Стивен Кинг - If It Bleeds

Chuck himself hasn’t got down on it—that mystical, satisfying it —in years, but every move feels perfect. He lifts one leg and spins on the other heel. Then he clasps his hands behind his back like a schoolboy called on to recite and moonwalks in place on the pavement in front of his briefcase.

The drummer goes “Yow, daddy!” in surprise and delight. He picks up the pace, now going from the cowbell to the floor tom with his left hand, working the kick-pedal, never losing the metallic sighing from the hi-hat. People are gathering. Money is pouring into Magic Hat: paper as well as metal. Something is happening here.

Two young men in matching berets and Rainbow Coalition tees are at the front of the little crowd. One of them tosses what looks like a five into the hat and yells “Go, man, go!”

Chuck doesn’t need the encouragement. He’s into it now. Banking in the twenty-first century has slipped his mind. He frees the button on his suit coat, brushes the coat behind him with the backs of his hands, hooks his thumbs into his belt like a gunslinger, and does a modified split, out and back. He follows with a quick-step and turn. The drummer is laughing and nodding. “You the cheese,” he says. “You the cheese, daddy!”

The crowd is growing, the hat is filling, Chuck’s heart isn’t just beating in his chest but thrumming. Good way to have a heart attack, but he doesn’t care. If his wife saw him doing this she’d shit a brick, and he doesn’t care. His son would be embarrassed, but his son isn’t here. He puts his right shoe on his left calf, spins again, and when he comes back front and center, he sees a pretty young woman standing next to the beret guys. She’s wearing a filmy pink blouse and a red wrap skirt. She’s staring at him with wide, fascinated eyes.

Chuck holds his hands out to her, smiling, snapping his fingers. “Come on,” he says. “Come on, little sister, dance.”

Jared doesn’t think she will—she looks like the shy type—but she walks slowly toward the man in the gray suit. Maybe Magic Hat really is magic.

“Dance!” one of the beret guys says, and others pick it up, clapping along with the beat Jared is laying down: “Dance, dance, dance!”

Janice breaks into a what-the-hell smile, tosses her purse down beside Chuck’s briefcase, and takes his hands. Jared drops what he’s been doing and turns into Charlie Watts, hammering like a soldier. Mr. Businessman twirls the girl, puts a hand on her trim waist, draws her to him, and quick-steps her past the drumkit, almost to the corner of the Walgreens building. Janice pulls away, waving her finger in a “naughty-naughty” gesture, then comes back and grasps both of Chuck’s hands. As if they had practiced this a hundred times, he does another modified split and she shoots between his legs, a daring move that opens the wrap skirt to the top of one pretty thigh. There are a few gasps as she props herself on one tented hand and then springs back up. She’s laughing.

“No more,” Chuck says, patting his chest. “I can’t—”

She springs to him and puts her hands on his shoulders and he can after all. He catches her by the waist, turning her on his hip and then setting her neatly on the pavement. He lifts her left hand and she spins beneath it like a hopped-up ballerina. There must be over a hundred people watching now, they crowd the sidewalk and spill into the street. They burst into fresh applause.

Jared runs the drums one time, hits the cymbals, then holds up his sticks triumphantly. There’s another round of applause. Chuck and Janice are looking at each other, both out of breath. Chuck’s hair, just starting to gray, is stuck to his sweaty forehead.

“What are we doing?” Janice asks. Now that the drums have stopped, she looks dazed.

“I don’t know,” Chuck says, “but that’s the best thing that’s happened to me in I don’t know how long.”

Magic Hat is full to overflowing.

“More!” someone shouts, and the crowd picks it up. There are many phones being held up, ready to catch the next dance, and the girl looks like she would, but she’s young. Chuck is danced out. He looks at the drummer and shakes his head. The drummer gives him a nod to show he understands. Chuck is wondering how many people were quick enough to video that first dance, and what his wife will think if she sees it. Or his son. And suppose it goes viral? Unlikely, but if it does, if it gets back to the bank, what will they think when they see the man they sent to a conference in Boston shaking his booty on Boylston Street with a woman young enough to be his daughter? Or somebody’s little sister. Just what did he think he was doing?

“No more, folks,” the drummer calls. “We gotta quit while we’re ahead.”

“And I need to get home,” the girl says.

“Not yet,” says the drummer. “Please.”

Twenty minutes later they’re sitting on a bench facing the duck pond in Boston Common. Jared called Mac. Chuck and Janice helped Jared pack up his kit and load it in the back of the van. A few people hung out, congratulating them, offering high fives, adding a few more bucks to the overflowing hat. When they’re rolling—Chuck and Janice sitting side by side in the back seat, their feet planted among stacks of comic books—Mac says they’ll never find parking next to the Common.

“We will today,” Jared says. “Today is magic.” And they do, right across from the Four Seasons.

Jared counts out the cash. Somebody has actually tossed in a fifty, maybe the beret guy mistaking it for a five. There’s over four hundred dollars in all. Jared has never had such a day. Never expected to. He sets aside Mac’s ten per cent (Mac is currently standing at the edge of the pond, feeding the ducks from a package of peanut butter crackers he happened to have in his pocket), then begins to divvy up the rest.

“Oh, no,” Janice says when she understands what he’s doing. “That’s yours.”

Jared shakes his head. “Nope, we split even. By myself I wouldn’t have made half this much even if I drummed until midnight.” Not that the cops would ever allow such a thing. “Sometimes I clear thirty bucks, and that’s on a good day.”

Chuck has the beginnings of one of his headaches and knows it’s apt to be bad by nine o’clock, but the young man’s earnestness makes him laugh just the same. “All right. I don’t need it, but I guess I earned it.” He reaches out and pats Janice’s cheek, just as he sometimes used to pat the cheek of the lead singer’s potty-mouthed little sister. “So did you, young lady.”

“Where did you learn to dance like that?” Jared asks Chuck.

“Well, there was an extracurricular called Twirlers and Spinners back in middle school, but it was my grandma who showed me the best moves.”

“You?” he asks Janice.

“Pretty much the same,” she says, and blushes. “High school dances. Where did you learn to drum?”

“Self-taught. Like you,” he says to Chuck. “You were great by yourself, man, but the chick added a whole extra dimension. We could do this for a living, you know it? I really think we could busk our way to fame and fortune.”

For a mad moment Chuck actually considers it, and sees the girl is, too. Not in a serious way, but in the way you daydream of an alternate life. One where you play pro baseball or climb Mount Everest or duet with Bruce Springsteen at a stadium concert. Then Chuck laughs some more and shakes his head. As the girl tucks her third of the take into her purse, she is also laughing.

“It was really all you,” Jared says to Chuck. “What made you stop in front of me? And what made you start moving?”

Chuck thinks that over, then shrugs. He could say it was because he was thinking about that old half-assed band, the Retros, and how he liked to dance across the stage during the instrumental breaks, showing off, swinging that mike stand between his legs, but that’s not it. And really, had he ever danced with such elan and freedom even back then, when he had been a teenager, young and limber, with no headaches and nothing to lose?