by Stephen King
She surprised him by stepping out onto the stoop with him. “Walk around back with me, Mr. Barbara. I may invite you in later on, but not until I’m sure of you. Ordinarily I’d take a character reference from Julia like a shot, but these are not ordinary times.” She was leading him along the side of the house, over nicely clipped grass raked clear of autumn leaves. On the right was a board fence separating the Perkins home from its next-door neighbor; on the left were nicely kept flowerbeds.
“The flowers were my husband’s bailiwick. I suppose you think that’s a strange hobby for a law enforcement officer.”
“Actually, I don’t.”
“I never did, either. Which makes us in the minority. Small towns harbor small imaginations. Grace Metalious and Sherwood Anderson were right about that.
“Also,” she said as they rounded the rear corner of the house and entered a commodious backyard, “it will stay light out here longer. I have a generator, but it died this morning. Out of fuel, I believe. There’s a spare tank, but I don’t know how to change it. I used to nag Howie about the generator. He wanted to teach me how to maintain it. I refused to learn. Mostly out of spite.” A tear overspilled one eye and trickled down her cheek. She wiped it away absently. “I’d apologize to him now if I could. Admit he was right. But I can’t do that, can I?”
Barbie knew a rhetorical question when he heard one. “If it’s just the canister,” he said, “I can change it out.”
“Thank you,” she said, leading him to a patio table with an Igloo cooler sitting beside it. “I was going to ask Henry Morrison to do it, and I was going to get more canisters at Burpee’s, too, but by the time I got down to the high street this afternoon, Burpee’s was closed and Henry was out at Dinsmore’s field, along with everyone else. Do you think I’ll be able to get extra canisters tomorrow?”
“Maybe,” Barbie said. In truth, he doubted it.
“I heard about the little boy,” she said. “Gina Buffalino from next door came over and told me. I’m terribly sorry. Will he live?”
“I don’t know.” And, because intuition told him honesty would be the most direct route to this woman’s trust (provisional though that might be), he added, “I don’t think so.”
“No.” She sighed and wiped at her eyes again. “No, it sounded very bad.” She opened the Igloo. “I have water and Diet Coke. That was the only soft drink I allowed Howie to have. Which do you prefer?”
“Water, ma’am.”
She opened two bottles of Poland Spring and they drank. She looked at him with her sadly curious eyes. “Julia told me you want a key to the Town Hall. I understand why you want it. I also understand why you don’t want Jim Rennie to know—”
“He may have to. The situation’s changed. You see—”
She held up her hand and shook her head. Barbie ceased.
“Before you tell me that, I want you to tell me about the trouble you had with Junior and his friends.”
“Ma’am, didn’t your husband—?”
“Howie rarely talked about his cases, but this one he did talk about. It troubled him, I think. I want to see if your story matches his. If it does, we can talk about other matters. If it doesn’t, I’ll invite you to leave, although you may take your bottle of water with you.”
Barbie pointed to the little red shed by the left corner of the house. “That your gennie?”
“Yes.”
“If I change out the canister while we talk, will you be able to hear me?”
“Yes.”
“And you want the whole deal, right?”
“Yes indeed. And if you call me ma’am again, I may have to brain you.”
The door of the little generator shed was held shut with a hook-and-eye of shiny brass. The man who had lived here until yesterday had taken care of his things … although it was a shame about that lone canister. Barbie decided that, no matter how this conversation went, he would take it upon himself to try and get her a few more tomorrow.
In the meantime, he told himself, tell her everything she wants to know about that night. But it would be easier to tell with his back turned; he didn’t like saying the trouble had happened because Angie McCain had seen him as a slightly overage boy-toy.
Sunshine Rule, he reminded himself, and told his tale.
