by Stephen King
“It’s so noisy!” Alice says. Her cheeks are bright and her eyes are trying to look everywhere at once. “What should I do?”
After checking out the roulette table, Billy guides her there and buys her fifty dollars’ worth of chips, all the while telling himself bad idea, bad idea. Her beginner’s luck is phenomenal. In ten minutes she’s up two hundred dollars and people are cheering her on. Billy doesn’t care for that, so he guides her to a bank of five-dollar slots where she spends half an hour and wins another thirty bucks. Then she turns to him and says, “Push the button and look, push the button and look, rinse and repeat. It’s kinda stupid, isn’t it?”
Billy shrugs but can’t help smiling. He remembers Robin Maguire saying it’s only a grin when your teeth show, and then it’s nothing else.
“You said it, not me,” he says. And shows his teeth.
7
After the casino they go to the Century 16 and see not one movie but two, a comedy and an action flick. When they come out of that one, it’s almost dark.
“How about something to eat?” Alice asks.
“Happy to stop somewhere if you want, but I’m full of popcorn and Sour Patch Kids.”
“Maybe just a sandwich. Want to hear something nice about my mom?”
“Sure.”
“Every now and then, if I was good, we’d have what she called a special day. I could have pancakes with chocolate chips for breakfast and then do almost anything I wanted, like have an egg cream at the Green Line Apothecary, or get a stuffed animal—if it was cheap—or ride the bus to the end of the line, which I liked to do. Stupid kid, huh?”
“No,” Billy says.
She takes his hand, natural as anything, and swings it back and forth as they walk to the truck. “This day has been like that. Special.”
“Good.”
Alice turns to him. “You better not get killed.” She sounds absolutely fierce. “You just better not.”
“I won’t,” Billy says. “Okay?”
“Okay,” she agrees. “All okay.”
8
But that night she isn’t. Billy is sleeping just below the surface of wakefulness, or he never would have heard Alice’s knock. It’s light and tentative, almost not there at all. For a moment or two he thinks it’s part of the dream he’s having, something about Shanice Ackerman, then he’s back to the motel room on the outskirts of Vegas. He gets up, goes to the door, and looks through the peephole. She’s standing there in the baggy blue pajamas she bought on her shopping trip with Bucky. Her feet are bare and her hand is at her throat and he can hear her gasping. The gasping is louder than her knock was.
He opens up, takes her by the hand that’s not clasping her throat, and leads her into the room. As he closes the door he sings, “If you go down to the woods today… sing it with me, Alice.”
She shakes her head and tears in another breath. “—can’t—”
“Yes you can. If you go down to the woods today…”
“You better go…” Whoop. “… in dis… dis…” Whoop!
She’s swaying on her feet, close to fainting. Billy thinks it’s a wonder she didn’t pass out in the hall.
He gives her a shake. “Nope, that’s wrong. Try again. Next line.”
“You’re sure of a big surprise?” She’s still gasping but looks a little less likely to collapse.
“Right. Now let’s do it together. And don’t talk it, sing it. If you go down to the woods today…”
She joins him. “You’re sure of a big surprise. If you go down to the woods today you better go in disguise.” She pulls in a deep breath and lets it out in a series of jerks: huh… huh… huh. “Need to sit down.”
“Before you fall down,” Billy agrees. He still has her hand. He leads her to the chair by the window, the drape now drawn.
She sits, looks up at him, brushes her newly blond hair off her forehead. “I tried in my room and it didn’t work. Why did it work now?”
“You needed someone to duet with.” Billy sits on the edge of the bed. “What was it? Bad dream?”
“Horrible. One of those boys… those men… was stuffing a dishrag in my mouth. To make me stop yelling. Or maybe I was screaming. I think it was Jack. I couldn’t breathe. I was sure I was going to choke to death.”
“Did they do that?”
Alice shakes her head. “I don’t remember.”
But Billy knows they did, and she does, too. He has experienced this sort of thing himself, although not as badly or as often as some. He didn’t keep up with the jars he knew in Iraq—Johnny Capps was the exception—but there are websites and sometimes he checks them out.
“It’s natural, how the minds of combat survivors deal with the trauma. Or try to.”
“Is that what I am? A combat survivor?”
“That’s what you are. The song may not work every time. A wet cloth across your face may not work every time. There are other tricks to getting through panic attacks, you can read about them on the Internet. Sometimes, though, you just have to wait it out.”
“I thought I was better,” Alice whispers.
“You are. But you’re also under stress.” And I put you there, Billy thinks.
“Can I stay here tonight? With you?”
He almost tells her no, then looks at her pale pleading face and thinks again, I put you there.
“Okay.” He wishes he was wearing more than just a pair of loose boxers, but they will have to do.
She gets in and he gets in next to her. They lie on their backs. The bed is narrow and their hips touch. He looks up at the ceiling and thinks, I am not going to get an erection. Which is like telling a dog not to chase a cat. Their legs are also touching. Hers is warm and firm through the cotton. He hasn’t been with a woman since Phil and he doesn’t want to be with this one, but oh God.
“Can I help you?” Her voice is quiet but not timid. “I can’t make love to you… you know, the real way… but I could help you. I’d be glad to help you.”
