It (64 page)

Al Marsh thrust her aside with an “O-Jesus-Christ-what-next” expression on his face and went into the bathroom. He was in there so long that Beverly became afraid again.

Then he bawled:
“Beverly! You come here, girl!”

There was no question of not going. If the two of them had been standing on the edge of a high cliff and he had told her to step off—right
now,
girl—her instinctive obedience would almost certainly have carried her over the edge before her rational mind could have intervened.

The bathroom door was open. There her father stood, a big man who was now losing the auburn hair he had passed on to Beverly. He was still wearing his gray fatigue pants and his gray shirt (he was a janitor at the Derry Home Hospital), and he was looking hard at Beverly. He did not drink, he did not smoke, he did not chase after women.
I got all the women I need at home,
he said on occasion, and when he said it a peculiar secretive smile would cross his face—it did not brighten it but did quite the opposite. Watching that smile was like watching the shadow of a cloud travel rapidly across a rocky field.
They take care of me, and when they need it, I take care of them.

“Now just what the Sam Hill is this foolishness all about?” he asked as she came in.

Beverly felt as if her throat had been lined with slate. Her heart raced in her chest. She thought that she might vomit soon. There was blood on the mirror, running in long drips. There were spots of blood
on the light over the sink; she could
smell
it cooking onto the 40-watt bulb. Blood ran down the porcelain sides of the sink and plopped in fat drops on the linoleum floor.

“Daddy . . .” she whispered huskily.

He turned, disgusted with her (as he was so often), and began casually to wash his hands in the bloody sink. “Good God, girl. Speak up. You scared hell out of me. Explain yourself, for Lord's sake.”

He was washing his hands in the basin, she could see blood staining the gray fabric of his pants where they rubbed against the lip of the sink, and if his forehead touched the mirror (it was close) it would be on his
skin.
She made a choked noise in her throat.

He turned off the water, grabbed a towel on which two fans of blood from the drain had splashed, and began to dry his hands. She watched, near swooning, as he grimed blood into his big knuckles and the lines of his palms. She could see blood under his fingernails like marks of guilt.

“Well? I'm waiting.” He tossed the bloody towel back over the rod.

There was blood . . . blood everywhere . . .
and her father didn't see it.

“Daddy—” She had no idea what might have come next, but her father interrupted her.

“I worry about you,” Al Marsh said. “I don't think you're ever going to grow up, Beverly. You go out running around, you don't do hardly any of the housework around here, you can't cook, you can't sew. Half the time you're off on a cloud someplace with your nose stuck in a book and the other half you've got vapors and megrims. I worry.”

His hand suddenly swung and spatted painfully against her buttocks. She uttered a cry, her eyes fixed on his. There was a tiny stipple of blood caught in his bushy right eyebrow.
If I look at that long enough I'll just go crazy and none of this will matter,
she thought dimly.

“I worry a
lot,”
he said, and hit her again, harder, on the arm above the elbow. That arm cried out and then seemed to go to sleep. She would have a spreading yellowish-purple bruise there the next day.

“An awful
lot,”
he said, and punched her in the stomach. He pulled the punch at the last second, and Beverly lost only half of her air. She doubled over, gasping, tears starting in her eyes. Her father
looked at her impassively. He shoved his bloody hands in the pockets of his trousers.

“You got to grow up, Beverly,” he said, and now his voice was kind and forgiving. “Isn't that so?”

She nodded. Her head throbbed. She cried, but silently. If she sobbed aloud—started what her father called “that baby whining”—he might go to work on her in earnest. Al Marsh had lived his entire life in Derry and told people who asked (and sometimes those who did not) that he intended to be buried here—hopefully at the age of one hundred and ten. “No reason why I shouldn't live forever,” he sometimes told Roger Aurlette, who cut his hair once each month. “I have no vices.”

“Now explain yourself,” he said, “and make it quick.”

