The Bachman Books

by Stephen King

  "Can I tell you what I want to buy now?"

  "You could, and if you were a cop with six recorders on you, you still couldn't touch me. It's called entrapment. But I don't want to hear it now. You come back tomorrow, same time, same station, and I'll tell you if I want to hear it. Even if you're straight, I may not sell you anything. You know why?"

  "Why?"

  Magliore laughed. "Because I think you're a fruitcake. Driving on three wheels. Flying on instruments."

  "Why? Because I called you a name?"

  "No," Magliore said. "Because you remind me of something that happened to me when I was a kid about my son's age. There was a dog that lived in the neighborhood where I grew up. Hell's Kitchen, in New York. This was before the Second World War, in the Depression. And this guy named Piazzi had a black mongrel bitch named Andrea, but everybody just called her Mr. Piazzi's dog. He kept her chained up all the time, but that dog never got mean, not until this one hot day in August. It might have been 1937. She jumped a kid that came up to pet her and put him in the hospital for a month. Thirty-seven stitches in his neck. But I knew it was going to happen. That dog was out in the hot sun all day, every day, all summer long. In the middle of June it stopped wagging its tail when kids came up to pet it. Then it started to roll its eyes. By the end of July it would growl way back in its throat when some kid patted it. When it started doing that, I stopped patting Mr. Piazzi's dog. And the guys said, Wassa matta, Sally? You chickenshit? And I said, No, I ain't chickenshit but I ain't stupid, either. That dog's gone mean. And they all said, Up your ass, Mr. Piazzi's dog don't bite, she never bit nobody, she wouldn't bite a baby that stuck its head down her throat. And I said, You go on and pat her, there's no law that says you can't pat a dog, but I ain't gonna. And so they all go around saying, Sally's chickenshit, Sally's a girl, Sally wants his mama to walk him past Mr. Piazzi's dog. You know how kids are. "

  "I know," he said. Mansey had come back in with his credit cards and was standing by the door, listening.

  "And one of the kids who was yelling the loudest was the kid who finally got it. Luigi Bronticelli, his name was. A good Jew like me, you know?" Magliore laughed. "He went up to pat Mr. Piazzi's dog one day in August when it was hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk, and he ain't talked above a whisper since that day. He's got a barbershop in Manhattan, and they call him Whispering Gee. "

  Magliore smiled at him.

  "You remind me of Mr. Piazzi's dog. You ain't growling yet, but if someone was to pat you, you'd roll your eyes. And you stopped wagging your tail a long time ago. Pete, give this man his things."

  Mansey gave him the bundle.

  "You come back tomorrow and we'll talk some more," Magliore said. He watched him putting things back into his wallet. "And you really ought to clean that mess out. You're racking that wallet all to shit."

  "Maybe I will," he said.

  "Pete, show this man out to his car." 'Sure."

  He had the door open and was stepping out when Magliore called after him: "You know what they did to Mr. Piazzi's dog, mister? They took her to the pound and gassed her."

  After supper, while John Chancellor was telling about how the reduced speed limit on the Jersey Turnpike had probably been responsible for fewer accidents, Mary asked him about the house.

  "Termites," he said.

  Her face fell like an express elevator. "Oh. No good, huh?"

  "Well, I'm going out again tomorrow. If Tom Granger knows a good exterminator, I'll take the guy out with me. Get an expert opinion. Maybe it isn't as bad as it looks."

  "I hope it isn't. A backyard and all . . . " She trailed off wistfully.

  Oh, you're a prince, Freddy said suddenly. A veritable prince. How come you're so good to your wife, George? Was it a natural talent or did you take lessons?

  "Shut up," he said.

  Mary looked around, startled. "What?"

  "Oh . . . Chancellor," he said. "I get so sick of gloom and doom from John Chancellor and Walter Cronkite and the rest of them."

  "You shouldn't hate the messenger because of the message," she said, and looked at John Chancellor with doubtful, troubled eyes.

  "I suppose so," he said, and thought: You bastard, Freddy.

  Freddy told him not to hate the messenger for the message.

