by Stephen King
Ricky Lee brought him four and laid them out neatly on a fresh napkin next to the stein of whiskey. Hanscom picked one of them up, tilted his head back like a man about to administer eyedrops to himself, and then began to squeeze raw lemon-juice into his right nostril.
"Holy Jesus!" Ricky Lee cried, horrified.
Hanscom's throat worked. His face flushed ... and then Ricky Lee saw tears running down the flat planes of his face toward his ears. Now the Spinners were on the juke, singing about the rubberband-man. "Oh Lord, I just don't know how much of this I can stand," the Spinners sang.
Hanscom groped blindly on the bar, found another slice of lemon, and squeezed the juice into his other nostril.
"You're gonna fucking kill yourself," Ricky Lee whispered.
Hanscom tossed both of the wrung-out lemon wedges onto the bar. His eyes were fiery red and he was breathing in hitching, wincing gasps. Clear lemon-juice dripped from both of his nostrils and trickled down to the comers of his mouth. He groped for the stein, raised it, and drank a third of it. Frozen, Ricky Lee watched his adam's apple go up and down.
Hanscom set the stein aside, shuddered twice, then nodded. He looked at Ricky Lee and smiled a little. His eyes were no longer red.
"Works about like they said it did. You are so fucking concerned about your nose that you never feel what's going down your throat at all."
"You're crazy, Mr. Hanscom," Ricky Lee said.
"You bet your fur," Mr. Hanscom said. "You remember that one, Ricky Lee? We used to say that when we were kids 'You bet your fur.' Did I ever tell you I used to be fat?"
"No sir, you never did," Ricky Lee whispered. He was now convinced that Mr. Hanscom had received some intelligence so dreadful that the man really had gone crazy ... or at least taken temporary leave of his senses.
"I was a regular butterball. Never played baseball or basketball, always got caught first when we played tag, couldn't keep out of my own way. I was fat, all right. And there were these fellows in my home town who used to take after me pretty regularly. There was a fellow named Reginald Huggins, only everyone called him Belch. A kid named Victor Criss. A few other guys. But the real brains of the combination was a fellow named Henry Bowers. If there has ever been a genuinely evil kid strutting across the skin of the world, Ricky Lee, Henry Bowers was that kid. I wasn't the only kid he used to take after; my problem was, I couldn't run as fast as some of the others."
Hanscom unbuttoned his shirt and opened it. Leaning forward, Ricky Lee saw a funny, twisted scar on Mr. Hanscom's stomach, just above his navel. Puckered, white, and old. It was a letter, he saw. Someone had carved the letter "H" into the man's stomach, probably long before Mr. Hanscom had been a man.
"Henry Bowers did that to me. About a thousand years ago. I'm lucky I'm not wearing his whole damned name down there."
"Mr. Hanscom--"
Hanscom took the other two lemon-slices, one in each hand, tilted his head back, and took them like nose-drops. He shuddered wrackingly, put them aside, and took two big swallows from the stein. He shuddered again, took another gulp, and then groped for the padded edge of the bar with his eyes closed. For a moment he held on like a man on a sailboat clinging to the rail for support in a heavy sea. Then he opened his eyes again and smiled at Ricky Lee.
"I could ride this bull all night," he said.
"Mr. Hanscom, I wish you wouldn't do that anymore," Ricky Lee said nervously.
Annie came over to the waitresses' stand with her tray and called for a couple of Millers. Ricky Lee drew them and took them down to her. His legs felt rubbery.
"Is Mr. Hanscom all right, Ricky Lee?" Annie asked. She was looking past Ricky Lee and he turned to follow her gaze. Mr. Hanscom was leaning over the bar, carefully picking lemon-slices out of the caddy where Ricky Lee kept the drink garnishes.
"I don't know," he said. "I don't think so."
"Well get your thumb out of your ass and do something about it." Annie was, like most other women, partial to Ben Hanscom.
"I dunno. My daddy always said that if a man's in his right mind--"
"Your daddy didn't have the brains God gave a gopher," Annie said. "Never mind your daddy. You got to put a stop to that, Ricky Lee. He's going to kill himself."
Thus given his marching orders, Ricky Lee went back down to where Ben Hanscom sat. "Mr. Hanscom, I really think you've had en--"
Hanscom tilted his head back. Squeezed. Actually sniffed the lemon-juice back this time, as if it were cocaine. He gulped whiskey as if it were water. He looked at Ricky Lee solemnly. "Bing-bang, I saw the whole gang, dancing on my living-room rug," he said, and then laughed. There was maybe two inches of whiskey left in the stein.
