When the car was gone, Brian mounted his bike and began to pedal, hellbent for leather. He didn't stop until he was coasting up his own driveway. The numbness was leaving his hands by then, but they itched and smarted ... and they were still red.
When he went in, his mother called, "That you, Brian?" from the living room.
"Yes, Ma." What he had done in the Jerzyck back yard already seemed like something he might have dreamed. Surely the boy standing here in this sunny, sane kitchen, the boy who was now going to the refrigerator and taking out the milk, could not be the same boy who had plunged his hands up to the wrists in the mud of Wilma Jerzyck's garden and then flung that mud at Wilma Jerzyck's clean sheets again and again and again.
Surely not.
He poured himself a glass of milk, studying his hands as he did. They were clean. Red, but clean. He put the milk back. His heart had returned to its normal rhythm.
"Did you have a good day at school, Brian?" Cora's voice floated out.
"It was okay."
"Want to come in and watch TV with me? Santa Barbara will be on pretty soon, and there's Hershey's Kisses."
"Sure," he said, "but I'm going upstairs for a few minutes first."
"Don't you leave a milk-glass up there! It goes all sour and stinks and it never comes off in the dishwasher!"
"I'll bring it down, Ma."
"You better!"
Brian went upstairs and spent half an hour sitting at his desk, dreaming over his Sandy Koufax card. When Sean came in to ask if he wanted to go down to the comer store with him, Brian shut his baseball-card book with a snap and told Sean to get out of his room and not to come back until he learned how to knock on a door when it was shut. He heard Sean standing out in the hallway, crying, and felt no sympathy at all.
There was, after all, such a thing as manners.
10
Warden threw a party in the county jail,
Prison band was there and they began to wail,
The band was jumpin and the joint began to swing,
Y'oughtta heard those knocked-out jailbirds sing!
The King stands with his legs apart, his blue eyes blazing, the bell bottoms of his white jumpsuit shaking. Rhinestones glitter and flash in the overhead spotlights. A sheaf of blue-black hair falls across his forehead. The mike is near his mouth, but not so near Myra cannot see the pouty curl of his upper lip.
She can see everything. She is in the first row.
And suddenly, as the rhythm section blasts off, he is holding a hand out, holding it out to HER, the way Bruce Springsteen (who will never be The King in a million years, no matter how hard he tries) holds his hand out to that girl in his "Dancing in the Dark" video.
For a moment she's too stunned to do anything, too stunned to move, and then hands from behind push her forward, and HIS hand has closed over her wrist, HIS hand is pulling her up on stage. She can SMELL him, a mixture of sweat, English Leather, and hot, clean flesh.
A bare moment later, Myra Evans is in Elvis Presley's arms.
The satin of his jumpsuit is slick under her hands. The arms around her are muscular. That face, HIS face, the face of The King, is inches from hers. He is dancing with her--they are a couple, Myra Josephine Evans from Castle Rock, Maine, and Elvis Aron Presley, from Memphis, Tennessee! They dirty-dance their way across a wide stage in front of four thousand screaming fans as the Jordanaires chant that funky old fifties refrain: "Let's rock ... everybody let's rock ..."
His hips move in against hers; she can feel the coiled tension at the center of him nudging against her belly. Then he twirls her, her skirt flares out flat, showing her legs all the way to the lace of her Victoria's Secret panties, her hand spins inside his like an axle inside a hub, and then he is drawing her to him again, and his hand slides down the small of her back to the swell of her buttocks, cupping her tightly to him. For a moment she looks down and there, beyond and below the glare of the footlights, she sees Cora Rusk staring up. Cora's face is baleful with hate and witchy with envy.
Then Elvis turns her head toward him and speaks in that syrupy mid-South drawl: "Ain't we supposed to be lookin at each othah, honeh?"
Before she can reply, his full lips are on hers; the smell of him and the feel of him fill the world. Then, suddenly, his tongue is in her mouth--the King of Rock and Roll is french-kissing her in front of Cora and the whole damned world! He draws her tight against him again and as the horns kick in with a syncopated shriek, she feels ecstatic heat begin to uncoil in her loins. Oh, it has never been like this, not even down at Castle Lake with Ace Merrill all those years ago. She wants to scream, but his tongue is buried in her mouth and she can only claw into his smooth satin back, pumping her hips as the horns thunder into "My Way."
