.
(<< back)
13
To learn more about The Haven Foundation, you can go to my website. That be www.stephenking.com.
(<< back)
14
I didn’t like the idea of Clay Blaisdell growing up in post-World War II America; all that has come to seem impossibly antique, although it seemed (and probably was) okay in 1973, when I was pecking it out in the trailer where my wife and I lived with our two children.
(<< back)
15
If I had written it today, certainly cell phones and Caller ID would have needed to be taken into consideration.
(<< back)
FB2 document info
Document ID: c5f984cc-6f67-4fec-b36e-5a256e06a360
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 6.12.2012
Created using: calibre 0.9.8, FictionBook Editor Release 2.6.6 software
Document authors :
Namenlos
About
This file was generated by Lord KiRon's FB2EPUB converter version 1.1.5.0.
(This book might contain copyrighted material, author of the converter bears no responsibility for it's usage)
Этот файл создан при помощи конвертера FB2EPUB версии 1.1.5.0 написанного Lord KiRon.
(Эта книга может содержать материал который защищен авторским правом, автор конвертера не несет ответственности за его использование)
http://www.fb2epub.net
https://code.google.com/p/fb2epub/
Blaze Page 25