Just After Sunset by Stephen King

Curtis made no reply. At least with Grunwald leaning on the Port-O-San’s door, the damned thing had steadied.

“Sure you are. Snug as a bug in a whatever.”

There was another thump, and then the toilet rocked forward again. Grunwald had removed his weight from it. Curtis once more assumed the position, standing on the balls of his feet, bending all his will to keeping the stinking cubicle more or less upright. Sweat was trickling down his face, stinging a shaving cut on the left jawline. This made him think of his own bathroom, usually taken for granted, with loving nostalgia. He would give every dollar in his retirement fund to be there, razor in his right hand, watching blood trickle through the shaving cream on the left-hand side while some stupid pop song played from the clock radio beside his bed. Something by The Carpenters or Don Ho.

It’s going over this time, going over for sure, that was his plan all along—

But the Port-O-San steadied instead of tumbling over. All the same it was close to going, very close. Curtis stood on tiptoe with his hands braced against the wall and his midsection arched over the bench seat, becoming aware now of how badly the hot little cubicle smelled, even with the seat closed. There was the odor of disinfectant—it would be the blue stuff, of course—mingling with the stench of decaying human waste, and that made it somehow even worse.

When Grunwald spoke again, his voice came from beyond the rear wall. He had stepped over the ditch and circled around to the back of the Port-O-San. Curtis was so surprised he almost recoiled, but managed not to. Still, he couldn’t suppress a jerk. His splayed hands momentarily left the wall. The Port-O-San tottered. He brought his hands back to the wall again, leaning forward as far as he could, and it steadied.

“How you doing, neighbor?”

“Scared to death,” Curtis said. His hair had fallen onto his forehead, it was sticking in the sweat there, but he was afraid to flick it back. Even that much extra movement might send the Port-O-San tumbling. “Let me out. You’ve had your fun.”

“If you think I’m having fun, you’re very much mistaken,” The Motherfucker said in a pedantic voice. “I’ve thought about this a long time, neighbor, and finally decided it was necessary—the only course of action. And it had to be now, because if I waited much longer, I’d no longer be able to trust my body to do what I needed it to do.”

“Grunwald, we can settle this like men. I swear we can.”

“Swear all you like, I would never take the word of a man like you,” he said in that same pedantic voice. “Any man who takes the word of a faggot deserves what he gets.” And then, yelling so loud his voice broke into splinters: “YOU GUYS THINK YOU’RE SO SMART! HOW SMART DO YOU FEEL NOW?”

Curtis said nothing. Each time he thought he was getting a handle on The Motherfucker’s madness, new vistas opened before him.

At last, in a calmer tone, Grunwald went on.

“You want an explanation. You think you deserve one. Possibly you do.”

Somewhere a crow cawed. To Curtis, in his hot little box, it sounded like laughter.

“Did you think I was joking when I called you a gay witch? I was not. Does that mean you know you’re a, well, a malevolent supernatural force sent to try me and test me? I don’t know. I don’t. I’ve spent many a sleepless night since my wife took her jewelry and left thinking about this question—among others—and I still don’t. You probably don’t.”

“Grunwald, I assure you I’m not—”

“Shut up. I’m talking here. And of course, that’s what you’d say, isn’t it? Regardless of whether you knew or not, it’s what you’d say. Look at the testimonies of various witches in Salem. Go on, look. I have. It’s all on the Internet. They swore they weren’t witches, and when they thought it would get them out of death’s receiving room they swore they were, but very few of them actually knew for sure themselves! That becomes clear when you look at it with your enlightened you know, enlightened your enlightened whatever. Mind or whatever. Hey neighbor, how is it when I do this?”

Suddenly The Motherfucker—sick but apparently still quite strong—began to rock the Port-O-San. Curtis was almost thrown against the door, which would have resulted in disaster for sure.

“Stop it!” he roared. “Stop doing that!”

Grunwald laughed indulgently. The Port-O-San stopped rocking. But Curtis thought the angle of the floor was steeper than it had been. “What a baby you are. It’s as solid as the stock market, I tell you!”

A pause.

“Of course there is this: all faggots are liars, but not all liars are faggots. It’s not a balancing equation, if you see what I mean. I’m as straight as an arrow, always have been, I’d fuck the Virgin Mary and then go to a barn dance, but I lied to get you out here, I freely admit it, and I might be lying now.”

That cough again—deep and dark and almost certainly painful.

“Let me out, Grunwald. I beg you. I am begging you.”

A long pause, as if The Motherfucker were considering this. Then he resumed his previous scripture.

“In the end—when it comes to witches—we can’t rely on confessions,” he said. “We can’t even rely on testimony, because it might be cocked. When you’re dealing with witches, the subjective gets all it gets all you know. We can only rely on the evidence. So I considered the evidence in my case. Let’s look at the facts. First, you fucked me on the Vinton Lot. That was the first thing.”

“Grunwald, I never—”

“Shut up, neighbor. Unless you want me to tip over your happy little home, that is. In that case, you can talk all you want. Is that what you want?”

“No!”

“Good call. I don’t know exactly why you fucked me, but I believe you did it because you were afraid I meant to stick a couple of condos out there on Turtle Point. In any case, the evidence—namely, your ridiculous so-called bill of sale—indicates that fuckery was what it was, pure and simple. You claim that Ricky Vinton meant to sell you that lot for one million, five hundred thousand dollars. Now, neighbor, I ask you. Would any judge and jury in the world believe that?”

Curtis didn’t reply. He was afraid to even clear his throat now, and not just because it might set The Motherfucker off; it might tip the precariously balanced Port-O-San over. He was afraid it might go over if he so much as lifted a little finger from the back wall. Probably that was stupid, but maybe it wasn’t.

“Then the relatives swooped in, complicating a situation that was already complicated enough—by your gayboy meddling! And you were the one who called them. You or your lawyer. That’s obvious, a, you know, QED type of situation. Because you like things just the way they are.”

Curtis remained silent, letting this go unchallenged.

“That’s when you threw your curse. Must have been. Because the evidence bears it out. ‘You don’t need to see Pluto to deduce Pluto is there.’ Some scientist said that. He figured out Pluto existed by observing the irregularities in some other planet’s orbit, did you know that? Deducing witchcraft is like that, Johnson. You have to check the evidence and look for irregularities in the orbit of your, you know, your whatever. Life. Plus, your spirit darkens. It darkens. I felt that happening. Like an eclipse. It—”

He coughed some more. Curtis stood in the ready-to-be-frisked position, butt out, stomach arched over the toilet where Grunwald’s carpenters had once sat down to take care of business after their morning coffee kicked in.

“Next, Ginny left me,” The Motherfucker said. “She’s currently living on Cape Cod. She says she’s there by herself, of course she does, because she wants that alimony—they all do—but I know better. If that randy bitch didn’t have a cock to pole-vault on twice a day, she’d eat chocolate truffles in front of American Idol until she exploded.

“Then the IRS. Those bastards came next, with their laptops and questions. ‘Did you do this, did you do that, where’s the paperwork on the other?’ Was that witchcraft, Johnson? Or maybe fuckery of a more, I don’t know, ordinary kind? Like you picking up the telephone and saying, ‘Audit this guy, he’s got a lot more cake in his pantry than he’s letting on.’”

“Grunwald, I never called—”

The Port-O-San shook. Curtis rocked backward, sure that this time

But once more the Port-O-San settled. Curtis was starting to feel woozy. Woozy and pukey. It wasn’t just the smell; it was the heat. Or maybe it was both together. He could feel his shirt sticking to his chest.