"That is enough," Ricky Lee said, and reached for the stein.
Hanscom moved it gently out of his reach. "Damage has been done, Ricky Lee," he said. "The damage has been done, boy."
"Mr. Hanscom, please--"
"I've got something for your kids, Ricky Lee. Damn if I didn't almost forget!"
He was wearing a faded denim vest, and now he reached something out of one of its pockets. Ricky Lee heard a muted clink.
"My dad died when I was four," Hanscom said. There was no slur at all in his voice. "Left us a bunch of debts and these. I want your kiddos to have them, Ricky Lee." He put three cartwheel silver dollars on the bar, where they gleamed under the soft lights. Ricky Lee caught his breath.
"Mr. Hanscom, that's very kind, but I couldn't--"
"There used to be four, but I gave one of them to Stuttering Bill and the others. Bill Denbrough, that was his real name. Stuttering Bill's just what we used to call him ... just a thing we used to say, like 'You bet your fur.' He was one of the best friends I ever had--I did have a few, you know, even a fat kid like me had a few. Stuttering Bill's a writer now."
Ricky Lee barely heard him. He was looking at the cartwheels, fascinated. 1921, 1923, and 1924. God knew what they were worth now, just in terms of the pure silver they contained.
"I couldn't," he said again.
"But I insist." Mr. Hanscom took hold of the stein and drained it. He should have been flat on his keister, but his eyes never left Ricky Lee's. Those eyes were watery, and very bloodshot, but Ricky Lee would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that they were also the eyes of a sober man.
"You're scaring me a little, Mr. Hanscom," Ricky Lee said. Two years ago Gresham Arnold, a rumdum of some local repute, had come into the Red Wheel with a roll of quarters in his hand and a twenty-dollar bill stuck into the band of his hat. He handed the roll to Annie with instructions to feed the quarters into the juke-box by fours. He put the twenty on the bar and instructed Ricky Lee to set up drinks for the house. This rumdum, this Gresham Arnold, had long ago been a star basketball player for the Hemingford Rams, leading them to their first (and most likely last) high-school team championship. In 1961 that had been. An almost unlimited future seemed to lie ahead of the young man. But he had flunked out of L.S.U. his first semester, a victim of drink, drugs, and all-night parties. He came home, cracked up the yellow convertible his folks had given him as a graduation present, and got a job as head salesman in his daddy's John Deere dealership. Five years passed. His father could not bear to fire him, and so he finally sold the dealership and retired to Arizona, a man haunted and made old before his time by the inexplicable and apparently irreversible degeneration of his son. While the dealership still belonged to his daddy and he was at least pretending to work, Arnold had made some effort to keep the booze at arm's length; afterward, it got him completely. He could get mean, but he had been just as sweet as horehound candy the night he brought in the quarters and set up drinks for the house, and everyone had thanked him kindly, and Annie kept playing Moe Bandy songs because Gresham Arnold liked ole Moe Bandy. He sat there at the bar--on the very stool where Mr. Hanscom was sitting now, Ricky Lee realized with steadily deepening unease--and drank three or four bourbon-and-bitters, and sang along with the juke, and caused no trouble, and went home when Ricky L
ee closed the Wheel up, and hanged himself with his belt in an upstairs closet. Gresham Arnold's eyes that night had looked a little bit like Ben Hanscom's eyes looked right now.
"Scaring you a bit, am I?" Hanscom asked, his eyes never leaving Ricky Lee's. He pushed the stein away and then folded his hands neatly in front of those three silver cartwheels. "I probably am. But you're not as scared as I am, Ricky Lee. Pray to Jesus you never are."
"Well, what's the matter?" Ricky Lee asked. "Maybe--" He wet his lips. "Maybe I can give you a help."
"The matter?" Ben Hanscom laughed. "Why, not too much. I had a call from an old friend tonight. Guy named Mike Hanlon. I'd forgotten all about him, Ricky Lee, but that didn't scare me much. After all, I was just a kid when I knew him, and kids forget things, don't they? Sure they do. You bet your fur. What scared me was getting about halfway over here and realizing that it wasn't just Mike I'd forgotten about--I'd forgotten everything about being a kid."
Ricky Lee only looked at him. He had no idea what Mr. Hanscom was talking about--but the man was scared, all right. No question about that. It sat funny on Ben Hanscom, but it was real.
