He wanted to ask her how it worked, but he didn’t want to look like a goddam dummy, so he asked her where she got the wires instead.
“Out of these telephones I bought at Radio Shack,” she said. “The one at the Bangor Mall. They were on sale! There’s some other stuff from the phones in it too. I had to change everything around, but it was easy. It just, you know ... come to me. You know?”
“Yeah,” Joe said slowly, thinking about the bookie’s face when Joe had come in to collect his sixty bucks after the Pirates beat Gooden and the Mets. “Not bad. For a woman.”
For a moment her brow darkened and he thought: You want to say something? You want to fight? Come on. That’s okay. That’s just about as okay as the other.
Then her brow cleared and she smiled. “Now we can do it even longer.” Her fingers slid down the hard ridge in his pants. “You do want to do it don’t you, Joe?”
And Joe did. They slipped to the floor and he forgot all about being mad at her, and how all of a sudden he seemed to be able to figure the odds on everything from baseball games to horse races to golf matches in the wink of an eye. He slid into her and she moaned and Joe even forgot the tenebrous whispering sound those wires made as they sifted the first-class mail into the row of flour sifters.
5
When Joe entered the living room, ’Becka was sitting in her rocker, pretending to read the latest issue of The Upper Room. Just ten minutes before Joe came in, she had finished wiring the gadget Jesus had shown her how to make into the back of the Sony TV. She followed His instructions to the letter, because He said you had to be careful when you were fooling around inside the back of a television.
“You could fry yourself,” Jesus advised. “More juice back there than there is in a Birds Eye warehouse, even when it’s turned off.”
The TV was off now and Joe said ill-temperedly, “I thought you’d have this all wa’amed up for me.”
“I guess you know how to turn on the damned TV,” ’Becka said, speaking to her husband for the last time.
Joe raised his eyebrows. Damned anything was damned odd, coming from ’Becka. He thought about calling her on it, and decided to let it ride. Could be there was one fat old mare who’d find herself keeping house by herself before much of a longer went by.
“Guess I do,” Joe said, speaking to his wife for the last time.
He pushed the button that turned the Sony on, and better than two thousand volts of current slammed into him, AC which had been boosted, switched over to lethal DC, and then boosted again. His eyes popped wide open, bulged, and then burst like grapes in a microwave. He had started to set the quart of beer on top of the TV next to Jesus. When the electricity hit, his hand clenched tightly enough to break the bottle. Spears of brown glass drove into his fingers and palm. Beer foamed and ran. It hit the top of the TV (its plastic casing already blistering) and turned to steam that smelled like yeast.
“EEEEEOOOOOOARRRRHMMMMMMM!” Joe Paulson screamed. His face began to turn black: Blue smoke poured out of his hair and his ears. His finger was nailed to the Sony’s On button.
A picture popped on the TV. It was Dwight Gooden throwing the wild pitch that let in two runs and chased him, making Joe Paulson forty dollars richer. It flipped and showed him and Nancy Voss screwing on the post-office floor in a litter of catalogues and Congressional Newsletters and ads from insurance companies saying you could get all the coverage you needed even if you were over sixty-five, no salesman would call at your door, no physical examination would be required, your loved ones would be protected at a cost of pennies a day.
“No!” ’Becka screamed, and the picture flipped again. Now she saw Moss Harlingen behind a fallen pine, notching his father in the sight of his .30-.30 and murmuring Not you, Em, not tonight. It flipped and she saw a man and a woman digging in the woods, the woman behind the controls of something that looked a little bit like a payloader and a little bit like something out of a Rube Goldberg cartoon, the man looping a chain around a stump. Beyond them, a vast dish-shaped object jutted out of the earth. It was silvery, but dull; the sun struck it in places but did not twinkle.
Joe Paulson’s clothes burst into flame.
The living room was filled with the smell of cooking beer. The 3-D picture of Jesus jittered around and then exploded.
’Becka shrieked, understanding that, like it or not, it had been her all along, her, her, her, and she was murdering her husband.
She ran to him, seized his looping, spasming hand ... and was herself galvanized.
Jesus oh Jesus save him, save me, save us both, she thought as the current slammed into her, driving her up on her toes like the world’s heftiest ballerina en pointe. And a mad, cackling voice, the voice of her father, rose in her brain: Fooled you, ’Becka, didn’t I?Fooled you good! Teach you to lie! Teach you for good and all!
