by Stephen King
“I can be discreet, sai,” he said. “As for propriety? I’m amazed you even know the word.”
She looked up into his cold face, her smile fading. He saw anger come in to fill it, but before anger there was hurt, as if he had slapped her. He felt both glad and sorry at the same time.
“Why do you speak so?” she whispered.
The music stopped before he could answer . . . although how he might have answered, he had no idea. She curtseyed and he bowed, while those surrounding them clapped and whistled. They went back to their places, to their separate circles, and the guitars began again. Roland felt his hands grasped on either side and began to turn with the circle once more.
Laughing. Kicking. Clapping on the beat. Feeling her somewhere behind him, doing the same. Wondering if she wanted as badly as he did to be out of here, to be in the dark, to be alone in the dark, where he could put his false face aside before the real one beneath could grow hot enough to set it afire.
CHAPTER VI
SHEEMIE
1
Around ten o’ the clock, the trio of young men from the Inner Baronies made their manners to host and hostess, then slipped off into the fragrant summer night. Cordelia Delgado, who happened to be standing near Henry Wertner, the Barony’s stockliner, remarked that they must be tired. Wertner laughed at this and replied in an accent so thick it was almost comic: “Nay, ma’am, byes that age’re like rats explorin en woodpile after hokkut rain, so they are. It’ll be hours yet before the bunks out’ta Bar K sees em.”
Olive Thorin left the public rooms shortly after the boys, pleading a headache. She was pale enough to be almost believable.
By eleven, the Mayor, his Chancellor, and the chief of his newly inaugurated security staff were conversing in the Mayor’s study with the last few late-staying guests (all ranchers, all members of the Horsemen’s Association). The talk was brief but intense. Several of the ranchers present expressed relief that the Affiliation’s emissaries were so young. Eldred Jonas said nothing to this, only looked down at his pale, long-fingered hands and smiled his narrow smile.
By midnight, Susan was at home and undressing for bed. She didn’t have the sapphire to worry about, at least; that was a Barony jewel, and had been tucked back into the strongbox at Mayor’s House before she left, despite what Mr. Ain’t-We-Fine Will Dearborn might think about it and her. Mayor Thorin (she couldn’t bring herself to call him Hart, although he had asked her to do so—not even to herself could she do it) had taken it back from her himself. In the hallway just off from the reception room, that had been, by the tapestry showing Arthur Eld carrying his sword out of the pyramid in which it had been entombed. And he (Thorin, not the Eld) had taken the opportunity to kiss her mouth and have a quick fumble at her breasts—a part of her that had felt much too naked during that entire interminable evening. “I burn for Reaping,” he had whispered melodramatically in her ear. His breath had been redolent of brandy. “Each day of this summer seems an age.”
Now, in her room, brushing her hair with harsh, quick strokes and looking out at the waning moon, she thought she had never been so angry in her life as she was at this moment: angry at Thorin, angry at Aunt Cord, furious with that self-righteous prig of a Will Dearborn. Most of all, however, she was angry at herself.
“There’s three things ye can do in any situation, girl,” her father had told her once. “Ye can decide to do a thing, ye can decide not to do a thing . . . or ye can decide not to decide.” That last, her da had never quite come out and said (he hadn’t needed to) was the choice of weaklings and fools. She had promised herself she would never elect it herself . . . and yet she had allowed herself to drift into this ugly situation. Now all the choices seemed bad and honorless, all the roads either filled with rocks or hub-deep in mud.
In her room at Mayor’s House (she had not shared a chamber with Hart for ten years, or a bed, even briefly, for five), Olive sat in a nightdress of undecorated white cotton, also looking out at the waning moon. After closing herself into this safe and private place, she had wept . . . but not for long. Now she was dry-eyed, and felt as hollow as a dead tree.
And what was the worst? That Hart didn’t understand how humiliated she was, and not just for herself. He was too busy strutting and preening (also too busy trying to look down the front of sai Delgado’s dress at every opportunity) to know that people—his own Chancellor among them—were laughing at him behind his back. That might stop when the girl had returned to her aunt’s with a big belly, but that wouldn’t be for months yet. The witch had seen to that. It would be even longer if the girl kindled slowly. And what was the silliest, most humilating thing of all? That she, John Haverty’s daughter Olive, still loved her husband. Hart was an overweening, vainglorious, prancing loon of a man, but she still loved him.
