The coins clicked on the glass.
The man bent forward and studied the pile. “That looks about right,” he remarked, and brushed the feather-duster over the meager collection. When he removed it again, the knife, the lighter, and the Certs were still there. The coins were gone.
Hugh observed this with no surprise at all. He stood as silently as a toy with dead batteries while the tall man went to the display window and came back with the fox-brush. He laid it on top of the cabinet beside Hugh’s shrunken pile of pocket paraphernalia.
Slowly, Hugh stretched out one hand and stroked the fur. it felt cold and rich; it crackled with silky static electricity.
Stroking it was like stroking a clear autumn night.
“Nice?” the tall man asked.
“Nice,” Hugh agreed distantly, and made to pick up the foxtail.
“Don’t do that,” the tall man said sharply, and Hugh’s hand fell away at once. He looked at Gaunt with a hurt so deep it was grief.
“We’re not done dickering yet.”
“No,” Hugh agreed. I’m hypnotized, he thought. Damned if the guy hasn’t hypnotized me. But it didn’t matter. It was, in fact, sort of… nice.
He reached for his wallet again, moving as slowly as a man under water.
“Leave that alone, you ass,” Mr. Gaunt said impatiently, and laid his feather-duster aside.
Hugh’s hand dropped to his side again.
“Why is it that so many people think all the answers are in their wallets?” the man asked querulously.
“I don’t know,” Hugh said. He had never considered the idea before. “It does seem a little silly.”
“Worse,” Gaunt snapped. His voice had taken on the nagging, slightly uneven cadences of a man who is either very tired or very angry. He was tired; it had been a long, demanding day. Much had been accomplished, but the work was still just barely begun. “It’s much worse. It’s criminally stupid! Do you know something, Hugh?
The world is full of needy people who don’t understand that everything, everything, is for sale… if you’re willing to pay the price.
They give lip-service to the concept, that’s all, and pride themselves on their healthy cynicism. Well, lip-service is bushwah!
Absolute… bushwah!”
“Bushwah,” Hugh agreed mechanically.
“For the things people really need, Hugh, the wallet is no answer.
The fattest wallet in this town isn’t worth the sweat from a working man’s armpit. Absolute bushwah! And souls! If I had a nickel, Hugh, for every time I ever heard someone say I’d sell my soul for thusand-such,’ I could buy the Empire State Building!” He leaned closer and now his lips stretched back from his uneven teeth in a huge unhealthy grin. “Tell me this, Hugh: what in the name of all the beasts crawling under the earth would I want with your soul?”
“Probably nothing.” His voice seemed far away. His voice seemed to be coming from the bottom of a deep, dark cave. “I don’t think it’s in very good shape these days.”
Mr. Gaunt suddenly relaxed and straightened up. “Enough of these lies and half-truths. Hugh, do you know a woman named Nettle Cobb?”
“Crazy Nettle? Everyone in town knows Crazy Nettle. She killed her husband.”
“So they say. Now listen to me, Hugh. Listen carefully. Then you can take your fox-tail and go home.”
Hugh Priest listened carefully.
Outside it was raining harder, and the wind had begun to blow.
8
“Brian!” Miss Ratcliffe said sharply. “Why, Brian Rusk! I wouldn’t have believed it of you! Come up here! Right now!”
He was sitting in the back row of the basement room where the speech therapy classes were held, and he had done something wrong-terribly wrong, by the sound of Miss Ratcliffe’s voice-but he didn’t know what it was until he stood up. Then he saw that he was naked. A horrible wave of shame swept over him, but he felt excited, too. When he looked down at his penis and saw it starting to stiffen, he felt both alarmed and thrilled.
“Come up here, I said!”
He advanced slowly to the front of the room while the others@ally Meyers, Donny Frankel, Nome Martin, and poor old half-bright Slopey Dodd-goggled at him.
MISS Ratcliffe stood i’n front of her desk, hands on hips, eyes blazing, a gorgeous cloud of dark-auburn hair floating around her head.
“You’re a bad boy, Brian-a very bad boy.”
He nodded his head dumbly, but his penis was raising ITS head, and so it seemed there was at least one part of him that did not mind being bad at all. That in fact RELISHED being bad.
She put a piece of chalk in his hand. He felt a small holt of electricity when their hands touched. “Now,” Miss Ratcliffe said severely, “You must write I WILL FINISH PAYING FOR MY SANDY KOUFAX CARD five hundred times on the blackboard. “Yes, Miss Ratcliffe. “He began to write, standing on tiptoe to reach the top of the board, aware of warm air on his naked buttocks.
