by Stephen King
He walked carefully over to the barred door and looked out into a short corridor. To his left was the drunk tank. An old man was lying on one of its five bunks, a hand like driftwood dangling on the floor. To the right the corridor ended in a door that was wedged open.
A shadow rose, danced on the propped-open door, and then a large man in khaki suntans walked into the corridor. He was wearing a Sam Browne belt and a big pistol. He hooked his thumbs into his pants pockets and looked at Nick for almost a full minute without speaking. Then he said, “When I was a boy we caught ourselves a mountain lion up in the hills and shot it and then drug it twenty mile back to town over dirt hardpan. What was left of that creature when we got home was the sorriest-lookin sight I ever saw. You the second-sorriest, boy.”
Nick thought it had the feel of a prepared speech, carefully honed and treasured, saved for out-of-towners and vags that occupied the barred Saltines boxes from time to time.
“What’s your name, boy?”
Nick put a finger to his swelled and lacerated lips and shook his head. He put a hand over his mouth, then cut the air with it in a soft diagonal hashmark and shook his head again.
“What? You can’t talk? What’s this happy horseshit?” The words were spoken amiably enough, but Nick could not follow tones or inflections. He plucked an invisible pen from the air and wrote it.
“You want a pencil?”
Nick nodded.
“If you’re mute, how come you don’t have none of those cards?” Nick shrugged. He turned out his empty pockets. He balled his fists and shadowboxed the air, which sent another bolt of pain through his head and another wave of nausea through his stomach. He finished by tapping his own temples lightly with his fists, rolling his eyes up, and sagging on the bars. Then he pointed to his empty pockets.
“You were robbed.”
Nick nodded.
The man in khaki turned away and went back into his office. A moment later he returned with a dull pencil and a notepad. He thrust them through the bars. Written across the top of each notesheet was MEMO and From The Desk Of Sheriff John Baker.
Nick turned the pad around and tapped the pencil eraser at the name. He raised questioning eyebrows.
“Yeah, that’s me. Who are you?”
“Nick Andros,” he wrote. He put his hand through the bars.
Baker shook his head. “I ain’t gonna shake with you. You deaf, too?”
Nick nodded.
“What happened to you tonight? Doc Soames and his wife almost ran you down like a woodchuck, boy.”
“Beat up & robbed. A mile or so from a roadhouse on Main St. Zack’s Place.”
“That hangout’s no place for a kid like you,” Baker said. “You surely aren’t old enough to drink.”
Nick shook his head indignantly. “I’m twenty-two,” he wrote. “I can have a couple of beers without getting beaten up & robbed for them, can’t I?”
Baker read this with a sourly amused look on his face. “It don’t appear you can in Shoyo. What you doing here, kid?”
Nick tore the first sheet off the memo pad, crumpled it in a ball, and dropped it on the floor. Before he could begin to write his reply, an arm shot through the bars and a steel hand clutched his shoulder. Nick’s head jerked up.
“My wife neatens these cells,” Baker said, “and I don’t see any need for you to litter yours up. Go throw that in the john.”
Nick bent over, wincing at the pain in his back, and fished the ball of paper off the floor. He took it over to the toilet, tossed it in, and then looked up at Baker with his eyebrows raised. Baker nodded.
Nick came back. This time he wrote longer, pencil flying over the paper. Baker reflected that teaching a deafmute kid to read and write was probably quite a trick, and this Nick Andros must have some pretty good equipment upstairs to have caught the hang of it. There were fellows here in Shoyo, Arkansas, who had never properly caught the hang of it, and more than a few of them hung out in Zack’s. But you couldn’t expect a kid who just blew into town to know that.
Nick handed the pad through the bars.
“I’ve been traveling around but I’m not a vag. Spent today working for a man named Rich Ellerton about 6 miles west of here. I cleaned his barn & put a load of hay in his loft. Last week I was in Watts, Okla running fence. The men who beat me up got my week’s pay.”
“You sure it was Rich Ellerton you was working for? I can check that, you know.” Baker had tom off Nick’s explanation, folded it to wallet-photo size, and tucked it into his shirt pocket.
