Stephen King - A Good Marriage

Darcy felt the first thin stirrings of anger. Probably absurd, given the circumstances, but there it was.

“You check my computer ? You sneak! You dirty sneak!”

“Of course I check. I have a very bad friend who does very bad things. A man in a situation like that has to keep current with those closest to him. Since the kids left home, that’s you and only you.”

Bad friend? A bad friend who does bad things? Her head was swimming, but one thing seemed all too clear: further denials would be useless. She knew, and he knew she did.

“You haven’t just been checking on Marjorie Duvall.” She heard no shame or defensiveness in his voice, only a hideous regret that it should have come to this. “You’ve been checking on all of them.” Then he laughed and said, “Whoops!”

She sat up against the headboard, which pulled her slightly away from him. That was good. Distance was good. All those years she’d lain with him hip to hip and thigh to thigh, and now distance was good.

“What bad friend? What are you talking about?”

He cocked his head to one side, Bob’s body language for I find you dense, but amusingly so. “Brian.”

At first she had no idea who he was talking about, and thought it must be someone from work. Possibly an accomplice? It didn’t seem likely on the face of it, she would have said Bob was as lousy at making friends as she was, but men who did such things sometimes did have accomplices. Wolves hunted in packs, after all.

“Brian Delahanty,” he said. “Don’t tell me you forgot Brian. I told you all about him after you told me about what happened to Brandolyn.”

Her mouth dropped open. “Your friend from junior high? Bob, he’s dead! He got hit by a truck while he was chasing down a baseball, and he’s dead .”

“Well…” Bob’s smile grew apologetic. “Yes… and no. I almost always called him Brian when I talked about him to you, but that’s not what I called him back in school, because he hated that name. I called him by his initials. I called him BD.”

She started to ask him what that had to do with the price of tea in China, but then she knew. Of course she knew. BD.

Beadie.

He talked for a long time, and the longer he talked, the more horrified she became. All these years she’d been living with a madman, but how could she have known? His insanity was like an underground sea. There was a layer of rock over it, and a layer of soil over the rock; flowers grew there. You could stroll through them and never know the madwater was there… but it was. It always had been. He blamed BD (who had become Beadie only years later, in his notes to the police) for everything, but Darcy suspected Bob knew better than that; blaming Brian Delahanty only made it easier to keep his two lives separate.

It had been BD’s idea to take guns to school and go on a rampage, for instance. According to Bob, this inspiration had occurred in the summer between their freshman and sophomore years at Castle Rock High School. “1971,” he said, shaking his head goodnaturedly, as a man might do when recalling some harmless childhood peccadillo. “Long before those Columbine oafs were even a twinkle in their daddies’ eyes. There were these girls that snooted us. Diane Ramadge, Laurie Swenson, Gloria Haggerty… there were a couple of others, too, but I forget their names. The plan was to get a bunch of guns—Brian’s dad had about twenty rifles and pistols in his basement, including a couple of German Lugers from World War II that we were just fascinated with—and take them to school. No searches or metal detectors back then, you know.

“We were going to barricade ourselves in the science wing. We’d chain the doors shut, kill some people—mostly teachers, but also some of the guys we didn’t like—and then stampede the rest of the kids outside through the fire door at the far end of the hall. Well… most of the kids. We were going to keep the girls who snooted us as hostages. We planned— BD planned—to do all of this before the cops could get there, right? He drew maps, and he kept a list of the steps we’d have to take in his geometry notebook. I think there were maybe twenty steps in all, starting with ‘Pull fire alarms to create confusion.’” He chuckled. “And after we had the place locked down…”

He gave her a slightly shamefaced smile, but she thought what he was mostly ashamed of was how stupid the plan had been in the first place.

“Well, you can probably guess. Couple of teenage boys, hormones so high we got horny when the wind blew. We were going to tell those girls that if they’d, you know, fuck us real good, we’d let them go. If they didn’t, we’d have to kill them. And they’d fuck, all right.”

He nodded slowly.

“They’d fuck to live. BD was right about that.” He was lost in his story. His eyes were hazy with (grotesque but true) nostalgia. For what? The crazy dreams of youth? She was afraid that might actually be it.

“We didn’t plan to kill ourselves like those heavy-metal dumbbells in Colorado, either. No way. There was a basement under the science wing, and Brian said there was a tunnel down there. He said it went from the supply room to the old fire station on the other side of Route 119. Brian said that when the high school was just a K-through-eight grammar school back in the fifties, there was a park over there, and the little kids used to play in it at recess. The tunnel was so they could get to the park without having to cross the road.”

Bob laughed, making her jump.

“I took his word for all that, but it turned out he was full of shit. I went down there the next fall to look for myself. The supply room was there, full of paper and stinking of that mimeograph juice they used to use, but if there was a tunnel, I never found it, and even back then I was very thorough. I don’t know if he was lying to both of us or just to himself, I only know there was no tunnel. We would have been trapped upstairs, and who knows, we might have killed ourselves after all. You never know what a fourteen-year-old’s going to do, do you? They roll around like unexploded bombs.”

You’re not unexploded anymore, she thought. Are you, Bob?

“We probably would have chickened out, anyway. But maybe not. Maybe we would have tried to go through with it. BD got me all excited, talking about how we were going to feel them up first, then make them take off each other’s clothes…” He looked at her earnestly. “Yes, I know how it sounds, just boys’ jack-off fantasies, but those girls really were snoots. You tried to talk to them, they’d laugh and walk away. Then stand in the corner of the caff, the bunch of them, looking us over and laughing some more. So you really couldn’t blame us, could you?”

He looked at his fingers, drumming restlessly on his suit-pants where they stretched tight over his thighs, then back up at Darcy.

“The thing you have to understand—that you really have to see—is how persuasive Brian was. He was lots worse than me. He really was crazy. Plus it was a time when the whole country was rioting, don’t forget, and that was part of it, too.”

I doubt it, she thought.

The amazing thing was how he made it sound almost normal, as if every adolescent boy’s sexual fantasies involved rape and murder. Probably he believed that, just as he had believed in Brian Delahanty’s mythical escape tunnel. Or had he? How could she know? She was, after all, listening to the recollections of a lunatic. It was just hard to believe that—still!—because the madman was Bob. Her Bob.

“Anyway,” he said, shrugging, “it never happened. That was the summer Brian ran into the road and got killed. There was a reception at his house after the funeral, and his mother said I could go up to his room and take something, if I wanted. As a souvenir, you know. And I did want to! You bet I did! I took his geometry notebook, so nobody would go leafing through it and come across his plans for The Great Castle Rock Shoot-Out and Fuck Party. That’s what he called it, you know.”