Стивен Кинг - If It Bleeds

“It was magic,” Janice says. She giggles. She didn’t expect to hear that sound coming from her today. Crying, yes. Giggling, no. “Like your hat.”

Mac comes back. “Jere, we gotta roll or you’re gonna end up spending your take paying for my parking ticket.”

Jared stands up. “Sure you don’t want to change career streams, you two? We could busk this town from Beacon Hill to Roxbury. Make a name for ourselves.”

“I’ve got a conference to attend tomorrow,” Chuck says. “On Saturday I’m flying home. I’ve got a wife and son waiting for me.”

“And I can’t do it by myself,” Janice says, smiling. “It would be like Ginger without Fred.”

“I hear that,” Jared says, and holds out his arms. “But you have to get in here before you go. Group hug.”

They join him. Chuck knows they can smell his sweat—this suit will have to be dry-cleaned before he wears it again, and strenuously—and he can smell theirs. It’s all right. He thinks the girl nailed it when she used the word magic. Sometimes there is such a thing. Not much, but a little. Like finding a forgotten twenty in the pocket of an old coat.

“Buskers forever,” Jared says.

Chuck Krantz and Janice Halliday repeat it.

“Buskers forever,” Mac says, “great. Now let’s get out of here before a meter maid shows up, Jere.”

Chuck tells Janice he’s headed to the Boston Hotel, past the Prudential Center, if she’s going that way. Janice was, the plan had been to walk all the way to Fenway, brooding about her ex-boyfriend and muttering doleful shit to her purse, but she’s changed her mind. She says she’ll take the T from Arlington Street.

He walks her there, the two of them cutting across the park. At the head of the stairs, she turns to him and says, “Thank you for the dance.”

He gives her a bow. “It was my pleasure.”

He watches her until she’s out of sight, then heads back down Boylston. He walks slowly because his back hurts, his legs hurt, and his head is throbbing. He can’t remember having bad headaches like this in his whole life. Not until a couple of months ago, that is. He supposes if they keep up, he’ll have to see a doctor. He supposes he knows what this might be.

All that’s for later, though. If at all. Tonight he thinks he’ll treat himself to a good dinner—why not, he’s earned it—and a glass of wine. On second thought, make it Evian. Wine might intensify his headache. When he’s finished his meal—dessert definitely included—he’ll call Ginny and tell her that her husband might be the next one-day Internet sensation. That probably won’t happen, somewhere right now someone is undoubtedly filming a dog juggling empty soda bottles and someone else is memorializing a goat smoking a cigar, but it’s better to get out front with it, just in case.

As he passes the place where Jared set up his drums, those two questions recur: why did you stop to listen, and why did you start to dance? He doesn’t know, and would answers make a good thing better?

Later he will lose the ability to walk, never mind dancing with little sister on Boylston Street. Later he will lose the ability to chew food, and his meals will come from a blender. Later he will lose his grip on the difference between waking and sleeping and enter a land of pain so great that he will wonder why God made the world. Later he will forget his wife’s name. What he will remember—occasionally—is how he stopped, and dropped his briefcase, and began to move his hips to the beat of the drums, and he will think that is why God made the world. Just that.

Chuck was looking forward to having a baby sister. His mother promised he could hold her if he was very careful. Of course he was also looking forward to having parents, but none of that worked out thanks to an icy patch on an I-95 overpass. Much later, in college, he would tell a girlfriend that there were all sorts of novels, movies, and TV shows where a main character’s parents died in a car crash, but he was the only person he knew who’d had that happen in real life.

The girlfriend thought this over, then rendered her verdict. “I’m sure it happens all the time, although partners can also be taken in housefires, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, and avalanches while on ski vacations. To name only a few of the possibilities. And what makes you think you’re a main character in anything but your own mind?”

She was a poet and sort of a nihilist. The relationship only lasted a semester.

Chuck wasn’t in the car when it went flying upside-down from the turnpike overpass because his parents were having a dinner date and he was being babysat by his grandparents, who at that time he was still calling Zaydee and Bubbie (this mostly ended in the third grade, when kids made fun of him and he reverted to the more all-American Grandma and Grandpa). Albie and Sarah Krantz lived just a mile down the road, and it was natural enough for them to raise him after the accident when he became what he first believed to be an orphant. He was seven.

For a year—maybe a year and a half—that was a house of unadulterated sadness. The Krantzes had not only lost their son and daughter-in-law, they had lost the granddaughter who would have been born just three months later. The name had already been picked out: Alyssa. When Chuck said that sounded to him like rain, his mother had laughed and cried at the same time.

He never forgot that.

He knew his other grandparents of course, there were visits every summer, but they were basically strangers to him. They called a lot after he became an orphant, your basic how-are-you-doing-how’s-school calls, and the summer visits continued; Sarah (aka Bubbie, aka Grandma) took him on the plane. But his mother’s parents remained strangers, living in the foreign land of Omaha. They sent him presents on his birthday and at Christmas—the latter especially nice since Grandma and Grandpa didn’t “do” Christmas—but otherwise he continued to think of them as outliers, like the teachers who were left behind as he moved up through the grades.

Chuck began to slip his metaphorical mourning garments first, necessarily pulling his grandparents (old, yeah, but not ancient ) out of their own grief. There came a time, when Chuck was ten, that they took the boy to Disney World. They had adjoining rooms at the Swan Resort, the door between the rooms kept open at night, and Chuck only heard his grandma crying once. Mostly, they had fun.

Some of that good feeling came back home with them. Chuck sometimes heard Grandma humming in the kitchen, or singing along with the radio. There had been lots of take-out meals after the accident (and whole recyclable bins full of Grandpa’s Budweiser bottles), but in the year after Disney World, Grandma began cooking again. Good meals that put weight on a formerly skinny boy.

She liked rock and roll while she was cooking, music Chuck would have thought much too young for her, but which she clearly enjoyed. If Chuck wandered into the kitchen looking for a cookie or maybe hoping to make a brown-sugar roll-up with a slice of Wonder Bread, Grandma was apt to hold out her hands to him and start snapping her fingers. “Dance with me, Henry,” she’d say.

His name was Chuck, not Henry, but he usually took her up on it. She taught him jitterbug steps and a couple of crossover moves. She told him there were more, but her back was too creaky to attempt them. “I can show you, though,” she said, and one Saturday brought back a stack of videotapes from the Blockbuster store. There was Swing Time , with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, West Side Story , and Chuck’s favorite, Singin’ in the Rain , where Gene Kelly danced with a lamppost.