In the dark quiet he said: "I"m off drinking, Jacky-boy. It"s all over. I"ve slain my last martian." And now, sweating in this phonebootb, it occurred to lack that he had never doubted Al"s ability to carry through. He had driven back to his own house in the VW with the radio turned up, and some disco group chanted over and over again, talismanic in the house before dawn: Do it anyway... you wanta do it... do it anyway you want... No matter how loud he heard the squealing tires, the crash. When he blinked his eyes shut, he saw that single crushed wheel with its broken spokes pointing at the sky.
When he got in, Wendy was asleep on the couch. He looked in Danny"s room and Danny was in his crib on his back, sleeping deeply, his arm still buried in the cast. In the softly filtered glow from the streetlight outside he could see the dark lines on its plastered whiteness where all the doctors and nurses in pediatrics had signed it.
It was an accident. He fell down the stairs.
(o you dirty liar) It was an accident. I lost my temper.
(you f.u.c.king drunken waste G.o.d wiped snot out of his nose and that was you) Listen, hey, come on, please, just an accident- But the last plea was driven away by the image of that bobbing flashlight as they hunted through the dry late November weeds, looking for the sprawled body that by all good rights should have been there, waiting for the police. It didn"t matter that Al had been driving. There had been other nights when he had been driving.
He pulled the covers up over Danny, went into their bedroom, and took the Spanish Llama.38 down from the top shelf of the closet. It was in a shoe box.
He sat on the bed with it for nearly an hour, looking at it, fascinated by its deadly shine.
It was dawn when he put it back in the box and put the box back in the closet.
That morning he had called Bruckner, the department head, and told him to please post his cla.s.ses. He had the flu. Bruckner agreed, with less good grace than was common. Jack Torrance had been extremely susceptible to the flu in the last year.
Wendy made him scrambled eggs and coffee. They ate in silence. The only sound came from the back yard, where Danny was gleefully running his trucks across the sand pile with his good hand.
She went to do the dishes. Her back to him, she said: "Jack. I"ve been thinking."
"Have you?" He lit a cigarette with trembling hands. No hangover this morning, oddly enough. Only the shakes. He blinked. In the instant"s darkness the bike flew up against the windshield, starring the gla.s.s. The tires shrieked. The flashlight bobbed.
"I want to talk to you about... about what"s best for me and Danny. For you too, maybe. I don"t know. We should have talked about it before, I guess."
"Would you do something for me?" he asked, looking at the wavering tip of his cigarette. "Would you do me a favor?"
"What?" Her voice was dull and neutral. He looked at her back.
"Let"s talk about it a week from today. If you still want to."
Now she turned to him, her hands lacy with suds, her pretty face pale and disillusioned. "Jack, promises don"t work with you. You just go right on with-" She stopped, looking in his eyes, fascinated, suddenly uncertain.
"In a week," he said. His voice had lost all its strength and dropped to a whisper. "Please. I"m not promising anything. If you still want to talk then, we"ll talk. About anything you want." They looked across the sunny kitchen at each other for a long time, and when she turned back to the dishes without saying anything more, he began to shudder.
G.o.d, he needed a drink. Just a little pick-me-up to put things in their true perspective- "Danny said he dreamed you had a car accident," she said abruptly. "He has funny dreams sometimes. He said it this morning, when I got him dressed. Did you, Jack? Did you have an accident?"
"No." By noon the craving for a drink had become a low-grade fever. He went to Al"s.
"You dry?" Al asked before letting him in. Al looked horrible.
"Bone dry. You look like Lon Chaney in Phantom of the Opera."
"Come on in." They played two-handed whist all afternoon. They didn"t drink.
A week pa.s.sed. He and Wendy didn"t speak much. But he knew she was watching, not believing. He drank coffee black and endless cans of Coca-Cola. One night he drank a whole six-pack of c.o.ke and then ran into the bathroom and vomited it up.
The level of the bottles in the liquor cabinet did not go down. After his cla.s.ses he went over to Al Shockley"s-she hated Al Shockley worse than she had ever hated anyone-and when he came home she would swear she smelled scotch or gin on his breath, but he would talk lucidly to her before supper, drink coffee, play with Danny after supper, sharing a c.o.ke with him, read him a bedtime story, then sit and correct themes with cup after cup of black coffee by his hand, and she would have to admit to herself that she had been wrong.
