Bag of Bones

by Стивен Кинг

  Why not smile? Everything she was saying sounded absolutely great, especially once you cleared the confines of Michael Noonan’s dirty mind.

  It sounded like we might have the expected fairy-tale ending, if we could keep our courage and hold our course. And if I could restrain myself from making a pass at a girl young enough to be my daughter… outside of my dreams, that was. If I couldn’t, I probably deserved whatever I got. But Kyra wouldn’t. She was the hood ornament in all this, doomed to go wherever the car took her. If I got any of the wrong ideas, I’d do well to remember that. “If the judge sends Devore home empty-handed, I’ll take you out to Renoir Nights in Portland and buy you nine courses of French chow,” I said. “Storrow, too. I’ll even spring for the legal beagle I’m dating on Friday. So who’s better than me, huh?”

  “No one I know,” she said, sounding serious. “I’ll pay you back for this, Mike. I’m down now, but I won’t always be down. If it takes me the rest of my life, I’ll pay you back.”

  “Mattie, you don’t have to—”

  “I do,” she said with quiet vehemence. “I do. And I have to do something else today, too.”

  “What’s that?” I loved hearing her sound the way she did this morn-ing—so happy and free, like a prisoner who has just been pardoned and let out of jail—but already I was looking longingly at the door to my office. I couldn’t do much more today, I’d end up baked like an apple if I tried, but I wanted another page or two, at least. Do what you want, both women had said in my dreams. Do what you want. “I have to buy Kyra the big teddybear they have at the Castle Rock Wal-Mart,” she said. “I’ll tell her it’s for being a good girl because I can’t tell her it’s for walking in the middle of the road when you were coming the other way.”

  “Just not a black one,” I said. The words were out of my mouth before I knew they were even in my head. “Huh?” Sounding startled and doubtful. “I said bring me back one,” I said, the words once again out and down the wire before I even knew they were there. “Maybe I will,” she said, sounding amused. Then her tone grew serious again. “And if I said anything last night that made you unhappy, even for a minute, I’m sorry. I never for the world—”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not unhappy. A little confused, that’s all. In fact I’d pretty much forgotten about Jo’s mystery date.” A lie, but in what seemed to me to be a good cause. “That’s probably for the best. I won’t keep you—go on back to work. It’s what you want to do, isn’t it?” I was startled. “What makes you say that?”

  “I don’t know, I just. .” She stopped. And I suddenly knew two things: What she had been about to say, and that she wouldn’t say it. I dreamed about you last night. I dreamed about us together. were going to make love and one of us said “Do what you want.”

  Or maybe, I don’t know, maybe we both said it. Perhaps sometimes ghosts were alive—minds and desires divorced from their bodies, unlocked impulses floating unseen. Ghosts from the id, spooks from low places.

  “Mattie? Still there?”

  “Sure, you bet. Do you want me to stay in touch?

  Or will you hear all you need from John Storrow?"

  “If you don’t stay in touch, I’ll be pissed at you. Royally.” She laughed. “I will, then. But not when you’re working. Goodbye, Mike. And thanks again. So much.” I told her goodbye, then stood there for a moment looking at the old fashioned Bakelite phone handset after she had hung up. She’d call and keep me updated, but not when I was working. How would she know when that was? She just would. As I’d known last night that she was lying when she said Jo and the man with the elbow patches on the sleeves of his sportcoat had walked off toward the parking lot. Mattie had been wearing a pair of white shorts and a halter top when she called me, no dress or skirt required today because it was Wednesday and the library was closed on Wednesday. You don’t know any of that. IOU ’re just making it up. But I wasn’t. If I’d been making it up, I probably would have put her in something a little more suggestive—a Merry Widow from Victoria’s Secret, perhaps. That thought called up another. Do what you want, they had said. Both of them. Do what you want. And that was a line I knew.