10
What he remembered most clearly about last summer was the James McMurtry song that seemed to be playing everywhere—“Talkin’ at the Texaco,” it was called. And the line he remembered most clearly was the one about how in a small town “we all must know our place.” When Angie started standing too close to him while he was cooking, or pressing a breast against his arm while she reached for something he could have gotten for her, the line recurred. He knew who her boyfriend was, and he knew that Frankie DeLesseps was part of the town’s power structure, if only by virtue of his friendship with Big Jim Rennie’s son. Dale Barbara, on the other hand, was little more than a drifter. In the Chester’s Mill scheme of things, he had no place.
One evening she had reached around his hip and given his crotch a light squeeze. He reacted, and he saw by her mischievous grin that she’d felt him react.
“You can have one back, if you want,” she said. They’d been in the kitchen, and she’d twitched the hem of her skirt, a short one, up a little, giving him a quick glimpse of frilly pink underwear. “Fair’s fair.”
“I’ll pass,” he said, and she stuck her tongue out at him.
He’d seen similar hijinks in half a dozen restaurant kitchens, had even played along from time to time. It might have amounted to no more than a young girl’s passing letch for an older and moderately good-looking co-worker. But then Angie and Frankie broke up, and one night when Barbie was dumping the swill in the Dumpster out back after closing, she’d put a serious move on him.
He turned around and she was there, slipping her arms around his shoulders and kissing him. At first he kissed her back. Angie unlocked one arm long enough to take his hand and put it on her left breast. That woke his brain up. It was good breast, young and firm. It was also trouble. She was trouble. He tried to pull back, and when she hung on one-handed (her nails now biting into the nape of his neck) and tried to thrust her hips against him, he pushed her away with a little more force than he had intended. She stumbled against the Dumpster, glared at him, touched the seat of her jeans, and glared harder.
“Thanks! Now I’ve got crap all over my pants!”
“You should know when to let go,” he said mildly.
“You liked it!”
“Maybe,” he said, “but I don’t like you.” And when he saw the hurt and anger deepen on her face, he added: “I mean I do, just not that way.” But of course people have a way of saying what they really mean when they’re shaken up.
Four nights later, in Dipper’s, someone poured a glass of beer down the back of his shirt. He turned and saw Frankie DeLesseps.
“Did you like that, Baaarbie ? If you did, I can do it again—it’s two-buck pitcher night. Of course, if you didn’t, we can take it outside.”
“I don’t know what she told you, but it’s wrong,” Barbie said. The jukebox had been playing—not the McMurtry song, but that was what he heard in his head: We all must know our place.
“What she told me is she said no and you went ahead and fucked her anyway. What do you outweigh her by? Hunnert pounds? That sounds like rape to me.”
“I didn’t.” Knowing it was probably hopeless.
“You want to go outside, motherfuck, or are you too chicken?”
“Too chicken,” Barbie said, and to his surprise, Frankie went away. Barbie decided he’d had enough beer and music for one night and was getting up to go when Frankie returned, this time not with a glass but a pitcher.
“Don’t do that,” Barbie said, but of course Frankie paid no attention. Splash, in the face. A Bud Light shower. Several people laughed and applauded drunkenly.
“You can come out now and settle this,” Frankie said, “or I can wait. Las
t call’s comin, Baaarbie. ”
Barbie went, realizing it was then or later, and believing that if he decked Frankie fast, before a lot of people could see, that would end it. He could even apologize and repeat that he’d never been with Angie. He wouldn’t add that Angie had been coming on to him, although he supposed a lot of people knew it (certainly Rose and Anson did). Maybe, with a bloody nose to wake him up, Frankie would see what seemed so obvious to Barbie: this was the little twit’s idea of payback.
At first it seemed that it might work out that way. Frankie stood flat-footed on the gravel, his shadow cast two different ways by the glare of the sodium lights at either end of the parking lot, his fists held up like John L. Sullivan. Mean, strong, and stupid: just one more smalltown brawler. Used to putting his opponents down with one big blow, then picking them up and hitting them a bunch of little ones until they cried uncle.
He shuffled forward and uncorked his not-so-secret weapon: an uppercut Barbie avoided by the simple expedient of cocking his head slightly to one side. Barbie countered with a straight jab to the solar plexus. Frankie went down with a stunned expression on his face.
