I decided I didn’t care who might be watching from the other side of the lake. I didn’t care if the two of them were still lurking on one of the tree-shielded parts of The Street, either. I swam until I could feel strands of waterweed tickling my ankles and see the crescent of my beach. Then I stood up, wincing at the air, which now felt cold on my skin. I limped to shore, one hand raised to fend off a hail of rocks, but no rocks came. I stood for a moment on The Street, my jeans and polo shirt dripping, looking first one way, then the other. It seemed I had this little part of the world to myself. Last, I looked back at the water, where weak moonlight beat a track from the thumbnail of beach out to the swimming float.
‘Thanks, Jo,’ I said, then started up the railroad ties to the house. I got about halfway, then had to stop and sit down. I had never been so utterly tired in my whole life.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I climbed the stairs to the deck instead of going around to the front door, still moving slowly and marvelling at how my legs felt twice their normal weight. When I stepped into the living room I looked around with the wide eyes of someone who has been away for a decade and returns to find everything just as he left it — Bunter the moose on the wall, the Boston Globe on the couch, a compilation of Tough Stuff crossword puzzles on the end-table, the plate on the counter with the remains of my stir-fry still on it. Looking at these things brought the realization home full force —
I had gone for a walk, leaving all this normal light clutter behind, and had almost died instead. Had almost been murdered.
I began to shake. I went into the north-wing bathroom, took off my wet clothes, and threw them into the tub — splat. Then, still shaking, I turned and stared at myself in the mirror over the washbasin. I looked like someone who has been on the losing side in a barroom brawl. One bicep bore a long, clotting gash. A blackish-purple bruise was unfurling what looked like shadowy wings on my left collarbone. There was a bloody furrow on my neck and behind my ear, where the lovely Rogette had caught me with the stone in her ring.
I took my shaving mirror and used it to check the back of my head. ‘Can’t you get that through your thick skull?’ my mother used to shout at me and Sid when we were kids, and now I thanked God that Ma had apparently been right about the thickness factor, at least in my case. The spot where Devore had struck me with his cane looked like the cone of a recently extinct volcano.
Whitmore’s bull’s-eye had left a red wound that would need stitches if I wanted to avoid a scar.
Blood, rusty and thin, stained the nape of my neck all around the hairline. God knew how much had flowed out of that unpleasant-looking red mouth and been washed away by the lake.
I poured hydrogen peroxide into my cupped palm, steeled myself, and slapped it onto the gash back there like aftershave. The bite was monstrous, and I had to tighten my lips to keep from crying out. When the pain started to fade a little, I soaked cotton balls with more peroxide and cleaned my other wounds.
I showered, threw on a tee-shirt and a pair of jeans, then went into the hall to phone the County Sheriff. There was no need for directory assistance; the Castle Rock P.D. and County Sheriff’s numbers were on the IN CASE OF EMERGENCY card thumbtacked to the bulletin board, along with numbers for the fire department, the ambulance service, and the 900-number where you could get three answers to that day’s Times crossword puzzle for a buck-fifty.
I dialed the first three numbers fast, then began to slow down. I got as far as 955-960 before stopping altogether. I stood there in the hall with the phone pressed against my ear, visualizing another headline, this one not in the decorous Times but the rowdy New York Post. NOVELIST TO
AGING COMPU-KING: ‘YOU BIG BULLY!’ Along with side-by-side pictures of me, looking roughly my age, and Max Devore, looking roughly a hundred and six. The Post would have great fun telling its readers how Devore (along with his companion, an elderly lady who might weigh ninety pounds soaking wet) had lumped up a novelist half his age — a guy who looked, in his photograph, at least, reasonably trim and fit.
The phone got tired of holding only six of the required seven numbers in its rudimentary brain, double-clicked, and dumped me back to an open line. I took the handset away from my ear, stared at it for a moment, and then set it gently back down in its cradle.
I’m not a sissy about the sometimes whimsical, sometimes hateful attention of the press, but I’m wary, as I would be around a bad-tempered fur-bearing mammal. America has turned the people who entertain it into weird high-class whores, and the media jeers at any ‘celeb’ who dares complain about his or her treatment. ‘Quitcha bitchin!’ cry the newspapers and the TV gossip shows (the tone is one of mingled triumph and indignation).
‘Didja really think we paid ya the big bucks just to sing a song or swing a Louisville Slugger?
Wrong, asshole! We pay so we can be amazed when you do it well — whatever “it” happens to be in your particular case — and also because it’s gratifying when you fuck up. The truth is you’re supplies. If you cease to be amusing, we can always kill you and eat you.’
They can’t really eat you, of course. They can print pictures of you with your shirt off and say you’re running to fat, they can talk about how much you drink or how many pills you take or snicker about the night you pulled some starlet onto your lap at Spago and tried to stick your tongue in her ear, but they can’t really eat you. So it wasn’t the thought of the Post calling me a crybaby or being a part of Jay Leno’s opening monologue that made me put the phone down; it was the realization that I had no proof. No one had seen us. And, I realized, finding an alibi for himself and his personal assistant would be the easiest thing in the world for Max Devore.
There was one other thing, too, the capper: imagining the County Sheriff sending out George Footman, aka daddy, to take my statement on how the mean man had knocked li’l Mikey into the lake. How the three of them would laugh later about that!
I called John Storrow instead, wanting him to tell me I was doing the right thing, the only thing that made any sense. Wanting him to remind me that only desperate men were driven to such desperate lengths (I would ignore, at least for the time being, how the two of them had laughed, as if they were having the time of their lives), and that nothing had changed in regard to Ki Devore —
her grandfather’s custody case still sucked bogwater.
I got John’s recording machine at home and left a message — just call Mike Noonan, no emergency, but feel free to call late. Then I tried his office, mindful of the scripture according to John Grisham: young lawyers work until they drop. I listened to the firm’s recording machine, then followed instructions and punched STO on my phone keypad, the first three letters of John’s last name.
There was a click and he came on the line — another recorded version, unfortunately. ‘Hi, this is John Storrow. I’ve gone up to Philly for the weekend to see my mom and dad. I’ll be in the office on Monday; for the rest of the week, I’ll be out on business. From Tuesday to Friday you’ll probably have the most luck trying to reach me at . . . ‘
The number he gave began 207-955, which meant Castle Rock. I imagined it was the hotel where he’d stayed before, the nice one up on the View. ‘Mike Noonan,’ I said. ‘Call me when you can. I left a message on your apartment machine, too.’
I went in the kitchen to get a beer, then only stood there in front of the refrigerator, playing with the magnets. Whoremaster, he’d called me. Say there, whoremaster, where’s your whore? A minute later he had offered to save my soul. Quite funny, really. Like an alcoholic offering to take care of your liquor cabinet. He spoke of you with what I think was genuine affection, Mattie had said. Your great-grandfather and his great-grandfather shit in the same pit.