11
Mr. Gaunt sat in one of the plush chairs, watching Myra Evans with clinical detachment as her orgasm ripped through her. She was shaking like a woman experiencing a total neural breakdown, the picture of Elvis clutched tightly in her hands, eyes closed, bosom heaving, legs tightening, loosening, tightening, loosening. Her hair had lost its beauty-shop curl and lay against her head in a not-too-charming helmet. Her double chins ran with sweat much as Elvis's own had done as he gyrated ponderously across the stage during his last few concerts.
"Ooohh!" Myra cried, shaking like a bowl of jelly on a plate. "Ooooh! Oooooooh my God! Ooooooooooooh my Gahhhhhhhhd! OOOOHHHH--"
Mr. Gaunt idly tweezed the crease of his dark slacks between his thumb and forefinger, shook it out to its former razor sharpness, then leaned forward and snatched the picture from Myra's hands. Her eyes, full of dismay, flew open at once. She grabbed for the picture, but it was already out of her reach. She started to get up.
"Sit down," Mr. Gaunt said.
Myra remained where she was, as if she had been turned to stone during the act of rising.
"If you ever want to see this picture again, Myra, sit ... down."
She sat, staring at him in dumb agony. Large patches of sweat were creeping out from under her arms and along the sides of her breasts.
"Please," she said. The word came out in a croak so dusty that it was like a puff of wind in the desert. She held her hands out.
"Name me a price," Gaunt invited.
She thought. Her eyes rolled in her sweaty face. Her Adam's apple went up and down.
"Forty dollars!" she cried.
He laughed and shook his head.
"Fifty!"
"Ridiculous. You must not want this picture very badly, Myra."
"I do!" Tears began to seep from the corners of her eyes. They ran down her cheeks, mixing with the sweat there. "I doooooo!"
"All right," he said. "You want it. I accept the fact that you want it. But do you need it, Myra? Do you really need it?"
"Sixty! That's all I've got! That's every red cent!"
"Myra, do I look like a child to you?"
"No--"
"I think I must. I'm an old man--older than you would believe, I've aged very well, if I do say so myself--but I really think I must look like a child to you, a child who will believe a woman who lives in a brand-new duplex less than three blocks from Castle View has only sixty dollars to her name."
"You don't understand! My husband--"
Mr. Gaunt rose, still holding the picture. The smiling man who had stood aside to grant her admittance was no longer in this room. "You didn't have an appointment, Myra, did you? No. I saw you out of the goodness of my heart. But now I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to leave."
"Seventy! Seventy dollars!"
"You insult my intelligence. Please go."
Myra fell on her knees before him. She was weeping in hoarse, panicky sobs. She clutched his calves as she grovelled before him. "Please! Please, Mr. Gaunt! I have to have that picture! I have to! It does ... you wouldn't believe what it does!"
Mr. Gaunt looked at the picture of Elvis and a momentary moue of distaste crossed his face. "I don't think I'd want to know," he said. "It looked extremely ... swe
aty."
"But if it was more than seventy dollars, I'd have to write a check. Chuck would know. He'd want to know what I spent it for. And if I told him, he'd ... he'd ..."
"That," Mr. Gaunt said, "is not my problem. I am a shopkeeper, not a marriage counsellor." He was looking down at her, speaking to the top of her sweaty head. "I'm sure that someone else--Mrs. Rusk, for instance--will be able to afford this rather unique likeness of the late Mr. Presley."
At the mention of Cora, Myra's head snapped up. Her eyes were sunken, glittering points in deep brown sockets. Her teeth were revealed in a snarl. She looked, in that instant, quite insane.
"You'd sell it to her?" she hissed.
"I believe in free trade," Mr. Gaunt said. "It's what made this country great. I really wish you'd let go of me, Myra. Your hands are positively running with sweat. I'm going to have to have these pants dry-cleaned, and even then I'm not sure--"
"Eighty! Eighty dollars!"
