Stephen King - Joyland

I’m not doing it, I thought. I’ll be damned if I’ll do it.

Then I leaned forward, doing another compression on the way, and pressed my mouth to his. It wasn’t as bad as I feared; it was worse. His lips were bitter with the taste of cigarettes, and there was the stink of something else in his mouth—God help me, I think it was jalapeno peppers, maybe from a breakfast omelet. I got a good seal, though, pinched his nostrils shut, and breathed down his throat.

I did that five or six times before he started breathing on his own again. I stopped the compressions to see what would happen, and he kept going. Hell must have been full that day, that’s all I can figure. I rolled him onto his side in case he vomited. Lane stood beside me with a hand on my shoulder. Shortly after that, we heard the wail of an approaching siren.

Lane hurried to meet them at the gate and direct them. Once he was gone, I found myself looking at the snarling green monster-faces decorating the façade of Horror House, COME IN IF YOU DARE was written above the faces in drippy green letters. I found myself thinking again of Linda Gray, who had gone in alive and had been carried out hours later, cold and dead. I think my mind went that way because Erin was coming with information. Information that troubled her. I also thought of the girl’s killer.

Could have been you, Mrs. Shoplaw had said. Except you’re dark-haired instead of blond and don’t have a bird’s head tattooed on one of your hands. This guy did. An eagle or maybe a hawk.

Eddie’s hair was the premature gray of the lifelong heavy smoker, but it could have been blond four years ago. And he always wore gloves. Surely he was too old to have been the man who had accompanied Linda Gray on her last dark ride, surely, but…

The ambulance was very close but not quite here, although I could see Lane at the gate, waving his hands over his head, making hurry-up gestures. Thinking what the hell, I stripped off Eddie’s gloves. His fingers were lacy with dead skin, the backs of his hands red beneath a thick layer of some sort of white cream. There were no tattoos.

Just psoriasis.

As soon as he was loaded up and the ambulance was heading back to the tiny Heaven’s Bay hospital, I went into the nearest donniker and rinsed my mouth again and again. It was a long time before I got rid of the taste of those damn jalapeno peppers, and I have never touched one since.

When I came out, Lane Hardy was standing by the door. “That was something,” he said. “You brought him back.”

“He won’t be out of the woods for a while, and there might be brain damage.”

“Maybe yes, maybe no, but if you hadn’t been there, he’d have been in the woods permanently. First the little girl, now the dirty old man. I may start calling you Jesus instead of Jonesy, because you sure are the savior.”

“You do that, and I’m DS.” That was Talk for down south , which in turn meant turning in your time-card for good.

“Okay, but you did all right, Jonesy. In fact, I gotta say you rocked the house.”

“The taste of him,” I said. “God!”

“Yeah, I bet, but look on the bright side. With him gone, you’re free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, you’re free at last. I think you’ll like it better that way, don’t you?”

I certainly did.

From his back pocket, Lane drew out a pair of rawhide gloves. Eddie’s gloves. “Found these laying on the ground. Why’d you take ’em off him?”

“Uh… I wanted to let his hands breathe.” That sounded primo stupid, but the truth would have sounded even stupider. I couldn’t believe I’d entertained the notion of Eddie Parks being Linda Gray’s killer for even a moment. “When I took my life-saving course, they told us that heart attack victims need all the free skin they can get. It helps, somehow.” I shrugged. “It’s supposed to, at least.”

“Huh. You learn a new thing every day.” He flapped the gloves. “I don’t think Eddie’s gonna be back for a long time—if at all—so you might as well stick these in his doghouse, yeah?”

“Okay,” I said, and that’s what I did. But later that day I went and got them again. Something else, too.

I didn’t like him, we’re straight on that, right? He’d given me no reason to like him. He had, so far as I knew, given not one single Joyland employee a reason to like him. Even old-timers like Rozzie Gold and Pop Allen gave him a wide berth. Nevertheless, I found myself entering the Heaven’s Bay Community Hospital that afternoon at four o’clock, and asking if Edward Parks could have a visitor. I had his gloves in one hand, along with the something else.

The blue-haired volunteer receptionist went through her paperwork twice, shaking her head, and I was starting to think Eddie had died after all when she said, “Ah! It’s Edwin, not Edward. He’s in Room 315. That’s ICU, so you’ll have to check at the nurse’s station first.”

I thanked her and went to the elevator—one of those huge ones big enough to admit a gurney. It was slower than old cold death, which gave me plenty of time to wonder what I was doing here. If Eddie needed a visit from a park employee, it should have been Fred Dean, not me, because Fred was the guy in charge that fall. Yet here I was. They probably wouldn’t let me see him, anyway.

But after checking his chart, the head nurse gave me the okay. “He maybe sleeping, though.”

“Any idea about his—?” I tapped my head.

“Mental function? Well… he was able to give us his name.”

That sounded hopeful.

He was indeed asleep. With his eyes shut and that day’s late-arriving sun shining on his face, the idea that he might have been Linda Gray’s date a mere four years ago was even more ludicrous. He looked at least a hundred, maybe a hundred and twenty. I saw I needn’t have brought his gloves, either. Someone had bandaged his hands, probably after treating the psoriasis with something a little more powerful than whatever OTC cream he’d been using on them. Looking at those bulky white mittens made me feel a queer, reluctant pity.

I crossed the room as quietly as I could, and put the gloves in the closet with the clothes he’d been wearing when he was brought in. That left me with the other thing—a photograph that had been pinned to the wall of his cluttered, tobacco-smelling little shack next to a yellowing calendar that was two years out of date. The photo showed Eddie and a plain-faced woman standing in the weedy front yard of an anonymous tract house. Eddie looked about twenty-five. He had his arm around the woman. She was smiling at him. And—wonder of wonders—he was smiling back.

There was a rolling table beside his bed with a plastic pitcher and a glass on it. This I thought rather stupid; with his hands bandaged the way they were, he wasn’t going to be pouring anything for a while. Still, the pitcher could serve one useful purpose. I propped the photo against it so he’d see it when he woke up. With that done, I started for the door.

I was almost there when he spoke in a whispery voice that was a long way from his usual ill-tempered rasp. “Kiddo.”

I returned—not eagerly—to his bedside. There was a chair in the corner, but I had no intention of pulling it over and sitting down. “How you feeling, Eddie?”

“Can’t really say. Hard to breathe. They got me all taped up.”

“I brought you your gloves, but I see they already…” I nodded at his bandaged hands.

“Yeah.” He sucked in air. “If anything good comes out of this, maybe they’ll fix ’em up. Fuckin itch all the time, they do.” He looked at the picture. “Why’d you bring that? And what were you doin in my doghouse?”