Текст книги "The Bazaar of Bad Dreams"

Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 33 страниц)

The first play I was cast in was She Stoops to Conquer, and that’s where I met Vicky Abington. I was Tony Lumpkin and she was Constance Neville. She was a beautiful girl with masses of curly blond hair, very thin and high-strung. Far too beautiful for me, I thought, but eventually I got up enough nerve to ask her out for coffee. That was how it began. We’d sit for hours in Nordy’s – that’s the hamburger joint in Pitt Union – and she’d pour out all her troubles, which mostly had to do with her dominating mother, and tell me about her ambitions, which were all about the theater, especially serious theater in New York. Twenty-five years ago there still was such a thing.

I knew she got pills at the Nordenberg Wellness Center – maybe for anxiety, maybe for depression, maybe for both – but I thought, That’s just because she’s ambitious and creative, probably most really great actors and actresses take those pills. Probably Meryl Streep takes those pills, or did before she got famous in The Deer Hunter. And you know what? Vicky had a great sense of humor, which is something many beautiful women seem to lack, especially if they suffer from the nervous complaint. She could laugh at herself, and often did. She said being able to do that was the only thing that kept her sane.

We were cast as Nick and Honey in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and got better reviews than the kids who played George and Martha. After that we weren’t just coffee buddies, we were a couple. Sometimes we made out in a dark corner of the Union, although those sessions often ended with her crying and saying she knew she wasn’t good enough, she’d fail at acting just like her mother said she would. One night – this was after the cast party for Deathtrap, our junior year – we had sex. It was the only time. She said she loved it, it was wonderful, but I guess it wasn’t. Not for her, anyway, because she’d never do it again.

In the summer of 2000, we stayed on campus because there was going to be a summer production of The Music Man in Frick Park. It was a huge deal because Mandy Patinkin was going to direct it. Vicky and I both tried out. I wasn’t a bit nervous, because I didn’t expect to get anything, but that show had become the biggest thing in Vicky’s life. She called it her first step to stardom, saying it the way people do when they’re joking but not really. We were called in by sixes, each of us holding a card saying the part we were most interested in, and Vicky was shaking like a leaf while we waited outside the rehearsal hall. I put my arm around her and she quieted, but just a little. She was so white her makeup looked like a mask.

I went in and handed over my wish-card with Mayor Shinn written on it, because that’s a smallish part in the show, and damned if I didn’t end up getting the lead role – Harold Hill, the charming con man. Vicky tried out for Marian Paroo, the librarian who gives piano lessons. She’s the female lead. She read all right, I thought – not great, not her best, but all right. Then came the singing.

It was Marian’s big number. If you don’t know it, it’s this very sweet and simple song called ‘Goodnight, My Someone.’ She’d sung it for me – a capella – half a dozen times, and she was perfect. Sweet and sad and hopeful. But that day in the rehearsal hall, Vicky screwed the pooch. That girl was just clench-your-fists-and-close-your-eyes awful. She couldn’t find her note and had to start again not once but twice. I could see Patinkin getting impatient, because he had half a dozen other girls waiting to read and sing. The accompanist was rolling her eyes. I wanted to punch her right in her stupid, horsey face.

By the time Vicky finished, she was trembling all over. Mr Patinkin thanked her, and she thanked him, all very polite, and then ran. I caught up with her before she could get out of the building and told her she had been great. She smiled and thanked me and said we both knew better. I said that if Mr Patinkin was as good as everyone said, he’d look past her nerves and see what a great actress she was. She hugged me and said I was her best friend. Besides, she said, there will be other shows. Next time I’ll take a Valium before I try out. I was just afraid it would change my voice, because I’ve heard that some pills can do that. Then she laughed and said, But how much worse could it be than it was today? I said I’d buy her an ice cream at Nordy’s, she said that sounded good, and off we went.

We were walking down the sidewalk, hand in hand, which made me remember all the times I walked back and forth to Mary Day Grammar holding hands with Marlee Jacobs. I won’t say those thoughts summoned him, but I won’t say they didn’t, either. I don’t know. I only know that some nights I lie awake in my cell, wondering.

I guess she was feeling a little better, because as we walked along she was talking about what a great Professor Hill I’d make, when someone yelled at us from the other side of the street. Only it wasn’t a yell; it was a donkey bray.