“No, Alice. Thank you, but no.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“All right.” She rolls on her side, away from him and toward the wall.
Billy waits until her breathing grows long and mild and steady. Then he goes in the bathroom and helps himself.
9
Days go by, just a few, almost like a vacation, and then it’s almost time. There’s a Target down the road, and after breakfast they shop there. Alice buys a big plastic jug of moisturizer and a spray bottle. Also bathing suits. Hers is a modest blue tank. His are billowy trunks with tropical fish on them. She also buys him a pair of pre-washed bib overalls, yellow work gloves, a denim barn coat, and a T-shirt with a very Vegas slogan on it.
They swim in the motel pool, which they discover is the best part of their current accommodation. Alice plays water volleyball with some kids while Billy lies on a chaise, watching. It all feels natural. They could be a father and daughter on their way to Los Angeles, maybe looking for work, maybe looking for relatives they can touch up for a long-term loan or a place to stay.
The motel clerk was right about the buffet—it’s heavy on mac and cheese and prehistoric roast beef au jus—but after almost two hours in the pool, Alice eats everything on her heaped plate and goes back for more. Billy can’t keep up with her, although there was a time—basic training, for instance—when he could have eaten her under the table. After lunch, she says she wants a nap. Billy isn’t surprised.
Around four o’clock they go shopping again, this time at a farm-and-garden store called Grow Baby Grow. Alice’s great mood of the morning has darkened, but she makes no effort to change his mind about the next day. Billy is grateful. Persuasion might lead to argument and arguing with Alice is the last thing he wants. Not on what could be their last day together.
When they park at the motel, Billy reaches into his back pocket and brings out a folded piece of paper. He unfolds it, smooths it gently, and then attaches it to the dashboar
d with Scotch tape from Target. Alice looks at the little girl hugging the pink flamingo.
“Who is that?”
Shanice’s careful crayon work has blurred a little, but the hearts rising from the flamingo’s noddy head to Shanice’s are still clear enough. Billy touches one of them. “The little girl who lived next door to me in Midwood. But tomorrow she’s going to be my daughter. If I need her to be.”
10
Billy trusts people not to steal, but only so far. The old tools and dirty barrels are safe enough, but someone might see the stuff they bought at Grow Baby Grow and decide to filch some, so they carry the bags inside and store them in Billy’s bathroom. There are four 50-pound sacks of Miracle-Gro potting soil, five 10-pound sacks of Buckaroo Worm Castings, and a 25-pound sack of Black Kow fertilizer.
Alice lets Billy tote the Black Kow. She wrinkles her nose and says she can smell it even through the bag.
They watch TV in her room and she asks him if he will stay the night with her. Billy says it would be better if he didn’t.
“I don’t think I can sleep alone,” Alice says.
“I don’t think I can, either, but we’re both going to try. Come here. Give me a hug.”
She gives him a good one. He can feel her trembling, not because she’s afraid of him but because she’s afraid for him. She doesn’t deserve to be afraid at all, but if she has to be, Billy thinks, this way is better. A lot.
“Set your phone alarm for six,” he says when he lets her go.
“I won’t have to.”
He smiles. “Do it anyway. You might surprise yourself.”
In his room next door, he texts Bucky: Have you heard anything about N?
Bucky’s reply is immediate. No. He’s probably there but I don’t know for sure. Sorry.
It’s okay, Billy texts back, then sets his own phone alarm for five. He doesn’t expect to sleep, either, but he might surprise himself.
He does, a little, and dreams of Shanice. She’s tearing up the picture of Dave the Flamingo and saying I hate you I hate you I hate you.
He wakes up at four, and when he goes outside with the new gloves in one hand, Alice is sitting in the eternal motel lawn chair, bundled up in an I LOVE LAS VEGAS sweatshirt and looking up at a rind of moon.
“Hey,” Billy says.
“Hey.”
He goes to the edge of the cement walk and scrubs the new gloves in the dirt. When he’s satisfied that they look right, he claps the dust off them and stands up.
“Cold,” Alice says. “That will be good for you. You can wear the coat.”
Billy knows it will warm up fast once the sun rises. It may be October, but this is the desert. He’ll wear the barn coat anyway.
“You want something to eat? Egg McMuffin? The Mickey D’s down the road is twenty-four-hour.”
She shakes her head. “Not hungry.”
“Coffee?”
“Sure, that would be great.”
“Cream and sugar?”
“Black, please.”
He goes down to the deserted lobby and gets them each a cup from the eternal motel Bunn. When he comes back, she’s still looking at the moon. “It looks close enough to reach out and touch. Isn’t it beautiful?”
“It is, but you’re shivering. Let’s go inside.”
She sits in his chair by the window and sips her coffee, then sets it on the little table and falls asleep. The sweatshirt is too big and the neck slips to the side, baring one shoulder. Billy thinks it’s at least as beautiful as the moon. He sits and drinks his coffee and watches her. He likes her long slow breaths. The time passes. It’s got a knack for that, Billy thinks.
11
When he wakes her up at seven-thirty she scolds him for letting her sleep. “We need to get you sprayed up. That goo takes at least four hours to work.”
