The Bachman Books

barbershop in Manhattan, and they call him Whispering Gee. '

Magliore smiled at him.

'You remind me of Mr. Piazzi's dog. You ain't growling yet, but if someone was to pat you, you'd roll your eyes. And you stopped wagging your tail a long time ago. Pete, give this man his things.'

Mansey gave him the bundle.

'You come back tomorrow and we'll talk some more,' Magliore said. He watched him putting things back into his wallet. 'And you really ought to clean that mess out. You're racking that wallet all to shit.'

'Maybe I will,' he said.

'Pete, show this man out to his car.' 'Sure.'

He had the door open and was stepping out when Magliore called after him: 'You know what they did to Mr. Piazzi's dog, mister? They took her to the pound and gassed her.'

After supper, while John Chancellor was telling about how the reduced speed limit on the Jersey Turnpike had probably been responsible for fewer accidents, Mary asked him about the house.

'Termites,' he said.

Her face fell like an express elevator. 'Oh. No good, huh?'

'Well, I'm going out again tomorrow. If Tom Granger knows a good exterminator, I'll take the guy out with me. Get an expert opinion. Maybe it isn't as bad as it looks.'

'I hope it isn't. A backyard and all . . . ' She trailed off wistfully.

Oh, you're a prince, Freddy said suddenly. A veritable prince. How come you're so good to your wife, George? Was it a natural talent or did you take lessons?

'Shut up,' he said.

Mary looked around, startled. 'What?'

'Oh . . . Chancellor,' he said. 'I get so sick of gloom and doom from John Chancellor and Walter Cronkite and the rest of them.'

'You shouldn't hate the messenger because of the message,' she said, and looked at John Chancellor with doubtful, troubled eyes.

'I suppose so,' he said, and thought: You bastard, Freddy.

Freddy told him not to hate the messenger for the message.

They watched the news in silence for a while. A commercial for a cold medicine came on-two men whose heads had been turned into blocks of snot. When one of them took the cold pill, the gray-green cube that had been encasing his head fell off in large lumps.

'Your cold sounds better tonight,' he said.

'It is. Bart, what's the realtor's name?'

'Monohan,' he said automatically.

'No, not the man that's selling you the plant. The one that's selling the house. '

'Olsen,' he said promptly, picking the name out of an internal litter bag.

The news came on again. There was a report on David Ben-Gurion, who was about to join Harry Truman in that great Secretariat in the sky.

'How does Jack like it out there?' she asked presently.

He was going to tell her Jack didn't like it at all and heard himself saying, 'Okay, I guess.'

John Chancellor closed out with a humorous item about flying saucers over Ohio.

He went to bed at half past ten and must have had the bad dream almost at once-when he woke up the digital clock said:

11:22P.M.

In the dream he had been standing on a corner in Norton-the corner of Venner and Rice Street. He had been standing right under the street sign. Down the street, in front of a candy store, a pink pimpmobile with caribou antlers mounted on the hood had just pulled up. Kids began to run toward it from stoops and porches.

Across the street, a large black dog was chained to the railing of a leaning brick tenement. A little boy was approaching it confidently.

He tried to cry out: Don't pet that dog! Go get your candy! But the words wouldn't come out. As if in slow motion, the pimp in the white suit and planter's hat turned to look. His hands were full of candy. The children who had crowded around him turned to look. All the children around the pimp were black, but the little boy approaching the dog was white.

The dog struck, catapulting up from its haunches like a blunt arrow. The boy screamed and staggered backward, hands to his throat. When he turned around, the blood was streaming through his fingers. It was Charlie.

That was when he had wakened.

The dreams. The goddam dreams.

His son had been dead three years.

November 28, 1973