Стивен Кинг - If It Bleeds

He spent the morning in the town of Bitter River, but with a box of Kleenex near at hand. When he finished for the day (another eighteen pages, he was absolutely killing it), he was amazed to see he’d used up half the tissues. The wastebasket beside Pop’s old desk was drifted with them. There was a bright side to this; while struggling with Village , he had regularly filled the wastebasket beside his desk with discarded pages of copy: grove or copse? moose or bear? was the sun brilliant or blazing? There was none of that bullshit in the town of Bitter River, which he was increasingly reluctant to leave.

But leave he must. He was down to a few cans of corned beef hash and Beefaroni. The milk was gone, ditto orange juice. He needed eggs, hamburger, maybe some chicken, and for sure half a dozen frozen dinners. Also, he could use a bag of cough drops and a bottle of NyQuil, Lucy’s old standby. The Big 90 would probably have all that stuff. If it didn’t, he’d bite the bullet and drive to St. Christopher. Turn the white lie he’d told Lucy into the truth.

He made his slow, bumping way out Shithouse Road and pulled in at the Big 90. By then he was coughing as well as sneezing, his throat was a little worse, one ear felt stuffed up, and he thought maybe he had a touch of fever, after all. Reminding himself to add a bottle of Aleve or Tylenol to his shopping basket, he went inside.

Roy DeWitt had been replaced behind the counter by a scrawny young woman with purple hair, a nose ring, and what looked like a chrome stud in her lower lip. She was chewing gum. Drew, his mind still turned on from his morning’s work (and maybe, who knew, that little touch of fever), saw her going home to a trailer up on cement blocks and two or three kids with dirty faces and home haircuts, the youngest a toddler dressed in a saggy diaper and a food-stained tee-shirt saying MOMMY’S L’IL MONSTER. That was a meanly vicious stereotype, and elitist as hell, but that didn’t necessarily make it untrue.

Drew grabbed a market basket. “Do you have any fresh meat or produce?”

“Hamburgers and hotdogs in the cooler. Couple of pork chops, maybe. And we got coleslaw.”

Well, he supposed that was produce of a sort. “What about chicken?”

“Nope. Got eggs, though. Might be able to raise a chicken or two from those, would you keep em in a warm place.” She laughed at this sally, exposing brown teeth. Not gum after all. Chaw.

Drew ended up filling two baskets. There was no NyQuil, but there was something called Dr. King’s Cough & Cold Remedy, also Anacin and Goody’s Headache Powder. He topped off his shopping spree with a few cans of chicken noodle soup (Jewish penicillin, his nana had called it), a tub of Shedd’s Spread margarine, and two loaves of bread. It was the spongy white stuff, pretty industrial, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. He saw soup and a toasted cheese sandwich in his not-too-distant future. Good grub for a man with a sore throat.

The counter woman rang him up, chewing away as she did it. Drew was fascinated by the rise and fall of the stud in her lip. How old would Mommy’s l’il monster be before she had one just like it? Fifteen? Eleven, maybe? He told himself again that he was being an elitist, an elitist asshole, in fact, but his overstimulated mind kept running along a trail of associations just the same. Welcome Walmart shoppers. Pampers, inspired by babies. I love a man with a Skoal ring. Each day is a page in your fashion diary. Lock her up send her b—

“Hundred and eight-seventy,” she said, snapping the flow of his thoughts.

“Holy crow, really?”

She smiled, revealing teeth he could have done without seeing again. “You want to shop out here in the willies, Mr.… Larson, is it?”

“Yes. Drew Larson.”

“You want to shop out here in the willies, Mr. Larson, you gotta be prepared to pay the price.”

“Where’s Roy today?”

She rolled her eyes. “Dad’s in the hospital, over St. Christopher. Got the flu, wouldn’t go see the doctor, had to be a man about it, and it went pneumonia. My sister’s sittin my kids so I can mind his business and lemme tell you, she ain’t happy about it.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” In truth, he didn’t care much one way or the other about Roy DeWitt. What he cared about, what he was thinking about, was DeWitt’s snot-clotted bandanna. And how he, Drew, had shaken the hand that had been using it.

“Not as sorry as I am. We’ll be busy tomorrow with that storm comin in over the weekend.” She pointed two spread fingers at his baskets. “I hope you c’n pay cash for that, the credit machine’s busted and Dad keeps forgettin to get it fixed.”

“I can do that. What storm?”

“A norther, that’s what they’re sayin on the Rivière-du-Loup. Quebec radio station, you know.” She pronounced it Kwa-beck . “Lots of wind and rain. Comin in day after tomorrow. You’re out there on the Shithouse, ain’tcha?”

“Yes.”

“Well, if you don’t want to be out there for the next month or so, you might want to pack up your groceries and your luggage and head back down south.”

Drew was familiar with this attitude. Up here on the TR, it didn’t matter if you were a Maine native; if you didn’t come from Aroostook County, you were considered a namby-pamby flatlander who couldn’t tell a spruce from a pine. And if you lived south of Augusta, you might as well be just another Masshole, by gorry.

“I think I’ll be okay,” he said, taking out his wallet. “I live on the coast. We’ve seen our share of nor’easters.”

She looked at him with what might have been pity. “Not talking about a nor’easter, Mr. Larson. Talking about a norther , comin straight across O Canador from the Arctic Circle. Temperature’s gonna fall off the table, they say. Goodbye sixty-five, hello thirty-eight. Could go lower. Then you got your sleet flyin horizontal at thirty miles per. You get stuck out there on Shithouse Road, you stuck .”

“I’ll be okay,” Drew said. “It’ll be—” He stopped. He had been about to say It’ll be like taking dictation .

“What?”

“Fine. It’ll be fine.”

“You better hope so.”

On his way back to the cabin—the sun flaring in his eyes and kicking off a headache to go with his other symptoms—Drew brooded on that snotty bandanna. Also on how Roy DeWitt had tried to man through it and wound up in the hospital.

He glanced into the rearview mirror and briefly regarded his red, watery eyes. “I am not getting the fucking flu. Not when I’m on a roll.” Okay, but why in God’s name had he shaken that son of a bitch’s hand, when it had undoubtedly been crawling with germs? Ones so big you’d hardly need a microscope to see them? And since he had, why hadn’t he asked for the bathroom so he could wash them? Christ, his kids knew about hand-washing. He’d taught them himself.

“I am not getting the fucking flu,” he repeated, then dropped the visor to keep the sun out of his eyes. To keep it from flaring in his eyes.

Flaring? Or glaring? Was glaring better, or was it too much?

He mused on this as he drove back to the cabin. He brought his groceries in and saw the message light was flashing. It was Lucy, asking that he call back as soon as possible. He felt that tug of annoyance again, the sense that she was looking over his shoulder, but then he realized it might not be about him. After all, not everything was. One of the kids might have gotten sick or had an accident.

He called, and for the first time in a long time—since The Village on the Hill , probably—they argued. Not as bad as some of the arguments they’d had in the first years of their marriage, when the kids had been small and money tight, those had been doozies, but bad enough. She had also heard about the storm (of course she had, she was a Weather Channel addict), and she wanted him to pack up and come home.