"Yes, boss."
"But first, watch this--a little trick I learned back in Kansas."
Kurtz sprayed the cards. In the crazy blizzard-wind coming through the door, they flew every whichway. Only one landed faceup in the hat, but it was the ace of spades.
7
Mr. Gray held the menu, looking at the lists of stuff--meatloaf, sliced beets, roast chicken, chocolate silk pie--with interest and an almost total lack of understanding. Jonesy realized it wasn't just not knowing how food tasted; Mr. Gray didn't know what taste was. How could he? When you cut to the chase, he was nothing but a mushroom with a high IQ.
Here came a waitress, moving under a vast tableland of frozen ash-blond hair. The badge on her not inconsiderable bosom read WELCOME TO DYSART'S, I AM YOUR WAITRESS DARLENE.
"Hi, hon, what can I get you?"
"I'd like scrambled eggs and bacon. Crisp, not limp."
"Toast?"
"How about canpakes?"
She raised her eyebrows and looked at him over her pad. Beyond her, at the counter, the State Trooper was eating some kind of drippy sandwich and talking with the short-order cook.
"Sorry--cakepans, I meant to say."
The eyebrows went higher. Her question was plain, blinking at the front of her mind like a neon sign in a saloon window: was this guy a mushmouth, or was he making fun of her?
Standing at his office window, smiling, Jonesy relented.
"Pancakes," Mr. Gray said.
"Uh-huh. I sort of figured. Coffee with that?"
"Please."
She snapped her pad closed and started away. Mr. Gray was back at the locked door of Jonesy's office at once, and furious all over again.
How could you do that? he asked. How could you do that from in there? An ill-natured thump as Mr. Gray hit the door. And he was more than angry, Jonesy realized. He was frightened, as well. Because if Jonesy could interfere, everything was in jeopardy.
I don't know, Jonesy said, and truthfully enough. But don't take it so hard. Enjoy your breakfast. I was just fucking with you a little.
Why? Still furious. Still drinking from the well of Jonesy's emotions, and liking it in spite of himself. Why would you do that?
Call it payback for trying to roast me in my office while I was sleeping, Jonesy said.
With the restaurant section of the truck stop almost deserted, Darlene was back with the food in no time. Jonesy considered seeing if he could gain control of his mouth long enough to say something outrageous (Darlene, can I bite your hair? was what came to mind), and thought better of it.
She set his plate down, gave him a dubious look, then started away. Mr. Gray, looking at the bright yellow lump of eggs and the dark twigs of bacon (not just crispy but almost incinerated, in the great Dysart's tradition) through Jonesy's eyes, was feeling the same dubiety.
Go on, Jonesy said. He was standing at his office window, watching and waiting with amusement and curiosity. Was it possible that the bacon and eggs would kill Mr. Gray? Probably not, but it might at least make the hijacking motherfucker good and sick. Go on, Mr. Gray, eat up. Bon-fuckin-appetit.
Mr. Gray consulted Jonesy's files on the proper use of the silverware, then picked up a tiny clot of scrambled eggs on the tines of his fork, and put them in Jonesy's mouth.
What followed was both amazing and hilarious. Mr. Gray gobbled everything in huge bites, pausing only to drown the pancakes in fake maple syrup. He loved it all, but most particularly the bacon.
Flesh! Jonesy heard him exulting--it was almost the voice of the creature in one of those corny old monster movies from the thirties. Flesh! Flesh! This is the taste of flesh!
Funny . . . but maybe not all that funny, either. Maybe sort of horrible. The cry of a new-made vampire.
Mr. Gray looked around, ascertained that he wasn't being watched (the State Bear was now addressing a large piece of cherry pie), then picked up the plate and licked the grease from it with big swipes of Jonesy's tongue. He finished by licking the sticky syrup from the ends of his fingers.
Darlene returned, poured more coffee, looked at the empty dishes. "Why, you get a gold star," she said. "Anything else?"
"More bacon," Mr. Gray said. He consulted Jonesy's files for the correct terminology, and added: "A double order."
And may you choke on it, Jonesy thought, but now without much hope.
"Gotta stoke the stove," Darlene said, a comment Mr. Gray didn't understand and didn't bother hunting down in Jonesy's files. He put two sugars in his coffee, looked around to make sure he wasn't observed, then poured the contents of a third packet down his throat. Jonesy's eyes half-closed for a few seconds as Mr. Gray drowned happily in the bliss of sweet.
