by Stephen King
“Ma,” Pig Pen said. “That’s Ma for you. Two hundred Be-Bop pencils in a plastic box. You know what her big thing is? Besides all those shitty suppers where they give you a big plate of Hamburger Helper and a paper cup of orange Jell-O full of grated carrots? Huh? She enters contests. That’s her hobby. Hundreds of contests. All the time. She subscribes to all the women’s magazines and enters the sweepstakes. Why she likes Rinso for all her dainty things in twenty-five words or less. My sister had a kitten once, and Ma wouldn’t even let her keep it.”
“She the one who got pregnant?” Corky asked.
“Wouldn’t even let her keep it,” Pig Pen said. “Drownded it in the bathtub when no one would take it. Lilly begged her to at least take it to the vet so it could have gas, and Ma said four bucks for gas was too much to spend on a worthless kitten.”
“Oh, poor thing,” Susan Brooks said.
“I swear to God, she did it right in the bathtub. All those goddamn pencils. Will she buy me a new shirt? Huh? Maybe for my birthday. I say, ’ma, you should hear what the kids call me. Ma, for Lord’s sake. I don’t even get an allowance, she says she needs it for postage so she can enter her contests. A new shirt for my birthday and a shitload of Be-Bop pencils in a plastic box to take back to school. I tried to get a paper route once, and she put a stop to that. She said there were women of loose virtue who laid in wait for young boys after their husbands went to work.”
“Oh, my Gawwd!” Sylvia bellowed.
“And contests. And PTA suppers. And chaperoning dances. Grabbing on to everybody. Sucking up to them and grinning.”
He looked at me and smiled the oddest smile I had seen all day. And that was going some.
“You know what she said when Lilly had to go away? She said I’d have to sell my car. That old Dodge my uncle gave me when I got my driver’s license. I said I wouldn’t. I said Uncle Fred gave it to me and I was going to keep it. She said if I wouldn’t sell it, she would. She’d signed all the papers, and legally it was hers. She said I wasn’t going to get any girl pregnant in the back seat. Me. Get a girl pregnant in the back seat. That’s what she said.”
He brandished a broken pencil half. The lead poked out of the wood like a black bone. “Me. Hah. The last date I had was for the eighth-grade class picnic. I told Ma I wouldn’t sell the Dodge. She said I would. I ended up selling it. I knew I would. I can’t fight her. She always knows what to say. You start giving her a reason why you can’t sell your car, and she says: 'Then how come you stay in the bathroom so long?' Right off the wall. You’re talking about the car, and she’s talking about the bathroom. Like you’re doing something dirty in there. She grinds you.” He stared out the window. Mrs. Dano was no longer in sight. “She grinds and grinds and grinds, and she always beats you. Be-Bop pencils that break every time you try to sharpen them. That’s how she beats you. That’s how she grinds you down. And she’s so mean and stupid, she drownded the kitty, just a little kitty, and she’s so stupid that you know everybody laughs at her behind her back. So what does that make me? Littler and stupider. After a while you feel just like a little kitty that crawled into a plastic box full of Be-Bop pencils and got brought home by mistake.” The room was dead quiet. Pig Pen had center stage. I don’t think he knew it. He looked grubby and pissed off, fists clenched around his broken pencil halves. Outside, a cop had driven a police cruiser onto the lawn. He parked it parallel to the school, and a few more cops ran down behind it, presumably to do secret things. They had riot guns in their hands. “I don’t think I’d mind if she snuffed it,” Pig Pen said, grinning a small, horrified grin. “I wish I had your stick, Charlie. If I had your stick, I think I’d kill her myself.”
“You’re crazy, too,” Ted said worriedly. “God, you’re all going crazy right along with him.”
“Don’t be such a creep, Ted.” It was Carol Granger. In a way, it was surprising not to find her on Ted’s side. I knew he had taken her out a few times before she started with her current steady, and bright establishment types usually stick together. Still, it had been she who had dropped him. To make a very clumsy analogy, I was beginning to suspect that Ted was to my classmates what Eisenhower must always have been to the dedicated liberals of the fifties-you had to like him, that style, that grin, that record, those good intentions, but there was something exasperating and a tiny bit slimy about him. You can see I’m fixated on Ted…
Why not? I’m still trying to figure him out. Sometimes it seems that everything that happened on that long morning is just something I imagined, or some half-baked writer’s fantasy. But it did happen. And sometimes, now, it seems to me that Ted was at the center of it all, not me. It seems that Ted goaded them all into people they were not… or into the people they really were. All I know for sure is that Carol was looking at him defiantly, not like a demure valedictorian-to-be due to speak on the problems of the black race. She looked angry and a wee bit cruel.
