It (101 page)

“Give you an extra three bucks for the screwdriver,” Tom said when he was done.

The kid looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, shrugged, handed the screwdriver over, and took the three ones Tom was holding out.
None of my business,
the shrug said, and Tom thought:
How right you are, my good little buddy.
Tom saw him into a cab, then got behind the wheel of the Ford.

It was a piece of shit: transmission whiny, universal groany, body rattly, brakes slushy. None of it mattered. He drove around to the long-term parking lot, took a ticket, and drove in. He parked next to a Subaru that looked as if it had been there for awhile. He used the kid's screwdriver to remove the Subaru's plates and put them on the LTD. He hummed as he worked.

By 10:00
P.M.
he was driving east on Route 2, a Maine roadmap open on the seat beside him. He had discovered that the LTD's radio didn't work, so he drove in silence. That was all right. He had plenty to think about. All the wonderful things he was going to do to Beverly when he caught up with her, for instance.

He was sure in his heart, quite sure, that Beverly was close by.

And smoking.

Oh my dear girl, you fucked with the wrong man when you fucked with Tom Rogan. And the question is this—what, exactly, are we to do with you?

The Ford bulled its way through the night, chasing its high beams, and by the time Tom got to Newport, he knew. He found a drugs-and-sundries shop on the main drag that was still open. He went inside and bought a carton of Camels. The proprietor wished him a good evening. Tom wished him the same.

He tossed the carton on the seat and got moving again. He drove slowly on up Route 7, hunting for his turnoff. Here it was—Route 3, with a sign which read
HAVEN 21 DERRY
15.

He made the turn and got the Ford rolling faster. He glanced at the carton of cigarettes and smiled a little. In the green glow of the dashlights, his cut and lumpy face looked strange, ghoulish.

Got some cigarettes for you, Bevvie,
Tom thought as the wagon ran between stands of pine and spruce, heading toward Derry at a little better than sixty.
Oh my yes. A whole carton. Just for you. And when I see you, dear, I'm going to make you eat every fucking one. And if this guy Denbrough needs some education, we can arrange that, too. No problem, Bevvie. No problem at all.

For the first time since the dirty bitch had bushwhacked him and run out, Tom began to feel good.

Audra Denbrough flew first class to Maine on a British Airways DC-10. She had left Heathrow at ten minutes of six that afternoon and had been chasing the sun ever since. The sun was winning—had won, in fact—but that didn't really matter. By a stroke of providential luck she had discovered that British Airways flight 23, London to Los Angeles, made one refueling stop . . . at Bangor International Airport.

The day had been a crazy nightmare. Freddie Firestone, the producer of
Attic Room,
had of course wanted Bill first thing. There had been some kind of ballsup about the stuntwoman who was supposed to fall down a flight of stairs for Audra. It seemed that stuntpeople had a union too, and this woman had fulfilled her quota of stunts for the week, or some silly thing. The union was demanding that Freddie either sign an extension-of-salary waiver or hire another woman to do the stunt. The problem was there was no other woman close enough to Audra's body-type available. Freddie told the union boss that they would have to get a man to do the stunt, then, wouldn't they? It wasn't as if the fall had to be taken in bra and panties. They had the auburn-haired wig, and the wardrobe woman could fit the fellow up with falsies and hip-padding. Even some arse-pads, if that was necessary.

Can't be done, mate, the union boss said. Against the union charter to have a man step in for a woman. Sexual discrimination.

In the movie business Freddie's temper was fabled, and at that point he had lost it. He told the union boss, a fat man whose B.O. was almost paralyzing, to bugger himself. The union boss told Freddie he better watch his gob or there would be no more stunts on the set of
Attic Room
at all. Then he had rubbed his thumb and forefinger together in a
baksheesh
gesture that had driven Freddie crazy. The union boss was big but soft; Freddie, who still played football every chance he got and who had once bowled a century at cricket, was big
and hard. He threw the union boss out, went back into his office to meditate, and then came out again twenty minutes later hollering for Bill. He wanted the entire scene rewritten so that the fall could be scrubbed. Audra had to tell Freddie that Bill was no longer in England.