Weeks pa.s.sed and the unspoken word retreated further from the back of her lips. Jack sensed its retirement but knew it would never retire completely.
Things began to get a little easier. Then George Hatfield. He had lost his temper again, this time stone sober.
"Sir, your party still doesn"t-"
"h.e.l.lo?" Al"s voice, out of breath.
"Go ahead," the operator said dourly.
"Al, this is Jack Torrance."
"Jacky-boy!" Genuine pleasure. "How are you?"
"Good. I just called to say thanks. I got the job. It"s perfect. If I can"t finish that G.o.ddam play snowed in all winter, I"ll never finish it."
"You"ll finish."
"How are things?" Jack asked hesitantly.
"Dry," Al responded. "You?"
"As a bone."
"Miss it much?"
"Every day." Al laughed. "I know that scene. But I don"t know how you stayed dry after that Hatfield thing, Jack. That was above and beyond."
"I really b.i.t.c.hed things up for myself," he said evenly.
"Oh, h.e.l.l. I"ll have the Board around by spring. Effinger"s already saying they might have been too hasty. And if that play comes to something-"
"Yes. Listen, my boy"s out in the car, Al. He looks like he might be getting restless-"
"Sure. Understand. You have a good winter up there, Jack. Glad to help."
"Thanks again, Al." He hung up, closed his eyes in the hot booth, and again saw the crashing bike, the bobbing flashlight. There had been a squib in the paper the next day, no more than a s.p.a.ce-filler really, but the owner had not been named. Why it had been out there in the night would always be a mystery to them, and perhaps that was as it should be.
He went back out to the car and gave Danny his slightly melted Baby Ruth.
"Daddy?"
"What, doc?" Danny hesitated, looking at his father"s abstracted face.
"When I was waiting for you to come back from that hotel, I had a bad dream. Do you remember? When I fell asleep?"
"Um-hm." But it was no good. Daddy"s mind was someplace else, not with him. Thinking about the Bad Thing again.
(I dreamed that you hurt me, Daddy) "What was the dream, doc?"
"Nothing," Danny said as they pulled out into the parking lot. He put the maps back into the glove compartment.
"You sure?"
"Yes." Jack gave his son a faint, troubled glance; and then his mind turned to his play.
6 - Night Thoughts
Love was over, and her man was sleeping beside her.
Her man.
She smiled a little in the darkness, his seed still trickling with slow warmth from between her slightly parted thighs, and her smile was both rueful and pleased, because the phrase her man summoned up a hundred feelings. Each feeling examined alone was a bewilderment. Together, in this darkness floating to sleep, they were like a distant blues tune heard in an almost deserted night club, melancholy but pleasing.
Lovin" you baby, is just like rollin" off a log, But if I can"t be your woman, I sure ain"t goin" to be your dog.
Had that been Billie Holiday? Or someone more prosaic like Peggy Lee? Didn"t matter. It was low and torchy, and in the silence of her head it played mellowly, as if issuing from one of those old-fashioned jukeboxes, a Wurlitzer, perhaps, half an hour before closing.
Now, moving away from her consciousness, she wondered how many beds she had slept in with this man beside her. They had met in college and had first made love in his apartment... that had been less than three months after her mother drove her from the house, told her never to come back, that if she wanted to go somewhere she could go to her father since she had been responsible for the divorce. That had been in 1970. So long ago? A semester later they had moved in together, had found jobs for the summer, and had kept the apartment when their senior year began. She remembered that bed the most clearly, a big double that sagged in the middle. When they made love, the rusty box spring had counted the beats. That fall she had finally managed to break from her mother. Jack had helped her. She wants to keep beating you, Jack had said. The more times you phone her, the more times you crawl back begging forgiveness, the more she can beat you with your father. It"s good for her, Wendy, because she can go on making believe it was your fault. But it"s not good for you. They had talked it over again and again in that bed, that year.
(Jack sitting up with the covers pooled around his waist, a cigarette burning between his fingers, looking her in the eye-he had a half-humorous, half-scowling way of doing that-telling her: She told you never to come back, right?
Never to darken her door again, right? Then why doesn"t she hang up the phone when she knows it"s you? Why does she only tell you that you can"t come in if I"m with you? Because she thinks I might cramp her style a little bit. She wants to keep putting the thumbscrews right to you, baby. You"re a fool if you keep letting her do it. She told you never to come back, so why don"t you take her at her word? Give it a rest. And at last she"d seen it his way.) It had been Jack"s idea to separate for a while-to get perspective on the relationship, he said. She had been afraid he had become interested in someone else. Later she found it wasn"t so. They were together again in the spring and he asked her if she had been to see her father. She had jumped as if he"d struck her with a quirt.
