by Stephen King
Stu then called the question and asked if there was any further discussion.
Fran: “Yes, there’s some discussion. I have a question. What if somebody blows your head off?”
Stu: “I don’t think—”
Fran: “No, you don’t think. You don’t think so. Well, what’s Nick going to tell me if what you all think is wrong? Oh, I’m sorry, Fran? Is that what he’s going to say? Your man is down in the county courthouse with a bullet hole in his head and I guess we made a mistake? Jesus Mary and Joseph, I’m going to have a baby and you people want him to be Pat Garrett!”
There was another ten minutes of discussion, most of which is irrelevant; and Fran, your ob’nt recording secretary, had herself a good cry and then got herself under control. The vote on nominating Stu to be Free Zone Marshal was 6-1, and this time Fran would not change her vote. Glen asked to be recognized for one last thing before we closed the meeting.
Glen: “This is middle-think again, not a motion, nothing to vote on, but something we ought to chew over. Going back to Nick’s third example of law-and-order problems. He described the dase and finished by saying we didn’t have to be concerned with who was right and who was wrong. I think he was mistaken. I believe Stu is one of the fairest men I’ve ever met. But law enforcement without a courts system isn't justice. It’s just vigilantism, rule by the fist. Now suppose that fellow we all know had gotten a .45 and had killed his woman and her lover. And further suppose that Stu, as our marshal, went out and collared him and put him in the callaboose. Then what? How long do we keep him there? Legally, we couldn’t keep him at all, at least according to the Constitution we adopted at our meeting last night, because under that document a man’s innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Now, as a matter of fact, we all know we’d keep him locked up. We wouldn’t feel safe with him walking the streets! So we’d do it even though it would be patently unconstitutional, because when safety and constitutionality are at swords’ points, safety must win out. But it behooves us to make safety and constitutionality synonymous as quickly as we can. We need to think about a court system.”
Fran moved that the meeting be adjourned, and it was so voted, 7-0.
Frances Goldsmith, Secretary
“Why are you stopping?” Fran asked as Stu slowly biked over to the curb and put his feet down. “It’s a block further up.” Her eyes were still red from her burst of tears during the meeting, and Stu thought he had never seen her looking so tired.
“This marshal thing—” he began.
“Stu, I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Somebody has to do it, honey. And Nick was right. I’m the logical choice.”
“Fuck logic. What about me and the baby?”
“I ought to know what you want for the baby,” he said softly. “Haven’t you told me enough times? You want him brought into a world that isn’t totally crazy. You want things safe for him—or her. I want that, too. But I wasn’t going to say that in front of the rest. It’s between you and me. And you and the baby are the two main reasons I said okay.”
“I know that,” she said in a low, choked voice.
He put his fingers under her chin and tilted her face up. He smiled at her and she made an effort to smile back. It was a weary smile, and tears were coursing down her cheeks, but it was better than no smile at all.
“Everything’s going to be fine,” he said.
She was shaking her head back and forth slowly, and some of her tears flew off into the warm summer night.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “No, I really don’t think it is.”
She lay awake long into the night, thinking that warmth can only come from a burning—Prometheus got his eyes pecked out on that one—and that love always comes due in blood.
And a queer certainty stole over her, as numbing as some creeping
anesthesia, that they would finish by wading in blood. The thought made her place her hands protectively over her belly, and she found herself thinking for the first time in weeks of her dream: the dark man with his grin . . . and his twisted coathanger.
As well as hunting for Mother Abagail with a picked group of volunteers in his spare time, Harold Lauder was on the Burial Committee, and on August 21 he spent the day in the back of a dump truck with five other men, all of them wearing boots and protective clothing and heavy-duty Playtex rubber gloves. The head of the Burial Committee, Chad Norris, was out at what he referred to as Burial Site $1, with an almost grisly calm. $1 was ten miles southwest of Boulder in an area that had once been stripmined for coal. It lay as bleak and barren as the mountains of the moon under the burning August sun. Chad had accepted the post reluctantly because he had once been an undertaker’s assistant in Morristown, New Jersey.
“There’s no undertaking about this,” he had said this morning at the Greyhound Bus Terminal between Arapahoe and Walnut that was the Burial Committee’s base of operations. He lit a Winston with a wooden match and grinned at the twenty men sitting around. “That is, it’s an undertaking but not an undertaking undertaking, if you get my meaning.”
There were a few strained smiles, Harold’s largest among them. His belly had been rumbling constantly because he hadn’t dared eat breakfast. He hadn’t been sure he could keep it down, considering the nature of the work. He could have stuck with finding Mother Abagail, and no one would have murmured a word of protest, even though it had to be obvious to every thinking man in the Zone that looking for her with fifteen men was an exercise in comic relief when you considered the thousands of square miles of empty forest and plain around Boulder—and of course, she might never have left Boulder, none of them seemed to have thought of that (which didn’t surprise Harold at all). She could be set up in a house just about anywhere beyond the center of town and they’d still never find her without a house-to-house search. Redman and Andros hadn’t raised a word of protest between them when Harold suggested that the Search Committee be a weekend and evening sort of thing, which told Harold that they had accepted it as a closed case, too.
