I stood there for a moment on the path, then ran forward and leaped into the water. Even as I flew through the air with the greatest of ease, it occurred to me that the last time I had jumped in like this, I had been holding my wife’s hand.
Touching down was almost a catastrophe. The water was cold enough to remind me that I was forty, not fourteen, and for a moment my heart stopped dead in my chest. As Dark Score Lake closed over my head, I felt quite sure that I wasn’t going to come up alive. I’d be found drifting facedown between the swimming float and my little stretch of The Street, a victim of cold water and a greasy Villageburger. They’d carve Your Mother Always Said To Wait At Least An Hour on my tombstone.
Then my feet landed in the stones and slimy weedstuff growing along the bottom, my heart kick-started, and I shoved upward like a guy planning to slam-dunk home the last score of a close basketball game. As I returned to the air, I gasped. Water went in my mouth and I coughed it back out, patting one hand against my chest in an effort to encourage my heart — come on, baby, keep going, you can do it.
I came back down standing waist-deep in the lake and with my mouth full of that cold taste —
lakewater with an undertinge of minerals, the kind you’d have to correct for when you washed your clothes. It was exactly what I had tasted while standing on the shoulder of Route 68. It was what I had tasted when Mattie Devore told me her daughter’s name.
I made a psychological connection, that’s all. From the similarity of the names to my dead wife to this lake. Which —
‘Which I have tasted a time or two before,’ I said out loud. As if to underline the fact, I scooped up a palmful of water — some of the cleanest and clearest in the state, according to the analysis reports I and all the other members of the so-called Western Lakes Association get each year —
and drank it down. There was no revelation, no sudden weird flashes in my head. It was just Dark Score, first in my mouth and then in my stomach.
I swam out to the float, climbed the three-rung ladder on the side, and flopped on the hot boards, feeling suddenly very glad I had come. In spite of everything. Tomorrow I would start putting together some sort of life down here . . . trying to, anyway. For now it was enough to be lying with my head in the crook of one arm, on the verge of a doze, confident that the day’s adventures were over.
As it happened, that was not quite true.
During our first summer on the TR, Jo and I discovered it was possible to see the Castle Rock fireworks show from the deck overlooking the lake. I remembered this just as it was drawing down
toward dark, and thought that this year I would spend that time in the living room, watching a movie on the video player. Reliving all the Fourth of July twilights we had spent out there, drinking beer and laughing as the big ones went off, would be a bad idea. I was lonely enough without that, lonely in a way of which I had not been conscious in Derry. Then I wondered what I had come down here for, if not to finally face Johanna’s memory — all of it — and put it to loving rest.
Certainly the possibility of writing again had never seemed more distant than it did that night.
There was no beer — I’d forgotten to get a sixpack either at the General Store or at the Village Cafe — but there was soda, courtesy of Brenda Meserve. I got a can of Pepsi and settled in to watch the lightshow, hoping it wouldn’t hurt too much. Hoping, I supposed, that I wouldn’t cry. Not that I was kidding myself; there were more tears here, all right. I’d just have to get through them.
The first explosion of the night had just gone off a spangly burst of blue with the bang travelling far behind — when the phone rang. It made me jump as the faint explosion from Castle Rock had not. I decided it was probably Bill Dean, calling long-distance to see if I was settling in all right.
In the summer before Jo died, we’d gotten a wireless phone so we could prowl the downstairs while we talked, a thing we both liked to do. I went through the sliding glass door into the living room, punched the pickup button, and said, ‘Hello, this is Mike,’ as I went back to my deck-chair and sat down. Far across the lake, exploding below the low clouds hanging over Castle View, were green and yellow starbursts, followed by soundless flashes that would eventually reach me as noise.
For a moment there was nothing from the phone, and then a man’s raspy voice — an elderly voice but not Bill Dean’s — said, ‘Noonan? Mr. Noonan?’
‘Yes?’ A huge spangle of gold lit up the west, shivering the low clouds with brief filigree. It made me think of the award shows you see on television, all those beautiful women in shining dresses.
‘Devore.’
‘Yes?’ I said again, cautiously.
‘Max Devore.’
We don’t see him in here too often, Audrey had said. I had taken that for Yankee wit, but apparently she’d been serious. Wonders never ceased.
Okay, what next? I was at a total loss for conversational gambits. I thought of asking him how he’d gotten my number, which was unlisted, but what would be the point? When you were worth over half a billion dollars — if this really was the Max Devore I was talking to — you could get any old unlisted number you wanted.
I settled for saying yes again, this time without the little uptilt at the end.
Another silence followed. When I broke it and began asking questions, he would be in charge of the conversation . . . if we could be said to be having a conversation at that point. A good gambit, but I had the advantage of my long association with Harold Oblowski to fall back on — Harold, master of the pregnant pause. I sat tight, cunning little cordless phone to my ear, and watched the show in the west. Red bursting into blue, green into gold; unseen women walked the clouds in glowing award-show evening dresses.
‘I understand you met my daughter-in-law today,’ he said at last. He sounded annoyed.
‘I may have done,’ I said, trying not to sound surprised. ‘May I ask why you’re calling, Mr.
Devore?’
‘I understand there was an incident.’
White lights danced in the sky — they could have been exploding spacecraft. Then, trailing after, the bangs. I’ve discovered the secret of time travel, I thought. It’s an auditory phenomenon.
My hand was holding the phone far too tightly, and I made it relax. Maxwell Devore. Half a billion dollars. Not in Palm Springs, as I had supposed, but close — right here on the TR, if the characteristic under-hum on the line could be trusted.
‘I’m concerned for my granddaughter.’ His voice was raspier than ever. He was angry, and it showed — this was a man who hadn’t had to conceal his emotions in a lot of years. ‘I understand my daughter-in-law’s attention wandered again. It wanders often.’
Now half a dozen colored starbursts lit the night, blooming like flowers in an old Disney nature film. I could imagine the crowds gathered on Castle View sitting cross-legged on their blankets, eating ice cream cones and drinking beer and all going Oooooh at the same time. That’s what makes any successful work of art, I think-everybody goes Oooooh at the same time.
‘You’re scared of this guy, aren’t you? Jo asked. Okay, maybe you’re right to be scared. A man who feels he can be angry whenever he wants to at whoever he wants to . . . that’s a man who can be dangerous.
Then Mattie’s voice: Mr. Noonan, I’m not a bad mother. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before.
Of course that’s what most bad mothers say in such circumstances, I imagined . . . but I had believed her.
Also, goddammit, my number was unlisted. I had been sitting here with a soda, watching the fireworks, bothering nobody, and this guy had —
‘Mr. Devore, I don’t have any idea what — ‘
‘Don’t give me that, with all due respect don’t give me that, Mr. Noonan, you were seen talking to them.’ He sounded as I imagine Joe Mccarthy sounded to those poor schmucks who ended up being branded dirty commies when they came before his committee.