by Stephen King
“JAMIE!” he shouted, and buttonhooked around the table, almost knocking Annabelle out of her chair. He grabbed me in a bearhug and covered my face with kisses. I laughed and pounded him on the back. Then Terry was there as well, grabbing both of us, and the three brothers did a kind of clumsy mitzvah tantz, making the floor shake. I saw that Con was crying, and I felt a little bit like crying myself.
“Stop it, you guys!” Terry said, although he was still jumping himself. “We’ll wind up in the basement!”
For awhile we went on jumping. It seemed to me that we had to. And that was all right. That was good.
• • •
Con introduced the hunk, who was probably twenty years his junior, as “my good friend from the University of Hawaii Botany Department.” I shook hands with him, wondering if they had bothered to take two rooms at the Castle Rock Inn. In this day and age, probably not. I can’t remember when I first realized that Con was gay; probably while he was in grad school and I was still playing “Land of 1000 Dances” with the Cumberlands at the University of Maine. I’m sure our parents knew much earlier. They didn’t make a big deal of it, and so none of us did, either. Children learn much more by mute example than by spoken rules, or so it seems to me.
I only heard Dad allude to his second son’s sexual orientation once, during the late eighties. It must have made a big impression on me, because those were my blackout years, and I called home as seldom as possible. I wanted my dad to know I was still alive, but I was always afraid he might hear my oncoming death, which I had pretty much accepted, in my voice.
“I pray for Connie every night,” he said during that call. “This damn AIDS thing. It’s like they’re letting it spread on purpose.”
Con had avoided that and looked awesomely healthy now, but there was no disguising the fact that he was getting on, especially sitting next to his friend from the Botany Department. I had a flash memory of Con and Ronnie Paquette sitting shoulder to shoulder on the living room couch, singing “House of the Rising Sun” and trying to harmonize . . . an exercise in futility if there ever was one.
Some of this must have shown on my face, because Con grinned as he wiped his eyes. “Been a long time since we were arguing over whose turn it was to bring in Ma’s laundry off the line, huh?”
“Long time,” I agreed, and thought again of a frog too dumb to realize the water in his stovetop pond was growing ever warmer.
Terry and Annabelle’s daughter, Dawn, joined us with Cara Lynne in her arms. The baby’s eyes were that shade our mother used to call Morton Blue. “Hi, Uncle Jamie. Here’s your grand-niece. She’s one tomorrow, and she’s getting a new tooth to celebrate.”
“She’s beautiful. Can I hold her?”
Dawn smiled shyly at the stranger she’d last seen when she was still in braces. “You can try, but she usually bawls her head off when it’s someone she doesn’t know.”
I took the baby, ready to hand her back the second the yowls started. Only they didn’t. Cara Lynne examined me, reached out a hand, and tweaked my nose. Then she laughed. My family cheered and applauded. The baby looked around, startled, then looked back at me with what I could have sworn were my mother’s eyes.
And laughed again.
• • •
The actual party the next day had much the same cast, only with more supporting characters. Some I recognized at once; others looked vaguely familiar, and I realized several were children of people who had worked for my father long ago and now worked for Terry, whose empire had grown: as well as the fuel oil business, he owned a New England–wide chain of convenience stores called Morton’s Fast-Shops. Bad handwriting had been no bar to success.
A catering crew from Castle Rock presided over four grills, dealing out hamburgers and hotdogs to go with a mind-boggling array of salads and desserts. Beer flowed from steel kegs and wine from wooden ones. As I chowed down on a bacon-loaded calorie-bomb in the backyard, one of Terry’s salesmen—drunk, cheerful, and voluble—told me Terry also owned Splash City in Fryeburg and Littleton Raceway in New Hampshire. “That track don’t make a cent of money,” the salesman said, “but you know Terry—he always loved the stocks and bombers.”
I remembered him working with my father on various incarnations of the Road Rocket in the garage, both of them dressed in greasy tee-shirts and saggy-butt coveralls, and suddenly realized that my hometown, country-mouse brother was well-to-do. Perhaps even rich.
