If It Bleeds

by Stephen King

  Chuck holds his hands out to her, smiling, snapping his fingers. “Come on,” he says. “Come on, little sister, dance.”

  * * *

  Jared doesn’t think she will—she looks like the shy type—but she walks slowly toward the man in the gray suit. Maybe Magic Hat really is magic.

  “Dance!” one of the beret guys says, and others pick it up, clapping along with the beat Jared is laying down: “Dance, dance, dance!”

  Janice breaks into a what-the-hell smile, tosses her purse down beside Chuck’s briefcase, and takes his hands. Jared drops what he’s been doing and turns into Charlie Watts, hammering like a soldier. Mr. Businessman twirls the girl, puts a hand on her trim waist, draws her to him, and quick-steps her past the drumkit, almost to the corner of the Walgreens building. Janice pulls away, waving her finger in a “naughty-naughty” gesture, then comes back and grasps both of Chuck’s hands. As if they had practiced this a hundred times, he does another modified split and she shoots between his legs, a daring move that opens the wrap skirt to the top of one pretty thigh. There are a few gasps as she props herself on one tented hand and then springs back up. She’s laughing.

  “No more,” Chuck says, patting his chest. “I can’t—”

  She springs to him and puts her hands on his shoulders and he can after all. He catches her by the waist, turning her on his hip and then setting her neatly on the pavement. He lifts her left hand and she spins beneath it like a hopped-up ballerina. There must be over a hundred people watching now, they crowd the sidewalk and spill into the street. They burst into fresh applause.

  Jared runs the drums one time, hits the cymbals, then holds up his sticks triumphantly. There’s another round of applause. Chuck and Janice are looking at each other, both out of breath. Chuck’s hair, just starting to gray, is stuck to his sweaty forehead.

  “What are we doing?” Janice asks. Now that the drums have stopped, she looks dazed.

  “I don’t know,” Chuck says, “but that’s the best thing that’s happened to me in I don’t know how long.”

  Magic Hat is full to overflowing.

  “More!” someone shouts, and the crowd picks it up. There are many phones being held up, ready to catch the next dance, and the girl looks like she would, but she’s young. Chuck is danced out. He looks at the drummer and shakes his head. The drummer gives him a nod to show he understands. Chuck is wondering how many people were quick enough to video that first dance, and what his wife will think if she sees it. Or his son. And suppose it goes viral? Unlikely, but if it does, if it gets back to the bank, what will they think when they see the man they sent to a conference in Boston shaking his booty on Boylston Street with a woman young enough to be his daughter? Or somebody’s little sister. Just what did he think he was doing?

  “No more, folks,” the drummer calls. “We gotta quit while we’re ahead.”

  “And I need to get home,” the girl says.

  “Not yet,” says the drummer. “Please.”

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later they’re sitting on a bench facing the duck pond in Boston Common. Jared called Mac. Chuck and Janice helped Jared pack up his kit and load it in the back of the van. A few people hung out, congratulating them, offering high fives, adding a few more bucks to the overflowing hat. When they’re rolling—Chuck and Janice sitting side by side in the back seat, their feet planted among stacks of comic books—Mac says they’ll never find parking next to the Common.

  “We will today,” Jared says. “Today is magic.” And they do, right across from the Four Seasons.

  Jared counts out the cash. Somebody has actually tossed in a fifty, maybe the beret guy mistaking it for a five. There’s over four hundred dollars in all. Jared has never had such a day. Never expected to. He sets aside Mac’s ten per cent (Mac is currently standing at the edge of the pond, feeding the ducks from a package of peanut butter crackers he happened to have in his pocket), then begins to divvy up the rest.

  “Oh, no,” Janice says when she understands what he’s doing. “That’s yours.”

  Jared shakes his head. “Nope, we split even. By myself I wouldn’t have made half this much even if I drummed until midnight.” Not that the cops would ever allow such a thing. “Sometimes I clear thirty bucks, and that’s on a good day.”

