Текст книги "Salem's Lot"
Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King
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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 21 страниц)
“Nice out here,” Ben said, looking toward the barbecue in the backyard. It was a low, businesslike construction of bricks, and a shimmer of heat hung over it.
“Built it myself,” Bill said. “Better be nice.”
Ben drank deeply and then belched, another sign in his favor.
“Susie thinks you’re quite the fella,” Norton said.
“She’s a nice girl.”
“Good practical girl,” Norton added, and belched reflectively. “She says you’ve written three books. Published ’em, too.”
“Yes, that’s so.”
“They do well?”
“The first did,” Ben said, and said no more. Bill Norton nodded slightly, in approval of a man who had enough marbles to keep his dollars-and-cents business to himself.
“You like to lend a hand with some burgers and hot dogs?”
“Sure.”
“You got to cut the hot dogs to let the squidges out of ’em. You know about that?”
“Yeah.” He made diagonal slashes in the air with his right index finger, grinning slightly as he did so. The small slashes in natural casing franks kept them from blistering.
“You came from this neck of the woods, all right,” Bill Norton said. “Goddamn well told. Take that bag of briquettes over there and I’ll get the meat. Bring your beer.”
“You couldn’t part me from it.”
Bill hesitated on the verge of going in and cocked an eyebrow at Ben Mears. “You a serious-minded fella?” he asked.
Ben smiled, a trifle grimly. “That I am,” he said.
Bill nodded. “That’s good,” he said, and went inside.
Babs Griffen’s prediction of rain was a million miles wrong, and the backyard dinner went well. A light breeze sprang up, combining with the eddies of hickory smoke from the barbecue to keep the worst of the late-season mosquitoes away. The women cleared away the paper plates and condiments, then came back to drink a beer each and laugh as Bill, an old hand at playing the tricky wind currents, trimmed Ben 21–6 at badminton. Ben declined a rematch with real regret, pointing at his watch.
“I got a book on the fire,” he said. “I owe another six pages. If I get drunk, I won’t even be able to read what I wrote tomorrow morning.”
Susan saw him to the front gate—he had walked up from town. Bill nodded to himself as he damped the fire. He had said he was serious-minded, and Bill was ready to take him at his word. He had not come with a big case on to impress anyone, but any man who worked after dinner was out to make his mark on somebody’s tree, probably in big letters.
Ann Norton, however, never quite unthawed.
SEVENTEEN
7:00 PM
Floyd Tibbits pulled into the crushed-stone parking lot at Dell’s about ten minutes after Delbert Markey, owner and bartender, had turned on his new pink sign out front. The sign said dell’s in letters three feet high, and the apostrophe was a highball glass.
Outside, the sunlight had been leached from the sky by gathering purple twilight, and soon ground mist would begin to form in the low-lying pockets of land. The night’s regulars would begin to show up in another hour or so.
“Hi, Floyd,” Dell said, pulling a Michelob out of the cooler. “Good day?”
“Fair,” Floyd said. “That beer looks good.”
He was a tall man with a well-trimmed sandy beard, now dressed in double-knit slacks and a casual sports jacket—his Grant’s working uniform. He was second in charge of credit, and liked his work in the absent kind of way that can cross the line into boredom almost overnight. He felt himself to be drifting, but the sensation was not actively unpleasant. And there was Suze—a fine girl. She was going to come around before much longer, and then he supposed he would have to make something of himself.
He dropped a dollar bill on the bar, poured beer down the side of his glass, downed it thirstily, and refilled. The bar’s only other patron at present was a young fellow in phone-company coveralls—the Bryant kid, Floyd thought. He was drinking beer at a table and listening to a moody love song on the juke.
“So what’s new in town?” Floyd asked, knowing the answer already. Nothing new, not really. Someone might have showed up drunk at the high school, but he couldn’t think of anything else.
“Well, somebody killed your uncle’s dog. That’s new.”
Floyd paused with his glass halfway to his mouth. “What? Uncle Win’s dog, Doc?”
“That’s right.”
