by Stephen King
Many of the people in the park were sick, but not many had died there. Perhaps they had uneasy thoughts of being munched for dinner by the animals, and they had crawled indoors when they felt the end was near. Larry had had only one confrontation with death this morning, and one was all he wanted. He had walked up Transverse Number One to the comfort station there. He had opened the door and a grinning dead man with maggots crawling briskly hither and yon on his face had been seated inside, his hands settled on his bare thighs, his sunken eyes staring into Larry’s own. A sickening sweet smell bloated out at Larry as if the man sitting there was a rancid bonbon, a sweet treat which, in all the confusion, had been left for the flies. Larry slammed the door to, but belatedly: He lost the cornflakes he had eaten for breakfast and then had dry-heaved until he was afraid he might rupture some of his inner workings. God, if You’re there, he had prayed as he stumbled back toward the menagerie, if You’re taking requests today, Big Fella, mine is not to have to look at anything else like that today. The kooks are bad enough, something like that is more than I can take. Thank you so much.
Now, sitting on this bench (the monster-shouter had moved out of earshot, at least temporarily), Larry found himself thinking about the World Series five years ago, when Cincinnati had played and bested the Boston Red Sox. It was good to remember that because, it now seemed to him, that was the last time he had been completely happy, his physical condition tiptop, his mind resting easily and not working against itself.
That had been just after he and Rudy split. That had been a damn piss-poor thing, that split-up, and if he ever saw Rudy again (never happen, his mind told him with a sigh), Larry was going to apologize. He would get down and kiss Rudy’s shoetops, if that was what Rudy needed to make it okay again.
They had worked their way across the country, and for a while they worked on a farm in western Nebraska, and one night Larry had lost sixty dollars in a poker game. The next day he’d had to ask
Rudy for a loan to tide him over. They had arrived in L.A. a month later, and Larry had been the first to land a job—if you wanted to call washing dishes for the minimum wage working. One night about three weeks later, Rudy had broached the subject of the loan. He said he’d met a guy who’d recommended a really good employment agency, never miss, but the fee was twenty-five bucks. Which happened to be the amount of the loan he had made to Larry after the poker game. Ordinarily, Rudy said, he never would have asked, but—
Larry had protested that he’d paid the loan back. They were square. If Rudy wanted the twenty-five, okay, but he just hoped Rudy wasn’t trying to get him to pay off the same loan twice.
Rudy said he didn’t want a gift; he wanted the money he was owed, and he wasn’t interested in a lot of Larry Underwood bullshit, either. Jesus Christ, Larry said, trying a good-humored laugh. I never thought I’d need a receipt from you, Rudy. Guess I was wrong.
It had escalated into a full-scale argument, almost to the point of blows. At the end Rudy’s face had been flushed. That’s you, Larry, he’d shouted. That’s you all over. That’s how you are. I used to think I’d never learn my lesson, but I think I finally did. Fuck off, Larry.
Rudy left, and Larry followed him to the stairs of the cheap rooming house, digging his wallet out of his back pocket. There were three tens neatly folded into the secret compartment behind the photos and he had heaved them after Rudy. Go on, you cheap little lying fuck! Take it! Take the goddam money!
Rudy had slammed the outer door open with a bang and had gone out into the night, toward whatever destiny the Rudys of this world can expect. He didn’t look back. Larry had stood at the top of the stairs, breathing hard, and after a minute or so he had gathered up his three ten-dollar bills and put them away again.
Thinking of the incident now and then over the years, he had become more and more sure that Rudy had been right. Actually, he was positive. Even if he had paid Rudy back, the two of them had been friends since grade school, and it seemed (looking back) that Larry had always been a dime short for the Saturday matinee because he’d bought some licorice whips or a couple of candy bars on the way over to Rudy’s, or borrowing a nickel to round out his school lunch money or getting seven cents to make up carfare. Over the years he must have bummed fifty dollars in change from Rudy, maybe a hundred. When Rudy had braced him for that twenty-five,
Larry could remember the way he had tightened up. His brain had subtracted twenty-five dollars from the three tens, and had said to him: That only leaves five bucks. Therefore, you already paid him back. I’m not sure just when, but you did. Let’s have no more discussion of the matter. And no more there had been.