Every time Dawn brought Cara Lynne near, the little girl held her arms out to me. I ended up toting her around for most of the afternoon, and she finally fell asleep on my shoulder. Seeing this, her dad relieved me of my burden. “I’m amazed,” he said as he laid her on a blanket in the shade of the backyard’s biggest tree. “She never takes to folks like that.”
“I’m flattered,” I said, and kissed the sleeping baby’s teething-flushed cheek.
There was a lot of talk about old days and old times, the kind of chatter that’s fabulously interesting to those who were there and stupendously boring to those who weren’t. I steered clear of the beer and wine, so when the party moved four miles down the road to the Eureka Grange, I was one of the designated drivers, trying to find my way through the gears of a monster King Cab pickup that belonged to the oil company. I hadn’t driven a standard in thirty years, and my inebriated passengers—there must have been a dozen, counting the seven or so in the truck bed—howled with laughter each time I popped the clutch and the truck lurched. It was a wonder none of them tumbled out the back.
The catering crew had arrived ahead of us, and there were already food tables set up along the sides of a dance floor that I remembered well. I stood there looking at that expanse of polished wood until Con squeezed my shoulder.
“Bring back memories, baby brother?”
I thought of walking onto the bandstand for the first time, scared to death and smelling the sweat that came roasting up from my armpits in waves. And later, Mom and Dad waltzing by as we played “Who’ll Stop the Rain?”
“More than you’ll ever know,” I said.
“I think I do,” he said, and hugged me. In my ear he whispered it again: “I think I do.”
• • •
There were maybe seventy people at the home place for the noon meal; by seven o’clock, there were twice that many at Eureka Grange No. 7, and the place could have used some of Charlie Jacobs’s magic air-conditioning to augment the lackadaisical ceiling fans. I grabbed the sort of dessert that was still a Harlow specialty—lime Jell-O with bits of canned fruit suspended in it—and took it outside. I walked around the corner of the building, nibbling away with a plastic spoon, and there was the fire escape beneath which I had kissed Astrid Soderberg for the first time. I remembered how the fur parka she had been wearing framed the perfect oval of her face. I remembered the taste of her strawberry lipstick.
Was it all right? I had asked. And she had replied, Do it again and I’ll tell you.
“Hey, freshie.” From right behind me, making me jump. “Want to play some music tonight?”
At first I didn’t recognize him. The lanky, long-haired teenager who had recruited me to play rhythm guitar in Chrome Roses was now bald on top, gray on the sides, and sporting a gut that hung over his tight-cinched trousers. I stared at him, my little paper bowl of Jell-O drooping in one hand.
“Norm? Norm Irving?”
He grinned widely enough to flash gold teeth at the back of his mouth. I dropped my Jell-O and hugged him. He laughed and hugged me back. We told each other that we looked great. We told each other it had been too long. And of course we talked about the old days. Norm said he’d gotten Hattie Greer pregnant and married her. It only lasted a few years, but after a period of post-divorce acrimony, they had decided to put the past aside and be friends. Their daughter, Denise, was now pushing forty, and owned her own hair salon in Westbrook.
“Free
and clear, too, bank all paid off. I got two boys by my second wife, but between you and me, Deenie’s my darlin. Hattie’s got one by her second husband.” He leaned closer, smiling grimly. “In and out of jail. Kid’s not worth the powder to blow him to hell.”
“What about Kenny and Paul?”
Kenny Laughlin, our bass player, had also married his Chrome Roses sweetie, and they were still married. “He owns an insurance agency in Lewiston. Doin good. He’s here tonight. You didn’t see him?”
“No.” Although maybe I had, and just hadn’t recognized him. And maybe he hadn’t recognized me.
“As for Paul Bouchard . . .” Norm shook his head. “He was climbing in Acadia State Park and took a fall. Lived two days, then passed away. 1990, that was. Probably a mercy. Docs said he would have been paralyzed from the neck down, if he’d lived. What they call a quad.”
For a moment I imagined our old drummer pulling through. Lying in bed with a machine to help him breathe and watching Pastor Danny on TV. I shook the thought away. “What about Astrid? Do you know where she is?”
