Bag of Bones

by Стивен Кинг

  He was Johnny Carson; she was Ed Mcmahon. I3u can make it. I’ll help you. The float, I realized, might be my only chance—there wasn’t another one on this part of the shore, and it was at least ten yards beyond Whit-more’s longest rockshot so far. I began to dogpaddle in that direction, my arms now as leaden as my feet. Each time I felt my head on the verge of going under I paused, treading water, telling myself to take it easy, I was in pretty good shape and doing okay, telling myself that if I didn’t panic I’d be all right. The old bitch and the even older bastard resumed pacing me, but they saw where I was headed and the laughter stopped. So did the taunts. For a long time the swimming float seemed to draw no closer. I told myself that was just because the light was fading, the color of the water draining from red to purple to a near-black that was the color of Devore’s gums, but I was able to muster less and less conviction for this idea as my breath shortened and my arms grew heavier. When I was still thirty yards away a cramp struck my left leg. I rolled sideways like a swamped sailboat, trying to reach the bunched muscle. More water poured down my throat. I tried to cough it out, then retched and went under with my stomach still trying to heave and my fingers still looking for the knotted place above the knee. I’m really drowning, I thought, strangely calm now that it was happening.

  This is how it happens, this is it. Then I felt a hand seize me by the nape of the neck. The pain of having my hair yanked brought me back to reality in a flash—it was better than an epinephrine injection. I felt another hand clamp around my left leg; there was a brief but terrific sense of heat. The cramp let go and I broke the surface swimming—really swimming this time, not just dog-paddling, and in what seemed like seconds I was clinging to the ladder on the side of the float, breathing in great, snatching gasps, waiting to see if I was going to be all right or if my heart was going to detonate in my chest like a hand grenade. At last my lungs started to overcome my oxygen debt, and everything began to calm down. I gave it another minute, then climbed out of the water and into what was now the ashes of twilight. I stood facing west for a little while, bent over with my hands on my knees, dripping on the boards. Then I turned around, meaning this time to flip them not just a single bird but that fabled double eagle. There was no one to flip it to. The Street was empty. Devore and Rogette Whitmore were gone.

  Maybe they were gone. I’d do well to remember there was a lot of Street I couldn’t see. I sat cross-legged on the float until the moon rose, waiting and watching for any movement. Half an hour, I think. Maybe forty-five minutes. I checked my watch, but got no help there; it had shipped some water and stopped at 7:30?.M. To the other satisfactions Devore owed me I could now add the price of one Timex Indiglo—that’s $29.95, asshole, cough it up. At last I climbed back down the ladder, slipped into the water, and stroked for shore as quietly as I could. I was rested, my head had stopped aching (although the knot above the nape of my neck still throbbed steadily), and I no longer felt off-balance and incredulous. In some ways, that had been the worst of it—trying to cope not just with the apparition of the drowned boy, the flying rocks, and the lake, but with the pervasive sense that none of this could be happening, that rich old software moguls did not try to drown novelists who strayed into their line of sight. Had tonight’s adventure been a case of simple straying into Devore’s view, though? A coincidental meeting, no more than that? Wasn’t it likely he’d been having me watched ever since the Fourth of July. . maybe from the other side of the lake, by people with high-powered optical equipment? Paranoid bullshit, I would have said… at least I would have said it before the two of them almost sank me in Dark Score Lake like a kid’s paper boat in a mudpuddle. I decided I didn’t care who might be watching from the other side of the lake. I didn’t care if the two of them were still lurking on one of the tree-shielded parts of The Street, either. I swam until I could feel strands of waterweed tickling my ankles and see the crescent of my beach. Then I stood up, wincing at the air, which now felt cold on my skin. I limped to shore, one hand raised to fend off a hail of rocks, but no rocks came. I stood for a moment on The Street, my jeans and polo shirt dripping, looking first one way, then the other. It seemed I had this little part of the world to myself. Last, I looked back at the water, where weak moonlight beat a track from the thumbnail of beach out to the swimming float. “Thanks, Jo,” I said, then started up the railroad ties to the house. I got about halfway, then had to stop and sit down. I had never been so utterly tired in my whole life.