  They watched the news in silence for a while. A commercial for a cold medicine came on-two men whose heads had been turned into blocks of snot. When one of them took the cold pill, the gray-green cube that had been encasing his head fell off in large lumps.

  "Your cold sounds better tonight," he said.

  "It is. Bart, what's the realtor's name?"

  "Monohan," he said automatically.

  "No, not the man that's selling you the plant. The one that's selling the house. "

  "Olsen," he said promptly, picking the name out of an internal litter bag.

  The news came on again. There was a report on David Ben-Gurion, who was about to join Harry Truman in that great Secretariat in the sky.

  "How does Jack like it out there?" she asked presently.

  He was going to tell her Jack didn't like it at all and heard himself saying, "Okay, I guess."

  John Chancellor closed out with a humorous item about flying saucers over Ohio.

  He went to bed at half past ten and must have had the bad dream almost at once-when he woke up the digital clock said:

  11:22P.M.

  In the dream he had been standing on a corner in Norton-the corner of Venner and Rice Street. He had been standing right under the street sign. Down the street, in front of a candy store, a pink pimpmobile with caribou antlers mounted on the hood had just pulled up. Kids began to run toward it from stoops and porches.

  Across the street, a large black dog was chained to the railing of a leaning brick tenement. A little boy was approaching it confidently.

  He tried to cry out: Don't pet that dog! Go get your candy! But the words wouldn't come out. As if in slow motion, the pimp in the white suit and planter's hat turned to look. His hands were full of candy. The children who had crowded around him turned to look. All the children around the pimp were black, but the little boy approaching the dog was white.

  The dog struck, catapulting up from its haunches like a blunt arrow. The boy screamed and staggered backward, hands to his throat. When he turned around, the blood was streaming through his fingers. It was Charlie.

  That was when he had wakened.

  The dreams. The goddam dreams.

  His son had been dead three years.

  November 28, 1973

  It was snowing when he got up, but it had almost stopped by the time he got to the laundry. Tom Granger came running out of the plant in his shirtsleeves, his breath making short, stiff plumes in the cold air. He knew from the expression on Tom's face that it was going to be a crummy day.

  "We've got trouble, Bart."

  "Bad?"

  "Bad enough. Johnny Walker had an accident on his way back from Holiday Inn with his first load. Guy in a Pontiac skidded through a red light on Deakman and hit him dead center. Kapow. " He paused and looked aimlessly back toward the loading doors. There was no one there. "The cops said Johnny was in a bad way. "

  "Holy Christ."

  "I got out there fifteen or twenty minutes after it happened. You know the intersection-"

  "Yeah, yeah, it's a bitch."

  Tom shook his head. "If it wasn't so fucking awful you'd have to laugh. It looks like somebody threw a bomb at a washerwoman. There's Holiday Inn sheets and towels everywhere. Some people were stealing them, the fucking ghouls, can you believe what people will do? And the truck . . . Bart, there's nothing left from the driver's side door up. Just junk. Johnny got thrown."

  "Is he at Central?"

  "No, St Mary's. Johnny's a Catholic, didn't you know that?"

  "You want to drive over with me?"

  "I better not. Ron's hollering for pressure on the boiler." He shrugged, embarrassed. "You know Ron. The show must go on.
"

  "All right."

  He got back into his car and drove out toward St. Mary's Hospital. Jesus Christ, of all the people for it to happen to. Johnny Walker was the only person left at the laundry besides himself who had been working at the Blue Ribbon in 1953Johnny, in fact, went back to 1946. The thought lodged in his throat like an omen. He knew from reading the papers that the 784 extension was going to make the dangerous Deakman intersection pretty much obsolete.

  His name wasn't Johnny at all, not really. He was Corey Everett Walker-he had seen it on enough time cards to know that. But he had been known as Johnny even twenty years ago. His wife had died in 1956 on a vacation trip in Vermont. Since then he had lived with his brother, who drove a sanitation truck for the city. There were dozens of workers at the Blue Ribbon who called Ron "Stoneballs" behind his back, but Johnny had been the only one to use it to his face and get away with it.

  He thought: If Johnny dies, I'm the oldest employee the laundry has got. Held over for a twentieth record-breaking year. Isn't that a sketch, Fred?

  Fred didn't think so.

