Skeleton Crew Read online

  With Pig Pen's cyclonic clutter gone it looked barren and sterile. The swirled, heaped, drifted pile that had been Pig Pen's bed was stripped down to the bare-if slightly come-stained--mattress pad. Two Playboy gatefolds looked down at him with frozen two-dimensional come-ons.

  Not much change in Garrish's half of the room, which had always been barracks-neat. You could drop a quarter on the top blanket of Garrish's bed and it would bounce. All that neat had gotten on Piggy's nerves. He was an English major with a fine turn of phrase. He called Garrish a pigeonholer. The only thing on the wall above Garrish's bed was a huge blow-up of Humphrey Bogart that he had gotten in the college bookstore. Bogie had an automatic pistol in each hand and he was wearing suspenders. Pig Pen said pistols and braces were impotency symbols. Garrish doubted if Bogie had been impotent, although he had never read anything about him.

  He went to the closet door, unlocked it, and brought out the big walnut-stocked .352 Magnum that his father, a Methodist minister, had bought him for Christmas. He had bought the telescopic sight himself last March.

  You weren't supposed to have guns in your room, not even hunting rifles, but it hadn't been hard. He had signed it out of the university gun storage room the day before with a forged withdrawal slip. He put it in its waterproof leather scabbard, and left it in the woods behind the football field. Then, this morning around three A.M., he just went out and got it and brought it upstairs through the sleeping corridors.

  He sat down on the bed with the gun across his knees and wept a little bit. The Thinker on the toilet seat was looking at him. Garrish put the gun on his bed, crossed the room, and slapped it off Piggy's table and onto the floor, where it shattered. There was a knock at the door.

  Garrish put the rifle under his bed. "Come in."

  It was Bailey, standing there in his skivvies. There was a puff of lint in his bellybutton. There was no future for Bailey. Bailey would marry a stupid girl and they would have stupid kids. Later on he would die of cancer or maybe renal failure.

  "How was the chem final, Curt?"

  "All right."

  "I just wondered if I could borrow your notes. I've got it tomorrow. "

  "I burned them with my trash this morning."

  "Oh. Hey, Jesus! Did Piggy go and do that?" He pointed at the remains of the Thinker.

  "I guess so."

  "Why did he want to go and do that? I liked that thing. I was going to buy it off him." Bailey had sharp, ratty little features. His skivvies were thready and saggy-seated. Garrish could see exactly how he would look, dying of emphysema or something in an oxygen tent. How he would look yellow. I could help you, Garrish thought.

  "You think he'd mind if I scoffed up those pinups?"

  "I guess not."

  "Okay." Bailey crossed the room, stepping his bare feet gingerly over the pottery shards, and untacked the Playmates.

  "That picture of Bogart is really sharp, too. No tits, but, hey! You know?" Bailey peered at Garrish to see if Garrish would smile. When Garrish did not, he said, "I don't suppose you planned on throwing it away, or anything?"

  "No. I was just getting ready to take a shower."

  "Okay. Have a good summer if I don't see you again, Curt."

  "Thanks."

  Bailey went back to the door, the seat of his skivvies flapping. He paused at the door. "Another four-point this semester, Curt?"

  "At least."

  "Good deal. See you next year."

  He went out and closed the door. Garrish sat on the bed for a little while, then took the gun out, stripped it, and cleaned it. He put the muzzle up to his eye and looked at the tiny circle of light at the far end. The barrel was clean. He reintegrated the gun.

  In the third drawer of his bureau were three heavy boxes of Winchester ammunition. He laid these on the windowsill. He locked the room's door and went back to the window. He pulled the blinds up.

  The mall was bright and green, peppered with strolling students. Quinn and his idiot friend had gotten up a raggletaggle softball game. They scurried back and forth like crippled ants escaping a broken burrow.

  "Let me tell you something," Garrish told Bogie. "God got mad at Cain because Cain had an idea God was a vegetarian. His brother knew better. God made the world in His image, and if you don't eat the world, the world eats you. So Cain says to his brother, 'Why didn't you tell me?' And his brother says, 'Why didn't you listen?' And Cain says, 'Okay, I'm listening now.' So he waxes his brother and says, 'Hey God! You want meat? Here it is! You want roast or ribs or Abelburgers or what?' And God told him to put on his boogie shoes. So ... what do you think?"

