Стивен Кинг - The Drawing of the Three

"I can see that plate as clearly as I can see you now, Eddie. My mother gave it to Aunt Blue and she cried and cried over it. I think she'd seen a plate like that once when she and my mother were children, only of course their parents could never have afforded such a thing. There was none of them who got any thing forspecial as kids. After the reception Aunt Blue and her husband left for the Great Smokies on their honeymoon. They went on the train." She looked at Eddie.

"In the Jim Crow car," he said.

"That's right! In the Crow car! In those days that's what Negros rode in and where they ate. That's what we're trying to change in Oxford Town ."

She looked at him, almost surely expecting him to insist she was here, but he was caught in the webwork of his own memory again: wet diapers and those words. Oxford Town . Only suddenly other words came, just a single line, but he could remember Henry singing it over and over until his mother asked if he couldn't please stop so she could hear Walter Cronkite.

Somebody better investigate soon. Those were the words. Sung over and over by Henry in a nasal monotone. He tried for more but couldn't get it, and was that any real surprise? He could have been no more than three at the time. Somebody better investigate soon. The words gave him a chill.

"Eddie, are you all right?"

"Yes. Why?"

"You shivered."

He smiled. "Donald Duck must have walked over my grave."

She laughed. "Anyway, at least I didn't spoil the wedding. It happened when we were walking back to the railway sta­tion. We stayed the night with a friend of Aunt Blue's, and in the morning my father called a taxi. The taxi came almost right away, but when the driver saw we were colored, he drove off like his head was on fire and his ass was catching. Aunt Blue's friend had already gone ahead to the depot with our luggage―there was a lot of it, because we were going to spend a week in New York . I remember my father saying he couldn't wait to see my face light up when the clock in Central Park struck the hour and all the animals danced.

"My father said we might as well walk to the station. My mother agreed just as fast as lickety-split, saying that was a fine idea, it wasn't but a mile and it would be nice to stretch our legs after three days on one train just behind us and half a day on another one just ahead of us. My father said yes, and it was gorgeous weather besides, but I think I knew even at five that he was mad and she was embarrassed and both of them were afraid to call another taxi-cab because the same thing might happen again.

"So we went walking down the street. I was on the inside because my mother was afraid of me getting too close to the traffic. I remember wondering if my daddy meant my face would actually start to glow or something when I saw that clock in Central Park, and if that might not hurt, and that was when the brick came down on my head. Everything went dark for a while. Then the dreams started. Vivid dreams."

She smiled.

"Like this dream, Eddie."

"Did the brick fall, or did someone bomb you?"

"They never found anyone. The police (my mother told me this long after, when I was sixteen or so) found the place where they thought the brick had been, but there were other bricks missing and more were loose. It was just outside the window of a fourth-floor room in an apartment building that had been condemned. But of course there were lots of people staying there just the same. Especially at night."

"Sure," Eddie said.

"No one saw anyone leaving the building, so it went down as an accident. My mother said she thought it had been, but I think she was lying. She didn't even bother trying to tell me what my father thought. They were both still smarting over how the cab-driver had taken one look at us and driven off. It was that more than anything else that made them believe someone had been up there, just looking out, and saw us coming, and decided to drop a brick on the niggers.

"Will your lobster-creatures come out soon?"

"No," Eddie said. "Not until dusk. So one of your ideas is that all of this is a coma-dream like the ones you had when you got bopped by the brick. Only this time you think it was a billy-club or something."

"Yes."

"What's the other one?"

Odetta's face and voice were calm enough, but her head was filled with an ugly skein of images which all added up to Oxford Town , Oxford Town . How did the song go? Two men killed by the light of the moon,/Somebody better investigate soon. Not quite right, but it was close. Close.

"I may have gone insane," she said.

The first words which came into Eddie's mind were If you think you've gone insane, Odetta, you're nuts.

Brief consideration, however, made this seem an unprof­itable line of argument to take.

Instead he remained silent for a time, sitting by her wheelchair, his knees drawn up, his hands holding his wrists.

"Were you really a heroin addict?"

"Am," he said. "It's like being an alcoholic, or 'basing. It's not a thing you ever get over. I used to hear that and go 'Yeah, yeah, right, right,' in my head, you know, but now I understand. I still want it, and I guess part of me will always want it, but the physical part has passed."

"What's 'basing?" she asked.

"Something that hasn't been invented yet in your when. It's something you do with cocaine, only it's like turning TNT into an A-bomb."

"You did it?"

"Christ, no. Heroin was my thing. I told you."

"You don't seem like an addict," she said.

Eddie actually was fairly spiffy … if, that was, one ignored the gamy smell arising from his body and clothes (he could rinse himself and did, could rinse his clothes and did, but lacking soap, he could not really wash either). His hair had been short when Roland stepped into his life (the better to sail through customs, my dear, and what a great big joke that had turned out to be), and was a still a respectable length. He shaved every morning, using the keen edge of Roland's knife, gingerly at first, but with increasing confidence. He'd been too young for shaving to be part of his life when Henry left for 'Nam, and it hadn't been any big deal to Henry back then, either; he never grew a beard, but sometimes went three or four days before Mom nagged him into "mowing the stubble." When he came back, however, Henry was a maniac on the subject (as he was on a few others―foot-powder after shower­ing; teeth to be brushed three or four times a day and followed by a chaser of mouthwash; clothes always hung up) and he turned Eddie into a fanatic as well. The stubble was mowed every morning and every evening. Now this habit was deep in his grain, like the others Henry had taught him. Including, of course, the one you took care of with a needle.

"Too clean-cut?" he asked her, grinning.

"Too white," she said shortly, and then was quiet for a moment, looking sternly out at the sea. Eddie was quiet, too. If there was a comeback to something like that, he didn't know what it was.

"I'm sorry," she said. "That was very unkind, very unfair, and very unlike me."

"It's all right."

"It's not. It's like a white person saying something like 'Jeez, I never would have guessed you were a nigger' to some­one with a very light skin."

"You like to think of yourself as more fair-minded," Eddie said.

"What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common, I should think, but yes―I like to think of myself as more fair-minded. So please accept my apology, Eddie."

"On one condition."

"What's that?" she was smiling a little again. That was good. He liked it when he was able to make her smile.