Текст книги "The Mist"

Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 1 (всего у книги 10 страниц)

The Mist

Stephen King

I. The Coming of the Storm

This is what happened. On the night that the worst heat wave in northern New England history finally broke-the night of July 19-the entire western Maine region was lashed with the most vicious thunderstorms I have ever seen.

We lived on Long Lake; and we saw the first of the storms beating its way across the water toward us just before dark. For an hour before, the air had been utterly still. The American flag that my father put up on our boathouse in 1936 lay limp against its pole. Not even its hem fluttered. The heat was like a solid thing, and it seemed as deep as sullen quarry-water. That afternoon the three of us had gone swimming, but the water was no relief unless you went out deep. Neither Steffy nor I wanted to go deep because Billy couldn't. Billy is five.

We ate a cold supper at five-thirty, picking listlessly at ham sandwiches and potato salad out on the deck that faces the lake. Nobody seemed to want anything but Pepsi, which was in a steel bucket of ice cubes.

After supper Billy went out back to play on his monkey bars for a while. Steff and I sat without talking much, smoking and looking across the sullen flat mirror of the lake to Harrison on the far side. A few powerboats droned back and

forth. The evergreens over there looked dusty and beaten. In the west, great purple thunderheads were slowly building up, massing like an army. Lightning flashed inside them. Next Door, Brent Norton's radio, tuned to that classical-music station that broadcasts from the top of Mount Washington, sent out a loud bray of static each time the lightning flashed.

Norton was a lawyer from New Jersey and his place on Long Lake was only a summer cottage with no furnace or insulation. Two years before, we had a boundary dispute that finally wound up in county court. I won. Norton claimed I

Won because he was an out-of-towner. There was no love lost between us.

Steff sighed and fanned the top of her breasts with the edge of her halter. I doubted if it cooled her off much but it improved the view a lot.

“I don't want to scare you,” I said, “but there's a bad storm on the way, I think.” She looked at me doubtfully. “There were thunderheads last night and the night before, David. They just broke up.”

“They won't do that tonight.” “No?” “If it gets bad enough, we're going to go downstairs.”

“How bad do you think it can get?” My dad was the first to build a year-round home on this side of the lake. When he was hardly more than a kid he and his brothers put up a summer place where the house now stood, and in 1938 a summer storm knocked it flat, stone walls and all. Only the boathouse escaped. A year later he

started the big house. It's the trees that do the damage in a bad blow. They get old, and the wind knocks them over. It's Mother Nature's way of cleaning house periodically. “I don't really know,” I said; truthfully enough. I had only heard stories about the great storm of thirty-eight. “But the wind can come off the lake like an express train.”

Billy came back a while later, complaining that the monkey bars were no fun because he was “all sweated up.” I ruffled his hair and gave him another Pepsi. More work for the dentist.

The thunderheads were getting closer, pushing away the blue. There was no doubt now that a storm was coming. Norton had turned off his radio. Billy sat between his mother and me, watching the sky, fascinated. Thunder boomed, rolling slowly across the lake and then echoing back again. The clouds twisted and rolled, now black, now purple, now veined, now black again. They gradually overspread the lake, and I could see a delicate caul of rain extending down from them. It was still a distance away. As we watched, it was probably raining on Bolster's Mills, or maybe even Norway.

The air began to move, jerkily at first, lifting the flag and then dropping it again. It began to freshen and grew steady, first cooling the perspiration on our bodies and then seeming to freeze it.

That was when I saw the silver veil rolling across the lake. It blotted out Harrison in seconds and then came straight at us. The powerboats had vacated the scene.

Billy stood up-from his chair, which was a miniature replica of our director's chairs, complete with his name printed on the back. “Daddy! Look!”

“Let's go in,” I said. I stood up and put my arm around his shoulders. “But do you see it? Dad, what is it?”

“A water-cyclone. Let's go in.”

Steff threw a quick, startled glance at my face and then said, “Come on, Billy. Do what your father says.”

We went in through the sliding glass doors that give on the living room. I slid the door shut on its track and paused for another look out. The silver veil was three-quarters of the way across the lake. It had resolved itself into a crazily spinning teacup between the lowering black sky and the surface of the water, which had gone the color of lead streaked with white chrome. The lake had 'begun to look eerily like the ocean, with high waves rolling in and sending spume up from the docks and breakwaters. Out in the middle, big whitecaps were tossing their heads back and forth.

