Salem’s Lot (9 page)

And now there was a car up there at the Marsten House He was still looking at it when someone said at his elbow: ‘Failin’ asleep, Larry?’

He jumped and looked around at Parkins Gillespie, who was standing on the corner next to him and lighting a Pall Mall.

‘No,’ he said, and laughed nervously. ‘Just thinking.’

Parkins glanced up at the Marsten House, where the sun twinkled on chrome and metal in the driveway, then down at the old laundry with its new sign in the window. ‘And you’re not the only one, I guess. Always good to get new folks in town. You’ve met ‘em, ain’t you?’

‘One of them. Last year.’

‘Mr Barlow or Mr Straker?’

‘Straker.’

‘Seem like a nice enough sort, did he?’

‘Hard to tell,’ Larry said, and found he wanted to lick his lips. He didn’t. ‘We only talked business. He seemed okay.’

‘Good. That’s good. Come on. I’ll walk up to the Excellent with you.’

When they crossed the street, Lawrence Crockett was thinking about deals with the devil.

12

1:00 P.M.

Susan Norton stepped into Babs’ Beauty Boutique, smiled at Babs Griffen (Hal and Jack’s eldest sister), and said, ‘Thank goodness you could take me on such short notice.’

‘No problem in the middle of the week,’ Babs said, turning on the fan. ‘My, ain’t it close? It’ll thunderstorm this afternoon.’

Susan looked at the sky, which was an unblemished blue. ‘Do you think so?’

‘Yeah. How do you want it, hon?’

‘Natural,’ Susan said, thinking of Ben Mears. ‘Like I hadn’t even been near this place.’

‘Hon,’ Babs said, closing in on her with a sigh, ‘that’s what they all say.’

The sigh wafted the odor of Juicy Fruit gum, and Babs asked Susan if she had seen that some folks were opening up a new furniture store in the old Village Washtub. Expensive stuff by the look of it, but wouldn’t it be nice if they had a nice little hurricane lamp to match the one she had in her apartment and getting away from home and living in town was the smartest move she’d ever made and hadn’t it been a nice summer? It seemed a shame it ever had to end.

13

3:00 P.M.

Bonnie Sawyer was lying on the big double bed in her house on the Deep Cut Road. It was a regular house, no shanty trailer, and it had a foundation and a cellar. Her husband, Reg, made good money as a car mechanic at Jim Smith’s Pontiac in Buxton.

She was naked except for a pair of filmy blue panties, and she looked impatiently over at the clock on the nightstand: 3:02-where was he?

Almost as if the thought had summoned him, the bedroom door opened the tiniest bit, and Corey Bryant peered through.

‘Is it okay?’ he whispered. Corey was only twenty-two, had been working for the phone company two years, and this affair with a married woman-especially a knockout like Bonnie Sawyer, who had been Miss Cumberland County of 1973-left him feeling weak and nervous and horny.

Bonnie smiled at him with her lovely capped teeth. ‘If it wasn’t, honey,’ she said, ‘you’d have a hole in you big enough to watch TV through.’

He came tiptoeing in, his utility lineman’s belt jingling ridiculously around his waist.

Bonnie giggled and opened her arms. ‘I really like you, Corey. You’re cute.’

Corey’s eyes happened on the dark shadow beneath the taut blue nylon, and began to feel more horny than nervous. He forgot about tiptoeing and came to her, and as they joined, a cicada began to buzz somewhere in the woods.

14

4:00 P.M.

Ben Mears pushed away from his desk, the afternoon’s writing done. He had forgone his walk in the park so he could go to dinner at the Nortons’ that night with a clear conscience, and had written for most of the day without a break.

He stood up and stretched, listening to the bones in his spine crackle. His torso was wet with sweat. He went to the cupboard at the head of the bed, pulled out a fresh towel, and went down to the bathroom to shower before everyone else got home from work and clogged the place.

He hung the towel over his shoulder, turned back to the door, and then went to the window, where something had caught his eye. Nothing in town; it was drowsing away the late afternoon under a sky that peculiar shade of deep blue that graces New England on fine late summer days.

He could look across the two-story buildings on Jointner Avenue, could see their flat, asphalted roofs, and across the park where the children now home from school lazed or biked or squabbled, and out to the northwest section of town where Brock Street disappeared behind the shoulder of that first wooded hill. His eyes traveled naturally up to the break in the woods where the Burns Road and the Brooks Road intersected in a T-and on up to where the Marsten House sat overlooking the town.

From here it was a perfect miniature, diminished to the size of a child’s doll house. And he liked it that way. From here the Marsten House was a size that could be coped with. You could hold up your hand and blot it out with your palm.