  No reply from Bogie.

  Garrish put the window up and rested his elbows on the ledge, not letting the barrel of the .352 project out into the sunlight. He looked into the sight.

  He was centered on Carlton Memorial women's dormitory across the mall. Carlton was more popularly known as the dog kennels. He put the crosshairs on a big Ford wagon. A blond coed in jeans and a blue shell top was talking to her mother while her father, red-faced and balding, loaded suitcases into the back.

  Someone knocked on the door.

  Garrish waited.

  The knock came again.

  "Curt? I'll give you half a rock for the Bogart poster."

  Bailey.

  Garrish said nothing. The girl and her mother were laughing at something, not knowing there were microbes in their intestines, feeding, dividing, multiplying. The girl's father joined them and they stood in the sunlight together, a family portrait in the crosshairs.

  "Damn it all," Bailey said. His feet padded down the hall.

  Garrish squeezed the trigger.

  The gun kicked hard against his shoulder, the good, padded kick you get when you have seated the gun in exactly the right place. The smiling girl's blond head sheared itself away.

  Her mother went on smiling for a moment, and then her hand went to her mouth. She screamed through her hand. Garrish shot through it. Hand and head disappeared in a red spray. The man who had been loading the suitcases broke into a lumbering run.

  Garrish tracked him and shot him in the back. He raised his head, looking out of the sight for a moment. Quinn was holding the softball and looking at the blond girl's brains, which were splattered on the NO PARKING sign behind her prone body. Quinn didn't move. All across the mall people stood frozen, like children engaged in a game of statues.

  Somebody pounded on the door, then rattled the handle. Bailey again. "Curt? You all right, Curt? I think somebody's --"

  "Good drink, good meat, good God, let's eat!" Garrish exclaimed, and shot at Quinn. He pulled instead of squeezing and the shot went wide. Quinn was running. No problem. The second shot took Quinn in the neck and he flew maybe twenty feet.

  "Curt Garrish is killing himself!"Bailey was screaming. "Rollins! Rollins! Come quick!"

  His footsteps faded down the hall.

  Now they were starting to run. Garrish could hear them screaming. Garrish could hear the faint smack-smack sound of their shoes on the walks.

  He looked up at Bogie. Bogie held his two guns and looked beyond him. He looked at the shattered remnants of Piggy's Thinker and wondered what Piggy was doing today, if he was sleeping or watching TV or eating some great big wonderful meal. Eat the world, Piggy, Garrish thought. You gulp that sucker right down.

  "Garrish!" It was Rollins now, pounding on the door. "Open up, Garrish!"

  "It's locked," Bailey panted. "He looked lousy, he killed himself, I know it."

  Garrish pushed the muzzle out of the window again. A boy in a madras shirt was crouched down behind a bush, scanning the dormitory windows with desperate intensity. He wanted to run for it, Garrish saw, but his legs were frozen.

  "Good God, let's eat," Garrish murmured, and began to pull the trigger again.

  Mrs. Todd's Shortcut

  "There goes the Todd woman," I said.

  Homer Buckland watched the little Jaguar go by and nodded. The woman raised her hand to Homer
. Homer nodded his big, shaggy head to her but didn't raise his own hand in return. The Todd family had a big summer home on Castle Lake, and Homer had been their caretaker since time out of mind. I had an idea that he disliked Worth Todd's second wife every bit as much as he'd liked 'Phelia Todd, the first one.

  This was just about two years ago and we were sitting on a bench in front of Bell's Market, me with an orange soda-pop, Homer with a glass of mineral water. It was October, which is a peaceful time in Castle Rock. Lots of the lake places still get used on the weekends, but the aggressive, boozy summer socializing is over by then and the hunters with their big guns and their expensive nonresident permits pinned to their orange caps haven't started to come into town yet. Crops have been mostly laid by. Nights are cool, good for sleeping, and old joints like mine haven't yet started to complain. In October the sky over the lake is passing fair, with those big white clouds that move so slow; I like how they seem so flat on the bottoms, and how they are a little gray there, like with a shadow of sundown foretold, and I can watch the sun sparkle on the water and not be bored for some space of minutes. It's in October, sitting on the bench in front of Bell's and watching the lake from afar off, that I still wish I was a smoking man.

