by Stephen King
Lisey looked into the black eye of the pistol he held and felt the strength run out of her legs. This was no cheap hockshop .22, this was the real deal, a big automatic (she thought it was an automatic) that would make a big hole. She sat down on the edge of her desk. If the desk hadn’t been there, she was pretty sure she would have gone sprawling on the floor. For a moment she was almost positive she was going to wet her pants, but she managed to hold her water. For the time being, at least.
“Take what you want,” she whispered through lips that felt Novocain-numb. “Take all of it.”
“Come upstairs, Missus,” he said. “We’ll talk about it upstairs.”
The idea of being in Scott’s study with this man filled her with horror and revulsion. “No. Just take his papers and go. Leave me alone.”
He stared at her patiently. At first glance he looked thirty-five. Then you saw the little fans of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and mouth and realized he was five more than that, five at least. “Upstairs, Missus, unless you want to start this with a bullet in the foot. That’d be a painful way to talk bi’ness. There’s a lot of bones and tendons in a person’s foot.”
“You won’t…you don’t dare…the noise…” Her voice sounded farther away with each word. It was as if her voice were on a train, and the train was pulling out of the station; her voice was leaning out of its window to bid her a fond farewell. Bye-bye, little Lisey, voice must leave you now, soon you’ll be mute.
“Oh, the noise wouldn’t fuss me a bit,” Dooley said, looking amused. “Your next-door neighbors are gone—off to work, I ’magine—and your pet cop’s off on a run.” His smile faded, yet he still managed to look amused. “You’ve come all over gray. Reckon you’ve had quite a shock to the system. Reckon you’re gonna pass clean out, Missus. Save me some trouble if you do, maybe.”
“Stop…stop calling me…” Missus was how she wanted to finish, but a series of wings seemed to be enfolding her, wings of darker and darker gray. Before they grew too dark and too thick to see through, she was faintly aware of Dooley shoving the gun into the waistband of his pants (Blow your balls off, Lisey thought dreamily, do the world a favor) and darting forward to catch her. She didn’t know if he made it. Before the issue was decided, Lisey had fainted.
4
She became aware of something wet stroking her face and at first thought a dog was licking her—Louise, maybe. Except Lou had been their Collie back in Lisbon Falls, and Lisbon Falls had been a long time ago. She and Scott had never had a dog, maybe because they’d never had kids and the two things just naturally seemed to go together like peanut butter and jelly, or peaches and cr—
Come upstairs, Missus…unless you want to start this with a bullet in the foot.
That brought her back fast. She opened her eyes and saw Dooley squatting before her with a damp washcloth in one hand, watching her: those bright blue eyes. She tried to pull away from them. There was a metallic rattle, then a dull thud of pain in her shoulder as something snubbed tight and stopped her. “Ow!”
“Don’t yank and you won’t hurt yourself,” Dooley said, as though this were the most reasonable thing in the world. Lisey supposed that to a nutjob like him, it probably was.
There was music playing through Scott’s sound-system for the first time in Christ knew how long, maybe since April or May of 2004, the last time he was in here, writing. “Waymore’s Blues.” Not Ole Hank but someone’s cover version—The Crickets, maybe. Not super-loud, not cranked the way Scott used to crank the music, but loud enough. She had a very good idea
(I am going to hurt you)
of why Mr. Jim “Zack McCool” Dooley had turned on the sound-system. She didn’t
(places you didn’t let the boys to touch)
want to think about that—what she wanted was to be unconscious again, actually—but she couldn’t seem to help it. “The mind is a monkey,” Scott used to say, and Lisey remembered the source of that one even now, sitting on the floor in the bar alcove with one wrist apparently handcuffed to a waterpipe under the sink: Dog Soldiers, by Robert Stone.
Go to the head of the class, little Lisey! If, that is, you can ever go anywhere, ever again.
“Ain’t that just the cutest song?” Dooley said, sitting down in the alcove doorway. He crossed his legs tailor-fashion. His brown paper lunchsack was in the diamond-shaped hole thus formed by them. The pistol lay on the floor beside his right hand. Dooley looked at her sincerely. “Lot of truth in it, too. You did yourself a favor, you know, passin out the way you did—I tell you what.” Now she could hear the South in his voice, not all showy, like the chickenshit asshole from Nashville, but just a fact of life: Fayvuh…tail yew whut.