Nick nodded.
“You see his dog?”
Nick nodded.
“What kind was it?”
Nick gestured for the pad. “Big Doberman,” he wrote. “But nice. Not mean.”
Baker nodded, turned away, and went back into his office. Nick stood at the bars, watching anxiously. A moment later, Baker returned with a big keyring, unlocked the holding cell, and pushed it back on its track.
“Come on in the office,” Baker said. “You want some breakfast?”
Nick shook his head, then made pouring and drinking motions.
“Coffee? Got that. You take cream and sugar?”
Nick shook his head.
“Take it like a man, huh?” Baker laughed. “Come on.”
In the outer office, Baker poured him a cup of black coffee out of a huge Thermos. The sheriff’s half-finished breakfast plate stood on his desk blotter, and he pulled it back to himself. Nick sipped the coffee. It hurt his mouth, but it was good.
He tapped Baker on the shoulder and when he looked up, Nick pointed to the coffee, nibbed his stomach, and winked soberly.
Baker smiled. “You better say it’s good. My wife Jane puts it up.” He tucked half a hard-fried egg into his mouth, chewed, and then pointed at Nick with his fork. “You’re pretty good. Just like one of those pantomimers. Bet you don’t have much trouble makin yourself understood, huh?”
Nick made a seesawing gesture with his hand in midair. Comme ci, comme ca.
“I ain’t gonna hold you,” Baker said, mopping up grease with a slice of toasted Wonder Bread, “but I tell you what. If you stick around, maybe we can get the guy who did this to you. You game?” Nick nodded and wrote: “You think I can get my week’s pay back?”
“Not a chance,” Baker said flatly.
Nick nodded and shrugged. Putting his hands together, he made a bird flying away.
“How many were there?” Baker asked.
Nick held up four fingers, shrugged, then held up five.
“Think you could identify any of them?”
Nick held up one finger and wrote: “Big & blond. Your size, maybe a little heavier. Gray shirt & pants. He was wearing a big ring on 3rd finger right hand. Purple stone. That’s what cut my face.”
As Baker read this, a change came over his face. First concern, then anger. Nick, thinking the anger was directed against him, became frightened again.
“Oh Jesus Christ,” Baker said. “This here’s a full commode slopping over for sure. You sure?”
Nick nodded reluctantly.
“Anything else? You see anything else?”
Nick thought hard, then wrote: “Small scar. On his forehead.” Baker looked at the words. “That’s Ray Booth,” he said. “My brother-in-law. Thanks, kid. Five in the morning and my day’s wrecked already.”
Nick’s eyes opened a little wider, and he made a cautious gesture of commiseration.
“Well, all right,” Baker said, more to himself than to Nick. “He’s a bad actor and Janey knows it. He beat her up enough times when they was kids together. Still, they’re brother and sister and I guess I can forget my lovin for this week.”
Nick looked down, embarrassed. After a moment Baker shook his shoulder so that Nick would see him speaking.
“It probably won’t do any good anyway,” he said. “They’ll just swear each other up. Your word against theirs. Did you get any licks in?”
“Kicked this Ray in the
guts,” Nick wrote. “Got another one in the nose. Might have broken it.”
“Ray pals around with Vince Hogan, Billy Warner, and Mike Childress, mostly,” Baker said. “I might be able to get Vince alone and break him down. He’s as spineless as a jellyfish. If I could get him I could go after Mike and Billy. Ray got that ring in a fraternity at LSU. He flunked out his sophomore year.” He paused, drumming his fingers against the rim of his breakfast plate. “I guess we could give it a go, kid, if you wanted to. But I’ll warn you in advance, we probably couldn’t get them. They’re as vicious and cowardly as a dogpack, but they’re town boys and you’re just a deafmute drifter. And if they got off, they’d come after you.”
Nick thought about it. In his mind he kept coming back to the image of himself, being shoved from one of them to the next like a bleeding scarecrow, and to Ray’s lips forming the words: I’m gonna mess im up. Sucker kicked me. To the feel of his knapsack, that old friend of the last two wandering years, being ripped from his back.
