by Stephen King
"How do you feel about that, Morris?" Downs asked.
Morris, ordinarily good with words, was too stunned to say anything, but he didn't have to. He burst into tears.
Two months later, after the obligatory pre-release counseling and shortly before his job at the MAC was scheduled to begin, he walked through Gate A and back into the free world. In his pocket were his earnings from thirty-five years in the dyehouse, the furniture workshop, and the library. It amounted to twenty-seven hundred dollars and change.
The Rothstein notebooks were finally within reach.
PART 2: OLD PALS
1
Kermit William Hodges--plain old Bill, to his friends--drives along Airport Road with the windows rolled down and the radio turned up, singing along with Dylan's "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry." He's sixty-six, no spring chicken, but he looks pretty good for a heart attack survivor. He's lost forty pounds since the vapor-lock, and has quit eating the junk food that was killing him a little with each mouthful.
Do you want to live to see seventy-five? the cardiologist asked him. This was at his first full checkup, a couple of weeks after the pacemaker went in. If you do, give up the pork rinds and doughnuts. Make friends with salads.
As advice goes, it's not up there with love thy neighbor as thyself, but Hodges has taken it to heart. There's a salad in a white paper bag on the seat beside him. He'll have plenty of time to eat it, with Dasani to wash it down, if Oliver Madden's plane is on time. And if Madden comes at all. Holly Gibney has assured him that Madden is already on the way--she got his flight plan from a computer site called AirTracker--but it's always possible that Madden will smell something downwind and head in another direction. He has been out there doing dirt for quite some time now, and guys like that have very educated sniffers.
Hodges passes the feeder road to the main terminals and short-term parking and continues on, following the signs that read AIR FREIGHT and SIGNATURE AIR and THOMAS ZANE AVIATION. He turns in at this last. It's an independent fixed-based operator, huddled--almost literally--in the shadow of the much bigger Signature Air FBO next door. There are weeds sprouting from the cracked asphalt of the little parking lot, which is empty except for the front row. That has been reserved for a dozen or so rental cars. In the middle of the economies and mid-sizes, and hulking above them, is a black Lincoln Navigator with smoked glass windows. Hodges takes this as a good sign. His man does like to go in style, a common trait among dirtbags. And although his man may wear thousand-dollar suits, he is still very much a dirtbag.
Hodges bypasses the parking lot and pulls into the turnaround out front, stopping in front of a sign reading LOADING AND UNLOADING ONLY.
Hodges hopes to be loading.
He checks his watch. Quarter to eleven. He thinks of his mother saying You must always arrive early on important occasions, Billy, and the memory makes him smile. He takes his iPhone off his belt and calls the office. It rings just once.
"Finders Keepers," Holly says. She always says the name of the company, no matter who's calling; it's one of her little tics. She has many little tics. "Are you there, Bill? Are you at the airport? Are you?"
Little tics aside, this Holly Gibney is very different from the one he first met four years ago, when she came to town for her aunt's funeral, and the changes are all for the better. Although she's sneaking the occasional cigarette again; he has smelled them on her breath.
"I'm here," he says. "Tell me I'm gonna get lucky."
"Luck has nothing to do with it," she says. "AirTracker is a very good website. You might like to know that there are currently six thousand, four hundred and twelve flights in U.S. airspace. Isn't that interesting?"
"Totally fascinating. Is Madden's ETA still eleven thirty?"
"Eleven thirty-seven, to be exact. You left your skim milk on your desk. I put it back in the fridge. Skim milk goes over very rapidly on hot days, you know. Even in an air-conditioned environment, which this is. Now." She nagged Hodges into the air-conditioning. Holly is a very good nagger, when she puts her mind to it.
"Chug-a-lug, Holly," he says. "I have a Dasani."
"No, thank you, I'm drinking my Diet Coke. Barbara Robinson called. She wanted to talk to you. She was all serious. I told her she could call you later this afternoon. Or you'd call her." Uncertainty creeps into her voice. "Was that all right? I thought you'd want your phone available for the time being."
"That's fine, Holly. Did she say what she was all serious about?"
"No."