From his sack he took a quart mayonnaise jar with the Hellmann’s label still on it. Inside, floating in a puddle of clear liquid, was a crumpled white rag.
“Chloroform,” he said, sounding as proud as Smiley Flanders had been of his moose. “I was told how to use it by a fella claimed to know, but he also said it was easy to do things wrong. At the very best you would have awoken up with a bad headache, Missus. But I knew you wouldn’t want to come up here. I had a tuition about that.”
He cocked a finger at her like a gun, smiling as he did so, and on the sound-system Dwight Yoakam began to sing “A Thousand Miles from Nowhere.” Dooley must have found one of Scott’s homemade honky-tonk CDs.
“May I have a drink of water, Mr. Dooley?”
“Huh? Oh, sure! Mouth a little dry, is it? A person has a shock to the system, that’s gonna happen ever’ time.” He got up, leaving the gun where it was—probably out of her reach, even if she lunged to the limit of the handcuff chain…and to try for it and come up short would be a bad idea, indeed.
He turned on the tap. The pipes chugged and glugged. After a moment or two she heard the faucet begin to spit water. Yes, the gun was probably out of reach, but Dooley’s crotch was almost directly over her head, no more than a foot away. And she had one hand free.
As if reading her mind, Dooley said: “You could ring my chimes a damn good ’un if you wanted, I guess. But these are Doc Martens I’m wearing on my feet, and you’re not wearing anything at all on your hands.” From Dooley, at all came out one word: tall. “Be smart, Missus, and settle for a nice cool drink. This tap ain’t been run much for awhile, but it’s clearing out a right smart.”
“Rinse the glass before you fill it,” she said. Her voice sounded hoarse, on the verge of breaking. “They haven’t been used much, either.”
“Roger, wilco.” Just as pleasant as could be. Reminded her of anyone from town. Reminded her of her own Dad, for that matter. Of course, Dooley also reminded her of Gerd Allen Cole, the original 51-50 Kid. For a moment she almost reached up and twisted his balls anyway, just for daring to put her in this position. For a moment she could barely restrain herself.
Then Dooley was bending down, holding out one of the heavy Waterford glasses. It was three-quarters full, and while the water hadn’t run entirely clear, it looked clear enough to drink. It looked wonderful. “Slow and easy does it,” Dooley said in a solicitous tone. “I’ll let you hold the glass, but if you throw it at me, I’m gonna have to snap your ankle. Hit me with it and I’ll snap both of em for you, even if you don’t draw blood. I mean it, all right?”
She nodded, and sipped her glass of water. On the stereo, Dwight Yoakam gave way to Ole Hank himself, asking the eternal questions: Why don’t you love me like you used to do? How come you treat me like a worn-out shoe?
Dooley squatted on his hunkers, his butt almost touching the raised heels of his boots, one arm wrapped around his knees. He could have been a farmer watching a cow drink at a stream in the north forty. She judged he was on alert but not on high alert. He didn’t expect her to throw the clunky drinking glass, and of course he was right not to expect it. Lisey didn’t want her ankles snapped.
Why, I’ve never even taken that all-important first in-line skating lesson, she thought, and Tuesday nights are
Singles Nights at Oxford Skate Central.
When her thirst was slaked, she held the glass out to him. Dooley took it, examined it. “You sure you don’t want them—those—last two swallows, Missus?” Not even close to swallers, and Lisey had a sudden tuition of her own: Dooley was exaggerating the good-old-boy thing. Maybe on purpose, maybe without even realizing it. When it came to language he corrected up because it would have been pretentious to correct down. Did it matter? Probably not.
“I’ve had enough.”
Dooley polished the last two swallows off himself, his adam’s apple sliding in his skinny throat. Then he asked if she was feeling any better.
“I’ll feel better when you’re gone.”