"I'll sell it to you for exactly twice that," Mr. Gaunt said. "One hundred and sixty dollars." He grinned, revealing his large, crooked teeth. "And Myra--your personal check is good with me."
She uttered a howl of despair. "I can't! Chuck will kill me!"
"Maybe," Mr. Gaunt said, "but you would be dying for a hunka-hunka burning love, would you not?"
"A hundred," Myra whined, grabbing his calves again as he tried to step away from her. "Please, a hundred dollars."
"A hundred and forty," Gaunt countered. "It's as low as I can go. It is my final offer."
"All right," Myra panted. "All right, that's all right, I'll pay it--"
"And you'll have to throw in a blowjob, of course," Gaunt said, grinning down at her.
She looked up at him, her mouth a perfect O. "What did you say?" she whispered.
"Blow me!" he shouted down at her. "Fellate me! Open that gorgeous metal-filled mouth of yours and gobble my crank!"
"Oh my God," Myra moaned.
"As you wish," Mr. Gaunt said, beginning to turn away.
She grabbed him before he could leave her. A moment later her shaking hands were scrabbling at his fly.
He let her scrabble for a few moments, his face amused, and then he slapped her hands away. "Forget it," he said. "Oral sex gives me amnesia."
"What--"
"Never mind, Myra." He tossed her the picture. She flailed her hands at it, caught it somehow, and clutched it to her bosom. "There is one other thing, however."
"What?" she hissed at him.
"Do you know the man who tends the bar on the other side of the Tin Bridge?"
She was beginning to shake her head, her eyes filling with alarm again, then realized who he must mean. "Henry Beaufort?"
"Yes. I believe he also owns the establishment which is called The Mellow Tiger. A rather interesting name."
"Well, I don't know him, but I know who he is, I guess." She had never been in The Mellow Tiger in her life, but she knew as well as anyone who owned and ran the place.
"Yes. Him. I want you to play a littte trick on Mr. Beaufort."
"What ... what kind of a trick?"
Gaunt reached down, grasped one of Myra's sweat-slimy hands, and helped her to her feet.
"That," he said, "is something we can talk about while you write your check, Myra." He smiled then, and all his charm flooded back into his face. His brown eyes sparkled and danced. "And by the way, would you like your picture gift-wrapped?"
CHAPTER FIVE
1
Alan slid into a booth in Nan's Luncheonette across from Polly and saw at once that the pain was still bad--bad enough for her to have taken a Percodan in the afternoon, which was rare. He knew it even before she opened her mouth--it was something in the eyes. A sort of shine. He had come to know it ... but not to like it. He didn't think he would ever like it. He wondered, not for the first time, if she was addicted to the stuff yet. In Polly's case, he supposed that addiction was just another side-effect, something to be expected, noted, and then sublimated to the main problem--which was, simply put, the fact that she was living with pain he probably couldn't even comprehend.
His voice showed none of this as he asked, "How's it going, pretty lady?"
She smiled. "Well, it's been an interesting day. Verrrrry ... inderesting, as that guy used to say on LaughIn."
"You're not old enough to remember that."
"I am so. Alan, who's that?"
He turned in the direction of her gaze just in time to spot a woman with a rectangular package cradled in her arms drift past Nan's wide plate-glass window. Her eyes were fixed straight ahead, and a man coming the other way had to jig rapidly out of her way to avoid a collision. Alan flicked rapidly through the huge file of names and faces he kept in his head and came up with what Norris, who was deeply in love with police language, would undoubtedly have called "a partial."
"Evans. Mabel or Mavis or something like that. Her husband's Chuck Evans."
"She looks like she just smoked some very good Panamanian Red," Polly said. "I envy her."
Nan Roberts herself came over to wait on them. She was one of William Rose's Baptist Christian Soldiers, and today she wore a small yellow button above her left breast. It was the third one Alan had seen this afternoon, and he guessed he would see a great many more in the weeks ahead. It showed a slot machine inside a black circle with a red diagonal line drawn through it. There were no words on the button; it made the wearer's feelings about Casino Nite perfectly clear without them.
