Stephen King - The Stand

He turned on the last phrase and Nick caught “… truck stop up the road.” He raised his eyebrows and shrugged his shoulders to indicate his puzzlement.

“Don’t matter,” Baker said. “Not to a young kid like you, anyway.”

In the outer office, Baker poured him a cup of black coffee out of a huge thermos. The sheriff’s half-finished breakfast plate stood on his desk blotter, and he pulled it back to himself. Nick sipped the coffee. It hurt his mouth, but it was good.

He tapped Baker on the shoulder, and when he looked up, Nick pointed to the coffee, rubbed his stomach, and winked soberly.

Baker smiled. “You better say it’s good. My wife Jane puts it up.” He tucked half a hard-fried egg into his mouth, chewed, and then pointed at Nick with his fork. “You’re pretty good. Just like one of those pantomimers. Bet you don’t have much trouble makin yourself understood, huh?”

Nick made a seesawing gesture with his hand in midair. Comme çi, comme ça .

“I ain’t gonna hold you,” Baker said, mopping up grease with a slice of toasted Wonder Bread, “but I tell you what. If you stick around, maybe we can get the guys who did this to you. You game?”

Nick nodded and wrote: “You think I can get my week’s pay back?”

“Not a chance,” Baker said flatly. “I’m just a hick sheriff, boy. For somethin like that, you’d be wantin Oral Roberts.”

Nick nodded and shrugged. Putting his hands together, he made a bird flying away.

“Yeah, like that. How many were there?”

Nick held up four fingers, shrugged, then held up five.

“Think you could identify any of them?”

Nick held up one finger and wrote: “Big & blond. Your size, maybe a little heavier. Gray shirt & pants. He was wearing a big ring. 3rd finger right hand. Purple stone. That’s what cut me.”

As Baker read this, a change came over his face. First concern, then anger. Nick, thinking the anger was directed against him, became frightened again.

“Oh Jesus Christ,” Baker said. “This here’s a full commode slopping over for sure. You sure?”

Nick nodded reluctantly.

“Anything else? You see anything else?”

Nick thought hard, then wrote: “Small scar. On his forehead.”

Baker looked at the words. “That’s Ray Booth,” he said. “My brother-in-law. Thanks, kid. Five in the morning and my day’s wrecked already.”

Nick’s eyes opened a little wider, and he made a cautious gesture of commiseration.

“Well, all right,” Baker said, more to himself than to Nick. “He’s a bad actor. Janey knows it. He beat her up enough times when they was kids together. Still, they’re brother n sister and I guess I can forget my lovin for this week.”

Nick looked down, embarrassed. After a moment Baker shook his shoulder so—that Nick would see him speaking.

“It probably won’t do any good anyway,” he said. “Ray ‘n his jerk-off buddies’ll just swear each other up. Your word against theirs. Did you get any licks in?”

“Kicked this Ray in the guts,” Nick wrote. “Got another one in the nose. Might have broken it.”

“Ray chums around with Vince Hogan, Billy Warner, and Mike Childress, mostly,” Baker said. “I might be able to get Vince alone and break him down. He’s got all the spine of a dyin jellyfish. If I could get him I could go after Mike and Billy. Ray got that ring in a fraternity at LSU. He flunked out his sophomore year.” He paused, drumming his fingers against the rim of his breakfast plate. “I guess we could give it a go, kid, if you wanted to. But I’ll warn you in advance, we probably won’t get them. They’re as vicious and cowardly as a dogpack, but they’re town boys and you’re just a deaf-mute drifter. And if they got off, they’d come after you.”

Nick thought about it. In his mind he kept coming back to the image of himself, being shoved from one of them to the next like a bleeding scarecrow, and to Ray’s lips forming the words: I’m gonna mess im up. Sucker kicked me . To the feel of his knapsack, that old friend of the last two wandering years, being ripped from his back.

On the memo pad he wrote and underlined two words: “ Let’s try .”

Baker sighed and nodded. “Okay. Vince Hogan works down to the sawmill… well, that ain’t just true. What he does mostly is fucks off down to the sawmill. We’ll take a ride down there about nine, if that’s fine with you. Maybe we can get him scared enough to spill the beans.”

Nick nodded.

“How’s your mouth? Doc Soames left some pills. He said it would probably be a misery to you.”

Nick nodded ruefully.

“I’ll get em. It…” He broke off, and in Nick’s silent movie world, he watched the sheriff explode several sneezes into his handkerchief. “That’s another thing,” he went on, but he had turned away now and Nick caught only the first word. “I’m comin down with a real good cold. Jesus Christ, ain’t life grand? Welcome to Arkansas, boy.”

He got the pills and came back to where Nick sat. After he passed them and a glass of water to Nick, Baker rubbed gently under the angle of his jaw. There was a definite painful swelling there. Swollen glands, coughing, sneezing, a low fever, felt like. Yeah, it was shaping up to be a wonderful day.

Larry woke up with a hangover that was not too bad, a mouth that tasted as if a baby dragon had used it for a potty chair, and a feeling that he was somewhere he shouldn’t be.

The bed was a single, but there were two pillows on it. He could smell frying bacon. He sat up, looked out the windows at another gray New York day, and his first thought was that they had done something horrible to Berkeley overnight: turned it dirty and sooty, had aged it. Then last night began coming back and he realized he was looking at Fordham, not Berkeley. He was in a second-floor flat on Tremont Avenue, not far from the Concourse, and his mother was going to wonder where he had been last night. Had he called her, given her any kind of excuse, no matter how thin?

He swung his legs out of bed and found a crumpled pack of Winstons with one crazy cigarette left in it. He lit it with a green plastic Bic lighter. It tasted like dead horseshit. Out in the kitchen the sound of frying bacon went on and on, like radio static.

The girl’s name was Maria and she had said she was a… what? Oral hygienist, was that it? Larry didn’t know how much she knew about hygiene, but she was great on oral. He vaguely remembered being gobbled like a Perdue drumstick. Crosby, Stills, and Nash on the crappy little stereo in the living room, singing about how much water had gone underneath the bridge, time we had wasted on the way. If his memory was correct, Maria sure hadn’t wasted much time. She had been a little overwhelmed to discover he was that Larry Underwood. At one point in the evening’s festivities, hadn’t they gone out reeling around looking for an open record store so they could buy a copy of “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?”?

He groaned very softly and tried to retrace yesterday from its innocuous beginnings to its frantic, gobbling finale.

The Yankees weren’t in town, he remembered that. His mother had been gone to work when he woke up, but she had left a Yankees schedule on the kitchen table along with a note: “Larry. As you can see, the Yankees won’t be back until Jul 1. They are playing a doubleheader the 4th of July. If you’re not doing anything that day, why not take your mom to the ball park. I’ll buy the beer and hotdogs. There are eggs and sausage in the fridge or sweetrolls in the breadbox if you like them better. Take care of yourself kiddo.” There was a typical Alice Underwood PS: “Most of the kids you hung around with are gone now and good riddance to that bunch of hoods butt think Buddy Marx is working at that print shop on Stricker Avenue.”