  I climbed the stairs to the deck instead of going around to the front door, still moving slowly and marvelling at how my legs felt twice their normal weight. When I stepped into the living room I looked around with the wide eyes of someone who has been away for a decade and returns to find everything just as he left it—Bunter the moose on the wall, the Boston Globe on the couch, a compilation of 7bgh Stffcrossword puzzles on the end-table, the plate on the counter with the remains of my stir-fry still on it. Looking at these things brought the realization home full force—I had gone for a walk, leaving all this normal light clutter behind, and had almost died instead. Had almost been murdered.

  I began to shake. I went into the north-wing bathroom, took off my wet clothes, and threw them into the tub—sd/at. Then, still shaking, I turned and stared at myself in the mirror over the washbasin. I looked like someone who has been on the losing side in a barroom brawl. One bicep bore a long, clotting gash. A blackish-purple bruise was unfurling what looked like shadowy wings on my left collarbone. There was a bloody furrow on my neck and behind my ear, where the lovely Rogette had caught me with the stone in her ring.

  I took my shaving mirror and used it to check the back of my head.

  “Can’t you get that through your thick skull?” my mother used to shout at me and Sid when we were kids, and now I thanked God that Ma had apparently been right about the thickness factor, at least in my case.

  The spot where Devore had struck me with his cane looked like the cone of a recently extinct volcano. Whitmore’s bull’s-eye had left a red wound that would need stitches if I wanted to avoid a scar. Blood, rusty and thin, stained the nape of my neck all around the hairline. God knew how much had flowed out of that unpleasant-looking red mouth and been washed away by the lake.

  I poured hydrogen peroxide into my cupped palm, steeled myself, and slapped it onto the gash back there like aftershave. The bite was monstrous, and I had to tighten my lips to keep from crying out. When the pain started to fade a little, I soaked cotton balls with more peroxide and cleaned my other wounds.

  I showered, threw on a tee-shirt and a pair of jeans, then went into the hall to phone the County Sheriff. There was no need for directory assistance; the Castle Rock P.D. and County Sheriff’s numbers were on the N CASE OF EMEV, GENCY card thumbtacked to the bulletin board, along with numbers for the fire department, the ambulance service, and the 900-number where you could get three answers to that day’s Times crossword puzzle for a buck-fifty.

  I dialled the first three numbers fast, then began to slow down. I got as far as 955–960 before stopping altogether. I stood there in the hall with the phone pressed against my ear, visualizing another headline, this one not in the decorous 7}’roes but the rowdy New York Post. NOVEI IST TO AGING COMPU-KING: “YOU BIG BULLY!” Along with side-by-side pictures of me, looking roughly my age, and Max Devore, looking roughly a hundred and six. The Post would have great fun telling its readers how Devore (along with his companion, an elderly lady who might weigh ninety pounds soaking wet) had lumped up a novelist half his age—a guy who looked, in his photograph, at least, reasonably trim and fit.

  The phone got tired of holding only six of the required seven numbers in its rudimentary brain, double-clicked, and dumped me back to an open line. I took the handset away from my ear, stared at it for a moment, and then set it gently back down in its cradle. I’m not a sissy about the sometimes whimsical, sometimes hateful attention of the press, but I’m wary, as I would be around a bad-tempered fur-bearing mammal.
>
  America has turned the people who entertain it into weird high-class whores, and the media jeers at any “celeb” who dares complain about his or her treatment. “Quitcha bitchin!” cry the newspapers and the TV gossip shows (the tone is one of mingled triumph and indignation).

