Текст книги "Salem's Lot"
Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King
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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 21 страниц)
He looked over his shoulder at Jack, who was forking hay slowly and dreamily into the first four stalls from a broken bale. There was the bookworm, Daddy’s pet. The miserable little shit.
“Come on!” he shouted. “Fork that hay!”
He opened the storage lockers and pulled out the first of their four milking machines. He trundled it down the aisle, frowning fiercely over the glittering stainless-steel top.
School. Fucking for chrissakes school.
The next nine months stretched ahead of him like an endless tomb.
THREE
4:30 AM
The fruits of yesterday’s late milking had been processed and were now on their way back to the Lot, this time in cartons rather than galvanized steel milk cans, under the colorful label of Slewfoot Hill Dairy. Charles Griffen’s father had marketed his own milk, but that was no longer practical. The conglomerates had eaten up the last of the independents.
The Slewfoot Hill milkman in west Salem was Irwin Purinton, and he began his run along Brock Street (which was known in the country as the Brock Road or That Christless Washboard). Later he would cover the center of town and then work back out of town along the Brooks Road.
Win had turned sixty-one in August, and for the first time his coming retirement seemed real and possible. His wife, a hateful old bitch named Elsie, had died in the fall of 1973 (predeceasing him was the one considerate thing she had done in twenty-seven years of marriage), and when his retirement finally came he was going to pack up his dog, a half-cocker mongrel named Doc, and move down to Pemaquid Point. He planned to sleep until nine o’clock every day and never look at another sunrise.
He pulled over in front of the Norton house, and filled his carry rack with their order: orange juice, two quarts of milk, a dozen eggs. Climbing out of the cab, his knee gave a twinge, but only a faint one. It was going to be a fine day.
There was an addition to Mrs Norton’s usual order in Susan’s round, Palmer-method script: “Please leave one small sour cream, Win. Thanx.”
Purinton went back for it, thinking it was going to be one of those days when everyone wanted something special. Sour cream! He had tasted it once and liked to puke.
The sky was beginning to lighten in the east, and on the fields between here and town, heavy dew sparkled like a king’s ransom of diamonds.
FOUR
5:15 AM
Eva Miller had been up for twenty minutes, dressed in a rag of a housedress and a pair of floppy pink slippers. She was cooking her breakfast—four scrambled eggs, eight rashers of bacon, a skillet of home fries. She would garnish this humble repast with two slices of toast and jam, a ten-ounce tumbler of orange juice, and two cups of coffee with cream to follow. She was a big woman, but not precisely fat; she worked too hard at keeping her place up to ever be fat. The curves of her body were heroic, Rabelaisian. Watching her in motion at her eight-burner electric stove was like watching the restless movements of the tide, or the migration of sand dunes.
She liked to eat her morning meal in this utter solitude, planning the work ahead of her for the day. There was a lot of it: Wednesday was the day she changed the linen. She had nine boarders at present, counting the new one, Mr Mears. The house had three stories and seventeen rooms and there were also floors to wash, the stairs to be scrubbed, the banister to be waxed, and the rug to be turned in the central common room. She would get Weasel Craig to help her with some of it, unless he was sleeping off a bad drunk.
The back door opened just as she was sitting down to the table.
“Hi, Win. How are you doing?”
“Passable. Knee’s kickin’ a bit.”
“Sorry to hear it. You want to leave an extra quart of milk and a gallon of that lemonade?”
“Sure,” he said, resigned. “I knew it was gonna be that kind of day.”
She dug into her eggs, dismissing the comment. Win Purinton could always find something to complain about, although God knew he should have been the happiest man alive since that hellcat he had hooked up with fell down the cellar stairs and broke her neck.
At quarter of six, just as she was finishing up her second cup of coffee and smoking a Chesterfield, the Press-Heraldthumped against the side of the house and dropped into the rosebushes. The third time this week; the Kilby kid was batting a thousand. Probably delivering the papers wrecked out of his mind. Well, let it sit there awhile. The earliest sunshine, thin and precious gold, was slanting in through the east windows. It was the best time of her day, and she would not disturb its moveless peace for anything.
Her boarders had the use of the stove and the refrigerator—that, like the weekly change of linen, came with their rent—and shortly the peace would be broken as Grover Verrill and Mickey Sylvester came down to slop up their cereal before leaving for the textile mill over in Gates Falls where they both worked.