"Call her back and tell her I'll be in touch as soon as this is wrapped up."
"You'll be careful, won't you?"
"I always am." Although Holly knows that's not exactly true; he damned near got himself, Barbara's brother, Jerome, and Holly herself blown to kingdom come four years ago . . . and Holly's cousin was blown up, although that came earlier. Hodges, who had been more than halfway to in love with Janey Patterson, still mourns her. And still blames himself. These days he takes care of himself for himself, but he also does it because he believes it's what Janey would have wanted.
He tells Holly to hold the fort and returns his iPhone to the place on his belt where he used to carry his Glock before he became a Det-Ret. In retirement he always used to forget his cell, but those days are gone. What he's doing these days isn't quite the same as carrying a badge, but it's not bad. In fact, it's pretty good. Most of the fish Finders Keepers nets are minnows, but today's is a bluefin tuna, and Hodges is stoked. He's looking at a big payday, but that's not the main thing. He's engaged, that's the main thing. Nailing bad boys like Oliver Madden is what he was made to do, and he intends to keep on doing it until he no longer can. With luck, that might be eight or nine years, and he intends to treasure every day. He believes Janey would have wanted that for him, too.
Yeah, he can hear her say, wrinkling her nose at him in that funny way she had.
Barbara Robinson was also nearly killed four years ago; she was at the fateful concert with her mother and a bunch of friends. Barbs was a cheerful, happy kid then and is a cheerful, happy teenager now--he sees her when he takes the occasional meal at the Robinson home, but he does that less often now that Jerome is away at school. Or maybe Jerome's back for the summer. He'll ask Barbara when he talks to her. Hodges hopes she's not in some kind of jam. It seems unlikely. She's your basic good kid, the kind who helps old ladies across the street.
Hodges unwraps his salad, douses it with lo-cal French, and begins to snark it up. He's hungry. It's good to be hungry. Hunger is a sign of health.
2
Morris Bellamy isn't hungry at all. A bagel with cream cheese is the most he can manage for lunch, and not much of that. He ate like a pig when he first got out--Big Macs, funnel cakes, pizza by the slice, all the stuff he had longed for while in prison--but that was before a night of puking after an ill-advised visit to Senor Taco in Lowtown. He never had a problem with Mexican when he was young, and youth seems like just hours ago, but a night spent on his knees praying to the porcelain altar was all it took to drive home the truth: Morris Bellamy is fifty-nine, on the doorstep of old age. The best years of his life were spent dying bluejeans, varnishing tables and chairs to be sold in the Waynesville Outlet Shop, and writing letters for an unending stream of dead-end Charlies in prison overalls.
Now he's in a world he hardly recognizes, one where movies show on bloated screens called IMAX and everyone on the street is either wearing phones in their ears or staring at tiny screens. There are television cameras watching inside every shop, it seems, and the prices of the most ordinary items--bread, for instance, fifty cents a loaf when he went up--are so high they seem surreal. Everything has changed; he feels glare-blind. He is way behind the curve, and he knows his prison-oriented brain will never catch up. Nor his body. It's stiff when he gets out of bed in the morning, achy when he goes to bed at night; a touch of arthritis, he supposes. After that night of vomiting (and when he wasn't doing that, he was shitting brown water), h
is appetite just died.
For food, at least. He has thought of women--how could he not, when they're everywhere, the young ones barely dressed in the early summer heat?--but at his age, he'd have to buy one younger than thirty, and if he went to one of the places where such transactions are made, he would be violating his parole. If he were caught, he'd find himself back in Waynesville with the Rothstein notebooks still buried in that patch of waste ground, unread by anyone except the author himself.
He knows they're still there, and that makes it worse. The urge to dig them up and have them at last has been a maddening constant, like a snatch of music (I need a lover that won't drive me cray-zee) that gets into your head and simply won't leave, but so far he has done almost everything by the book, waiting for his PO to relax and let up a little. This was the gospel according to Warren "Duck" Duckworth, handed down when Morris first became eligible for parole.