“We don’t have to—” Barbie began, and that was when Junior Rennie hit him from behind, in the kidneys, probably with his hands laced together to make one big fist. Barbie stumbled forward. Carter Thibodeau was there to meet him, stepping from between two parked cars and throwing a roundhouse. It might have broken Barbie’s jaw if it had connected, but Barbie got his arm up in time. That accounted for the worst of his bruises, still an unlovely yellow when he tried to leave town on Dome Day.
He twisted to one side, understanding this had been a planned ambush, knowing he had to get out before someone was really hurt. Not necessarily him. He was willing to run; he wasn’t proud. He got three steps before Melvin Searles tripped him up. Barbie sprawled in the gravel on his belly and the kicking started. He covered his head, but a squall of bootleather pounded his legs, ass, and arms. One caught him high in the rib cage just before he managed to knee-scramble behind Stubby Norman’s used-furniture panel truck.
His good sense left him then, and he stopped thinking about running away. He got up, faced them, then held out his hands to them, palms up and fingers wiggling. Beckoning. The slot he was standing in was narrow. They’d have to come one by one.
Junior tried first; his enthusiasm was rewarded with a kick in the belly. Barbie was wearing Nikes rather than boots, but it was a hard kick and Junior folded up beside the panel truck, woofing for breath. Frankie scrambled over him and Barbie popped him twice in the face—stinging shots, but not quite hard enough to break anything. Good sense had begun to reassert itself.
Gravel crunched. He turned in time to catch incoming from Thibodeau, who had cut behind him. The blow connected with his temple. Barbie saw stars. (“Or maybe one was a comet,” he told Brenda, opening the valve on the new gas canister.) Thibodeau moved in. Barbie pistoned a hard kick to his ankle, and Thibodeau’s grin turned to a grimace. He dropped to one knee, looking like a football player holding the ball for a field goal attempt. Except ball-holders usually don’t clutch their ankles.
Absurdly, Carter Thibodeau cried: “Fuckin dirty-fighter!”
“Look who’s ta—” Barbie got that far before Melvin Searles locked an elbow around his throat. Barbie drove his own elbow back into Searles’s midsection and heard the grunt of escaping air. Smelled it, too: beer, cigarettes, Slim Jims. He was turning, knowing that Thibodeau would probably be on him again before he could fight his way entirely clear of the aisle between vehicles into which he had retreated, no longer caring. His face was throbbing, his ribs were throbbing, and he suddenly decided—it seemed quite reasonable—that he was going to put all four of them in the hospital. They could discuss what constituted dirty fighting and what did not as they signed each other’s casts.
That was when Chief Perkins—called by either Tommy or Willow Anderson, the roadhouse proprietors—drove into the parking lot with his jackpots lit and his headlights winking back and forth. The combatants were illuminated like actors on a stage.
Perkins hit the siren once; it blipped half a whoop and died. Then he got out, hitching his belt up over his considerable girth.
“Little early in the week for this, isn’t it, fellas?”
To which Junior Rennie replied
11
Brenda didn’t need Barbie to tell her that; she’d heard it from Howie, and hadn’t been surprised. Even as a child, Big Jim’s boy had been a fluent confabulator, especially when his self-interest was at stake.
“To which he replied, ‘The cook started it.’ Am I right?”
“Yep.” Barbie pushed the gennie’s start button and it roared into life. He smiled at her, although he could feel a flush warming his cheeks. What he’d just told was not his favorite story. Although he supposed he’d pick it over the one of the gym in Fallujah any day. “There you go—lights, camera, action.”
“Thank you. How long will it last?”
“Only a couple of days, but this may be over by then.”
“Or not. I suppose you know what saved you from a trip to the county lockup that night?”
“Sure,” Barbie said. “Your husband saw it happening. Four-onone. It was kind of hard to miss.”
