“You give those cartwheels to your kids,” he repeated, and slipped out into the night.
“What the blue hell? Annie asked, but Ricky Lee ignored her. He flipped up the bar’s partition and ran over to one of the windows which looked out on the parking lot. He saw the headlights of Mr Hanscom’s Caddy come on, heard the engine rev. It pulled out of the dirt lot, kicking up a rooster-tail of dust behind it. The taillights dwindled away to red points down Highway 63, and the Nebraska nightwind began to pull the hanging dust apart.
“He took on a boxcar full of booze and you let him get in that big car of his and drive away,” Annie said. “Way to go, Ricky Lee.”
“Never mind.”
“He’s going to kill himself.”
And although this had been Ricky Lee’s own thought less than five minutes ago, he turned to her when the taillights winked out of sight and shook his head.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Although the way he looked tonight, it might be better for him if he did.”
“What did he say to you?”
He shook his head. It was all confused in his mind, and the sum total of it seemed to mean nothing. “It doesn’t matter. But I don’t think we’re ever going to see that old boy again.”
4
EDDIE KASPBRAK TAKES HIS MEDICINE
If you would know all there is to know about an American man or woman of the middle class as the millennium nears its end, you would need only to look in his or her medicine cabinet-or so it has been said. But dear Lord, get a look into this one as Eddie Kaspbrak slides it open, mercifully sliding aside his white face and wide, staring eyes.
On the top shelf there’s Anacin, Excedrin, Excedrin PM, Contac, Gelusil, Tylenol, and a large blue jar of Vicks, looking like a bit of brooding deep twilight under glass. There is a bottle of Vivarin, a bottle of Serutan (That’s “Nature’s” spelled backwards, the ads on Lawrence Welk used to say when Eddie Kaspbrak was but a wee slip of a lad), and two bottles of Phillips Milk of Magnesia-the regular, which tastes like liquid chalk, and the new mint flavor, which tastes like mint-flavored liquid chalk. Here is a large bottle of Rolaids standing chummily close to a large bottle of Turns. The Turns are standing next to a large bottle of orange-flavored Di-Gel tablets. The three of them look like a trio of strange piggy-banks, stuffed with pills instead of dimes.
Second shelf, and dig the vites: you got your E, your C, your C with rosehips. You got B-simple and B-complex and B-12. There’s L-Lysine, which is supposed to do something about those embarrassing skin problems, and lecithin, which is supposed to do something about that embarrassing cholesterol build-up in and around the Big Pump. There’s iron, calcium, and cod liver oil. There’s One-A-Day multiples, Myadec multiples, Centrum multiples. And sitting up on top of the cabinet itself is a gigantic bottle of Geritol, just for good measure.
Moving right along to Eddie’s third shelf, we find the utility infielders of the patent-medicine world. Ex-Lax. Carter’s Little Pills. Those two keep Eddie Kaspbrak moving the mail. Here, nearby, is Kaopectate, Pepto-Bismol, and Preparation H in case the mail moves too fast or too painfully. Also some Tucks in a screw-top jar just to keep everything tidy after the mail has gone through, be it just an advertising circular or two addressed to OCCUPANT or a big old special-delivery package. Here is Formula 44 for coughs, Nyquil and Dristan for colds, and a big bottle of castor oil. There’s a tin of Sucrets in case Eddie’s throat gets sore, and there’s a quartet of mouthwashes: Chloraseptic, Cepacol, Cepestat in the spray bottle, and of course good old Listerine, often imitated but never duplicated. Visine and Murine for the eyes. Cortaid and Neosporin ointment for the skin (the second line of defense if the L-Lysine doesn’t live up to expectations), a tube of Oxy-5 and a plastic bottle of Oxy-Wash (because Eddie would definitely rather have a few less cents than a few more zits), and some tetracyline pills.
And off to one side, clustered like bitter conspirators, are three bottles of coal-tar shampoo.
The bottom shelf is almost deserted, but the stuff which is here means serious business-you could cruise on this stuff, okay. On this stuff you could fly higher than Ben Hanscom’s jet and crash harder than Thurman Munson’s. There’s Valium, Percodan, Elavil, and Darvon Complex. There is also another Sucrets box on this low shelf, but there are no Sucrets in it. If you opened that one you would find six Quaaludes.
Eddie Kaspbrak believed in the Boy Scout motto.
He was swinging a blue tote-bag as he came into the bathroom. He set it on the sink, unzipped it, and then, with trembling hands, he began to spill bottles and jars and tubes and squeeze-bottles and spray-bottles into it. Under other circumstances he would have taken them out handful by careful handful, but there was no time for such niceties now. The choice, as Eddie saw it, was as simple as it was brutal: get moving and keep moving or stand in one place long enough to start thinking about what all of this meant and simply die of fright.
“Eddie?” Myra called up from downstairs. “Eddie, what are you dooooing?
Eddie dropped the Sucrets box containing the “ludes into the bag. The medicine cabinet was now entirely empty except for Myra’s Midol and a small, almost used-up tube of Blistex. He paused for a moment and then grabbed the Blistex. He started to zip the bag closed, debated, and then threw in the Midol as well. She could always buy more.
“Eddie?” from halfway up the stairs now.
Eddie zipped the bag the rest of the way closed and then left the bathroom, swinging it by his side. He was a short man with a timid, rabbity sort of face. Much of his hair was gone; what was left grew in listless, piebald patches. The weight of the bag pulled him noticeably to one side.
An extremely large woman was climbing slowly to the second floor. Eddie could hear the stairs creak protestingly under her.
“What are you DOOOOOOOOING?”
