by Stephen King
She now put those palms against the top of her shift and cupped her breasts with her fingers. The nipples were hard, like little pebbles. And when she touched them, the heat between her legs flared suddenly and urgently.
She could sleep, she thought. She could, if she took care of that heat. If she knew how.
And she did. The old woman had shown her. Even a girl who’s intact don’t need to lack for a shiver now ’ then… Like a little bud o’ silk, so it is.
Susan shifted in bed and slipped a hand deep beneath the sheet. She forced the old woman’s bright eyes and hollow cheeks out of her mind- it wasn’t hard to do at all once you set your mind to it, she discovered- and replaced it with the face of the boy with the big gelding and the silly flat-crowned hat. For a moment the vision of her mind became so clear and so sweet that it was real, and all the rest of her life only a drab dream. In this vision he kissed her over and over, their mouths widening, their tongues touching; what he breathed out, she breathed in.
She burned. She burned in her bed like a torch. And when the sun finally came over the horizon some short time later, she lay deeply asleep, with a faint smile on her lips and her unbraided hair lying across the side of her face and her pillow like loose gold.
3
In the last hour before dawn, the public room of the Travellers’ Rest was as quiet as it ever became. The gaslights which turned the chandelier into a brilliant jewel until two of the clock or so on most nights were now turned down to guttering blue points, and the long, high room was shadowy and spectral.
In one corner lay a jumble of kindling-the remains of a couple of chairs smashed in a fight over a Watch Me game (the combatants were currently residing in the High Sheriff’s drunk-cell). In another comer was a fairly large puddle of congealing puke. On the raised platform at the east end of the room stood a battered piano; propped against its bench was the ironwood club which belonged to Barkie, the saloon’s bouncer and all-around tough man. Barkie himself, the naked mound of his scarred stomach rising above the waistband of his corduroy pants like a clot of bread dough, lay under the bench, snoring. In one hand he held a playing card: the deuce of diamonds.
At the west end of the room were the card tables. Two drunks lay with their heads on one of these, snoring and drooling on the green felt, their outstretched hands touching. Above them, on the wall, was a picture of Arthur, the Great King of Eld astride his white stallion, and a sign which read (in a curious mixture of High and Low Speech): ARGYOU NOT ABOUT THE HAND YOU ARE DELT IN CARDS OR LIFE.
Mounted behind the bar, which ran the length of the room, was a monstrous trophy: a two-headed elk with a rack of antlers like a forest grove and four glaring eyes. This beast was known to local habitues of the Travellers’ as The Romp. None could have said why. Some wit had carefully drawn a pair of sow-titty condoms over the prongs of two of its antlers. Lying on the bar itself and directly beneath The Romp’s disapproving gaze was Pettie the Trotter, one of the Travellers’ dancers and gilly-girls… although Pettie’s actual girlhood was well behind her now, and soon she would be reduced to doing her business on her knees behind the Travellers’ rather than upstairs in one of the tiny cribs. Her plump legs were spread, one dangling over the bar on the inside, one on the outside, the filthy tangle of her skirt frothed up between. She breathed in long snores, occasionally twitching at the feet and fat fingers. The only other sounds were the hot summer wind outside and the soft, regular snap of cards being turned one by one.
A small table stood by itself near the batwing doors which gave upon the Hambry High Street; it was here that Coral Thorin, owner of the Travellers’ Rest (and the Mayor’s sister), sat on the nights when she descended from her suite “to be a part of the company.” When she came down, she came down early-when there were still more steaks than whiskey being served across the old scratched bar-and went back up around the time that Sheb, the piano player, sat down and began to pound his hideous instrument. The Mayor himself never came in lit nil, although it was well-known that he owned at least a half-interest in the Travellers'. Clan Thorin enjoyed the money the place brought in; they just didn’t enjoy the look of it after midnight, when the sawdust spread on the floor began to soak up the spilled beer and the spilled blood. Yet there was a hard streak in Coral, who had twenty years before been what was called “a wild child.” She was younger than her political brother, not so thin, and good-looking in a large-eyed, weasel-headed way. No one sat at her table during the saloon’s operating hours-Barkie would have put a stop to anyone who tried, and double-quick-but operating hours were over now, the drunks mostly gone or passed out upstairs, Sheb curled up and fast asleep in the comer behind his piano. The softheaded boy who cleaned the place had been gone since two o’ the clock or so (chased out by jeers and insults and a few flying beer-glasses, as he always was; Roy Depape in particular had no love in his heart for that particular lad). He would be back around nine or so, to begin readying the old party-palace for another night of hilarity, but until then the man sitting at Mistress Thorin’s table had the place to himself.