GEORGE AND VICKY UP IN A TREE! F-U-C-K-I-N-G!

It was him. The bad little kid. Same shorts, same sweater, same orange hair sticking out from under that beanie with the plastic propeller on top. Over ten years had passed and he hadn’t aged a day. It was like being thrown back in time, only now it was Vicky Abington, not Marlee Jacobs, and we were on Reynolds Street in Pittsburgh instead of School Street in Talbot, Alabama.

What in the world, Vicky said. Do you know that boy, George?

Well, what was I going to say to that? I didn’t say anything. I was so far beyond surprise I couldn’t even open my mouth.

You act like shit and you sing worse! he shouted. CROWS sing better than you do! And you’re UGLEEE! UGLEE VICKEE is what you are!

She put her hands over her mouth, and I remember how big her eyes were, and how they were filling up with tears all over again.

Suck his dink, why don’t you? he shouted. That’s the only way an ugly no-talent cunt like you will ever get a part!

I started for him, only it didn’t feel real. It felt like it was all happening in a dream. It was late afternoon and Reynolds Street was full of traffic, but I never thought of that. Vicky did, though. She caught me by the arm and pulled me back. I think I owe her my life, because a big bus went past only a second or two later, blaring its horn.

Don’t, she said. He’s not worth it, whoever he is.

There was a truck right behind the bus, and once they were both by us, we saw the kid running up the other side of the street with his big ass jouncing. He got to the corner and turned it, but before he did, he shoved down the back of his shorts, bent over, and mooned us.

Vicky sat down on a bench and I sat down beside her. She asked me again who he was, and I said I didn’t know.

Then how did he know our names? she asked.

I don’t know, I repeated.

Well, he was right about one thing, she said. If I want a part in The Music Man, I should go back and suck Mandy Patinkin’s cock. Then she laughed, and this time it was real laughing, the kind that comes all the way up from the belly. She threw back her head and just let fly. Did you see that little ugly butt? she said. Like two muffins ready for the oven!

That got me going. We put our arms around each other, and put our heads together cheek to cheek, and really howled. I thought we were okay, but the truth of it – you never see these things at the time, do you? – is that we were both hysterical. Me because it was the same kid from all those years ago, Vicky because she believed what he said: she was no good, and even if she was, she’d never be able to get on top of her nerves enough to show it.

I walked her back to Fudgy Acres, this big old apartment house that rented exclusively to young women – whom we still called coeds then – and she hugged me and told me again that I would make a great Harold Hill. Something about the way she said that worried me, and I asked if she was all right. She said, Of course I am, silly, and went running up the walk. That was the last time I saw her alive.

After the funeral, I took Carla Winston out for coffee, because she was the only girl in Fudgy Acres Vicky had been close to. I ended up pouring her cup into a glass, because her hands were shaking so badly I was afraid she’d burn herself. Carla wasn’t just brokenhearted; she blamed herself for what happened. The same way I’m sure Mrs Peckham blamed herself for what happened to Marlee.

She came across Vicky in the downstairs lounge that afternoon, staring at the TV. Only the TV was turned off. She said Vicky seemed distant and disconnected. She’d seen Vicky that way before, when she lost count of her pills and took one too many, or took them in the wrong order. She asked if Vicky wanted to go to the Wellness Center and get looked at. Vicky said no, she was fine, it had been a hard day but she’d be feeling better very soon.

There was a nasty little kid, Vicky told Carla. I fucked up my tryout, and then this kid started ragging on me.

That’s too bad, Carla said.

George knew him, Vicky said. He told me he didn’t, but I could tell he did. Do you want to know what I think?

Carla said sure. By then she was positive Vicky had screwed up her meds, smoked some dope, or both.

I think George put him up to it, she said. For a tease. But when he saw how upset I was, he was sorry and tried to make the kid stop. Only the kid wouldn’t.

Carla said, That doesn’t make sense, Vic. George would never tease you about a part. He likes you.

Vicky said, That kid was right, though. I might as well give up.

At this point in Carla’s story, I told her the kid had nothing to do with me. Carla said I didn’t even have to tell her that, she knew I was a good guy and how much I cared for Vicky. Then she started to cry.