He could have stuck with it, but who gets to be best-liked in any community? Who is the most trusted? Why, the man who does the dirty job, of course, and does it with a smile. The man who does the job you couldn’t bring yourself to do.
“It’s going to be like burying cordwood,” Chad told them. “If you can keep it on that level in your mind, you’ll be okay. Some of you may have to vomit here at the start. There’s no shame in that; just try to go someplace where the rest won’t have to look at you do it.”
The men were eying each other uncomfortably.
Chad broke them up into three six-man crews. He and the other two went out to prepare a place for those who were brought. Each of the three crews were given a specific area of town to work. Harold’s truck had spent the day in the Table Mesa area, working their way slowly west from the Denver-Boulder Turnpike exit ramp. Up Martin Drive to the Broadway intersection. Down Thirty-ninth Street and then back up Fortieth, suburban houses in a tract area now about thirty years old, dating back to the start of Boulder’s population boom.
Chad had provided gas masks from the local National Guard armory, but they didn’t have to use them until after lunch (lunch? what lunch? Harold’s consisted of a can of Berry’s apple pie filling, it was all he could bring himself to eat), when they entered the Church of Latter-day Saints on lower Table Mesa Drive. They had come here, filled with the plague, and they had died there, over seventy of them, and the stink was enormous.
“Cordwood,” one of Harold’s mates had said in a high, revolted, laughing voice, and Harold had turned and stumbled out past him and he went around the corner of the handsome brick building that had once been a polling place in election years and up came the Berry’s apple pie filling and he discovered that Norris had been right: He really felt better without it.
It took them two trips and most of the afternoon to empty the church. Twenty men, Harold thought, to get rid of all the corpses in Boulder. I
t’s almost funny. A goodly number of Boulder’s previous population had run like rabbits because of the Air Testing Center scare, but still . . . Harold supposed that, as the Burial Committee grew with the population, it was just barely possible that they might get most of the bodies in the ground by the first heavy snowfall (not that he himself expected to be around by then), and most of the people would never know how real the danger of some new epidemic— one they weren't immune to—had been.
The Free Zone Committee was full of bright ideas, he thought with contempt. The committee would be just fine ... as long as they had good old Harold Lauder to make sure their shoelaces were tied, of course. Good old Harold’s good enough for that, but not quite good enough to serve on their fucking Permanent Committee. Heavens, no. He had never been quite good enough, not even quite good enough to get a date for the Class Dance at Ogunquit High School, even with a scag. Good God no, not Harold. Let’s remember, folks, when we get right down to that proverbial place where the ursine mammal evacuated his bowels in the buckwheat, that this is no analytical, logical matter, not even a matter of common sense. When we get right down to it, what we end up with is a frigging beauty contest.
Well, somebody remembers. Somebody is keeping score, kids.
So he came back into the church, wiping his mouth and grinning as best he could, nodding that he was ready to go on. Someone clapped him on the back and Harold’s grin widened and he thought: Someday you're going to lose your hand for that, shitheap.
They made their last run at 4:15 P.M., the body of the dump truck filled with the last of the Latter-day corpses. In town the truck had to weave laboriously in and out of stalled traffic, but on Colorado 119, three tow-trucks had been out all day, latching onto stalled cars and depositing them into the ditches on both sides of the road. They lay there like the overturned toys of some giant-child.
At the burial site, the other two orange trucks were already parked. Men stood around with their rubber gloves off, their fingers white and pruney at the tips from a day of sweating inside rubber. They smoked and talked desultorily. Most of them were very pale.
Norris and his two helpers had it down to a science now. They shook out a huge piece of plastic sheeting on the rubbly ground. Norman Kellogg, the Louisianian who was driving Harold’s truck, backed up to the edge of the plastic. The tailgate slammed down and the first bodies fell out onto the plastic drawsheet like partially stiffened ragdolls. Harold wanted to turn away but was afraid that the others might construe it as weakness. He did not mind watching them fall out too much; it was the sound they made when they hit what was going to become their shroud.
The note of the dumper’s engine deepened and there was a hydraulic whine as the truck’s body began to go up. Now the bodies tumbled out in a grotesque human rain. Harold felt an instant of pity, a feeling so deep it was an ache. Cordwood, he thought. How right he was. That's all that's left. Just. . . cordwood.
uHo!" Chad Norris shouted, and Kellogg pulled the dump truck ahead and shut it off. Chad and his helpers stepped onto the plastic carrying rakes and now Harold did turn away, pretending to scan the sky for rain, and he was not alone—but he heard a sound that would haunt him in his dreams, and that was the sound of change falling from the pockets of the dead men and women as Chad and his helpers worked with their rakes, spreading the corpses evenly. The coins falling on the plastic made a sound that reminded Harold absurdly of tiddledywinks.
When he looked back, the three of them were pulling the edges of the plastic shroud together, grunting with the strain, arms bulging. A few of the other men, Harold among them, pitched in. Chad Norris produced a huge industrial stapling gun. Twenty minutes later that part of the job was done, and the plastic lay on the ground like a giant gelatin capsule. Norris climbed into the cab of a bright yellow bulldozer and keyed the engine. The scarred blade thudded down. The dozer rolled forward.
