Doctor Sleep (9 page)

No, it wouldn't be. There were tarps over a lot of stuff on the common, but they'd be coming off soon, exposing the superstructure of small-town resort summer: hotdog stands, ice cream booths, a circular something that looked to Dan like a merry-go-round. And
there was the train, of course, the one with the teeny passenger cars and the big turbodiesel engine. If he could stay off the sauce and prove trustworthy, Freeman or the boss—Kingsley—might let him drive it a time or two. He'd like that. Farther down the line, when the municipal department hired the just-out-of-school local kids, there was always the hospice.

If he decided to stay, that was.

You better stay somewhere,
Hallorann said—this was Dan's day for hearing voices and seeing visions, it seemed.
You better stay somewhere soon, or you won't be able to stay anywhere
.

He surprised himself by laughing. “It sounds good to me, Mr. Freeman. It sounds really good.”

“Done any grounds maintenance?” Billy Freeman asked. They were walking slowly along the flank of the train. The tops of the cars only came up to Dan's chest, making him feel like a giant.

“I can weed, plant, and paint. I know how to run a leaf blower and a chainsaw. I can fix small engines if the problem isn't too complicated. And I can manage a riding mower without running over any little kids. The train, now . . . that I don't know about.”

“You'd need to get cleared by Kingsley for that. Insurance and shit. Listen, have you got references? Mr. Kingsley won't hire without em.”

“A few. Mostly janitorial and hospital orderly stuff. Mr. Freeman—”

“Just Billy'll do.”

“Your train doesn't look like it could carry passengers, Billy. Where would they sit?”

Billy grinned. “Wait here. See if you think this is as funny as I do. I never get tired of it.”

Freeman went back to the locomotive and leaned in. The engine, which had been idling lazily, began to rev and send up rhythmic
jets of dark smoke. There was a hydraulic whine along the whole length of
The Helen Rivington
. Suddenly the roofs of the passenger wagons and the yellow caboose—nine cars in all—began to rise. To Dan it looked like the tops of nine identical convertibles all going up at the same time. He bent down to look in the windows and saw hard plastic seats running down the center of each car. Six in the passenger wagons and two in the caboose. Fifty in all.

When Billy came back, Dan was grinning. “Your train must look very weird when it's full of passengers.”

“Oh yeah. People laugh their asses off and burn yea film, takin pitchers. Watch this.”

There was a steel-plated step at the end of each passenger car. Billy used one, walked down the aisle, and sat. A peculiar optical illusion took hold, making him look larger than life. He waved grandly to Dan, who could imagine fifty Brobdingnagians, dwarfing the train upon which they rode, pulling grandly out of Teenytown Station.

As Billy Freeman rose and stepped back down, Dan applauded. “I'll bet you sell about a billion postcards between Memorial Day and Labor Day.”

“Bet your ass.” Billy rummaged in his coat pocket, brought out a battered pack of Duke cigarettes—a cut-rate brand Dan knew well, sold in bus stations and convenience stores all over America—and held it out. Dan took one. Billy lit them up.

“I better enjoy it while I can,” Billy said, looking at his cigarette. “Smoking'll be banned here before too many more years. Frazier Women's Club's already talkin about it. Bunch of old biddies if you ask me, but you know what they say—the hand that rocks the fuckin cradle rules the fuckin world.” He jetted smoke from his nostrils. “Not that most of
them
have rocked a cradle since Nixon was president. Or needed a Tampax, for that matter.”

“Might not be the worst thing,” Dan said. “Kids copy what they see in their elders.” He thought of his father. The only thing Jack Torrance had liked better than a drink, his mother had once said, not long before she died, was a dozen drinks. Of course what
Wendy had liked was her cigarettes, and they had killed her. Once upon a time Dan had promised himself he'd never get going with that habit, either. He had come to believe that life was a series of ironic ambushes.

Billy Freeman looked at him, one eye squinted mostly shut. “I get feelins about people sometimes, and I got one about you.” He pronounced
got
as
gut,
in the New England fashion. “Had it even before you turned around and I saw your face. I think you might be the right guy for the spring cleanin I'm lookin at between now and the end of May. That's how it feels to me, and I trust my feelins. Prob'ly crazy.”