“Hit him with a car?”
“Not so you’d notice. Mike Ryerson found him. He was out to Harmony Hill to mow the grass and Doc was hangin’ off those spikes atop the cemetery gate. Ripped wide open.”
“Son of a bitch!” Floyd said, astounded.
Dell nodded gravely, pleased with the impression he had made. He knew something else that was a fairly hot item in town this evening—that Floyd’s girl had been seen with that writer who was staying at Eva’s. But let Floyd find that out for himself.
“Ryerson brung the co’pse in to Parkins Gillespie,” he told Floyd. “ Hewas of the mind that maybe the dog was dead and a bunch of kids hung it up for a joke.”
“Gillespie doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.”
“Maybe not. I’ll tell you what Ithink.” Dell leaned forward on his thick forearms. “I think it’s kids, all right…hell, I knowthat. But it might be a smidge more serious than just a joke. Here, looka this.” He reached under the bar and slapped a newspaper down on it, turned to an inside page.
Floyd picked it up. The headline read satan worshippers desecrate fla. church. He skimmed through it. Apparently a bunch of kids had broken into a Catholic Church in Clewiston, Florida, some time after midnight and had held some sort of unholy rites there. The altar had been desecrated, obscene words had been scrawled on the pews, the confessionals, and the holy font, and splatters of blood had been found on steps leading to the nave. Laboratory analysis had confirmed that although some of the blood was animal (goat’s blood was suggested), most of it was human. The Clewiston police chief admitted there were no immediate leads.
Floyd put the paper down. “Devil worshippers in the Lot? Come on, Dell. You’ve been into the cook’s pot.”
“The kids are going crazy,” Dell said stubbornly. “You see if that ain’t it. Next thing you know, they’ll be doing human sacrifices in Griffen’s pasture. Want a refill on that?”
“No thanks,” Floyd said, sliding off his stool. “I think I’ll go out and see how Uncle Win’s getting along. He loved that dog.”
“Give him my best,” Dell said, stowing his paper back under the bar—Exhibit A for later in the evening. “Awful sorry to hear about it.”
Floyd paused halfway to the door and spoke, seemingly to the air. “Hung him up on the spikes, did they? By Christ, I’d like to get hold of the kids who did that.”
“Devil worshippers,” Dell said. “Wouldn’t surprise me a bit. I don’t know what’s got into people these days.”
Floyd left. The Bryant kid put another dime in the juke, and Dick Curless began to sing “Bury the Bottle with Me.”
EIGHTEEN
7:30 PM
“You be home early,” Marjorie Glick said to her eldest son, Danny. “School tomorrow. I want your brother in bed by quarter past nine.”
Danny shuffled his feet. “I don’t see why I have to take him at all.”
“You don’t,” Marjorie said with dangerous pleasantness. “You can always stay home.”
She turned back to the counter, where she was freshening fish, and Ralphie stuck out his tongue. Danny made a fist and shook it, but his putrid little brother only smiled.
“We’ll be back,” he muttered and turned to leave the kitchen, Ralphie in tow.
“By nine.”
“Okay, okay.”
In the living room Tony Glick was sitting in front of the TV with his feet up, watching the Red Sox and the Yankees. “Where are you going, boys?”
“Over to see that new kid,” Danny said. “Mark Petrie.”
“Yeah,” Ralphie said. “We’re gonna look at his… electric trains.”
Danny cast a baleful eye on his brother, but their father noticed neither the pause nor the emphasis. Doug Griffen had just struck out. “Be home early,” he said absently.
Outside, afterlight still lingered in the sky, although sunset had passed. As they crossed the backyard Danny said, “I ought to beat the stuff out of you, punko.”
“I’ll tell,” Ralphie said smugly. “I’ll tell why you reallywanted to go.”
“You creep,” Danny said hopelessly.
At the back of the mowed yard, a beaten path led down the slope to the woods. The Glick house was on Brock Street, Mark Petrie’s on South Jointner Avenue. The path was a shortcut that saved considerable time if you were twelve and nine years old and willing to pick your way across the Crockett Brook stepping-stones. Pine needles and twigs crackled under their feet. Somewhere in the woods, a whippoorwill sang, and crickets chirred all around them.