  While on Key Largo I’d read an Atlantic Monthly essay on pornography by some feminist. I wasn’t sure which one, only that it hadn’t been Naomi Wolf or Camille Paglia. This woman had been of the conservative stripe, and she had used that phrase. Sally Tisdale, maybe? Or was my mind just hearing echo-distortions of Sara Tidwell? Whoever it had been, she’d claimed that “do what I want” was the basis of erotica which appealed to women and “do what you want” was the basis of pornography which appealed to men. Women imagine speaking the former line in sexual situations; men imagine having the latter line spoken to them. And, the writer went on, when real-world sex goes bad—sometimes turning violent, sometimes shaming, sometimes just unsuccessful from the female partner’s point of view—porn is often the unindicted co-conspirator. The man is apt to round on the woman angrily and cry, “You wanted me to! Quit lying and admit it! You wanted me to!” The writer claimed it was what every man hoped to hear in the bedroom: Do what you want. Bite me, sodomize me, lick between my toes, drink wine out of my navel, give me a hairbrush and raise your ass for me to paddle, it doesn’t matter. Do what you want. The door is closed and we are here, but really onlyyou are here, I am just a willing extension of your fantasies and onlyyou are here. I have no wants of my own, no needs of my own, no taboos. Do what you want to this shadow, this fantasy, this ghost.

  I’d thought the essayist at least fifty per cent full of shit; the assumption that a man can find real sexual pleasure only by turning a woman into a kind of jackoff accessory says more about the observer than the participants. This lady had had a lot of jargon and a fair amount of wit, but underneath she was only saying what Somerset Maugham, Jo’s old favorite, had had Sadie Thompson say in “Rain,” a story written eighty years before: men are pigs, filthy, dirty pigs, all of them. But we are not pigs, as a rule, not beasts, or at least not unless we are pushed to the final extremity. And if we are pushed to it, the issue is rarely sex; it’s usually territory. I’ve heard feminists argue that to men sex and territory are interchangeable, and that is very far from the truth.

  I padded back to the office, opened the door, and behind me the telephone rang again. And here was another familiar sensation, back for a return visit after four years: that anger at the telephone, the urge to simply rip it out of the wall and fire it across the room. Why did the whole world have to call while I was writing? Why couldn’t they just… well… let me do what I wanted? I gave a doubtful laugh and returned to the phone, seeing the wet handprint on it from my last call.

  “Hello?”

  “I said to stay visible while you were with her.”

  “Good morning to you, too, Lawyer Storrow.”

  “You must be in another time-zone up there, chum. I’ve got one-fifteen down here in New York.”

  “I had dinner with her,” I said. “Outside. It’s true that I read the little kid a story and helped put her to bed, but—”

  “I imagine half the town thinks you’re bopping each other’s brains out by now, and the other half will think it if I have to show up for her in court.” But he didn’t sound really angry; I thought he sounded as though he was having a happy-face day. “Can they make you tell who’s paying for your services?” I asked.

  “At the custody hearing, I mean?”

  “Nope.”

  “At my deposition on Friday?”

  “Christ, no. Durgin would lose all credibility as guardian adlitem if he went in that direction. Also, they have reasons to steer clear of the sex angle. Their focus is on Mattie as neglectful and perhaps abusive.

  Proving that Mom isn’t a nun quit working around the time Kramer vs.

  Kramer came out in the movie theaters. Nor is that the only problem they have with the issue.” He now sounded positively gleeful.

  “Tell me.”

  “Max Devore is eig
hty-five and divorced. Twice divorced, in point of fact. Before awarding custody to a single man of his age, secondary custody has to be taken into consideration. It is, in fact, the single most important issue, other than the allegations of abuse and neglect levelled at the mother.”

  “What are those allegations? Do you know?”

  “No. Mattie doesn’t either, because they’re fabrications. She’s a sweetie, by the way—”

  “Yeah, she is.”

  “—and I think she’s going to make a great witness. I can’t wait to meet her in person. Meantime, don’t sidetrack me. We’re talking about secondary custody, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Devore has a daughter who has been declared mentally incompetent and lives in an institution somewhere in California—Modesto, I think.

  Not a good bet for custody.”

  “It wouldn’t seem so.”