There was a car in the driveway

He stood with the towel over his shoulder, looking out at it, not moving, feeling a crawl of terror in his belly that he did not try to analyze. Two of the fallen shutters had been replaced, too, giving the house a secretive, blind look that it had not possessed before.

His lips moved silently, as if forming words no one-even himself-could understand.

15

5:00 P.M.

Matthew Burke left the high school carrying his briefcase in his left hand and crossed the empty parking lot to where his old Chevy Biscayne sat, still on last year’s snow tires.

He was sixty-three, two years from mandatory retirement, and still carrying a full load of English classes and extracurricular activities. Fall’s activity was the school play, and he had just finished readings for a three-act farce called
Charley’s Problem
. He had gotten the usual glut of utter impossibles, perhaps a dozen usable warm bodies who would at least memorize their lines (and then deliver them in a deathly, trembling monotone), and three kids who showed flair. He would cast them on Friday and begin blocking next week. They would pull together between then and October 30, which was the play date. It was Matt’s theory that a high school play should be like a bowl of Campbell’s Alphabet Soup: tasteless but not actively offensive. The relatives would come and love it. The theater critic from the Cumberland
Ledger
would come and go into polysyllabic ecstasies, as he was paid to do over any local play. The female lead (Ruthie Crockett this year, probably) would fall in love with some other cast member and quite possibly lose her virginity after the cast party. And then he would pick up the threads of the Debate Club.

At sixty-three, Matt Burke still enjoyed teaching. He was a lousy disciplinarian, thus forfeiting any chance he might once have had to step up to administration (he was a little too dreamy-eyed to ever serve effectively as an assistant principal), but his lack of discipline had never held him back. He had read the sonnets of Shakespeare in cold, pipe-clanking classrooms full of flying airplanes and spitballs, had sat down upon tacks and thrown them away absently as he told the class to turn to page 467 in their grammars, had opened drawers to get composition paper only to discover crickets, frogs, and once a seven-foot black snake.

He had ranged across the length and breadth of the English language like a solitary and oddly complacent Ancient Mariner: Steinbeck period one, Chaucer period two, the topic sentence period three, and the function of the gerund just before lunch. His fingers were permanently yellowed with chalk dust rather than nicotine, but it was still the residue of an addicting substance.

Children did not revere or love him; he was not a Mr Chips languishing away in a rustic corner of America and waiting for Ross Hunter to discover him, but many of his students did come to respect him, and a few)earned from him that dedication, however eccentric or humble, can be a noteworthy thing. He liked his work.

Now he got into his car, pumped the accelerator too much and flooded it, waited, and started it again. He tuned the radio to a Portland rock ‘n’ roll station and jacked the volume almost to the speaker’s distortion point. He thought rock ‘n’ roll was fine music. He backed out of his parking slot, stalled, and started the car up again.

He had a small house out on the Taggart Stream Road, and had very few callers. He had never been married, had no family except for a brother in Texas who worked for an oil company and never wrote. He did not really miss the attachments. He was a solitary man, but solitude had in no way twisted him.

He paused at the blinking light at the intersection of Jointner Avenue and Brock Street, then turned toward home. The shadows were long now, and the daylight had taken on a curiously beautiful warmth - flat and golden, like something from a French Impressionist painting. He glanced over to his left, saw the Marsten House, and glanced again.

‘The shutters,’ he said aloud, against the driving beat from the radio. ‘Those shutters are back up.’

He glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw that there was a car parked in the driveway. He had been teaching in ‘salem’s Lot since 1952, and he had never seen a car parked in that driveway.

‘Is someone living up there?’ he asked no one in particular, and drove on.

16

6:00 P.M.

Susan’s father, Bill Norton, the Lot’s first selectman, was surprised to find that he liked Ben Mears-liked him quite a lot. Bill was a big, tough man with black hair, built like a truck, and not fat even after fifty, He had left high school for the Navy in the eleventh grade with his father’s permission, and he had clawed his way up from there, picking up his diploma at the age of twenty-four on a high school equivalency test taken almost as an afterthought. He was not a blind, bullish anti-intellectual as some plain workingmen become when they are denied the level of learning that they may have been capable of, either through fate or their own doing, but he had no patience with ‘art farts’, as he termed some of the doe-eyed, longhaired boys Susan had brought home from school. He didn’t mind their hair or their dress. What bothered him was that none of them seemed serious-minded. He didn’t share his wife’s liking for Floyd Tibbits, the boy that Susie had been going around with the most since she graduated, but he didn’t actively dislike him, either. Floyd had a pretty good job at the executive level in the Falmouth Grant’s, and Bill Norton considered him to be moderately serious-minded. And he was a hometown boy. But so was this Mears, in a manner of speaking.