Watching the water-cyclone was hypnotic. It was nearly on top of us when lightning, flashed so brightly that it printed everything on my eyes in negative for thirty seconds afterward. The telephone gave out a startled ting! and I turned to see my wife and son standing directly in front of the big picture window that gives us a panoramic view of the lake to the northwest.

One of those terrible visions came to me-I think they are reserved exclusively for husbands and fathers-of the picture window blowing in with a low hard coughing sound and sending jagged arrows of glass into my wife's bare stomach, into my boy's face and neck. The horrors of the Inquisition are nothing compared to the fates your mind can imagine for your loved ones. I grabbed them both hard and jerked them away. “What the hell are you doing? Get away from there!”

Steff gave me a startled glance. Billy only looked at me as if he had been partially awakened from a deep dream. I led them into the kitchen and hit the light switch. The phone ting-a-Tinged again. Then the wind came. It was as if the house had taken off like a 747. It was a high, breathless whistling, sometimes deepening to a bass roar before glissading up to a whooping scream. “Go downstairs,” I told Steff, and now I had to shout to make myself heard. Directly over the house thunder whacked mammoth planks together and Billy shrank against my leg. “You come too!” Steff yelled back. I nodded and made shooing gestures. I had to pry Billy off my leg. “Go with your mother. I want to get some candles in case the lights go off.” He went with her, and I started opening cabinets. Candles are funny things, you know. You lay them by every spring, knowing that a summer storm may knock out the power. And when the time comes, they hide. I was pawing through the fourth cabinet, past the half-ounce of grass that Steff and I bought four years ago and had still not smoked much of, past Billy's wind-up set of chatter-ing teeth from the Auburn Novelty Shop, past the drifts of photos Steffy kept forgetting to glue in our album. I looked

under a Sears catalogue and behind a Kewpie doll from Taiwan that I had won at the Fryeburg Fair knocking over wooden milk bottles with tennis balls. I found the candles behind the Kewpie doll with its glazed dead man's eyes. They were still wrapped in their cellophane. As my hand closed around them the lights went out and the only electricity was the stuff in the sky. The dining room was lit in a series of shutterflashes that were white and purple.

Downstairs I heard Billy start to cry and the low murmur of Steff soothing him. I had to have one more look at the storm.

The water-cyclone had either passed us or broken up when it reached the shoreline, but I still couldn't see twenty yards out onto the lake. The water was in complete turmoil. I saw someone's dock-the Jassers', maybe-hurry by with its main supports alternately turned up to the sky and buried in the churning water.

I went downstairs. Billy ran to me and clung to my legs. I lifted him up and gave him a hug. Then I lit the candles. We sat in the guestroom down the hall from my little studio and looked at each other's faces in the flickering yellow glow and listened to the storm roar and bash at our house. About -twenty minutes later we heard a ripping, rending crash as one of the big pines went down nearby. Then there was a lull.

“Is it over?” Steff asked. “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe only for a while.”

We went upstairs, each of us carrying a candle, like monks going to vespers. Billy carried his proudly and carefully. Carrying a candle, carrying the fire, was a very big deal for him. It helped him forget about being afraid.

It was too dark to see what damage had been done around the house. It was past Billy's bedtime, but neither of us suggested putting him in. We sat in the living room, listened to the wind, and looked at the lightning.

About an hour later it began to crank up again. For three weeks the temperature had been over ninety, and on six of those twenty-one days the National Weather Service station at the Portland Jetport had reported temperatures of over one hundred degrees. Queer weather. Coupled with the grueling winter we had come through and the late spring, some people had dragged out that old chestnut about the long-range results of the fifties A-bomb tests again. That, and of course, the end of the world. The oldest chestnut of them all.

The second squall wasn't so hard, but we heard the crash of several trees weakened by the first onslaught. As the wind began to die down again, one thudded heavily on the roof, like a fist dropped on a coffin lid; Billy jumped and looked apprehensively upward.

“It'll hold, champ,” I said. Billy smiled nervously. Around ten o'clock the last squall came. It was bad. The wind howled almost as loudly as it had the first time, and lightning seemed to be flashing all around us. More trees fell, and there was a splintering crash down by the water that made Steff utter a low cry. Billy had gone to sleep on her lap.

