something stopped him.
'Daddy?' he said. 'Where's the car?'
Torrance came toward him, and Jacky saw how very drunk he was.
'Wrecked it up,' he said thickly.
'Oh...' Careful now. Careful what you say. For your life, be
careful. 'That's too bad'
His father stopped and regarded Jacky from his stupid pig eyes.
Jacky held his breath. Somewhere behind his father's brow, under
the lawn-mowered brush of his crew cut, the scales were turning.
The hot, afternoon stood still while Jacky waited, staring up
anxiously into his father's face to see if his father would throw a
rough bear arm around his shoulder, grinding Jacky's cheek against
the rough, cracked leather of the belt that held up his white pants
and say, 'Walk with me into the house, big boy.' in the hard and
contemptuous way that was the only way he could even approach
love without destroying himself - or if it would be something else.
Tonight it was something else.
The thunderheads appeared on his father's brow. 'What do you
mean, 'That's too bad'? What kind of shit is that?'
'Just...too bad, Daddy. That's all I meant. it's-'
Torrance's hand swept out at the end of his arm, huge hand,
hamhock arm, but speedy, yes, very speedy, and Jacky went down
with church bells in his head and a split lip.
'Shutup' his father said, giving it a broad A.
Jacky said nothing. Nothing would do any good now. The balance
had swung the wrong way.
'You ain't gonna sass me,' said Torrance. 'You won't sass your
daddy. Get up here and take your medicine.'
There was something in his face this time, some dark and blazing
thing. And Jacky suddenly knew that this time there might be no
hug at the end of the blows, and if there was he might, be
unconscious and unknowing ... maybe even dead.
He ran.
Behind him, his father let out a bellow of rage and chased him., a
flapping specter in hospital whites, a juggernaut of doom following
his son from the front yard to the back.
Jacky ran for his life. The tree house, he was thinking. He can't get
up there; the ladder nailed to the tree won't hold him. I'll get up
there, talk to him; maybe he'll go to sleep - Oh, God, please let him
go to sleep - he was weeping in terror as he ran.
'Come back here, goddammit!' His father was roaring behind him.
'Come back here and take your medicine! Take it like a man!'
Jacky flashed past the back steps. His mother, that thin and
defeated woman, scrawny in a faded housedress, had come out
through the screen door from the kitchen, just as Jacky ran past
with his father in pursuit. She opened her mouth as if to speak or
cry out, but her hand came up in a fist and stopped whatever she
might have said, kept it safely behind her teeth. She was afraid for
her son, but more afraid that her husband would turn on her.
'No, you don't! Come back here!'