As if her thought had summoned a messenger of their coming, the toilet on the second floor flushed and she heard Sylvester’s heavy work boots on the stairs.
She heaved herself up and went to rescue the paper.
FIVE
6:05 AM
The baby’s thin wails pierced Sandy McDougall’s thin morning sleep and she got up to check the baby with her eyes still bleared shut. She barked her shin on the nightstand and said, “ Kukka!”
The baby, hearing her, screamed louder. “Shut up!” she yelled. “I’m coming!”
She walked down the narrow trailer corridor to the kitchen, a slender girl who was losing whatever marginal prettiness she might once have had. She got Randy’s bottle out of the refrigerator, thought about warming it, then thought to hell with it. If you want it so bad, buster, you can just drink it cold.
She went down to his bedroom and looked at him coldly. He was ten months old, but sickly and puling for his age. He had only started crawling last month. Maybe he had polio or something. Now there was something on his hands, and on the wall, too. She pushed forward, wondering what in Mary’s name he had been into.
She was seventeen years old and she and her husband had celebrated their first wedding anniversary in July. At the time she had married Royce McDougall, six months’ pregnant and looking like the Goodyear blimp, marriage had seemed every bit as blessed as Father Callahan said it was—a blessed escape hatch. Now it just seemed like a pile of kukka.
Which was, she saw with dismay, exactly what Randy had smeared all over his hands, on the wall, and in his hair.
She stood looking at him dully, holding the cold bottle in one hand.
This was what she had given up high school for, her friends for, her hopes of becoming a model for. For this crummy trailer stuck out in the Bend, Formica already peeling off the counters in strips, for a husband that worked all day at the mill and went off drinking or playing poker with his no-good gas-station buddies at night. For a kid who looked just like his no-good old man and smeared kukka all over everything.
He was screaming at the top of his lungs.
“You shut up!”she screamed back suddenly, and threw the plastic bottle at him. It struck his forehead and he toppled on his back in the crib, wailing and thrashing his arms. There was a red circle just below the hairline, and she felt a horrid surge of gratification, pity, and hate in her throat. She plucked him out of the crib like a rag.
“ Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” She had punched him twice before she could stop herself and Randy’s screams of pain had become too great for sound. He lay gasping in his crib, his face purple.
“I’m sorry,” she muttered. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. I’m sorry. You okay, Randy? Just a minute, Momma’s going to clean you up.”
By the time she came back with a wet rag, both of Randy’s eyes had swelled shut and were discoloring. But he took the bottle and when she began to wipe his face with a damp rag, he smiled toothlessly at her.
I’ll tell Roy he fell off the changing table, she thought. He’ll believe that. Oh God, let him believe that.
SIX
6:45 AM
Most of the blue-collar population of ’salem’s Lot was on its way to work. Mike Ryerson was one of the few who worked in town. In the annual town report he was listed as a groundskeeper, but he was actually in charge of maintaining the town’s three cemeteries. In the summer this was almost a full-time job, but even in the winter it was no walk, as some folks, such as that prissy George Middler down at the hardware store, seemed to think. He worked part-time for Carl Foreman, the Lot’s undertaker, and most of the old folks seemed to poop off in the winter.
Now he was on his way out to the Burns Road in his pickup truck, which was loaded down with clippers, a battery-driven hedge-trimmer, a box of flag stands, a crowbar for lifting gravestones that might have fallen over, a ten-gallon gas can, and two Briggs & Stratton lawn mowers.
He would mow the grass at Harmony Hill this morning, and do any maintenance on the stones and the rock wall that was necessary, and this afternoon he would cross town to the Schoolyard Hill Cemetery, where schoolteachers sometimes came to do rubbings, on account of an extinct colony of Shakers who had once buried their dead there. But he liked Harmony Hill best of all three. It was not as old as the Schoolyard Hill boneyard, but it was pleasant and shady. He hoped that someday he could be buried there himself—in a hundred years or so.
He was twenty-seven, and had gone through three years of college in the course of a rather checkered career. He hoped to go back someday and finish up. He was good-looking in an open, pleasant way, and he had no trouble connecting with unattached females on Saturday nights out at Dell’s or in Portland. Some of them were turned off by his job, and Mike found this honestly hard to understand. It was pleasant work, there was no boss always looking over your shoulder, and the work was in the open air, under God’s sky; and so what if he dug a few graves or on occasion drove Carl Foreman’s funeral hack? Somebody had to do it. To his way of thinking, the only thing more natural than death was sex.