The rear of the television, which she had screwed back on after she had finished adding her alterations, blew-back against the wall with a mighty blue flash of light. ’Becka tumbled to the carpet, pulling Joe with her. Joe was already dead.
By the time the smoldering wallpaper behind the TV had ignited the chintz curtains, ’Becka Paulson was dead too.
3.
HILLY BROWN
1
The day Hillman Brown did the most spectacular trick of his career as an amateur magician—the only spectacular trick of his career as an amateur magician, actually—was Sunday, July 17th, exactly one week before the Haven town hall blew up. That Hillman Brown had never managed a really spectacular trick before was not so surprising. He was only ten, after all.
His given name had been his mother’s maiden name. There had been Hillmans in Haven going back to the time when it had been Montgomery, and although Marie Hillman had no regrets about becoming Marie Brown—after all, she loved the guy!—she had wanted to preserve the name, and Bryant had agreed. The new baby wasn’t home a week before everyone was calling him Hilly.
Hilly grew up nervous. Marie’s father, Ev, said he had cat whiskers for nerves and would spend his whole life on the jump. It wasn’t news Bryant and Marie Brown wanted to hear, but after their first year with Hilly, it wasn’t really news at all; just a fact of life. Some babies attempt to comfort themselves by rocking in their cribs or cradles; some by sucking a thumb. Hilly rocked in his crib almost constantly (crying angrily at the same time, more often than not), and sucked both thumbs—sucked them so hard that he had painful blisters on them by the time he was eight months old.
“He’ll stop now,” Dr. Lester in Derry told them confidently, after examining the nasty blisters that ringed Hilly’s thumbs ... blisters Marie had wept over as if they had been her own. But Hilly hadn’t stopped. His need for comfort was apparently greater than whatever pain his hurt thumbs gave him. Eventually the blisters turned to hard calluses.
“He’ll always be on the jump,” the boy’s grandfather prophesied whenever anyone asked him (and even when no one did; at sixty-three, Ev Hillman was garrulous-going-on-tiresome). “Cat whiskers for nerves, ayuh! He’ll keep his mom n dad on the hop, Hilly will.”
Hilly kept them hopping, all right. Lining both sides of the Brown driveway were stumps, placed there by Bryant, at Marie’s instigation. Upon each she put a planter, and in each planter was a different sort of plant or bunch of flowers. At age three, Hilly one day climbed out of his crib where he was supposed to be taking a nap (“Why do I have to have a nap, Mom?” Hilly asked. “Because I need the rest, Hilly,” his exhausted mother replied), wriggled out the window, and knocked over all twelve of the planters, stumps and all. When Marie saw what Hilly had done, she wept as inconsolably as she had wept over her boy’s poor thumbs. Seeing her cry, Hilly had also burst into tears (around his thumbs; he was attempting to suck both of them at once). He hadn’t knocked over the stumps and the planters to be mean; it had just seemed a good idea at the time.
“You don’t count the cost, Hilly,” his father said on that occasion. He would say it a good many
times before Sunday, July 17th, 1988.
At the age of five, Hilly got on his sled and shot down the ice-coated Brown driveway one December day and out into the road. It never occurred to him, he told his ashy-faced mother later, to wonder if something might be coming down Derry Road; he had gotten up, seen the glaze of ice that had fallen, and had only wondered how fast his Flexible Flyer would go down their driveway. Marie saw him, saw the fuel tanker lumbering down Route 9, and shrieked Hilly’s name so loudly that she could barely talk above a whisper for the next two days. That night, trembling in Bryant’s arms, she told him she had seen the boy’s tombstone in Homeland—had actually seen it: Hillman Richard Brown, 1978—1983, Taken Too Soon.
“Hiiillyyyyyyyy!”
Hilly’s head snapped around at the sound of his mother’s scream, which sounded to him as loud as a jet plane. As a result, he fell off his sled just before it reached the foot of the driveway. The driveway was asphalted, the glaze of sleet was really quite thin, and Hilly Brown never had that knack with which a kind God blesses most squirmy, active children—the knack of falling lucky. He broke his left arm just above the elbow and fetched his forehead such a dreadful crack that he knocked himself out.