"I mean I'd forgotten all about it, " he said, and rapped his knuckles lightly on the bar for emphasis. "Did you ever hear, Ricky Lee, of having an amnesia so complete you didn't even know you had amnesia?"
Ricky Lee shook his head.
"Me either. But there I was, tooling along in the Caddy tonight, and all of a sudden it hit me. I remembered Mike Hanlon, but only because he called me on the phone. I remembered Derry, but only because that was where he was calling from."
"Derry?"
"But that was all. It hit me that I hadn't even thought about being a kid since ... since I don't even know when. And then, just like that, it all started to flood back in. Like what we did with the fourth silver dollar."
"What did you do with it, Mr. Hanscom?"
Hanscom looked at his watch, and suddenly slipped down from his stool. He staggered a bit--the slightest bit. That was all. "Can't let the time get away from me," he said. "I'm flying tonight."
Ricky Lee looked instantly alarmed, and Hanscom laughed.
"Flying but not driving the plane. Not this time. United Airlines, Ricky Lee."
"Oh." He supposed his relief showed on his face, but he didn't care. "Where are you going?"
Hanscom's shirt was still open. He looked thoughtfully down at the puckered white lines of the old scar on his belly and then began to button the shirt over it.
"Thought I told you that, Ricky Lee. Home. I'm going home. Give those cartwheels to your kids." He started toward the door, and something about the way he walked, even the way he hitched at the sides of his pants, terrified Ricky Lee. The resemblance to the late and mostly unlamented Gresham Arnold was suddenly so acute it was nearly like seeing a ghost.
"Mr. Hanscom!" he cried in alarm.
Hanscom turned back, and Ricky Lee stepped quickly backward. His ass hit the backbar and glassware gossiped briefly as the bottles knocked together. He stepped back because he was suddenly convinced that Ben Hanscom was dead. Yes, Ben Hanscom was lying dead someplace, in a ditch or an attic or possibly in a closet with a belt noosed around his neck and the toes of his four-hundred-dollar cowboy boots dangling an inch or two above the floor, and this thing standing near the juke and staring back at him was a ghost. For a moment--just a moment, but it was plenty long enough to cover his working heart with a rime of ice--he was convinced he could see tables and chairs right through the man.
"What is it, Ricky Lee?"
"Nuh-n-nuh. Nothin."
Ben Hanscom looked out at Ricky Lee from eyes which had dark-purple crescents beneath them. His cheeks burned with liquor; his nose looked red and sore.
"Nothin," Ricky Lee whispered again, but he couldn't take his eyes from that face, the face of a man who has died deep in sin and now stands hard by hell's smoking side door.
"I was fat and we were poor," Ben Hanscom said. "I remember that now. And I remember that either a girl named Beverly or Stuttering Bill saved my life with a silver dollar. I'm scared almost insane by whatever else I may remember before tonight's over, but how scared I am doesn't matter, because it's going to come anyway. It's all there, like a great big bubble that's growing in my mind. But I'm going, because all I've ever gotten and all I have now is somehow due to what we did then, and you pay for what you get in this world. Maybe that's why God made us kids first and built us close to the ground, because He knows you got to fall down a lot and bleed a lot before you learn that one simple lesson. You pay for what you get, you own what you pay for ... and sooner or later whatever you own comes back home to you."
"You gonna be back this weekend, though, ain't you?" Ricky Lee asked through numbed lips. In his increasing distress this was all he could find to hold on to. "You gonna be back this weekend just like always, ain't you?"
"I don't know," Mr. Hanscom said, and smiled a terrible smile. "I'm going a lot farther than London this time, Ricky Lee."
"Mr. Hanscom--!"
"You give those cartwheels to your kids," he repeated, and slipped out into the night.
"What the blue hell?" Annie asked, but Ricky Lee ignored her. He flipped up the bar's partition and ran over to one of the windows which looked out on the parking lot. He saw the headlights of Mr. Hanscom's Caddy come on, heard the engine rev. It pulled out of the dirt lot, kicking up a rooster-tail of dust behind it. The taillights dwindled away to red points down Highway 63, and the Nebraska nightwind began to pull the hanging dust apart.
"He took on a boxcar full of booze and you let him get in that big car of his and drive away," Annie said. "Way to go, Ricky Lee."
"Never mind."
"He's going to kill himself."