Humming, he turned off onto the Burns Road and shifted to second going up the hill. Dry dust spumed out behind him. Through the choked summer greenery on both sides of the road he could see the skeletal, leafless trunks of the trees that had burned in the big fire of ’51, like old and moldering bones. There were deadfalls back in there, he knew, where a man could break his leg if he wasn’t careful. Even after twenty-five years, the scar of that great burning was there. Well, that was just it. In the midst of life, we are in death.
The cemetery was at the crest of the hill, and Mike turned in the drive, ready to get out and unlock the gate…and then braked the truck to a shuddering stop.
The body of a dog hung head-down from the wrought-iron gate, and the ground beneath was muddy with its blood.
Mike got out of the truck and hurried over to it. He pulled his work gloves out of his back pockets and lifted the dog’s head with one hand. It came up with horrible, boneless ease, and he was staring into the blank, glazed eyes of Win Purinton’s mongrel cocker, Doc. The dog had been hung on one of the gate’s high spikes like a slab of beef on a meat hook. Flies, slow with the coolness of early morning, were already crawling sluggishly over the body.
Mike struggled and yanked and finally pulled it off, feeling sick to his stomach at the wet sounds that accompanied his efforts. Graveyard vandalism was an old story to him, especially around Halloween, but that was still a month and a half away and he had never seen anything like this. Usually they contented themselves with knocking over a few gravestones, scrawling a few obscenities, or hanging a paper skeleton from the gate. But if this slaughter was the work of kids, then they were real bastards. Win was going to be heartbroken.
He debated taking the dog directly back to town and showing it to Parkins Gillespie, and decided it wouldn’t gain anything. He could take poor old Doc back to town when he went in to eat his lunch—not that he was going to have much appetite today.
He unlocked the gate and looked at his gloves, which were smeared with blood. The iron bars of the gate would have to be scrubbed, and it looked like he wouldn’t be getting over to Schoolyard Hill this afternoon after all. He drove inside and parked, no longer humming. The zest had gone out of the day.
SEVEN
8:00 AM
The lumbering yellow school buses were making their appointed rounds, picking up the children who stood out by their mailboxes, holding their lunch buckets and skylarking. Charlie Rhodes was driving one of these buses, and his pickup route covered the Taggart Stream Road in east ’salem and the upper half of Jointner Avenue.
The kids who rode Charlie’s bus were the best behaved in town—in the entire school district, for that matter. There was no yelling or horseplay or pulling pigtails on Bus 6. They goddamn well sat still and minded their manners, or they could walk the two miles to Stanley Street Elementary and explain why in the office.
He knew what they thought of him, and he had a good idea of what they called him behind his back. But that was all right. He was not going to have a lot of foolishness and shit-slinging on his bus. Let them save that for their spineless teachers.
The principal at Stanley Street had had the nerve to ask him if he hadn’t acted “impulsively” when he put the Durham boy off three days’ running for just talking a little too loud. Charlie had just stared at him, and eventually the principal, a wet-eared little pipsqueak who had only been out of college four years, had looked away. The man in charge of the S.A.D. 21 motor pool, Dave Felsen, was an old buddy; they went all the way back to Korea together. They understood each other. They understood what was going on in the country. They understood how the kid who had been “just talking a little too loud” on the school bus in 1958 was the kid who had been out pissing on the flag in 1968.
He glanced into the wide overhead mirror and saw Mary Kate Griegson passing a note to her little chum Brent Tenney. Little chum, yeah, right. They were banging each other by the sixth grade these days.
He pulled over, switching on his Stop flashers. Mary Kate and Brent looked up, dismayed.
“Got a lot to talk about?” he asked into the mirror. “Good. You better get started.”
He threw open the folding doors and waited for them to get the hell off his bus.
EIGHT
9:00 AM
Weasel Craig rolled out of bed—literally. The sunshine coming in his second-floor window was blinding. His head thumped queasily. Upstairs that writer fella was already pecking away. Christ, a man would have to be nuttier than a squirrel to tap-tap-tap away like that, day in and day out.
He got up and went over to the calendar in his skivvies to see if this was the day he picked up his unemployment. No. This was Wednesday.
His hangover wasn’t as bad as it had been on occasion. He had been out at Dell’s until it closed at one, but he had only had two dollars and hadn’t been able to cadge many beers after that was gone. Losing my touch, he thought, and scrubbed the side of his face with one hand.