You can have that any time you want it, Jonesy said through the door. Now he supposed he knew how Satan felt when he took Jesus up on the mountaintop and tempted him with all the cities of the earth. Not good; not really bad; just doing the job, selling the product.
Except . . . check that. It did feel good, because he knew he was getting through. He wasn't opening stab-wounds exactly, but he was at least pricking Mr. Gray. Making him sweat little blood-beads of desire.
Give it up, Jonesy coaxed. Go native. You can spend years exploring my senses. They're pretty sharp; I'm still under forty.
No reply from Mr. Gray. He looked around, saw no one looking his way, poured fake maple syrup into his coffee, slurped it, and looked around again for his supplemental bacon. Jonesy sighed. This was like being with a strict Muslim who has somehow wound up on a Las Vegas holiday.
On the far side of the restaurant was an arch with a sign reading TRUCKERS' LOUNGE & SHOWERS above it. In the short hallway beyond, there was a bank of pay telephones. Several drivers stood there, no doubt explaining to spouses and bosses that they wouldn't be back on time, they'd been shut down by a surprise storm in Maine, they were at Dysart's Truck Stop (known to the cognoscenti as Dry Farts, Jonesy thought) south of Derry and here they would likely remain until at least noon tomorrow.
Jonesy turned from the office window with its view of the truck stop and looked at his desk, now covered with all his old and comforting clutter. There was his phone, the blue Trimline. Would it be possible to call Henry on it? Was Henry even still alive? Jonesy thought he was. He thought that if Henry were dead, he would have felt the moment of his passing--more shadows in the room, perhaps. Elvis has left the building, Beaver had often said when he spotted a name he knew in the obits. What a fuckin pisser. Jonesy didn't think Henry had left the building just yet. It was even possible that Henry had an encore in mind.
8
Mr. Gray didn't choke on his second order of bacon, but when his lower belly suddenly cramped up, he let out a dismayed roar. You poisoned me!
Relax, Jonesy said. You just need to make a little room, my friend.
Room? What do you--
He broke off as another cramp gripped his gut.
I mean that we had better hurry along to the little boys' room, Jonesy said. Good God, didn't all those abductions you guys did in the sixties teach you anything about the human anatomy?
Darlene had left the check, and Mr. Gray picked it up.
Leave her fifteen percent on the table, Jonesy said. It's a tip.
How much is fifteen percent?
Jonesy sighed. These were the masters of the universe that the movies had taught us to fear? Merciless, star-faring conquerors who didn't know how to take a shit or figure a tip?
Another cramp, plus a fairly silent fart. It smelled, but not of ether. Thank God for small favors, Jonesy thought. Then, to Mr. Gray: Show me the check.
Jonesy looked at the green slip of paper through his office window.
Leave her a buck and a half. And when Mr. Gray seemed dubious: This is good advice I'm giving you, my friend. More and she remembers you as the night's big tipper. Less, and she remembers you as a chintz.
He sensed Mr. Gray checking for the meaning of chintz in Jonesy's files. Then, without further argument, he l
eft a dollar and two quarters on the table. With that taken care of, he headed for the cash register, which was on the way to the men's room.
The cop was working his pie--with slightly suspicious slowness, Jonesy thought--and as they passed him, Jonesy felt Mr. Gray as an entity (an ever more human entity) dissolve, going out to peek inside the cop's head. Nothing out there now but the redblack cloud, running Jonesy's various maintenance systems.
Quick as a flash, Jonesy grabbed the phone on his desk. For a moment he hesitated, unsure.
Just dial 1-800-HENRY, Jonesy thought.
For a moment there was nothing . . . and then, in some other somewhere, a phone began to ring.
9
"Pete's idea," Henry muttered.
Owen, at the wheel of the Humvee (it was huge and it was loud, but it was equipped with oversized snow tires and rode the storm like the QE2), looked over. Henry was asleep. His glasses had slid down to the end of his nose. His eyelids, now delicately fuzzed with byrus, rippled as the eyeballs beneath them moved. Henry was dreaming. About what? Owen wondered. He supposed he could dip into his new partner's head and have a look, but that seemed perverse.
