Part 15 (2/2)

'Could be s.h.i.+t,' Gary says, just as quietly but even more forcefully. 'It's the Newall place, a new wing on the Newall place, already framed up, and if you still got doubts, just step outside and have a look for yourself.'

With that said, there is nothing left to say - they believe him. Neither Paul nor anyone else rushes outside to crane up at the new wing being added to the Newall house, however. They consider it a matter of some importance, and thus nothing to hurry over. More time pa.s.ses - Harley McKissick has reflected more than once that if time was pulpwood, they'd all be rich. Paul goes to the old water-cooled soft-drink chest and gets an Orange Crush. He gives Harley sixty cents and Harley rings up the purchase. When he slams the cash-drawer shut again, he realizes the atmosphere in the store has changed somehow. There are other matters to discuss.

Lenny Partridge coughs, winces, presses his hands lightly against his chest where the broken ribs have never really healed, and asks Gary when they are going to have services for Dana Roy.

'Tomorrow,' Gary says, 'down Gorham. That's where his wife is laid to rest.'

Lucy Roy died in 1968; Dana, who was until 1979 an electrician for U.S. Gypsum over in Gates Falls (these men routinely and with no prejudice refer to the company as U.S. Gyp Em), died of intestinal cancer two days before. He lived in Castle Rock all his life, and liked to tell people that he'd only been out of Maine three times in his eighty years, once to visit an aunt in Connecticut, once to see the Boston Red Sox play at Fenway Park ('And they lost, those b.u.ms,' he always added at this point), and once to attend an electricians' convention in Portsmouth, New Hamps.h.i.+re. 'd.a.m.n waste of time,' he always said of the convention. 'Nothin but drinkin and wimmin, and none of the wimmin even worth lookin at, let alone that other thing.' He was a crony of these men, and in his pa.s.sing they feel a queer mixture of sorrow and triumph.

'They took out four feet of his underpinnin,' Gary tells the other men. 'Didn't do no good. It was all through him.'

'He knew Joe Newall,' Lenny says suddenly. 'He was up there with his dad when his dad was puttin in Joe's lectricity - couldn't have been more'n six or eight, I'd judge. I remember he said Joe give him a sucker one time, but he pitched it out'n his daddy's truck on the ride home. Said it tasted sour and funny. Then, later, after they got all the mills runnin again - the late thirties, that would've been - he was in charge of the rewirin. You member that, Harley?'

'Yup.'

Now that the subject has come back to Joe Newall by way of Dana Roy, the men sit quietly, conning their brains for anecdotes Concerning either man. But when Old Clut finally speaks, he says a startling thing. ' 'It was Dana Roy's big brother, Will, who throwed that skunk at the side of the house that time. I'm almost sure 'twas.'

'Will?' Lenny raises his eyebrows. 'Will Roy was too steady to do a thing like that, I would have said.'

Gary Paulson says, very quietly: 'Ayuh, it was Will.'

They turn to look at him.

'And 'twas the wife that give Dana a sucker that day he came with his dad,' Gary says. 'Cora, not Joe. And Dana wa'ant no six or eight; the skunk was throwed around the time of the Crash, and Cora was dead by then. No, Dana maybe remembered some of it, but he couldn't have been no more than two. It was around 1916 that he got that sucker, because it was in ' 16 that Eddie Roy wired the house. He was never up there again. Frank - the middle boy, he's been dead ten or twelve year now - he would have been six or eight then, maybe. Frank seen what Cora done to the little one, that much I know, but not when he told Will. It don't matter. Finally Will decided to do somethin about it. By then the woman was dead, so he took it out on the house Joe built for her.'

'Never mind that part,' Harley says, fascinated. 'What'd she do to Dana? That's what I want to know.'

Gary speaks calmly, almost judiciously. 'What Frank told me one night when he'd had a few was that the woman give him the sucker with one hand and reached into his didies with the other. Right in front of the older boy.'

'She never!' Old Clut says, shocked in spite of himself.

Gary only looks at him with his yellowed, fading eyes and says nothing.