Danny had made the mistake of telling his brother that Mark Petrie had the entire set of Aurora plastic monsters—wolfman, mummy, Dracula, Frankenstein, the mad doctor, and even the Chamber of Horrors. Their mother thought all that stuff was bad news, rotted your brains or something, and Danny’s brother had immediately turned blackmailer. He was putrid, all right.
“You’re putrid, you know that?” Danny said.
“I know,” Ralphie said proudly. “What’s putrid?”
“It’s when you get green and squishy, like boogers.”
“Get bent,” Ralphie said. They were going down the bank of Crockett Brook, which gurgled leisurely over its gravel bed, holding a faint pearliness on its surface. Two miles east it joined Taggart Stream, which in turn joined the Royal River.
Danny started across the stepping-stones, squinting in the gathering gloom to see his footing.
“I’m gonna pushya!” Ralphie cried gleefully behind him. “Look out, Danny, I’m gonna pushya!”
“You push me and I’ll push you in the quicksand, ringmeat,” Danny said.
They reached the other bank. “There ain’t no quicksand around here,” Ralphie scoffed, moving closer to his brother nevertheless.
“Yeah?” Danny said ominously. “A kid got killed in the quicksand just a few years ago. I heard those old dudes that hang around the store talkin’ about it.”
“Really?” Ralphie asked. His eyes were wide.
“Yeah,” Danny said. “He went down screamin’ and hollerin’ and his mouth filled up with quicksand and that was it. Raaaacccccchhhh.”
“C’mon,” Ralphie said uneasily. It was close to full dark now, and the woods were full of moving shadows. “Let’s get out of here.”
They started up the other bank, slipping a little in the pine needles. The boy Danny had heard discussed in the store was a ten-year-old named Jerry Kingfield. He might have gone down in the quicksand screaming and hollering, but if he had, no one had heard him. He had simply disappeared in the Marshes six years ago while fishing. Some people thought quicksand, others held that a sex preevert had killed him. There were preeverts everywhere.
“They say his ghost still haunts these woods,” Danny said solemnly, neglecting to tell his little brother that the Marshes were three miles south.
“Don’t, Danny,” Ralphie said uneasily. “Not…not in the dark.”
The woods creaked secretively around them. The whippoorwill had ceased his cry. A branch snapped somewhere behind them, almost stealthily. The daylight was nearly gone from the sky.
“Every now and then,” Danny went on eerily, “when some ringmeat little kid comes out after dark, it comes flapping out of the trees, the face all putrid and covered with quicksand—”
“Danny, come on.”
His little brother’s voice held real pleading, and Danny stopped. He had almost scared himself. The trees were dark, bulking presences all around them, moving slowly in the night breeze, rubbing together, creaking in their joints.
Another branch snapped off to their left.
Danny suddenly wished they had gone by the road.
Another branch snapped.
“Danny, I’m scared,” Ralphie whispered.
“Don’t be stupid,” Danny said. “Come on.”
They started to walk again. Their feet crackled in the pine needles. Danny told himself that he didn’t hear any branches snapping. He didn’t hear anything except them. Blood thudded in his temples. His hands were cold. Count steps, he told himself. We’ll be at Jointner Avenue in two hundred steps. And when we come back we’ll go by the road, so ringmeat won’t be scared. In just a minute we’ll see the streetlights and feel stupid but it will be goodto feel stupid so count steps. One…two…three…
Ralphie shrieked.
“I see it! I see the ghost! I SEE IT!”
Terror like hot iron leaped into Danny’s chest. Wires seemed to have run up his legs. He would have turned and run, but Ralphie was clutching him.
“Where?” he whispered, forgetting that he had invented the ghost. “Where?” He peered into the woods, half afraid of what he might see, and saw only blackness.
“It’s gone now—but I saw him…it. Eyes. I saw eyes. Oh, Danneee—” He was blubbering.