It’s my fault, not yours, she said. I could see she was screwed up, but I didn’t do anything. And you know what happened. That’s on me, too, because she didn’t really mean to. I’m sure she didn’t.

Carla left Vicky and went upstairs to study. A couple of hours later, she went down to Vicky’s room.

I thought she might like to go out and get something to eat, she said. Or if the pills had worn off, maybe have a glass of wine. Only she wasn’t there. So I checked the lounge, but she wasn’t there, either. A couple of girls were watching TV, and one said she thought she saw Vicky going downstairs a little while ago, probably to do a wash.

Because she had some sheets, the girl said.

That worried Carla, although she wouldn’t let herself think why. She went downstairs, but there was no one in the laundry room and none of the washers was going. The next room along was the box room, where the girls stored their luggage. She heard sounds from there, and when she went in, she saw Vicky with her back to her. She was standing on a little stack of suitcases. She’d tied two sheets together to make a hanging rope. One end was noosed around her neck. The other was tied to an overhead pipe.

But the thing was, Carla told me, there were only three suitcases, and plenty of slack in the sheets. If she’d meant business, she would have used one sheet and stood some girl’s trunk on end. It was only what theater people call a dress rehearsal.

You don’t know that for sure, I said. You don’t know how many of her pills she might have taken, or how confused she was.

I know what I saw, Carla said. She could have stepped right off those suitcases and onto the floor without pulling the noose tight. But I didn’t think of that then. I was too shocked. I just yelled her name.

That loud shout from behind startled her, and instead of stepping off the suitcases, Vicky jerked and toppled forward, the suitcases sliding along the floor behind. She would have hit the concrete floor smack on her belly, Carla said, but there wasn’t that much slack in her rope. She still might have lived if the knot holding the two sheets together had given way, but it didn’t. Her falling weight pulled the noose tight and yanked her head up hard.

I heard the snap when her neck broke, Carla said. It was loud. And it was my fault.

Then she cried and cried and cried.

I got her out of the coffee shop and into a bus shelter on the corner. I told her over and over again that it hadn’t been her fault, and eventually she stopped crying. She even smiled a little.

She said, You’re very persuasive, George.

What I didn’t tell her – because she wouldn’t have believed it – was that my persuasiveness came from absolute certainty.

5

‘The bad little kid came after the people I cared about,’ Hallas said.

Bradley nodded. It was obvious that Hallas believed it, and if this story had come out at the trial, it might have earned the man a life sentence instead of a billet in Needle Manor. The jury very likely wouldn’t have been completely sold, but it would have given them an excuse to take the death penalty off the table. Now it was probably too late. A written motion requesting a stay based on Hallas’s story of the bad little kid would look like grasping at straws. You had to be in his presence, and see the absolute certainty on his face. To hear it in his voice.

The condemned man, meanwhile, was looking at him through the slightly clouded Plexiglas with a trace of a smile. ‘That kid wasn’t just bad; he was also greedy. For him, it always had to be a twofer. One dead; one left to baste in a nice warm gravy of guilt.’

‘You must have convinced Carla,’ Bradley said. ‘She married you, after all.’

‘I never convinced her completely, and she never believed in the bad little kid at all. If she had, she would have been at the trial, and we’d still be married.’ He stared through the barrier at Bradley, his eyes dead level. ‘If she had, she would have been glad that I killed him.’

The guard in the corner – McGregor – looked at his watch, removed his earbuds, and stood up. ‘I don’t want to hurry you along, Counselor, but it’s eleven thirty, and pretty soon your client has to be back in his cell for the midday count.’

‘I don’t see why you can’t count him right here,’ Bradley said … but mildly. It didn’t do to get on the mean side of any guard, and although McGregor was one of the better ones, Bradley was sure he had a mean side. It was a requirement for men charged with overseeing hard cons. ‘You’re looking at him, after all.’

‘Rules are rules,’ McGregor said, then raised his hand, as if to stifle a protest Bradley hadn’t made. ‘I know you’re entitled to as much time as you want this close to his date, so if you want to wait around, I’ll bring him back after count. He’ll miss his lunch, though, and probably you will too.’

They watched McGregor return to his seat and once more replace his earbuds. When Hallas turned back to the Plexi barrier, there was more than a trace of a smile on his lips. ‘Hell, you could probably guess the rest.’