A man named Weizak, also on Harold’s truck, walked away from the scene with the jerky steps of a badly-controlled puppet. A cigarette jittered between his fingers. “Man, I can’t watch that,” he said as he passed Harold. “It’s really kind of funny. I never knew I was Jewish until today.”
The bulldozer shoved and rolled the large plastic package into a long rectangular cut in the ground. Chad backed off, shut down, and climbed off. Motioning the men to gather around, he walked over to one of the Public Works trucks and put one booted foot up on the running board.
“No football cheers,” he said, “but you did damned good. We put away close to a thousand units today, I guess.”
Units, Harold thought.
“I know this kind of work takes something out of a man. Committee’s promising us another two men before the end of the week, but I know that don’t change the way you guys feel—or the way I feel, for that matter. All I’m saying is that if you’ve had enough, don’t feel like you can take another day of it, you don’t have to worry about avoiding me on the street. But if you feel like you can’t cut it, its awful-damn important that you find someone to take your place tomorrow. So far as I’m concerned, this is the most important job in the Zone. It isn’t too bad now, but if we’ve still got twenty thousand corpses in Boulder next month when it gets to be wet weather, people are going to get sick. If you feel like you can make it, I’ll see you tomorrow morning at the bus station.”
“I’ll be there,” someone said.
“Me too,” Norman Kellogg said. “After a six-hour bath tonight.” There was laughter.
“Count me in,” Weizak chimed in.
“Me too,” Harold said quietly.
“It’s a dirty job,” Norris said in a low, emotional voice. “You’re good men. The rest of them may never know just how good.”
Harold felt a sense of drawing-together, a camaraderie, and he fought against it, suddenly afraid. This was no part of the plan.
“See you tomorrow, Hawk,” Weizak said, and squeezed his shoulder.
Harold’s grin was startled and defensive. Hawk? What kind of joke was that? A bad one, of course. Cheap sarcasm. Calling fat, pimply Harold Lauder Hawk. He felt the old black hate rise, directed at Weizak this time, and then it subsided in sudden confusion. He wasn't fat anymore. He couldn’t even properly be called stout. His pimples had vanished over the last seven weeks. Weizak didn’t know he had once been a school joke. Weizak didn’t know that Harold’s father had once asked him if he was a homosexual. Weizak didn’t know that Harold had been his popular sister’s cross to bear. And if he had known, Weizak probably wouldn’t have given one leaf off the fig-tree.
Harold climbed into the back of one of the trucks, his mind churning helplessly. All of a sudden the old grudges, the old hurts, and the unpaid debts seemed as worthless as the paper money choking all the cash registers of America.
Could that be true? Could it possibly be true? He felt panicked, alone, scared. No, he decided at last. It couldn’t possibly be true. Because, consider: If you were strong-willed enough to be able to resist the low opinions of others, when they thought you were a queer, or an embarrassment, or just a plain old bag of shit, then you had to be strong-willed enough to resist. . .
Resist what?
Their good opinion of you? That was . . . well, lunacy, wasn’t it?
An old quote surfaced in his troubled mind, some general’s defense of interning Japanese-Americans during World War II. It had been pointed out to this general that no acts of sabotage had occurred on the West Coast, where the naturalized Japanese were most heavily concentrated. The general’s reply had been: “The very fact that no sabotage has taken place is an ominous development.”
Their truck pulled into the bus station parking lot. Harold jumped over the side, reflecting that even his co-ordination had improved a thousand per cent, either from the weight he had lost, his almost constant exercise, or both.
The thought came to him again, stubborn, refusing to be buried: / could be an asset to this community.
But they had shut him out.
; That doesn’t matter. I’ve got the brains to pick the lock on the door they slammed in my face. And I believe I’ve found enough guts to open it once it's unlocked.
But—
Stop it! Stop it! You might as well be wearing handcuffs and legchains with that one word stamped all over them. But, but, but!
“Hey, man, you okay?”
Harold jumped. It was Norris, coming out of the dispatcher’s office, which he had taken over. He looked tired.
“Me? I’m fine. I was just thinking.”
“Well, you go right along. Seems like every time you do that you coin money for this joint.”
Harold shook his head. “Not true.”
“No?” Chad let it go. “Can I drop you somewhere?”
“Huh-uh. I’ve got my chopper.”
“You wanna know something, Hawk? I think most of these guys are really going to come back tomorrow.”
“Yes, so do I.” Harold walked over to his motorcycle and climbed on, savoring his new nickname, rather against his will.
Norris shook his head. “I never would have believed it. I’ll see you tomorrow, man.”
“Eight,” Harold confirmed, and drove out Arapahoe to Broadway. To his right a crew comprised mostly of women was at work with a wrecker and a derrick righting a tractor-trailer truck that had jack-knifed, partially blocking the street. They had drawn a respectable little crowd. This place is building up, Harold thought. I don’t recognize half of those people. He went on out toward his house, his mind worrying and gnawing at the problem he thought he had solved long ago. When he got home, there was a small white Vespa parked at the curb. And a woman sitting on his front step.