4
Cityscape Hotel was full.
That was no trouble for sister Anne.
She got herself a double, then bullied the harried manager into giving her another because the air conditioner in the first rattled and because the color on the TV was so bad, she said, that all the actors looked like they had just eaten shit and would soon die.
She unpacked, masturbated to a grim-and-cheerless climax with a vibrator nearly the size of one of the mutant carrots in Bobbi’s garden (the only climaxes she had were of the grim-and-cheerless type; she’d never been with a man in bed and never intended to), showered, napped, then went to dinner. She scanned the menu with a darkening frown, then bared her teeth in a spitless grin at the waiter who came to take her order.
“Bring me a bunch of vegetables. Raw, leafy vegetables.”
“Madame wants a sal—”
“Madame wants a bunch of raw, leafy vegetables. I don’t give a shit what you call them. Just wash them first to get the bugpiss off. And bring me a sombrero right now.”
“Yes, madame,” the waiter said, licking his lips. People were looking at them. A few smiled ... but those who got a look at Anne Anderson’s eyes soon stopped. The waiter started away and she called him back, her voice loud and even and undeniable.
“A sombrero,” she said, “has Kahlua and cream in it. Cream. If you bring me a sombrero with milk in it, chum, you’re going to be shampooing with the motherfucker.”
The waiter’s Adam’s apple went up and down like a monkey on a stick. He tried to summon the sort of aristocratic, pitying smile which is a good waiter’s chief weapon against vulgar customers. To do him full credit, he got a pretty good start on that smile—then Anne’s lips curved up in a grin that froze it dead. There was no good nature in that grin. There was something like murder in it.
“I mean it, chum,” sister Anne said softly. The waiter believed her.
5
She was back in her room at seven-thirty. She undressed, put on a robe, and sat looking out the fourth-story window. In spite of its name, Cityscape Hotel was actually far out on Bangor’s outskirts. The view Anne looked out on was, except for the lights in the small parking lot, one of almost unalloyed darkness. That was exactly the sort of view she liked.
There were amphetamine capsules in her purse. Anne took one of them out, opened it, poured the white powder onto the mirror of her compact, made a line with one sensibly short nail, and snorted half of it. Her heart immediately began to jackrabbit in her narrow chest. A flush of color bloomed in her pallid face. She left the rest for the morning. She had begun to use yellowjackets this way shortly after her father’s first stroke. Now she found she could not sleep without a snort of this stuff, which was the diametric opposite of a sedative. When she had been a little girl—a very little girl—her mother had once cried at Anne in utter exasperation, “You’re so contrary cheese’d physic ya!”
Anne supposed it had been true then, and that it was true now ... not that her mother would ever dare say it now, of course.
Anne glanced at the phone and then away. Just looking at it made her think of Bobbi, of the way she had refused to come to Father’s funeral—not in words but in a cowardly way that was typical of her, by simply refusing to respond to Anne’s increasingly urgent efforts to communicate with her. She had called twice during the twenty-four hours following the old bastard’s stroke, when it became obvious he was going to snuff it. The phone had not been answered either time.
She called again after her father died—this time at 1:04 on the morning of August 2nd. Some drunk had answered the telephone.
“I’d like Roberta Anderson, please,” Anne said. She stood stiffly at the pay phone in the lobby of Utica Soldiers’ Hospital. Her mother sat in a nearby plastic chair, surrounded by endless brothers and endless sisters with their endless Irish-potato faces, weeping and weeping and weeping. “Right now.”
“Bobbi?” the drunk voice at the other end said. “You want the old boss or the New and Improved Boss?”
“Spare me the bullshit, Gardener. Her father has—”
“Can’t talk to Bobbi now,” the drunk—it was Gardener, all right, she recognized the voice now—broke in. Anne closed her eyes. There was only one piece of phone-related bad manners she hated worse than being broken in upon. “She’s out in the shed with the Dallas Police. They’re all getting even Newer and more Improved.”
