Stephen King – Desperation

She looked at them one by one, as if trying to measure the effect her words were having.

“He was grinning. Grinning and laughing like a kid on his first visit to Disney World.

Happy, you know? Happy.”

Audrey had crouched there at the laundrymat door, watching Entragian chase the Escolla boy and his girl north onMain Street with the cruiser. He caught them and ran them down as he had the older woman-it was easy to get them both at once, she said, because the boy was trying to help the girl, the two of them were running together. When they were down, Entragian had stopped, backed up, backed slowly over them (there had been no wind then, Audrey told them, and she had heard the sound of their bones snapping very clearly), got out, walked over to them, knelt between them, put a bullet in the back of the girl’s head, then took off the Escolla boy’s hat, which had stayed on through everything, and put a bullet in the back of his head.

“Then he put the hat back on him again,” Audrey said.

“If I live through this, that’s one thing I’ll never forget, no matter how long I live-how he took the boy’s hat off to shoot him, then put it back on again. It was as if he was saying he understood how hard this was on them, and he wanted to be as considerate as possible.”

Entragian stood up, turned in a circle (reloading as he did), seeming to look everywhere at once. Audrey said he was wearing a big, goony smile. Johnny knew the kind she meant. He had seen it. In a crazy way it seemed to him he had seen all of this-in a dream, or another life.

It’s just dem old kozmicVietnam blues again, he told himself. The way she described the cop reminded him of certain stoned troopers he had run with, and certain stories he had been told late at night-whispered tales from grunts who had seen guys, their own guys, do terrible, unspeakable things with that same look of immaculate good cheer on their faces. It’sVietnam , that’s all, coming at you like an acid flashback. All you need now to complete the circle is a transistor radio sticking out of some-one’s pocket, playing “People Are Strange” or “Pictures of Matchstick Men.”

But was that all? A deeper part of him seemed to doubt the idea. That part thought something else was going on here, something which had little or nothing to do with the paltry memories of a novelist who had fed on war like a buzzard on carrion … and had subsequently produced exactly the sort of bad book such behavior probably warranted.

All right, then-if it’s not you, what is it?

“What did you do then?” Steve asked her.

“Went back to the laundrymat office. I crawled. And when I got there, I crawled into the kneehole under the desk and curled up in there and went to sleep. I was very tired. Seeing all those things. . . all that death.., it made me very tired.

“It was thin sleep. I kept hearing things. Gunshots, explosions, breaking glass, screams. I have no idea how much of it was real and how much was jvst in my mind. When I woke up, it was late afternoon. I was sore all over, at first I thought it had all been a dream, that I might even still be camping. Then I opened my eyes and saw where I was, curled up under a desk, and I smelled bleach and laundry soap, and realized I had to pee worse than ever in my life. Also, both my legs were asleep.

“I started wiggling out from under the desk, telling myself not to panic if I got a little stuck, and that was when I heard somebody come into the front of the store, and I yanked myself back under the desk again.

It was him. I knew it just by the way he walked. It was the sound of a man in boots.

“He goes, ‘Is anyone here?’ and came up the aisle between the washers and dryers. Like he was following my tracks, In a way he was. It was my perfume. I hardly ever wear it, but putting on a dress made me think of it, made me think it might make things go a little smoother at my meeting with Mr.

Symes.” She shrugged, maybe a little embarrassed.

“You know what they say about using the tools.”

Cynthia looked blank at this, but Mary nodded.

‘It smells like Opium,’ he says. ‘Is it, miss? Is that what you’re wearing?’ I didn’t say anything, just curled up there in the kneehole with my arms wrapped around my head. He goes, ‘Why don’t you come out? If you come out, I’ll make it quick. If I have to find you, I 11 make it slow.’ And I wanted to come out, that’s how much he’d gotten to me. How much he’d scared me I believed he knew for sure that I was still in there some where, and that he was going to follow the smell of my perfume to me like a bloodhound, and I wanted to get out from under the desk and go to him so he’d kill me quick I wanted to go to him the way the people at Jonestown must have wanted to stand in line to get the Kool-Aid.