When I think about the Eisenhower administration, I think about the U-2 incident. When I think about that funny morning, I think about the sweat patches that were slowly spreading under the arms of Ted’s khaki shirt.
“When they drag him off, they won’t find anything but nut cases,” Ted was saying. He looked mistrustfully at Pig Pen, who was glaring sweatily at the halves of his Be-Bop pencil as if they were the only things left in the world. His neck was grimy, but what the hell. Nobody was talking about his neck.
“They grind you down,” he whispered. He threw the pencil halves on the floor. He looked at them, then looked up at me. His face was strange and grief-stunned. It made me uncomfortable. “They’ll grind you down, too, Charlie. Wait and see if they don’t.”
There was an uncomfortable silence in the room. I was holding on to the pistol very tightly. Without thinking about it much, I took out the box of shells and put three of them in, filling the magazine again. The handgrip was sweaty. I suddenly realized I had been holding it by the barrel, pointing it at myself, not looking at them. No one had made a break. Ted was sort of hunched over his desk, hands gripping the edge, but he hadn’t moved, except in his head. I suddenly thought that touching his skin would be like touching an alligator handbag. I wondered if Carol had ever kissed him, touched him. Probably had. The thought made me want to puke.
Susan Brooks suddenly burst into tears.
Nobody looked at her. I looked at them, and they looked at me. I had been holding the pistol by the barrel. They knew it. They had seen it.
I moved my feet, and one of them kicked Mrs. Underwood. I looked down at her. She had been wearing a casual tartan coat over a brown cashmere sweater. She was beginning to stiffen. Her skin probably felt like an alligator handbag. Rigor, you know. I had left a footmark on her sweater at some point in time. For some reason, that made me think of a picture I had once seen of Ernest Hemingway, standing with one foot on a dead lion and a rifle in his hand and half a dozen grinning black bearers in the background. I suddenly needed to scream. I had taken her life, I had snuffed her, put a bullet in her head and spilled out algebra.
Susan Brooks had put her head down on her desk, the way they used to make us do in kindergarten when it was nap time. She was wearing a powder-blue scarf in her hair. It looked very pretty. My stomach hurt.
“DECKER!”
I cried out and jerked the pistol around toward the windows. It was a state trooper with a battery-powered bullhorn. Up on the hill, the newsmen were grinding away with their cameras. Just grinding away-Pig Pen hadn’t been so far wrong, at that.
“COME OUT, DECKER, WITH YOUR HANDS UP!”
“Let me be,” I said.
My hands had begun to tremble. My stomach really did hurt. I’ve always had a lousy stomach. Sometimes I’d get the dry heaves before I went to school in the morning, or when I was taking a girl out for the first time. Once, Joe and I took a couple of girls down to Harrison State Park. It was July, warm and very beautiful. The sky had a dim, very high haze. The girl I was with was named Annmarie. She spelled
it all one name. She was very pretty. She wore dark green corduroy shorts and a silk pullover blouse. She had a beach bag. We were going down Route 1 toward Bath, the radio on and playing good rock 'n' roll. Brian Wilson, I remember that, Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys. And Joe was driving his old blue Mercury-he used to call it De Blue Frawwwg and then grin his Joe McKennedy grin. All the vents were open. I got sick to my stomach. It was very bad. Joe was talking to his girl. They were talking about surfing, which was certainly compatible with the Beach Boys on the radio. She was a fine-looking girl. Her name was Rosalynn. She was Annmarie’s sister. I opened my mouth to say I felt sick, and puked all over the floor. Some of it got on Annmarie’s leg, and the look on her face, you couldn’t imagine it. Or maybe you could. They all tried to make light of it, brush it off. I let all my guys puke on me on the first date, ha-ha. I couldn’t go in swimming that day. My stomach felt too bad. Annmarie sat on the blanket next to me most of the time and got a burn. The girls had packed a picnic lunch. I drank a soda, but I couldn’t eat any of the sandwiches. I was thinking about Joe’s blue Mere, standing in the sun all day, and how it was going to smell going home. The late Lenny Bruce once said you can’t get snot off a suede jacket, and to that I would add one of the other great home truths: you can’t get the smell of vomit out of a blue Mercury’s upholstery. It’s there for weeks, for months, maybe years. And it smelled just about like I thought it would. Everybody just pretended it wasn’t there. But it was.