  Chuck has the beginnings of one of his headaches and knows it’s apt to be bad by nine o’clock, but the young man’s earnestness makes him laugh just the same. “All right. I don’t need it, but I guess I earned it.” He reaches out and pats Janice’s cheek, just as he sometimes used to pat the cheek of the lead singer’s potty-mouthed little sister. “So did you, young lady.”

  “Where did you learn to dance like that?” Jared asks Chuck.

  “Well, there was an extracurricular called Twirlers and Spinners back in middle school, but it was my grandma who showed me the best moves.”

  “You?” he asks Janice.

  “Pretty much the same,” she says, and blushes. “High school dances. Where did you learn to drum?”

  “Self-taught. Like you,” he says to Chuck. “You were great by yourself, man, but the chick added a whole extra dimension. We could do this for a living, you know it? I really think we could busk our way to fame and fortune.”

  For a mad moment Chuck actually considers it, and sees the girl is, too. Not in a serious way, but in the way you daydream of an alternate life. One where you play pro baseball or climb Mount Everest or duet with Bruce Springsteen at a stadium concert. Then Chuck laughs some more and shakes his head. As the girl tucks her third of the take into her purse, she is also laughing.

  “It was really all you,” Jared says to Chuck. “What made you stop in front of me? And what made you start moving?”

  Chuck thinks that over, then shrugs. He could say it was because he was thinking about that old half-assed band, the Retros, and how he liked to dance across the stage during the instrumental breaks, showing off, swinging that mike stand between his legs, but that’s not it. And really, had he ever danced with such elan and freedom even back then, when he had been a teenager, young and limber, with no headaches and nothing to lose?

  “It was magic,” Janice says. She giggles. She didn’t expect to hear that sound coming from her today. Crying, yes. Giggling, no. “Like your hat.”

  Mac comes back. “Jere, we gotta roll or you’re gonna end up spending your take paying for my parking ticket.”

  Jared stands up. “Sure you don’t want to change career streams, you two? We could busk this town from Beacon Hill to Roxbury. Make a name for ourselves.”

  “I’ve got a conference to attend tomorrow,” Chuck says. “On Saturday I’m flying home. I’ve got a wife and son waiting for me.”

  “And I can’t do it by myself,” Janice says, smiling. “It would be like Ginger without Fred.”

  “I hear that,” Jared says, and holds out his arms. “But you have to get in here before you go. Group hug.”

  They join him. Chuck knows they can smell his sweat—this suit will have to be dry-cleaned before he wears it again, and strenuously—and he can smell theirs. It’s all right. He thinks the girl nailed it when she used the word magic. Sometimes there is such a thing. Not much, but a little. Like finding a forgotten twenty in the pocket of an old coat.

  “Buskers forever,” Jared says.

  Chuck Krantz and Janice Halliday repeat it.

  “Buskers forever,” Mac says, “great. Now let’s get out of here before a meter maid shows up, Jere.”

  * * *

  Chuck tells Janice he’s headed to the Boston Hotel, past the Prudential Center, if she’s going that way. Janice was, the plan had been to walk all the way to Fenway, brooding about her ex-boyfriend and muttering doleful shit to her purse, but she’s changed her mind. She says she’ll take the T from Arlington Street.

  He walks her there, the two of them cutting across the park. At the head of the stairs, she turns to him and says, “Thank you for the dance.”

  He g
ives her a bow. “It was my pleasure.”

  He watches her until she’s out of sight, then heads back down Boylston. He walks slowly because his back hurts, his legs hurt, and his head is throbbing. He can’t remember having bad headaches like this in his whole life. Not until a couple of months ago, that is. He supposes if they keep up, he’ll have to see a doctor. He supposes he knows what this might be.

  All that’s for later, though. If at all. Tonight he thinks he’ll treat himself to a good dinner—why not, he’s earned it—and a glass of wine. On second thought, make it Evian. Wine might intensify his headache. When he’s finished his meal—dessert definitely included—he’ll call Ginny and tell her that her husband might be the next one-day Internet sensation. That probably won’t happen, somewhere right now someone is undoubtedly filming a dog juggling empty soda bottles and someone else is memorializing a goat smoking a cigar, but it’s better to get out front with it, just in case.

