by Стивен Кинг
The line is in the water, the offer is on the table, the puck’s on the ice, pick your favorite metaphor, mix em and match em if you desire.”
“Got your irons in the fire,” Mattie said.
“Your checkers on the board,” I added. We looked at each other and laughed. John regarded us sadly, then sighed, picked up his sandwich, and began to eat again. “You really have to meet him with his lawyer more or less dancing attendance?” I asked. “Would you like to win this thing, then discover Devore can do it all again based on unethical behavior by Mary Devore’s legal resource?” John returned. “Don’t even joke about it!” Mattie cried. “I wasn’t joking,” John said. “It has to be with his lawyer, yes. I don’t think it’s going to happen, not on this trip. I haven’t even got a look at the old cockuh, and I have to tell you my curiosity is killing me.”
“If that’s all it takes to make you happy, show up behind the backstop at the softball field next Tuesday evening,” Mattie said. “He’ll be there in his fancy wheelchair, laughing and clapping and sucking his damned old oxygen every fifteen minutes or so.”
“Not a bad idea,” John said. “I have to go back to New York for the weekend—I’m leaving apres Osgood—but maybe I’ll show up on Tuesday. I might even bring my glove.” He began clearing up our litter, and once again I thought he looked both prissy and endearing at the same time, like Stan Laurel wearing an apron. Mattie eased him aside and took over.
“No one ate any Twinkles,” she said, a little sadly. “Take them home to your daughter,” John said. “No way. I don’t let her eat stuff like this.
What kind of mother do you think I am?” She saw our expressions, replayed what she’d just said, then burst out laughing. We joined her.
Mattie’s old Scout was parked in one of the slant spaces behind the war memorial, which in Castle Rock is a World War I soldier with a generous helping of birdshit on his pie-dish helmet. A brand-new Taurus with a Hertz decal above the inspection sticker was parked next to it. John tossed his briefcase—reassuringly thin and not very ostentatious—into the back seat.
“if I can make it back on Tuesday, I’ll call you,” he told Mattie. “If I’m able to get an appointment with your father-in-law through this man Osgood, I will also call you.”
“I’ll buy the Italian sandwiches,” Mattie said. He smiled, then grasped her arm in one hand and mine in the other.
He looked like a newly ordained minister getting ready to marry his first couple. “You two talk on the telephone if you need to,” he said, “always remembering that one or both lines may be tapped. Meet in the market if you happen to. Mike, you might feel a need to drop by the local library and check out a book.”
“Not until you renew your card, though,” Mattie said, giving me a demure glance. “But no more visits to Mattie’s trailer. Is that understood?” I said yes; she said yes; John Storrow looked unconvinced. It made me wonder if he was seeing something in our faces or bodies that shouldn’t be there. “They are committed to a line of attack which probably isn’t going to work,” he said. “We can’t risk giving them the chance to change course. That means innuendos about the two of you; it also means innuendos about Mike and Kyra.” Mattie’s shocked expression made her look twelve again. “Mike and Kyra! What are you talking about?”
“Allegations of child molestation thrown up by people so desperate they’ll try anything.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “And if my father-in-law wanted to sling that kind of mud—” John nodded. “Yes, we’d be obligated to sling it right back. Newspaper coverage from coast to coast would follow, maybe even Court TV, God bless and save us. We want none of that if we can avoid it. It’s not good for the grownups, and it’s not good for the child. Now or later.”
He bent and kissed Mattie’s cheek. “I’m sorry about all this,” he said, and he did sound genuinely sorry. “Custody’s just this way.”
“I think you warned me. It’s just that. . the idea someone might make a thing like that up just because there was no other way for them to win…”
“Let me warn you again,” he said. His face came as close to grim as its young and good-natured features would probably allow. “What we have is a very rich man with a very shaky case. The combination could be like working with old dynamite.” I turned to Mattie. “Are you still worried about Ki? Still feel she’s in danger?” I saw her think about hedging her response—out of plain old Yankee reserve, quite likely—and then deciding not to. Deciding, perhaps, that hedging was a luxury she couldn’t afford. “Yes. But it’s just a feeling, you know.” John was frowning. I supposed the idea that Devore might resort to extralegal means of obtaining what he wanted had occurred to him, as well. “Keep your eye on her as much as you can,” he said. “I respect intuition. Is yours based on anything concrete?”
“No,” Mattie answered, and her quick glance in my direction asked me to keep my mouth shut. “Not really.” She opened the Scout’s door and tossed in the little brown bag with the Twinkies in it—she had decided to keep them after all. Then she turned to John and me with an expression that was close to anger. “I’m not sure how to follow that advice, anyway. I work five days a week, and in August, when we do the microfiche update, it’ll be six. Right now Ki gets her lunch at Vacation Bible School and her dinner from Arlene Cullum. I see her in the mornings. The rest of the time…” I knew what she was going to say before she said it; the expression was an old one.
”… she’s on the TR.”
