“I guess so.”
“Why did he want to go and do that? I liked that thing. I was going to buy it off him.” Bailey had sharp, ratty little features. His skivvies were thready and saggy-seated. Garrish could see exactly how he would look, dying of emphysema or something in an oxygen tent. How he would look yellow. I could help you, Garrish thought.
“You think he’d mind if I scoffed up those pinups?”
“I guess not.”
“Okay.” Bailey crossed the room, stepping his bare feet gingerly over the pottery shards, and untacked the Playmates. “That picture of Bogart is really sharp, too. No tits, but, hey! You know?” Bailey peered at Garrish to see if Garrish would smile. When Garrish did not, he said, “I don’t suppose you planned on throwing it away, or anything?”
“No. I was just getting ready to take a shower.”
“Okay. Have a good summer if I don’t see you again, Curt.”
“Thanks.” Bailey went back to the door, the seat of his skivvies flapping. He paused at the door. “Another four-point this semester, Curt?”
“At least.”
“Good deal. See you next year.” He went out and closed the door. Garrish sat on the bed for a little while, then took the gun out, stripped it, and cleaned it. He put the muzzle up to his eye and looked at the tiny circle of light at the far end. The barrel was clean. He reintegrated the gun.
In the third drawer of his bureau were three heavy boxes of Winchester ammunition. He laid these on the windowsill. He locked the room’s door and went back to the window. He pulled the blinds up.
The mall was bright and green, peppered with strolling students. Quinn and his idiot friend had gotten up a raggle-taggle softball game. They scurried back and forth like crippled ants escaping a broken burrow.
“Let me tell you something,” Garrish told Bogie. “God got mad at Cain because Cain had an idea God was a vegetarian. His brother knew better. God made the world in His image, and if you don’t eat the world, the world eats you. So Cain says to his brother, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ And his brother says, ‘Why didn’t you listen?’ And Cain says, ‘Okay, I’m listening now.’ So he waxes his brother and says, ‘Hey God! You want meat?
Here it is! You want roast or ribs or Abelburgers or what?’ And God told him to put on his boogie shoes. So …
what do you think?” No reply from Bogie.
Garrish put the window up and rested his elbows on the ledge, not letting the barrel of the .352 project out into the sunlight. He looked into the sight.
He was centered on Carlton Memorial women’s dormitory across the mall. Carlton was more popularly known as the dog kennels. He put the crosshairs on a big Ford wagon. A blond coed in jeans and a blue shell top was talking to her mother while her father, red-faced and balding, loaded suitcases into the back.
Someone knocked on the door.
Garrish waited.
The knock came again.
“Curt? I’ll give you half a rock for the Bogart poster.” Bailey.
Garrish said nothing. The girl and her mother were laughing at something, not knowing there were microbes in their intestines, feeding, dividing, multiplying. The girl’s father joined them and they stood in the sunlight together, a family portrait in the crosshairs.
“Damn it all,” Bailey said. His feet padded down the hall.
Garrish squeezed the trigger.
The gun kicked hard against his shoulder, the good, padded kick you get when you have seated the gun in exactly the right place. The smiling girl’s blond head sheared itself away.
Her mother went on smiling for a moment, and then her hand went to her mouth. She screamed through her hand. Garrish shot through it. Hand and head disappeared in a red spray. The man who had been loading the suitcases broke into a lumbering run.
Garrish tracked him and shot him in the back. He raised his head, looking out of the sight for a moment.
Quinn was holding the softball and looking at the blond girl’s brains, which were splattered on the NO PARKING sign behind her prone body. Quinn didn’t move. All across the mall people stood frozen, like children engaged in a game of statues.
Somebody pounded on the door, then rattled the handle. Bailey again. “Curt? You all right, Curt? 1 think somebody’s—”
“Good drink, good meat, good God, let’s eat!” Garrish exclaimed, and shot at Quinn. He pulled instead of squeezing and the shot went wide. Quinn was running. No problem. The second shot took Quinn in the neck and he flew maybe twenty feet.
“Curt Garrish is killing himself!” Bailey was screaming. “Rollins! Rollins! Come quick!” His footsteps faded down the hall.
