“You annoy the shit out of me, Jonesy.” Putting on his gloves now, the ones that had belonged to the owner of the Dodge Ram. The owner of Lad.
This time there was a reply. The feeling is mutual, partner. So why don’t you go someplace where you’re wanted? Take your act and put it on the road?
“Can’t do that,” Mr Gray said. He extended a hand to the dog, and Lad sniffed gratefully at the scent of its master on the glove. Mr Gray sent it a be-calm thought, then got out of the plow and began to walk toward the side of the restaurant. Around back would be the “employee’s parking lot”.
Henry and the other guy are right on top of you, asshole. Sniffing up your tailpipe. So relax. Spend as much time here as you want. Have a triple order of bacon.
“They can’t feel me,” Mr Gray said, his breath puffing out in front of him (the sensation of the cold air in his mouth and throat and lungs was exquisite, invigorating-even the smells of gasoline and diesel fuel were wonderful). “If I can’t feel them, they can’t feel me.”
Jonesy laughed-actually laughed. It stopped Mr Gray in his tracks beside the Dumpster.
The rules have changed, my friend. They stopped for Duddits, and Duddits sees the line.
“I don’t know what that means.”
Of course you do, asshole.
“Stop calling me that!” Mr Gray snapped.
If you stop insulting my intelligence, maybe I will.
Mr Gray started walking again, and yes, here, around the comer, was a little clutch of cars, most of them old and battered.
Duddits sees the line.
He knew what it meant, all right; the one named Pete had possessed the same thing, the same talent, although likely not as strongly as this puzzling other, this Duddits.
Mr Gray didn’t like the idea of leaving a trail “Duddits” could see, but he knew something Jonesy didn’t. “Pearly” believed that Henry, Owen, and Duddits were only fifteen miles south of Pearly’s own position. If that was indeed the case, Henry and Owen were forty-five miles back, somewhere between Pittsfield and Waterville. Mr Gray didn’t believe that actually qualified as “sniffing up one’s tailpipe”.
Still, it would not do to linger here.
The back door of the restaurant opened. A young man in a uniform the Jonesy-files identified as “cook’s whites” came out carrying two large bags of garbage, clearly bound for the Dumpsters. This young man s name was John, but his friends called him “Butch”. Mr Gray thought it would be enjoyable to kill him, but “Butch” looked a good deal stronger than Jonesy, not to mention younger and probably much quicker. Also, murder had annoying side effects, the worst being how quickly it rendered a stolen car useless.
Hey, Butch.
Butch stopped, looking at him alertly.
Which car is yours?
Actually, it wasn’t his but his mother’s, and that was good. Butch’s own rustbucket was back home, victim of a dead battery. He had his Mom’s unit, an all-wheel-drive Subaru. Mr Gray, Jonesy would have said, had just rolled another seven.
Butch handed over the keys willingly enough. He still looked alert (“bright-eyed and bushy-tailed” was how Jonesy put it, although the young cook had no tail Mr Gray could see), but his consciousness was gone. “Out on his feet,” Jonesy thought.
You won’t remember this, Mr Gray said.
“No,” Butch agreed.
Just back to work.
“You bet,” Butch agreed. He picked up his bags of garbage and headed for the Dumpsters again. By the time his shift was over and he realized his mother’s car was gone, all this would likely be over.
Mr Gray unlocked the red Subaru and got in. There was half a bag of barbecue potato chips on the seat. Mr Gray gobbled them greedily as he drove back to the plow. He finished by licking Jonesy’s fingers. Greasy. Good. Like the bacon. He got the dog. Five minutes later he was on the turnpike again.
South and south and south.
2
The night roars with music and laughter and loud voices; the air is big with the smell of grilled hotdogs, chocolate, roasted peanuts; the sky blooms with colored fire. Binding it all together, identifying it, signing it like summer’s own autograph, is an amplified rock-and-roll song from the speakers that have been set up in Strawford Park:
Hey pretty baby take a ride with me
We’re goin down to Alabama on the C amp;C.