  Johnny's brother was sitting in the waiting room of the emergency wing, a tall man with Johnny's features and high complexion, dressed in olive work clothes and a black cloth jacket. He was twirling an olive-colored cap between his knees and looking at the floor. He glanced up at the sound of footsteps.

  "You from the laundry?" he asked.

  "Yes. You're . . . " He didn't expect the name to come to him, but it did. "Arnie, right?"

  "Yeah, Arnie Walker." He shook his head slowly. "I dunno, Mr . . . ?"

  "Dawes. "

  "I dunno, Mr. Dawes. I seen him in one of those examinin rooms. He looked pretty banged up. He ain't a kid anymore. He looked bad."

  "I'm very sorry," he said.

  "That's a bad corner. It wasn't the other guy's fault. He just skidded in the snow. I don't blame the guy. They say he broke his nose but that was all. It's funny the way those things work out, you know it?"

  "Yes. "

  "I remember one time when I was driving a big rig for Hemingway, this was in the early sixties, and I was on the Indiana Toll Road and I saw-"

  The outer door banged open and a priest came in. He stamped snow from his boots and then hurried up the corridor, almost running. Arnie Walker saw him, and his eyes widened and took on the glazed look of shock. He made a whining, gasping noise in his throat and tried to stand up. He put an arm around Arnie's shoulders and restrained him.

  "Jesus!" Arnie cried. "He had his pyx, did you see it? He's gonna give him the last rites . . . maybe he's dead already. Johnny-"

  There were other people in the waiting room: a teenage kid with a broken arm, an elderly woman with an elastic bandage around one leg, a man with his thumb wrapped in a giant dressing. They looked up at Arnie and then down, self-consciously, at their magazines.

  "Take it easy," he said meaninglessly.

  "Let me go," Arnie said. "I got to go see."

  "Listen-"

  "Let me go! "

  He let him go. Arnie Walker went around the corner and out of sight, the way the priest had gone. He sat in the plastic contour seat for a moment, wondering what to do. He looked at the floor, which was covered with black, slushy tracks. He looked at the nurses' station, where a woman was covering a switchboard. He looked out the window and saw that the snow had stopped.

  There was a sobbing scream from up the corridor, where the examining rooms were.

  Everybody looked up, and the same half-sick expression was on every face.

  Another scream, followed by a harsh, braying cry of grief.

  Everyone looked back at their magazines. The kid with the broken arm swallowed audibly, producing a small click in the silence.

  He got up and went out quickly, not looking back.

  At the laundry everyone on the floor came over, and Ron Stone didn't stop them.

  I don't know, he told them. I never found out if he was alive or dead. You'll hear. I just don't know.

  He fled upstairs, feeling weird and disconnected.

  "Do you know how Johnny is, Mr. Dawes?" Phyllis asked him. He noticed for the first time that Phyllis, jaunty blue-rinsed hair notwithstanding, was looking old.

  "He's bad," he said. "The priest came to give him the last rites."

  "Oh, what a dirty shame. And so close to Christmas."

  "Did someone go out to Deakman to pick up his load?"

  She looked at him a little reproachfully. "Tom sent out Harry Jones. He brought it in five minutes ago."

  "Good," he said, but it wasn't good. It was bad. He thought of going down to the washroom and dumping enough Hexlite into the washers to disintegrate all of it-when the extract ended and Pollack opened the machines there would be nothing but a pile of gray fluff. That would be good.

  Phyllis had said something and he hadn't heard.

  "What? I'm sorry."

  "I said that Mr. Ordner called. He wants you to call back right away. And a fellow named Harold Swinnerton. He said the cartridges had come in."

  "Harold-?" And then he remembered. Harvey's Gun Shop. Only Harvey, like Marley, was as dead as a doornail. "Yes, right."

  He went into his office and closed the door. The sign on his desk still said:

  THINK!

  It May Be A New Experience

  He took it off the desk and dropped it into the wastebasket. Chink.

