George T. Nelson, the high school wood shop teacher. George T.
Nelson, who, under his bluff, macho exterior, was just as gay as old dad’s hatband. George T. Nelson, with whom Frank jewett had once attended a sort of party in Boston, the sort of party where there were a great many middle-aged men and a small group of undressed boys. The sort of party that could land you in jail for the rest of your life.
The sort of partyThere was a manila envelope sitting on his desk blotter. His name was written on the center of it. Frank jewett felt a horrible sinking sensation in the pit of his belly. It felt like an elevator out of control. He looked up and saw Alice and Brion peering in at him, almost cheek to cheek. Their eyes were wide, their mouths open, and Frank thought: Now I know what it feels like to be a fish in an aquarium.
He waved at them-go away! They didn’t go, and this somehow did not surprise him. This was a nightmare, and in nightmares, things never went the way you wanted them to. That was why they were nightmares. He felt a terrible sense of loss and disorientation… but somewhere beneath it, like a living spark beneath a heap of wet kindling, was a little blue flame of anger.
He sat behind his desk and put the stack of magazines on the floor. He saw that the drawer they’d been in had been forced, just as he had feared. He ripped open the envelope and spilled out the contents. Most of them were glossy photographs. Photographs of him and George T. Nelson at that party in Boston. They were cavorting with a number of nice young fellows (the oldest of the nice young fellows might have been twelve), and in each picture George T. Nelson’s face was obscured but Frankjewett’s was crystal clear.
This didn’t much surprise Frank, either.
There was a note in the envelope. He took it out and read it.
Frank old Buddy, Sorry to do this, but I have to leave town and have no time to fuck around. I want $2,000. Bring it to my house tonight at 7:00 p.m. So far you can wiggle out of this thing, it will be tough but no real problem for a slippery bastard like you, but ask yourself how you’re going to like seeing copies of these pix nailed up on every phone pole in town, right under those Casino Nite posters.
They will run you out of town on a rail, old Buddy. Remember, $2,000 at my house by 7:15 at’the latest or you will wish you were born without a dick.
Your friend, George Your friend.
Your friend!
His eyes kept returning to that closing line with a kind of incredulous, wondering horror.
Your motherfucking backstabbing Judas-kissing FRIEND!
Brion McGinley was still hammering on the door, but when Frank jewett finally looked up from whatever it was on his desk which had taken his attention, Brion’s fist paused in mid-stroke.
The principal’s face was waxy white except for two bright clownspots of flush on his cheeks. His lips were drawn back from his teeth in a narrow smile.
He didn’t look in the least like Mr. Weatherbee.
Myfriend, Frank thought. He crumpled the note with one hand as he shoved the glossy photographs back into the envelope with the other.
Now the blue spark of anger had turned orange. The wet kindling was catching fire. I’ll be there, all right. I’ll be there to discuss this matter with my friend George T. Nelson.
“Yes indeed,” Frank Jewett said. “Yes indeed.” He began to smile.
It was going on quarter past three and Alan had decided Brian Rusk must have taken a different route; the flood of home-going students had almost dried up. Then, just as he was reaching into his pocket for his car-keys, he saw a lone figure biking down School Street toward him.
The boy was riding slowly, seeming almost to trudge over the handlebars, and his head was bent so low Alan couldn’t see his face.
But he could see what was in the carrier basket of the boy’s bike: a Playmate cooler.
“Do you understand?” Gaunt asked Polly, who was now holding the envelope.
“Yes, I… I understand. I do.” But her dreaming face was troubled.
“You don’t look happy.”
“Well… I…”
“Things like the azka don’t always work very well for people who aren’t happy,” Mr. Gaunt said. He pointed at the tiny bulge where the silver ball lay against her skin, and again she seemed to feel something shift strangely inside. At the same moment, horrible cramps of pain invaded her hands, spreading like a network of cruel steel hooks. Polly moaned loudly.
11
Mr. Gaunt crooked the finger he had pointed in a come-along gesture. She felt that shift in the silver ball again, more clearly this time, and the pain was gone.