And here comes the tallest cowboy in the world, a nine-foot Pecos Bill under the burning sky, towering over the crowd, little kids with their ice-cream-smeared mouths dropped open in wonder, their eyes wide; laughing parents hold them up or put them on their shoulders so they can see better. In one hand Pecos Bill waves his hat, in the other a banner which reads DERRY DAYS 1981.
We’re gonna walk the tracks, stay up all night
we get a little bored, then we’ll have a little fight.
“Ow eee-oh all?” Duddits asks. He has a cone of blue cotton candy in one hand, but it is forgotten; as he watches the stilt-walking cowboy pass under the burning fireworks sky, his eyes are as wide as any three-year-old’s. Standing on one side of Duddits are Pete and Jonesy; on the other are Henry and the Beav. Behind the cowboy comes a retinue of vestal virgins (surely some of them are still virgins, even in this year of grace 1981) in spangly cowboy skirts and white cowboy boots, tossing the batons that won the West,
“Don’t know how he can be so tall, Duds,” Pete says, laughing. He yanks a hank of blue floss from the cone in Duddits’s hand and tucks it into Duddits’s amazed mouth. “Must be magic.”
They all laugh at how Duddits chews without even taking his eyes from the cowpoke on stilts. Duds is taller than all of them now, even taller than Henry. But he’s still just a kid, and he makes them all happy. Magic is what he is; he won’t find Josie Rinkenhauer for another year, but they know-he’s fuckin magic. It was scary going up against Richie Grenadeau and his friends, but that was still the luckiest day of their lives-they all think so.
Don’t say no, baby, come with me
We’re gonna take a little ride on the C amp;C.
“Hey, Tex!” Beaver shouts, waving his own lid (a Derry Tigers baseball hat) up at the tall cowboy. “Kiss my bender, big boy! I mean, sit on it and spin!”
And they’re all killing themselves laughing (it is a memory for the ages, all right, the night Beaver ranked on the stilt-walking cowboy in the Derry Days Parade beneath that burning gunpowder sky), all but Duddits, who is staring with that expression of stoned wonder, and Owen Underhill (Owen! Henry thinks, how did you get here, buddy?), who looks worried.
Owen is shaking him, Owen is once more telling him to wake up, Henry, wake up, wake
3
up, for God’s sake!”
It was the fright in Owen’s voice that finally roused Henry from his dream. For a moment he could still smell peanuts and Duddits’s cotton candy. Then the world came back in: white sky, snow-covered turnpike lanes, a green sign reading AUGUSTA NEXT TWO EXITS. Also Owen shaking him, and from behind them a barking sound, hoarse and desperate. Duddits coughing.
“Wake up, Henry, he’s bleeding! Will you please wake the fuck-”
“I’m awake, I’m awake.”
He unbuckled his seatbelt, twisted around, got up on his knees. The overstrained muscles in his thighs shrieked in protest, but Henry paid no attention.
It was better than he expected. From the panic in Owen’s voice, he had expected some sort of hemorrhage, but it was just a trickle from one nostril and a fine spray of blood from Duddits’s mouth when he coughed. Owen had probably thought poor old Duds was coughing up his lungs, when in fact he’d probably strained something in his throat. Not that this wasn’t potentially serious. In Duddits’s increasingly fragile condition, anything was potentially serious; a random cold-germ could kill him. From the moment he’d seen him, Henry had known Duds was coming out of the last turn and heading for home.
“Duds!” he called sharply. Something different. Something different in him, Henry. What? No time to think about it now. “Duddits, breathe in through your nose! Your nose, Duds! Like this!”
Henry demonstrated, taking big breaths through flared nostrils… and when he exhaled, little threads of white flew from his nostrils. Like the fluff in milkweed pods, or dandelions gone to seed. Byrus, Henry thought. It was growing up my nose, but now it’s dead. I’m sloughing it off, literally breath by breath. And then he understood the difference: the itching had stopped, in his leg and in his mouth and in the thatch of his groin. His mouth still tasted as if it had been lined with someone’s old carpet, but it didn’t itch.