  “Didja really think we paid ya the big bucks just to sing a song or swing a Louisville Slugger? Wrong, asshole! We pay so we can be amazed when you do it well—whatever ’it’ happens to be in your particular case—and also because it’s gratifying when you fuck up. The truth is you’re supplies. If you cease to be amusing, we can always kill you and eat you.” They can’t really eat you, of course. They can print pictures of you with your shirt off and say you’re running to fat, they can talk about how much you drink or how many pills you take or snicker about the night you pulled some starlet onto your lap at Spago and tried to stick your tongue in her ear, but they can’t really eat you. So it wasn’t the thought of the Post calling me a crybaby or being a part of Jay Leno’s opening monologue that made me put the phone down; it was the realization that I had no proof. No one had seen us. And, I realized, finding an alibi for himself and his personal assistant would be the easiest thing in the world for Max Devore. There was one other thing, too, the capper: imagining the County Sheriff sending out George Footman, aka daddy, to take my statement on how the mean man had knocked li’l Mikey into the lake. How the three of them would laugh later about that! I called John Storrow instead, wanting him to tell me I was doing the right thing, the only thing that made any sense. Wanting him to remind me that only desperate men were driven to such desperate lengths (I would ignore, at least for the time being, how the two of them had laughed, as if they were having the time of their lives), and that nothing had changed in regard to Ki Devore—her grandfather’s custody case still sucked bogwater.

  I got John’s recording machine at home and left a message—just call Mike Noonan, no emergency, but feel free to call late. Then I tried his office, mindful of the scripture according to John Grisham: young lawyers work until they drop. I listened to the firm’s recording machine, then followed instructions and punched sto on my phone keypad, the first three letters of John’s last name. There was a click and he came on the line—another recorded version, unfortunately. “Hi, this is John Storrow. I’ve gone up to Philly for the weekend to see my mom and dad. I’ll be in the office on Monday; for the rest of the week, I’ll be out on business. From Tuesday to Friday you’ll probably have the most luck trying to reach me at…” The number he gave began 207–955, which meant Castle Rock. I imagined it was the hotel where he’d stayed before, the nice one up on the View. “Mike Noonan,” I said. “Call me when you can. I left a message on your apartment machine, too.” I went in the kitchen to get a beer, then only stood there in front of the refrigerator, playing with the magnets. Whoremaster, he’d called me. Say there, whoremaster, where’s your whore? A minute later he had offered to save my soul. Quite funny, really. Like an alcoholic offering to take care of your liquor cabinet. He spoke of you with what I think was genuine ajkction, Mattie had said. Your great-grandfather and his great-grandfather shit in the same pit. I left the fridge with all the beer still safe inside, went back to the phone, and called Mattie. “Hi,” said another obviously recorded voice. I was on a roll. “It’s me, but either I’m out or not able to come to the phone right this minute. Leave a message, okay?” A pause, the mike rustling, a distant whisper, and then Kyra, so loud she almost blew my ear off: “Leave a HAM’ message!”

  What followed was laughter from both of them, cut off by the beep. “Hi, Mattie, it’s Mike Noonan,” I said. “I just wanted—” I don’t know how I would have finished that thought, and I didn’t have to. There was a click and then Mattie herself said, “Hello, Mike.” There was such a difference between this dreary, defeated-sounding voice and the cheerful one on the tape that for a moment I was silenced. Then I asked her what was wrong.

  “Nothing,” she said, then began to cry. “Everything. I lost my job.

  Lindy fired me.”

  Firing wasn’t what Lindy had called it, of course. She’d called it “belt-tightening,” but it was firing, all right, and I knew that if I looked into the funding of the Four Lakes Consolidated Library, I would discover that one of the chief supporters over the years had been Mr. Max Devore. And he’d continue to be one of the chief supporters. . if, that was, Lindy Briggs played ball. “We shouldn’t have talked where she could see us doing it,” I said, knowing I could have stayed away from the library completely and Mattie would be just as gone. “And we probably should have seen this coming.”