“There was—” She swallowed and it hurt because there was no moisture in her throat, none at all. “There was a spider. A big fat black spider. It . . . it crawled out of the drain and I . . . I guess it crawled back down.”

“Oh!”
He smiled a little at her now, as if pleased by this explanation. “Was
that
it? Damn! If you'd told me, Beverly, I never would have hit you. All girls are scared of spiders. Sam Hill! Why didn't you speak up?”

He bent over the drain and she had to bite her lip to keep from crying out a warning . . . and some other voice spoke deep inside her, some terrible voice which could not have been a part of her; surely it was the voice of the devil himself:
Let it get him, if it wants him. Let it pull him down. Good-fucking-riddance.

She turned away from that voice in horror. To allow such a thought to stay for even a moment in her head would surely damn her to hell.

He peered into the eye of the drain. His hands squelched in the blood on the rim of the basin. Beverly fought grimly with her gorge. Her belly ached where her dad had hit her.

“Don't see a thing,” he said. “All these buildings are old, Bev. Got drains the size of freeways, you know it? When I was janitorin down in the old high school, we used to get drowned rats in the toilet bowls once in awhile. It drove the girls crazy.” He laughed fondly at the thought of such female vapors and megrims. “Mostly when the Kenduskeag was high. Less wildlife in the pipes since they put in the new drain system, though.”

He put an arm around her and hugged her.

“Look. You go to bed and don't think about it anymore. Okay?”

She felt her love for him.
I never hit you when you didn't deserve it, Beverly,
he told her once when she had cried out that some punishment had been unfair. And surely that had to be true, because he
was
capable of love. Sometimes he would spend a whole day with her, showing her how to do things or just telling her stuff or walking around town with her, and when he was kind like that she thought her heart would swell with happiness until it killed her. She loved him, and tried to understand that he had to correct her often because it was (as he said) his God-given job.
Daughters,
Al Marsh said,
need more correction than sons.
He had no sons, and she felt vaguely as if that might be partly her fault as well.

“Okay, Daddy,” she said. “I won't.”

They walked into her small bedroom together. Her right arm now ached fiercely from the blow it had taken. She looked back over her shoulder and saw the bloody sink, bloody mirror, bloody wall, bloody floor. The bloody towel her father had used and then hung casually over the rod. She thought:
How can I ever go in there to wash up again? Please God, dear God, I'm sorry if I had a bad thought about my dad and You can punish me for it if You want, I deserve to be punished, make me fall down and hurt myself or make me have the flu like last winter when I coughed so hard once I threw up but please God make the blood be gone in the morning, pretty please, God, okay? Okay?

Her father tucked her in as he always did, and kissed her forehead. Then he only stood there for a moment in what she would always think of as “his” way of standing, perhaps of being: bent slightly forward, hands plunged deep—to above the wrist—in his pockets, the bright blue eyes in his mournful basset-hound's face looking down at her from above. In later years, long after she stopped thinking about Derry at all, she would see a man sitting on the bus or maybe standing on a corner with his dinnerbucket in his hand, shapes, oh shapes of men, sometimes seen as day closed down, sometimes seen across Watertower Square in the noonlight of a clear windy autumn day, shapes of men, rules of men, desires of men: or Tom, so like her father when he took off his shirt and stood slightly slumped in front of the bathroom mirror to shave. Shapes of men.

“Sometimes I worry about you, Bev,” he said, but there was
no trouble or anger in his voice now. He touched her hair gently, smoothing it back from her forehead.

The bathroom is full of blood, Daddy!
she almost screamed then.
Didn't you see it? It's everywhere! Cooking onto the light over the sink, even! Didn't you SEE it?

