Stephen King: Sleeping Beauties

Tiffany heard a thump and all at once she was on the floor. Her hip throbbed where it had banged against the edge of the counter.

Cigarette dangling off his lip, Truman stared down at her.

“Earth to crack whore.” He was in his cowboy boots and boxer shorts and nothing else. The flesh of his torso was as tight as plastic wrap over his ribs. “Earth to crack whore,” Truman repeated and clapped his hands in front of her face like she was a bad dog. “Can’t you hear? Someone’s knocking on the door.”

Tru was such an asshole that, in the part of Tiffany where she was still alive—the part where she occasionally felt the urge to brush her hair or call that Elaine woman from the Planned Parenthood clinic who wanted her to agree to sign up on a list for a lockdown detox—she sometimes regarded him with scientific amazement. Tru was an asshole standard. Tiffany would ask herself, “Is so-and-so a bigger asshole than Truman?” Few could compare—in fact, so far, officially, there was only Donald Trump and cannibals. Truman’s record of malfeasance was lengthy. As a boy he had stuck his finger up his butt and jammed it into the nostrils of smaller kids. Later, he had stolen from his mother, pawned her jewelry and her antiques. He had turned Tiffany on to meth that afternoon he’d swung by to see her at the nice apartment in Charlottesville. His idea of a prank was to poke you in the bare flesh of your shoulder with a lit cigarette while you were sleeping. Truman was a rapist, but had never done time for it. Some assholes just struck lucky. His face was patterned with an uneven growth of red-gold beard, and his eyes were enormous with pupil, but the sneering, unapologetic boy he’d always been was there in the jut of his jaw.

“Crack whore, come in.”

“What?” Tiffany managed to ask.

“I told you to answer the door! Jesus Christ!” Truman feinted a punch and she covered her head with her hands. She blinked tears.

“Fuck you,” she said half-heartedly. She hoped Dr. Flickinger didn’t hear. He was in the bathroom. Tiffany liked the doctor. The doc was a trip. He always called her Madame and threw a wink to let her know he wasn’t making fun.

“You are a toothless deaf crack whore,” Truman announced, overlooking the fact that he was himself in need of cosmetic dental surgery.

Truman’s friend came out of the trailer’s bedroom, sat down at the foldout table, and said, “Crack whore phone home.” He giggled at his joke and did an elbow jig. Tiffany couldn’t remember his name, but she hoped his mother was super proud of her son who had the South Park poop tattooed on his Adam’s apple.

A knock at the door. This time Tiffany did register it, a firm double-rap.

“Never mind! Wouldn’t want to trouble you, Tiff. Just sit right there on your dumb ass.” Truman yanked open the door.

A woman was standing there in one of Truman’s checked shirts, a length of olive-toned leg visible beneath.

“What’s this?” Truman asked her. “What you want?”

The voice that answered him was faint. “Hello, man.”

From his seat at the table Truman’s friend called out, “Are you the Avon Lady, or what?”

“Listen, honey,” Truman said to her. “You’re welcome to come in—but I believe I’m going to need that shirt back.”

That made Truman’s friend laugh. “This is amazing! I mean, this your birthday or what, Tru?”

From the bathroom, Tiffany heard the flush of the toilet. Dr. Flickinger had finished his business.

The woman at the door shot a hand out and grabbed Truman’s neck. He made a little wheezing noise; his cigarette popped from his mouth. He reached up and dug his fingers into the visitor’s wrist. Tiffany saw the flesh of the woman’s hand whiten under the pressure, but she didn’t let go.

Red spots appeared on Truman’s cheekbones. Blood trickled from the gashes his fingernails were making in the woman’s wrist. She still didn’t let go. The wheezing noise narrowed to a whistle. Truman’s free hand found the grip of the Bowie knife tucked into his belt and pulled it loose.

The woman stepped into the room, her other hand catching the forearm of Truman’s knife hand in mid-stab. She backed him up, slamming him against the opposite wall of the trailer. It happened so quickly that Tiffany was never able to capture the stranger’s face, only the screen of her tangled, shoulder-length hair, which was so dark it seemed to have a green tint.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” said Truman’s friend, scrabbling for the pistol behind a roll of paper towels and rising up from his chair.

On Truman’s cheeks the red spots had expanded into purple clouds. He was making a noise like sneakers squeaking on hardwood, his grimace slipping into a sad clown droop. His eyes rolled. Tiffany could see his heartbeat pulsing in the taut skin to the left of his breastbone. The woman’s strength was astonishing.

“Whoa,” Truman’s friend said yet again, as the woman head-butted Truman. Tru’s nose broke with a firecracker snap.

A thread of blood lashed across the ceiling, a few droplets splashing on the bubble of the light fixture. The moths were going crazy, battering themselves against the fixture, the sound like an ice cube being shaken around in a glass.

When Tiffany’s eyes slipped back down, she saw the woman swinging Truman’s body toward the table. Truman’s friend stood and pointed his gun. The crash of a stone bowling ball boomed through the trailer. An irregular-shaped puzzle piece appeared in Truman’s forehead. A ragged handkerchief fell across Truman’s eye, skin with a section of eyebrow attached, torn loose and hanging down. Blood overspread Truman’s sagging mouth and slid down his chin. The flap of skin with his eyebrow on it flopped against his cheek. Tiffany thought of the mop-like sponges at the carwash that swabbed the windshield.

A second shot ripped a hole through Truman’s shoulder, blood misted over Tiffany’s face, and the woman barreled Truman’s corpse into Truman’s friend. The table collapsed under the weight of the three bodies. Tiffany couldn’t hear her own screaming.

Time jumped.

Tiffany found herself in the corner of the closet, a raincoat pulled up to her chin. A series of muffled, rhythmic thuds made the trailer sway back and forth on its foundation. Tiffany was cast back to a memory of the Charlottesville bistro’s kitchen all those years earlier, the chef using a mallet to pound veal. The thuds were like that, except much, much heavier. There was a pop of ripping metal and plastic, then the thuds ceased. The trailer stopped moving.

A knock shook the closet door.

“Are you okay?” It was the woman.

“Go ’way!” Tiffany howled.

“The one in the bathroom got out the window. I don’t think you have to worry about him.”

“What did you do?” Tiffany sobbed. Truman’s blood was on her and she didn’t want to die.

The woman didn’t answer right away. Not that she needed to. Tiffany had seen what she had done, or seen enough. And heard enough.

“You should rest now,” said the woman. “Just rest.”

A few seconds later Tiffany thought she heard, through the sound baffles left by the gunfire, the click of the exterior door shutting.

She huddled under the raincoat and moaned Truman’s name.

He had taught her how to smoke dope—take small sips, he said. “You’ll feel better.” What a liar. What a bastard he had been, what a monster. So why was she crying over him? She couldn’t help it. She wished she could, but she couldn’t.

The Avon Lady who was not an Avon Lady walked away from the trailer and back toward the meth lab. The smell of propane grew stronger with each step until the air was rancid with it. Her footprints appeared behind her, white and small and delicate, shapes that came from nowhere and seemed to be made of milkweed fluff. The hem of her borrowed shirt fluttered around her long thighs.