He realized he was crying a little bit, and he felt a momentary disgust that he should be sitting here on a bench in Central Park, crying in the sun like some wretched old man on a pension. Then it occurred to him that he had a right to cry for the things he had lost, that he had a right to be in shock if that was what this was.
His mother had died three days ago. She had been lying on a cot in the hallway of Mercy Hospital when she died, crammed in with thousands of others who were also busy dying. Larry had been kneeling beside her when she went, and he had thought he might go mad, watching his mother die while all around him rose the stench of urine and feces, the hell’s babble of the delirious, the choking, the insane, the screams of the bereaved. She hadn’t known him at the end; there had been no final moment of recognition. Her chest had finally just stopped in mid-heave and had settled very slowly, like the weight of an automobile settling down on a flat tire. He had crouched beside her for ten minutes or so, not knowing what to do, thinking in a confused way that he ought to wait until a death certificate was signed or someone asked him what had happened. But it was obvious what had happened, it was happening everywhere. It was just as obvious that the place was a madhouse. No sober young doctor was going to come along, express sympathy, and then start the machinery of death. Sooner or later his mother would just be carried away like a sack of oats, and he didn’t want to watch that. Her purse was under the cot. He found a pen and a bobby pin and her checkbook. He tore a deposit slip from the back of her book and wrote on it her name, her address, and after a moment’s subtraction, her age. He clipped it to her blouse pocket with the bobby pin and began to cry. He kissed her cheek and fled, crying. He felt like a deserter. Being on the street had been a little better, although at that time the streets had been full of crazy people, sick people, and circling army patrols. And now he could sit on this bench and grieve for more general things: his mother’s loss of her retirement, the loss of his own career, for that time in L.A. when he had sat watching the Reds play the Bosox, knowing there would be bed and love later, and for Rudy. Most of all he grieved for Rudy and wished he had paid Rudy his twenty-five dollars with a grin and a shrug, saving the six years that had been lost.
The monkey died at quarter of twelve.
It was on its perch, just sitting there apathetically with its hands drawn up under its chin, and then its eyelids fluttered and it fell forward and hit the cement with a final horrid smack.
Larry didn’t want to sit there anymore. He got up and began to walk aimlessly down toward the mall with its large bandshell. He had heard the monster-shouter some fifteen minutes ago, very far away, but now the only sound in the park seemed to be his own heels clicking on the cement and the twitter of the birds. Birds apparently didn’t catch the flu. Good for them.
When he neared the bandshell, he saw that a woman was sitting on one of the benches in front of it. She was maybe fifty, but had taken great pains to look younger. She was dressed in expensive-looking gray-green slacks and a silk off-the-shoulder peasant blouse ... except, Larry thought, as far as he knew, peasant’s can’t afford silk. She looked around at the sound of Larry’s footsteps. She held a pill in one hand and tossed it casually into her mouth like a peanut.
“Hi,” Larry said. Her face was calm, her eyes blue. Sharp intelligence gleamed in them. She was wearing gold-rimmed glasses,
and her pocketbook was trimmed with something that certainly looked like mink. There were four rings on her fingers: a wedding band, two diamonds, and a cat’s-eye emerald.
“Uh, I’m not dangerous,” he said. It was a ridiculous thing to say, he supposed, but she looked like she might be wearing about $20,000 on her fingers. Of course, they might be fakes, but she didn’t look like a woman who would have much use for zircons.
“No,” she said, “you don’t look dangerous. You’re not sick, either.” Her voice rose a little on the last word, making her statement into a polite half-question. She wasn’t as calm as she looked at first glance; there' was a little tic working on the side of her neck, and behind the light of intelligence in the blue eyes was the same dull shock that Larry had seen in his own eyes this morning as he shaved.
