his previous two nights, was roaring along as if the pa-
trons expected to greet the dawn. He saw two tables had
vanished—victims of the fistfight that had broken out just before his last expedition into the john. Now people were dancing where the tables had been.
“About time,” Smokey said as Jack staggered the length of
the bar on the inside and put the case down by the refrigerator compartments. “You get those in there and go back for the
fucking Bud. You should have brought that first, anyway.”
“Lori didn’t say—”
Hot, incredible pain exploded in his foot as Smokey drove
one heavy shoe down on Jack’s sneaker. Jack uttered a muf-
fled scream and felt tears sting his eyes.
“Shut up,” Smokey said. “Lori don’t know shit from Shin-
ola, and you are smart enough to know it. Get back in there and run me out a case of Bud.”
He went back to the storeroom, limping on the foot
Smokey had stomped, wondering if the bones in some of his
toes might be broken. It seemed all too possible. His head
roared with smoke and noise and the jagged ripsaw rhythm of The Genny Valley Boys, two of them now noticeably weaving
on the bandstand. One thought stood out clearly: it might not be possible to wait until closing. He really might not be able
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to last that long. If Oatley was a prison and the Oatley Tap was his cell, then surely exhaustion was as much his warder as Smokey Updike—maybe even more so.
In spite of his worries about what the Territories might be like at this place, the magic juice seemed more and more to promise him his only sure way out. He could drink some and
flip over . . . and if he could manage to walk a mile west over there, two at the most, he could drink a bit more and flip back into the U.S.A. well over the town line of this horrible little place, perhaps as far west as Bushville or even Pembroke.
When I was six, when Jack-O was six, when—
He got the Bud and stumble-staggered out through the
door again . . . and the tall, rangy cowboy with the big hands, the one who looked like Randolph Scott, was standing there, looking at him.
“Hello, Jack,” he said, and Jack saw with rising terror that the irises of the man’s eyes were as yellow as chicken-claws.
“Didn’t somebody tell you to get gone? You don’t listen very good, do you?”
Jack stood with the case of Bud dragging at the ends of his arms, staring into those yellow eyes, and suddenly a horrid idea hammered into his mind: that this had been the lurker in the tunnel—this man-thing with its dead yellow eyes.
“Leave me alone,” he said—the words came out in a win-
tery little whisper.
He crowded closer. “You were supposed to get gone.”
Jack tried to back up . . . but now he was against the wall, and as the cowboy who looked like Randolph Scott leaned toward him, Jack could smell dead meat on its breath.
2
Between the time Jack started work on Thursday at noon and
four o’clock, when the Tap’s usual after-work crowd started to come in, the pay phone with the PLEASE LIMIT YOUR CALLS TO
THREE MINUTES sign over it rang twice.
The first time it rang, Jack felt no fear at all—and it turned out to be only a solicitor for the United Fund.
Two hours later, as Jack was bagging up the last of the previous night’s bottles, the telephone began to shrill again. This
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time his head snapped up like an animal which scents fire in a dry forest . . . except it wasn’t fire he sensed, but ice. He turned toward the telephone, which was only four feet from
where he was working, hearing the tendons in his neck creak.
He thought he must see the pay phone caked with ice, ice that was sweating through the phone’s black plastic case, extruding from the holes in the earpiece and the mouthpiece in lines of blue ice as thin as pencil-leads, hanging from the rotary dial and the coin return in icicle beards.
But it was just the phone, and all the coldness and death
was on the inside.
He stared at it, hypnotized.
“Jack!” Smokey yelled. “Answer the goddam phone! What
the fuck am I paying you for?”
Jack looked toward Smokey, as desperate as a cornered an-
imal . . . but Smokey was staring back with the thin-lipped, out-of-patience expression that he got on his face just before he popped Lori one. He started toward the phone, barely
aware that his feet were moving; he stepped deeper and
deeper into that capsule of coldness, feeling the gooseflesh run up his arms, feeling the moisture crackle in his nose.
He reached out and grasped the phone. His hand went
numb.
He put it to his ear. His ear went numb.
“Oatley Tap,” he said into that deadly blackness, and his
mouth went numb.
The voice that came out of the phone was the cracked,
rasping croak of something long dead, some creature which
could never be seen by the living: the sight of it would drive a living person insane, or strike him dead with frost-etchings on his lips and staring eyes blinded by cataracts of ice. “Jack,”
this scabrous, rattling voice whispered up out of the earpiece, and his face went numb, the way it did when you needed to
spend a heavy day in the dentist’s chair and the guy needled you up with a little too much Novocain. “You get your ass back home, Jack.”
From far away, a distance of light-years, it seemed, he
could hear his voice repeating: “Oatley Tap, is anyone there?
Hello? . . . Hello? . . .”
Cold, so cold.
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His throat was numb. He drew breath and his lungs
seemed to freeze. Soon the chambers of his heart would ice
up and he would simply drop dead.
That chilly voice whispered, “Bad things can happen to a boy alone on the road, Jack. Ask anybody.”
He hung the phone up with a quick, clumsy reaching ges-
ture. He pulled his hand back and then stood looking at the phone.
“Was it the asshole, Jack?” Lori asked, and her voice was
distant . . . but a little closer than his own voice had seemed a few moments ago. The world was coming back. On the hand-set of the pay phone he could see the shape of his hand, outlined in a glittering rime of frost. As he looked, the frost began to melt and run down the black plastic.
3
That was the night—Thursday night—that Jack first saw
Genny County’s answer to Randolph Scott. The crowd was a
little smaller than it had been Wednesday night—very much a day-before-payday crowd—but there were still enough men
present to fill the bar and spill over into the tables and booths.
They were town men from a rural area where the plows
were now probably rusting forgotten in back sheds, men who
perhaps wanted to be farmers but had forgotten how. There
were a lot of John Deere caps in evidence, but to Jack, very few of these men looked as if they would be at home riding a tractor. These were men in gray chinos and brown chinos and green chinos; men with their names stitched on blue shirts in gold thread; men in square-toed Dingo Boots and men in
great big clumping Survivors. These men carried their keys
on their belts. These men had wrinkles but no laugh-lines;
their mouths were dour. These men wore cowboy hats and
when Jack looked at the bar from in back of the stools, there were as many as eight who looked like Charlie Daniels in the chewing-tobacco ads. But these men didn’t chew; these men
smoked cigarettes, and a lot of them.
Jack was cleaning the bubble front of the jukebox when
Digger Atwell came in. The juke was turned off; the Yankees were on the cable, and the men at the bar were watching intently. The night before, Atwell had been in the Oatley male’s
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version of sports clothes (chinos, khaki shirt with a lot of pens in one of the two big pockets, steel-toed workboots).
Tonight he was wearing a blue cop’s uniform. A large gun
with wood grips hung in a holster on his creaking leather belt.
He glanced at Jack, who thought of Smokey saying I’ve
heard that ole Digger’s got a taste for kids on the road. Boys, mostly, and flinched back as if guilty of something. Digger Atwell grinned a wide, slow grin. “Decided to stick around