“I could help you find an all pair,” I said, thinking it would be a hell of a lot cheaper than John Storrow. “No,” they said in such perfect unison that they glanced at each other and laughed. But even while she was laughing, Mattie looked tense and unhappy. “We’re not going to leave a paper trail for Durgin or Devore’s custody team to exploit,” John said. “Who pays me is one thing. Who pays Mattie’s child-care help is another.”
“Besides, I’ve taken enough from you,” Mattie said. “More than I can sleep easy on. I’m not going to get in any deeper just because I’ve been having megrims.” She climbed into the Scout and closed the door. I rested my hands on her open window. Now we were on the same level, and the eye-contact was so strong it was disconcerting. “Mattie, I don’t have anything else to spend it on. Really.”
“When it comes to John’s fee, I accept that. Because John’s fee is about Ki.” She put her hand over mine and squeezed briefly. “This other is about me. All right?”
“Yeah. But you need to tell your babysitter and the people who run this Bible thing that you’ve got a custody case on your hands, a potentially bitter one, and Kyra’s not to go anywhere with anyone, even someone they know, without your say-so.” She smiled. “It’s already been done. On John’s advice. Stay in touch, Mike.” She lifted my hand, gave it a hearty smack, and drove away. “What do you think?” I asked John as we watched the Scout blow oil on its way to the new Prouty Bridge, which spans Castle Street and spills outbound traffic onto Highway 68. “I think it’s grand she has a well-heeled benefactor and a smart lawyer,” John said. He paused, then added: “But I’ll tell you some-thing—she somehow doesn’t feel lucky to me at all. There’s a feeling I get… I don’t know…”
“That there’s a cloud around her you can’t quite see.”
“Maybe. Maybe that’s it.” He raked his hands through the restless mass of his red hair. “I just know it’s something sad.” I knew exactly what he meant… except for me there was more. I wanted to be in bed with her, sad or not, right or not. I wanted to feel her hands on me, tugging and pressing, patting and stroking. I wanted to be able to smell her skin and taste her hair. I wanted to have her lips against my ear, her breath tickling the fine hairs within its cup as she told me to do what I wanted, whatever I wanted.
I got back to Sara Laughs shortly before two o’clock and let myself in, thinking about nothing but my study and the IBM with the Courier ball. I was writing again—writing. I could still hardly believe it. I’d w
ork (not that it felt much like work after a four-year layoff) until maybe six o’clock, swim, then go down to the Village Cafe for one of Buddy’s cholesterol-rich specialties. The moment I stepped through the door, Bunter’s bell began to ring stridently. I stopped in the foyer, my hand frozen on the knob. The house was hot and bright, not a shadow anywhere, but the gooseflesh forming on my arms felt like midnight.
“Who’s here?” I called. The bell stopped ringing. There was a moment of silence, and then a woman shrieked. It came from everywhere, pouring out of the sunny, mote-laden air like sweat out of hot skin. It was a scream of outrage, anger, grief… but mostly, I think, of horror. And I screamed in response. I couldn’t help it. I had been frightened standing in the dark cellar stairwell, listening to the unseen fist thump on the insulation, but this was far worse. It never stopped, that scream. It faded, as the child’s sobs had faded; faded as if the person screaming was being carried rapidly down a long corridor and away from me. At last it was gone. I leaned against the bookcase, my palm pressed against my tee-shirt, my heart galloping beneath it. I was gasping for breath, and my muscles had that queer exploded feel they get after you’ve had a bad scare. A minute passed. My heartbeat gradually slowed, and my breathing slowed with it. I straightened up, took a tottery step, and when my legs held me, took two more. I stood in the kitchen doorway, looking across to the living room. Above the fireplace, Bunter the moose looked glassily back at me. The bell around his neck hung still and chimeless.
A hot sunpoint glowed on its side. The only sound was that stupid Felix the Cat clock in the kitchen. The thought nagging at me, even then, was that the screaming woman had been Jo, that Sara Laughs was being haunted by my wife, and that she was in pain. Dead or not, she was in pain.
“Jo?” I asked quietly. “Jo, are you—” The sobbing began again—the sound of a terrified child. At the same moment my mouth and nose once more filled with the iron taste of the lake. I put one hand to my throat, gagging and frightened, then leaned over the sink and spat. It was as it had been before—instead of voiding a gush of water, nothing came out but a little spit. The waterlogged feeling was gone as if it had never been there. I stayed where I was, grasping the counter and bent over the sink, probably looking like a drunk who has finished the party by upchucking most of the night’s bottled cheer. I felt like that, too—stunned and bleary, too overloaded to really understand what was going on. At last I straightened up again, took the towel folded over the dishwasher’s handle, and wiped my face with it. There was tea in the fridge, and I wanted a tall, ice-choked glass of it in the worst way. I reached for the doorhandle and froze.
The fruit and vegetable magnets were drawn into a circle again. In the center was this: help im drown That’s it, I thought. I’m getting out of here. Right now. %day. Yet an hour later I was up in my stifling study with a glass of tea on the desk beside me (the cubes in it long since melted), dressed only in my bathing trunks and lost in the world I was making—the one where a private detective named Andy Drake was trying to prove that John Shackleford was not the serial killer nicknamed Baseball Cap. This is how we go on: one day at a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time. Dentists go on one root-canal at a time; boat-builders go on one hull at a time. If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind us as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things—fish and unicorns and men on horseback—but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightning flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.