‘Now, you leave him alone about that art fart business,’ Susan said, rising at the sound of the doorbell. She was wearing a light green summer dress, her new casual hairdo pulled back and tied loosely with a hank of oversized green yarn.

Bill laughed. ‘I got to call ‘em as I see ‘em, Susie darlin’. I won’t embarrass you… never do, I?’

She gave him a pensive, nervous smile and went to open the door.

The man who came back in with her was lanky and agile-looking, with finely drawn features and a thick, almost greasy shock of black hair that looked freshly washed despite its natural oiliness. He was dressed in a way that impressed Bill favorably: plain blue jeans, very new, and a white shirt rolled to the elbows.

‘Ben, this is my dad and mom-Bill and Ann Norton. Mom, Dad, Ben Mears.’

‘Hello. Nice to meet you.’

He smiled at Mrs Norton with a touch of reserve and she said, ‘Hello, Mr Mears. This is the first time we’ve seen a real live author up close. Susan has been
awfully
excited.’

‘Don’t worry; I don’t quote from my own works.’ He smiled again.

‘H’lo,’ Bill said, and heaved himself up out of his chair. He had worked himself up to the union position he now held on the Portland docks, and his grip was hard and strong. But Mears’s hand did not crimp and jellyfish like that of your ordinary, garden-variety art fart, and Bill was pleased. He imposed his second testing criterion.

‘Like a beer? Got some on ice out yonder.’ He gestured toward the back patio, which he had built himself. Art farts invariably said no; most of them were potheads and couldn’t waste their valuable consciousness juicing.

‘Man, I’d love a beer,’ Ben said, and the smile became a grin. ‘Two or three, even.’

Bill’s laughter boomed out. ‘Okay, you’re my man. Come on.’

At the sound of his laughter, an odd communication seemed to pass between the two women, who bore strong resemblance to each other. Ann Norton’s brow contracted while Susan’s smoothed out-a load of worry seemed to have been transferred across the room by telepathy.

Ben followed Bill out onto the veranda. An ice chest sat on a stool in the corner, stuffed with ring-tab cans of Pabst. Bill pulled a can out of the cooler and tossed it to Ben, who caught it one-hand but lightly, so it wouldn’t fizz.

‘Nice out here,’ Ben said, looking toward the barbecue in the back yard. It was a low, businesslike construction of bricks, and a shimmer of heat hung over it.

‘Built it myself,’ Bill said. ‘Better be nice.’

Ben drank deeply and then belched, another sign in his favor.

‘Susie thinks you’re quite the fella,’ Norton said.

‘She’s a nice girl.’

‘Good practical girl,’ Norton added, and belched reflectively. ‘She says you’ve written three books. Published em, too.’

‘Yes, that’s so.’

‘They do well?’

‘The first did,’ Ben said, and said no more. Bill Norton nodded slightly, in approval of a man who had enough marbles to keep his dollars-and-cents business to himself.

‘You like to lend a hand with some burgers and hot dogs?’

‘Sure.’

‘You got to cut the hot dogs to let the squidges out of ‘em. You know about that?’

‘Yeah.’ He made diagonal slashes in the air with his right index finger, grinning slightly as he did so. The small slashes in natural-casing franks kept them from blistering.

‘You came from this neck of the woods, all right,’ Bill Norton said. ‘Goddamn well told. Take that bag of briquettes over there and I’ll get the meat. Bring your beer.’

‘You couldn’t part me from it.’

Bill hesitated on the verge of going in and cocked an eyebrow at Ben Mears. ‘You a serious-minded fella?’ he asked.

Ben smiled, a trifle grimly. ‘That I am,’ he said.

Bill nodded. ‘That’s good,’ he said, and went inside.

Babs Griffen’s prediction of rain was a million miles wrong, and the back yard dinner went well. A light breeze sprang up, combining with the eddies of hickory smoke from the barbecue to keep the worst of the late-season mosquitoes away. The women cleared away the paper plates and condiments, then came back to drink a beer each and laugh as Bill, an old hand at playing the tricky wind currents, trimmed Ben 21-6 at badminton. Ben declined a rematch with real regret, pointing at his watch.

‘I got a book on the fire,’ he said. ‘I owe another six pages. If I get drunk, I won’t even be able to read what I wrote tomorrow morning.’

Susan saw him to the front gate-he had walked up from town. Bill nodded to himself as he damped the fire. He had said he was serious-minded, and Bill was ready to take him at his word. He had not come with a big case on to impress anyone, but any man who worked after dinner was out to make his mark on somebody’s tree, probably in big letters.

Ann Norton, however, never quite unthawed.