He pulled on the thermal undershirt that he wore winter and summer, pulled on his green work pants, and then opened his closet and got breakfast—a bottle of warm beer for up here and a box of government-donated-commodities oatmeal for downstairs. He hated oatmeal, but he had promised the widow he would help her turn that rug, and she would probably have some other chores lined up.
He didn’t mind—not really—but it was a comedown from the days when he had shared Eva Miller’s bed. Her husband had died in a sawmill accident in 1959, and it was kind of funny in a way, if you could call any such horrible accident funny. In those days the sawmill had employed sixty or seventy men, and Ralph Miller had been in line for the mill’s presidency.
What had happened to him was sort of funny because Ralph Miller hadn’t touched a bit of machinery since 1952, seven years before, when he stepped up from foreman to the front office. That was executive gratitude for you, sure enough, and Weasel supposed that Ralph had earned it. When the big fire had swept out of the Marshes and jumped Jointner Avenue under the urging of a twenty-five-mile-an-hour east wind, it had seemed that the sawmill was certain to go. The fire departments of six neighboring townships had enough on their hands trying to save the town without sparing men for such a pissant operation as the Jerusalem’s Lot Sawmill. Ralph Miller had organized the whole second shift into a fire-fighting force, and under his direction they wetted the roof and did what the entire combined fire-fighting force had been unable to do west of Jointner Avenue—he had constructed a firebreak that stopped the fire and turned it south, where it was fully contained.
Seven years later he had fallen into a shredding machine while he was talking to some visiting brass from a Massachusetts company. He had been taking them around the plant, hoping to convince them to buy in. His foot slipped in a puddle of water and son of a bitch, right into the shredder before their very eyes. Needless to say, any possibility of a deal went right down the chute with Ralph Miller. The sawmill that he had saved in 1951 closed for good in February of 1960.
Weasel looked in his water-spotted mirror and combed his white hair, which was shaggy, beautiful, and still sexy at sixty-seven. It was the only part of him that seemed to thrive on alcohol. Then he pulled on his khaki work shirt, took his oatmeal box, and went downstairs.
And here he was, almost sixteen years after all of that had happened, hiring out as a frigging housekeeper to a woman he had once bedded—and a woman he still regarded as damned attractive.
The widow fell on him like a vulture as soon as he stepped into the sunny kitchen.
“Say, would you like to wax that front banister for me after you have your breakfast, Weasel? You got time?” They both preserved the gentle fiction that he did these things as favors, and not as pay for his fourteen-dollar-a-week upstairs room.
“Sure would, Eva.”
“And that rug in the front room—”
“—has got to be turned. Yeah, I remember.”
“How’s your head this morning?” She asked the question in a businesslike way, allowing no pity to enter her tone…but he sensed its existence beneath the surface.
“Head’s fine,” he said touchily, putting water on to boil for the oatmeal.
“You were out late, is why I asked.”
“You got a line on me, is that right?” He cocked a humorous eyebrow at her and was gratified to see that she could still blush like a schoolgirl, even though they had left off any funny stuff almost nine years ago.
“Now, Ed—”
She was the only one who still called him that. To everyone else in the Lot he was just Weasel. Well, that was all right. Let them call him any old thing they wanted. The bear had caught him, sure enough.
“Never mind,” he said gruffly. “I got up on the wrong side of the bed.”
“Fell out of it, by the sound.” She spoke more quickly than she had intended, but Weasel only grunted. He cooked and ate his hateful oatmeal, then took the can of furniture wax and rags without looking back.
Upstairs, the tap-tap of that guy’s typewriter went on and on. Vinnie Upshaw, who had the room upstairs across from him, said he started in every morning at nine, went till noon, started in again at three, went until six, started in againat nine and went right through until midnight. Weasel couldn’t imagine having that many words in your mind.
Still, he seemed a nice enough sort, and he might be good for a few beers out to Dell’s some night. He had heard most of those writers drank like fish.
He began to polish the banister methodically, and fell to thinking about the widow again. She had turned this place into a boardinghouse with her husband’s insurance money, and had done quite well. Why shouldn’t she? She worked like a dray horse. But she must have been used to getting it regular from her husband, and after the grief had washed out of her, that need had remained. God, she had liked to do it!
In those days, ’61 and ’62, people had still been calling him Ed instead of Weasel, and he had still been holding the bottle instead of the other way around. He had a good job on the B&M, and one night in January of 1962 it had happened.