"Pete's idea," Henry repeated. "Pete saw her first." And he sighed, a sound so tired that Owen felt bad for him. No, he decided, he didn't want any part of what was going on in Henry's head. Another hour to Derry, more if the wind stayed high. Better to just let him sleep.
10
Behind Derry High School is the football field where Richie Grenadeau once strutted his stuff, but Richie is five years in his teenage hero's grave, just another small-town car-crash James Dean. Other heroes have risen, thrown their passes, and moved on. It's not football season now, anyway. It's spring, and on the field there is a gathering of what look like birds--huge red ones with black heads. These mutant crows are laughing and talking as they sit in their folding chairs, but Mr. Trask, the principal, has no problem being heard; he's at the podium on the makeshift stage, and he's got the mike.
"One last thing before I dismiss you!" he booms. "I won't tell you not to throw your mortarboards at the end of the ceremony, I know from years of experience I might as well be talking to myself on that score--"
Laughter, cheers, applause.
"--but I'm telling you to PICK THEM UP AND TURN THEM IN OR YOU WILL BE CHARGED FOR THEM!"
There are a few boos and some raspberries, Beaver Clarendon's the loudest.
Mr. Trask gives them a final surveying look. "Young men and women, members of the Class of '82, I think I speak for the entire faculty when I say I'm proud of you. This concludes rehearsal, so . . ."
The rest is lost, amplification or no amplification; the red crows rise in a gusty flap of nylon, and they fly. Tomorrow at noon they will fly for good; although the three crows laughing and grabassing their way toward the parking lot where Henry's car is parked do not realize it, the childhood phase of their friendship is now only hours from the end. They don't realize it, and that is probably just as well.
Jonesy snatches Henry's mortarboard, slaps it on top of his own, and books for the parking lot.
"Hey, asshole, give that back!" Henry yells, and then he snatches Beaver's. Beav squawks like a chicken and runs after Henry, laughing. So the three of them swoop across the grass and behind the bleachers, graduation robes billowing around their jeans. Jonesy has two hats on his head, the tassels swinging in opposite directions, Henry has one (far too big; it's sitting on his ears), and Beaver runs bareheaded, his long black hair flowing out behind him and a toothpick jutting from his mouth.
Jonesy is looking back as he runs, taunting Henry ("Come on, Mr. Basketball, ya run like a girl"), and almost piles into Pete, who is looking at DERRY DOIN'S, the glassed-in notice-board by the north entrance to the parking lot. Pete, who is graduating from nothing but the junior class this year, grabs Jonesy, bends him backward like a guy doing a tango with some beautiful chick, and kisses him square on the mouth. Both mortarboards tumble off Jonesy's head, and he screams in surprise.
"Queerboy!" Jonesy yells, rubbing frantically at his mouth . . . but he's starting to laugh, too. Pete's an oddity--he'll go along quietly for weeks at a time, Norman Normal, and then he'll break out and do something nutso. Usually the nutso comes out after a couple of beers, but not this afternoon.
"I've always wanted to do that, Gariella," Pete says sentimentally. "Now you know how I really feel."
"Fuckin queerboy, if you gave me the syph, I'll kill you!"
Henry arrives, snatches his mortarboard off the grass, and swats Jonesy with it. "There's grass-stains on this," Henry says. "If I have to pay for it, I'll do a lot more than just kiss you, Gariella."
"Don't make promises you can't keep, fuckwad," Jonesy says.
"Beautiful Gariella," Henry says solemnly.
The Beav comes steaming up, puffing around his toothpick. He takes Jonesy's mortarboard, peers into it, and says, "There's a come-stain in this one. Ain't I seen enough on my own sheets to know?" He draws in a deep breath and bugles to the departing seniors in their Derry-red graduation gowns: "Gary Jones beats off in his graduation hat! Hey, everybody, listen up, Gary Jones beats off--"
Jonesy grabs him, pulls him to the ground, and the two of them roll over and over in billows of red nylon. Both mortarboards are cast off to one side and Henry grabs them to keep them from getting crushed.