Dan didn't think it was crazy at all, and now he understood why he had heard Billy Freeman's thoughts so clearly, and without even trying. He remembered something Dick Hallorann had told him once—Dick, who had been his first adult friend.
Lots of people have got a little of what I call the shining, but mostly it's just a twinkle—the kind of thing that lets em know what the DJ's going to play next on the radio or that the phone's gonna ring pretty soon
.

Billy Freeman had that little twinkle. That gleam.

“I guess this Cary Kingsley would be the one to talk to, huh?”

“Casey, not Cary. But yeah, he's the man. He's run municipal services in this town for twenty-five years.”

“When would be a good time?”

“Right about now, I sh'd think.” Billy pointed. “Yonder pile of bricks across the street's the Frazier Municipal Building and town offices. Mr. Kingsley's in the basement, end of the hall. You'll know you're there when you hear disco music comin down through the ceiling. There's a ladies' aerobics class in the gym every Tuesday and Thursday.”

“All right,” Dan said, “that's just what I'm going to do.”

“Got your references?”

“Yes.” Dan patted the duffel, which he had leaned against Teenytown Station.

“And you didn't write them yourself, nor nothin?”

Danny smiled. “No, they're straight goods.”

“Then go get im, tiger.”

“Okay.”

“One other thing,” Billy said as Dan started away. “He's death on drinkin. If you're a drinkin man and he asts you, my advice is . . . lie.”

Dan nodded and raised his hand to show he understood. That was a lie he had told before.

Judging by his vein-congested nose, Casey Kingsley had not always been death on drinkin. He was a big man who didn't so much inhabit his small, cluttered office as wear it. Right now he was rocked back in the chair behind his desk, going through Dan's references, which were neatly kept in a blue folder. The back of Kingsley's head almost touched the downstroke of a plain wooden cross hanging on the wall beside a framed photo of his family. In the picture, a younger, slimmer Kingsley posed with his wife and three bathing-suited kiddos on a beach somewhere. Through the ceiling, only slightly muted, came the sound of the Village People singing “YMCA,” accompanied by the enthusiastic stomp of many feet. Dan imagined a gigantic centipede. One that had recently been to the local hairdresser and was wearing a bright red leotard about nine yards long.

“Uh-huh,” Kingsley said. “Uh-huh . . . yeah . . . right, right, right . . .”

There was a glass jar filled with hard candies on the corner of his desk. Without looking up from Dan's thin sheaf of references, he took off the top, fished one out, and popped it into his mouth. “Help yourself,” he said.

“No, thank you,” Dan said.

A queer thought came to him. Once upon a time, his father had probably sat in a room like this, being interviewed for the position of caretaker at the Overlook Hotel. What had he been thinking? That
he really needed a job? That it was his last chance? Maybe. Probably. But of course, Jack Torrance had had hostages to fortune. Dan did not. He could drift on for awhile if this didn't work out. Or try his luck at the hospice. But . . . he liked the town common. He liked the train, which made adults of ordinary size look like Goliaths. He liked Teenytown, which was absurd and cheerful and somehow brave in its self-important small-town-America way. And he liked Billy Freeman, who had a pinch of the shining and probably didn't even know it.

Above them, “YMCA” was replaced by “I Will Survive.” As if he had just been waiting for a new tune, Kingsley slipped Dan's references back into the folder's pocket and passed them across the desk.

He's going to turn me down
.

But after a day of accurate intuitions, this one was off the mark. “These look fine, but it strikes me that you'd be a lot more comfortable working at Central New Hampshire Hospital or the hospice here in town. You might even qualify for Home Helpers—I see you've got a few medical and first aid qualifications. Know your way around a defibrillator, according to these. Heard of Home Helpers?”

“Yes. And I thought about the hospice. Then I saw the town common, and Teenytown, and the train.”

Kingsley grunted. “Probably wouldn't mind taking a turn at the controls, would you?”

