Stephen King - Under the Dome

Andy started to tear up again, and that was when Big Jim himself put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. Andy hadn’t heard him come in, but he didn’t jump. He had almost expected the hand, because its owner always seemed to turn up when Andy needed him the most.

“I thought I’d find you here,” Big Jim said. “Andy—pal—I’m just so, so sorry.”

Andy lurched to his feet, groped his arms around Big Jim’s bulk, and began to sob against Big Jim’s jacket. “I told her those lessons were dangerous! I told her Chuck Thompson was a jackass, just like his father!”

Big Jim rubbed his back with a soothing palm. “I know. But she’s in a better place now, Andy—she had dinner with Jesus Christ tonight—roast beef, fresh peas, mashed with gravy! How’s that for an awesome thought? You hang onto that. Think we should pray?”

“Yes!” Andy sobbed. “Yes, Big Jim! Pray with me!”

They got on their knees and Big Jim prayed long and hard for the soul of Claudette Sanders. (Below them, in the workroom, Stewart Bowie heard, looked up at the ceiling, and observed: “That man shits from both ends.”)

After four or five minutes of we see through a glass darkly and when I was a child I spake as a child (Andy didn’t quite see the relevance of that one, but didn’t care; it was comforting just to be kneebound with Big Jim), Rennie finished up—“ForJesussakeamen”—and helped Andy to his feet.

Face-to-face and bosom to bosom, Big Jim grasped Andy by the upper arms and looked into his eyes. “So, partner,” he said. He always called Andy partner when the situation was serious. “Are you ready to go to work?”

Andy stared at him dumbly.

Big Jim nodded as if Andy had made a reasonable (under the circumstances) protest. “I know it’s hard. Not fair. Inappropriate time to ask you. And you’d be within your rights—God knows you would—if you were to bust me one right in the cotton-picking chops. But sometimes we have to put the welfare of others first—isn’t that true?”

“The good of the town,” Andy said. For the first time since getting the news about Claudie, he saw a sliver of light.

Big Jim nodded. His face was solemn, but his eyes were shining. Andy had a strange thought: He looks ten years younger. “Right you are. We’re custodians, partner. Custodians of the common good. Not always easy, but never unnecessary. I sent the Wettington woman to hunt up Andrea. Told her to bring Andrea to the conference room. In handcuffs, if that’s what it takes.” Big Jim laughed. “She’ll be there. And Pete Randolph’s making a list of all the available town cops. Aren’t enough. We’ve got to address that, partner. If this situation goes on, authority’s going to be key. So what do you say? Can you suit up for me?”

Andy nodded. He thought it might take his mind off this. Even if it didn’t, he needed to make like a bee and buzz. Looking at Gert Evans’s coffin was beginning to give him the willies. The silent tears of the Chief’s widow had given him the willies, too. And it wouldn’t be hard. All he really needed to do was sit there at the conference table and raise his hand when Big Jim raised his. Andrea Grinnell, who never seemed entirely awake, would do the same. If emergency measures of some sort needed to be implemented, Big Jim would see that they were. Big Jim would take care of everything.

“Let’s go,” Andy replied.

Big Jim clapped him on the back, slung an arm over Andy’s thin shoulders, and led him out of the Remembrance Parlor. It was a heavy arm. Meaty. But it felt good.

He never even thought of his daughter. In his grief, Andy Sanders had forgotten her entirely.

Julia Shumway walked slowly down Commonwealth Street, home of the town’s wealthiest residents, toward Main Street. Happily divorced for ten years, she lived over the offices of the Democrat with Horace, her elderly Welsh Corgi. She had named him after the great Mr. Greeley, who was remembered for a single bon mot—“Go West, young man, go West”—but whose real claim to fame, in Julia’s mind, was his work as a newspaper editor. If Julia could do work half as good as Greeley’s on the New York Trib, she would consider herself a success.

Of course, her Horace always considered her a success, which made him the nicest dog on earth, in Julia’s book. She would walk him as soon as she got home, then enhance herself further in his eyes by scattering a few pieces of last night’s steak on top of his kibble. That would make them both feel good, and she wanted to feel good—about something, anything—because she was troubled.

This was not a new state for her. She had lived in The Mill for all of her forty-three years, and in the last ten she liked what she saw in her hometown less and less. She worried about the inexplicable decay of the town’s sewer system and waste treatment plant in spite of all the money that had been poured into them, she worried about the impending closure of Cloud Top, the town’s ski resort, she worried that James Rennie was stealing even more from the town till than she suspected (and she suspected he had been stealing a great deal for decades). And of course she was worried about this new thing, which seemed to her almost too big to comprehend. Every time she tried to get a handle on it, her mind would fix on some part that was small but concrete: her increasing inability to place calls on her cell phone, for instance. And she hadn’t received a single one, which was very troubling. Never mind concerned friends and relatives outside of town trying to get in touch; she should have been jammed up with calls from other papers: the Lewiston Sun, the Portland Press Herald, perhaps even the New York Times.

Was everyone else in The Mill having the same problems?

She should go out to the Motton town line and see for herself. If she couldn’t use her phone to buzz Pete Freeman, her best photographer, she could take some pix herself with what she called her Emergency Nikon. She had heard there was now some sort of quarantine zone in place on the Motton and Tarker’s Mills sides of the barrier—probably the other towns, as well—but surely she could get close on this side. They could warn her off, but if the barrier was as impermeable as she was hearing, warning would be the extent of it.

“Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” she said. Absolutely true. If words could hurt her, Jim Rennie would have had her in ICU after the story she’d written about that joke audit the state had pulled three years ago. Certainly he’d blabbed aplenty-o about suing the paper, but blabbing was all it had been; she had even briefly considered an editorial on the subject, mostly because she had a terrific headline: SUPPOSED SUIT SLIPS FROM SIGHT.

So, yes, she had worries. They came with the job. What she wasn’t used to worrying about was her own behavior, and now, standing on the corner of Main and Comm, she was. Instead of turning left on Main, she looked back the way she had come. And spoke in the low murmur she usually reserved for Horace. “I shouldn’t have left that girl alone.”

Julia would not have done, if she’d come in her car. But she’d come on foot, and besides—Dodee had been so insistent. There had been a smell about her, too. Pot? Maybe. Not that Julia had any strong objections to that. She had smoked her own share over the years. And maybe it would calm the girl. Take the edge off her grief while it was sharpest and most likely to cut.

“Don’t worry about me,” Dodee had said, “I’ll find my dad. But first I have to dress.” And indicated the robe she was wearing.