“You tell her her sister Anne—”
Click!
Dry rage turned the sides of her throat to heated flannel. She held the telephone handset away from her and looked at it the way a woman might look at a snake that has bitten her. Her fingernails were white-going-on-purple.
The piece of phone manners she hated most was being hung up on.
6
She had dialed back at once, but this time, after a long pause, the telephone began to make a weird sirening noise in her ear. She hung up and went over to her weeping mother and her harp relatives.
“Did you get her, Sissy?” her mother asked Anne.
“Yes.”
“What did she say?” Her eyes begged Anne for good news. “Did she say she’d come home for his funeral?”
“I couldn’t get a commitment one way or another,” Anne said, and suddenly all of her fury at Roberta—Roberta, who had had the temerity to try to escape—suddenly burst out of her heart, but not in shrillness. Anne would never be still or shrill. That sharklike grin surfaced on her face. The murmuring relatives grew silent and looked at Anne uneasily. Two of the old ladies gripped their rosaries. “She did say that she was glad the old bastard was dead. Then she laughed. Then she hung up.”
There was a moment of stunned silence. Then Paula Anderson clapped her hands to her ears and began to shriek.
7
Anne had had no doubt—at least at first—that Bobbi would be at the funeral. Anne meant for her to be there, and so she would be. Anne always got what she wanted; that made the world nice for her, and that was the way things should be. When Roberta did come, she would be confronted with the lie Anne had told—probably not by their mother, who would be too pathetically glad to see her to mention it (or probably even to remember it), but surely by one of the harp uncles. Bobbi would deny it, so the harp uncle would probably let it go—unless the harp uncle happened to be very drunk, which was always a good possibility with Mama’s brothers—but they would all remember Anne’s statement, not Bobbi’s denial.
That was good. Fine, in fact. But not enough. It was time—overtime—that Roberta came home. Not just for the funeral; for good.
She would see to it. Leave it to Sissy.
8
Sleep did not come easily to Anne that night in the Cityscape. Part of it was being in a strange bed; part of it was the dim gabble of TVs from other rooms and the sense of being surrounded by other people, just another bee trying to sleep in just another chamber of this hive where the chambers were square instead of hexagonal; part of it was knowing that tomorrow would be an extremely busy day; most of it, however, was her continuing dull fury at being balked. It was the thing which she hated above all others—it reduced such annoyances to minor piffles. Bobbi had balked her. So far she had balked her utterly and completely, necessitating this stupid trip during what the weather forecasters were calling the worst heatwave to hit New England since 1974.
An hour after her lie about Bobbi to her mother and the harp aunts and uncles, she had tried to phone again, this time from the undertaker’s (her mother had long since tottered home, where Anne supposed she would be sitting up with her cunt of a sister Betty, the two of them drinking that shitty claret they liked, wailing over the dead man while they got slopped). She got nothing but that sirening sound again. She called the operator and reported trouble on the line.
“I want you to check it, locate the trouble, and see that it’s corrected,” Anne said. “There’s been a death in the family, and I need to reach my sister as soon as possible.”
; “Yes, ma’am. If you’ll give me the number you’re calling from—”
“I’m calling from the undertaker’s,” Anne said. “I’m going to pick out a coffin for my father and then go to bed. I’ll call in the morning. Just make sure my call goes through then, honey.”
She hung up and turned to the undertaker.
“Pine box,” she said. “Cheapest one you’ve got.”
“But, Ms. Anderson, I’m sure you’ll want to think about—”
“I don’t want to think about anything,” Anne barked. She could feel the warning pulses which signaled the onset of one of her frequent migraine headaches. “Just sell me the cheapest pine box you’ve got so I can get the fuck out of here. It smells dead.”
“But ...” The undertaker was flabbergasted. “But won’t you want to see ...”
“I’ll see it when he’s wearing it,” Anne said, drawing her checkbook out of her purse. “How much?”
