She laughed.
He returned to the Graymoor that afternoon and collected the rest of his money. Correzente was smiling and robust.
Bracken was thanked profusely. More business would be thrown his way.
Bracken nodded, and Correzente leaned toward him in a fatherly way.
“Can you keep your mouth shut about all this?”
“I always keep my mouth shut.” Bracken said, and left.
Benny the Bull gave him a handshake and an envelope containing a plane ticket to Cleveland. Once there, Bracken bought a used car and drove back. He took up residence in Norma Correzente’s second apartment. She brought him a carton of paperback novels. He read them and watched old movies on TV. He did not go out even when it would have been safe to go out. They made love regularly. It was like being in a very plush jail. Ten weeks after the contract with Dan Vittorio had been fulfilled, she killed the rabbit.
Bracken left town again.
He was in Palm Springs, and the phone connection was very bad.
“Mr. Bracken?”
“Yes. Talk louder, please.” Bracken was dressed in sweaty tennis whites; the girl on the bed wore only her skin. A tennis racket dangled from one hand. She swished at the air with it idly watching Bracken with the nearly expressionless eyes of experienced desire.
“This is Benito Torreos, Mr. Bracken.”
“Yes.”
“You did a job for my Don seven months ago. You remember?”
“Yes.” New sweat began to crawl down his back.
“He wants to see you. He’s dying.”
Bracken thought carefully, knowing his life almost certainly depended on his next words. He did not see what he had done as a double-cross: he had fulfilled two separate and exclusive contracts, and had been able to vacation from then until now on his earnings. But the old man would see it as a cross, a stain on his pride and good faith. He was a man with a belly.
“Why does he want to see me?”
“To ask a question.”
142
The connection was very bad, and Bracken knew that to simply replace the instrument in its cradle would likely mean death. The family has a long arm. It was either to go Vito or run, and the connection was very bad.
“How is Mrs. Correzente?” he asked politely.
“Dead,” Benny Torreos said flatly. “She died last month, in childbirth.”
The bedroom was gothic shades of white on white – rug, walls, ceiling, curtains, even the sky beyond the windows. A steady drizzle was falling outside the Graymoor. Don Vito, shrunken to the size of a jockey twisted from the back of his horse, lay immured in his deathbed, which was also white.
He lifted one hand to Bracken. It shook briefly in the air, then dropped to the snowy coverlet again. There was a soft click as Torreos left them, closing the door to rejoin the relatives in the front room. The women out there were dressed in black, and shawled. Even the business suits of their men seemed old fashioned, as if death had dragged Sicily back into the fabric of the clothes and of the wearers by force.
Bracken went to the bed. The old man’s face had fallen away to a skull. There was a sour smell that seemed to come from the folds of his flesh. His mouth had been twisted down cruelly on the left side, and the left hand was claw-fingered and frozen.
“Bracken,” Correzente said. His voice was blurred and cottony. The operative side of his face lifted in a grotesque smile while the other side remained impassive. “I must tell you. I…”
“Benny said you had a question.”
“Yes.” The word came out yeth. “But I must…tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
“They told me you did a good job. You do. You have killed my wife and me.”
“I did my job.”
“Pride”, the old man said, and smiled apologetically. “Pride …” He seemed to gather himself. “She promised to be a good wife, a dutiful wife. She said she had been taking pills but these pills were no more.
She said she would bear me a son.
“We made love together. But I am old. She asked if it was too much for me.” The skull smile again. “Should I tell my chastened wife that I am no more a man? No, I say no too much…
“We make love more. And I, I have a stroke. A little blood vessel up here” – he tapped his head gravely – “goes pop, like a balloon. The doctor comes and says, No more, Vito. You will kill yourself. And I 143
say, yes, more. Until I have put a child in her.
“Pride …
. “Then the doctor say, You have done this. You have made a baby at seventy-eight. He say, I would give you a cigar, Vito, but you must smoke no more cigars. ”
Bracken shifted his legs. The whiteness of the room was oppressive, creeping.
“I am overjoyed. I am a man, much man. I have a belly. The house is filled with my family. We have, oh, the word is for much food – ”
“Banquet,” Bracken said.
“Yes. And I sit at the head of the table, then rise. My wife, she rises. I toast her with wine and tell them. I say, I have given my belly to my wife!” “I am the happiness of the world. I am beyond laughings and dirty jokes. I give her money for the wheels and tables. I give her what she wants. Then one night, we argue. Much hard words pass. And then
…I have this. Pain. One eye goes blind. She saw it and screamed. She runs for the telephone in the living room with her belly before her. I try to call but am down a dark hole. When I wake up, they tell me she has fallen on the steps going down to the living room. They tell me she is in the hospital. Then they tell me…” The hand rose again. “Fut.” Don Vito said. The dreadful smile came and went.
Correzente was visibly tired now. His eyes closed, then opened slowly, as if weighted.
“You see?” he whispered. “The irony?”
“Benny said you had a question,” Bracken said.
The dead face looked up at him steadily. “The baby lives,” he said.
“They tell me this. In a glass house.”
“Incubator.”
“They say the baby has pretty blue eyes.”
Bracken said nothing.
“You made one of Norma’s eyes black. But they were brown. And there is no blue-eyed Sicilian.”
“Benny said you had a question,” Bracken said.
“I have ask my question. My doctor say, it’s genes. I do not know genes. I only know what a dying man lies in bed and thinks. How she was prideful and how she could wait.”
Bracken looked down at him, his mind a thousand miles away. He thought of the blonde, how she served, the brown flesh of her legs below the blinding white of her skirt, the flickering glimpse of her panties, the fan of her hair on the pillow, her trained tennis muscles.
“How stupid you are,” he said to the old man, softly. He leaned forward, breathing in the scent of Correzente’s doom. “Death has made 144
you senile. I have my own belly. Do you think I would take my own leavings?”
A line of spittle was making a slow trek down from the corner of the old man’s mouth to his chin.
“The baby’s eyes will go brown. Too bad you won’t see it. Goodbye, stupid old man.” He got up. The room was white and full of death. He left and went back to Palm Springs.
145
SKYBAR
by Brian Hartz and Stephen King
The following story was written from a contest with Doubleday books to promote the 1982 Do it Yourself Bestseller book edited by Tom Silberkleit and Jerry Biederman. There were many authors featured in the book, including Belva Plain and Isaac Asimov. Each writer provided the beginning and ending to a story. It was up to the reader to provide the middle, hence the name Do It
Yourself Bestseller. As part of the promotion, Doubleday books held a national contest to see who could write the best middle portion. Each winner was chosen by the individual writer – in this case, Stephen King. Brian Hartz was 18 at the time it was written.
There were twelve of us when we went in that night, but only two of us came out – my friend Kirby and me. And Kirby was insane. All of the things I’m going to tell you about happened twelve years ago. I was eleven then, in the sixth grade. Kirby was ten and in the fifth. In those days, before gas shot up to $1.40 a gallon or more (as I recall the best deal in town was at Dewey’s Sunoco, where you could get hi-test for 31.9 cents, plus double S&H Green stamps), Skybar Amusement Park was still a growing concern; its great double Ferris wheel turned endlessly against a summer sky, and you could hear the great, grinding mechanical laugh of the fun-house clown even at my house, five miles inland, when the wind was right. Yeah, Skybar was the place to go, all right – you could blast away with the .22 of your choice at Pop Dupree’s Dead Eye Shootin’ Gallery, you could ride the Whip until you puked, wander into the Mirror Labyrinth, or look at the Adults Only freak tent and wonder what was in there…you especially wondered when the people came out, white-faced, some of the women crying, or hysterical.