Eddie did not need a shrink to tell him that he had, in a sense, married his mother. Myra Kaspbrak was huge. She had only been big when Eddie married her five years ago, but he sometimes thought his subconscious had seen the potential for hugeness in her; God knew his own mother had been a whopper. And she looked somehow more huge than ever as she reached the second-floor landing. She was wearing a white nightgown which swelled, comberlike, at bosom and hip. Her face, devoid of make-up, was white and shiny. She looked badly frightened.
“I have to go away for awhile,” Eddie said.
“What do you mean, you have to go away? What was that telephone call?”
“Nothing,” he said, fleeing abruptly down the hallway to their walk-in closet. He put the tote-bag down, opened the closet’s fold-back door, and raked aside the half-dozen identical black suits which hung there, as conspicuous as a thundercloud among the other, more brightly colored, clothes. He always wore one of the black suits when he was working. He bent into the closet, smelling mothballs and wool, and pulled out one of the suitcases from the back. He opened it and began throwing clothes in.
Her shadow fell over him.
“What’s this about, Eddie? Where are you going? You tell me!”
“I can’t tell you.”
She stood there, watching him, trying to decide what to say next, or what to do. The thought of simply bundling him into the closet and then standing with her back against the door until this madness had passed crossed her mind, but she was unable to bring herself to do it, although she certainly could have; she was three inches taller than Eddie and outweighed him by a hundred pounds. She couldn’t think of what to do or say, because this was so utterly unlike him. She could not have been any more dismayed and frightened if she had walked into the television room and found their new big-screen TV floating in the air.
“You can’t go,” she heard herself saying. “You promised you’d get me Al Pacino’s autograph.” It was an absurdity-God knew it was-but at this point even an absurdity was better than nothing.
“You’ll still get it,” Eddie said. “You’ll have to drive him yourself.”
Oh, here was a new terror to join those already circling in her poor dazzled head. She uttered a small scream. “I can’t-I never-”
“You’ll have to,” he said. He was examining his shoes now. “There’s no one else.”
“Neither of my uniforms fit anymore! They’re too tight in the tits!”
“Have Delores let one of them out,” he said implacably. He threw two pairs of shoes back, found an empty shoebox, and popped a third pair into it. Good black shoes, plenty of use left in them still, but looking just a bit too worn to wear on the job. When you drove rich people around New York for a living, many of them famous rich people, everything had to look just right. These shoes no longer looked just right… but he supposed they would do for where he was going. And for whatever he might have to do when he got there. Maybe Richie Tozier would -
But then the blackness threatened and he felt his throat beginning to close up. Eddie realized with real panic that he had packed the whole damned drugstore and had left the most important thing of all-his aspirator-downstairs on top of the stereo cabinet.
He banged the suitcase closed and latched it. He looked around at Myra, who was standing there in the hallway with her hand pressed against the short thick column of her neck as if she were the one with the asthma. She was staring at him, her face full of perplexity and terror, and he might have felt sorry for her if his heart had not already been so filled with terror for himself.
“What’s happened, Eddie? Who was that on the telephone? Are you in trouble? You are, aren’t you? What kind of trouble are you in?”
He walked toward her, zipper-bag in one hand and suitcase in the other, standing more or less straight now that he was more evenly weighted. She moved in front of him, blocking off the stairway, and at first he thought she would not give way. Then, when his face was about to crash into the soft roadblock of her breasts, she did give way… fearfully. As he walked past, never slowing, she burst into miserable tears.
“I can’t drive Al Pacino!” she bawled. “I’ll smash into a stop-sign or something, I know I will! Eddie I’m scaaarrred!”
He looked at the Seth Thomas clock on the table by the stairs. Twenty past nine. The canned-sounding Delta clerk had told him he had already missed the last flight north to Maine-that one had left La Guardia at eight-twenty-five. He had called Amtrak and discovered there was a late train to Boston departing Perm Station at eleven-thirty. It would drop him off at South Station, where he could take a cab to the offices of Cape Cod Limousine on Arlington Street. Cape Cod and Eddie’s company, Royal Crest, had worked out a useful and friendly reciprocal arrangement over the years. A quick call to Butch Carrington in Boston had taken care of his transportation north-Butch said he would have a Cadillac limo gassed and ready for him. So he would go in style, and with no pain-in-the- ass client sitting in the back seat, stinking the air up with a big cigar and asking if Eddie knew where he could score a broad or a few grams of coke or both.
Going in style, all right, he thought. Only way you could go in more style would be if you were going in a hearse. But don’t worry, Eddie-that’s probably how you’ll come back. If there’s enough of you left to pick up, that is.
“Eddie?”
Nine-twenty. Plenty of time to talk to her, plenty of time to be kind. Ah, but it would have been so much better if this had been her whist night, if he could have just slipped out, leaving a note under one of the magnets on the refrigerator door (the refrigerator door was where he left all his notes for Myra, because there she never missed them). Leaving that way-like a fugitive-would not have been good, but this was even worse. This was like having to leave home all over again, and that had been so hard he’d had to do it three times.
Sometimes home is where the heart is, Eddie thought randomly. I believe that. Old Bobby Frost said home’s the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. Unfortunately, it’s also the place where, once you’re in there, they don’t ever want to let you out.
He stood at the head of the stairs, forward motion temporarily spent, filled with fear, breath wheezing noisily in and out of the pinhole his throat had become, and regarded his weeping wife.
“Come on downstairs with me and I’ll tell you what I can,” he said.
Eddie put his two bags-clothes in one, medicine in the other-by the door in the front hall. He remembered something else then… or rather the ghost of his mother, who had been dead many years but who still spoke frequently in his mind, remembered for him.
You know when your feet get wet you always get a cold, Eddie-you’re not like other people, you have a very weak system, you have to be careful. That’s why you must always wear your rubbers