  He sat behind his desk, took everything out of the IN basket and threw it into the wastebasket without looking at it. He paused and looked around the office. The walls were wood-paneled. On the left were two framed degrees: one from college, one from the Laundry Institute, where he had gone during the summers of 1969 and 1970. Behind the desk was a large blow-up of himself shaking hands with Ray Tarkington in the Blue Ribbon parking lot just after it had been hot-topped. He and Ray were smiling. The laundry stood in the background, three trucks backed into the loading bay. The smokestack still looked very white.

  He had been in this office since 1967, over six years. Since before Woodstock, before Kent State, before the assassination of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, since before Nixon. Years of his life had been spent between these four walls. Millions of breaths, millions of heartbeats. He looked around, seeing if he felt anything. He felt faintly sad. That was all.

  He cleaned out his desk, throwing away personal papers and his personal account books. He wrote his resignation on the back of a printed wash formula and slipped it into a laundry pay envelope. He left the impersonal things-the paper clips, the Scotch tape, the big book of checks, the pile of blank time cards held together with robber bands.

  He got up, took the two degrees off the wall, and threw them into the wastebasket. The glass covering the Laundry Institute diploma shattered. The squares where the degrees had hung all these years were a little brighter than the rest of the wall, and that was all.

  The phone rang and he picked it up, thinking it would be Ordner. But it was Ron Stone, calling from downstairs.

  " Bart?"

  "Yeah."

  "Johnny passed away a half hour ago. I guess he never really had a chance."

  "I'm very sorry. I want to shut it down the rest of the day, Ron."

  Ron sighed. "That's best, I guess. But won't you catch hell from the big bosses?"

  "I don't work for the big bosses anymore. I just wrote my resignation." There. It was out. That made it real.

  A dead beat of silence on the other end. He could hear the washers and the steady thumping hiss of the ironer. The mangler, they called it, on account of what would happen to you if you ever got caught in it.-

  "I must have heard you wrong," Ron said finally. "I thought you said-"

  "I said it, Ron. I'm through. It's been a pleasure working with you and Tom and even Vinnie, when he could keep his mouth shut. But it's over."

  "Hey, listen, Bart. Take it easy. I know this has got you upset-"

  "It's not over Johnny," he said, not knowing if it was true o
r not. Maybe he still would have made an effort to save himself, to save the life that had existed under a protective dome of routine for the last twenty years. But when the priest had walked quickly past them down the hall, almost running, to the place where Johnny lay dying or dead, and when Arnie Walker had made that funny whining noise high up in his throat, he had given up. Like driving a car in a skid, or fooling yourself that you were driving, and then just taking your hands off the wheel and putting them over your eyes.

  "It's not over Johnny," he repeated.

  "Well, listen . . . listen . . . " Ron sounded very upset.

  "Look, I'll talk to you later, Ron," he said, not knowing if he would or not. "Go on, have them punch out."

  "Okay. Okay, but-"

  He hung up gently.

  He took the phone book out of the drawer and looked in the yellow pages under GUNS. He dialed Harvey's Gun Shop.

  "Hello, Harvey's."

  "This is Barton Dawes," he said.

  "Oh, right. Those shells came in late yesterday afternoon. I told you I'd have them in plenty of time for Christmas. Two hundred rounds."

  "Good. Listen, I'm going to be awfully busy this afternoon. Are you open tonight?"

  "Open nights until nine right up to Christmas."

  "Okay. I'll try to get in around eight. If not, tomorrow afternoon for sure."

  "Good enough. Listen, did you find out if it was Boca Rio?"

  "Boca . . . " Oh, yes, Boca Rio, where his cousin Nick Adams would soon be hunting. "Boca Rio. Yeah, I think it was."

  "Jesus, I envy him. That was the best time I ever had in my life."

  "Shaky cease-fire holds," he said. A sudden image came to him of Johnny Walker's head mounted over Stephan Ordner's electric log fireplace, with a small polished bronze plaque beneath, saying:

  HOMO LAUNDROMAT

  November 28, 1973

  Bagged on the corner of Deakman

  "What was that?" Harry Swinnerton asked, puzzled.

  "I said, I envy him too," he said, and closed his eyes. A wave of nausea raced through him. I'm cracking up, he thought. This is called cracking up.

  "Oh. Well, I'll see you, then."

  "Sure. Thanks again, Mr. Swinnerton."