“There ain’t no ghosts, you fool. Come on.”
Danny held his brother’s hand and they began to walk. His legs felt as if they were made up of ten thousand pencil erasers. His knees were trembling. Ralphie was crowding against him, almost forcing him off the path.
“It’s watchin’ us,” Ralphie whispered.
“Listen, I’m not gonna—”
“No, Danny. Really. Can’t you feelit?”
Danny stopped. And in the way of children, he did feel something and knew they were no longer alone. A great hush had fallen over the woods; but it was a malefic hush. Shadows, urged by the wind, twisted languorously around them.
And Danny smelled something savage, but not with his nose.
There were no ghosts, but there werepreeverts. They stopped in black cars and offered you candy or hung around on street corners or…or they followed you into the woods…
And then…
Oh and then they…
“Run,” he said harshly.
But Ralphie trembled beside him in a paralysis of fear. His grip on Danny’s hand was as tight as baling wire. His eyes stared into the woods, and then began to widen.
“Danny?”
A branch snapped.
Danny turned and looked where his brother was looking.
The darkness enfolded them.
NINETEEN
9:00 PM
Mabel Werts was a hugely fat woman, seventy-four on her last birthday, and her legs had become less and less reliable. She was a repository of town history and town gossip, and her memory stretched back over five decades of necrology, adultery, thievery, and insanity. She was a gossip but not a deliberately cruel one (although those whose stories she had sped on their back fence way might tend to disagree); she simply lived in and for the town. In a way she wasthe town, a fat widow who now went out very little, and who spent most of her time by her window dressed in a tentlike silk camisole, her yellowish-ivory hair done up in a coronet of thick, braided cables, with the telephone on her right hand and her high-powered Japanese binoculars on the left. The combination of the two—plus the time to use them fully—made her a benevolent spider sitting in the center of a communications web that stretched from the Bend to east ’salem.
She had been watching the Marsten House for want of something better to watch when the shutters to the left of the porch were opened, letting out a golden square of light that was definitely not the steady glow of electricity. She had gotten just a tantalizing glimpse of what might have been a man’s head and shoulders silhouetted against the light. It gave her a queer thrill.
There had been no more movement from the house.
She thought: Now, what kind of people is it that only opens up when a body can’t catch a decent glimpse of them?
She put the glasses down and carefully picked up the telephone. Two voices—she quickly identified them as Harriet Durham and Glynis Mayberry—were talking about the Ryerson boy finding Irwin Purinton’s dog.
She sat quietly, breathing through her mouth, so as to give no sign of her presence on the line.
TWENTY
11:59 PM
The day trembled on the edge of extinction. The houses slept in darkness. Downtown, night lights in the hardware store and the Foreman Funeral Home and the Excellent Café threw mild electric light onto the pavement. Some lay awake—George Boyer, who had just gotten home from the three-to-eleven shift at the Gates Mill, Win Purinton, sitting and playing solitaire and unable to sleep for thinking of his Doc, whose passing had affected him much more deeply than that of his wife—but most slept the sleep of the just and the hard-working.
In Harmony Hill Cemetery a dark figure stood meditatively inside the gate, waiting for the turn of time. When he spoke, the voice was soft and cultured.
“O my father, favor me now. Lord of Flies, favor me now. Now I bring you spoiled meat and reeking flesh. I have made sacrifice for your favor. With my left hand I bring it. Make a sign for me on this ground, consecrated in your name. I wait for a sign to begin your work.”
The voice died away. A wind had sprung up, gentle, bringing with it the sigh and whisper of leafy branches and grasses and a whiff of carrion from the dump up the road.
There was no sound but that brought on the breeze. The figure stood silent and thoughtful for a time. Then it stooped and stood with the figure of a child in his arms.
“I bring you this.”
It became unspeakable.
Chapter Four
Danny Glick and Others
Danny and Ralphie Glick had gone out to see Mark Petrie with orders to be in by nine, and when they hadn’t come home by ten past, Marjorie Glick called the Petrie house. No, Mrs Petrie said, the boys weren’t there. Hadn’t been there. Maybe your husband had better talk to Henry. Mrs Glick handed the phone to her husband, feeling the lightness of fear in her belly.
