Stephen King - Skeleton Crew

“You’re a good boy, George. Don’t be scared. You’re not scared of Gramma anymore, are you?”

“Huh-uh,” George said. He smiled. The smile felt pretty good; the smile of a fellow who was laying chilly with negative perspiration on his brow, the smile of a fellow who Had It Knocked, the smile of a fellow who was most definitely not six anymore. He swallowed. It was a great smile, but beyond it, down in the darkness behind his smile, was one very dry throat. It felt as if his throat was lined with mitten-wool. “Tell Buddy I’m sorry he broke his leg.”

“I will,” she said, and went to the door again. Four-o’clock sunshine slanted in through the window. “Thank God we took the sports insurance, Georgie. I don’t know what we’d do if we didn’t have it.”

“Tell him I hope he tagged the sucker out.”

She smiled her distracted smile, a woman of just past fifty with two late sons, one thirteen, one eleven, and no man. This time she opened the door, and a cool whisper of October came in through the sheds.

“And remember, Dr. Arlinder — ”

“Sure,” he said. “You better go or his leg’ll be fixed by the time you get there.”

“She’ll probably sleep the whole time,” Mom said. “I love you, Georgie. You’re a good son.” She closed the door on that.

George went to the window and watched her hurry to the old ’69 Dodge that burned too much gas and oil, digging the keys from her purse. Now that she was out of the house and didn’t know George was looking at her, the distracted smile fell away and she only looked distracted — distracted and sick with worry about Buddy. George felt bad for her. He didn’t waste any similar feelings on Buddy, who liked to get him down and sit on top of him with a knee on each of George’s shoulders and tap a spoon in the middle of George’s forehead until he just about went crazy (Buddy called it the Spoon Torture of the Heathen Chinee and laughed like a madman and sometimes went on doing it until George cried), Buddy who sometimes gave him the Indian Rope Burn so hard that little drops of blood would appear on George’s forearm, sitting on top of the pores like dew on blades of grass at dawn, Buddy who had listened so sympathetically when George had one night whispered in the dark of their bedroom that he liked Heather MacArdle and who the next morning ran across the schoolyard screaming GEORGE AND HEATHER UP IN A TREE, KAY-EYE-ESS-ESS-EYE-EN-GEE! FIRSE COMES LOVE AN THEN COMES MARRITCH! HERE COMES HEATHER WITH A BABY CARRITCH! like a runaway fire engine. Broken legs did not keep older brothers like Buddy down for long, but George was rather looking forward to the quiet as long as this one did. Let’s see you give me the Spoon Torture of the Heathen Chinee with your leg in a cast, Buddy. Sure, kid — EVERY day.

The Dodge backed out of the driveway and paused while his mother looked both ways, although nothing would be coming; nothing ever was. His mother would have a two-mile ride over washboards and ruts before she even got to tar, and it was nineteen miles to Lewiston after that.

She backed all the way out and drove away. For a moment dust hung in the bright October afternoon air, and then it began to settle.

He was alone in the house.

With Gramma.

He swallowed.

Hey! Negative perspiration! Just lay chilly, right?

“Right,” George said in a low voice, and walked across the small, sunwashed kitchen. He was a towheaded, good-looking boy with a spray of freckles across his nose and cheeks and a look of good humor in his darkish gray eyes.

Buddy’s accident had occurred while he had been playing in the Pony League championship game this October 5th. George’s Pee Wee League team, the Tigers, had been knocked out of their tournament on the first day, two Saturdays ago (What a bunch of babies! Buddy had exulted as George walked tearfully off the field. What a bunch of PUSSIES!)… and now Buddy had broken his leg. If Mom wasn’t so worried and scared, George would have been almost happy.

There was a phone on the wall, and next to it was a note-minder board with a grease pencil hanging beside it. In the upper corner of the board was a cheerful country Gramma, her cheeks rosy, her white hair done up in a bun; a cartoon Gramma who was pointing at the board. There was a comic-strip balloon coming out of the cheerful country Gramma’s mouth and she was saying, “REMEMBER THIS, SONNY!” Written on the board in his mother’s sprawling hand was Dr. Arlinder, 681-4330. Mom hadn’t written the number there just today, because she had to go to Buddy; it had been there almost three weeks now, because Gramma was having her “bad spells” again.

George picked up the phone and listened.

“ — so I told her, I said, ‘Mabel, if he treats you like that — ’ ”

He put it down again. Henrietta Dodd. Henrietta was always on the phone, and if it was in the afternoon you could always hear the soap opera stories going on in the background. One night after she had a glass of wine with Gramma (since she started having the “bad spells” again, Dr. Arlinder said Gramma couldn’t have the wine with her supper, so Mom didn’t either — George was sorry, because the wine made Mom sort of giggly and she would tell stories about her girlhood), Mom had said that every time Henrietta Dodd opened her mouth, all her guts fell out. Buddy and George laughed wildly, and Mom put a hand to her mouth and said Don’t you EVER tell anyone I said that, and then she began to laugh too, all three of them sitting at the supper table laughing, and at last the racket had awakened Gramma, who slept more and more, and she began to cry Ruth! Ruth! ROO-OOOTH! in that high, querulous voice of hers, and Mom had stopped laughing and went into her room.

Today Henrietta Dodd could talk all she wanted, as far as George was concerned. He just wanted to make sure the phone was working. Two weeks ago there had been a bad storm, and since then it went out sometimes.

He found himself looking at the cheery cartoon Gramma again, and wondered what it would be like to have a Gramma like that. His Gramma was huge and fat and blind; the hypertension had made her senile as well. Sometimes, when she had her “bad spells,” she would (as Mom put it) “act out the Tartar,” calling for people who weren’t there, holding conversations with total emptiness, mumbling strange words that made no sense. On one occasion when she was doing this last, Mom had turned white and had gone in and told her to shut up, shut up, shut up! George remembered that occasion very well, not only because it was the only time Mom had ever actually yelled at Gramma, but because it was the next day that someone discovered that the Birches cemetery out on the Maple Sugar Road had been vandalized — gravestones knocked over, the old nineteenth-century gates pulled down, and one or two of the graves actually dug up — or something. Desecrated was the word Mr. Burdon, the principal, had used the next day when he convened all eight grades for Assembly and lectured the whole school on Malicious Mischief and how some things Just Weren’t Funny. Going home that night, George had asked Buddy what desecrated meant, and Buddy said it meant digging up graves and pissing on the coffins, but George didn’t believe that… unless it was late. And dark.

Gramma was noisy when she had her “bad spells,” but mostly she just lay in the bed she had taken to three years before, a fat slug wearing rubber pants and diapers under her flannel nightgown, her face runneled with cracks and wrinkles, her eyes empty and blind — faded blue irises floating atop yellowed corneas.

At first Gramma hadn’t been totally blind. But she had been going blind, and she had to have a person at each elbow to help her totter from her white vinyl egg-and-baby-powder-smelling chair to her bed or the bathroom. In those days, five years ago, Gramma had weighed well over two hundred pounds.