“It’s okay. The game starts at one and I’m not going to move on him until at least one-thirty.”
“Still, I wish we’d done this an hour ago, just to be safe.” She sighs. “Come in my room. We’ll do it there.”
A few minutes later his shirt is off and he’s rubbing moisturizer over his hands, forearms, and face. She tells him not to neglect his eyelids and the back of his neck. When he’s done, she goes to work with the tanning spray. The first coat takes five minutes. When she’s done, he goes into the bathroom and takes a look. What he sees is a white man with a desert tan.
“Not good enough,” he says.
“I know. Moisturize again.”
She uses the spray a second time. When he goes into the bathroom for another look it’s better, but he’s still not satisfied. “I don’t know,” he tells Alice when he comes out. “This might have been a bad idea.”
“It’s not. Remember what I said? For the next four to six hours, it will continue to darken. With the cowboy hat and the bib overalls…” She gives him a critical look. “If I didn’t think you could pass for Chicano, I’d tell you.”
This is where she asks me again to just give it up and come back to Colorado with her, Billy thinks. But she doesn’t. She tells him to get dressed in what she calls “your costume.” Billy goes back to his room and puts on the dark wig, T-shirt, bib overalls, barn coat (work gloves stuffed in the pockets), and the battered cowboy hat Bucky and Alice bought in Boulder. It comes down to his ears and he reminds himself to raise it up a little when the time comes, to show that long black hair streaked with gray.
“You look fine.” All business, red-rimmed eyes notwithstanding. “Got your pad and pencil?”
He pats the front pocket of the biballs. It’s capacious, with plenty of room for the silenced Ruger as well as the writing stuff.
“You’re getting darker already.” She smiles wanly. “Good thing the PC Police aren’t here.”
“Needs must,” Billy says. He reaches into the side pocket of the biballs, the one that doesn’t hold the Glock 17, and brings out a roll of bills. It’s everything he has left except for a couple of twenties. “Take this. Call it insurance.”
Alice pockets it without argument.
“If you don’t get a call from me this afternoon, wait. I have no idea what kind of cell coverage they have north of here. If I’m not back by eight tonight, nine at the outside, I’m not coming back. Stay the night, then check out and get a Greyhound to Golden or Estes Park. Call Bucky. He’ll pick you up. All right?”
“That would not be all right, but I understand. Let me help you carry those bags of fertilizer out to the truck.”
They make two trips and then Billy slams the tailgate. They stand there looking at each other. A few sleepy-eyed people—a couple of salesmen, a family—are toting out their luggage and preparing to move on.
“If you don’t need to be there until one, you can stay another hour,” she says. “Two, even.”
“I think I better go now.”
“Yeah, maybe you better,” Alice says. “Before I break down.”
He hugs her. Alice hugs back fiercely. He expects her to say be careful. He expects her to tell him again not to die. He expects her to ask him one more time, maybe plead with him, not to go. She doesn’t. She looks up at him and says, “Get what’s yours.”
She lets go of him and walks back toward the motel. When she gets there, she turns to him and holds up her phone. “Call me when you’re done. Don’t forget.”
“I won’t.”
If I can, he thinks. I will if I can.
CHAPTER 20
1
An hour north of Vegas on Route 45, Billy comes to a Dougie’s Donuts mated to an ARCO gas station and a convenience store with the unlikely name of Terrible Herbst. It’s a truck stop surrounded by great expanses of parking, big rigs on one side snoring like sleeping beasts. Billy gasses up, grabs a bottle of orange juice and a cruller, then parks around back. He thinks about calling Alice, only because he’d like to hear her voice and thinks she might like to hear his. My hostage, he thinks. My Stockholm Syndrome hostage. Only that’s not what she is now, if
she ever was. He remembers how she said Get what’s yours. Not fearless, she hasn’t morphed into some comic book warrior queen (at least not yet), but plenty fierce. He has his phone in his hand before remembering she got as little sleep as he did last night. If she’s gone back to bed with the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging on the door, he doesn’t want to wake her.
He drinks his juice and eats his cruller and lets the time pass. There’s enough of it for doubts to creep in. In some ways—many, actually—it’s like the Funhouse all over again, only with no squad to back him up. He can’t be sure Nick went to Promontory Point for the weekend. He has no idea how many men he may have brought back with him if he did. Some for sure, not bounty hunters from some other outfit but his own guys, and Billy has no idea where they might be placed. He has an idea of the interior layout from the Zillow photographs, but there might have been changes made after Nick bought the place. If Nick is there, rooting on the Giants, Billy doesn’t know where he’ll be watching. He doesn’t even know if he can get in through the service entrance. Maybe sí, maybe no.
There’s a line of Porta-Johns, and he uses one to offload his coffee and juice. When he comes out, a black chick in a halter and a denim skirt short enough to show the edges of her panties is standing nearby. She looks like she’s been up all night and the night was a hard one. The mascara around her eyes reminds Billy—dumb self Billy—of the Beagle Boys in the old Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comics he sometimes picks up at rummage and yard sales.
“Hey, goodlooking man,” the lot lizard says. “Want to date me?”