"You gotta be super-careful to start with," Duck had said. This was before Morris's first board hearing and the first vengeful appearance of Cora Ann Hooper. "Like you're walking on eggs. 'Cause, see, the bastard will show up when you least expect it. You can take that to the bank. If you get the idea to do something that might get you marked up on Doubtful Behavior--that's a category they have--wait until after your PO makes a surprise visit. Then you prob'ly be all right. Get me?"
Morris did.
And Duck had been right.
3
After not even one hundred hours as a free man (well, semi-free), Morris came back to the old apartment building where he now lived to find his PO sitting on the stoop and smoking a cigarette. The graffiti-decorated cement-and-breezeblock pile, called Bugshit Manor by the people who lived there, was a state-subsidized fish tank stocked with recovering druggies, alcoholics, and parolees like himself. Morris had seen his PO just that noon, and been sent on his way after a few routine questions and a Seeya next week. This was not next week, this was not even the next day, but here he was.
Ellis McFarland was a large black gentleman with a vast sloping gut and a shining bald head. Tonight he was dressed in an acre of bluejeans and a Harley-Davidson tee-shirt, size XXL. Beside him was a battered old knapsack. "Yo, Morrie," he said, and patted the cement next to one humongous haunch. "Take a pew."
"Hello, Mr. McFarland."
Morris sat, heart beating so hard it was painful. Please just a Doubtful Behavior, he thought, even though he couldn't think what he'd done that was doubtful. Please don't send me back, not when I'm so close.
"Where you been, homie? You finish work at four. It's now after six."
"I . . . I stopped and had a sandwich. I got it at the Happy Cup. I couldn't believe the Cup was still there, but it is." Babbling. Not able to stop himself, even though he knew babbling was what people did when they were high on something.
"Took you two hours to eat a sandwich? Fucker must have been three feet long."
"No, it was just regular. Ham and cheese. I ate it on one of the benches in Government Square, and fed some of the crusts to the pigeons. I used to do that with a friend of mine, back in the day. And I just . . . you know, lost track of the time."
All perfectly true, but how lame it sounded!
"Enjoying the air," McFarland suggested. "Digging the freedom. That about the size of it?"
"Yes."
"Well, you know what? I think we ought to go upstairs and then I think you ought to drop a urine. Make sure you haven't been digging the wrong kind of freedom." He patted the knapsack. "Got my little kit right here. If the pee don't turn blue, I'll get out of your hair and let you get on with your evening. You don't have any objection to that plan, do you?"
"No." Morris was almost giddy with relief.
"And I'll watch while you make wee-wee in the little plastic cup. Any objection to that?"
"No." Morris had spent over thirty-five years pissing in front of other people. He was used to it. "No, that's fine, Mr. McFarland."
McFarland flipped his cigarette into the gutter, grabbed his knapsack, and stood up. "In that case, I believe we'll forgo the test."
Morris gaped.
McFarland smiled. "You're okay, Morrie. For now, at least. So what do you say?"
For a moment Morris couldn't think what he should say. Then it came to him. "Thank you, Mr. McFarland."
McFarland ruffled the hair of his charge, a man twenty years older than himself, and said, "Good boy. Seeya next week."
Later, in his room, Morris replayed that indulgent, patronizing good boy over and over, looking at the few cheap furnishings and the few books he was allowed to bring with him out of purgatory, listening to the animal-house yells and gawps and thumps of his fellow housemates. He wondered if McFarland had any idea how much Morris hated him, and supposed McFarland did.
Good boy. I'll be sixty soon, but I'm Ellis McFarland's good boy.
He lay on his bed for awhile, then got up and paced, thinking of the rest of the advice Duck had given him: If you get the idea to do something that might get you marked up on Doubtful Behavior, wait until after your PO makes a surprise visit. Then you prob'ly be all right.
Morris came to a decision and yanked his jeans jacket on. He rode down to the lobby in the piss-smelling elevator, walked two blocks to the nearest bus stop, and waited for one with NORTHFIELD in the destination window. His heart was beating double-time again, and he couldn't help imagining Mr. McFarland somewhere near. McFarland thinking, Ah, now that I've lulled him, I'll double back. See what that bad boy's really up to. Unlikely, of course; McFarland was probably home by now, eating dinner with his wife and three kids as humongous as he was. Still, Morris couldn't help imagining it.