“Downeast somewhere. Castine? Rockland?” He shook his head. “Don’t remember. I know she dropped out of college to get married, and her folks were pissed at her. Probably double pissed when she got divorced. I think she runs a restaurant, one of those lobster shack things, but don’t quote me. You guys had it bad, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “We sure did.”
He nodded. “Young love. Nothin on earth like it. Not sure I’d want to see her these days, because the old Soda Burger was steppin dynamite back then. Steppin nitro. Wasn’t she?”
“Yes,” I said, thinking of the ruined cabin next to Skytop. And the iron rod. How it glowed red when the lightning struck it. “Yes, she was.”
For a moment we said nothing, then he clapped me on the shoulder. “Anyway, what do you think? Gonna gig with us? You better say yes, because the band’s gonna be fuckin lame if you say no.”
“You’re in the band? The Castle Rock All-Stars? Kenny too?”
“Sure. We don’t play much anymore—not like the old days—but no way we could turn this one down.”
“Did my brother Terry put you up to this?”
“He might’ve thought you’d come up for a tune or two, but no. He just wanted a band from the old days, and me and Kenny are about the only ones from back then who are still alive, still hanging around this shit-all neck of the woods, and still playing. Our rhythm guy’s a carpenter from Lisbon Falls, and last Wednesday he fell off a roof and broke both legs.”
“Ouch,” I said.
“His ouch is my gain,” Norm Irving said. “We were gonna play as a trio, which, as you know, sucks the bird. Three out of four Chrome Roses ain’t bad, considering we played our last gig at the PAL hop up-the-city over thirty-five years ago. So come on. Reunion tour, and all that.”
“Norm, I don’t have a guitar.”
“I got three in the truck,” he said. “You can take your pick. Just remember, we still start with ‘Hang On Sloopy.’”
• • •
We trooped onstage to enthusiastic, alcohol-fueled applause. Kenny Laughlin, as thin as ever but now sporting several less than lovely moles on his face, looked up from adjusting the strap on his Fender P-Bass and dapped me. I wasn’t nervous, as I had been the first time I stood on this stage with a guitar in my hands, but I did feel as if I were having a particularly vivid dream.
Norm adjusted his mike one-handed, just as he always had, and addressed the audience waiting to bust a few of their old-time rock-and-roll moves. “It says Castle Rock All-Stars on the drumkit, folks, but tonight we’ve got a special guest on rhythm, and for the next couple of hours, we’re Chrome Roses again. Kick it in, Jamie.”
I thought of kissing Astrid under the fire escape. I thought of Norm’s rusty microbus and of his father, Cicero, sitting on the busted-down sofa in his old trailer, rolling dope in Zig-Zag papers and telling me if I wanted to get my license first crack out of the basket, I’d better cut my fucking hair. I thought of playing teen dances at the Auburn RolloDrome, and how we never stopped when the inevitable fights broke out between the kids from Edward Little and Lisbon High, or those from Lewiston High and St. Dom’s; we just turned it up louder. I thought of how life had been before I realized I was a frog in a pot.
I shouted: “One, two, you-know-what-to-do!”
We kicked it in.
Key of E.
All that shit starts in E.
• • •
In the seventies, we might have played until one-o’clock curfew, but this was no longer the seventies, and by eleven o’clock we were dripping sweat and exhausted. That was okay; on Terry’s orders, the beer and wine had been whisked away at ten, and with no more firewater, the crowd thinned out fast. Most of those remaining had resumed their seats, content to listen but too exhausted to dance.
“You’re a hell of a lot better than you used to be, freshie,” Norm said as we racked our instruments.
“So are you.” Which was as much a lie as you look great. At fourteen I never would have believed the day would come when I’d be a better rock guitarist than Norman Irving, but that day had come. He gave me a smile to say he knew what was better left unspoken. Kenny joined us, and the three remaining members of Chrome Roses huddled in a hug we would have called “faggot stuff” when we were in high school.