Nan was a middle-aged woman with a huge bosom and a sweetly pretty face that made you think of Mom and apple pie. The apple pie at Nan's was, as Alan and all his deputies knew, very good, too--especially with a large scoop of vanilla ice cream melting on top. It was easy to take Nan at face value, but a good many business people--realtors, for the most part--had discovered that doing so was a bad idea. Behind the sweet face there was a clicking computer of a mind, and beneath the motherly swell of bosom there was a pile of account books where the heart should have been. Nan owned a very large chunk of Castle Rock, including at least five of the business buildings on Main Street, and now that Pop Merrill was in the ground, Alan suspected she was probably the wealthiest person in town.
She reminded him of a whorehouse madam he had once arrested in Utica. The woman had offered him a bribe, and when he turned that down, she had tried very earnestly to knock his brains out with a birdcage. The tenant, a scrofulous parrot who sometimes said "I fucked your mamma, Frank" in a morose and thoughtful voice, had still been in the cage at the time. Sometimes, when Alan saw the vertical frown-line between Nan Roberts's eyes deepen down, he felt she would be perfectly capable of doing the same thing. And he found it perfectly natural that Nan, who did little these days but sit at the cash register, would come over to serve the County Sheriff herself. It was the personal touch that means so much.
"Hullo, Alan," she said, "I haven't seen you in a dog's age! Where you been?"
"Here and there," he said. "I get around, Nan."
"Well, don't forget your old friends while you're doing it," she said, giving him her shining, motherly smile. You had to spend quite awhile around Nan, Alan reflected, before you started to notice how rarely that smile made it all the way to her eyes. "Come see us once in a while."
"And, lo! Here I be!" Alan said.
Nan pealed laughter so loud and lusty that the men at the counter--loggers, for the most part--craned briefly around. And later, Alan thought, they'll tell their friends that they saw Nan Roberts and the Sheriff yukking it up together. Best of friends.
"Coffee, Alan?"
"Please."
"How about some pie to go with that? Home-made--apples from McSherry's Orchard over in Sweden. Picked yesterday." At least she didn't try to tell us she picked them herself, Alan thought.
"No, thanks."
"Sure? What about you, Polly?"
Polly shook her head.
Nan went to get the coffee. "You don't like her much, do you?" Polly asked him in
a low voice.
He considered this, a little surprised--likes and dislikes had not really entered his thoughts. "Nan? She's all right. It's just that I like to know who people really are, if I can."
"And what they really want?"
"That's too damn hard," he said, laughing. "I'll settle for knowing what they're up to."
She smiled--he loved to make her smile--and said, "We'll turn you into a Yankee philosopher yet, Alan Pangborn."
He touched the back of her gloved hand and smiled back.
Nan returned with a cup of black coffee in a thick white mug and left at once. One thing you can say for her, Alan thought, she knows when the amenities have been performed and the flesh has been pressed to a sufficiency. It wasn't something everyone with Nan's interests and ambitions did know.
"Now," Alan said, sipping his coffee. "Spill the tale of your very interesting day."
She told him in greater detail about how she and Rosalie Drake had seen Nettie Cobb that morning, how Nettie had agonized in front of Needful Things, and how she had finally summoned up enough courage to go in.
"That's wonderful," he said, and meant it.
"Yes--but that's not all. When she came out, she'd bought something! I've never seen her so cheerful and so ... so buoyant as she was today. That's it, buoyant. You know how sallow she usually is?"
Alan nodded.
"Well, she had roses in her cheeks and her hair was sort of mussed and she actually laughed a few times."
"Are you sure business was all they were doing?" he asked, and rolled his eyes.
"Don't be silly." She spoke as if she hadn't suggested the same thing to Rosalie herself. "Anyway, she waited outside until you'd left--I knew she would--and then she came in and showed us what she bought. You know that little collection of carnival glass she has?"
"Nope. There are a few things in this town which have escaped my notice. Believe it or not."
"She has half a dozen pieces. Most of them came to her from her mother. She told me once that there used to be more, but some of them got broken. Anyway, she loves the few things she has, and he sold her the most gorgeous carnival glass lampshade I've seen in years. At first glance I thought it was Tiffany. Of course it isn't--couldn't be, Nettie could never afford a piece of real Tiffany glass--but it's awfully good."