9
The next morning Bobbi’s telephone was working, but there was no answer. There continued to be no answer all day. Anne grew steadily more angry. Around four P.M., with the wake in the next room going full-blast, she had called Maine directory assistance and told the operator she wanted the number of the Haven Police Department.
“Well ... there’s no police department, exactly, but I have a listing for the Haven constable. Will that—”
“Yeah. Give it to me.”
The directory-assistance operator did. Anne called. The phone rang ... rang ... rang. The tone of the ring was exactly the same as the tone she got when she dialed the house where her spineless sister had been hiding out for the last thirteen years or so. A person could almost believe they were ringing into the same receiver.
She actually toyed with the idea for a moment before brushing it aside. But giving such a paranoid thought even a moment’s house-room was unlike her, and it made her angrier. The rings sounded alike because the same little dipshit backwoods phone company sold and serviced all the phone equipment in town, that was all.
“Did you get her?” Paula asked timidly, coming to the door.
“No. She doesn’t answer, the town constable doesn’t answer, I think the whole fucking town went to Bermuda. Jesus!” She blew a lock of hair off her sweaty forehead.
“Perhaps if you called one of her friends—”
“What friends? The loony she’s shacked up with?”
“Sissy! You don’t know—”
“I know who answered the phone the one time I did get through,” she returned grimly. “After living in this family, it’s easier for me to tell when a man’s drunk by his voice.”
Her mother said nothing; she had been reduced to wet-eyed, trembling silence, one hand hovering at the collar of her black dress, and that was just how Anne liked her.
“No, he’s there, and they both know I’m trying to get through and why, and they’re going to be sorry they fucked with me.”
“Sissy, I do so wish you wouldn’t use that lang—”
“Shut up!” Anne screamed at her, and of course her mother did.
Anne picked up the telephone again. This time when she dialed directory assistance, she asked for the number of the Haven mayor. They didn’t have one of those either. There was something called a town manager, whatever the fuck that was.
Muffled little clicks, like rats’ claws on glass, as the operator looked things up on her computer screen. Her mother had fled. From the other room came the theatrically overblown sobs and wails of Irish grief. Like a V-2 rocket, Anne thought, an Irish wake was powered by liquid fuel, and in both cases the liquid was the same. Anne closed her eyes. Her head thumped. She ground her teeth together—it produced a bitter, metallic taste. She closed her eyes and imagined how good, how wonderful it would be to perform a little surgery on Bobbi’s face with her fingernails.
“Are you still there, honey,” she asked without opening her eyes, “or did you suddenly run off to the W.C.?”
“Yes, I have a I—”
“Give it to me.”
The operator was gone. A robot recited a number in odd, herky-jerky cadences. Anne dialed it. She fully expected no answer, but the phone was picked up promptly. “Selectmen’s. Newt Berringer here.”
“Well, it’s good to know someone’s there. My name’s Anne Anderson. I’m calling from Utica, New York. I tried to call your constable, but apparently he’s gone fishing.”
Berringer’s voice was even. “He’s a she, Miss Anderson. She died unexpectedly last month. The office hasn’t been filled. Probably won’t be until next town meeting.”
This stopped Anne for only an instant. She focused instead on something which interested her more.
“Miss Anderson? How did you know I was a Miss, Berringer?”
There was no pause. Berringer said, “Ain’t you Bobbi’s sister? If you are, and if you were married, you wouldn’t be Anderson, would you?”
“You know Bobbi then, do you?”
“Everyone in Haven knows Bobbi, Miss Anderson. She’s our resident celebrity. We’re real proud of her.”
It went through the meat of Anne’s brain like a sliver of glass. Our resident celebrity. Oh dear bleeding Christ.
“Good job, Sherlock. I’ve been trying to reach her on whatever passes for phones up there in Moosepaw County to tell her her father died yesterday and he’s going to be buried tomorrow.”