A game of Patience was laid out before him: black on red, red on black, the partially formed Square o’ Court above all, just as it was in the affairs of men. In his left hand the player held the remains of the deck. As he flipped the cards up, one by one, the tattoo on his right hand moved. It was disconcerting somehow, as if the coffin were breathing. The card-player was an oldish fellow, not as thin as the Mayor or his sister, but thin. His long white hair straggled down his back. He was deeply tanned, except for his neck, where he always burned; the flesh there hung in scant wattles. He wore a mustache so long the ragged white ends hung nearly to his jaw-a sham gunslinger’s mustache, many thought it, but no one used the word “sham” to Eldred Jonas’s face. He wore a white silk shirt, and a black-handled revolver hung low on his hip. His large, red-rimmed eyes looked sad on first glance. A second, closer look showed them only to be watery. Of emotion they were as dead as the eyes of The Romp.
He turned up the Ace of Wands. No place for it. “Pah, you bugger,” he said in an odd, reedy voice. It quavered, as well, like the voice of a man on the verge of tears. It fit perfectly with his damp and red-rimmed eyes. He swept the cards together.
Before he could reshuffle, a door opened and closed softly upstairs. Jonas put the cards aside and dropped his hand to the butt of his gun.
Then, as he recognized the sound of Reynolds’s boots coming along the gallery, he let go of the gun and drew his tobacco-pouch from his belt instead. The hem of the cloak Reynolds always wore came into view, and then he was coming down the stairs, his face freshly washed and his curly red hair hanging about his ears. Vain of his looks was dear old Mr. Reynolds, and why not? He’d sent his cock on its exploring way up more damp and cozy cracks than Jonas had ever seen in his life, and Jonas was twice his age.
At the bottom of the stairs Reynolds walked along the bar, pausing to squeeze one of Pettie’s plump thighs, and then crossed to where Jonas sat with his makings and his deck of cards.
“Evening, Eldred.”
“Morning, Clay.” Jonas opened the sack, took out a paper, and sprinkled tobacco into it. His voice shook, but his hands were steady. “Like a smoke?”
“I could do with one.”
Reynolds pulled out a chair, turned it around, and sat with his forearms crossed on its back. When Jonas handed him the cigarette, Reynolds danced it along the backs of his fingers, an old gunslinger trick. The Big Coffin Hunters were full of old gunslinger tricks.
“Where’s Roy? With Her Nibs?” They had been in Hambry a little over a month now, and in that time Depape had conceived a passion for a fifteen-year-old whore named Deborah. Her bowlegged clumping walk and her way of squinting off into the distance led Jonas to suspect she was just another cowgirl from a long line of them, but she had high-hat ways. It was Clay who had started calling the girl Her Nibs, or Her Majesty, or sometimes (when drunk) “Roy’s Coronation Cunt.”
Reynolds
now nodded. “It’s like he’s drunk on her.”
“He’ll be all right. He ain’t throwing us over for some little snuggle-bunny with pimples on her tits. Why, she’s so ignorant she can’t spell cat. Not so much as cat, no. I asked her.”
Jonas made a second cigarette, drew a sulfur match from the sack, and popped it alight with his thumbnail. He lit Reynolds’s first, then his own.
A small yellow cur came in under the batwing doors. The men watched it in silence, smoking. It crossed the room, first sniffed at the curdled vomit in the comer, then began to eat it. Its stub of a tail wagged back and forth as it dined.
Reynolds nodded toward the admonition not to argue about the cards you were dealt. “That mutt’d understand that, I’d say.”
“Not at all, not at all,” Jonas demurred. “Just a dog is all he is, a spew-eating dog. I heard a horse twenty minutes ago. First on the come, then on the go. Would it have been one of our hired watchmen?”