His Flexible Flyer shot into the road. The driver of the Webber Fuel truck reacted before he had a chance to see there was no one on the sled. He spun the wheel and the tanker-truck waltzed into a low embankment of snow with the huge grace of the elephant ballet dancers in Fantasia. It crashed through and landed in the ditch, canted alarmingly to one side. Less than five minutes after the driver wriggled out of the passenger door and ran to Marie Brown, the truck tipped over on its side and lay in the frozen grass like a dead mastodon, expensive No. 2 fuel oil gurgling out of its three overflow vents.
Marie was running down the road with her unconscious child in her arms, screaming. In her terror and confusion she felt sure that Hilly must have been run over, even though she had quite clearly seen him fall off his sled at the bottom of the driveway.
“Is he dead?” the tanker driver screamed. His eyes were wide, his face pale as paper, his hair standing on end. There was a dark spot spreading on the crotch of his pants. “Oh sufferin Jesus lady, is he dead?”
“I think so,” Marie wept. “I think he is, oh I think he’s dead.”
“Who’s dead?” Hilly asked, opening his eyes.
“Oh, Hilly, thank God!” Marie screamed, and hugged him. Hilly screamed back with great enthusiasm. She was grinding together the splintered ends of the broken bone in his left arm.
Hilly spent the next three days in Derry Home Hospital.
“It’ll slow him down, at least,” Bryant Brown said the next evening over a dinner of baked beans and hot dogs.
Ev Hillman happened to be taking dinner with them that evening; since his wife had died, Ev Hillman did that every now and again; about five evenings out of every seven on the average. “Want to bet?” Ev said now, cackling through a mouthful of cornbread.
Bryant cocked a sour eye at his father-in-law and said nothing.
As usual, Ev was right—that was one of the reasons Bryant so often felt sour about him. On his second night in the hospital, long after the other children in Pediatrics were asleep, Hilly decided to go exploring. How he got past the duty nurse was a mystery, but get past he did. He was discovered missing at three in the morning. An initial search of the pediatrics ward did not turn him up. Neither did a floor-wide search. Security was called in. A search of the whole hospital was then mounted—administrators who had at first only been mildly annoyed were now becoming worried—and discovered nothing. Hilly’s father and mother were called and came in at once, looking shell-shocked. Marie was weeping, but because of her swollen larynx, she could only do so in a breathy croak.
“We think he may have wandered out of the building somehow,” the Head of Administrative Services told them.
“How the hell could a five-year-old just wander out of the building?” Bryant shouted. “What kind of a place you guys running here?”
“Well ... well ... you understand it’s hardly a prison, Mr. Brown—”
Marie cut them both off. “You’ve got to find him,” she whispered. “It’s only twenty-two degrees out there. Hilly was in his pj’s. He could be ... be ...”
“Oh, Mrs. Brown, I really think such worries are premature,” the Head of Administrative Services broke in, smiling sincerely. He did not, in fact, think they were premature at all. The first thing he had done after ascertaining that the boy might have been gone ever since the eleven-o’clock bedcheck was to find out how cold the night had been. The answer had occasioned a call to Dr. Elfman, who specialized in cases of hypothermia—there were a lot of those in Maine winters. Dr. Elfman’s prognosis was grave. “If he got out, he’s probably dead,” Elfman said.
Another hospital-wide search, this one augmented by Derry police and firemen, turned up nothing. Marie Brown was given a sedative and put to bed. The only good news was of a negative sort; so far no one had found Hilly’s frozen pajama-clad body. Of course, the Head of Administrative Services thought, the Penobscot River was close to the hospital. Its surface had frozen. It was just possible that the boy had tried to cross the ice and had plunged through. Oh, how he wished the Browns had taken their little brat to Eastern Maine Medical.
At two that afternoon, Bryant Brown sat numbly in a chair beside his sleeping wife, wondering how he could tell her their only child was dead, if it became necessary to do so. At about that same time, a janitor who was in the basement to check on the laundry boilers saw an amazing sight: a small boy wearing nothing but pajama bottoms and a plaster cast on one arm strolling nonchalantly between two of the hospital’s giant furnaces in his bare feet.
“Hey!” the janitor yelled. “Hey, kid!”
