for a while, boy?”
“Yes, sir,” Jack muttered, and squirted more Windex onto
the juke’s bubble front, although it was already as clean as it was going to get. He was only waiting for Atwell to go away.
After a while, Atwell did. Jack turned to watch the beefy cop cross to the bar . . . and that was when the man at the far left end of the bar turned around and looked at him.
Randolph Scott, Jack thought at once, that’s just who he looks like.
But in spite of the rangy and uncompromising lines of his
face, the real Randolph Scott had had an undeniable look of heroism; if his good looks had been harsh, they had also been part of a face that could smile. This man looked both bored and somehow crazy.
And with real fright, Jack realized the man was looking at
him, at Jack. Nor had he simply turned around during the commercial to see who might be in the bar; he had turned
around to look at Jack. Jack knew this was so.
The phone. The ringing phone.
With a tremendous effort, Jack pulled his gaze away. He
looked back into the bubble front of the juke and saw his own frightened face hovering, ghostlike, over the records inside.
The telephone began to shriek on the wall.
The man at the left end of the bar looked at it . . . and then looked back at Jack, who stood frozen by the jukebox with his bottle of Windex in one hand and a rag in the other, his hair stiffening, his skin freezing.
“If it’s that asshole again, I’m gonna get me a whistle to
start blowing down the phone when he calls, Smokey,” Lori
was saying as she walked toward it. “I swear to God I am.”
She might have been an actress in a play, and all the cus-
tomers extras paid the standard SAG rate of thirty-five dollars a day. The only two real people in the world were him and this
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dreadful cowboy with the big hands and the eyes Jack could
not . . . quite . . . see.
Suddenly, shockingly, the cowboy mouthed these words:
Get your ass home. And winked.
The phone stopped ringing even as Lori stretched out her
hand to it.
Randolph Scott turned around, drained his glass, and
yelled, “Bring me another tapper, okay?”
“I’ll be damned,” Lori said. “That phone’s got the ghosts.”
4
Later on, in the storeroom, Jack asked Lori who the guy was who looked like Randolph Scott.
“Who looks like who? ” she asked.
“An old cowboy actor. He was sitting down at the end of
the bar.”
She shrugged. “They all look the same to me, Jack. Just a
bunch of swinging dicks out for a good time. On Thursday
nights they usually pay for it with the little woman’s Beano money.”
“He calls beers ‘tappers.’ ”
Her eyes lit. “Oh yeah! Him. He looks mean.” She said this
last with actual appreciation . . . as if admiring the straight-ness of his nose or the whiteness of his smile.
“Who is he?”
“I don’t know his name,” Lori said. “He’s only been
around the last week or two. I guess the mill must be hiring again. It—”
“For Christ’s sake, Jack, did I tell you to run me out a keg or not?”
Jack had been in the process of walking one of the big kegs of Busch onto the foot of the hand-dolly. Because his weight and the keg’s weight were so close, it was an act requiring a good deal of careful balancing. When Smokey shouted from
the doorway, Lori screamed and Jack jumped. He lost control of the keg and it went over on its side, the cap shooting out like a champagne cork, beer following in a white-gold jet. Smokey was still shouting at him but Jack could only stare at the beer, frozen . . . until Smokey popped him one.
When he got back out to the taproom perhaps twenty min-
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utes later, holding a Kleenex against his swelling nose, Randolph Scott had been gone.
5
I’m six.
John Benjamin Sawyer is six.
Six—
Jack shook his head, trying to clear this steady, repeating thought out as the rangy millhand who was not a millhand
leaned closer and closer. His eyes . . . yellow and somehow scaly. He— it—blinked, a rapid, milky, swimming blink, and Jack realized it had nictitating membranes over its eyeballs.
“You were supposed to get gone,” it whispered again, and reached toward Jack with hands that were beginning to twist and plate and harden.
The door banged open, letting in a raucous flood of the
Oak Ridge Boys.
“Jack, if you don’t quit lollygagging, I’m going to have to make you sorry,” Smokey said from behind Randolph Scott.
Scott stepped backward. No melting, hardening hooves here;
his hands were just hands again—big and powerful, their
backs crisscrossed with prominent ridged veins. There was
another milky, swirling sort of blink that didn’t involve the eyelids at all . . . and then the man’s eyes were not yellow but a simple faded blue. He gave Jack a final glance and then
headed toward the men’s room.
Smokey came toward Jack now, his paper cap tipped for-
ward, his narrow weasel’s head slightly inclined, his lips
parted to show his alligator teeth.
“Don’t make me speak to you again,” Smokey said. “This
is your last warning, and don’t you think I don’t mean it.”
As it had against Osmond, Jack’s fury suddenly rose up—
that sort of fury, closely linked as it is to a sense of hopeless injustice, is perhaps never as strong as it is at twelve—college students sometimes think they feel it, but it is usually little more than an intellectual echo.
This time it boiled over.
“I’m not your dog, so don’t you treat me like I am,” Jack
said, and took a step toward Smokey Updike on legs that were still rubbery with fear.
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Surprised—possibly even flabbergasted—by Jack’s totally
unexpected anger, Smokey backed up a step.
“Jack, I’m warning you—”
“No, man, I’m warning you,” Jack heard himself say. “I’m not Lori. I don’t want to be hit. And if you hit me, I’m going to hit you back, or something.”
Smokey Updike’s discomposure was only momentary. He
had most assuredly not seen everything—not living in Oatley, he hadn’t—but he thought he had, and even for a minor leaguer, sometimes assurance can be enough.
He reached out to grab Jack’s collar.
“Don’t you smart off to me, Jack,” he said, drawing Jack
close. “As long as you’re in Oatley, my dog is just what you are. As long as you’re in Oatley I’ll pet you when I want and I’ll beat you when I want.”
He adminstered a single neck-snapping shake. Jack bit his
tongue and cried out. Hectic spots of anger now glowed in
Smokey’s pale cheeks like cheap rouge.
“You may not think that is so right now, but Jack, it is. As long as you’re in Oatley you’re my dog, and you’ll be in Oatley until I decide to let you go. And we might as well start getting that learned right now.”
He pulled his fist back. For a moment the three naked sixty-watt bulbs which hung in this narrow hallway sparkled crazily on the diamond chips of the horseshoe-shaped pinky ring he
wore. Then the fist pistoned forward and slammed into the side of Jack’s face. He was driven backward into the graffiti-covered wall, the side of his face first flaring and then going numb. The taste of his own blood washed into his mouth.
Smokey looked at him—the close, judgmental stare of a
man who might be thinking about buying a heifer or a lottery number. He must not have seen the expression he wanted to
see in Jack’s eye, because he grabbed the dazed boy again,
presumably the better to center him for a second shot.
At that moment a woman shrieked, from the Tap, “No,
Glen! No! ” There was a tangle of bellowing male voices, most of them alarmed. Another woman screamed—a high,
drilling sound. Then a gunshot.
“Shit on toast! ” Smokey cried, enunciating each word as carefully as an actor on a Broadway stage. He threw Jack
back against the wall, whirled, and slammed out through the
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swinging door. The gun went off again and there was a
scream of pain.
Jack was sure of only one thing—the time had come to get
out. Not at the end of tonight’s shift, or tomorrow’s, or on Sunday morning. Right now.
The uproar seemed to be quieting down. There were no