Although Bradley was sure he could, he folded his hands on his blank legal pad and said, ‘Why don’t you tell me anyway?’

6

I declined the part of Harold Hill and dropped out of Drama Club. I had lost my taste for acting. During my final year at Pitt, I concentrated on my business classes, especially accounting, and Carla Winston. The year I graduated, we were married. My father was my best man. He died three years later.

One of the mines he was responsible for was in the town of Louisa. That’s a little south of Ironville, where he still lived with Nona McCarthy – Mama Nonie – as his ‘housekeeper.’ The mine was called Fair Deep. One day there was a rockfall in its second parlor, which was about two hundred feet down. Not serious, everyone got out fine, but my father went down with a couple of company guys from the front office to look at the damage and try to figure out how long it would take to get things up and running again. He never came out. None of them did.

That boy keeps calling, Nonie said later. She had always been a pretty woman, but in the year after my father died, she bloomed out in wrinkles and dewlaps. Her walk turned into a shuffle, and she hunched her shoulders whenever anyone came into the room, as if she expected to be struck. It wasn’t my father’s death that did it to her; it was the bad little kid.

He keeps calling. He calls me a nigger bitch, but I don’t mind that. I been called worse. That kind of thing rolls right off my back. What doesn’t is him saying it happened because of the present I gave your father. Those boots. That can’t be true, can it, Georgie? It had to’ve been something else. He had to’ve been wearing his felts. He never would have forgotten his felts after a mine accident, even one that didn’t seem serious.

I agreed, but I could see the doubt eating into her like acid.

The boots were Trailman Specials. She gave them to him for his birthday not two months before the explosion in Fair Deep. They must have set her back at least three hundred dollars, but they were worth every penny. Knee high, leather as supple as silk, but tough. They were the kind of boots a man could wear all his life and then pass on to his son. Hobnail boots, you understand, and nails like that can strike sparks on the right surface, just like flint on steel.

My dad never would have worn nailboots into a mine where there might be methane or firedamp, and don’t tell me he could have just forgot, not when he and those other two were toting respirators on their hips and wearing oxygen bottles on their backs. Even if he had been wearing the Specials, Mama Nonie was right – he would also have been wearing felts over them. She didn’t need me to tell her; she knew how careful he was. But even the craziest idea can work its way into your mind if you’re lonely and grief-stricken and someone keeps harping on it. It can wriggle in there like a bloodworm, and lay its eggs, and pretty soon your whole brain is squirming with maggots.

I told her to change her phone number, and she did, but the kid got the new one and kept calling, telling her my father had forgotten what he had on his feet and one of those hobnails struck a spark, and there went the old ballgame.

Never would have happened if you hadn’t given him those boots, you stupid black bitch. That’s the kind of thing he said, and probably worse that she wouldn’t tell me.

Finally she had the phone taken out altogether. I told her she had to have a phone, living by herself like she did, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She said, Sometimes he calls in the middle of the night, Georgie. You don’t know how it is, lying awake and listening to the telephone ring and knowing it’s that child. What kind of parents he has to let him do such things I can’t imagine.

Unplug it at night, I said.

She said, I did. But sometimes it rings anyway.

I told her that was just her imagination. And I tried to believe it, but I never did, Mr Bradley. If that bad kid could get hold of Marlee’s Steve Austin lunchbox, and know how badly Vicky messed up her tryout, and about the Trailman Specials – if he could stay young, year after year – then sure, he could make a phone ring even if it was unplugged. Bible says the devil was set free to roam the earth, that God’s hand would not stay him. I don’t know if that bad little kid was the devil, but I know he was a devil.

Nor do I know if an ambulance call could have saved Mama Nonie. All I know is that when she had her heart attack, she couldn’t call for one because the phone was gone. She died alone, in her kitchen. A neighbor lady found her the next day.

Carla and I went to the funeral, and after Nonie was laid to rest, we spent the night in the house she and my father had shared. I woke up from a bad dream just before daybreak and couldn’t get back to sleep. When I heard the newspaper flop on the porch, I went to get it and saw the flag was up on the mailbox. I walked down to the street in my robe and slippers and opened it. Inside there was a beanie with a plastic propeller on top. I fished it out and it was hot, like the person who’d just taken it off was burning up with fever. Touching it made me feel contaminated, but I turned it over and looked inside. It was greasy with some sort of hair oil, the old-fashioned stuff hardly anyone uses anymore. There were a few orangey hairs sticking in it. There was also a note, printed the way a kid might do it – the letters all crooked and slanting downhill. The note said, KEEP IT, I HAVE ANOTHER ONE.