“Hi,” Hilly said, coming over. His feet were black with dirt; his pajama bottoms were swatched with grease. “Boy, this is a big place! I think I’m lost.”
The janitor carried Hilly upstairs to the administration office. The Head sat Hilly down in a large wing chair (after prudently putting down a double spread of the Bangor Daily News) and sent his secretary out to fetch back a Pepsi-Cola and a bag of Reese’s Pieces for the brat. Under other circumstances the Head would have gone himself, thereby impressing the boy with his grand-fatherly kindness. Under other circumstances—by which I mean, the Head thought grimly to himself, with a different boy. He was afraid to leave Hilly alone.
When the secretary came back with the candy and the soft drink, the Head sent her away again ... after Bryant Brown this time. Bryant was a strong man, but when he saw Hilly sitting in the Head’s wing chair, his dirty feet swinging four inches off the rug and the papers crackling under his butt as he ate candy and drank Pepsi, he was unable to hold back his tears of relief and thanksgiving. This of course made Hilly—who never in his life had ever done anything consciously bad—also burst into tears.
“Christ, Hilly, where you been?”
Hilly told the story as best he could, leaving Bryant and the Head to parse objective truth out of it as best they could. He had gotten lost, wandered into the basement (“I was followin a pixie,” Hilly told them), and had crawled under one of the furnaces to sleep. It had been very warm there, he told them, so warm he had taken off his pajama shirt, working it carefully over the new cast.
“I liked the pups, too,” he said. “Can we have a puppy, Daddy?”
The janitor who had spotted Hilly also found Hilly’s shirt. It was under the No. 2 furnace. Getting the shirt out, he saw the “puppies” too, although they skittered away from his light. He did not mention them to Mr. and Mrs. Brown, who looked like folks who would just fall apart if faced with one more shock. The janitor, a kindly man, thought they would do just as well not knowing that their son had spent the night with a pack of basement rats, some of which had indeed looked as large as puppies as they fled from his flashlight beam.
2
Asked for his perceptions of these things—and t
he similar (if less spectacular) incidents that occurred over the next five years of his life—Hilly would have shrugged and said, “I’m always getting in trouble, I guess.” Hilly meant he was accident-prone, but no one had taught him this valuable phrase yet.
When he was eight—two years after David was born—he brought home a note from Mrs. Underhill, his third-grade teacher, asking if Mr. and Mrs. Brown could come in for a brief conference. The Browns went, not without some trepidation. They knew that during the previous. week, Haven’s third-graders had been given IQ tests. Bryant was secretly convinced that Mrs. Underhill was going to tell them Hilly had tested far below normal and would have to be put in remedial classes. Marie was convinced (and just as secretly) that Hilly was dyslexic. Neither had slept very well the night before.
What Mrs. Underhill told them was that Hilly was completely off the scale—bluntly put, the lad was a genius. “You’ll have to take him to Bangor and have him take the Wechsler Test if you want to know how high his IQ actually is,” Mrs. Underhill told them. “Giving Hilly the Tompall IQ Test is like trying to determine a human’s IQ by giving him an intelligence test designed for goats.”
Marie and Bryant discussed it ... and decided against pursuing the matter any further. They didn’t really want to know how bright Hilly was. It was enough to know he was not disadvantaged ... and, as Marie said that night in bed, it explained so much: Hilly’s restlessness, his apparent inability to sleep much more than six hours a night, his fierce interests which blew in like hurricanes, then blew out again with the same rapidity. One day when Hilly was almost nine, she had come back from the post office with baby David to find the kitchen, which had been spotless when she left only fifteen minutes before, a complete shambles. The sink was full of flour-clotted bowls. There was a puddle of melting butter on the counter. And something was cooking in the oven. Marie popped David quickly in his playpen and had pulled the oven open, expecting to be greeted by billows of smoke and the smell of burning. Instead, she found a tray of Bisquick rolls which, while misshapen, were quite tasty. They had had them for supper that night . . . but before then, Marie had paddled Hilly’s bottom and sent him, wailing apologies, to his room. Then she had sat down at the kitchen table and cried until she laughed, while David—a placid, happy-go-lucky baby who was a sunny Tahiti to Hilly’s Cape of Storms—sat holding the bars of the playpen, staring at her comically.
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