“COME ON OUT, DECKER. WE’RE THROUGH FOOLING AROUND WITH YOU!”
“Stop it! Shut up!” Of course they couldn’t hear me. They didn’t want to. This was their game.
“Don’t like it so well when you can’t talk back, do you?” Ted Jones said. “When you can’t play any of your smart games.”
“Leave me alone.” I sounded suspiciously like I was whining.
“They’ll wearya out,” Pig Pen said. It was the voice of doom. I tried to think about the squirrel, and about the way the lawn grew right up to the building, no fucking around. I couldn’t do it. My mind was jackstraws in the wind. The beach that day had been bright and hot. Everybody had a transistor radio, all of them tuned to different stations. Joe and Rosalynn had body-surfed in glass-green waves.
“YOU’ve GOT FIVE MINUTES, DECKER!”
“Go on out,” Ted urged. He was gripping the edge of his desk again. “Go out while you’ve got a chance.”
Sylvia whirled on him. “What have you got to be? Some kind of hero? Why? Why? Shit, that’s all you’ll be, Ted Jones. I’ll tell them-”
“Don’t tell me what-”
“… wearya down, Charlie, grind ya, wait and-”
“DECKER!”
“Go on out, Charlie…”
“… please, can’t you see you’re upsetting him-”
“DECKER!”
“… PTA suppers and all that lousy…”
“… cracking up if you’d just let him DECKER! alone grindya wearya down you go Charlie you can’t DON’T WANT TO BE FORCED TO SHOOT until you’re ready leave him be Ted if you know what all of you shut up good for you COMEOUT…”
I swung the pistol up at the windows, holding it in both hands, and pulled the trigger four times. The reports slammed around the room like bowling balls. Window glass blew out in great crackling fistfuls. The troopers dived down out of sight. The cameramen hit the gravel. The clot of spectators broke and ran in all directions. Broken glass shone and twinkled on the green grass outside like diamonds on show-window velvet, brighter gems than any in Mr. Frankel’s store.
There was no answering fire. They were bluffing. I knew that; it was my stomach, my goddamn stomach. What else could they do but bluff?
Ted Jones was not bluffing. He was halfway to the desk before I could bring the pistol around on him. He froze, and I knew he thought I was going to shoot him. He was looking right past me into darkness.
“Sit down,” I said.
He didn’t move. Every muscle seemed paralyzed.
“Sit down.”
He began to tremble. It seemed to begin in his legs and spread up his trunk and arms and neck. It reached his mouth, which began to gibber silently. It climbed to his right cheek, which began to twitch. His eyes stayed steady. I have to give him that, and with admiration. One of the few things my father says when he’s had a few that I agree with is that kids don’t have much balls in this generation. Some of them are trying to start the revolution by bombing U.S. government washrooms, but none of them are throwing Molotov cocktails at the Pentagon. But Ted’s eyes, even full of darkness, stayed steady.
“Sit down,” I repeated.
He went and sat down.
Nobody in the room had cried out. Several of them had put their hands over their ears. Now they took them away carefully, sampling the noise level of the air, testing it. I looked for my stomach. It was there. I was in control again.
The man with the bullhorn was shouting, but this time he wasn’t shouting at me. He was telling the people who had been watching from across the road to get out of the area and be snappy about it. They were doing it. Many of them ran hunched over, like Richard Widmark in a World War II epic.
A quiet little breeze riffled in through the two broken windows. It caught a paper on Harmon Jackson’s desk and fluttered it into the aisle. He leaned over and picked it up.
Sandra Cross said, “Tell something else, Charlie.”