  "She don't drive as fast as 'Phelia," Homer said. "I swan I used to think what an old-fashion name she had for a woman that could put a car through its paces like she could."

  Summer people like the Todds are nowhere near as interesting to the year-round residents of small Maine towns as they themselves believe. Year-round folk prefer their own love stories and hate stories and scandals and rumors of scandal. When that textile fellow from Amesbury shot himself, Estonia Corbridge found that after a week or so she couldn't even get invited to lunch on her story of how she found him with the pistol still in one stiffening hand. But folks are still not done talking about Joe Camber, who got killed by his own dog.

  Well, it don't matter. It's just that they are different race-courses we run on. Summer people are trotters; us others that don't put on ties to do our week's work are just pacers. Even so there was quite a lot of local interest when Ophelia Todd disappeared back in 1973. Ophelia was a genuinely nice woman, and she had done a lot of things in town. She worked to raise money for the Sloan Library, helped to refurbish the war memorial, and that sort of thing. But all the summer people like the idea of raising money. You mention raising money and their eyes light up and commence to gleam. You mention raising money and they can get a committee together and appoint a secretary and keep an agenda. They like that. But you mention time (beyond, that is, one big long walloper of a combined cocktail party and committee meeting) and you're out of luck. Time seems to be what summer people mostly set a store by. They lay it by, and if they could put it up in Ball jars like preserves, why, they would. But 'Phelia Todd seemed willing to spend time-to do desk duty in the library as well as to raise money for it. When it got down to using scouring pads and elbow grease on the war memorial, 'Phelia was right out there with town women who had lost sons in three different wars, wearing an overall with her hair done up in a kerchief. And when kids needed ferrying to a summer swim program, you'd be as apt to see her as anyone headed down Landing Road with the back of Worth Todd's big shiny pickup full of kids. A good woman. Not a town woman, but a good woman. And when she disappeared, there was concern. Not grieving, exactly, because a disappearance is not exactly like a death. It's not like chopping something off with a cleaver; more like something running down the sink so slow you don't know it's all gone until long after it is.

  " 'Twas a Mercedes she drove," Homer said, answering the question I hadn't asked. "Two-seater sportster. Todd got it for her in sixty-four or sixty-five, I guess. You remember her taking the kids to the lake all those years they had Frogs and Tadpoles?"

  "Ayuh."

  "She'd drive 'em no more than forty, mindful they was in the back. But it chafed her. That woman had lead in her foot and a ball bearing sommers in the back of her ankle."

  It used to be that Homer never talked about his summer people. But then his wife died. Five years ago it was. She was plowing a grade and the tractor tipped over on her and Homer was taken bad off about it. He grieved for two years or so and then seemed to feel better. But he was not the same. He seemed waiting for something to happen, waiting for the next thing. You'd pass his neat little house sometimes at dusk and he would be on the porch smoking a pipe with a glass of mineral water on the porch rail and the sunset would be in his eyes and pipe smoke around his head and you'd think-I did, anyway--Homer is waiting for the next thing. This bothered me over a wider range of my mind than I liked to admit, and at last I decided it was because if it had been me, I wouldn't have been waiting for the next thing, like a groom who has put on his morning coat and finally has his tie right and is only sitting there on a bed in the upstairs of his house and looking first at himself in the mirror and then at the clock on the mantel and waiting for it to be eleven o'clock so he can get married. If it had been me, I would not have been waiting for the next thing; I would have been waiting for the last thing.

  But in that waiting period-which ended when Homer went to Vermont a year later--he sometimes talked about those people. To me, to a few others.

  "She never even drove fast with her husband, s'far as I know. But when I drove with her, she made that Mercedes strut."

  A fellow pulled in at the pumps and began to fill up his car. The car had a Massachusetts plate.