“Fair enough. I won’t take up much of your time.” He tucked the gun back into his waistband and got to his feet. His knees popped and Lisey thought again (marveled, really), This is no dream. This is really happening to me. He kicked the glass absently, and it rolled a little way onto the oyster-white wall-to-wall carpet out there in the main office. He hitched up his pants. “Can’t afford to linger in any case, Missus. Your cop’ll be back, him or another, and I got an idear you got some kind of sister-twister goin on as well, isn’t that so?”
Lisey made no reply.
Dooley shrugged as if to say Have it your way and then leaned out of the bar alcove. For Lisey it was a surreal moment, because she had seen Scott do exactly the same thing many times, one hand gripping each side of the doorless doorway, feet on the bare wood of the alcove, head and torso out in the study. But Scott would never have been caught dead in khakis; he had been a bluejeans man to the end. Also, there had been no bald spot at the back of his head. My husband died with a full head of hair, she thought.
“Awful nice place,” he said. “What is it? Converted hayloft? Must be.”
She said nothing.
Dooley continued to lean out, now rocking back and forth a little, looking first left, then right. Lord of all he surveys, she thought.
“Real nice place,” he said. “Just about what I would have expected. You got your three rooms—what I’d call rooms—and your three skylights, so there’s plenty of natural light. Down home we call places all a-row like this shotgun houses or sometimes shotgun shacks, but ain’t nothing shacky about this, is it?”
Lisey said nothing.
He turned to her, looking serious. “Not that I begrudge him, Missus—or you, now that he’s dead. I did some time in Brushy Mountain State Prison. Maybe the Prof told you that. And it was your husbun got me through the worst of it. I read all his books, and you know which one I liked best?”
Of course, Lisey thought. Empty Devils. You probably read it nine times.
But Dooley surprised her. “The Coaster’s Daughter. And I didn’t just like it, Missus, I loved it. I’ve made it my bi’ness to read that book ever’ two or three years since I found it in the jailhouse library, and I could quote you whole long passages of it. You know what part I like best? Where Gene finally talks back and tells his father he’s leaving whether the old man likes it or not. Do you know what he tells that miserable holy-rollin old fuck, pardon my French?”
That he has never understood the duty of love, Lisey thought, but she said nothing. Dooley didn’t seem to mind; he was on a roll now, enraptured.
“Gene says his old man has never understood the duty of love. The duty of love! How beautiful is that? How many of us have felt something like that but haven’t never had the words to say it? But your husbun did. For all of us who otherwise would have stood mute, that’s what the Prof said. God must have loved your man, Missus, to give him such a tongue.”
Dooley looked up at the ceiling. The cords on his neck stood out.
“The DUTY! Of LOVE! And the ones God loves best he takes home soonest, to be with Him. Amen.” He lowered his head briefly. His wallet stuck out of his back pocket. It was on a chain. Of course it was. Men like Jim Dooley always wore their wallets on chains that were attached to their belt-loops. Now he looked up again and said: “He deserved a nice place like this. I hope he enjoyed it, when he wasn’t agonizin over his creations.”
Lisey thought of Scott at the desk he called Dumbo’s Big Jumbo, sitting before his big-screen Mac and laughing at something he’d just written. Chewing either a plastic straw or his own fingernails. Sometimes singing along with the music. Making arm-farts if it was summer and hot and his shirt was off. That was how he agonized over his smucking creations. But she still said nothing. On the sound-system, Ole Hank gave way to his son. Junior was singing “Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound.”
Dooley said: “Giving me the old silent treatment? Well, more power to you, but it won’t do you no good, Missus. You have got some correction comin. I won’t try to sell you the old one about how it’s gonna hurt me more than it’s gonna hurt you, but I will say I’ve come to like your spunk in the short time I’ve known you, and that it’s gonna—going to—hurt both of us. I also want to say I’ll go as easy as I can, because I don’t want to break that spirit of yours. Still—we had an agreement, and you didn’t keep to it.”
An agreement? Lisey felt a chill sweep through her body. For the first time she got a clear picture of the breadth and complexity of Dooley’s insanity. The gray wings threatened to descend across her vision and this time she fought them fiercely.
Dooley heard the rattle of the handcuff-chain (he must have had the cuffs in his sack, along with the mayonnaise jar) and turned to her.