Silence again, except for the wind and the clapping shutter. The children on the bandstand have taken their firetruck and gone somewhere else with it and still the depthless afternoon continues on and on, the light that of an Andrew Wyeth painting, white and still and full of idiot meaning. The ground has given up its meager yield and waits uselessly for snow.

Gary would like to tell them of the sickroom at c.u.mberland Memorial Hospital where Dana Roy lay dying with black snot caked around his nostrils and smelling like a fish left out in the sun. He would like to tell them of the cool blue tiles and of nurses with their hair drawn back in nets, young things for the most part with pretty legs and firm young b.r.e.a.s.t.s and no idea that 1923 was a real year, as real as the pains which haunt the bones of old men. He feels he would like to sermonize on the evil of time and perhaps even the evil of certain places, and explain why Castle Rock is now like a dark tooth which is finally ready to fall out. Most of all he would like to inform them that Dana Roy sounded as if someone had stuffed his chest full of hay and he was trying to breathe through it, and that he looked as if he had already started to rot. Yet he can say none of these things because he doesn't know how, and so he only sucks back spit and says nothing.

'No one liked old Joe much,' Old Clut says . . . and then his face brightens suddenly. 'But by G.o.d, he grew on you!'

The others do not reply.

Nineteen days later, a week before the first snow comes to cover the useless earth, Gary Paulson has a surprisingly s.e.xual dream . . . except it is mostly a memory.

On August 14, 1923, while driving by the Newall house in his father's farm truck, thirteen-year-old Gary Martin Paulson happened to observe Cora Leonard Newall turning away from her mailbox at the end of the driveway. She had the newspaper in one hand. She saw Gary and reached down with her free hand to grasp the hem of her housedress. She did not smile. That tremendous moon of a face was pallid and empty as she raised the dress, revealing her s.e.x to him - it was the first time he had ever seen that mystery so avidly discussed by the boys he knew. And, still not smiling but only looking at him gravely, she pistoned her hips at his gaping, amazed face as he pa.s.sed her by. And as he pa.s.sed, his hand dropped into his lap and moments later he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed into his flannel pants.

It was his first o.r.g.a.s.m. In the years since, he has made love to a good many women, beginning with Sally Ouelette underneath the Tin Bridge back in '26, and every time he has neared the moment of o.r.g.a.s.m - every single one - he has seen Cora Leonard Newall: has seen her standing beside her mailbox under a hot gunmetal sky, has seen her lifting her dress to reveal an almost non-existent thatch of gingery hair beneath the creamy ground-swell of her belly, has seen the exclamatory slit with its red lips tinting toward what he knows would be the most deliriously delicate coral (Cora).

pink. Yet it is not the sight of her v.u.l.v.a below that somehow promiscuous swell of gut that has haunted him through all the years, so that every woman became Cora at the moment of release; or it is not just that. What always drove him mad with l.u.s.t when he remembered (and when he made love he was helpless not to) was the way she had pumped her hips at him . . . once, twice, three times. That, and the lack of expression on her face, a neutrality so deep it seemed more like idiocy, as if she were the sum of every very young man's limited s.e.xual understanding and desire - a tight and yearning darkness, no more than that, a limited Eden glowing Cora-pink.

His s.e.x-life has been both delineated and delimited by that experience - a seminal experience if ever there was one - but he has never mentioned it, although he has been tempted more than once when in his cups. He has h.o.a.rded it. And it is of this incident that he is dreaming, p.e.n.i.s perfectly erect for the first time in almost nine years, when a small blood vessel in his cerebellum ruptures, forming a clot which kills him quietly, considerately sparing him four weeks or four months of paralysis, the flexible tubes in the arms, the catheter, the noiseless nurses with their hair in nets and their fine high b.r.e.a.s.t.s. He dies in his sleep, p.e.n.i.s wilting, the dream fading like the afterimage of a television picture tube switched off in a dark room. His cronies would be puzzled, however, if any of them were there to hear the last two words he speaks - gasped out but still clear enough: 'The moon!'

The day after he is laid to rest in Homeland, a new cupola starts to go up on the new wing on the Newall house.