“What?”
Freddie said. His mouth hung open. He was looking at Audra as if he believed she had gone mad. “What are you telling me?”

“He's been called back to the States—that's what I'm telling you.”

Freddie made as if to grab her and Audra shrank back, a bit afraid. Freddie looked down at his hands, then put them in his pockets and only looked at her.

“I'm sorry, Freddie,” she said in a small voice. “Really.”

She got up and poured herself a cup of coffee from the Silex on Freddie's hotplate, noticing that her hands were trembling slightly. As she sat down she heard Freddie's amplified voice over the studio loudspeakers, telling everyone to go home or to the pub; the day's shooting was off. Audra winced. There went a minimum of ten thousand pounds, right down the bog.

Freddie turned off the studio intercom, got up, poured his own cup of coffee. He sat down again and offered her his pack of Silk Cut cigarettes.

Audra shook her head.

Freddie took one, lit it, and squinted at her through the smoke. “This is serious, isn't it?”

“Yes,” Audra said, keeping her composure as best she could.

“What's happened?”

And because she genuinely liked Freddie and genuinely trusted him, Audra told him everything she knew. Freddie listened intently, gravely. It didn't take long to tell; doors were still slamming and engines starting in the parking lot outside when she finished.

Freddie was silent for some time, looking out his window. Then he swung back to her. “He's had a nervous breakdown of some sort.”

Audra shook her head. “No. It wasn't like that.
He
wasn't like that.” She swallowed and added, “Maybe you had to be there.”

Freddie smiled crookedly. “You must realize that grown men rarely feel compelled to honor promises they made as little boys. And you've read Bill's work; you know how much of it is about childhood, and it's very good stuff indeed. Very much on the nail. The idea that
he's forgotten everything that ever happened to him back then is absurd.”

“The scars on his hands,” Audra said. “They were never there. Not until this morning.”

“Bollocks! You just didn't notice them until this morning.”

She shrugged helplessly. “I'd've noticed.”

She could see he didn't believe that, either.

“What's to do, then?” Freddie asked her, and she could only shake her head. Freddie lit another cigarette from the smoldering end of the first. “I can square it with the union boss,” he said. “Not myself, maybe; right now he'd see me in hell before giving me another stunt. I'll send Teddy Rowland round to his office. Teddy's a pouf, but he could talk the birds down from the trees. But what happens after? We've got four weeks of shooting left, and here's your husband somewhere in Massachusetts—”

“Maine—”

He waved a hand. “Wherever. And how much good are you going to be without him?”

“I—”

He leaned forward. “I like you, Audra. I genuinely do. And I like Bill—even in spite of this mess. We can make do, I guess. If the script needs cobbling up, I can cobble it. I've done my share of that sort of shoemaking in my time, Christ knows. . . . If he doesn't like the way it turns out, he'll have no one but himself to blame. I can do without Bill, but I can't do without you. I can't have you running off to the States after your man, and I've got to have you putting out at full power. Can you do that?”

“I don't know.”

“Nor do I. But I want you to think about something. We can keep things quiet for awhile, maybe for the rest of the shoot, if you'll stand up like a trouper and do your job. But if you take off, it can't be kept quiet. I can be pissy, but I'm not vindictive by nature and I'm not going to tell you that if you take off I'll see that you never work in the business again. But you should know that if you get a reputation for temperament, you might end up stuck with just that. I'm talking to you like a Dutch uncle, I know. Do you resent it?”

“No,” she said listlessly. In truth, she didn't care much one way or the other. Bill was all she could think of. Freddie was a nice enough
man, but Freddie didn't understand; in the last analysis, nice man or not, all
he
could think of was what this was going to do to his picture. He had not seen the look in Bill's eyes . . . or heard him stutter.