“David, what was that?” “I think it was the boathouse.” “Oh. Oh, Jesus.” “Steffy, I want us to go downstairs again.” I took Billy in my arms and stood up with him. Steff's eyes were big and frightened.

“David, are we going to be all right?' “Yes.” “Really?” “Yes.” We went downstairs. Ten minutes later, as the final squall peaked, there was a splintering crash from upstairs the picture window. So maybe my vision earlier hadn't been so crazy after all. Steff, who had been dozing, woke up with a little shriek, and Billy stirred uneasily in the guest bed.

“The rain will come in,” she said. It'll ruin the furniture.” “If it does, it does. It's insured. “ “That doesn't make it any better,” she said in an upset, scolding voice. “Your mother's dresser... our new sofa... the color TV...” “Shhh,” I said. “Go to sleep.” “I can't,” she said, and five minutes later She had. I stayed awake for another half-hour with one lit candle for company, listening to the thunder walk and talk outside. I had a feeling that there were going to be a lot of people from the lakefront communities calling their insurance agents in the morning, a lot of chainsaws burring as cottage owners art up the trees that had fallen on their roofs and battered through their windows, and a lot of orange CMP trucks on the road.

The storm was fading now, with no sign of a new squall coming in. I went back upstairs, leaving Steff and Billy on The bed, and looked into the living roam. The sliding glass door had held. But where the picture window had been there was now a jagged hole stuffed with birch leaves. It was the top of the old tree that had stood by our outside basement access for as long as I could remember. Looking at its top, now visiting in our living room, I could understand what Steff had meant by saying insurance didn't make it any better. I had loved that tree. It had been a hard campaigner of many winters, the one tree on the lakeside of the house that was exempt from my own chainsaw. Big chunks of glass on the rug reflected my candle-flame over and over. I reminded myself to warn Steff and Billy. They would want to wear their slippers in here. Both of them liked to slop around barefoot in the morning.

I went downstairs again. All three of us slept together in the guest bed, Billy between Steff and me. I had a dream that I saw God walking across Harrison on the far side of the lake, a God so gigantic that above the waist He was lost in a clear blue sky. In the dream I could hear the rending crack and splinter of breaking trees as God stamped the woods into the shape of His footsteps. He was circling the lake, coming toward the Bridgeton side, toward all the houses and us and cottages and summer places were bursting into purple-white flame like lightning, and soon the smoke covered everything. The smoke covered everything like a mist.

II. After the Storm. Norton. A Trip to Town.

“Jeee-pers,” Billy said. He was standing by the fence that separates our property from Norton's and looking down our driveway. The driveway runs a quarter of a mile to a camp road which, in its turn, runs about three-quarters of a mile to a stretch of two-lane blacktop, called Kansas Road. From Kansas Road you can go anywhere you want, as long as it's Bridgeton.

I saw what Billy was looking at and my heart went cold. “Don't go any closer, champ. Right there is close enough.”

Billy didn't argue. The morning was bright and as clear as a bell. The sky, which had been a mushy, hazy color during the heat wave, had regained a deep, crisp blue that was nearly autumnal. There was a light breeze, making cheerful sun-dapples move back and forth in the driveway. Not far from where Billy was standing there was a steady hissing noise, and in the grass there was what you might at first have taken for a writhing bundle of snakes. The power lines leading to our house had fallen in an untidy tangle about twenty feet away and lay in a burned patch of grass. They were twisting lazily and spitting. If the trees and grass hadn't been so completely damped down by the torrential rains, the house might have gone up. As it was, there was only that black patch where the wires had touched directly.

“Could that lectercute a person, Daddy?” “Yeah. It could.” “What are we going to do about it?” “Nothing. Wait for the CMP.”

“When will they come?” “I don't know.” Five-year-olds have as many questions as Hallmark has cards. “I imagine they're pretty busy this morning. Want to take a walk up to the end of the driveway with me?”

He started to come and then stopped, eyeing the wires nervously. One of them humped up and turned over lazily, as if beckoning.

“Daddy, can lectricity shoot through the ground?” A fair question. “Yes, but don't worry. Electricity wants the ground, not you, Billy. You'll be all right if you stay away from the wires.”

“Wants the ground,” he muttered, and then came to me. We walked up the driveway holding hands.

It was worse than I had imagined. Trees had fallen across the drive in four different places, one of them small, two of them middling, and one old baby that must have been five feet through the middle. Moss was crusted onto it like a moldy corset.

