It (14 page)

“Scaring you a bit, am I?” Hanscom asked, his eyes never leaving Ricky Lee's. He pushed the stein away and then folded his hands neatly in front of those three silver cartwheels. “I probably am. But you're not as scared as I am, Ricky Lee. Pray to Jesus you never are.”

“Well, what's the matter?” Ricky Lee asked. “Maybe—” He wet his lips. “Maybe I can give you a help.”

“The matter?” Ben Hanscom laughed. “Why, not too much. I had a call from an old friend tonight. Guy named Mike Hanlon. I'd forgotten all about him, Ricky Lee, but that didn't scare me much. After all, I was just a kid when I knew him, and kids forget things, don't they? Sure they do. You bet your fur. What scared me was getting about halfway over here and realizing that it wasn't just Mike I'd forgotten about—I'd forgotten
everything
about being a kid.”

Ricky Lee only looked at him. He had no idea what Mr. Hanscom was talking about—but the man was scared, all right. No question about that. It sat funny on Ben Hanscom, but it was real.

“I mean I'd forgotten
all about it,
” he said, and rapped his knuckles lightly on the bar for emphasis. “Did you ever hear, Ricky Lee, of having an amnesia so complete you didn't even know you
had
amnesia?”

Ricky Lee shook his head.

“Me either. But there I was, tooling along in the Caddy tonight, and all of a sudden it hit me. I remembered Mike Hanlon, but only
because he called me on the phone. I remembered Derry, but only because that was where he was calling from.”

“Derry?”

“But that was
all.
It hit me that I hadn't even
thought
about being a kid since . . . since I don't even know when. And then, just like that, it all started to flood back in. Like what we did with the fourth silver dollar.”

“What
did
you do with it, Mr. Hanscom?”

Hanscom looked at his watch, and suddenly slipped down from his stool. He staggered a bit—the slightest bit. That was all. “Can't let the time get away from me,” he said. “I'm flying tonight.”

Ricky Lee looked instantly alarmed, and Hanscom laughed.

“Flying but not driving the plane. Not this time. United Airlines, Ricky Lee.”

“Oh.” He supposed his relief showed on his face, but he didn't care. “Where are you going?”

Hanscom's shirt was still open. He looked thoughtfully down at the puckered white lines of the old scar on his belly and then began to button the shirt over it.

“Thought I told you that, Ricky Lee. Home. I'm going home. Give those cartwheels to your kids.” He started toward the door, and something about the way he walked, even the way he hitched at the sides of his pants, terrified Ricky Lee. The resemblance to the late and mostly unlamented Gresham Arnold was suddenly so acute it was nearly like seeing a ghost.

“Mr. Hanscom!” he cried in alarm.

Hanscom turned back, and Ricky Lee stepped quickly backward. His ass hit the backbar and glassware gossiped briefly as the bottles knocked together. He stepped back because he was suddenly convinced that Ben Hanscom was dead. Yes, Ben Hanscom was lying dead someplace, in a ditch or an attic or possibly in a closet with a belt noosed around his neck and the toes of his four-hundred-dollar cowboy boots dangling an inch or two above the floor, and this thing standing near the juke and staring back at him was a ghost. For a moment—just a moment, but it was plenty long enough to cover his working heart with a rime of ice—he was convinced he could see tables and chairs right through the man.

“What is it, Ricky Lee?”

“Nuh-n-nuh. Nothin.”

Ben Hanscom looked out at Ricky Lee from eyes which had dark-purple crescents beneath them. His cheeks burned with liquor; his nose looked red and sore.

“Nothin,” Ricky Lee whispered again, but he couldn't take his eyes from that face, the face of a man who has died deep in sin and now stands hard by hell's smoking side door.

“I was fat and we were poor,” Ben Hanscom said. “I remember that now. And I remember that either a girl named Beverly or Stuttering Bill saved my life with a silver dollar. I'm scared almost insane by whatever else I may remember before tonight's over, but how scared I am doesn't matter, because it's going to come anyway. It's all there, like a great big bubble that's growing in my mind. But I'm going, because all I've ever gotten and all I have now is somehow due to what we did then, and you pay for what you get in this world. Maybe that's why God made us kids first and built us close to the ground, because He knows you got to fall down a lot and bleed a lot before you learn that one simple lesson. You pay for what you get, you own what you pay for . . . and sooner or later whatever you own comes back home to you.”