“You don’t miss a trick, do you?”
“Don’t pay to, no, don’t pay a bit. Was it?”
“Yep. Fellow who works for one of the small freeholders out along the east end of the Drop. He seen ’em come in. Three. Young. Babies.” Reynolds pronounced this last as they did in the North'rd Baronies: babbies. “Nothing to worry of.”
“Now, now, we don’t know that,” Jonas said, his quavering voice making him sound like a temporizing old man. “Young eyes see far, they say.”
“Young eyes see what they’re pointed at,” Reynolds replied. The dog trotted past him, licking its chops. Reynolds helped it on its way with a kick the cur was not quite quick enough to avoid. It scuttled back out under the batwings, uttering little yike-yike sounds that made Barkie snort thickly from his place of rest beneath the piano bench. His hand opened and the playing card dropped out of it.
“Maybe so, maybe not,” Jonas said. “In any case, they’re Affiliation brats, sons of big estates off in the Green Somewhere, if Rimer and that fool he works for have it straight. That means we’ll be very, very careful. Walk easy, like on eggshells. Why, we’ve got three more months here, at least! And those young'uns may be here that whole time, counting this ’ counting that and putting it all down on paper. Folks counting things ain’t good for us right now. Not for men in the resupply business.”
“Come on! It’s make-work, that’s all-a slap on the wrist for getting in trouble. Their daddies-”
“Their daddies know Farson’s in charge of the whole Southwest Edge now, and sitting on high ground. The brats may know the same-that playtime’s purt' near over for the Affiliation and all its pukesome royalty. Can’t know, Clay. With folks like these, you can’t know which way they’ll jump. At the very least, they may try to do a half-decent job just to try and get on the good side o’ their parents again. We’ll know better when we see em, but I tell you one thing: we can’t just put guns to the backs of their heads and drop them like broke-leg bosses if they see the wrong thing. Their daddies might be mad at em alive, but I think they’d be very tender of em dead-that’s just the way daddies are. We’ll want to be trig, Clay; as trig as we can be.”
“Better leave Depape out of it, then.”
“Roy will be fine,” Jonas said in his quavery voice. He dropped the stub of his cigarette to the floor and crushed it under his bootheel. He looked up at The Romp’s glassy eyes and squinted, as if calculating. “Tonight, your friend said? They arrived tonight, these brats?”
“Yep.”
“They’ll be in to see Avery tomorrow, then, I reckon.” This was Herk Avery, High Sheriff of Mejis and Chief Constable of Hambry, a large man who was as loose as a trundle of laundry.
“Reckon so,” Clay Reynolds said. “To present their papers ’ all.”
“Yes, sir, yes indeedy. How-d'you-do, and how-d'you-do, and how-d'you-do again.”
Reynolds said nothing. He often didn’t understand Jonas, but he had been riding with him since the age of fifteen, and knew it was usually better not to ask for enlightenment. If you did, you were apt to end up listening to a cult-manni lecture about the other worlds the old buzzard had visited through what he called “the special doors.” As far as Reynolds was concerned, there were enough ordinary doors in the world to keep him busy.
“I’ll speak to Rimer and Rimer’ll talk to the Sheriff about where they should stay,” Jonas said. “I think the bunkhouse at the old Bar K ranch. You know where I mean?”
Reynolds did. In a Barony like Mejis, you got to know the few landmarks in a hurry. The Bar K was a deserted spread of land northwest of town, not too far from that weird squalling canyon. They burned at the mouth of the canyon every fall, and once, six or seven years ago, the wind had shifted and gone back wrong and burned most of the Bar K to the ground-barns, stables, the home place. It had spared the bunkhouse, however, and that would be a good spot for three tenderfeet from the Inners. It was away from the Drop; it was also away from the oil patch.
“Ye like it, don’t ye?” Jonas asked, putting on a hick Hambry accent. “Aye, ye like it very much, I can see ye do, my cully. Ye know what they say in Cressia? 'Ifye’d steal the silver from the dining room, first put the dog in the pantry.'”
Reynolds nodded. It was good advice. “And those trucks? Those what-do-you-callums, tankers?”