“You don’t want to go back to the way things were, do you, Polly?” Mr. Gaunt asked in a silky voice. “No!” she cried. Her breast was moving rapidly up and down. Her hands began to make frantic washing gestures, one against the other, and her wide eyes never left his. “Please, no!”
“Because things could go from bad to worse, couldn’t they?”
“Yes! Yes, they could!”
“And nobody understands, do they? Not even the Sheriff. He doesn’t know what it’s like to wake up at two in the morning with hell in his hands, does he?” She shook her head and began to weep. “Do as I say and you’ll never have to wake up that way again,
Polly. And here is something else@o as I say and if anyone in Castle Rock finds out that your child burned to death in a San Francisco tenement, they won’t find it out from me.”
Polly uttered a hoarse, lost cry-the cry of a woman hopelessly ensnarled in a grinding nightmare. Mr. Gaunt smiled. “There are more kinds of hell than one, aren’t there, Polly?”
“How do you know about him?” she whispered. “No one knows. Not even Alan. I told Alan-”
“I know because knowing.is my business. And suspicion is his, Polly-Alan never believed what you told him.”
“He said-”
“I’m sure he said all kinds of things, but he never believed you. The woman you hired to baby-sit was a drug addict, wasn’t she? That wasn’t your fault, but of course the things which led to that situation were all a matter of personal choice, Polly, weren’t they? Your choice. The young woman you hired to watch Kelton passed out and dropped a cigarette-or maybe it was a joint-into a wastebasket.
Hers was the finger that pulled the trigger, you might say, but the gun was loaded because of your pride, your inability to bend your neck before your parents and the other good people of Castle Rock.”
Polly was sobbing harder now.
“Yet is a young woman not entitled to her pride?” Mr. Gaunt asked gently. “When everything else is gone, is she not at least entitled to this, the coin without which her purse is entirely empty?”
Polly raised her streaming, defiant face. “I thought it was my business,” she said. “I still do. If that’s pride, so what?”
“Yes,” he said soothingly. “Spoken like a champion… butthey would have taken you back, wouldn’t they? Your mother and father?
It might not have been pleasant-not with the child always there to remind them, not with the way tongues wag in pleasant little backwaters like this one-but it would have been possible.”
“Yes, and I would have spent every day trying to stay out from under my mother’s thumb!” she burst out in a furious, ugly voice which bore almost no resemblance to her normal tone.
“Yes,” Mr. Gaunt said in that same soothing voice. “So you stayed where you were. You had Kelton, and you had your pride. And when Kelton was dead, you still had your pride… didn’t you?”
Polly screamed in grief and agony and buried her wet face in her hands.
“It hurts worse than your hands, doesn’t it?” Mr. Gaunt asked.
Polly nodded her head without taking her face out of her hands.
Mr. Gaunt put his own ugly, long-fingered hands behind his head and spoke in the tone of one who gives a eulogy: “Humanity! So noble!
So willing to sacrifice the other fellow!”
“Stop!” she moaned. “Can’t you stop?”
“It’s a secret thing, isn’t it, Patricia?”
“Yes.”
He touched her forehead. Polly uttered a gagging moan but did not draw away.
“That’s one door into hell you’d like to keep locked, isn’t it?”
She nodded inside her hands.
“Then do as I say, Polly,” he whispered. He took one of her hands away from her face and began caressing it. “Do as I say, and keep your mouth shut.” He looked closely at her wet cheeks and her streaming, reddened eyes. A little look of disgust puckered his lips for a moment.
“I don’t know which makes me sicker-a crying woman or a laughing man. Wipe your goddamned face, Polly.”
Slowly, dreamily, she took a lace-edged handkerchief from her purse and began to do it.
“That’s good,” he said, and rose. “I’ll let you go home now, Polly; you have things to do. But I want you to know it has been a great pleasure doing business with you. I have always so enjoyed ladies who take pride in themselves.”