Easy, babyluv, easy, Scott murmured. Talk to the guy—run your everlasting mouth.
This was advice Lisey hardly needed. As long as the talking was going on, the correctin would remain deferred.
“Listen to me, Mr. Dooley. We didn’t have an agreement, you’re mistaken about that—” She saw his brow begin to furrow, his look begin to darken, and hurried on. “Sometimes it’s hard to get things together over the phone, but I’m ready to work with you now.” She swallowed and heard a distinct click in her throat. She was ready for more water, a good long cool drink of it, but this didn’t seem like a good time to ask. She leaned forward, fixed his eyes with her own, blue on blue, and spoke with all the earnestness and sincerity she could muster. “I’m saying that as far as I’m concerned, you’ve made your point. And you know what? You were just looking at the manuscripts your…um…your colleague especially wants. Did you notice the black file-cabinets in the central space?”
Now he was looking at her with his eyebrows hoisted and a skeptical little smile playing on his mouth…but that might only be his dickering look. Lisey allowed herself to hope. “Looked to me like there was a right smart of boxes downstairs, too,” he said. “More of his books, from the look of them.”
“Those are—” What was she going to tell him? Those are bools, not books? She guessed that most of them were, but Dooley wouldn’t understand. They’re practical jokes, Scott’s version of itchy-powder and plastic vomit? That he’d understand but likely not believe.
He was still looking at her with that skeptical smile. Not a dickering look at all. No, this was a look that said While you’re at it, why don’t you go on and pull the other one, Missus?
“There’s nothing in those cartons downstairs but carbon copies and Xeroxes and blank sheets,” she said, and it sounded like a lie because it was a lie, and what was she supposed to say? You’re too crazy to understand the truth, Mr. Dooley? Instead she rushed on. “The stuff Woodsmucky wants—the good stuff—is all up here. Unpublished stories…copies of letters to other writers…their letters back to him…”
Dooley threw back his head and laughed. “Woodsmucky! Missus, you got your husbun’s way with words.” Then the laughter faded, and although the smile stayed on his lips, there was no more amusement in his eyes. His eyes looked like ice. “So what do you think I sh’d do? Hie over to Oxford or Mechanic Falls and rent a U-Haul, then come back here to load those filing cabinets up? Say, maybe you could get one of those deputy-boys to he’p me!”
“I—”
> “Shut up.” Pointing a finger at her. The smile all gone by now. “Why, if I was to go away and then come back, you’d have a dozen State Police graybacks here waitin for me, I reckon. They’d take me in and Missus, I tell you what, I’d deserve another ten years inside just for believin such a thing.”
“But—”
“And besides, that wadnt—wasn’t—the deal we made. The deal was that you’d call the Prof, ole Woodsmucky—girl, I like that—and he’d send me a e-mail the special way we have, and then he’d arrange about the papers. Right?”
Some part of him actually believed this. Had to believe it, or why would he keep on with it when it was just the two of them?
“Ma’am?” Dooley asked her. He sounded solicitous. “Missus?”
If there was a part of him that had to go on telling lies when it was just the two of them, maybe it was because there was a part of him that needed lying to. If so, that was the part of Jim Dooley she needed to reach. The part that might still be sane.
“Mr. Dooley, listen to me.” She pitched her voice low and kept her delivery slow. It had been the way she talked to Scott when Scott was ready to go off half-cocked over anything from a bad review to a shoddy piece of plumbing. “Professor Woodbody has no way of getting in touch with you, and down inside somewhere, you know that. But I can get in touch with him. I already have. I called him last night.”
“You’re lyin,” he said, but this time she wasn’t and he knew she wasn’t, and for some reason it upset him. That reaction ran exactly counter to the one she wanted to provoke—she wanted to soothe him—but she thought she had to go on, hoping the sane part of Jim Dooley was in there somewhere, listening.
“I’m not,” she said. “You left me his number and I called him.” Holding Dooley’s eyes with hers. Mustering every bit of sincerity she could manage as she headed back into the Land of Fabrication. “I promised him the manuscripts and told him to call you off and he said he couldn’t call you off because he had no way of getting in touch with you anymore, he said his first two e-mails went through, but after that they just bounced ba—”