Low men in yellow coats by Stephen King

Bobby looked at his sneakers and said nothing. Kept all the blubbering and all the angry words locked in his throat and said nothing. Silence spun out between them. He could smell her cigarette and all of last night’s cigarettes behind this one, and those smoked on all the other nights when she didn’t so much look at the TV as through it, waiting for the phone to ring.

‘All right, I guess we’ve got ourselves straight,’ she said after giving him fifteen seconds or so to open his mouth and stick his big fat foot in it. ‘Have a nice day, Bobby.’ She went out without kissing him.

Bobby went to the open window (tears were running down his face now, but he hardly noticed them), drew aside the curtain, and watched her head toward Commonwealth, high heels tapping. He took a couple of big, watery breaths and then went into the kitchen. He looked across it at the cupboard where the blue pitcher hid behind the gravy boat. He could take some money out of it, she didn’t keep any exact count of how much was in there and she’d never miss three or four quarters, but he wouldn’t. Spending it would be joyless. He wasn’t sure how he knew that, but he did; had known it even at nine, when he first discovered the pitcher of change hidden there. So, with feelings of regret rather than righteousness, he went into his bedroom and looked at the Bike Fund jar instead.

It occurred to him that she was right — he could take a little of his saved dough to spend at Savin Rock. It might take him an extra month to accumulate the price of the Schwinn, but at least spending this money would feel all right. And there was something else, as well. If he refused to take any money out of the jar, to do anything but hoard it and save it, he’d be like her.

That decided the matter. Bobby fished five dimes out of the Bike Fund, put them in his pocket, put a Kleenex on top of them to keep them from bouncing out if he ran somewhere, then finished collecting his stuff for the beach. Soon he was whistling, and Ted came downstairs to see what he was up to.

‘Are you off, Captain Garfield?’

Bobby nodded. ‘Savin Rock’s a pretty cool place. Rides and stuff, you know?’

‘Indeed I do. Have a good time, Bobby, and don’t fall out of anything.’

Bobby started for the door, then looked back at Ted, who was standing on the bottom step of the stairs in his slippers. ‘Why don’t you come out and sit on the porch?’ Bobby asked. ‘It’s gonna be hot in the house, I bet.’

Ted smiled. ‘Perhaps. But I think I’ll stay in.’

‘You okay?’

‘Fine, Bobby. I’m fine.’

As he crossed to the Gerbers’ side of Broad Street, Bobby realized he felt sorry for Ted, hiding up in his hot room for no reason. And it had to be for no reason, didn’t it? Sure it did.

Even if there were low men out there, cruising around someplace (in the west, he thought, they draw west), what could they want of an old retired guy like Ted Brautigan?

At first the quarrel with his mother weighed him down a little (Mrs Gerber’s pudgy, pretty friend Rionda Hewson accused him of being ‘in a brown study,’ whatever that was, then began tickling him up the sides and in the armpits until Bobby laughed in self-defense), but after they had been on the beach a little while he began to feel better, more himself.

Although it was still early in the season, Savin Rock was full speed ahead — the merry-go-round turning, the Wild Mouse roaring, the little kids screaming, tinny rock and roll pouring from the speakers outside the funhouse, the barkers hollering from their booths. Sully-John didn’t get the teddy bear he wanted, knocking over only two of the last three milk-bottles (Rionda claimed some of them had special weights in the bottom to keep them from going over unless you whacked them just right), but the guy in the baseball-toss booth awarded him a pretty neat prize anyway — a goofy-looking anteater covered with yellow plush. S-J