  “The son, Roger, is…” I heard a faint fluttering of notebook pages.

  ”… fifty-four. So he’s not exactly a spring chicken, either. Still, there are lots of guys who become daddies at that age nowadays; it’s a brave new world. But Roger is a homosexual.”

  I thought of Bill Dean saying, Rump-wrangler. Understand there’s a lot of that going around out them in Calij3rnia.

  “I thought you said sex doesn’t matter.”

  “Maybe I should have said hetero sex doesn’t matter. In certain states—California is one of themhomo sex doesn’t matter, either… or not as much. But this case isn’t going to be adjudicated in California.

  It’s going to be adjudicated in Maine, where folks are less enlightened about how well two married men—married to each other, I meanan raise a little girl.”

  “Roger Devore is married?” Okay. I admit it. I now felt a certain horrified glee myself. I was ashamed of it—Roger Devore was just a guy living his life, and he might not have had much or anything to do with his elderly dad’s current enterprise—but I felt it just the same.

  “He and a software designer named Morris Ridding tied the knot in 1996,” John said. “I found that on the first computer sweep. And if this does wind up in court, I intend to make as much of it as I possibly can. I don’t know how much that will be—at this point it’s impossible to predict—but if I get a chance to paint a picture of that bright-eyed, cheerful little girl growing up with two elderly gays who probably spend most of their lives in computer chat-rooms speculating about what Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock might have done after the lights were out in officers’ country… well, if I get that chance, I’ll take it.”

  “It seems a little mean,” I said. I heard myself speaking in the tone of a man who wants to be dissuaded, perhaps even laughed at, but that didn’t happen.

  “Of course it’s mean. It feels like swerving up onto the sidewalk to knock over a couple of innocent bystanders. Roger Devote and Morris Ridding don’t deal drugs, traffic in little boys, or rob old ladies. But this is custody, and custody does an even better job than divorce of turning human beings into insects. This one isn’t as bad as it could be, but it’s bad enough because it’s so naked. Max Devore came up there to his old hometown for one reason and one reason only: to buy a kid. That makes me mad.”

  I grinned, imagining a lawyer who looked like Elmer Fudd standing outside of a rabbit-hole marked DEVO with a shotgun.

  “My message to Devore is going to be very simple: the price of the kid just went up. Probably to a figure higher than even he can afford.”

  “/fit goes to court—you’ve said that a couple of times now. Do you think there’s a chance Devore might just drop it and go away?”

  ’gk pretty good one, yeah. I’d say an excellent one if he wasn’t old and used to getting his own way. There’s also the question of whether or not he’s still sharp enough to know where his best interest lies. I’ll try for a meeting with him and his lawyer while I’m up there, but so far I haven’t managed to get past his secretary…”

  “Rogette Whitmore?”

  “No, I think she’s a step further up the ladder. I haven’t talked to her yet, either. But I will.”

  “Try either Richard Osgood or George Footman,” I said. “Either of them may be able to put you in touch with Devore or Devore’s chief counsel.”

  “I’ll want to talk to the Whitmore woman in any case. Men like Devore tend to grow more and more dependent on their close advisors as they grow older, and she could be a key to getting him to let this go. She could also be a headache for us. She might urge him to fight, possibly because she really thinks he can win and possibly because she wants to watch the fur fly. Also, she might marry him."

  “Marry him?”

  “Why not? He could have her sign a pre-nup—I could no more’ introduce that in court than his lawyers could go fishing for who hired Mattie’s lawyer—and it would strengthen his chances.”

  “John, I’ve seen the woman. She’s got to be seventy herself.”

  “But she’s a potential female player in a custody case involving a little girl, and she’s a layer between old man Devore and the married gay couple. We just need to keep it in mind.”

  “Okay.” I looked at the office door again, but not so longingly. There comes a point when you’re done for the day whether you want to be or not, and I thought I had reached that point. Perhaps in the evening… “The lawyer I got for you is named Romeo Bissonette.” He paused. “Can that be a real name?”