“Good.” He stood up. “Come on over to the Hare and Hounds with me. We can both use a drink.”

She shook her head. “A drink's the last thing I need. I'm going home and think this out.”

“I'll call for the car,” he said.

“No. I'll take the train.”

He looked at her fixedly, one hand on the telephone. “I believe you mean to go after him,” Freddie said, “and I'm telling you that it's a serious mistake, dear girl. He's got a bee in his bonnet, but at bottom he's steady enough. He'll shake it, and when he does he'll come back. If he'd wanted you along, he would have said so.”

“I haven't decided anything,” she said, knowing that she had in fact decided everything; had decided even before the car picked her up that morning.

“Have a care, love,” Freddie said. “Don't do something you'll regret later.”

She felt the force of his personality beating on her, demanding that she give in, make the promise, do her job, wait passively for Bill to come back . . . or to disappear again into that hole of the past from which he had come.

She went to him and kissed him lightly on the cheek. “I'll see you, Freddie.”

She went home and called British Airways. She told the clerk she might be interested in reaching a small Maine city called Derry if it was at all possible. There had been silence while the woman consulted her computer terminal . . . and then the news, like a sign from heaven, that BA #23 made a stop in Bangor, which was less than fifty miles away.

“Shall I book the flight for you, ma'am?”

Audra closed her eyes and saw Freddie's craggy, mostly kind, very earnest face, heard him saying:
Have a care, love. Don't do something you'll regret later.

Freddie didn't want her to go; Bill didn't want her to go; so why was her heart screaming at her that she
had
to go? She closed her eyes.
Jesus, I feel so fucked up—

“Ma'am? Are you still holding the wire?”

“Book it,” Audra said, then hesitated.
Have a care love. . . .
Maybe she should sleep on it; get some distance between herself and the craziness. She began to rummage in her purse for her American Express card. “For tomorrow. First class if you have it, but I'll take anything.”
And if I change my mind I can cancel. Probably will. I'll wake up sane and everything will be clear.

But nothing had been clear this morning, and her heart clamored just as loudly for her to go. Her sleep had been a crazy tapestry of nightmares. So she had called Freddie, not because she wanted to but because she felt she owed him that. She had not gotten far—she was trying, in some stumbling way, to tell him how much she felt Bill might need her—when there was a soft click at Freddie's end. He had hung up without saying a word after his initial hello.

But in a way, Audra thought, that soft click said everything that needed to be said.

The plane landed at Bangor at 7:09, EDT. Audra was the only passenger to deplane, and the others looked at her with a kind of thoughtful curiosity, probably wondering why anyone would choose to get off here, in this godforsaken little place. Audra thought of telling them
I'm looking for my husband, that's why. He came back to a little town near here because one of his boyhood chums called him and reminded him of a promise he couldn't quite remember. The call also reminded him that he hadn't thought of his dead brother in over twenty years. Oh yes: it also brought back his stutter . . . and some funny white scars on the palms of his hands.

And then, she thought, the customs agent standing by in the jetway would whistle up the men in the white coats.

She collected her single piece of luggage—it looked very lonely riding the carousel all by itself—and approached the rental-car booths as Tom Rogan would about an hour later. Her luck was better than his would be; National Car Rental had a Datsun.

The girl filled out the form and Audra signed it.

“I thought it was you,” the girl said, and then, timidly: “Might I please have your autograph?”

Audra gave it, writing her name on the back of a rental form, and thought:
Enjoy it while you can, girl. If Freddie Firestone is right, it won't be worth doodley-squat five years from now.

With some amusement she realized that, after only fifteen minutes back in the States, she had begun to think like an American again.

She got a roadmap, and the girl, so star-struck she could barely talk, managed to trace out her best route to Derry.

Ten minutes later Audra was on the road, reminding herself at every intersection that if she forgot and began driving on the left, they would be scrubbing her off the asphalt.

And as she drove, she realized that she was more frightened than she had ever been in her life.