She had expected some conventional sentiment from this faceless official—after all, he knew Bobbi—but there was none. “Been some trouble with the phones out her way,” was all Berringer said.
Anne was again put momentarily off-pace (very momentarily; Anne was never put off-pace for very long). The conversation was not going as she had expected. The man’s responses were a little strange, too reserved even for a Yankee. She tried to picture him and couldn’t. There was something very odd in his voice.
“Could you have her call me? Her mother is crying her eyes out in the other room, she’s near collapse, and if Roberta doesn’t get here in time for the funeral, I think she will collapse.”
“Well, I can’t make her call you, Miss Anderson, can I?” Berringer returned with infuriating, drawly slowness.
“She’s a grown woman. But I’ll surely pass the message along.”
“Maybe I’d better give you the number,” Anne said through clenched teeth. “I mean, we’re still here at the same old stand, but she calls so seldom these days, she might have forgotten it. It’s—”
“No need,” Berringer interrupted. “If she don’t remember, or have it written down, there’s always d‘rect’ry assistance, ain’t there? I guess that’s how you must have gotten this’un.”
Anne hated the telephone because it allowed only a fraction of the full, relentless force of her personality to come through. She thought she had never hated it so much as she did at this moment. “Listen!” she cried. “I don’t think you understand—”
“Think I do,” Berringer said. This was the second interruption, and the conversation was not three minutes old. “I’ll go out ‘fore I have m’dinner and pass it on. Thanks for calling, Miss Anderson.”
“Listen—”
Before she could finish, he did the thing she hated the most.
Anne hung up, thinking she could cheerfully stand by and watch as the jag-off to whom she’d just been speaking was eaten alive by wild dogs.
She had been grinding her teeth together madly.
10
Bobbi didn’t return her call that afternoon. Nor that early evening, as the V-2 of the wake entered the boozosphere. Nor that late evening as it went into orbit. Nor in the two hours past midnight as the last of the wakers stumbled blearily out to their cars, with which they would menace other drivers on their way home.
Anne lay sleepless and ramrod straight in her bed most of the night, wired up on speed like a suitcase bomb, alternately grinding her teeth and digging her nails into her palms, planning revenge.
You’ll come back, Bobbi, oh yes
you will. And when you do—
When she still hadn’t called the next day, Anne put the funeral off in spite of her mother’s weak wailings that it wasn’t fitting. Finally Anne whirled on her and snarled,
“I’ll say what’s fitting and what isn’t. What’s fitting is that that little whore should be here and she hasn’t even bothered to call. Now leave me alone!”
Her mother slunk away.
That night she tried first Bobbi’s number, then the selectmen’s office. At the first number the sirening sound continued. At the second, she got a recorded message. She waited patiently until the beep and then said, “It’s Bobbi’s sis again, Mr. Berringer, cordially hoping that you’ll be afflicted with syphilis that won’t be diagnosed until your nose falls off and your balls turn black.”
She called directory assistance back and asked for three Haven numbers—the number of Newt Berringer, a Smith (“Any Smith, dear, in Haven they’re all related”), and a Brown (the number she received in response to this last request was, by virtue of alphabetical order, Bryant’s). She got the same siren howl at each number.
“Shit!” Anne yelled, and threw the phone at the wall.
Upstairs in bed, her mother cringed and hoped Bobbi would not come home ... at least not until Anne was in a better mood.
11
She had put the funeral and interment off yet another day.
The relatives began to rumble, but Anne was more than equal to them, thank you. The funeral director took one look at her and decided the old mick could rot in his pine box before he got involved. Anne, who spent the whole day on the phone, would have congratulated him on making a wise decision. Her fury was rapidly passing all previous bounds. Now all the phones into Haven seemed out of service.
She could not delay the funeral another day longer and she knew it. Bobbi had won this battle; all right, so be it. But not the war. Oh no. If she thought that, the bitch had several more things coming—and all of them would be painful.
Stephen King Page 57