  “John Storrow did see it.” She was still crying, but making an effort to get it under control. “He said Max Devore would probably want to make sure I was as deep in the corner as he could push me, come the custody hearing. He said Devore would want to make sure I answered Tm unemployed, Your Honor’ when the judge asked where I worked. I told John Mrs. Briggs would never do anything so low, especially to a girl who’d given such a brilliant talk on Melville’s “Bartleby.” Do you know what he told me?”

  “He said, “You’re very young.” I thought that was a patronizing thing to say, but he was right, wasn’t he?”

  “Mattie—”

  “What am I going to do, Mike? What am I going to do?” The panic-rat had moved on down to Wasp Hill Road, it sounded like. I thought, quite coldly: Why not become my mistress? I3ur title will be “research assistant, “aperfictlyjake occupation as far as the IRS is concerned, I’ll throw in clothes, a couple of charge cards, a house—say goodbye to the rustbucket doublewide on Isp Hill Road—and a two-week vacation: how does February on Maul sound? Plus Ki’s education, of course, and a hejgy cash bonus at the end of the year. I’ll be considerate, too. Considerate and discreet.

  Once or twice a week, and never until your little girl is fast asleep.

  All you have to do is say yes and give me a key. All you have to do is slide over when I slide in. All you have to do is let me do what I want—all through the dark, all through the night, let me touch where I want to touch, let me do what I want to do, never say no, never say stop. I closed my eyes. “Mike? Are you there?”

  “Sure,” I said. I touched the throbbing gash at the back of my head and winced. “You’re going to do just fine, Mattie. You—”

  “The trailer’s not paid for!” she nearly wailed. “I have two overdue phone bills and they’re threatening to cut off the service! There’s something wrong with the Jeep’s transmission, and the rear axle, as well! I can pay for Ki’s last week of Vacation Bible School, I guess—Mrs. Briggs gave me three weeks’ pay in lieu of notice—but how will I buy her shoes? She outgrows everything so fast.

  … there’s holes in all her shorts and most of her g-g-goddam underwear…” She was starting to weep again. “I’m going to take care of you until you get back on your feet,” I said. “No, I can’t let—”

  “You can. And for Kyra’s sake, you will. Later on, if you still want to, you can pay me back. We’ll keep tabs on every dollar and dime, if you like.

  But I’m going to take care of you.” And you’ll never take off your clothes when I’m with you. That’s a promise, and I’m going to keep it.

  “Mike, you don’t have to do this.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. But I am going to do it. You just try and stop me.” I’d called meaning to tell her what had happened to me—giving her the humorous version—but that now seemed like the worst idea in the world. “This custody thing is going to be over before you know it, and if you can’t find anyone brave enough to put you to work down here once it is, I’ll find someone up in Derry who’ll do it. Besides, tell me the truth—aren’t you starting to feel that it might be time for a change of scenery?” She managed a scrap of a laugh. “I guess you could say that.”

  “Heard from John today?”

  “Actually, yes. He’s visiting his parents in Philadelphia but he gave me the number there. I called him.” He’d said he was take
n with her. Perhaps she was taken with him, as well. I told myself the thorny little tug I felt across my emotions at the idea was only my imagination. Tried to tell myself that, anyway. “What did he say about you losing your job the way you did?”

  “The same things you said. But he didn’t make me feel safe. You do. I don’t know why.” I did. I was an older man, and that is our chief attraction to young women: we make them feel safe. “He’s coming up again Tuesday morning. I said I’d have lunch with him.” Smoothly, not a tremor or hesitation in my voice, I said: “Maybe I could join you.” Mattie’s own voice warmed at the suggestion; her ready acceptance made me feel paradoxically guilty.

  “That would be great! Why don’t I call him and suggest that you both come over here? I could barbecue again. Maybe I’ll keep Ki home from V.B.S. and make it a foursome. She’s hoping you’ll read her another story. She really enjoyed that.”