I took the goddam thing inside – tweezed between my thumb and index finger, that was as much as I wanted to touch it – and stuck it in the kitchen woodstove. I put a match to it and it went up all at once: ka-floomp. The flames were greenish. When Carla came down half an hour later, she sniffed and said, What’s that awful smell? It’s like low tide!

I told her it was most likely the septic tank out back, full up and needing to be pumped, but I knew better. That was the stink of methane, probably the last thing my father smelled before something sparked and blew him and those two others to kingdom come.

By then I had a job with an accounting firm – one of the biggest independents in the Midwest – and I worked my way up the ladder pretty quickly. I find that if you come in early, leave late, and keep your eye on the ball in between, that just about has to happen. Carla and I wanted kids, and we could afford them, but it didn’t happen; she got her visit from the cardinal every month, just as regular as clockwork. We went to see an OB in Topeka, and he did all the usual tests. He said we were fine, and it was too early to talk about fertility treatments. He told us to go home, relax, and enjoy our sex life.

So that’s what we did, and eleven months later, my wife’s visits from the cardinal stopped. She had been raised Catholic, and stopped going to church when she was in college, but when she knew for sure she was pregnant, she started going again and dragged me with her. We went to St Andrew’s. I didn’t mind. If she wanted to give God the credit for the bun in her oven, that was okay with me.

She was in her sixth month when the miscarriage happened. Because of the accident that wasn’t really an accident. The baby lived for a few hours, then died. It was a girl. Because she needed a name, we named her Helen, after Carla’s grandmother.

The accident happened after church. When mass was over, we were going to have a nice lunch downtown, then go home, where I’d watch the football game. Carla would put her feet up and rest and enjoy being pregnant. She did enjoy it, Mr Bradley. Every day of it, even early on when she was sick in the mornings.

I saw the bad little kid as soon as we came out. Same baggy shorts, same sweater, same little round boy-tits and poochy belly. The beanie I found in the mailbox was blue, and the one he was wearing when we came out of the church was green, but it had the same kind of plastic propeller. I’d grown from a little boy to a man with the first threads of gray in his hair, but that bad little kid was still six years old. Seven at most.

He was standing back a little way. There was another kid in front of him. An ordinary kid, the kind who would grow up. He looked stunned and afraid. He had something in his hand. It looked like the ball on the end of the Bolo Bouncer Mama Nonie gave me all those years ago.

Go on, the bad little kid said. Unless you want me to take back that five bucks I gave you.

I don’t want to, the ordinary kid said. I done changed my mind.

Carla didn’t see any of this. She was standing at the top of the steps and talking to Father Patrick, telling him she’d enjoyed his homily, it had given her so much to think about. Those steps were granite, and they were steep.

I went to take her arm, I think, but maybe not. Maybe I was just frozen, the way I was when Vicky and I saw that kid after her lousy tryout for The Music Man. Before I could unfreeze, or say anything, the bad little kid stepped forward. He reached into the pocket of his shorts and whipped out a cigarette lighter. As soon as he flicked it and I saw the spark, I knew what had happened that day in the Fair Deep mine, and it had nothing to do with the hobnails on my father’s boots. Something started to fizz and spark on top of the red ball the ordinary kid was holding. He threw it just to get rid of it, and the bad little kid laughed. Except it was really a deep, snotty chuckle – hgurr-hgurr-hgurr, like that.

It struck the side of the steps, below the iron railing, and bounced back just before it went off with an ear-splitting bang and a flash of yellow light. That wasn’t a firecracker or even a cherry bomb. That was an M-80. It startled Carla the way Carla herself must have startled Vicky that day in the box room at Fudgy Acres. I grabbed for her, but she was holding one of Father Patrick’s hands in both of hers, and all I did was brush her elbow. They fell down the steps together. He broke his right arm and left leg. Carla broke an ankle and got a concussion. And she lost the baby. She lost Helen.