  “Is he from Lewiston?”

  “Yes, how did you know?”

  “Because in Maine, especially around Lewiston, that can be a real name. Am I supposed to go see him?” I didn’t want to go see him. It was fifty miles to Lewiston over two-lane roads which would now be crawling with campers and Winnebagos. What I wanted was to go swimming and then take a long nap. A long dream/ess nap. “You don’t need to. Call him and talk to him a little. He’s only a safety net, really—he’ll object if the questioning leaves the incident on the morning of July Fourth. About that incident you tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Got it?”

  “Talk to him before, then meet him on Friday at… wait… it’s right here…” The notebook pages fluttered again. “Meet him at the Route 120

  Diner at nine-fifteen. Coffee. Talk a little, get to know each other, maybe flip for the check. I’ll be with Mattie, getting as much as I can.

  We may want to hire a private dick.”

  “I love it when you talk dirty.”

  “Uh-huh. I’m going to see that bills go to your guy Goldacre. He’ll send them to your agent, and your agent can—”

  “No,” I said. “Instruct Goldacre to send them directly here. Harold’s a Jewish mother. How much is this going to cost me?”

  “Seventy-five thousand dollars, minimum,” he said with no hesitation at all. With no apology in his voice, either.

  “Don’t tell Mattie.”

  “LALL right. Are you having any fun yet, Mike?”

  “You know, I sort of am,” I said thoughtfully. “For seventy-five grand, you should.” We said our goodbyes and John hung up. As I put my own phone back into its cradle, it occurred to me that I had lived more in the last five days than I had in the last four years.

  This time the phone didn’t ring and I made it all the way back into the office, but I knew I was definitely done for the day. I sat down at the IBM, hit the TU,N key a couple of times, and was beginning to write myself a next-note at the bottom of the page I’d been working on when the phone interrupted me. What a sour little doodad the telephone is, and what little good news we get from it! Today had been an exception, though, and I thought I could sign off with a grin. I was working, after all-working. Part of me still marvelled that I was sitting here at all, breathing easily, my heart beating steadily in my chest, and not even a glimmer of an anxiety attack on my personal event horizon. I wrote:

  [NEXT: Drake to 1Zaiford. Stops on the way at vegetable stand to talk to the guy who runs it, old source, needs a good & colorful name. Straw hat. Disneywo
rld tee-shirt. They talk about Shackleford.]

  I turned the roller until the IBM spat this page out, stuck it on top of the manuscript, and jotted a final note to myself: “Call Ted Rosencrief about Raiford.” Rosencriefwas a retired Navy man who lived in Derry. I had employed him as a research assistant on several books, using him on one project to find out how paper was made, what the migratory habits of certain common birds were for another, a little bit about the architecture of pyramid burial rooms for a third. And it’s always “a little bit” I want, never “the whole damn thing.” As a writer, my motto has always been don’t confuse me with the facts. The Arthur Hailey type of fiction is beyond me—I can’t read it, let alone write it. I want to know just enough so I can lie colorfully. Rosie knew that, and we had always worked well together.

  This time I needed to know a little bit about Florida’s Raiford Prison, and what the deathhouse down there is really like. I also needed a little bit on the psychology of serial killers. I thought Rosie would probably be glad to hear from me… almost as glad as I was to finally have something to call him about.

  I picked up the eight double-spaced pages I had written and fanned through them, still amazed at their existence. Had an old IBM typewriter and a Courier type-ball been the secret all along? That was certainly how it seemed.

  What had come out was also amazing. I’d had ideas during my four-year sabbatical; there had been no writer’s block in that regard. One had been really great, the sort of thing which certainly would have become a novel if I’d still been able to write novels. Half a dozen to a dozen were of the sort I’d classify “pretty good,” meaning they’d do in a pinch… or if they happened to unexpectedly grow tall and mysterious overnight, like Jack’s beanstalk. Sometimes they do. Most were glimmers, little “what-ifs” that came and went like shooting stars while I was driving or walking or just lying in bed at night and waiting to go to sleep.