A resentful Pete Wexler has been drafted by Rebecca Vilas to bring in the deejay’s shit (Pete thinks of Henry as “the blind record-hopper”). Said shit consists of two speakers (very large), one turntable (light, but awkward as a motherfucker to carry), one preamp (very heavy), assorted wires (all tangled up, but that’s the blind record-hopper’s problem), and four boxes of actual records, which went out of style about a hundred years ago. Pete guesses that the blind record-hopper never heard a CD in his whole life.
The last item is a suit bag on a hanger. Pete has peeked in and ascertained that the suit is white.
“Hang it in there, please,” Henry says, pointing with unerring accuracy toward the supply closet that has been designated his dressing room.
“Okay,” Pete says. “What exactly is it, if you don’t mind me asking?”
Henry smiles. He knows perfectly well that Pete has already had a peep. He heard the plastic bag rattling and the zipper chinking in a duet that only occurs when someone pulls the bag away from the hanger at the neck. “Inside that bag, my friend, Symphonic Stan, the Big-Band Man, is just waiting for me to put him on and bring him to life.”
“Oh, uh-huh,” Pete says, not knowing if he has been answered or not. All he’s really sure of is that those records were almost as heavy as the preamp. Someone should really give the blind record-hopper some information about CDs, the next great leap forward.
“You asked me one; may I ask you one?”
“Be my guest,” Pete says.
“There appears to have been a police presence at Maxton Elder Care this afternoon,” the blind record-hopper says. “They’re gone now, but they were here when I arrived. What’s that about? There hasn’t been a robbery or an assault among the geriatrics, I hope?”
Pete stops in his tracks beneath a large cardboard strawberry, holding the suit bag and looking at the blind record-hopper with an amazement Henry can almost touch. “How’d you know the cops were here?”
Henry puts a finger to the side of his nose and tips his head to one side. He replies in a hoarse, conspiratorial whisper. “Smelled something blue.”
Pete looks puzzled, debates whether or not to inquire further, and decides not to. Resuming his march toward the supply closet–dressing room, he says: “They’re playing it cagey, but I think they’re looking for another lost kid.”
The look of amused curiosity fades from Henry’s face. “Good Christ,” he says.
“They came and went in a hurry. No kids here, Mr . . . uh, Leyden?”
“Leyden,” Henry confirms.
“A kid in this place would stand out like a rose in a patch of poison ivy, if you know what I mean.”
Henry doesn’t consider old folks in any way analogous to poison ivy, but he does indeed get Mr. Wexler’s drift. “What made them think—?”
“Someone found sumpin’ on the sidewalk,” Pete says. He points out the window, then realizes the blind guy can’t see him pointing. Duh, as Ebbie would say. He lowers his hand. “If a kid got snatched, someone probably came along in a car and snatched him. No kidnapers in here, I can tell you that much.” Pete laughs at the very idea of a Maxton moldy oldie snatching any kid big enough to ride a bike. The kid would probably break the guy over his knee like a dry stick.
“No,” Henry says soberly, “that hardly seems likely, does it?”
“But I guess the cops got to dot all the t’s and cross all the i’s.” He pauses. “That’s just a little joke of mine.”
Henry smiles politely, thinking that with some people, Alzheimer’s disease might be an actual improvement. “When you hang my suit up, Mr. Wexler, would you be so good as to give it a gentle shake? Just to banish any incipient wrinkles?”
“Okay. Want me to take it out of the bag forya?”
“Thanks, that won’t be necessary.”
Pete goes into the supply closet, hangs up the suit bag, and gives it a little shake. Incipient, just what the hell does that mean? There’s a rudiment of a library here at Maxton’s; maybe he’ll look it up in the dictionary. It pays to increase your word power, as it says in the Reader’s Digest, although Pete doubts it will pay him much in this job.
When he goes back out to the common room, the blind record-hopper—Mr. Leyden, Symphonic Stan, whoever the hell he is—has begun unraveling wires and plugging them in with a speed and accuracy Pete finds a trifle unnerving.
Poor old Fred Marshall is having a terrible dream. Knowing it’s a dream should make it less horrible but somehow doesn’t. He’s in a rowboat with Judy, out on a lake. Judy is sitting in the bow. They are fishing. He is, at least; Judy is just holding her pole. Her face is an expressionless blank. Her skin is waxy. Her eyes have a stunned, hammered look. He labors with increasing desperation to make contact with her, trying one conversational gambit after another. None work. To make what is, under the circumstances, a fairly apt metaphor, she spits every lure. He sees that her empty eyes appear fixed on the creel sitting between them in the bottom of the boat. Blood is oozing through the wickerwork in fat red dribbles.
It’s nothing, just fishblood, he tries to assure her, but she makes no reply. In fact, Fred isn’t so sure himself. He’s thinking he ought to take a look inside the creel, just to be sure, when his pole gives a tremendous jerk—if not for quick reflexes, he would have lost it over the side. He’s hooked a big one!
Fred reels it in, the fish on the other end of the line fighting him for every foot. Then, when he finally gets it near the boat, he realizes he has no net. Hell with it, he thinks, go for broke. He whips the pole backward, just daring the line to snap, and the fish—biggest goddamned lake trout you’d ever hope to see—flies out of the water and through the air in a gleaming, fin-flipping arc. It lands in the bottom of the boat (beside the oozing creel, in fact) and begins thrashing. It also begins to make gruesome choking noises. Fred has never heard a fish make noises like that. He bends forward and is horrified to see that the trout has Tyler’s face. His son has somehow become a weretrout, and now he’s dying in the bottom of the boat. Strangling.
Fred grabs at it, wanting to remove the hook and throw it back while there’s still time, but the terrible choking thing keeps slipping through his fingers, leaving only a shiny slime of scales behind. It would be tough to get the hook out, in any case. The Ty-fish has swallowed it whole, and the barbed tip is actually protruding from one of the gills, just below the point where the human face melts away. Ty’s choking becomes louder, harsher, infinitely more horrible—
Fred sits up with a low cry, feeling as if he’s choking himself. For a moment he’s completely adrift as to place and time—lost in the slippage, we might say—and then he realizes he’s in his own bedroom, sitting up on his side of the bed he shares with Judy.
He notices that the light in here is much dimmer, because the sun has moved to the other side of the house. My God, he thinks, how long have I been asleep? How could I—
Oh, but here is another thing: that hideous choking sound has followed him out of his dream. It’s louder than ever. It will wake Judy, scare her—
Judy is no longer on the bed, though.
“Jude? Judy?”
She’s sitting in the corner. Her eyes are wide and blank, just as they were in his dream. A corsage of crumpled paper is protruding from her mouth. Her throat is grotesquely swelled, looks to Fred like a sausage that has been grilled until the casing is ready to pop.
More paper, he thinks. Christ, she’s choking on it.
Fred rolls himself across the bed, falls off, and lands on his knees like a gymnast doing a trick. He reaches for her. She makes no move to evade him. There’s that, at least. And although she’s choking, he still sees no expression in her eyes. They are dusty zeros.
Fred yanks the corsage of paper from her mouth. There’s another behind it. Fred reaches between her teeth, tweezes this second ball of paper between the first two fingers of his right hand (thinking Please don’t bite me, Judy, please don’t), and pulls it out, too. There’s a third ball of paper behind this one, way at the back of her mouth. He gets hold of this one as well, and extracts it. Although it’s crumpled, he can see the printed words GREAT IDEA, and knows what she’s swallowed: sheets of paper from the notepad Ty gave her for her birthday.