  As he passes the place where Jared set up his drums, those two questions recur: why did you stop to listen, and why did you start to dance? He doesn’t know, and would answers make a good thing better?

  Later he will lose the ability to walk, never mind dancing with little sister on Boylston Street. Later he will lose the ability to chew food, and his meals will come from a blender. Later he will lose his grip on the difference between waking and sleeping and enter a land of pain so great that he will wonder why God made the world. Later he will forget his wife’s name. What he will remember—occasionally—is how he stopped, and dropped his briefcase, and began to move his hips to the beat of the drums, and he will think that is why God made the world. Just that.

  Act I: I Contain Multitudes

  1

  Chuck was looking forward to having a baby sister. His mother promised he could hold her if he was very careful. Of course he was also looking forward to having parents, but none of that worked out thanks to an icy patch on an I-95 overpass. Much later, in college, he would tell a girlfriend that there were all sorts of novels, movies, and TV shows where a main character’s parents died in a car crash, but he was the only person he knew who’d had that happen in real life.

  The girlfriend thought this over, then rendered her verdict. “I’m sure it happens all the time, although partners can also be taken in housefires, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, and avalanches while on ski vacations. To name only a few of the possibilities. And what makes you think you’re a main character in anything but your own mind?”

  She was a poet and sort of a nihilist. The relationship only lasted a semester.

  Chuck wasn’t in the car when it went flying upside-down from the turnpike overpass because his parents were having a dinner date and he was being babysat by his grandparents, who at that time he was still calling Zaydee and Bubbie (this mostly ended in the third grade, when kids made fun of him and he reverted to the more all-American Grandma and Grandpa). Albie and Sarah Krantz lived just a mile down the road, and it was natural enough for them to raise him after the accident when he became what he first believed to be an orphant. He was seven.

  For a year—maybe a year and a half—that was a house of unadulterated sadness. The Krantzes had not only lost their son and daughter-in-law, they had lost the granddaughter who would have been born just three months later. The name had already been picked out: Alyssa. When Chuck said that sounded to him like rain, his mother had laughed and cried at the same time.

  He never forgot that.

  He knew his other grandparents of course, there were visits every summer, but they were basically strangers to him. They called a lot after he became an orphant, your basic how-are-you-doing-how’s-school calls, and the summer visits continued; Sarah (aka Bubbie, aka Grandma) took him on the plane. But his mother’s parents remained strangers, living in the foreign land of Omaha. They sent him presents on his birthday and at Christmas—the latter especially nice since Grandma and Grandpa didn’t “do” Christmas—but otherwise he continued to think of them as outliers, like the teachers who were left behind as he moved up through the grades.

  Chuck began to slip his metaphorical mourning garments first, necessarily pulling his grandparents (old, yeah, but not ancient) out of their own grief. There came a time, when Chuck was ten, that they took the boy to Disney World. They had adjoining rooms at the Swan Resort, the door between the rooms kept open at night, and Chuck only heard his grandma crying once. Mostly, they had fun.

  Some of that good feeling came back home with them. Chuck sometimes heard Grandma humming in the kitchen, or singing along with the radio. There had been lots of take-out meals after the accident (and whole recyclable bins full of Grandpa’s Budweiser bottles), but in the year after Disney World, Grandma began cooking again. Good meals that put weight on a formerly skinny boy.

  She liked rock and roll while she was cooking, music Chuck would have thought much too young for her, but which she clearly enjoyed. If Chuck wandered into the kitchen looking for a cookie or maybe hoping to make a brown-sugar roll-up with a slice of Wonder Bread, Grandma was apt to hold out her hands to him and start snapping her fingers. “Dance with me, Henry,” she’d say.