I felt a weird smile stretch my lips. I wanted to sing the chorus from that folk song, the one about beautiful, beautiful blue eyes, but I couldn’t remember the words and probably wouldn’t have dared, anyway. I sing like a duck. So I only looked at her and smiled my weird smile. She blushed a little but didn’t drop her eyes. I thought of her married to some slob with five two-button suits and fancy pastel toilet paper in the bathroom. It hurt me with its inevitability. They all find out sooner or later how unchic it is to pop your buttons at the Sadie Hawkins dance, or to crawl into the trunk so you can get into the drive-in for free. They stop eating pizza and plugging dimes into the juke down at Fat Sammy’s. They stop kissing boys in the blueberry patch. And they always seem to end up looking like the Barbie doll cutouts in Jack and Jill magazine. Fold in at Slot A, Slot B, and Slot C. Watch Her Grow Old Before Your Very Eyes. For a second I thought I might actually turn on the waterworks, but I avoided that indignity by wondering if she was wearing white panties today.
It was 10:20. I said:
CHAPTER 22
I was twelve when Mom got me the corduroy suit. By that time Dad had pretty much given up on me and I was my mother’s responsibility. I wore the suit to church on Sundays and to Bible meetings on Thursday nights. With my choice of three snap-on bow ties. Rooty-toot.
But I hadn’t expected her to try and make me wear it to that goddamn birthday party. I tried everything. I reasoned with her. I threatened not to go. I even tried a lie-told her the party was off because Carol had the chickenpox. One call to Carol’s mother set that straight. Nothing worked. Mom let me run pretty much as I pleased most of the time, but when she got an idea solid in her mind, you were stuck with it. Listen to this: for Christmas one year, my dad’s brother gave her this weird jigsaw puzzle. I think Uncle Tom was in collusion with my dad on that one. She did a lot of jigsaws-I helped-and they both thought it was the biggest waste of time on earth. So Tom sent her a five-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle that had a single blueberry down in the lower-right-hand corner. The rest of the puzzle was solid white, no shades. My father laughed his ass off. “Let’s see you do that one, Mother,” he said. He always called her “Mother” when he felt a good one had been put over on her, and it never ceased to irritate her. She sat down on Christmas afternoon and spread the puzzle out on her puzzle table in her bedroom-by this time they each had their own. There were TV dinners and pickup lunches for Dad and I on December twenty-sixth and the twenty-seventh, but on the morning of the twenty-eighth, the puzzle was done. She took a Polaroid picture of it to send to Uncle Tom, who lives in Wisc
onsin. Then she took the puzzle apart and put it away in the attic. That was two years ago, and so far as I know, it’s still there. But she did it. My mother is a humorous, literate, pleasant person. She is kind to animals and accordion-playing mendicants. But you didn’t cross her, or she could dig in her heels… usually somewhere in the groin area.
I was crossing her. I was, in fact, starting to run through my arguments for the fourth time that day, but time had just about tun out. The bow tie was clutching my collar like a pink spider with hidden steel legs, the coat was too tight, and she’d even made me put on my square-toed shoes, which were my Sunday best. My father wasn’t there, he was down at Gogan’s slopping up a few with his good buddies, but if he’d been around he would have said I looked “squared away.” I didn’t feel like an asshole.
“Listen, Mother-”
“I don’t want to hear any more about it, Charlie.” I didn’t want to hear any more about it either, but since I was the one running for the Shithead of the Year Award, and not her, I felt obliged to give it the old school grunt.
“All I’m trying to tell you is that nobody is going to be wearing a suit to that party, Mom. I called up Joe McKennedy this morning, and he said he was just going to wear-”
“Just shut up about it,” she said, very soft, and I did. When my mother says “shut up,” she’s really mad. She didn’t learn “shut up” reading The Guardian. “Shut up, or you won’t be going anywhere.”
But I knew what that meant. “Not going anywhere” would apply to a lot more than Carol Granger’s party. It would probably mean movies, the Harlow rec center, and swimming classes for the next month. Mom is quiet, but she carries a grudge when she doesn’t get her way. I remembered the jigsaw puzzle, which had borne the whimsical title “Last Berry in the Patch.” That puzzle had crossed her, and it hadn’t been out of the attic for the last two years. And if you have to know, and maybe some of you do anyway, I had a little crush on Carol. I’d bought her a snot-rag with her initials on it and wrapped it myself. Mom offered, but I said no. It wasn’t any lousy fifteen-cent hankie, either. Those babies were going in the Lewiston J. C. Penney’s for fifty-nine cents, and it had lace all the way around the edge.