“Any other cop might not have seen it, even if it was right in front of his eyes. And it was just luck Howie was on that night; George Frederick was supposed to have the duty, but he called in with stomach flu.” She paused. “You might call it providence instead of luck.”
“So I might,” Barbie agreed.
“Would you like to come inside, Mr. Barbara?”
“Why don’t we sit out here? If you don’t mind. It’s pleasant.”
“Fine by me. The weather will turn cold soon enough. Or will it?”
Barbie said he didn’t know.
“When Howie got you all to the station, DeLesseps told Howie that you raped Angie McCain. Isn’t that how it went?”
“That was his first story. Then he said maybe it wasn’t quite rape, but when she got scared and told me to stop, I wouldn’t. That would make it rape in the second degree, I guess.”
She smiled briefly. “Don’t let any feminists hear you say there are degrees of rape.”
“I guess I better not. Anyway, your husband put me in the interrogation room—which seems to be a broom closet when it’s doing its day job—”
Brenda actually laughed.
“—then hauled Angie in. Sat her where she had to look me in the eye. Hell, we were almost rubbing elbows. It takes mental preparation to lie about something big, especially for a young person. I found that out in the Army. Your husband knew it, too. Told her it would go to court. Explained the penalties for perjury. Long story short, she recanted. Said there’d been no intercourse, let alone rape.”
“Howie had a motto: ‘Reason before law.’ It was the basis for the way he handled things. It will not be the way Peter Randolph handles things, partially because he’s a foggy thinker but mostly because he won’t be able to handle Rennie. My husband could. Howie said that when news of your … altercation … got back to Mr. Rennie, he insisted that you be tried for something. He was furious. Did you know that?”
“No.” But he wasn’t surprised.
“Howie told Mr. Rennie that if any of it made it into court, he’d see that all of it made it into court, including the four-on-one in the parking lot. He added that a good defense attorney might even be able to get some of Frankie and Junior’s high school escapades into the record. There were several, although nothing quite like what happened to you.”
She shook her head.
“Junior Rennie was never a great kid, but he used to be relatively harmless. Over the last year or so, he’s changed. Howie saw it, and was troubled by it. I’ve discovered that Howie knew things about both the son and the father …” She trailed off. Barbie could see her debating whether or not to go on and deciding not to. She had learned discretion as the wife of
a small-town police official, and it was a hard habit to unlearn.
“Howie advised you to leave town before Rennie found some other way to make trouble for you, didn’t he? I imagine you got caught by this Dome thing before you could do it.”
“Yes to both. Can I have that Diet Coke now, Mrs. Perkins?”
“Call me Brenda. And I’ll call you Barbie, if that’s what you go by. Please help yourself to a soft drink.”
Barbie did.
“You want a key to the fallout shelter so you can get the Geiger counter. I can and will help you there. But it sounded like you were saying Jim Rennie has to know, and with that idea I have trouble. Maybe it’s grief clouding my mind, but I don’t understand why you’d want to get into any kind of head-butting contest with him. Big Jim freaks out when anybody challenges his authority, and you he doesn’t like to begin with. Nor does he owe you any favors. If my husband were still Chief, maybe the two of you could go see Rennie together. I would rather have enjoyed that, I think.” She leaned forward, looking at him earnestly from her dark-circled eyes. “But Howie’s gone and you’re apt to wind up in a cell instead of looking around for some mystery generator.”
“I know all that, but something new has been added. The Air Force is going to shoot a Cruise missile at the Dome tomorrow at thirteen hundred hours.”
“Oh-my-Jesus.”
“They’ve shot other missiles at it, but only to determine how high the barrier goes. Radar doesn’t work. Those had dummy warheads. This one will have a very live one. A bunker-buster.”
She paled visibly.
“What part of our town are they going to shoot it at?”
“Point of impact will be where the Dome cuts Little Bitch Road. Julia and I were out there just last night. It’ll explode about five feet off the ground.”
Her mouth dropped open in an unladylike gape. “Not possible!”