And if he should double back and ask where I went? I'd tell him I wanted to look at my old house, that's all. No taverns or titty bars in that neighborhood, just a couple of convenience stores, a few hundred houses built after the Korean War, and a bunch of streets named after trees. Nothing but over-the-hill suburbia in that part of Northfield. Plus one block-sized patch of overgrown land caught in an endless, Dickensian lawsuit.
He got off the bus on Garner Street, near the library where he had spent so many hours as a kid. The libe had been his safe haven, because big kids who might want to beat you up avoided it like Superman avoids kryptonite. He walked nine blocks to Sycamore, then actually did idle past his old house. It still looked pretty rundown, all the houses in this part of town did, but the lawn had been mowed and the paint looked fairly new. He looked at the garage where he had stowed the Biscayne thirty-six years ago, away from Mrs. Muller's prying eyes. He remembered lining the secondhand trunk with plastic so the notebooks wouldn't get damp. A very good idea, considering how long they'd had to stay in there.
Lights were on inside Number 23; the people who lived here--their name was Saubers, according to computer research he'd done in the prison library--were home. He looked at the upstairs window on the right, the one overlooking the driveway, and wondered who was in his old room. A kid, most likely, and in degenerate times like these, one probably a lot more interested in playing games on his phone than reading books.
Morris moved on, turning the corner onto Elm Street, then walking up to Birch. When he got to the Birch Street Rec (closed for two years now due to budget cuts, a thing he also knew from his computer research), he glanced around, saw the sidewalks were deserted on both sides, and hurried up the Rec's brick flank. Once behind it, he broke into a shambling jog, crossing the outside basketball courts--rundown but still used, by the look--and the weedy, overgrown baseball field.
The moon was out, almost full and bright enough to cast his shadow beside him. Ahead of him now was an untidy tangle of bushes and runty trees, their branches entwined and fighting for space. Where was the path? He thought he was in the right location, but he wasn't seeing it. He began to course back and forth where the baseball field's right field had been, like a dog trying to catch an elusive scent. His heart was up to full speed again, his mouth dry and coppery. Revisiting the old n
eighborhood was one thing, but being here, behind the abandoned Rec, was another. This was Doubtful Behavior for sure.
He was about to give up when he saw a potato chip bag fluttering from a bush. He swept the bush aside and bingo, there was the path, although it was just a ghost of its former self. Morris supposed that made sense. Some kids probably still used it, but the number would have dropped after the Rec closed. That was a good thing. Although, he reminded himself, for most of the years he'd been in Waynesville, the Rec would have been open. Plenty of foot traffic passing near his buried trunk.
He made his way up the path, moving slowly, stopping completely each time the moon dove behind a cloud and moving on again when it came back out. After five minutes, he heard the soft chuckle of the stream. So that was still there, too.
Morris stepped out on the bank. The stream was open to the sky, and with the moon now directly overhead, the water shone like black silk. He had no problem picking out the tree on the other bank, the one he had buried the trunk under. The tree had both grown and tilted toward the stream. He could see a couple of gnarled roots poking out below it and then diving back into the earth, but otherwise it all looked the same.
Morris crossed the stream in the old way, going from stone to stone and hardly getting his shoes wet. He looked around once--he knew he was alone, if there had been anyone else in the area he would have heard them, but the old Prison Peek was second nature--and then knelt beneath the tree. He could hear his breath rasping harshly in his throat as he tore at weeds with one hand and held on to a root for balance with the other.
He cleared a small circular patch and then began digging, tossing aside pebbles and small stones. He was in almost halfway to the elbow when his fingertips touched something hard and smooth. He rested his burning forehead against a gnarled elbow of protruding root and closed his eyes.
Still here.
His trunk was still here.
Thank you, God.
It was enough, at least for the time being. The best he could manage, and ah God, such a relief. He scooped the dirt back into the hole and scattered it with last fall's dead leaves from the bank of the stream. Soon the weeds would be back--weeds grew fast, especially in warm weather--and that would complete the job.