On the memo pad he wrote and underlined two words: "Let’s tryr
Baker sighed and nodded. “Okay. Vince Hogan works down to the sawmill . . . well, that ain’t just true. What he does mostly is fucks off. We’ll take a ride down there about nine, if that’s fine with you. Maybe we can get him scared enough to spill it.”
Nick nodded.
“How’s your mouth? Doc Soames left some pills. He said it would probably be a misery to you.”
Nick nodded ruefully.
“I’ll get em. It . . .” He broke off, and in Nick’s silent movie world, he watched the sheriff explode several sneezes into his handkerchief. “That’s another thing,” he went on, but he had turned away now and Nick caught only the first word. “I’m comin down with a real good cold. Jesus Christ, ain’t life grand? Welcome to Arkansas, boy.”
He got the pills and came back to where Nick sat. Baker rubbed gently under the angle of his jaw. There was a definite painful swelling there. Swollen glands, coughing, sneezing, yeah, it was shaping up to be a wonderful day.
Chapter 10
Larry woke up with a hangover that was not too bad, a mouth that tasted as if a baby dragon had used it for a potty chair, and a feeling that he was somewhere he shouldn’t be.
The bed was a single, but there were two pillows on it. He could smell frying bacon. He sat up, looked out the windows at another gray New York day, and his first thought was that they had done something horrible to Berkeley overnight. Then last night began coming back and he realized he was looking at Fordham, not Berkeley. He was in a second-floor flat on Tremont Avenue, not far from the Concourse, and his mother was going to wonder where he had been last night. Had he called her, given her any kind of excuse, no matter how thin?
He swung his legs out of bed and found a crumpled pack of Winstons with one crazy cigarette left in it. He lit it with a green plastic Bic lighter. It tasted like dead horseshit. Out in the kitchen the sound of frying bacon went on and on, like radio static on the AM band.
The girl’s name was Maria and she had said she was a . . . oral hygienist, or something. Larry didn’t know how much she knew about hygiene, but she was great on oral. Maria had been a little overwhelmed to discover he was that Larry Underwood. At one point in the evening’s festivities, hadn’t they gone out reeling around looking for an open record store so they could buy a copy of “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?”
He groaned very softly and tried to retrace yesterday from its innocuous beginnings to its frantic, gobbling finale. The Yanks weren’t in town, he remembered that. His mother had been gone to work when he woke up, but she had left a Yankees schedule on the kitchen table along with a note—“As you can see, the Yankees won’t be in town until July 1. They are playing a double header the 4th of
July. If you’re not doing anything that day, why not take your mom to the ball park? I’ll buy the beer and hot dogs.” There was a typical Alice Underwood PS: “Most of the kids you hung around with are gone now and good riddance to that bunch of hoods but I think Buddy Marx is working at that print shop on Strieker Avenue.”
Just thinking of that note was enough to make him wince. No “dear” before his name. No “love” before her signature. She didn’t believe in phony stuff. The real stuff was in the refrigerator. Sometime while he had been sleeping off his long drive across country, she had gone out and stocked up on every goddam thing in the world that he liked. Her memory was so perfect it was frightening. A Daisy canned ham. Two pounds of real butter—how the hell could she afford that on her salary? Two six-packs of Coke. Deli sausages. A roast of beef already marinating in Alice’s secret sauce, and a gallon of Baskin-Robbins chocolate cheesecake ice cream in the freezer.
The oral hygienist came in, wearing a pink nylon halfslip and nothing else. “Hi, Larry,” she said. She was short, pretty in a vague Sandra Dee sort of way, and her breasts pointed at him perkily without a sign of a sag. What was the old joke? She had a pair of 38s and a real gun. Ha-ha, very funny. He had come three thousand miles to spend the night being eaten alive by Sandra Dee.
“Hi,” he said, and got up. He was naked but his clothes were at the foot of the bed. He began to put them on.
“I’ve got a robe you can wear if you want to. We’re having kippers and bacon.”
Kippers and bacon? His stomach began to fold in on itself with horror.
“No, honey, I’ve got to run. Someone I’ve got to see.”