“You gonna be back this weekend, though, ain't you?” Ricky Lee asked through numbed lips. In his increasing distress this was all he could find to hold on to. “You gonna be back this weekend just like always, ain't you?”

“I don't know,” Mr. Hanscom said, and smiled a terrible smile. “I'm going a lot farther than London this time, Ricky Lee.”

“Mr. Hanscom—!”

“You give those cartwheels to your kids,” he repeated, and slipped out into the night.

“What the blue
hell?
” Annie asked, but Ricky Lee ignored her. He flipped up the bar's partition and ran over to one of the windows which looked out on the parking lot. He saw the headlights of Mr. Hanscom's Caddy come on, heard the engine rev. It pulled out of the dirt lot, kicking up a rooster-tail of dust behind it. The taillights dwindled away to red points down Highway 63, and the Nebraska nightwind began to pull the hanging dust apart.

“He took on a boxcar full of booze and you let him get in that big car of his and drive away,” Annie said. “Way to go, Ricky Lee.”

“Never mind.”

“He's going to kill himself.”

And although this had been Ricky Lee's own thought less than five minutes ago, he turned to her when the taillights winked out of sight and shook his head.

“I don't think so,” he said. “Although the way he looked tonight, it might be better for him if he did.”

“What did he say to you?”

He shook his head. It was all confused in his mind, and the sum total of it seemed to mean nothing. “It doesn't matter. But I don't think we're ever going to see that old boy again.”

If you would know all there is to know about an American man or woman of the middle class as the millennium nears its end, you would need only to look in his or her medicine cabinet—or so it has been said. But dear Lord, get a look into this one as Eddie Kaspbrak slides it open, mercifully sliding aside his white face and wide, staring eyes.

On the top shelf there's Anacin, Excedrin, Excedrin P.M., Contac, Gelusil, Tylenol, and a large blue jar of Vicks, looking like a bit of brooding deep twilight under glass. There is a bottle of Vivarin, a bottle of Serutan
(That's “Nature's” spelled backwards,
the ads on Lawrence Welk used to say when Eddie Kaspbrak was but a wee slip of a lad), and two bottles of Phillips' Milk of Magnesia—the regular, which tastes like liquid chalk, and the new mint flavor, which tastes like mint-flavored liquid chalk. Here is a large bottle of Rolaids standing chummily close to a large bottle of Turns. The Turns are standing next to a large bottle of orange-flavored Di-Gel tablets. The three of them look like a trio of strange piggy-banks, stuffed with pills instead of dimes.

Second shelf, and dig the vites: you got your E, your C, your C with rosehips. You got B-simple and B-complex and B-12. There's L-Lysine, which is supposed to do something about those embarrassing skin problems, and lecithin, which is supposed to do something
about that embarrassing cholesterol build-up in and around the Big Pump. There's iron, calcium, and cod liver oil. There's One-A-Day multiples, Myadec multiples, Centrum multiples. And sitting up on top of the cabinet itself is a gigantic bottle of Geritol, just for good measure.

Moving right along to Eddie's third shelf, we find the utility infielders of the patent-medicine world. Ex-Lax. Carter's Little Pills. Those two keep Eddie Kaspbrak moving the mail. Here, nearby, is Kaopectate, Pepto-Bismol, and Preparation H in case the mail moves too fast or too painfully. Also some Tucks in a screw-top jar just to keep everything tidy after the mail has gone through, be it just an advertising circular or two addressed to
OCCUPANT
or a big old special-delivery package. Here is Formula 44 for coughs, Nyquil and Dristan for colds, and a big bottle of castor oil. There's a tin of Sucrets in case Eddie's throat gets sore, and there's a quartet of mouthwashes: Chloraseptic, Cēpacol, Cēpastat in the spray bottle, and of course good old Listerine, often imitated but never duplicated. Visine and Murine for the eyes. Cortaid and Neosporin ointment for the skin (the second line of defense if the L-Lysine doesn't live up to expectations), a tube of Oxy-5 and a plastic bottle of Oxy-Wash (because Eddie would definitely rather have a few less cents than a few more zits), and some tetracyline pills.

And off to one side, clustered like bitter conspirators, are three bottles of coal-tar shampoo.