  "It wasn't one of these new sports cars that run on onleaded gasoline and hitch every time you step on it; it was one of the old ones, and the speedometer was calibrated all the way up to a hundred and sixty. It was a funny color of brown and I ast her one time what you called that color and she said it was Champagne. Ain't that good, I says, and she laughs fit to split. I like a woman who will laugh when you don't have to point her right at the joke, you know."

  The man at the pumps had finished getting his gas.

  "Afternoon, gentlemen," he says as he comes up the steps.

  "A good day to you," I says, and he went inside.

  " 'Phelia was always lookin for a shortcut," Homer went on as if we had never been interrupted. "That woman was mad for a shortcut. I never saw the beat of it. She said if you can save enough distance, you'll save time as well. She said her father swore by that scripture. He was a salesman, always on the road, and she went with him when she could, and he was always lookin for the shortest way. So she got in the habit.

  "I ast her one time if it wasn't kinda funny--here she was on the one hand, spendin her time rubbin up that old statue in the Square and takin the little ones to their swimmin lessons instead of playing tennis and swimming and getting boozed up like normal summer people, and on the other hand bein so damn set on savin fifteen minutes between here and Fryeburg that thinkin about it probably kep her up nights. It just seemed to me the two things went against each other's grain, if you see what I mean. She just looks at me and says, 'I like being helpful, Homer. I like driving, too--at least sometimes, when it's a challenge-but I don't like the time it takes. It's like mending clothes--sometimes you take tucks and sometimes you let things out. Do you see what I mean?'

  " 'I guess so, missus,' I says, kinda dubious.

  " 'If sitting behind the wheel of a car was my idea of a really good time all the time, I would look for long-cuts,' she says, and that tickled me s'much I had to laugh."

  The Massachusetts fellow came out of the store with a six-pack in one hand and some lottery tickets in the other.

  "You enjoy your weekend," Homer says.

  "I always do," the Massachusetts fellow says. "I only wish I could afford to live here all year round."

  "Well, we'll keep it all in good order for when you can come," Homer says, and the fellow laughs.

  We watched him drive off toward someplace, that Massachusetts plate showing. It was a green one. My Marcy says those are the ones the Massachusetts Motor Registry gives to drivers who ain't had a accident in that strange, an
gry, fuming state for two years. If you have, she says, you got to have a red one so people know to watch out for you when they see you on the roll.

  "They was in-state people, you know, the both of them," Homer said, as if the Massachusetts fellow had reminded him of the fact.

  "I guess I did know that," I said.

  "The Todds are just about the only birds we got that fly north in the winter. The new one, I don't think she likes flying north too much."

  He sipped his mineral water and fell silent a moment, thinking.

  "She didn't mind it, though," Homer said. "At least, I judge she didn't although she used to complain about it something fierce. The complaining was just a way to explain why she was always lookin for a shortcut."

  "And you mean her husband didn't mind her traipsing down every wood-road in tarnation between here and Bangor just so she could see if it was nine-tenths of a mile shorter?"

  "He didn't care piss-all," Homer said shortly, and got up, and went in the store. There now, Owens, I told myself, you know it ain't safe to ast him questions when he's yarning, and you went right ahead and ast one, and you have buggered a story that was starting to shape up promising.

  I sat there and turned my face up into the sun and after about ten minutes he come out with a boiled egg and sat down. He ate her and I took care not to say nothing and the water on Castle Lake sparkled as blue as something as might be told of in a story about treasure. When Homer had finished his egg and had a sip of mineral water, he went on. I was surprised, but still said nothing. It wouldn't have been wise.

  "They had two or three different chunks of rolling iron," he said. "There was the Cadillac, and his truck, and her little Mercedes go-devil. A couple of winters he left the truck, 'case they wanted to come down and do some skiin. Mostly when the summer was over he'd drive the Caddy back up and she'd take her go-devil."

  I nodded but didn't speak. In truth, I was afraid to risk another comment. Later I thought it would have taken a lot of comments to shut Homer Buckland up that day. He had been wanting to tell the story of Mrs. Todd's shortcut for a long time.

  "Her little go-devil had a special odometer in it that told you how many miles was in a trip, and every time she set off from Castle Lake to Bangor she'd set it to 000-point-0 and let her clock up to whatever. She had made a game of it, and she used to chafe me with it."