Low men in yellow coats by Stephen King

‘Mrs Garfield, I assure you — ‘

‘Assure this, you dirty bastard!’ With the vase gone there was nothing left on the table and so she picked up the table itself and threw it. It struck Ted in the chest and drove him backward; would have floored him if not for the straight-backed chair. Ted flopped into it, looking at her with wide, incredulous eyes. His mouth was trembling.

‘Was he helping you?’ Liz asked. Her face was dead white. The bruises on it stood out like birthmarks. ‘Did you teach my son to help?’

‘Mom, he didn’t hurt her!’ Bobby shouted. He grabbed her around the waist. ‘He didn’t hurt her, he — ‘

She picked him up like the vase, like the table, and he would think later she had been as strong as he had been, carrying Carol up the hill from the park. She threw him across the room. Bobby struck the wall. His head snapped back and connected with the sunburst clock, knocking it to the floor and stopping it forever. Black dots flocked across his vision, making him think briefly and confusedly

(coming closing in now the posters have his name on them)

of the low men. Then he slid to the floor. He tried to stop himself but his knees wouldn’t lock.

Liz looked at him, seemingly without much interest, then back at Ted, who sat in the straight-backed chair with the table in his lap and the legs poking at his face. Blood was dripping down one of his cheeks now, and his hair was more red than white. He tried to speak and what came out instead was a dry and flailing old man’s cigarette cough.

‘Filthy man. Filthy, filthy man. For two cents I’d pull your pants down and yank that filthy thing right off you.’ She turned and looked at her huddled son again, and the expression Bobby now saw in the one eye he could really see — the contempt, the accusation — made him cry harder. She didn’t say You too, but he saw it in her eye. Then she turned back to Ted.

‘Know what? You’re going to jail.’ She pointed a finger at him, and even through his tears Bobby saw the nail that had been on it when she left in Mr Biderman’s Merc was gone; there

was a bloody-ragged weal where it had been. Her voice was mushy, seeming to spread out somehow as it crossed her oversized lower lip. ‘I’m going to call the police now. If you’re wise you’ll sit still while I do it. Just keep your mouth shut and sit still.’ Her voice was rising, rising. Her hands, scratched and swelled at the knuckles as well as broken at the nails, curled into fists which she shook at him. ‘If you run I’ll chase you and carve you up with my longest butcher knife. See if I don’t. I’ll do it right on the street for everyone to see, and I’ll start with the part of you that seems to give you . . . you boys . . . so much trouble. So sit still, Brattigan. If you want to live long enough to go to jail, don’t you move.’

The phone was on the table by the couch. She went to it. Ted sat with the table in his lap and blood flowing down his cheek. Bobby huddled next to the fallen clock, the one his mother had gotten with trading stamps. Drifting in the window on the breeze of Ted’s fan came Bowser’s cry: roop-roop-roop.

‘You don’t know what happened here, Mrs Garfield. What happened to you was terrible and you have all my sympathy . . . but what happened to you is not what happened to Carol.’

‘Shut up.’ She wasn’t listening, didn’t even look in his direction.

Carol ran to Liz, reached out for her, then stopped. Her eyes grew large in her pale face.

Her mouth dropped open. ‘They pulled your dress off?’ It was half a whisper, half a moan. Liz stopped dialing and turned slowly to look at her. ‘Why did they pull your dress off?’

Liz seemed to think about how to answer. She seemed to think hard. ‘Shut up,’ she said at last. ‘Just shut up, okay?’