Stephen King – The Waste Lands

him the voice of the choir seemed to swell.

“Are you sick, rose?”

There was no answer, of course. When his fingers left the faded pink bowl of the flower, it nodded back to its original position, growing out of the paint-splattered weeds in its quiet,

forgotten splendor.

Do roses bloom at this time of year? Jake wondered. Wild ones? Why would a wild rose

grow in a vacant lot, anyway? And if there’s one, how come there aren’t more?

He remained on his hands and knees a little longer, then realized he could stay here

looking at the rose for the rest of the afternoon (or maybe the rest of his life) and not come

any closer to solving its mystery. He had seen it plain for a moment, as he had seen

everything else in this forgotten, trash-littered corner of the city; he had seen it with its

mask off and its camouflage tossed aside. He wanted to see that again, but wanting would

not make it so.

It was time to go home.

He saw the two books he’d bought at The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind lying nearby.

As he picked them up, a bright silver object slipped from the pages of Charlie the

Choo-Choo and fell into a scruffy patch of weeds. Jake bent, favoring his hurt ankle, and

picked it up. As he did so, the choir seemed to sigh and swell, then fell back to its almost

inaudible hum.

“So that part was real, too,” he murmured. He ran the ball of his thumb over the blunt protruding points of the key and into those primi- tive V-shaped notches. He sent it skating

over the mild s-curves at the end of the third notch. Then he tucked it deep into the right

front pocket of his pants and began to limp back toward the fence.

He had reached it and was preparing to scramble over the top when a terrible thought

suddenly seized his mind.

The rose! What if somebody comes in here and picks it?

A little moan of horror escaped him. He turned back and after a moment his eyes picked it

out, although it was deep in the shadow of a neighboring building now—a tiny pink shape

in the dimness, vulnerable, beautiful, and alone.

I can’t leave it—I have to guard it!

But a voice spoke up in his mind, a voice that was surely that of the man he had met at the

way station in that strange other life. No one will pick it. Nor will any vandal crush it

beneath his heel because his dull eyes cannot abide the sight of its beauty. That is not the

danger. It can protect itself from such things as those.

A sense of deep relief swept through Jake.

Can I come here again and look at it? he asked the phantom voice.

When I’m low, or if the voices come hack and start their argument again? Can I come back

and look at it and have some peace?

The voice did not answer, and after a few moments of listening, Jake decided it was gone.

He tucked Charlie the Choo-Choo and Riddle-De-Dum! into the waistband of his

pants—which, he saw, were streaked with dirt and dotted with clinging burdocks—and

then grabbed the board fence. He boosted himself up, swung over the top, and dropped

onto the sidewalk of Second Avenue again, being careful to land on his good foot.

Traffic on the Avenue—both pedestrian and vehicular—was much heavier now as people

made their way home for the night. A few passersby looked at the dirty boy in the torn

blazer and untucked, flapping shirt as he jumped awkwardly down from the fence, but not

many. New Yorkers are used to the sight of people doing peculiar things.

He stood there a moment, feeling a sense of loss and realizing some- thing else, as

well—the arguing voices were still absent. That, at least, was something.

He glanced at the board fence; and the verse of spray-painted dog- gerel seemed to leap out

at him, perhaps because the paint was the same color as the rose.

“See the TURTLE of enormous girth” Jake muttered. “On his shell he holds the earth.” He shivered. “What a day! Boy!”

He turned and began to limp slowly in the direction of home.

19

THE DOORMAN MUST HAVE buzzed up as soon as Jake entered the lobby, because his

father was standing outside the elevator when it opened on the fifth floor. Elmer Chambers

was wearing faded jeans and cowboy boots that improved his five-ten to a rootin, tootin six

feet. His black, crewcut hair bolted up from his head; for as long as Jake could remem- ber,

his father had looked like a man who had just suffered some tremen- dous, galvanizing

shock. As soon as Jake stepped out of the elevator, Chambers seized him by the arm.

“Look at you!” His father’s eyes flicked up and down, taking in Jake’s dirty face and hands, the blood drying on his cheek and temple, the dusty pants, the torn blazer, and the burdock

that clung to his tie like some peculiar clip. “Get in here! Where the hell have you been?

Your mother’s just about off her fucking gourd!”

Without giving Jake a chance to answer, he dragged him through the apartment door. Jake

saw Greta Shaw standing in the archway between the dining room and the kitchen. She gave him a look of guarded sympathy, then disappeared before the eyes of “the mister”

could chance upon her.

Jake’s mother was sitting in her rocker. She got to her feet when she saw Jake, but she did

not leap to her feet; neither did she pelt across to the foyer so she could cover him with

kisses and invective. As she came toward him, Jake assessed her eyes and guessed she’d

had at least three Valium since noon. Maybe four. Both of his parents were firm believers

in better living through chemistry.

“You’re bleeding! Where have you been?” She made this inquiry in her cultured Vassar

voice, pronouncing been so it rhymed with seen. She might have been greeting an

acquaintance who had been involved in a minor traffic accident.

“Out,” he said.

His father gave him a rough shake. Jake wasn’t prepared for it. He stumbled and came

down on his bad ankle. The pain flared again, and he was suddenly furious. Jake didn’t

think his father was pissed because he had disappeared from school, leaving only his mad

composition behind; his father was pissed because Jake had had the temerity to fuck up his

own precious schedule.

To this point in his life, Jake had been aware of only three feelings about his father:

puzzlement, fear, and a species of weak, confused love. Now a fourth and fifth surfaced.

One was anger; the other was disgust. Mixed in with these unpleasant feelings was that

sense of homesickness. It was the largest thing inside him right now, weaving through

everything else like smoke. He looked at his father’s flushed cheeks and screaming haircut

and wished he was back in the vacant lot, looking at the rose and listening to the choir. This

is not my place, he thought. Not anymore. I have work to do. If only I knew what it was.

“Let go of me,” he said.

“What did you say to me?” His father’s blue eyes widened. They were very bloodshot

tonight. Jake guessed he had been dipping heavily into his supply of magic powder, and

that probably made this a bad time to cross him, but Jake realized he intended to cross him

just the same. He would not be shaken like a mouse in the jaws of a sadistic tomcat. Not

tonight. Maybe not ever again. He suddenly realized that a large part of his anger stemmed

from one simple fact: he could not talk to them about what had happened—what was still

happening. They had closed all the doors.

But I have a key, he thought, and touched its shape through the fabric of his pants. And the

rest of that strange verse occurred to him: If you want to run and play, /Come along the

BEAM today.

“I said let go of me,” he repeated. “I’ve got a sprained ankle and you’re hurting it.”

“I’ll hurt more than your ankle if you don’t—”

Sudden strength seemed to How into Jake. He seized the hand clamped on his arm just

below the shoulder and shoved it violently away. His father’s mouth dropped open.

“I don’t work for you,” Jake said. “I’m your son, remember? If you forgot, check the picture on your desk.”

His father’s upper lip pulled back from his perfectly capped teeth in a snarl that was two

parts surprise and one part fury. “Don’t you talk to me like that, mister—where in the hell is your respect?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I lost it on the way home.”