Branches, some half-stripped of their leaves, lay everywhere in jackstraw profusion. Billy and I walked up to the camp road, tossing the smaller branches off into the woods on either side. It reminded me of a summer's day that had been maybe twenty-five years before; I couldn't have been much older than Billy was now. All my uncles had been here, and they had spent the day in the woods with axes and hatchets and Darcy poles, cutting brush. Later that afternoon they had all sat down to the trestle picnic table my dad and mom used to have and there had been a monster meal of hot, dogs and hamburgers and potato salad. The Gansett beer had flowed like water and my uncle Rueben took a dive into the lake with all his clothes on, even his deck-shoes. In those days there were still deer in these woods.

“Daddy, can I go down to the lake?” He was tired of throwing branches, and the thing to do with a little boy when he's tired is to let him go do something else. “Sure.” We walked back to the house together and then Billy cut right, going around the house and giving the downed wires a large berth. I went left, into the garage, to get my McCullough. As I had suspected, I could already hear the unpleasant song of the chainsaw up and down the lake.

I topped up the tank, took off my shirt, and was starting back up the driveway, when Steff came out. She eyed the downed trees lying across the driveway nervously.

“How bad is it?” “I can cut it up. How bad is it in there?” “Well, I got the glass cleaned up, but you're going to have to do something about that tree, David. We can't have a tree in the living room.”

“No,” I said. “I guess we can't.” We looked at each other in the morning sunlight and got giggling. I set the McCullough down on the cement areaway, and kissed her, holding her buttocks firmly.

“Don't,” she murmured. “Billy's—” He came tearing around the corner of the house just then. “Dad! Daddy! Y'oughta see the—”

Steffy saw the live wires and screamed for him to watch out. Billy, who was a good distance away from them, pulled up short and stared at his mother as if she had gone mad.

“I'm okay, Mom,” he said in the careful tone of voice you use to placate the very old and senile. He walked toward us, showing us how all right he was, and Steff began to tremble in my arms.

“It's all right,” I said in her ear. “He knows about them.”

“Yes, but people get killed,” she said. “They have ads all the time on television about live wires, people get-Billy, I want you to come in the house right now!”

“Aw, come on, Mom! I wanna show Dad the boathouse!” He was almost bug-eyed with excitement and disappointment. He had gotten a taste of post storm apocalypse and wanted to share it.

“You go in right now! Those wires are dangerous and—”

“Dad said they want the ground, not me—”

“Billy, don't you argue with me!”

“I'll come down and look, champ. Go on down yourself.” I could feel Steff tensing against me. “Go around the other side, kiddo. “

“Yeah! Okay!”

He tore past us, taking the stone steps that led around the west end of the house two by two. He disappeared with his shirttail flying, trailing back one word-“Wow!”-as he spotted some other piece of destruction.

“He knows about the wires, Steffy.” I took her gently by the shoulders. “He's scared of them. That's good. It makes him safe.”

One tear tracked down her cheek. “David, I'm scared.”

“Come on! It's over.”

“Is it? Last winter... and the late spring... they called it a black spring in town... they said there hadn't been one in these parts since 1888—”

“They” undoubtedly meant Mrs. Carmody, who kept the Bridgeton Antiquary, a junk shop that Steff liked to rummage around in sometimes. Billy loved to go with her. In one of the shadowy, dusty back rooms, stuffed owls with gold-ringed eyes spread their wings forever as their feet endlessly grasped varnished logs; stuffed raccoons stood in a trio around a “stream” that was a long fragment of dusty mirror; and one moth-eaten wolf, which was foaming sawdust instead of saliva around his muzzle, snarled a creepy eternal snarl. Mrs. Carmody claimed the wolf was shot by her father as it came to drink from Stevens Brook one September afternoon in 1901.

The expeditions to Mrs. Carmody's Antiquary shop worked well for my wife and son. She was into carnival glass and he was into death in the name of taxidermy. But I thought that the old woman exercised a rather unpleasant hold over Steff's mind, which was in all other ways practical and hardheaded. She had found Steff's vulnerable spot, a mental Achilles' heel. Nor was Steff the only one in town who was fascinated by Mrs. Carmody's gothic pronouncements and folk remedies (which were always prescribed in God's name).

