by Stephen King
“Holy gee,” Lloyd said miserably as one of the troopers laid a big horse pistol upside his head. The other one cuffed him.
“In the back of the cruiser, sonny.”
The man in the SHELL cap had come out onto the porch, still clutching his shotgun. “He shot Bill Markson!” he yelled in a high, queer voice. “T’other one shot Missus Storm! Hell of a note! I shot t’other one! He’s deader’n a shitbug! Like to shoot this one too, iff’n you boys’ll stand away!”
“Calm down, pop,” one of the troopers said. “Fun’s over.”
“I’ll shoot him where he stands!” the old guy yelled. “I’ll lay him low!” Then he leaned forward like an English butler making a bow and threw up on his shoes.
“You boys get me away from that guy, would you?” Lloyd said. “I think he’s crazy.”
“You got this comin outta the store, you hairbag,” the other trooper said. The barrel of his pistol looped up and up, catching the sun, and then it crashed down on Lloyd Henreid’s head and he never woke up until that evening in the Apache County Jail’s infirmary.
Chapter 13
Nick opened the door between Sheriff Baker’s office and the jail cells and they started razzing him right off. Vincent Hogan and Billy Warner were in the two Saltine-box cells on Nick’s left. Mike Childress was in one of the two on the right. The other was empty and it was empty because Ray Booth, he of the purple LSU fraternity ring, had flown the coop.
“Hey dummy!” Childress called. “Hey, you fuckin dummy! What’s gonna happen to you when we get outta here? Huh? Answer me that. What the fuck you think’s gonna happen to you?”
“I’m personally gonna rip your balls off and stuff em down your throat until you strangle on em,” Billy Warner told him. “You understand me?”
Only Vince Hogan didn’t participate in the razzing. Mike and Billy didn’t have too much use for him on this day, June 23, when they were to be taken up to the Calhoun County seat and jugged pending trial. Sheriff Baker had leaned on ole Vince and ole Vince had spilled his yellow guts. Baker had told Nick he could get an indictment against these boys, but when it got to a jury trial, it was going to be Nick’s word against these three—four, if they picked up Ray Booth.
Nick lowered his head so he couldn’t see their lips and went on sweeping. He was careful to keep to the center of the aisle, out of reach of their hands.
He had gained a healthy respect for Sheriff John Baker—at 250 pounds, he was “Big John” to his constituents. The respect was not just because he had given Nick this swamper’s job to make up for his week’s lost pay, but because he had gone after the four men who had beaten Nick up as if the victim had been the oldest resident in town instead of a drifter passing through. There were sheriffs in the Border South, Nick knew, who would have been happy to see him onto the county workfarm instead.
They had driven out to the sawmill where Vince Hogan worked in Baker’s private car. He had a bubble light in the glovebox that he put on the dash when he was on business. It was up there when they had gone out on the morning of the twenty-first.
Baker had hawked, spat out the window, and dabbed at his watery eyes. His voice had acquired a nasal foghorning quality which Nick of course couldn’t hear.
“When we see him,” Baker said, “I’m gonna grab him by the arm. I’ll ask you, ‘Is this one of them?’ I don’t care if you saw him or not. You just nod yes. Get it?”
Nick nodded. He got it.
Vince was working on the board planer, standing in sawdust almost to the tops of his workboots. His eyes flicked uneasily to Nick standing beside the sheriff and he gave Baker a nervous smile. “Hi, Big John, what you doin out with the workin folk?”
The other men were watching, their eyes shifting from Nick to Vince to Baker in a kind of continuous triple play. One of them spat a stream of Red Man into the sawdust and wiped his chin deliberately with the heel of his hand.
Baker grabbed Vince by one flabby, sunburned arm and dragged him forward.
“Hey,” Vince said nervously. “Why you pullin on me, Big John?” Baker turned to Nick. “Is this one of them?”
Nick nodded firmly and pointed at Vince.
“Hey,” Vince protested. “I don’t know this dummy from Adam.” “Then how you so sure he’s a dummy? Come on, Vince. You can send one of these ole boys for your toothbrush. March.”
