Stephen King - The Stand

Nick made a thumb-and-forefinger circle.

“How’s our guests?”

Nick opened and closed his mouth several times in a mime jabbering. Looked furious. Made banging gestures on invisible bars.

Baker threw back his head and laughed, then sneezed several times.

“You ought to be on TV,” he said. “Did you write your life story down like you said you was gonna try to do?”

Nick nodded and handed the two sheets of longhand over. The sheriff sat down and read them carefully. When he was done he looked at Nick so long and so piercingly that Nick stared down at his feet for a moment, embarrassed and confused.

When he looked up again Baker said: “You’ve been on your own since you were sixteen? For six years?”

Nick nodded.

“And you’ve really taken all these high school courses?”

Nick wrote for some time on one of the memo sheets. “I was way behind because I started to read & write so late. When the orphanage closed I was just starting to catch up. I got six h.s. credits from there and another six since then from La Salle in Chicago. I learned about them from a matchbook cover. I need four more credits.”

“What courses do you still need?” Baker asked, then turned his head and shouted: “Shut up in there! You’ll get your hotcakes and coffee when I’m damned good and ready and not before!”

Nick wrote: “Geometry. Advanced math. Two years of a language. Those are the college requirements.”

“A language. You mean like French? German? Spanish?”

Nick nodded.

Baker laughed and shook his head. “Don’t that beat all. A deaf-mute learning to talk a foreign language. Nothing against you, boy. You understand that.”

Nick smiled and nodded.

“So why you been driftin around so much?”

“While I was still a minor I didn’t dare stay in one place for too long,” Nick wrote. “Afraid they’d try to stick me in another orphanage or something. When I got old enough to look for a steady job, times got worse. They said the stock-market crashed, or something, but since I’m deaf I didn’t hear it (ha-ha).”

“Most places would have just let you ramble on,” Baker said. “In hard times the milk of human kindness don’t flow so free, Nick. As for a steady job, I might be able to put you onto something around here, unless those boys soured you on Shoyo and Arkansas for good. But… we ain’t all like that.”

Nick nodded to show he understood.

“How’s your teeth? That was quite a shot in the mouth you took.”

Nick shrugged.

“Take any of those pain pills?”

Nick held up two fingers.

“Well, look, I got some paperwork to do on those boys. You go on with what you were doing. We’ll talk more later.”

Dr. Soames, the man who had almost hit Nick with his car, came by around 9:30 A.M. the same morning. He was a man of about sixty with shaggy white hair, a scrawny chicken neck, and very sharp blue eyes.

“Big John tells me you read lips,” he said. “He also says he wants to see you gainfully employed, so I guess I better make sure you’re not going to die on his hands. Take off your shirt.”

Nick unbuttoned his blue workshirt and took it off.

“Holy Jesus, lookitim,” Baker said.

“They did a job of work, all right.” Soames looked at Nick and said dryly, “Boy, you almost lost your left tit.” He pointed to a crescent-shaped scab just above the nipple. Nick’s belly and ribcage looked like a Canadian sunrise. Soames poked and prodded him and looked carefully into the pupils of his eyes. At last he examined the shattered remains of Nick’s front teeth, the only part of him that really hurt now, in spite of the spectacular bruises.

“That must hurt like a sonofabitch,” he said, and Nick nodded ruefully. “You’re gonna lose them,” Soames went on. “You—” He sneezed three times in quick succession. “Excuse me.”

He began to put his tools back into his black bag. “The prognosis is favorable, young man, barring strokes of lightning or further trips to Zack’s ginmill. Is your speaking problem physical, or does it come from being deaf?”

Nick wrote: “Physical. Birth defect.”

Soames nodded. “Damn shame. Got to think positive, though, and thank God that He didn’t decide to give your brains a stir while He was at it. Put your shirt on.”

Nick did. He liked Soames; in his way, he was very much like Rudy Sparkman, who had told him once that God had given all deaf-mute males an extra two inches below the waist to make up for the little bit He had subtracted from above the collarbones.

Soames said, “I’ll tell em to give you a refill on that pain medication down at the drugstore. Tell moneybags here to pay for it.”

“Ho-ho,” John Baker said.

“He’s got more dough stashed away in fruit jars than a hog has warts,” Soames went on. He sneezed again, wiped his nose, rummaged around in his bag, and brought out a stethoscope.

“You want to look out, Gramps, I’ll lock you up for drunk and disorderly,” Baker said with a smile.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Soames said. “You’ll open your mouth too wide one day and fall right in. Take off y’shirt, John, and let’s see if your boobs are as big as they used to be.”

“Take off my shirt? Why?”

“Because your wife wants me to look at you, that’s why. She thinks you’re a sick man and she doesn’t want you to get any sicker, God knows why. Ain’t I told her enough times that she and I wouldn’t have to sneak around anymore if you were underground? Come on, Johnny. Show us some skin.”

“It was just a cold,” Baker said, reluctantly unbuttoning his shirt. “I feel fine this morning. Honest to God, Ambrose, you sound worse’n I do.”

“You don’t tell the doctor, the doctor tells you.” As Baker pulled his shirt off, Soames turned to Nick and said, “But you know it’s funny how a cold will just start making the rounds. Mrs. Lathrop is down sick, and the whole Richie family, and most of those no-accounts out on the Barker Road are coughing their brains out. Even Billy Warner in there’s hacking away.”

Baker had wormed out of his undershirt.

“There, what’d I tell you?” Soames asked. “Ain’t he got a set of knockers on him? Even an old shit like me could get horny looking at that.”

Baker gasped as the stethoscope touched his chest. “Jesus, that’s cold! What do you do, keep it in a deep freeze?”

“Breathe in,” Soames said, frowning. “Now let it out.”

Baker’s exhale turned into a weak cough.

Soames kept at the sheriff for a long time. Front and back both. At last he put away his stethoscope and used a tongue depressor to look down Baker’s throat. Finished, he broke it in two and tossed it into the wastebasket.

“Well?” Baker said.

Soames pressed the fingers of his right hand into the flesh of Baker’s neck under the jaw. Baker winced away from it.

“I don’t have to ask if that hurt,” Soames said. “John, you go home and go to bed and that isn’t advice, that’s an order.”

The sheriff blinked. “Ambrose,” he said quietly, “come on. You know I can’t do that. I’ve got three prisoners who have to go up to Camden this afternoon. I left this kid with them last night, but I had no business doing it, and I won’t do it again. He’s mute. I wouldn’t have agreed to it last night if I had been thinking right.”

“You never mind them, John. You got problems of your own. It’s some kind of respiratory infection, a damn good one by the sound, and a fever to go with it. Your pipes are sick, Johnny, and to be perfectly frank, that’s no joke for a man who’s carrying around the extra meat you are. Go to bed. If you still feel okay tomorrow morning, get rid of them then. Better still, call the State Patrol to come down and get them.”