Black House by Stephen King

We watch in growing puzzlement as he produces a pack of American Spirit cigarettes from his shirt pocket and fires one up with a gold lighter. Surely this elegant fellow in the braces, Dockers, and Bass Weejuns cannot be George Rathbun. In our minds we have already built up a picture of George, and it is one of a fellow very different from this. In our mind’s eye we see a guy with a huge belly hanging over the white belt of his checked pants (all those ballpark bratwursts), a brick-red complexion (all those ballpark beers, not to mention all that bellowing at the dastardly umps), and a squat, broad neck (perfect for housing those asbestos vocal cords). The George Rathbun of our imagination—and all of Coulee Country’s, it almost goes without saying—is a pop-eyed, broad-assed, wild-haired, leather-lunged, Rolaids-popping, Chevy-driving, Republican-voting heart attack waiting to happen, a churning urn of sports trivia, mad enthusiasms, crazy prejudices, and high cholesterol.

This fellow is not that fellow. This fellow moves like a dancer. This fellow is iced tea on a hot day, cool as the king of spades.

But say, that’s the joke of it, isn’t it? Uh-huh. The joke of the fat deejay with the skinny voice, only turned inside out. In a very real sense, George Rathbun does not exist at all. He is a hobby in action, a fiction in the flesh, and only one of the slim man’s multiple personalities. The people at KDCU know his real name and think they’re in on the joke (the punch line of course being George’s trademark line, the even-a-blind-man thing), but they don’t know the half of it. Nor is this a metaphorical statement. They know exactly one-third of it, because the man in the Dockers and the straw fedora is actually four people.

In any case, George Rathbun has been the saving of KDCU, the last surviving AM station in a predatory FM market. For five mornings a week, week in and week out, he has been a drive-time bonanza. The U-Crew (as they call themselves) love him just about to death.

Above him, the loudspeaker cackles on: “—still no leads, according to Chief Dale Gilbertson, who has called Herald reporter Wendell Green ‘an out-of-town fearmonger who is more interested in selling papers than in how we do things in French Landing.’

“Meanwhile, in Arden, a house fire has taken the lives of an elderly farmer and his wife. Horst P. Lepplemier and his wife, Gertrude, both eighty-two . . .”

“Horst P. Lepplemier,” says the slim man, drawing on his cigarette with what appears to be great enjoyment. “Try saying that one ten times fast, you moke.”

Behind him and to his right, the door opens again, and although the smoker is still standing directly beneath the speaker, he hears the door perfectly well. The eyes behind the aviator shades have been dead his whole life, but his hearing is exquisite.

The newcomer is pasty-faced and comes blinking into the morning sun like a baby mole that has just been turned out of its burrow by the blade of a passing plow. His head has been shaved except for the Mohawk strip up the center of his skull and the pigtail that starts just above the nape of his neck and hangs to his shoulder blades. The Mohawk has been dyed bright red; the ’tail is electric blue. Dangling from one earlobe is a lightning-bolt earring that looks suspiciously like the Nazi S.S. insignia. He is wearing a torn black T-shirt with a logo that reads SNIVELLING SHITS ’97: THE WE GET HARD FOR JESUS TOUR. In one hand this colorful fellow has a CD jewel box.

“Hello, Morris,” says the slim man in the fedora, still without turning.

Morris pulls in a little gasp, and in his surprise looks like the nice Jewish boy that he actually is. Morris Rosen is the U-Crew’s summer intern from the Oshkosh branch of UW. “Man, I love that unpaid grunt labor!” station manager Tom Wiggins has been heard to say, usually while rubbing his hands together fiendishly. Never has a checkbook been guarded so righteously as the Wigger guards the KDCU checkbook. He is like Smaug the Dragon reclining on his heaps of gold (not that there are heaps of anything in the ’DCU accounts; it bears repeating to say that, as an AM talker, the station is lucky just to be alive).

Morris’s look of surprise—it might be fair to call it uneasy surprise—dissolves into a smile. “Wow, Mr. Leyden! Good grab! What a pair of ears!”