Protesting, Vince had been led to the cruiser and deposited inside. He was taken back to Shoyo, locked up, and left to stew for a couple of hours. When Baker came back in around noon, Vince was hungry and scared. He had spilled everything.
Mike Childress was in the jug by one o’clock, and Billy Warner was found at his house as he was packing up his old Ford to go somewhere. A long piece, from the look of all the suitcases and cartons.
Baker had taken Nick home to meet his wife and have some supper. In the car on the way over Baker had told Nick that she was bearing up under the news that her brother Ray had been involved in
the assault. “She knows you can’t pick your relatives like you do your friends,” he said.
Jane Baker was a small, pretty woman who made Nick welcome— but her eyes were red and socketed from weeping. “I’m pleased to know you, Nick,” she said, taking his hand. “And I apologize deeply for your trouble.”
Nick shrugged awkwardly and waved it away.
“I offered him a job around the place,” Baker said. “It’s gone to hell since Bradley moved to Little Rock. Painting and picking up, mostly. He’s gonna have to stick around anyway. For the—you know.”
“Trial,” she said. “Yes.”
There was a moment of silence, painful even to Nick.
Then, with forged gaiety, she said: “I hope you can eat country ham, Nick. That’s what there is, along with potato salad. My potato salad’s never up to what his mother made. That’s what he says.”
Nick patted his stomach and smiled.
Over the strawberry shortcake dessert Jane said, “You’ve been taking too much on, John Baker. Your cold’s worse. And you didn’t eat.”
Baker looked guiltily at his plate, then shrugged. “I can afford to miss one now and then,” he said, and palpitated his double chin. “You’re flushed, too. Fever?”
“Maybe a touch.”
“Well, you’re not going out tonight. That’s all.”
“My dear, I have prisoners. If they don’t need to be watched, they at least need to be fed and watered.”
“Nick can do that,” she said with finality. “You’re going to bed.” “I can’t do that,” he said weakly. “He isn’t a deputy.”
“Well, you just deputize him.”
“He ain’t a resident!”
“I won’t tell if you won’t,” she said firmly. She began clearing the table. “You just go on and do it.”
And that was how Nick Andros went from Shoyo prisoner to Shoyo deputy in less than twenty-four hours. As he was preparing to go up to the sheriff’s office, Baker came into the downstairs hall, looking large and ghostly in a frayed bathrobe. He seemed a little embarrassed to be seen in such attire.
“I shouldn’t have let her talk me into this,” he said. “Wouldn’t have, if I didn’t feel so punk. My chest’s all clogged up and I’m as hot as a fire-sale. Weak, too.”
Nick nodded sympathetically.
“I’m stuck between deputies. Bradley Caide and his wife went up to Little Rock after their baby died. One of those crib deaths. Awful thing. I don’t blame them for going.”
Nick pointed at his own chest and made a circle with his thumb and forefinger.
“Sure, you’ll be okay. You just take normal care, you hear? There’s a .45 in the third drawer of my desk, but don’t you be takin it back there. Nor the keys either. Understand?
“If you go back there, stay out of their reach. If any of em tries playin sick, don’t you fall for it. It’s the oldest dodge in the world. If one of em should get sick, Doc Soames can see them just as easy in the morning. I’ll be in th
en.”
Nick took his pad from his pocket and wrote: “I appreciate you trusting me. Thanks for locking them up & thanks for the job.”
Baker read this carefully. “You’re a puredee caution, boy. Where you from? How come you’re out on your own like this?”
“That’s a long story,” Nick jotted. “But I’ll write some of it down for you tonight, if you want.”
“You do that,” Baker said. “I guess you know I put your name on the wire.”
Nick nodded. It was SOP. But he was clean.
“I’ll get Jane to call Ma’s Truck Stop out by the highway. Those boys’ll be hollering police brutality if they don’t get their supper.” Nick wrote: “Have her tell whoever brings it to come right in. I can’t hear him if he knocks.”
“Okay.” Baker hesitated a moment longer. “You got your cot in the comer. It’s hard, but it’s clean. You just remember to be careful, Nick. You can’t call for help.”