Stump-water would take off bruises if your husband was the sort who got a bit too free with his fists after three drinks, You could tell what kind of a winter was coming by counting the rings on the caterpillars in June or by measuring the thickness of August honeycomb. And now, good God protect and preserve us, THE BLACK SPRING OF 1888 (add your own exclamation points, as many as you think it deserves). I had also heard the story. It's one they like to pass around up here-if the spring is cold enough, the ice on the lakes will eventually turn as black as a rotted tooth. It's rare, but hardly a once-in-a-century occurrence They like to pass it around, but I doubt that many could pass it around with as much conviction as Mrs Carmody. We had a hard winter and a late spring,” I said. “Now we're having a hot summer. And we had a storm but it's over. You're not acting like yourself, Stephanie.” “That wasn't an ordinary storm,” she said in that same husky voice. “No,” I said. “I'll go along with you there.”

I had heard the Black Spring story from Bill Giosti, who owned and operated-after a fashion-Giosti's Mobil in Casco Village. Bill ran the plate with his three tosspot sons (with occasional help from his four tosspot grandsons... when they could take time off from tinkering with their snowmobiles and dirtbikes). Bill was seventy, looked eighty, and could still drink like twenty-three when the mood was on him. Billy and I had taken the Scout in for a fill-up the day after a surprise mid-May storm dropped nearly a foot of wet, heavy

snow on the region, covering the new grass and flowers. Giosti had been in his cups for fair, and happy to pass along the Black Spring story, along with his own original twist. But we get snow in May sometimes; it comes and it's gone two days later. It's no big deal. Steff was glancing doubtfully at the downed wires again.. “When will the Power Company come?”

“Just as soon as they can. It won't be long. I just don't want you to worry about Billy. His head's on pretty straight. He forgets to pick up his clothes, but he isn't going to go step on a bunch of live lines. He's got a good, healthy dose of self-interest.” I touched a corner of her mouth and it obliged by turning up in the beginning of a smile. “Better?”

“You always make it seem better,” she said, and that made me feel good.

From the lakeside of the house Billy was yelling for us to come and see.

“Come on,” I said. “Let's go look at the damage.”

She snorted ruefully. “If I want to look at damage, I can go sit in my living room.” “Make a little kid happy, then.” We walked down the stone steps hand in hand. We had just reached the first turn in them when Billy came from the other direction at speed, almost knocking us over. “Take it easy,” Steff said, frowning a little. Maybe, in her mind, she was seeing him skidding unto that deadly nest of live wires instead of the two of us. “You gotta come see!” Billy panted. “The boathouse is all bashed! There's w dock on the rocks... and trees in the boat cove... Jesus Christ!” “Billy Drayton!” Steff thundered.

“Sorry, Ma-but you gotta-wow!” He was gone again.

“Having spoken, the doomsayer departs,” I said, and that made Steff giggle again. “Listen, after I cut up those trees across the driveway, I'll go by the Central Maine Power office on Portland Road. Tell them what we got. Okay?”

“Okay,” she said gratefully. “When do you think you can goo„

Except for the big tree-the one with the moldy corset of moss-it would have been an hour's work. With the big one added in, I didn't think the job would be done until eleven or so. “I'll give you lunch here, then. But you'll have to get some things at the market for me... we're almost out of milk and butter. Also... well, I'll have to make you a list.”

Give a woman a disaster and she turns squirrel. I gave her a hug and nodded. We went on around the house. It didn't take more than a glance to understand why Billy had been a little overwhelmed. “Lordy,” Steff said in a faint voice.

From where we stood we had enough elevation to be able to see almost a quarter of a mile of shoreline-the Bibber property to our left, our own, and Brent Norton's to our right.

The huge old pine that had guarded our boat cove had been sheared off halfway up. What was left looked like a brutally sharpened pencil, and the inside of the tree seemed a glistening and defenseless white against the age-and-weather-darkened outer bark. A hundred feet of tree, the old pine's top half, lay partly submerged in our shallow cove. It occurred to me that we were very lucky our little Star-Cruiser wasn't sunk underneath it. The week before, it had developed engine trouble and it was still at the Naples marina, patiently waiting its turn.

On the other side of our little piece of shorefront, the boathouse my father had built-the boathouse that had once housed a sixty-foot Chris-Craft when the Drayton family fortunes had been at higher mark than they were today-lay under another big tree. It was the one that had stood on Norton's side of the property line, I saw. That raised the first flush of anger. The tree had been dead for five years and he should have long since had it taken down. Now it was three-quarters of the way down; our boathouse was propping it up. The roof had taken on a drunken, swaybacked look. The wind had swirled shingles from the hole the tree had made all over the point of land the boathouse stood on. Billy's description, “bashed,” was as good as any.