  His name was Chuck, not Henry, but he usually took her up on it. She taught him jitterbug steps and a couple of crossover moves. She told him there were more, but her back was too creaky to attempt them. “I can show you, though,” she said, and one Saturday brought back a stack of videotapes from the Blockbuster store. There was Swing Time, with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, West Side Story, and Chuck’s favorite, Singin’ in the Rain, where Gene Kelly danced with a lamppost.

  “You could learn those moves,” she said. “You’re a natural, kiddo.”

  He asked her once, when they were drinking iced tea after an especially strenuous go to Jackie Wilson’s “Higher and Higher,” what she had been like in high school.

  “I was a kusit,” she said. “But don’t tell your zaydee I said that. He’s old-school, that one.”

  Chuck never told.

  And he never went in the cupola.

  Not then.

  He asked about it, of course, and more than once. What was up there, what you could see from the high window, why the room was locked. Grandma said it was because the floor wasn’t safe and he might go right through it. Grandpa said the same thing, that there was nothing up there because of the rotten floor, and the only thing you could see from those windows was a shopping center, big deal. He said that until one night, just before Chuck’s eleventh birthday, when he told at least part of the truth.

  2

  Drinking is not good for secrets, everybody knows that, and after the death of his son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter-to-be (Alyssa, sounds like rain), Albie Krantz drank a great deal. He should have bought stock in Anheuser-Busch, that was how much he drank. He could do it because he was retired, and comfortably off, and very depressed.

  After the trip to Disney World the drinking tapered off to a glass of wine with dinner or a beer in front of a baseball game. Mostly. Once in awhile—every month at first, every couple of months later on—Chuck’s grandpa tied one on. Always at home, and never making any fuss about it. The next day he would move slowly and eat little until afternoon, then he was back to normal.

  One night while watching the Red Sox get thumped by the Yankees, when Albie was well into his second sixpack of Bud, Chuck once more raised the subject of the cupola. Mostly just to have something to talk about. With the Sox down by nine, the game wasn’t exactly holding his attention.

  “I bet you can see way past the Westford Mall,” Chuck said.

  Grandpa considered this, then pushed the mute button on the TV controller, silencing an ad for Ford Truck Month. (Grandpa said Ford stood for Fix Or Repair Daily.) “If you went up there you might see a lot more than you wanted,” he said. “That’s why it’s locked, boychick.”

  Chuck felt a small and not entirely unpleasurable chill go through him, and his mind immediately flashed to Scooby-Doo and his friend
s, chasing down spooks in the Mystery Machine. He wanted to ask what Grandpa meant, but the adult part of him—not there in person, no, not at ten, but something that had begun to speak on rare occasions—told him to be quiet. Be quiet and wait.

  “Do you know what style this house is, Chucky?”

  “Victorian,” Chuck said.

  “That’s right, and not pretend Victorian, either. It was built in 1885, been remodeled half a dozen times since, but the cupola was there from the start. Your bubbie and I bought it when the shoe business really took off, and we got it for a song. Been here since 1971, and in all those years I haven’t been up to that damn cupola half a dozen times.”

  “Because the floor’s rotted?” Chuck asked, with what he hoped was appealing innocence.

  “Because it’s full of ghosts,” Grandpa said, and Chuck felt that chill again. Not so pleasurable this time. Although Grandpa might be joking. He did joke from time to time these days. Jokes were to Grandpa what dancing was to Grandma. He tipped his beer. Belched. His eyes were red. “Christmas Yet to Come. Do you remember that one, Chucky?”

  Chuck did, they watched A Christmas Carol every year on Christmas Eve even though they didn’t “do” Christmas otherwise, but that didn’t mean he knew what his grandpa was talking about.

  “The Jefferies boy was only a short time later,” Grandpa said. He was looking at the TV, but Chuck didn’t think he was actually seeing it. “What happened to Henry Peterson… that took longer. It was four, maybe five years on. By then I’d almost forgotten what I saw up there.” He jerked a thumb at the ceiling. “I said I’d never go up there again after that, and I wish I hadn’t. Because of Sarah—your bubbie—and the bread. It’s the waiting, Chucky, that’s the hard part. You’ll find that out when you’re—”