But she kept her silence as he went out and closed the door behind him, filling her room with darkness. She was still awake, still staring into the darkness, when her mother came in at eleven-thirty and the TV went off. She heard her parents go into their room and she heard the bedsprings creaking steadily as they did their sex-act thing. Beverly had overheard Greta Bowie telling Sally Mueller that the sex-act thing hurt like fire and no nice girl ever wanted to do it (“At the end of it the man pees all over your bug,” Greta said, and Sally had cried: “Oh yuck, I'd
never
let a boy do that to me!”). If it hurt as badly as Greta said, then Bev's mother kept the hurt to herself; Bev had heard her mom cry out once or twice in a low voice, but it hadn't sounded at all like a pain-cry.

The slow creak of the springs speeded up to a beat so rapid it was just short of frantic, and then stopped. There was a period of silence, then some low talk, then the sound of her mother's footsteps as she went into the bathroom. Beverly held her breath, waiting for her mother to scream or not.

There was no scream—only the sound of water running into the basin. That was followed by some low splashing. Then the water ran out of the basin with its familiar gurgling sound. Her mother was brushing her teeth now. Moments later the bedsprings in her parents' room creaked again as her mom got back into bed.

Five minutes or so after that her father began to snore.

A
black fear stole over her heart and closed her throat. She found herself afraid to turn over on her right side—her favorite sleeping position—because she might see something looking in the window at her. So she just lay on her back, stiff as a poker, looking up at the pressed-tin ceiling. Some time later—minutes or hours, there was no way of telling—she fell into a thin troubled sleep.

Beverly always woke up when the alarm went off in her parents' bedroom. You had to be fast, because the alarm no more than got started before her father banged it off. She dressed quickly while her father used the bathroom. She paused briefly (as she now almost always did) to look at her chest in the mirror trying to decide if her breasts had gotten any bigger in the night. She had started getting them late last year. There had been some faint pain at first, but that was gone now. They were extremely small—not much more than spring apples, really—but they were
there.
It was true; childhood would end; she would be a woman.

She smiled at her reflection and put a hand behind her head, pushing her hair up and sticking her chest out. She giggled a little girl's unaffected giggle . . . and suddenly remembered the blood spewing out of the bathroom drain the night before. The giggles stopped abruptly.

She looked at her arm and saw the bruise that had formed there in the night—an ugly stain between her shoulder and elbow, a stain with many discolored fingers.

The toilet went with a bang and a flush.

Moving quickly, not wanting him to be mad with her this morning (not wanting him to even
notice
her this morning), Beverly pulled on a pair of jeans and her Derry High School sweatshirt. And then, because it could no longer be put off, she left her room for the bathroom. Her father passed her in the living room on his way back to his room to get dressed. His blue pajama suit flapped loosely around him. He grunted something at her she didn't understand.

“Okay, Daddy,” she replied nevertheless.

She stood in front of the closed bathroom door for a moment, trying to get her mind ready for what she might see inside.
At least it's daytime,
she thought, and that brought some comfort. Not much, but some. She grasped the doorknob, turned it, and stepped inside.

That was a busy morning for Beverly. She got her father his breakfast—orange juice, scrambled eggs, Al Marsh's version of toast (the bread hot but not really toasted at all). He sat at the table, barricaded behind the
News,
and ate it all.

“Where's the bacon?”

“Gone, Daddy. We finished it yesterday.”

“Cook me a hamburger.”

“There's only a little bit of that left, t—”

The paper rustled, then dropped. His blue stare fell on her like weight.

“What did you say?” he asked softly.

“I said right away, Daddy.”

He looked at her a moment longer. Then the paper went back up and Beverly hurried to the refrigerator to get the meat.

She cooked him a hamburger, mashing the little bit of ground meat that was left in the icebox as hard as she could to make it look bigger. He ate it reading the Sports page and Beverly made his lunch—a couple of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, a big piece of cake her mother had brought back from Green's Farm last night, a Thermos of hot coffee heavily laced with sugar.

“You tell your mother I said to get this place cleaned up today,” he said, taking his dinnerbucket. “It looks like a damn old pigsty. Sam Hill! I spend the whole day cleaning up messes over to the hospital. I don't need to come home to a pigsty. You mind me, Beverly.”