“Fine where they are,” Jonas said. “Not that we could move em now without attracting the wrong kind of attention, eh? You and Roy want to go out there and cover them with brush. Lay it on nice and thick. Day after tomorrow you’ll do it.”
“And where will you be while we’re flexing our muscles out at Citgo?”
“By daylight? Preparing for dinner at Mayor’s House, you clod-the dinner Thorin will be giving to introduce his guests from the Great World to the shitpicky society of the smaller one.” Jonas began making another cigarette. He gazed up at The Romp rather than at what he was doing, and still spilled barely a scrap of tobacco. “A bath, a shave, a trim of these tangled old man’s locks… I might even wax my mustache, Clay, what do you say to that?”
“Don’t strain yourself, Eldred.”
Jonas laughed, the sound shrill enough to make Barkie mutter and Pettie stir uneasily on her makeshift bar-top bed. “So Roy and I aren’t invited to this fancy do.” “You’ll be invited, oh yes, you’ll be invited very warmly,” Jonas said, and handed Reynolds the fresh cigarette. He began making another for himself. “I’ll offer your excuses. I’ll do you boys proud, count on me. Strong men may weep.”
“All so we can spend the day out there in the dust and stink, covering those hulks. You’re too kind, Jonas.”
“I’ll be asking questions, as well,” Jonas said dreamily. “Drifting here and there… looking spruce, smelling of baybemes… and asking my little questions. I’ve known folks in our line of trade who’ll go to a fat, jolly fellow to find out the gossip-a saloon-keeper or bartender, perhaps a livery stable owner or one of the chubby fellows who always hangs about the jail or the courthouse with his thumbs tucked into his vest pockets. As for myself. Clay, I find that a woman’s best, and the narrower the better-one with more nose than tits sticking off her. I look for one who don’t paint her lips and keeps her hair scrooped back against her head.” “You have someone in mind?”
“Yar. Cordelia Delgado’s her name.” “Delgado?”
“You know the name, it’s on the lips of everyone in this town, I reckon. Susan Delgado, our esteemed Mayor’s soon-to-be gilly. Cordelia’s her auntie. Now here’s a fact of human nature I’ve found: folk are more apt to talk to someone like her, who plays them close, than they are to the local jolly types who’ll buy you a drink. And that lady plays them close. I’m going to slip in next to her at that dinner, and I’m going to compliment her on the perfume I doubt like hell she’ll be wearing, and I’m going to keep her wineglass full. Now, how sounds that for a plan?”
“A plan for what? That’s what I want to know.”
“For the game of Castles we may have to play,” Jonas said, and a
ll the lightness dropped out of his voice. “We’re to believe that these boys have been sent here more as punishment than to do any real job of work. It sounds plausible, too. I’ve known rakes in my time, and it sounds plausible, indeed. I believe it each day until about three in the morning, and then a little doubt sets in. And do you know what, Clay?”
Reynolds shook his head.
“I’m right to doubt. Just as I was right to go with Rimer to old man Thorin and convince him that Farson’s glass would be better with the witch-woman, for the nonce. She’ll keep it in a place where a gunslinger couldn’t find it, let alone a nosy lad who’s yet to have his first piece of arse. These are strange times. A storm’s coming. And when you know the wind is going to blow, it’s best to keep your gear battened down.”
He looked at the cigarette he had made. He had been dancing it along the backs of his knuckles, as Reynolds had done earlier. Jonas pushed back the fall of his hair and tucked the cigarette behind his ear.
“I don’t want to smoke,” he said, standing up and stretching. His back made small crackling sounds. “I’m crazy to smoke at this hour of the morning. Too many cigarettes are apt to keep an old man like me awake.”
He walked toward the stairs, squeezing Pettie’s bare leg as he went by, also as Reynolds had done. At the foot of the stairs he looked back.
“I don’t want to kill them. Things are delicate enough without that. I’ll smell quite a little wrong on them and not lift a finger, no, not a single finger of my hand. But… I’d like to make them clear on their place in the great scheme o’ things.”
“Give them a sore paw.”
Jonas brightened. “Yessir, partner, maybe a sore paw’s just what I’d like to give them. Make them think twice about tangling with the Big Coffin Hunters later on, when it matters. Make them swing wide around us when they see us in their road. Yessir, that’s something to think about. It really is.”