Chattery Teeth.

Looking into the display case was like looking through a dirty pane of gla.s.s into the middle third of his boyhood, those years from seven to fourteen when he had been fascinated by stuff like this. Hogan leaned closer, forgetting the rising whine of the wind outside and the gritty spick-s.p.a.ck sound of sand hitting the windows. The case was full of fabulous junk, most of it undoubtedly made in Taiwan and Korea, but there was no doubt at all about the pick of the litter. They were the largest Chattery Teeth he'd ever seen. They were also the only ones he'd ever seen with feet - big orange cartoon shoes with white spats. A real scream.

Hogan looked up at the fat woman behind the counter. She was wearing a tee-s.h.i.+rt that said NEVADA IS G.o.d'S COUNTRY on top (the words swelling and receding across her enormous b.r.e.a.s.t.s) and about an acre of jeans on the bottom. She was selling a pack of cigarettes to a pallid young man whose long blonde hair had been tied back in a ponytail with a sneaker shoelace. The young man, who had the face of an intelligent lab-rat, was paying in small change, counting it laboriously out of a grimy hand.

'Pardon me, ma'am?' Hogan asked.

She looked at him briefly, and then the back door banged open. A skinny man wearing a bandanna over his mouth and nose came in. The wind swirled desert grit around him in a cyclone and rattled the pin-up cutie on the Valvoline calendar thumb-tacked to the wall. The newcomer was pulling a handcart. Three wire-mesh cages were stacked on it. There was a tarantula in the one on top.

In the cages below it were a pair of rattlesnakes. They were coiling rapidly back and forth and shaking their rattles in agitation.

'Shut the d.a.m.n door, Scooter, was you born in a barn?' the woman behind the counter bawled.

He glanced at her briefly, eyes red and irritated from the blowing sand. 'Gimme a chance, woman! Can't you see I got my hands full here? Ain't you got eyes? Christ!' He reached over the dolly and slammed the door. The dancing sand fell dead to the floor and he pulled the dolly toward the storeroom at the back, still muttering.

'That the last of em?' the woman asked.

'All but Wolf.' He p.r.o.nounced it Woof. 'I'm gonna stick him in the lean-to back of the gas-pumps.'

'You ain't not!' the big woman retorted. 'Wolfs our star attraction, in case you forgot. You get him in here. Radio says this is gonna get worse before it gets better. A lot worse.'

'Just who do you think you're foolin?' The skinny man (her husband, Hogan supposed) stood looking at her with a kind of weary truculence, his hands on his hips. 'd.a.m.n thing ain't nothin but a Minnesota coydog, as anyone who took more'n half a look could plainly see.'

The wind gusted, moaning along the eaves of Scooter's Grocery Roadside Zoo, throwing sheaves of dry sand against the windows. It was getting worse, and Hogan could only hope he would be able to drive out of it. He had promised Lita and Jack he'd be home by seven, eight at the latest, and he was a man who liked to keep his promises.

'Just take care of him,' the big woman said, and turned irritably back to the rat-faced boy.

'Ma'am?' Hogan said again.

'Just a minute, hold your water,' Mrs. Scooter said. She spoke with the air of one who is all but drowning in impatient customers, although Hogan and the rat-faced boy were in fact the only ones present.

'You're a dime short, Sunny Jim,' she told the blonde kid after a quick glance at the coins on the counter-top.

The boy regarded her with wide, innocent eyes. 'I don't suppose you'd trust me for it?'

'I doubt if the Pope of Rome smokes Merit 100's, but if he did, I wouldn't trust him for it.'

The look of wide-eyed innocence disappeared. The rat-faced boy looked at her with an expression of sullen dislike for a moment (this expression looked much more at home on the kid's face, Hogan thought), and then slowly began to investigate his pockets again.

Just forget it and get out of here, Hogan thought. You'll never make it to LA by eight if you don't get moving, windstorm or no windstorm. This is one of those places that have only two speeds - slow and stop. You got your gas and paid for it, so just count yourself ahead of the game and get back on the road before the storm gets any worse.

<script>