Terry joined us, along with Terry Jr., his eldest son. My brother looked tired, but he also looked supremely happy. “Listen, Con and his friend took a bunch of folks who were too loaded to drive back to Castle Rock. Will you haul a bunch of Harlow folks in the King Cab, if I lend you Terry Jr. to copilot?”
I said I’d be happy to, and after a final so-long to Norm and Kenny (accompanied by those weird limp-fish handshakes peculiar to musicians), I gathered up my load of drunkies and set off. For awhile my nephew gave me instructions I hardly needed, even in the dark, but by the time I offloaded the last two or three couples out on Stackpole Road, he had ceased. I looked over and saw the kid was leaning against the passenger window, fast asleep. I woke him when we got back to the home place on Methodist Road. He kissed my cheek (which touched me more deeply than he could know), and stumbled into the house, where he would probably sleep until noon on Sunday, as adolescents are prone to do. I wondered if he would do so in my old room, and decided probably not; he’d be quartered in the new addition. Time changes everything, and maybe that’s okay.
I hung the King Cab’s keys on the rack in the hall, headed out to my rental car, and spied lights in the barn. I walked over, peeped in, and there was Terry. He had changed out of his party duds and into a coverall. His newest toy, a Chevy SS from the late sixties or early seventies, gleamed under the hanging lights like a blue jewel. He was Simonizing it.
He looked up when I came in. “Can’t sleep just yet. Too much excitement. I’ll buff on this baby for awhile, then toddle off to bed.”
I ran my hand up the hood. “It’s beautiful.”
“Now it is, but you should have seen it when I picked it up at auction down in Portsmouth. Looked like junk to most of the buyers there, but I thought I could bring it back.”
“Revive it,” I said. Not really talking to Terry.
He gave me a thoughtful look, then shrugged. “You could call it that, I guess, and once I drop a new tranny in er, it’ll be most of the way there. Not much like the old Road Rockets, is it?”
I laughed. “You remember when the first one went ass over teapot at the Speedway?”
Terry rolled his eyes. “First lap. Fucking Duane Robichaud. I think he got his license at Sears and Roebuck.”
“Is he still around?”
“Nah, dead ten years. Ten at least. Brain cancer. By the time they found it, poor bastard never had a chance.”
Suppose I were a neurosurgeon, Jacobs had said that day at The Latc
hes. Suppose I told you your chances of dying were twenty-five percent. Wouldn’t you still go ahead?
“That’s tough.”
He nodded. “Remember what we used to say when we were kids? ‘What’s tough? Life. What’s Life? A magazine. How much does it cost? Fifteen cents. I only got a dime. That’s tough. What’s tough? Life.’ Around and around it went.”
“I remember. Back then we thought it was a joke.” I hesitated. “Do you think of Claire very much, Terry?”
He tossed his polishing rag into a bucket and went to the sink to wash his hands. There had been nothing but one faucet back in the day—just cold—but now there were two. He turned them on, grabbed a cake of Lava, and began to soap up. All the way to the elbows, just as Dad had taught us.
“Every damn day. I think of Andy, too, but less often. That was what you call the natural order of things, I guess, although he might have lived a little longer if he hadn’t been so fond of his knife and fork. What happened to Claire, though . . . that was just fucking wrong. You know?”
“Yes.”
He leaned against the hood of the SS, looking at nothing in particular. “Remember how beautiful she was?” He shook his head slowly. “Our beautiful sister. That bastard—that beast—cheated her out of all the years she still had coming, then took the coward’s way out.” He swiped a hand across his face. “We shouldn’t talk about Claire. It makes me emotional.”
It made me emotional, too. Claire, who had been just enough older for me to see her as a kind of backup Mom. Claire, our beautiful sister, who never hurt anyone.
We walked across the dooryard, listening to the crickets sing in the high grass. They always sing the loudest in late August and early September, as if they know summer is ending.
Terry stopped at the foot of the steps, and I saw his eyes were still wet. He’d had a good day, but a long and stressful one, just the same. I had been wrong to bring up Claire at the end of it.
“Stay the night, little bro. The couch is a pullout.”