“No, I don’t think I am. Are you?”
“Not at all. Did you know you have an ice cream wrapper on your shoe?”
He looked down and saw that he did. It made him blush because he suspected that she would have informed him that his fly was open in that same tone. He stood on one leg and tried to pull it off.
“You look like a stork,” she said. “Sit down and try it. My name is Rita Blakemoor.”
“Pleased to know you. I’m Larry Underwood.”
He sat down. She offered her hand and he shook it lightly, his fingers pressing against her rings. Then he gingerly removed the ice cream wrapper from his shoe and dropped it primly into a can beside the bench that said IT’S YOUR PARK SO KEEP IT CLEAN! It struck him funny, the whole operation. He threw his head back and laughed. It was the first real laugh since the day he had come home to find his mother lying on the floor of her apartment, and he was enormously relieved to find that the good feel of laughing hadn’t changed.
Rita Blakemoor was smiling both at him and with him, and he was struck again by her casual yet elegant handsomeness. She looked like a woman from an Irwin Shaw novel, Nightwork, maybe, or the one they had made for TV some years ago.
“When I heard you coming, I almost hid,” she said. “I thought you were probably the man with the broken glasses and the queer philosophy.”
“The monster-shouter?”
“Is that what you call him or what he calls himself?”
“What I call him.”
“Very apt,” she said, opening her mink-trimmed (maybe) bag and taking out a package of menthol cigarettes. “He reminds me of an insane Diogenes.”
“Yeah, just lookin for an honest monster,” Larry said, and laughed again.
She lit her cigarette and chuffed out smoke.
“He’s not sick, either,” Larry said. “But most of the others are.” “The doorman at my building seems very well,” Rita said. “He’s still on duty. I tipped him five dollars when I came out this morning. I don’t know if I tipped him for being very well or for being on duty. What do you think?”
“I really don’t know you well enough to say.”
“No, of course you don’t.” She put her cigarettes back in her bag and he saw that there was a revolver in there. She followed his gaze. “It was my husband’s. He was a career executive with a major New York bank. That’s just how he put it when anyone asked what he did to keep himself in cocktail onions. I-am-a-career-executive-with-a-major-New-York-bank. He died two years ago. He was at a luncheon with one of those Arabs who always look as if they have rubbed all the visible areas of their skin with Brylcreem. He had a massive stroke. He died with his tie on. Do you think that could be our generation’s equivalent of that old saying about dying with your boots on? Harry Blakemoor died with his tie on. I like it, Larry.”
A finch landed in front of them and pecked the ground.
“He was insanely afraid of burglars, so he had this gun. Do guns really kick and make a loud, noise when they go off, Larry?”
Larry, who had never fired a gun in his life, said, “I don’t think one that size would kick much. Is it a .38?”
“A .32.” She took it out of her bag and he saw that there were also a good many small pill-bottles in there. This time she didn’t follow his gaze; she was looking at a small chinaberry tree about fifteen paces away. “I believe I’ll try it. Do you think I can hit that tree?”
“I don’t know,” he said apprehensively. “I don’t really think—”
She pulled the trigger and the gun went off with a fairly impressive bang. A small hole appeared in the chinaberry tree. “Bullseye,” she said, and blew smoke from the pistol barrel like a gunfighter.
“Real good,” Larry said, and when she put the gun back in her purse, his heart resumed something like its normal rhythm.
“I couldn’t shoot a person with it. I’m quite sure of that. And soon there won’t be anyone to shoot, will there?”
“Oh, I don’t know about that.”
“You were looking at my rings. Would you like one?”
“Huh? No!” He began to blush again.