Then he frowns. Even if Mr. Leyden—who’s standing directly beneath the outside honker, can’t forget that—heard someone come out, how in God’s name did he know which someone it was?

“How’d you know it was me?” he asks.

“Only two people around here smell like marijuana in the morning,” Henry Leyden says. “One of them follows his morning smoke with Scope; the other—that’s you, Morris—just lets her rip.”

“Wow,” Morris says respectfully. “That is totally bitchrod.”

“I am totally bitchrod,” Henry agrees. He speaks softly and thoughtfully. “It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it. In regard to your morning rendezvous with the undeniably tasty Thai stick, may I offer an Appalachian aphorism?”

“Go, dude.” This is Morris’s first real discussion with Henry Leyden, who is every bit the head Morris has been told to expect. Every bit and more. It is no longer so hard to believe that he could have another identity . . . a secret identity, like Bruce Wayne. But still . . . this is just so pimp.

“What we do in our childhood forms as a habit,” Henry says in the same soft, totally un–George Rathbun voice. “That is my advice to you, Morris.”

“Yeah, totally,” Morris says. He has no clue what Mr. Leyden is talking about. But he slowly, shyly, extends the CD jewel box in his hand. For a moment, when Henry makes no move to take it, Morris feels crushed, all at once seven years old again and trying to wow his always-too-busy father with a picture he has spent all afternoon drawing in his room. Then he thinks, He’s blind, dickweed. He may be able to smell pot on your breath and he may have ears like a bat, but how’s he supposed to know you’re holding out a fucking CD?

Hesitantly, a bit frightened by his own temerity, Morris takes Henry’s wrist. He feels the man start a little, but then Leyden allows his hand to be guided to the slender box.

“Ah, a CD,” Henry says. “And what is it, pray tell?”

“You gotta play the seventh track tonight on your show,” Morris says. “Please.”

For the first time, Henry looks alarmed. He takes a drag on his cigarette, then drops it (without even looking—of course, ha ha) into the sand-filled plastic bucket by the door.

“What show could you possibly mean?” he asks.

Instead of answering directly, Morris makes a rapid little smacking noise with his lips, the sound of a small but voracious carnivore eating something tasty. And, to make things worse, he follows it with the Wisconsin Rat’s trademark line, as well known to the folks in Morris’s age group as George Rathbun’s hoarse “Even a blind man” cry is known to their elders: “Chew it up, eat it up, wash it down, it aaallll comes out the same place!”

He doesn’t do it very well, but there’s no question who he’s doing: the one and only Wisconsin Rat, whose evening drive-time program on KWLA-FM is famous in Coulee Country (except the word we probably want is “infamous”). KWLA is the tiny college FM station in La Riviere, hardly more than a smudge on the wallpaper of Wisconsin radio, but the Rat’s audience is huge.

And if anyone found out that the comfortable Brew Crew–rooting, Republican-voting, AM-broadcasting George Rathbun was also the Rat—who had once narrated a gleeful on-air evacuation of his bowels onto a Backstreet Boys CD—there could be trouble. Quite serious, possibly, resounding well beyond the tight-knit little radio community.

“What in God’s name would ever make you think that I’m the Wisconsin Rat, Morris?” Henry asks. “I barely know who you’re talking about. Who put such a weird idea in your head?”

“An informed source,” Morris says craftily.

He won’t give Howie Soule up, not even if they pull out his fingernails with red-hot tongs. Besides, Howie only found out by accident: went into the station crapper one day after Henry left and discovered that Henry’s wallet had fallen out of his back pocket while he was sitting on the throne. You’d have thought a fellow whose other senses were so obviously tightwired would have sensed the absence, but probably Henry’s mind had been on other things—he was obviously a heavy dude who undoubtedly spent his days getting through some heavy thoughts. In any case, there was a KWLA I.D. card in Henry’s wallet (which Howie had thumbed through “in the spirit of friendly curiosity,” as he put it), and on the line marked NAME, someone had stamped a little inkpad drawing of a rat. Case closed, game over, zip up your fly.