Salem's Lot Page 6

  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-Herald thumped 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 Burn
s 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 f
ine," 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 again at 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.