He paused in the steady waxing movements and looked thoughtfully out of the narrow Judas window on the second-floor landing. It was filled with the last bright foolishly golden light of summer, a light that laughed at the cold, rattling autumn and the colder winter that would follow it.
It had been part her and part him that night, and after it had happened and they were lying together in the darkness of her bedroom, she began to weep and tell him that what they had done was wrong. He told her it had been right, not knowing if it had been right or not and not caring, and there had been a norther whooping and coughing and screaming around the eaves and her room had been warm and safe and at last they had slept together like spoons in a silverware drawer.
Ah God and sonny Jesus, time was like a river and he wondered if that writer fella knew that.
He began to polish the banister again with long, sweeping strokes.
NINE
10:00 AM
It was recess time at Stanley Street Elementary School, which was the Lot’s newest and proudest school building. It was a low, glassine four-classroom building that the school district was still paying for, as new and bright and modern as the Brock Street Elementary School was old and dark.
Richie Boddin, who was the school bully and proud of it, stepped out onto the playground grandly, eyes searching for that smart-ass new kid who knew all the answers in math. No new kid came waltzing into hisschool without knowing who was boss. Especially some four-eyes queer-boy teacher’s pet like this one.
Richie was eleven years old and weighed 140 pounds. All his life his mother had been calling on people to see what a hugeyoung man her son was. And so he knew he was big. Sometimes he fancied that he could feel the ground tremble underneath his feet when he walked. And when he grew up he was going to smoke Camels, just like his old man.
The fourth-and fifth-graders were terrified of him, and the smaller kids regarded him as a schoolyard totem. When he moved on to the seventh grade at Brock Street School, their pantheon would be empty of its devil. All this pleased him immensely.
And there was the Petrie kid, waiting to be chosen up for the recess touch football game.
“Hey!” Richie yelled.
Everyone looked around except Petrie. Every eye had a glassy sheen on it, and every pair of eyes showed relief when they saw that Richie’s rested elsewhere.
“Hey you! Four-eyes!”
Mark Petrie turned and looked at Richie. His steel-rimmed glasses flashed in the morning sun. He was as tall as Richie, which meant he towered over most of his classmates, but he was slender and his face looked defenseless and bookish.
“Are you speaking to me?”
“‘Are you speaking to me?’” Richie mimicked, his voice a high falsetto. “You sound like a queer, four-eyes. You know that?”
“No, I didn’t know that,” Mark Petrie said.
Richie took a step forward. “I bet you suck, you know that, four-eyes? I bet you suck the old hairy root.”
“Really?” His polite tone was infuriating.
“Yeah, I heard you really suck it. Not just Thursdays for you. You can’t wait. Every day for you.”
Kids began to drift over to watch Richie stomp the new boy. Miss Holcomb, who was playground monitor this week, was out front watching the little kids on the swings and seesaws.
“What’s your racket?” Mark Petrie asked. He was looking at Richie as if he had discovered an interesting new beetle.
“‘What’s your racket?’” Richie mimicked falsetto. “I ain’t got no racket. I just heard you were a big fat queer, that’s all.”
“Is that right?” Mark asked, still polite. “I heard that you were a big clumsy stupid turd, that’s what I heard.”
Utter silence. The other boys gaped (but it was an interested gape; none of them had ever seen a fellow sign his own death warrant before). Richie was caught entirely by surprise and gaped with the rest.
Mark took off his glasses and handed them to the boy next to him. “Hold these, would you?” The boy took them and goggled at Mark silently.
Richie charged. It was a slow, lumbering charge, with not a bit of grace or finesse in it. The ground trembled under his feet. He was filled with confidence and the clear, joyous urge to stomp and break. He swung his haymaker right, which would catch ole four-eyes queer-boy right in the mouth and send his teeth flying like piano keys. Get ready for the dentist, queer-boy. Here I come.
Mark Petrie ducked and sidestepped at the same instant. The haymaker went over his head. Richie was pulled halfway around by the force of his own blow, and Mark had only to stick out a foot. Richie Boddin thumped to the ground. He grunted. The crowd of watching children went “Aaaah.”
Mark knew perfectly well that if the big, clumsy boy on the ground regained the advantage, he would be beaten up badly. Mark was agile, but agility could not stand up for long in a schoolyard brawl. In a street situation this would have been the time to run, to outdistance his slower pursuer, then turn and thumb his nose. But this wasn’t the street or the city, and he knew perfectly well that if he didn’t whip this big ugly turd now the harassment would never stop.