Nick nodded and wrote, “I can take care of myself.”
“Yeah, I believe you can. Still, I’d get someone from town if I thought any of them would—” He broke off as Jane came in.
“You still jawing this poor boy? You let him go on, now, before my stupid brother comes along and breaks them all out.”
Baker laughed sourly. “He’ll be in Tennessee by now, I guess.” He whistled out a long sigh that broke up into a series of phlegmy, booming coughs. “I b’lieve I’ll go upstairs and lie down, Janey.”
“I’ll bring you some aspirin to cut that fever,” she said.
She looked back over her shoulder at Nick as she went to the stairs with her husband. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Nick. Whatever the circumstances. You be just as careful as he says.”
Nick bowed to her, and she dropped half a curtsy. He thought he saw a gleam of tears in her eyes.
A pimply, curious boy in a dirty busboy’s jacket brought three dinner trays about half an hour after Nick had gotten down to the jail. Nick motioned for the busboy to put the trays on the cot, and while he did, Nick scribbled: “Is this paid for?”
The busboy read this with all the concentration of a college freshman tackling Moby Dick. “Yeah,” he said. “Sheriffs office runs a tab. Say, can’t you talk?”
Nick shook his head.
“That’s a bitch,” the busboy said, and left in a hurry, as if the condition might be catching.
Nick took the trays in one at a time and pushed each one through the slot in the bottom of the cell door with a broomhandle.
He looked up in time to catch “—chickshit bastard, ain’t he?” from Mike Childress. Smiling, Nick showed him his middle finger.
“I’ll give you the finger, you dummy,” Childress said, grinning unpleasantly. “When I get out of here I’ll—” Nick turned away, missing the rest.
Back in the office, sitting in Baker’s chair, he drew the memo pad into the center of the blotter, sat thinking for a moment, and then jotted at the top:
Life History By Nick Andros
He stopped, smiling a little. He had been in funny places, but never in his wildest dreams had he expected to be sitting in a sheriff’s office, deputized, in charge of three men who had beaten him up, and writing his life story. After a moment he began to write again:
/ was born in Caslin, Nebraska, on November 14, 1958. My daddy was an independent farmer. He and my mom were always on the edge of getting squeezed out. They owed three different banks. My mother was six months pregnant with me and my dad was taking her to see the doctor in town when a tie-rod on his truck let go and they went into the ditch. My daddy had a heart attack and died. Anyway, three months after, my mom had me and I was born the way I am. Sure was a tough break on top of losing her husband that way.
She carried on with the farm until 1963 and then lost it to the "big operators as she always called them. She had no family but wrote to some friends in Big Springs, Iowa, and one of them got her a job in a bakery. We lived here until 1967 when she was killed in an accident. A man on a motorcycle hit her while she was crossing the street on her way home from work. It wasn’t even his fault but only bad luck as his brakes failed. He wasn’t even speeding or anything. The Baptist Church gave my mamma a charity funeral. This same church, the Grace Baptist, sent me to the Children of Jesus orphanage in Des Moines. This is a place that all sorts of churches chip together to support. That was where I learned to read and write . . .
He stopped there. His hand was aching from writing so much, but that wasn’t why. He felt uneasy, hot and uncomfortable at having to relive all that again. He went back to the jail quarters and looked in. Childress and Warner were asleep. Vince Hogan was standing by the bars, smoking a cigarette and looking across the corridor at the empty cell where Ray Booth would have been tonight if he hadn’t run so quick. Hogan looked as if he might have been crying, and that led him back in time to that small mute scrap of humanity, Nick Andros. There was a word he had learned at the movies as a kid. That word was INCOMMUNICADO. It was a word that had always had fantastic, Lovecraftian overtones to Nick, a fearful word that echoed and clanged in the brain, a word that inscribed all the nuances of fear that live only outside the sane universe and inside the human soul. He had been INCOMMUNICADO all his life.