He had finished WILL FINISH PAYING when he felt Miss Ratcliffe’s smooth, soft hand encircle his stiff penis and begin to tug on it gently. For a moment he thought he would faint dead away, it felt so good.
“Keep writing, “she said grimly from behind him, “and I’ll keep on doing this.”
“M-Miss Rub-Rub-Ratcliffe, what about my t-tongue exercises?”
asked Slopey Dodd.
“Shut up or I’ll run you over in the parking lot, Slopey, “Miss
Ratcliffe said. “I’ll make you squeak, little buddy.”
She went on pulling Brian’s pudding while she spoke. He was moaning now. It was wrong, he knew that, but it felt good. It felt most sincerely awesome. It felt like what he needed. just the thing.
Then he turned around and it wasn’t Miss Ratcliffe standing at his shoulder but Wilma jerzyck with her large round pallid face and her deep brown eyes, like two raisins pounded deep into a wad of dough.
“He’ll take it back if you don’t pay,” Wilma said. “And that’s not all, little buddy. Hell-”
9
Brian Rusk woke up with such a jerk that he almost fell out of bed and onto the floor. His body was covered with sweat, his heart was pounding like a jackhammer, and his penis was a small, hard branch inside his pajama trousers.
He sat up, shivering all over. His first impulse was to open his mouth and yell for his mother, as he had done when he was small and a nightmare had invaded his sleep. Then he realized that he wasn’t small anymore, he was eleven… and it wasn’t exactly the sort of dream you told your mother about, anyway, was it?
He lay back, eyes wide and staring into the dark. He glanced at the digital clock on the table next to the bed and saw it was four minutes past midnight. He could hear the sound of rain, hard now, pelting against his bedroom window, driven by huge, whooping gasps of wind. It sounded almost like sleet.
My card. My Sandy Koufax card it’s gone. it wasn’t. He knew it wasn’t, but he also knew he would not be able to go back to sleep until he’d checked to make sure it was still there, in the looseleaf binder where he kept his growing collection of Topps cards from 1956. He had checked it before leaving for school yesterday, had done so again when he got home, and last night, after supper, he had broken off playing pass in the back yard with Stanley Dawson to check on it once more. He had told Stanley he had to go to the bathroom. He had peeked at it one final time before crawling into bed and turning out the light. He recognized that it had become a kind of obsession with him, but recognition did not put a stop to it.
He slipped out of bed, barely noticing the way the cool air brought out goosebumps on his hot body and made his penis wilt.
He walked quietly across to his dresser. He left the shape of his own body behind him on the sheet which covered his mattress, printed in sweat. The big book lay on top of the dresser in a pool of white light thrown by the streetlamp outside.
He took it down, opened it, and paged rapidly through the sheets of clear plastic with the pockets you put the cards in. He passed Mel Parnell, Whitey Ford, and Warren Spahn-treasures over which he had once crowed mightily-with hardly a glance. He had a moment of terrible panic when he reached the sheets at the back of the book, the ones which were still empty, without seeing Sandy Koufax. Then he realized he had turned several pages at once in his hurry. He turned back, and yes, there he was-that narrow face, those faintly smiling, dedicated eyes looking out from beneath the bill of the cap.
To my good friend Brian, with best wishes, Sandy Koufax.
His fingers traced over the sloping lines of the inscription. His lips moved. He felt at peace again… or almost at peace. The card wasn’t really his yet. This was just sort of a… a trial run. There was something he had to do before it would really be his. Brian wasn’t completely sure what it was, but he knew it had something to do with the dream from which he had just wakened, and he was confident that he would know when the time (tomorrow? later today?) came.
He closed the looseleaf binder-BRIAN’s COLLECTION DO NOT TOUCH!
carefully printed on the file card Scotch-taped to the front-and returned it to the dresser. Then he went back to bed.
Only one thing about having the Sandy Koufax card was troubling.
He had wanted to show it to his father. Coming home from Needful Things, he had imagined just how it would be when he showed it to him.
He, Brian, elaborately casual: Hey, Dad, I picked up a ’56 today at the new store. Want to check it out? His dad would say okay, not really interested, just going along with Brian to his room to keep Brian happy-but how his eyes would light up when he saw what Brian had lucked into! And when he saw the inscription-!