There was something else, something quite apart from the matter of Hart’s turning into George o’ Goats in his late middle age: she thought there was an intrigue of some sort going on, something dangerous and quite likely dishonorable. Hart knew a little about it, but she guessed he knew only what Kimba Rimer and that hideous limping man wanted him to know.
There was a time, and not so long ago, when Hart wouldn’t have allowed himself to be fobbed off in such fashion by the likes of Rimer, a time when he would have taken one look at Eldred Jonas and his friends and sent them west ere they had so much as a single hot dinner in them. But that was before Hart had become besotted with sai Delgado’s gray eyes, high bosom, and flat belly.
Olive turned down the lamp, blew out the flame, and crept off to bed, where she would lie wakeful until dawn.
By one o’ the clock, no one was left in the public rooms of Mayor’s House except for a quartet of cleaning women, who performed their chores silently (and nervously) beneath the eye of Eldred Jonas. When one of them looked up and saw him gone from the window-seat where he had been sitting and smoking, she murmured softly to her friends, and they all loosened up a little. But there was no singing, no laughter. Il spectro, the man with the blue coffin on his hand, might only have stepped back into the shadows. He might still be watching.
By two o’ the clock, even the cleaning women were gone. It was an hour at which a party in Gilead would just have been reaching its apogee of glitter and gossip, but Gilead was far away, not just in another Barony but almost in another world. This was the Outer Arc, and in the Outers, even gentry went to bed early.
There was no gentry on view at the Travellers’ Rest, however, and beneath the all-encompassing gaze of The Romp, the night was still fairly young.
2
At one end of the saloon, fishermen still wearing their rolled-down boots drank and played Watch Me for small stakes. To their right was a poker table; to their left, a knot of yelling, exhorting men—cowpokes, mostly—stood along Satan’s Alley, watching the dice bounce down the velvet incline. At the room’s other end, Sheb McCurdy was pounding out jagged boogie, right hand flying, left hand pumping, the sweat pouring down his neck and pale cheeks. Beside and above him, standing drunk on a stool, Pettie the Trotter shook her enormous bottom and bawled out the words to the song at the top of her voice: “Come on over, baby, we got chicken in the barn, what barn, whose barn, my barn! Come on over, baby, baby got the bull by the horns . . .”
Sheemie stopped beside the piano, the camel bucket in one hand, grinning up at her and attempting to sing along. Pettie swatted him on his way, never missing a word, bump, or grind, and Sheemie went with his peculiar laugh, which was shrill but somehow not unpleasant.
A game of darts was in progress; in a booth near the back, a whore who styled herself Countess Jillian of Up’ard Killian (exiled royalty from distant Garlan, my dears, oh how special we are) was managing to give two handjobs at the same time while smoking a pipe. And at the bar, a whole line of assorted toughs, drifters, cowpunchers, drovers, drivers, carters, wheelwrights, stagies, carpenters, conmen, stockmen, boatmen, and gunmen drank beneath The Romp’s double head.
The
only real gunmen in the place were at the end of the bar, a pair drinking by themselves. No one attempted to join them, and not just because they wore shooting irons in holsters that were slung low and tied down gunslinger fashion. Guns were uncommon but not unknown in Mejis at that time, and not necessarily feared, but these two had the sullen look of men who have spent a long day doing work they didn’t want to do—the look of men who would pick a fight on no account at all, and be glad to end their day by sending some new widow’s husband home in a hurry-up wagon.
Stanley the bartender served them whiskey after whiskey with no attempt to make conversation, not so much as a “Hot day, gents, wa’n’t it?” They reeked of sweat, and their hands were pitchy with pine-gum. Not enough to keep Stanley from being able to see the blue coffin-shapes tattooed on them, though. Their friend, the old limping buzzard with the girl’s hair and the gimp leg, wasn’t here, at least. In Stanley’s view, Jonas was easily the worst of the Big Coffin Hunters, but these two were bad enough, and he had no intention of getting aslant of them if he could help it. With luck, no one would; they looked tired enough to call it a night early.