The kid who actually threw the M-80 walked into the police station the next day with his mother and owned up. He was devastated, of course, and said what kids always say and mostly mean after something goes wrong: it was an accident, he hadn’t meant to hurt anyone. He said he wouldn’t have thrown it at all, except the other boy lit the fuse and he was scared he’d lose his fingers. No, he said, he’d never seen the other kid before. No, he didn’t know his name. Then he gave the policeman the five dollars the bad little kid had given him.

Carla didn’t want to have much to do with me in the bedroom after that, and she stopped going to church. I kept on, though, and got involved with Conquest. You know what that is, Mr Bradley, not because you’re a Catholic, but because this is where you came in. I didn’t bother with the religion part, they had Father Patrick for that, but I was happy to coach the baseball and touch football teams. I was always there for the cookouts and the campouts; I got a D code on my driver’s license so I could take the boys to swim meets, amusement park fun days, and teen retreats in the church bus. And I always carried a gun. The .45 I bought at Wise Pawn and Loan – you know, the prosecution’s Exhibit A. I carried that gun for five years, either in the glove compartment of my car, or in the toolbox of the Conquest bus. When I was coaching, I carried it in my gym bag.

Carla came to dislike my work with Conquest, because it took up so much of my free time. When Father Patrick asked for volunteers, I was always the first one to raise my hand. I’d have to say she was jealous. You’re almost never home on weekends anymore, she said. I’m starting to wonder if you might be a little queer for those boys.

Probably I did seem a little queer, because I made a habit of picking out special boys and giving them extra attention. Making friends with them, helping them out. It wasn’t hard. A lot of them came from low-income homes. Usually the single parent in those homes was a mom who had to work one minimum-wage job or even two or three to keep food on the table. If there was a car, she’d need it, so I’d be happy to pick my current special boy up for the Thursday-night Conquest meetings and bring him home again after. If I couldn’t do that, I’d give the boys bus tokens. Never money, though – I found out early that giving those kids money was a bad idea.

I had some successes along the way. One kid – I think he had maybe two pairs of pants and three shirts to his name when I met him – was a math prodigy. I got him a scholarship at a private school and now he’s a freshman at Kansas State, riding a full boat. A couple of others were dabbling in drugs, and I got at least one of them out of that. I think. You can never tell for sure. Another ran away after an argument with his mom and called me from Omaha a month later, right around the time his mother was deciding he was either dead or gone for good. I went and got him.

Working with those Conquest boys gave me a chance to do more good than I ever did filing tax returns and setting up tax-dodge corporations in Delaware. But that wasn’t why I was doing it, only a side effect. Sometimes, Mr Bradley, I’d take one of my special boys fishing out to Dixon Creek, or to the big river, on the lower city bridge. I was fishing, too, but not for trout or carp. For a long time I didn’t feel a single nibble on my line. Then along came Ronald Gibson.

Ronnie was fifteen but looked younger. He was blind in one eye, so he couldn’t play baseball or football, but he was a whiz at chess and all the other board games the boys played on rainy days. No one bullied him; he was sort of the group mascot. His father walked out on the family when he was nine or so, and he was starved for male attention. Pretty soon he was coming to me with all his problems. The main one, of course, was that bad eye. It was a congenital defect called a keratoconus – a misshapen cornea. A doctor told his mother it could be fixed with a corneal transplant, but it would be expensive, and his moms couldn’t afford anything like that.

I went to Father Patrick, and between us we ran half a dozen fundraisers called Fresh Sight for Ronnie. We even got on TV – the local news on Channel 4. There was one shot of Ronnie and me walking in Barnum Park with my arm around his thin shoulders. Carla sniffed when she saw it. If you aren’t queer for them, she said, people will say you are when they see that.

I didn’t care what people said, because not long after that news report, I got the first tug on my line. Right in the middle of my head. It was the bad little kid. I’d finally caught his attention. I could feel him.

Ronnie had the surgery. He didn’t get all the sight back in his bad eye, but he got most of it. For the first year afterward, he was supposed to wear special glasses that got dark in bright sunshine, but he didn’t mind that; he said they made him look sort of cool.

Not too long after the operation, he and his mother came to see me one afternoon after school in the little Conquest office in the basement of St Andrew’s. She said, If there’s ever anything we can do to pay you back, Mr Hallas, all you have to do is ask.