“Oh hey, you can’t just run out on me like that—”
“Really, it’s important.”
“Well, I’m impawtant, too!” She was starting to be strident, and that hurt Larry’s head.
“Your Bronx is showing, luv,” he said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” She planted her hands on her hips and her breasts jiggled fetchingly . . . but Larry wasn’t fetched. He stepped into his pants and buttoned them. “So I’m from the Bronx, does that make me black? What have you got against the Bronx?”
“Nothing,” he said, and walked over to her in his bare feet. “Listen, the somebody I have to meet is my mother. I just got into town two days ago and I didn’t call her last night or anything ... did I?” he added hopefully.
“You didn’t call anybody,” she said sullenly. “I just bet it’s your mother.”
He walked back to the bed and stuck his feet in his loafers. “It is. Really. She works in the Chemical Bank Building as floor supervisor.”
“I bet you aren’t the Larry Underwood that has that record, either.”
“You believe what you want. I have to run.”
“You cheap prick!” she flashed at him. “What am I supposed to do with all the stuff I cooked?”
“Throw it out the window.”
She uttered a high squawk of anger and hurled the spatula at him. On any other day of his life, it would have missed him. One of the first laws of physics was, to wit, a spatula will not fly a straight trajectory if hurled by an angry oral hygienist. Only this was the exception that proved the rule, flip-flop, up and over, smash, right into Larry’s forehead. It didn’t hurt much. Then he saw two drops of blood fall on the throw-rug as he bent over to pick the spatula up.
He advanced two steps with the spatula in his hand. “I ought to paddle you with this!” he shouted at her.
“Sure,” she said, cringing back and starting to cry. “Why not? Big star. Fuck and run. I thought you were a nice guy. You ain’t no nice guy.” Several tears ran down her cheeks, dropped from her jaw, and plopped onto her upper chest. Fascinated, he watched one of them roll down the slope of her right breast and perch on the nipple. It had a magnifying effect. He could see pores, and one black hair sprouting from the inner edge of the aureole. Jesus Christ, I’m going crazy, he thought wonderingly.
“I have to go,” he said. His white cloth jacket was on the foot of the bed. He picked it up and slung it over his shoulder.
“You ain’t no nice guy!” she cried at him as he went into the living room. “I only went w
ith you because I thought you were a nice guy!”
The sight of the living room made him groan inwardly. On the couch where he dimly remembered being gobbled were at least two dozen copies of “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?” Three more were on the turntable of the dusty portable stereo. On the far wall was a huge poster of Ryan O’Neal and Ali McGraw. Being gobbled means never having to say you’re sorry, ha-ha. Jesus, I am going crazy.
She stood in the bedroom doorway, still crying, pathetic in her halfslip. He could see a nick on one of her shins where she had cut herself shaving.
“Listen, give me a call,” she said. “I ain’t mad.”
He should have said, “Sure,” and that would have been the end of it. Instead he heard his mouth utter a crazy laugh and then, “Your kippers are burning.”
Larry got out quickly and pounded down the stairs. As he went down the last six steps to the front door he heard her in the upstairs hall, yelling down: “You ain't no nice guy! You ain’t no—”
He slammed the door behind him and misty, humid warmth washed over him, with it the smell of spring trees and automobile exhaust. It was perfume after the smell of frying grease and stale cigarette smoke. He still had the crazy cigarette, now burned down to the filter, and he threw it into the gutter and took a deep breath of the fresh air. Wonderful to be out of that craziness. Return with us not to those wonderful days of normalcy as we—
Above and behind him a window went up with a rattling bang and he knew what was coming next.
“I hope you rot!” she screamed down at him. "I hope you fall in front of some fuckin subway train! You ain’t no singer! You’re shitty in bed! You louse! Take this to ya mother, you louse!”
A milk bottle came zipping down from her second-floor bedroom window. Larry ducked. It went off in the gutter like a bomb, spraying the street with glass fragments. A scotch bottle came next, twirling end over end, to crash nearly at his feet. Whatever else she was, her aim was terrifying. He broke into a run, holding one arm over his head. This madness was never going to end.