Reynolds and Depape were tired, all right—they had spent the day out at Citgo, camouflaging a line of empty steel tankers with nonsense words (TEXACO, CITGO, SUNOCO, EXXON) printed on their sides, a billion pine-boughs they’d hauled and stacked, it seemed—but they had no consequent plans to finish their drinking early. Depape might have done so if Her Nibs had been available, but that young beauty (actual name: Gert Moggins) had a ranch-job and wouldn’t be back until two nights hence. “And it’ll be a week if there’s hard cash on offer,” Depape said morosely. He pushed his spectacles up on his nose.
“Fuck her,” Reynolds said.
“That’s just what I’d do if I could, but I can’t.”
“I’m going to get me a plate of that free lunch,” Reynolds said, pointing down to the other end of the bar, where a tin bucket of steamed clams had just come out of the kitchen. “You want some?”
“Them look like hocks of snot and go down the same way. Bring me a strip of beef jerky.”
“All right, partner.” Reynolds went off down the bar. People gave him wide passage; gave even his silk-lined cloak wide passage.
Depape, more morose than ever now that he had thought of Her Nibs gobbling cowboy spareribs out there at the Piano Ranch, downed his drink, winced at the stench of pine-gum on his hand, then held his glass out in Stanley Ruiz’s direction. “Fill this up, you dog!” he shouted. A cowhand leaning with his back, butt, and elbows against the bar jerked forward at the sound of Depape’s bellow, and that was all it took to start trouble.
Sheemie was bustling toward the passthrough from which the steamers had just appeared, now holding the camel bucket out before him in both hands. Later, when the Travellers’ began to empty out, his job would be to clean up. For now, however, it was simply to circulate with the camel bucket, dumping in every unfinished drink he found. This combined elixir ended up in a jug behind the bar. The jug was labelled fairly enough—CAMEL PISS—and a double shot could be obtained for three pennies. It was a drink only for the reckless or the impecunious, but a fair number of both passed beneath the stern gaze of The Romp each night; Stanley rarely had a problem emptying the jug. And if it wasn’t empty at the end of the night, why, there was always a fresh night coming along. Not to mention a fresh supply of thirsty fools.
But on this occasion Sheemie never made it to the Camel Piss jug behind the end of the bar. He tripped over the boot of the cowboy who had jerked forward, and went to his knees with a grunt of surprise. The contents of the bucket sloshed out ahead of him, and, following Satan’s First Law of Malignity—to wit, if the worst can happen, it usually will—they drenched Roy Depape from the knees down in an eyewatering mixture of beer, graf, and white lightning.
Conversation at the bar stopped, and that stopped the talk of the men gathered around the dice-chute. Sheb turned, saw Sheemie kneeling before one of Jonas’s men, and stopped playing. Pettie, her eyes squeezed shut as she poured her entire soul into her singing, continued on a capella for three or four bars before registering the silence which was spreading out like a ripple. She stopped singing and opened her eyes. That sort of silence usually meant that someone was going to be killed. If so, she didn’t intend to miss it.
Depape stood perfectly still, inhaling the raw stench of alcohol as it rose. He didn’t mind the smell; on the whole, it had the stink of pine-gum beat six ways to the Peddler. He didn’t mind the way his pants were sticking to his knees, either. It might have been a bit of an irritation if some of that joy-juice had gotten down inside his boots, but none had.
His hand fell to the butt of his gun. Here, by god and by goddess, was something to take his mind off his sticky hands and absent whore. And good entertainment was ever worth a little wetting.
Silence blanketed the place now. Stanley stood as stiff as a soldier behind the bar, nervously plucking at one of his arm-garters. At the bar’s other end, Reynolds looked back toward his partner with bright interest. He took a clam from the steaming bucket and cracked it on the edge of the bar like a boiled egg. At Depape’s feet, Sheemie looked up, his eyes big and fearful beneath the wild snarl of his black hair. He was trying his best to smile.