The men talked it over. Yes, the boys had gone by the woods path. No, the little brook was very shallow at this time of year, especially after the fine weather. No more than ankle-deep. Henry suggested that he start from his end of the path with a high-powered flashlight and Mr Glick start from his. Perhaps the boys had found a woodchuck burrow or were smoking cigarettes or something. Tony agreed and thanked Mr Petrie for his trouble. Mr Petrie said it was no trouble at all. Tony hung up and comforted his wife a little; she was frightened. He had mentally decided that neither of the boys was going to be able to sit down for a week when he found them.
But before he had even left the yard, Danny stumbled out from the trees and collapsed beside the backyard barbecue. He was dazed and slow-spoken, responding to questions ploddingly and not always sensibly. There was grass in his cuffs and a few autumn leaves in his hair.
He told his father that he and Ralphie had gone down the path through the woods, had crossed Crockett Brook by the stepping-stones, and had gotten up the other bank with no trouble. Then Ralphie began to talk about a ghost in the woods (Danny neglected to mention he had put this idea in his brother’s head). Ralphie said he could see a face. Danny began to be frightened. He didn’t believe in ghosts or in any kid stuff like the bogeyman, but he did think he had heard something in the dark.
What did they do then?
Danny thought they had started to walk again, holding hands. He wasn’t sure. Ralphie had been whimpering about the ghost. Danny told him not to cry, because soon they would be able to see the streetlights of Jointner Avenue. It was only two hundred steps, maybe less. Then something bad had happened.
What? What was the bad thing?
Danny didn’t know.
They argued with him, grew excited, expostulated. Danny only shook his head slowly and uncomprehendingly. Yes, he knew he should remember, but he couldn’t. Honestly, he couldn’t. No, he didn’t remember falling over anything. Just…everything was dark. Very dark. And the next thing he remembered was lying on the path by himself. Ralphie was gone.
Parkins Gillespie said there was no point in sending men into the woods that night. Too many deadfalls. Probably the boy had just wandered off the path. He and Nolly Gardener and Tony Glick and Henry Petrie went up and down the path and along the shoulders of both South Jointner and Brock streets, hailing with battery-powered bullhorns.
Early the next morning, both the Cumberland and the state police began a coordinated search of the wood lot. When they found nothing, the search was widened. They beat the bushes for four days, and Mr and Mrs Glick wandered through the woods and fields, picking their way around the deadfalls left by the ancient fire, calling their son’s name with endless and wrenching hope.
When there was no result, Taggart Stream and the Royal River were dragged. No result.
On the morning of the fifth day, Marjorie Glick woke her husband at 4:00 AM, terrified and hysterical. Danny had collapsed in the upstairs hallway, apparently on his way to the bathroom. An ambulance bore him away to Central Maine General Hospital. The preliminary diagnosis was severe and delayed emotional shock.
The doctor in charge, a man named Gorby, took Mr Glick aside.
“Has your boy ever been subject to asthma attacks?”
Mr Glick, blinking rapidly, shook his head. He had aged ten years in less than a week.
“Any history of rheumatic fever?”
“Danny? No…not Danny.”
“Has he had a TB skin patch during the last year?”
“TB? My boy got TB?”
“Mr Glick, we’re only trying to find out—”
“Marge! Margie, come down here!”
Marjorie Glick got up and walked slowly down the corridor. Her face was pale, her hair absently combed. She looked like a woman in the grip of a deep migraine headache.
“Did Danny have a TB skin patch at school this year?”
“Yes,” she said dully. “When he started school. No reaction.”
Gorby asked, “Does he cough in the night?”
“No.”
“Complain of aches in the chest or joints?”
“No.”
“Painful urination?”
“No.”
“Any abnormal bleeding? Bloody noses or bloody stool or even an abnormal number of scrapes and bruises?”
“No.”