The book was big, okay? The book was major. I was afraid to change rooms, let alone pack up the typewriter and my slim just-begun manuscript and take it back to Derry. That would be as dangerous as taking an infant out in a windstorm. So I stayed, always reserving the right to move out if things got too weird (the way smokers reserve the right to quit if their coughs get too heavy), and a week passed. Things happened during that week, but until I met Max Devore on The Street the following Friday—the seventeenth of July, it would have been—the most important thing was that I continued to work on a novel which would, if finished, be called My Childhood Friend. Perhaps we always think what was lost was the best… or would have been the best. I don’t know for sure. What I do know is that my real life that week had mostly to do with Andy Drake, John Shackleford, and a shadowy figure standing in the deep background. Raymond Garraty, John Shackle-ford’s childhood friend.
A man who sometimes wore a baseball cap. During that week, the manifestations in the house continued, but at a lower level—there was nothing like that bloodcurdling scream. Sometimes Bunter’s bell rang, and sometimes the fruit and vegetable magnets would re-form themselves into a circle… never with words in the middle, though; not that week.
One morning I got up and the sugar cannister was overturned, making me think of Mattie’s story about the flour. Nothing was written in the spill, but there was a squiggle-as though something had tried to write and failed. If so, I sympathized. I knew what that was like.
My depo before the redoubtable Elmer Durgin was on Friday the tenth. On the following Tuesday I took The Street down to Warrington’s softball field, hoping for my own peek at Max Devore. It was going on six o’clock when I got within hearing range of the shouts, cheers, and batted balls.
A path marked with rustic signs (curlicued W’s burned into oak arrows)
led past an abandoned boathouse, a couple of sheds, and a gazebo half-buried in blackberry creepers. I eventually came out in deep center field. A litter of potato-chip bags, candy-wrappers, and beer cans suggested that others sometimes watched the games from this vantage-point. I couldn’t help thinking about Jo and her mysterious friend, the guy in the old brown sportcoat, the burly guy who had slipped an arm around her waist and led her away from the game, laughing, back toward The Street. Twice over the weekend I’d come close to calling Bonnie Amudson, seeing if maybe I could chase that guy down, put a name on him, and both times I had backed off. Sleeping dogs, I told myself each time. Sleeping dogs, Michael. I had the area beyond deep center to myself that evening, and it felt like the right distance from home plate, considering the man who usually parked his wheelchair behind the backstop had called me a liar and I had invited him to store my telephone number where the sunshine grows dim. I needn’t have worried in any case. Devore wasn’t in attendance, nor was the lovely Rogette. I did spot Mattie behind the casually maintained chickenwire barrier on the first-base line. John Storrow was beside her, wearing jeans and a polo shirt, his red hair mostly corralled by a Mets cap. They stood watching the game and chatting like old friends for two innings before they saw me—more than enough time for me to feel envious of John’s position, and a little jealous as well.
Finally someone lofted a long fly to center, where the edge of the woods served as the only fence. The center fielder backed up, but it was going to be far over his head. It was hit to my depth, off to my right. I moved in that direction without thinking, high-footing through the shrubs that formed a zone between the mown outfield and the trees, hoping I wasn’t running through poison ivy. I caught the softball in my outstretched left hand, and laughed when some of the spectators cheered.
The center fielder applauded me by tapping his bare right hand into the pocket of his glove. The batter, meanwhile, circled the bases serenely, knowing he had hit a ground-rule home run.
I tossed the ball to the fielder and as I returned to my original post among the candy-wrappers and beer cans, I looked back in and saw Mattie and John looking at me.
If anything confirms the idea that we’re just another species of animal, one with a slightly bigger brain and a much bigger idea of our own importance in the scheme of things, it’s how much we ca
n convey by gesture when we absolutely have to. Mattie clasped her hands to her chest, tilted her head to the left, raised her eyebrows—My hero. I held my hands to my shoulders and flipped the palms skyward Shucks, ma’am, ’t’warn’t nothin. John lowered his head and put his fingers to his brow, as if something there hurt—Iu lucky sonofabitch.
With those comments out of the way, I pointed at the backstop and shrugged a question. Both Mattie and John shrugged back. An inning later a little boy who looked like one giant exploding freckle ran out to where I was, his oversized Michael Jordan jersey churning around his shins like a dress.
“Guy down there gimme fifty cent to say you should call im later on at his hotel over in the Rock,” he said, pointing at John. “He say you gimme another fifty cent if there was an answer.”
“Tell him I’ll call him around nine-thirty,” I said. “I don’t have any change, though. Can you take a buck?”
“Hey, yeah, swank.” He snatched it, turned away, then turned back.
He grinned, revealing a set of teeth caught between Act I and Act II.
With the softball players in the background, he looked like a Norman Rockwell archetype. “Guy also say tell you that was a bullshit catch.”
“Tell him people used to say the same thing about Willie Mays all the time.”