“That's Norton's tree!” Steff said. And she said it with such hurt indignation that I had to smile in spite of the pain I felt. The flagpole was lying in the water and Old Glory floated soggily beside it in a tangle of lanyard. And I could imagine Norton's response: Sue me.

Billy was on the rock breakwater, examining the dock that had washed up on the stones. It was painted in jaunty blue and yellow stripes. He looked back over his shoulder at us and yelled gleefully, “It's the Martinses', isn't it?”

“Yeah, it is,” I said. “Wade in and fish the flag out, would you, Big Bill?”

“Sure!”

To the right of the breakwater was a small sandy beach. In 1941, before Pearl Harbor paid off the Great Depression in blood, my dad hired a man to truck in that fine beach sand-six dumptrucks full-and to spread it out to a depth that is about nipple-high on me, say five feet. The workman charged eighty bucks for the job, and the sand has never moved. Just as well, you know, you can't put a sandy beach in on your land now. Now that the sewerage runoff from the booming cottage-building industry has killed most of the fish and made the rest of them unsafe to eat, the EPA has forbidden installing sand beaches. They might upset the ecology of the lake, you see, and it is presently against the law for anyone except land developers to do that.

Billy went for the flag-then stopped. At the same moment I felt Steff go rigid against me, and I saw it myself. The Harrison side of the lake was gone. It had been buried under a line of bright-white mist, like a fair-weather cloud fallen to earth.

My dream of the night before recurred, and when Steff asked me what it was, the word that nearly jumped first from my mouth was God.

“David?”

You couldn't see even a hint of the shoreline over there, but years of looking at Long Lake made me believe that the shoreline wasn't hidden by much; only yards, maybe. The edge of the mist was nearly ruler-straight.

“What is it, Dad?” Billy yelled. He was in the water up to his knees, groping for the soggy flag.

“Fogbank,” I said.

“On the lake?” Steff asked doubtfully, and I could see Mrs. Carmody's influence in her eyes. Damn the woman. My own moment of unease was passing. Dreams, after all, are insubstantial things, like mist itself.

“Sure. You've seen fog on the lake before.”

“Never like that. That looks more like a cloud.”

“It's the brightness of the sun,” I said. “It's the same way clouds look from an airplane when you fly over them.”

“What would do it? We only get fog in damp weather.”

“No, we've got it right now,” I said. “Harrison does, anyway. It's a little leftover from the storm, that's all. Two fronts meeting. Something along that line.”

“David, are you sure?”

I laughed and hauled my arm around her neck. “No, actually, I'm bullshitting like crazy. If I was sure, I'd be doing the weather on the six-o'clock news. Go on and make your shopping list.”

She gave me one more doubtful glance, looked at the fogbank for a moment or two with the flat of her hand held up to shade her eyes, and then shook her head. “Weird,” she said, and walked away.

For Billy, the mist had lost its novelty. He had fished the flag and a tangle of lanyard out of the water. We spread it on the lawn to dry.

“I heard it was wrong to ever let the flag touch the ground, Daddy,” he said in a businesslike, let's-get-this-out-of-the-way tone. “Yeah?” “Yeah. Victor McAllister says they lectercute people for it.” “Well, you tell Vic he's full of what makes the grass grow green.” “Horseshit, right?” Billy is a bright boy, but oddly humorless. To the champ, everything is serious business. I'm hoping that he'll live long enough to learn that in this world that is a very dangerous attitude. ' “Yeah, right, but don't tell your mother I said so. When the flag's dry, we'll put it away. We'll even fold it into a cocked hat, so we'll be on safe ground there.” “Daddy, will we fix the boathouse roof and get a new flagpole?” For the first time he looked anxious. He'd maybe had enough destruction for a while. I clapped him on the shoulder. “You're damn tooting.”

“Can I go over to the Gibbers' and see what happened there?” “Just for a couple of minutes. They'll be cleaning up, too, and sometimes that makes people feel a little ugly.” The way I presently felt about Norton. “Okay. Bye!” He was off.

“Stay out of their way, champ. And Billy?” He glanced back. “Remember about the live wires. If you see more, steer clear of them.” “Sure, Dad.”