Gorby smiled and nodded. “We’d like to keep him for tests, if we may.”
“Sure,” Tony said. “Sure. I got Blue Cross.”
“His reactions are very slow,” the doctor said. “We’re going to do some X-rays, a marrow test, a white count—”
Marjorie Glick’s eyes had slowly been widening. “Has Danny got leukemia?” she whispered.
“Mrs Glick, that’s hardly—”
But she had fainted.
TWO
Ben Mears was one of the ’salem’s Lot volunteers who beat the bushes for Ralphie Glick, and he got nothing for his pains other than pants cuffs full of cockleburs and an aggravated case of hay fever brought on by late summer goldenrod.
On the third day of the search he came into the kitchen of Eva’s ready to eat a can of ravioli and then fall into bed for a nap before writing. He found Susan Norton bustling around the kitchen stove and preparing some kind of hamburger casserole. The men just home from work were sitting around the table, pretending to talk, and ogling her—she was wearing a faded check shirt tied at the midriff and cutoff corduroy shorts. Eva Miller was ironing in a private alcove off the kitchen.
“Hey, what are you doing here?” he asked.
“Cooking you something decent before you fall away to a shadow,” she said, and Eva snorted laughter from behind the angle of the wall. Ben felt his ears burn.
“Cooks real good, she does,” Weasel said. “I can tell. I been watchin’.”
“If you was watchin’ any more, your eyes woulda fell outta their sockets,” Grover Verrill said, and cackled.
Susan covered the casserole, put it in the oven, and they went out on the back porch to wait for it. The sun was going down red and inflamed.
“Any luck?”
“No. Nothing.” He pulled a battered pack of cigarettes out of his breast pocket and lit one.
“You smell like you took a bath in Old Woodsman’s,” she said.
“Fat lot of good it did.” He held out his arm and showed her a number of puffed insect bites and half-healed scratches. “Son of a bitching mosquitoes and goddamn pricker bushes.”
“What do you think happened to him, Ben?”
“God knows.” He exhaled smoke. “Maybe somebody crept up behind the older brother, coshed him with a sock full of sand or something, and abducted the kid.”
“Do you think he’s dead?”
Ben looked at her to see if she wanted an honest answer or merely a hopeful one. He took her hand and locked his fingers through hers. “Yes,” he said briefly. “I think the kid is dead. No conclusive proof yet, but I think so.”
She shook her head slowly. “I hope you’re wrong. My mom and some of the other ladies have been in to sit with Mrs Glick. She’s out of her mind and so is her husband. And the other boy just wanders around like a ghost.”
“Um,” Ben said. He was looking up at the Marsten House, not really listening. The shutters were closed; they would open up later on. After dark. The shutters would open after dark. He felt a morbid chill at the thought and its nearly incantatory quality.
“…night?”
“Hmm? Sorry.” He looked around at her.
“I said, my dad would like you to come over tomorrow night. Can you?”
“Will you be there?”
“Sure, I will,” she said, and looked at him.
“All right. Good.” He wanted to look at her—she was lovely in the sunset light—but his eyes were drawn toward the Marsten House as if by a magnet.
“It draws you, doesn’t it?” she said, and the reading of his thought, right down to the metaphor, was nearly uncanny.
“Yes. It does.”
“Ben, what’s this new book about?”
“Not yet,” he said. “Give it time. I’ll tell you as soon as I can. It’s…got to work itself out.”
She wanted to say I love youat that precise moment, say it with the ease and lack of self-consciousness with which the thought had risen to the surface of her mind, but she bit the words off behind her lips. She did not want to say it while he was looking…looking up there.
She got up. “I’ll check the casserole.”
When she left him, he was smoking and looking up at the Marsten House.
THREE
Lawrence Crockett was sitting in his office on the morning of the twenty-second, pretending to read his Monday correspondence and keeping an eye on his secretary’s jahoobies, when the telephone rang. He had been thinking about his business career in ’salem’s Lot, about that small, twinkling car in the Marsten House driveway, and about deals with the devil.