He sat down and reread the last line he’d written. That was where I learned to read and write. But it hadn’t been as simple as that. He lived in a silent world. Writing was code. Speech was the moving of lips, the rise and fall of teeth, the dance of a tongue. His mother had taught him to read lips, and had taught him how to write his name in struggling, sprawling letters. That’s your name, she had said. That’s you, Nicky. But of course she had said it silently, meaninglessly. The prime connection had come when she tapped the paper, then tapped his chest. The worst part about being deafmute was not living in the silent movie world; it was not knowing the names of things. He had not really begun to understand the concept of naming until he was four. He had not known that you called the tall green things trees until he was four. He had wanted to know, but no one had thought to tell him and he had no way to ask: He was INCOMMUNICADO.
When she died he had retreated almost all the way. The orphanage was a place of roaring silence where grimfaced thin boys made fun of his silence; two boys would run up to him, one boy with his hands plastered over his mouth, one boy with his hands plastered over his ears. If none of the staff happened to be near, they would punch him out. Why? No reason. Except that maybe in the vast white class of victims there are subclasses, the victims of victims.
He stopped wanting to communicate, and when that happened the thinking process itself began to rust and disintegrate. He began to wander from place to place vacantly, looking at the nameless things that filled the world. He watched groups of children in the play yard move their lips, raise and lower their teeth like white drawbridges, dance their tongues in the ritual mating of speech. He sometimes found himself looking at a single cloud for as long as an hour at a time.
Then Rudy had come. A big man with scars on his face and a bald head. Six feet, five inches tall, might as well have been twenty to runty Nick Andros. They met for the first time in a basement room where there was a table, six or seven chairs, and a TV that only worked when it felt like it. Rudy squatted, putting his eyes on approximately the same level as Nick’s. Then he took his huge, scarred hands and put them over his mouth, his ears.
I am a deaf mute.
Nick turned his face sullenly away: Who gives a fuck?
Rudy slapped him.
Nick fell down. His mouth opened and silent tears began to leak from his eyes. He didn’t want to be here with this scarred troll, this boogey. He was no deafmute, it was a cruel joke.
Rudy pulled him gently to his feet and led him to the table. A blank sheet of paper was there. Rudy pointed at it, then at Nick. Nick stared back sullenly and shook his head. Rudy nodded and pointed at the empty paper again. He produced a pencil and handed it to Nick. Nick put it down as if it were hot. He shook his he
ad. Rudy pointed at the pencil, then at Nick, then at the paper. Nick shook his head. Rudy slapped him again.
More silent tears. The scarred face looking at him with nothing but deadly patience. Rudy pointed at the paper again. At the pencil. At Nick.
Nick grasped the pencil in his fist. He wrote the four words that he knew, calling them forth from the cobwebby, rusting mechanism that was his thinking brain. He wrote:
Then he broke the pencil in half and looked sullenly and defiantly at Rudy. But Rudy was smiling. Suddenly he reached across the table and held Nick’s head steady between his hard, calloused palms. His hands were warm, gentle. Nick could not remember the last time he had been touched with such love. His mother had touched him like that.
Rudy removed his hands from Nick’s face. He picked up the half of the pencil with the point on it. He turned the paper over to the blank side. He tapped the empty white space with the tip of the pencil, and then tapped Nick. He did it again. And again. And suddenly Nick understood.
You are this blank page.
Nick began to cry.
Rudy came for the next six years.
. . . where I learned to read and write. A man named Rudy Sparkman came to help me. I was very lucky to have him. In 1974 the orphanage went broke. They placed as many kids as they could, but I was not one of them. They said I would get placed with a family and the state would pay them for keeping me. I wanted to go with Rudy but Rudy was in Africa working for the Peace Corps. So I ran away. Being sixteen, I don’t think they looked for me too hard. I figured if I could stay out of trouble I would be all right, and so far so good. I have been taking the high school correspondence courses one at a time, because Rudy always said education is the most important. When I settle down for a while I’m going to take that high-school equivalency test. I will be able to pass it soon. I like school. Maybe I will go to college someday. Well, that’s my story.
On the morning of June 22, yesterday, Baker came in around seven-thirty while Nick was emptying wastebaskets. The sheriff looked better.