Only I couldn’t. I froze up again and all I could do was lie there and think that I was going to die needing to pee. I saw the office chair-I’d pulled it out so I could get into the knee hole of the desk-and I thought,

‘When he sees where the chair is, he’ll know where I am.’ That was when he came into the office, while I was thinking that. ‘Is someone in here?’ he goes. ‘Come on out. I won’t hurt you. I just want to question you about what’s going on. We’ve got a big problem.~

Audrey began to tremble, as Johnny supposed she had trembled while she had been hedge-hogged in the kneehole of the desk, waiting for Entragian to come the rest of the way into the room, find her, and kill her. Except she was smiling, too, the kind of smile you could hardly bring yourself to look at.

“That’s how crazy he was.” She clasped her shaking hands together in her lap. “In one breath he says that if you come out he’ll reward you by killing you quick; in the next he says he just wants to ask you a few questions Crazy. But I believed both things at once.

So who’s the craziest one? Huh? Who’s the craziest one?

“He came a couple of steps into the room. I think it was a couple. Far enough for his shadow to fall over the desk and onto the other side, where I was. I remember thinking that if his shadow had eyes, they’d be able to see me. He stood there a long time. I could hear him breathing. Then he said ‘Fuck it’ and left.

A minute or so later, I heard the street door open and close. At first I was sure it was a trick. In my mind’s eye I could see him just as clearly as I can see you guys now, opening the door and then closing it again, but still standing there on the inside, next to the machine with the little packets of soap in it.

Standing there with his gun out, waiting for me to move. And you know what? I went on thinking that even after he started roaring around the streets in his car again, looking for other people to murder. I think I’d be under there still, except I knew that if I didn’t go to the bathroom I was going to wet my pants, and I didn’t want to do that. Huh-uh, no way. If he was able to smell my perfume, he’d smell fresh urine even quicker. So I crawled out and went to the bathroom-I hobbled like an old lady because my legs were still asleep, but I got there.”

And although she spoke for another ten minutes or so, Johnny thought that was where Audrey Wyler’s story essentially ended, with her hobbling into the office bath-room to take a leak. Her car was close by and she had the keys in her dress pocket, but it might as well have been on the moon instead ofMain Street for all the good it was to her. She’d gone back and forth several times between the office and the laundrymat proper (Johnny didn’t doubt for a moment the courage it must have taken to move around even that much), but she had gone no farther. Her nerve wasn’t just shot, it was shattered. When the gunshots and the maddening, ceaselessly revving engine stopped for awhile, she would think about making a break for it, she said, but then she would imagine Entragian catching up to her, running her off the road, pulling her out of her car, and shooting her in the head. Also, she told them, she had been convinced that help would arrive. Had to. Desperation was off the main road, yes, sure, but not that far off, and with the mine getting ready to reopen, people were always coming and going. Some people had come into town, she said. She had seen a Federal Express panel truck around five that after-noon and a Wickoff County Light and Power pickup aroundnoon of the next day, yesterday. Both went by onMain Street . She had heard music coming from the pickup. She didn’t hear Entragian’s cruiser that time, but five minutes or so after the pickup passed the laundrymat, there were more gunshots, and a man screaming “Oh, don’t! Oh, don’t!” in a voice so high it could have been a girl’s. After that, another endless night, not wanting to stay, not quite daring to try and make a break for it, eating snacks from the machine that stood at the end of the dryers, drinking water from the basin in the bathroom. Then a new day, with Entragian still circling like a vulture. She hadn’t been aware, she said, that he was bringing people into town and jugging them. By then all she’d been able to think about were plans for getting away, none of them seeming quite good enough. And, in a way, the laundrymat had begun to feel like home … to feel safe. Entragian had been in here once, had left, and hadn’t returned. He might never return.