Dan lied without hesitation. “No, sir, I don't think I'd care for that.” To admit he'd like to sit in the scavenged GTO driver's seat and lay his hands on that cut-down steering wheel would almost certainly lead to a discussion of his driver's license, then to a further discussion of how he'd lost it, and then to an invitation to leave Mr. Casey Kingsley's office forthwith. “I'm more of a rake-and-lawnmower guy.”

“More of a short-term employment guy, too, from the looks of this paperwork.”

“I'll settle someplace soon. I've worked most of the wanderlust out
of my system, I think.” He wondered if that sounded as bullshitty to Kingsley as it did to him.

“Short term's about all I can offer you,” Kingsley said. “Once the schools are out for the summer—”

“Billy told me. If I decide to stay once summer comes, I'll try the hospice. In fact, I might put in an early application, unless you'd rather I don't do that.”

“I don't care either way.” Kingsley looked at him curiously. “Dying people don't bother you?”

Your mother died there,
Danny thought. The shine wasn't gone after all, it seemed; it was hardly even hiding.
You were holding her hand when she passed. Her name was Ellen
.

“No,” he said. Then, with no reason why, he added: “We're all dying. The world's just a hospice with fresh air.”

“A philosopher, yet. Well, Mr. Torrance, I think I'm going to take you on. I trust Billy's judgment—he rarely makes a mistake about people. Just don't show up late, don't show up drunk, and don't show up with red eyes and smelling of weed. If you do any of those things, down the road you'll go, because the Rivington House won't have a thing to do with you—I'll make sure of it. Are we clear on that?”

Dan felt a throb of resentment

(
officious prick
)

but suppressed it. This was Kingsley's playing field and Kingsley's ball. “Crystal.”

“You can start tomorrow, if that suits. There are plenty of rooming houses in town. I'll make a call or two if you want. Can you stand paying ninety a week until your first paycheck comes in?”

“Yes. Thank you, Mr. Kingsley.”

Kingsley waved a hand. “In the meantime, I'd recommend the Red Roof Inn. My ex-brother-in-law runs it, he'll give you a rate. We good?”

“We are.” It had all happened with remarkable speed, the way the last few pieces drop into a complicated thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle. Dan told himself not to trust the feeling.

Kingsley rose. He was a big man and it was a slow process. Dan also got to his feet, and when Kingsley stuck his ham of a hand over the cluttered desk, Dan shook it. Now from overhead came the sound of KC and the Sunshine Band telling the world that's the way they liked it, oh-ho, uh-huh.

“I hate that boogie-down shit,” Kingsley said.

No,
Danny thought.
You don't. It reminds you of your daughter, the one who doesn't come around much anymore. Because she still hasn't forgiven you
.

“You all right?” Kingsley asked. “You look a little pale.”

“Just tired. It was a long bus ride.”

The shining was back, and strong. The question was, why now?

Three days into the job, ones Dan spent painting the bandstand and blowing last fall's dead leaves off the common, Kingsley ambled across Cranmore Avenue and told him he had a room on Eliot Street, if he wanted it. Private bathroom part of the deal, tub and shower. Eighty-five a week. Dan wanted it.

“Go on over on your lunch break,” Kingsley said. “Ask for Mrs. Robertson.” He pointed a finger that was showing the first gnarls of arthritis. “And don't you fuck up, Sunny Jim, because she's an old pal of mine. Remember that I vouched for you on some pretty thin paper and Billy Freeman's intuition.”

Dan said he wouldn't fuck up, but the extra sincerity he tried to inject into his voice sounded phony to his own ears. He was thinking of his father again, reduced to begging jobs from a wealthy old friend after losing his teaching position in Vermont. It was strange to feel sympathy for a man who had almost killed you, but the sympathy was there. Had people felt it necessary to tell his father not to fuck up? Probably. And Jack Torrance had fucked up anyway. Spectacularly. Five stars. Drinking was undoubtedly a part of it, but when you were down, some guys just seemed to feel an
urge to walk up your back and plant a foot on your neck instead of helping you to stand. It was lousy, but so much of human nature was. Of course when you were running with the bottom dogs, what you mostly saw were paws, claws, and assholes.

“And see if Billy can find some boots that'll fit you. He's squirreled away about a dozen pairs in the equipment shed, although the last time I looked, only half of them matched.”