And although this had been Ricky Lee's own thought less than five minutes ago, he turned to her when the taillights winked out of sight and shook his head.
"I don't think so," he said. "Although the way he looked tonight, it might be better for him if he did."
"What did he say to you?"
He shook his head. It was all confused in his mind, and the sum total of it seemed to mean nothing. "It doesn't matter. But I don't think we're ever going to see that old boy again."
4
Eddie Kaspbrak Takes His Medicine
If you would know all there is to know about an American man or woman of the middle class as the millennium nears its end, you would need only to look in his or her medicine cabinet--or so it has been said. But dear Lord, get a look into this one as Eddie Kaspbrak slides it open, mercifully sliding aside his white face and wide, staring eyes.
On the top shelf there's Anacin, Excedrin, Excedrin P.M., Contac, Gelusil, Tylenol, and a large blue jar of Vicks, looking like a bit of brooding deep twilight under glass. There is a bottle of Vivarin, a bottle of Serutan (That's "Nature's" spelled backwards, the ads on Lawrence Welk used to say when Eddie Kaspbrak was but a wee slip of a lad), and two bottles of Phillips' Milk of Magnesia--the regular, which tastes like liquid chalk, and the new mint flavor, which tastes like mint-flavored liquid chalk. Here is a large bottle of Rolaids standing chummily close to a large bottle of Turns. The Turns are standing next to a large bottle of orange-flavored Di-Gel tablets. The three of them look like a trio of strange piggy-banks, stuffed with pills instead of dimes.
Second shelf, and dig the vites: you got your E, your C, your C with rosehips. You got B-simple and B-complex and B-12. There's L-Lysine, which is supposed to do something about those embarrassing skin problems, and lecithin, which is supposed to do something about that embarrassing cholesterol build-up in and around the Big Pump. There's iron, calcium, and cod liver oil. There's One-A-Day multiples, Myadec multiples, Centrum multiples. And sitting up on top of the cabinet itself is a gigantic bottle of Geritol, just for good measure.
Moving right along to Eddie's third shelf, we find the utility infielders of the patent-medicine world. Ex-Lax. Carter's Little Pills. Those two keep Eddie Kaspbrak moving the
mail. Here, nearby, is Kaopectate, Pepto-Bismol, and Preparation H in case the mail moves too fast or too painfully. Also some Tucks in a screw-top jar just to keep everything tidy after the mail has gone through, be it just an advertising circular or two addressed to OCCUPANT or a big old special-delivery package. Here is Formula 44 for coughs, Nyquil and Dristan for colds, and a big bottle of castor oil. There's a tin of Sucrets in case Eddie's throat gets sore, and there's a quartet of mouthwashes: Chloraseptic, Cepacol, Cepestat in the spray bottle, and of course good old Listerine, often imitated but never duplicated. Visine and Murine for the eyes. Cortaid and Neosporin ointment for the skin (the second line of defense if the L-Lysine doesn't live up to expectations), a tube of Oxy-5 and a plastic bottle of Oxy-Wash (because Eddie would definitely rather have a few less cents than a few more zits), and some tetracyline pills.
And off to one side, clustered like bitter conspirators, are three bottles of coal-tar shampoo.
The bottom shelf is almost deserted, but the stuff which is here means serious business--you could cruise on this stuff, okay. On this stuff you could fly higher than Ben Hanscom's jet and crash harder than Thurman Munson's. There's Valium, Percodan, Elavil, and Darvon Complex. There is also another Sucrets box on this low shelf, but there are no Sucrets in it. If you opened that one you would find six Quaaludes.
Eddie Kaspbrak believed in the Boy Scout motto.
He was swinging a blue tote-bag as he came into the bathroom. He set it on the sink, unzipped it, and then, with trembling hands, he began to spill bottles and jars and tubes and squeeze-bottles and spray-bottles into it. Under other circumstances he would have taken them out handful by careful handful, but there was no time for such niceties now. The choice, as Eddie saw it, was as simple as it was brutal: get moving and keep moving or stand in one place long enough to start thinking about what all of this meant and simply die of fright.
"Eddie?" Myra called up from downstairs. "Eddie, what are you dooooing?"
Eddie dropped the Sucrets box containing the 'ludes into the bag. The medicine cabinet was now entirely empty except for Myra's Midol and a small, almost used-up tube of Blistex. He paused for a moment and then grabbed the Blistex. He started to zip the bag closed, debated, and then threw in the Midol as well. She could always buy more.