The bottom shelf is almost deserted, but the stuff which
is
here means serious business—you could cruise on this stuff, okay. On this stuff you could fly higher than Ben Hanscom's jet and crash harder than Thurman Munson's. There's Valium, Percodan, Elavil, and Darvon Complex. There is also another Sucrets box on this low shelf, but there are no Sucrets in it. If you opened that one you would find six Quaaludes.

Eddie Kaspbrak believed in the Boy Scout motto.

He was swinging a blue tote-bag as he came into the bathroom. He set it on the sink, unzipped it, and then, with trembling hands, he began to spill bottles and jars and tubes and squeeze-bottles and spray-bottles into it. Under other circumstances he would have taken them out handful by careful handful, but there was no time for such niceties now. The choice, as Eddie saw it, was as simple as it was brutal:
get moving and keep moving or stand in one place long enough to start thinking about what all of this meant and simply die of fright.

“Eddie?” Myra called up from downstairs. “Eddie, what are you
dooooing?
”

Eddie dropped the Sucrets box containing the 'ludes into the bag. The medicine cabinet was now entirely empty except for Myra's Midol and a small, almost used-up tube of Blistex. He paused for a moment and then grabbed the Blistex. He started to zip the bag closed, debated, and then threw in the Midol as well. She could always buy more.

“Eddie?” from halfway up the stairs now.

Eddie zipped the bag the rest of the way closed and then left the bathroom, swinging it by his side. He was a short man with a timid, rabbity sort of face. Much of his hair was gone; what was left grew in listless, piebald patches. The weight of the bag pulled him noticeably to one side.

An extremely large woman was climbing slowly to the second floor. Eddie could hear the stairs creak protestingly under her.

“What are you
DOOOOOOOOING?
”

Eddie did not need a shrink to tell him that he had, in a sense, married his mother. Myra Kaspbrak was huge. She had only been big when Eddie married her five years ago, but he sometimes thought his subconscious had seen the potential for hugeness in her; God knew his own mother had been a whopper. And she looked somehow more huge than ever as she reached the second-floor landing. She was wearing a white nightgown which swelled, comberlike, at bosom and hip. Her face, devoid of make-up, was white and shiny. She looked badly frightened.

“I have to go away for awhile,” Eddie said.

“What do you mean, you have to go away? What was that telephone call?”

“Nothing,” he said, fleeing abruptly down the hallway to their walk-in closet. He put the tote-bag down, opened the closet's foldback door, and raked aside the half-dozen identical black suits which hung there, as conspicuous as a thundercloud among the other, more brightly colored, clothes. He always wore one of the black suits when he was working. He bent into the closet, smelling mothballs and
wool, and pulled out one of the suitcases from the back. He opened it and began throwing clothes in.

Her shadow fell over him.

“What's this about, Eddie? Where are you going? You tell me!”

“I can't tell you.”

She stood there, watching him, trying to decide what to say next, or what to do. The thought of simply bundling him into the closet and then standing with her back against the door until this madness had passed crossed her mind, but she was unable to bring herself to do it, although she certainly could have; she was three inches taller than Eddie and outweighed him by a hundred pounds. She couldn't think of what to do or say, because this was so utterly unlike him. She could not have been any more dismayed and frightened if she had walked into the television room and found their new big-screen TV floating in the air.

“You can't go,” she heard herself saying. “You promised you'd get me Al Pacino's autograph.” It was an absurdity—God knew it was—but at this point even an absurdity was better than nothing.

“You'll still get it,” Eddie said. “You'll have to drive him yourself.”

Oh, here was a new terror to join those already circling in her poor dazzled head. She uttered a small scream. “I can't—I never—”

“You'll have to,” he said. He was examining his shoes now. “There's no one else.”

“Neither of my uniforms fit anymore! They're too tight in the tits!”

“Have Delores let one of them out,” he said implacably. He threw two pairs of shoes back, found an empty shoebox, and popped a third pair into it. Good black shoes, plenty of use left in them still, but looking just a bit too worn to wear on the job. When you drove rich people around New York for a living, many of them
famous
rich people, everything had to look just right. These shoes no longer looked just right . . . but he supposed they would do for where he was going. And for whatever he might have to do when he got there. Maybe Richie Tozier would—