“As a banker, my husband believed in diamonds. He believed in them the way the Baptists believe in Revelations. I have a great many diamonds, and they are all insured. We not only owned a piece of the rock, my Harry and I, I sometimes believed we held a lien on the whole goddam thing. But if someone should want my diamonds, I would hand them over. After all, they’re only rocks again, aren’t they?”
“I guess that’s right.”
“Of course,” she said, and the tic on the side of her neck jumped again. “And if a stick-up man wanted them, I’d not only hand them over, I would give him the address of Cartier’s. Their selection of rocks is much better than my own.”
“What are you going to do now?” Larry asked her.
“What would you suggest?”
“I just don’t know,” Larry said, and sighed.
“My answer exactly.”
“You know something? I saw a guy this morning who said he was going out to Yankee Stadium and je . . . and masturbate on home plate. Can you imagine?” He could feel himself blushing again.
“What an awful walk for him,” she said. “Why didn’t you suggest something closer?” She sighed, and the sigh turned into a shudder. She opened her purse, took out a bottle of pills, and popped a gel capsule into her mouth.
“What’s that?” Larry asked.
“Vitamin E,” she said with a glittering, false smile. The tic in her neck jumped once or twice and then stopped. She became serene again.
“There’s nobody in the bars,” Larry said suddenly. “I went into Pat’s on Forty-third and it was totally empty. They have that great big mahogany bar and I went behind it and poured myself a water glass full of Johnnie Walker. Then I didn’t even want to be there. So I left it sitting on the bar and got out.”
They sighed together, like a chorus.
“You’re very pleasant,” she said. “I like you very much.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Blakemoor.” He was surprised and pleased. “Rita. I’m Rita.”
“Okay.”
“Are you hungry, Larry?”
“As a matter of fact, I am.”
“Perhaps you’d take the lady to lunch.”
“That would be a pleasure.”
She stood up and offered him her arm with a slightly deprecatory smile. As he linked his through it, he caught a whiff of her sachet, a smell that was at once comforting and disquietingly adult in its associations for him, almost old. His mother had worn sachet on their many trips to the movies together.
Then he forgot about it as they walked out of the park and up Fifth Avenue, away from the dead monkey, the monster-shouter, and the dark sweet treat sitting endlessly inside the comfort station on Transverse Number One. She chattered incessantly, and later he could remember no one thing she had chattered about (yes, just one: she had always dreamed, she said, of strolling up Fifth Avenue on the arm of a handsome young man, a young man who could have been her own son but who wasn’t), but he recalled the walk often just the same, especially after she began to jitter apart like some indifferently made toy. H
er beautiful smile, her light, cynical, casual chatter, the whisper of her slacks.
They went into a steak house and Larry cooked, a trifle clumsily, but she applauded each course: the steak, the french fries, the instant coffee, the strawberry-rhubarb pie.
Chapter 22
There was a strawberry pie in the fridge. It was covered with Saran Wrap and after looking at it for a long time with dull and bemused eyes, Frannie took it out. She set it on the counter and cut a wedge. A strawberry fell to the counter with a fat plop as she was transferring the piece of pie to a small plate. She picked the berry up and ate it. She wiped up the small splotch of juice on the counter with a dishrag. She put the Saran Wrap back over the remains of the pie and stuck it back in the refrigerator.
She was turning back to get her pie when she happened to glance at the knife-rack beside the cupboards. Her father had made it. It was two magnetized runners. The knives hung from them, blades down. The early afternoon sun was gleaming on them. She stared at the knives for a long time, the dull, half-curious cast of her eyes never changing, her hands working restlessly in the folds of the apron tied around her waist.
At last, some fifteen minutes later, she remembered that she had been in the middle of something. What? A line of scripture, a paraphrase, occurred to her for no good reason: Before removing the mote in thy neighbor's eye, attend the beam in thine own. She considered it. Mote? Beam? That particular image had always bothered her. What sort of beam? Sunbeam? Moonbeam? Roofbeam? There were also flashlight beams and beaming faces and there had been a New York mayor named Abe Beame, and—