“Wellnow, boy,” Depape said. “You have wet me considerable.”
“Sorry, big fella, I go trippy-trip.” Sheemie jerked a hand back over his shoulder; a little spray of camel piss flew from the tips of his fingers. Somewhere someone cleared his throat nervously—raa-aach! The room was full of eyes, and quiet enough so that they all could hear both the wind in the eaves and the waves breaking on the rocks of Hambry Point, two miles away.
“The hell you did,” said the cowpoke who had jerked. He was about twenty, and suddenly afraid he might never see his mother again. “Don’t you go tryin to put your trouble off on me, you damned feeb.”
“I don’t care how it happened,” Depape said. He was aware he was playing for an audience, and knew that what an audience mostly wants is to be entertained. Sai R. B. Depape, always a trouper, intended to oblige.
He pinched the corduroy of his pants above the knees and pulled the legs up, revealing the toes of his boots. They were shiny and wet.
“See there. Look at what you got on my boots.”
Sheemie looked up at him, grinning and terrified.
Stanley Ruiz decided he couldn’t let this happen without at least trying to stop it. He had known Dolores Sheemer, the boy’s mother; there was even a possibility that he himself was the boy’s father. In any case, he liked Sheemie. The boy was foolish, but his heart was good, he never took a drink, and he always did his work. Also, he could find a smile for you even on the coldest, foggiest winter’s day. That was a talent many people of normal intelligence did not have.
“Sai Depape,” he said, taking a step forward and speaking in a low, respectful tone. “I’m very sorry about that. I’ll be happy to buy your drinks for the rest of the evening if we can just forget this regrettable—”
Depape’s movement was a blur almost too fast to see, but that wasn’t what amazed the people who were in the Rest that night; they would have expected a man running with Jonas to be fast. What amazed them was the fact that he never looked around to set his target. He located Stanley by his voice alone.
Depape drew his gun and swept it to the right in a rising arc. It struck Stanley Ruiz dead in the mouth, mashing his lips and shattering three of his teeth. Blood splashed the backbar mirror; several high-flying drops decorated the tip of The Romp’s lefthand nose. Stanley screamed, clapped his hands to his face, and staggered back against the shelf behind him. In the silence, the chattery clink of the bottles was very loud.
Down the bar, Reynolds cracked another clam and watched, fascinated. Good as a play, it was.
Depape turned his attention back to the kneeling boy. “Clean my boots,” he said.
A look of muddled relief came onto Sheemie’s face. Clea
n his boots! Yes! You bet! Right away! He pulled the rag he always kept in his back pocket. It wasn’t even dirty yet. Not very, at least.
“No,” Depape said patiently. Sheemie looked up at him, gaping and puzzled. “Put that nasty clout back where it come from—I don’t even want to look at it.”
Sheemie tucked it into his back pocket again.
“Lick em,” Depape said in that same patient voice. “That’s what I want. You lick my boots until they’re dry again, and so clean you can see your stupid rabbit’s face in em.”
Sheemie hesitated, as if still not sure what was required of him. Or perhaps he was only processing the information.
“I’d do it, boy,” Barkie Callahan said from what he hoped was a safe place behind Sheb’s piano. “If you want to see the sun come up, I’d surely do it.”
Depape had already decided the mush-brain wasn’t going to see another sunrise, not in this world, but kept quiet. He had never had his boots licked. He wanted to see what it felt like. If it was nice—kind of sexy-like—he could maybe try Her Nibs out on it.
“Does I have to?” Sheemie’s eyes were filling with tears. “Can’t just I-sorry and polish em real good?”
“Lick, you feeble-minded donkey,” Depape said.
Sheemie’s hair fell across his forehead. His tongue poked tentatively out between his lips, and as he bent his head toward Depape’s boots, the first of his tears fell.
“Stop it, stop it, stop it,” a voice said. It was shocking in the silence—not because it was sudden, and certainly not because it was angry. It was shocking because it was amused. “I simply can’t allow that. Nope. I would if I could, but I can’t. Unsanitary, you see. Who knows what disease might be spread in such fashion? The mind quails! Ab-so-lutely cuh-wails!”