Стивен Кинг - If It Bleeds

Instead of going for an afternoon walk, he turned on the TV and after a lengthy hunt through the DirecTV onscreen guide, found the Weather Channel. Having access to such a bewildering array of video input up here in the williwags might have amused him on another day, but not on this one. His long session at the laptop had left him wrung out, almost hollowed out, instead of energized. Why in God’s name had he shaken DeWitt’s hand? Common politeness, of course, and completely understandable, but why in God’s name hadn’t he washed afterwards?

Been through all that , he thought.

Yes, and here it was again, gnawing away. It sort of reminded him of his catastrophic last try at novel-writing, when he would lie awake long after Lucy had gone to sleep, mentally deconstructing and reconstructing the few paragraphs he’d managed that day, picking at the work until it bled.

Stop. That’s the past. This is now. Watch the goddam weather report.

But it wasn’t a report; the Weather Channel would never be so minimalist. This was a fucking opera of doom and gloom. Drew hadn’t been able to understand his wife’s love affair with the Weather Channel, which seemed populated solely by meteorological geeks. As if to underline this, they now gave names to even non-hurricane storms. The one the store clerk had warned him about, the one his wife was so worried about, had been dubbed Pierre. Drew could not conceive of a stupider name for a storm. It was swooping down from Saskatchewan on a northeast track (which made the woman with the lip stud full of shit, it was a nor’easter) that would bring it to TR-90 either tomorrow afternoon or evening. It was packing forty-mile-an-hour sustained winds, with gusts up to sixty-five.

“You might think that doesn’t sound too bad,” said the current weather geek, a young man with a fashionable beard scruff that made Drew’s eyes hurt. Mr. Scruffy was a poet of the Pierre Apocalypse, not quite speaking in iambic pentameter, but close. “What you need to remember, though, is that temperatures are going to fall radically when this front comes through, I mean they’re gonna drop off the table . Rain could turn to sleet , and you drivers up there in northern New England can’t discount the possibility of black ice .”

Maybe I should go home , Drew thought.

But it was no longer just the book that was keeping him. The idea of that long drive out Shithouse Road feeling as drained as he did today made him even more tired. And when he finally made it to something approximating civilization, was he supposed to go tooling down I-95 sipping away at alcohol-laced cold medicine?

“The major thing, though,” the scruffy weather geek was saying, “is that this baby is going to meet a ridge of high pressure coming in from east —a very unusual phenomenon. That means our friends north of Boston could be in for what the old Yankees called a three-day blow .”

Blow on this , Drew thought, and grabbed his crotch.

Later, after an unsuccessful try at napping—all he did was toss and turn—Lucy called. “Listen to me, Mister.” He hated when she called him that, it was like fingers dragged down a blackboard. “The forecast is only getting worse. You need to come home.”

“Lucy, it’s a storm, what my Pop used to call a cap of wind. Not nuclear war.”

“You need to come home while you still can.”

He had had enough of this, and enough of her. “No. I need to be here.”

“You’re a fool,” she said. Then, for the first time he could remember, she hung up on him.

Drew turned on the Weather Channel as soon as he got up the following morning, thinking As a dog returneth to its vomit, so a fool repeateth his folly .

He was hoping to hear that Autumn Storm Pierre had changed course. It had not. Nor had his cold changed course. It didn’t seem worse, but it didn’t seem better, either. He called Lucy and got her voicemail. Possibly she was running errands; possibly she just didn’t want to talk with him. That was okay with Drew either way. She was pissed at him, but she would get over it; no one trashed fifteen years of marriage over a storm, did they? Especially not one named Pierre.

Drew scrambled a couple of eggs and managed to eat half of them before his stomach warned him that stuffing down more might lead to a forcible ejection. He scraped his plate into the garbage, sat down in front of the laptop, and called up the current document (BITTER RIVER #3). He scrolled to where he had left off, looked at the white space beneath the blinking cursor, and started to fill it. The work went all right for the first hour or so, and then the trouble began. It started with the rocking chairs Sheriff Averill and his three deputies were meant to sit in outside the Bitter River jail.

They had to be sitting out front, in full view of the townsfolk and Dick Prescott’s gun thugs, because that was the basis of the clever plan Averill had hatched to get Prescott’s son out of town under the very noses of the hard men who were supposed to keep it from happening. The lawmen had to be seen, especially the deputy named Cal Hunt, who happened to be about the same height and build as the Prescott boy.

Hunt was wearing a colorful Mexican serape and a ten-gallon hat decorated with silver conchos. The hat’s extravagant brim obscured his face. That was important. The serape and hat weren’t Deputy Hunt’s; he said he felt like a fool in a hat like that. Sheriff Averill didn’t care. He wanted Prescott’s men to be looking at the clothes, and not the man inside them.

All fine. Good storytelling. Then the trouble came.

“All right,” Sheriff Averill told his deputies. “It’s time we took a little night air. Be seen by whoever wants to look at us. Hank, bring that jug. I want to be sure those boys on the rooftops get a good look at the dumb sheriff getting drunk with his even dumber deputies.”

“Do I have to wear this hat?” Cal Hunt almost moaned. “I’ll never live it down!”

“What you ought to be concerned about is living through the night,” Averill said. “Now come on. Let’s just get these rocking chairs outside and

That was where Drew stopped, transfixed by the image of the tiny Bitter River sheriff’s office containing three rocking chairs. No, four rocking chairs, because you had to add one for Averill himself. That was a lot more absurd than the ten-gallon, face-obscuring Stetson Cal Hunt was wearing, and not only because four rockers would fill the whole damn room. The whole idea of rocking chairs was antithetical to law enforcement, even in a small western town like Bitter River. People would laugh. Drew deleted most of the sentence and looked at what was left.

Let’s just get these

These what? Chairs? Would the sheriff’s office even have four chairs? It seemed unlikely. “Not like there’s a fucking waiting room,” Drew said, and wiped his forehead. “Not in a—” A sneeze surprised him and he let go before he could cover his mouth, spattering the laptop’s screen with a fine spray of spittle, distorting the words.

“Fuck! Goddam fuck !”

He grabbed for tissues to wipe the screen, but the Kleenex box was empty. He got a dishtowel instead, and when he’d finished cleaning the screen, he thought of how much the soggy dishtowel looked like Roy DeWitt’s bandanna. His besnotted bandanna.

Let’s just get these

Was his fever worse? Drew didn’t want to believe that, wanted to believe the growing heat he felt (plus the increased throbbing in his head) was just the pressure of trying to solve this idiotic rocking chair problem so he could move on, but it certainly seemed like—