"Get off me!" Beaver cries. "You're crushin me! Jesus-Christ-bananas! For God's sake--"
"Duddits knew her," Pete says. He has lost interest in their foolery, doesn't feel much of their high spirits anyway (Pete is perhaps the only one of them who senses the big changes that are coming). He's looking at the notice-board again. "We knew her, too. She was the one who always stood outside The Retard Academy. 'Hi, Duddie,' she'd go." When he says Hi, Duddie, Pete's voice goes up high, becomes momentarily girlish in a way that is sweet rather than mocking. And although Pete isn't a particularly good mimic, Henry knows that voice at once. He remembers the girl, who had fluffy blond hair and great brown eyes and scabbed knees and a white plastic purse which contained her lunch and her BarbieKen. That's what she always called them, BarbieKen, as if they were a single entity.
Jonesy and Beav also know who Pete's imitating, and Henry knows, too. There is that bond among them; it's been among them for years now. Them and Duddits. Jonesy and the Beav can't remember the little blond girl's name any more than Henry can--only that her last one was something impossibly long and clunky. And she had a crush on the Dudster, which was why she always waited for him outside The Retard Academy.
The three of them in their graduation gowns gather around Pete and look at the DERRY DOIN'S board.
As always, the board is crammed with notices--bake sales and car washes, tryouts for the Community Players version of The Fantastiks, summer classes at Fenster, the local junior college, plus plenty of handprinted student ads--buy this, sell that, need ride to Boston after graduation, looking for roommate in Providence.
And, way up in the corner, a photo of a smiling girl with acres of blond hair (frizzy rather than fluffy now) and wide, slightly puzzled eyes. She's no longer a little girl--Henry is surprised again and again by how the children he grew up with (including himself) have disappeared--but he would know those dark and puzzled eyes anywhere.
MISSING, says the single block-capital word under the photo. And below that, in slightly smaller type: JOSETTE RINKENHAUER, LAST SEEN STRAWFORD PARK SOFTBALL FIELD, JUNE 7, 1982. Below this there is more copy, but Henry doesn't bother reading it. Instead he reflects on how odd Derry is about missing children--not like other towns at all. This is June eighth, which means the Rinkenhauer girl has only been gone a day, and yet this poster has been tacked way up in the corner of the notice-board (or moved there), like somebody's afterthought. Nor is that all. There was nothing in the paper this morning--Henry knows, because he read it. Skimmed through it, anyway, while he was slurping up his cereal. Maybe it was buried way back in the Local section, he thinks, and knows at once tha
t's it. The key word is buried. Lots of things are buried in Derry. Talk of missing children, for instance. There have been a lot of child disappearances here over the years--these boys know it, it certainly crossed their minds on the day they met Duddits Cavell, but nobody talks much about it. It's as if the occasional missing kid is the price of living in such a nice, quiet place. At this idea Henry feels a dawning indignation stealing in first to mix with and then replace his former goofy happiness. She was sweet, too, with her BarbieKen. Sweet like Duddits. He remembers how the four of them would deliver Duddits to school--all those walks--and how often she'd be outside, Josie Rinkenhauer with her scabby knees and her great big plastic purse: "Hi, Duddie." She was sweet.
And still is, Henry thinks. She's--
"She's alive," Beaver says flatly. He takes the chewed-up toothpick out of his mouth, looks at it, and drops it to the grass. "Alive and still around. Isn't she?"
"Yeah," Pete says. He's still looking at the picture, fascinated, and Henry knows what Pete is thinking, almost the same thing as he is: she grew up. Even Josie, who in a fairer life might have been Doug Cavell's girlfriend. "But I think she's . . . you know . . ."
"She's in deep shit," Jonesy says. He has stepped out of his gown and now folds it over his arm.
"She's stuck," Pete says dreamily, still looking at the picture. His finger has begun to go back and forth, tick-tock, tick-tock.
"Where?" Henry asks, but Pete shakes his head. So does Jonesy.
"Let's ask Duddits," Beaver says suddenly. And they all know why. There is no need of discussion. Because Duddits sees the line. Duddits
11
"--sees the line!" Henry shouted suddenly, and jerked upright in the passenger seat of the Humvee. It scared the hell out of Owen, who was deep in some private place where there was only him and the storm and the endless line of reflectors to tell him he was still on the road. "Duddits sees the line!"
The Humvee swerved, skidded, came back under control. "Jesus, man!" Owen said. "Give me a little warning next time before you blow your top, would you?"