Even before the deal with Straker had been consummated (that’s some word, all right, he thought, and his eyes crawled over the front of his secretary’s blouse), Lawrence Crockett was, without doubt, the richest man in ’salem’s Lot and one of the richest in Cumberland County, although there was nothing about his office or his person to indicate it. The office was old, dusty, and lighted by two fly-specked yellow globes. The desk was an ancient rolltop, littered with papers, pens, and correspondence. A glue pot stood on one side of it and on the other was a square glass paperweight that showed pictures of his family on its different faces. Poised perilously on top of a stack of ledgers was a glass fish bowl filled with matches, and a sign on the front said, “For Our Matchless Friends.” Except for three fireproof steel filing cabinets and the secretary’s desk in a small enclosure, the office was barren.
There were, however, pictures.
Snapshots and photos were everywhere—tacked, stapled, or taped to every available surface. Some were new Polaroid prints, others were colored Kodak shots taken a few years back, still more were curled and yellowing black-and-whites, some going back fifteen years. Beneath each was a typed caption: Fine Country Living! Six Rms.or Hilltop Location! Taggart Stream Road, $32,000—Cheap! or Fit for a Squire! Ten-Rm. Farmhouse, Burns Road. It looked like a dismal, fly-by-night operation and so it had been until 1957, when Larry Crockett, who was regarded by the better element in Jerusalem’s Lot as only one step above shiftless, had decided that trailers were the wave of the future. In those dim dead days, most people thought of trailers as those cute silvery things you hooked on the back of your car when you wanted to go to Yellowstone National Park and take pictures of your wife and kids standing in front of Old Faithful. In those dim dead days, hardly anyone—even the trailer manufacturers themselves—foresaw a day when the cute silvery things would be replaced by campers, which hooked right over the bed of your Chevy pickup or which could come complete and motorized in themselves.
Larry, however, had not needed to know these things. A bush-league visionary at best, he had simply gone down to the town office (in those days he was not a selectman; in those days he couldn’t have gotten elected dogcatcher) and looked up the Jerusalem’s Lot zoning laws. They were tremendously satisfactory. Peering between the lines, he could see thousands of dollars. The law said you could not maintain a public dumping ground, or have more than three junked cars in your yard unless you also had a junk yard permit, or have a chemical toilet—a fancy and not very accurate term for outhouse—unless it was approved by the Town Health Officer. And that was it.
Larry had mortgaged himself to the hilt, had borrowed more, and had bought three trailers. Not cute little silvery things but long, plush, thyroidal monsters with plastic wood paneling and Formica bathrooms. He bought one-acre plots for each in the Bend, where land was cheap, had set them on cheap foundations, and had gone to work selling them. He had done so in three months, overcoming some initial resistance from people who were dubious about living in a home that resembled a Pullman car, and his profit had been close to ten thousand dollars. The wave of the future had arrived in ’salem’s Lot, and Larry Crockett had been right up there shooting the curl.
On the day R.T. Straker had walked into his office, Crockett had been worth nearly two million dollars. He had done this as a result of land speculation in a great many neighboring towns (but not in the Lot; you don’t shit where you eat was Lawrence Crockett’s motto), based on the conviction that the mobile-home industry was going to grow like a mad bastard. It did, and my God how the money rolled in.
In 1965 Larry Crockett became the silent partner of a contractor named Romeo Poulin, who was building a supermarket plaza in Auburn. Poulin was a veteran corner-cutter, and with his on-the-job know-how and Larry’s way with figures, they made $750,000 apiece and only had to report a third of that to Uncle. It was all extremely satisfactory, and if the supermarket roof had a bad case of the leaks, well, that was life.
In 1966–68 Larry bought controlling interests in three Maine mobile-home businesses, going through any number of fancy ownership shuffles to throw the tax people off. To Romeo Poulin he described this process as going into the tunnel of love with girl A, screwing girl B in the car behind you, and ending up holding hands with girl A on the other side. He ended up buying mobile homes from himself, and these incestuous businesses were so healthy they were almost frightening.