Now they were starting to run. Garrish could hear them screaming. Garrish could hear the faint smacksmack sound of their shoes on the walks.
He looked up at Bogie. Bogie held his two guns and looked beyond him. He looked at the shattered remnants of Piggy’s Thinker and wondered what Piggy was doing today, if he was sleeping or watching TV or eating some great big wonderful meal. Eat the world, Piggy, Garrish thought. You gulp that sucker right down.
“Garrish!” It was Rollins now, pounding on the door. “Open up, Garrish!”
“It’s locked,” Bailey panted. “He looked lousy, he killed himself, I know it.” Garrish pushed the muzzle out of the window again. A boy in a madras shirt was crouched down behind a bush, scanning the dormitory windows with desperate intensity. He wanted to run for it, Garrish saw, but his legs were frozen.
“Good God, let’s eat,” Garrish murmured, and began to pull the trigger again.
Todd’s Shortcut
“There goes the Todd woman,” I said.
Homer Buckland watched the little Jaguar go by and nodded. The woman raised her hand to Homer.
Homer nodded his big, shaggy head to her but didn’t raise his own hand in return. The Todd family had a big summer home on Castle Lake, and Homer had been their caretaker since time out of mind. I had an idea that he disliked Worth Todd’s second wife every bit as much as he’d liked ‘Phelia Todd, the first one.
This was just about two years ago and we were sitting on a bench in front of Bell’s Market, me with an orange soda-pop, Homer with a glass of mineral water. It was October, which is a peaceful time in Castle Rock. Lots of the lake places still get used on the weekends, but the aggressive, boozy summer socializing is over by then and the hunters with their big guns and their expensive nonresident permits pinned to their orange caps haven’t started to come into town yet. Crops have been mostly laid by. Nights are cool, good for sleeping, and old joints like mine haven’t yet started to complain. In October the sky over the lake is passing fair, with those big white clouds that move so slow; I like how they seem so flat on the bottoms, and how they are a little gray there, like with a shadow of sundown foretold, and I can watch the sun sparkle on the water and not be bored for some space of minutes. It’s in October, sitting on the bench in front of Bell’s and watching the lake from afar off, that I still wish I was a smoking man.
“She don’t drive as fast as ‘Phelia,” Homer said. “I swan I used to think what an old-fashion name she had for a woman that could put a car through its paces like she could.” Summer people like the Todds are nowhere near as interesting to the year-round residents of small Maine towns as they themselves believe. Year-round folk prefer their own love stones and hate stories and scandals and rumors of scandal. When that textile fellow from Amesbury shot himself, Estonia Corbridge found that after a week or so she couldn’t even get invited to lunch on her story of how she found him with the pistol still in one stiffening hand. But folks are still not done talking about Joe Camber, who got killed by his own dog.
Well, it don’t matter. It’s just that they are different racecourses we run on. Summer people are trotters; us others that don’t put on ties to do our week’s work are just pacers. Even so there was quite a lot of local interest when Ophelia Todd disappeared back in 1973. Ophelia was a genuinely nice woman, and she had done a lot of things in town. She worked to raise money for the Sloan Library, helped to refurbish the war memorial, and that sort of thing. But all the summer people like the idea of raising money. You mention raising money and their eyes light up and commence to gleam. You mention raising money and they can get a committee together and appoint a secretary and keep an agenda. They like that. But you mention time (beyond, that is, one big long walloper of a combined cocktail party and committee meeting) and you’re out of luck. Time seems to be what summer people mostly set a store by. They lay it by, and if they could put it up in Ball jars like preserves, why, they would. But ‘Phelia Todd seemed willing to spend time—to do desk duty in the library as well as to raise money for it. When it got down to using scouring pads and elbow grease on the war memorial, ‘Phelia was right out there with town women who had lost sons in three different wars, wearing an overall with her hair done up in a kerchief. And when kids needed ferrying to a summer swim program, you’d be as apt to see her as anyone headed down Landing Road with the back of Worth Todd’s big shiny pickup full of kids. A good woman. Not a town woman, but a good woman. And when she disappeared, there was concern. Not grieving, exactly, because a disappearance is not exactly like a death. It’s not like chopping something off with a cleaver; more like something running down the sink so slow you don’t know it’s all gone until long after it is.