These thoughts went through his mind in a fifth of a second.
He jumped on Richie Boddin’s back.
Richie grunted. The crowd went “Aaaah” again. Mark grabbed Richie’s arm, careful to get it above the shirt cuff so he couldn’t sweat out of his grip, and twisted it behind Richie’s back. Richie screamed in pain.
“Say uncle,” Mark told him.
Richie’s reply would have pleased a twenty-year Navy man.
Mark yanked Richie’s arm up to his shoulder blades, and Richie screamed again. He was filled with indignation, fright, and puzzlement. This had never happened to him before. It couldn’t be happening now. Surely no four-eyes queer-boy could be sitting on his back and twisting his arm and making him scream before his subjects.
“Say uncle,” Mark repeated.
Richie heaved himself to his knees; Mark squeezed his own knees into Richie’s sides, like a man riding a horse bareback, and stayed on. They were both covered with dust, but Richie was much the worse for wear. His face was red and straining, his eyes bulged, and there was a scratch on his cheek.
He tried to dump Mark over his shoulders, and Mark yanked upward on the arm again. This time Richie didn’t scream. He wailed.
“Say uncle, or so help me God I’ll break it.”
Richie’s shirt had pulled out of his pants. His belly felt hot and scratched. He began to sob and wrench his shoulders from side to side. Yet the hateful four-eyes queer-boy stayed on. His forearm was ice, his shoulder fire.
“Get off me, you son of a whore! You don’t fight fair!”
An explosion of pain.
“Say uncle.”
“No!”
He overbalanced on his knees and went facedown in the dust. The pain in his arm was paralyzing. He was eating dirt. There was dirt in his eyes. He thrashed his legs helplessly. He had forgotten about being huge. He had forgotten about how the ground trembled under his feet when he walked. He had forgotten that he was going to smoke Camels, just like his old man, when he grew up.
“Uncle! Uncle! Uncle!” Richie screamed. He felt that he could go on screaming uncle for hours, for days, if it would get his arm back.
“Say: ‘I’m a big ugly turd.’”
“I’m a big ugly turd!” Richie screamed into the dirt.
“Good enough.”
Mark Petrie got off him and stepped back warily out of reach as Richie got up. His thighs hurt from squeezing them together. He hoped that all the fight was out of Richie. If not, he was going to get creamed.
Richie got up. He looked around. No one met his eyes. They turned away and went back to whatever they had been doing. That stinking Glick kid was standing next to the queer-boy and looking at him as though he were some kind of God.
Richie stood by himself, hardly able to believe how quickly his ruination had come. His face was dusty except where it had been streaked clean with his tears of rage and shame. He considered launching himself at Mark Petrie. Yet his shame and fear, new and shining and huge, would not allow it. Not yet. His arm ached like a rotted tooth. Son of a whoring dirty fighter. If I ever land on you and get you down—
But not today. He turned away and walked off and the ground didn’t tremble a bit. He looked at the ground so he wouldn’t have to look anyone in the face.
Someone on the girls’ side laughed—a high, mocking sound that carried with cruel clarity on the morning air.
He didn’t look up to see who was laughing at him.
TEN
11:15 AM
The Jerusalem’s Lot Town Dump had been a plain old gravel pit until it struck clay and paid out in 1945. It was at the end of a spur that led off from the Burns Road two miles beyond Harmony Hill Cemetery.
Dud Rogers could hear the faint putter and cough of Mike Ryerson’s lawn mower down the road. But that sound would soon be blotted out by the crackle of flames.
Dud had been the dump custodian since 1956, and his reappointment each year at town meeting was routine and by acclamation. He lived at the dump in a neat tarpaper lean-to with a sign reading “Dump Custodian” on the skew-hung door. He had wangled a space heater out of that skinflint board of selectmen three years ago, and had given up his apartment in town for good.
He was a hunchback with a curious cocked head that made him look as if God had given him a final petulant wrench before allowing him out into the world. His arms, which dangled apelike almost to his knees, were amazingly strong. It had taken four men to load the old hardware store floor safe into their panel truck to bring it out here when the store got its new wall job. The tires of the truck had settled appreciably when they put it in. But Dud Rogers had taken it off himself, cords standing out on his neck, veins bulging on his forehead and forearms and biceps like blue cables. He had pushed it over the east edge himself.