How did you know that?
The Shadow knows.
Have you been spying on me?
And his impatient laughter, which had always made her feel so awkward-as if she were eight and he was able to see her motivations more clearly than she.
You needed time, Wendy.
For what?
I guess... to see which one of us you wanted to marry.
Jack, what are you saying?
I think I"m proposing marriage.
The wedding. Her father had been there, her mother had not been. She discovered she could live with that, if she had Jack. Then Danny had come, her fine son.
That had been the best year, the best bed. After Danny was born, Jack had gotten her a job typing for half a dozen English Department profs-quizzes, exams, cla.s.s syllabi, study notes, reading lists. She ended up tvping a novel for one of them, a novel that never got published... much to Jack"s very irreverent and very private glee. The job was good for forty a week, and skyrocketed all the way up to sixty during the two months she spent typing the unsuccessful novel. They had their first car, a five-year-old Buick with a baby seat in the middle. Bright, upwardly mobile young marrieds. Danny forced a reconciliation between her and her mother, a reconciliation that was always tense and never happy, but a reconciliation all the same. When she took Danny to the house, she went without Jack. And she didn"t tell Jack that her mother always remade Danny"s diapers, frowned over his formula, could always spot the accusatory first signs of a rash on the baby"s bottom or privates. Her mother never said anything overtly, but the message came through anyway: the price she had begun to pay (and maybe always would) for the reconciliation was the feeling that she was an inadequate mother. It was her mother"s way of keeping the thumbscrews handy.
During the days Wendy would stay home and housewife, feeding Danny his bottles in the sunwashed kitchen of the four-room second-story apartment, playing her records on the battered portable stereo she had had since high school. Jack would come home at three (or at two if he felt he could cut his last cla.s.s), and while Danny slept he would lead her into the bedroom and fears of inadequacy would be erased.
At night while she typed, he would do his writing and his a.s.signments. In those days she sometimes came out of the bedroom where the typewriter was to find both of them asleep on the studio couch, Jack wearing nothing but his underpants, Danny sprawled comfortably on her husband"s chest with his thumb in his mouth. She would put Danny in his crib, then read whatever Jack had written that night before waking him up enough to come to bed.
The best bed, the best year.
Sun gonna shine in my backyard someday...
In those days, Jack"s drinking had still been well in hand. On Sat.u.r.day nights a bunch of his fellow students would drop over and there would be a case of beer and discussions in which she seldom took part because her field had been sociology and his was English: arguments over whether Pepys"s diaries were literature or history; discussions of Charles Olson"s poetry; sometimes the reading of works in progress. Those and a hundred others. No, a thousand. She felt no real urge to take part; it was enough to sit in her rocking chair beside Jack, who sat cross-legged on the floor, one hand holding a beer, the other gently cupping her calf or braceleting her ankle.
The compet.i.tion at UNH had been fierce, and Jack carried an extra burden in his writing. He put in at least an hour at it every night. It was his routine.
The Sat.u.r.day sessions were necessary therapy. They let something out of him that might otherwise have swelled and swelled until he burst.
At the end of his grad work he had landed the job at Stovington, mostly on the strength of his stories-four of them published at that time, one of them in Esquire. She remembered that day clearly enough; it would take more than three years to forget it. She had almost thrown the envelope away, thinking it was a subscription offer. Opening it, she had found instead that it was a letter saying that Esquire would like to use Jack"s story "Concerning the Black Holes" early the following year. They would pay nine hundred dollars, not on publication but on acceptance. That was nearly half a year"s take typing papers and she had flown to the telephone, leaving Danny in his high chair to goggle comically after her, his face lathered with creamed peas and beef puree.
Jack had arrived from the university forty-five minutes later, the Buick weighted down with seven friends and a keg of beer. After a ceremonial toast (Wendy also had a gla.s.s, although she ordinarily had no taste for beer), Jack had signed the acceptance letter, put it in the return envelope, and went down the block to drop it in the letter box. When he came back he stood gravely in the door and said, "Veni, vidi, vici." There were cheers and applause. When the keg was empty at eleven that night, Jack and the only two others who were still ambulatory went on to hit a few bars.
She had gotten him aside in the downstairs hallway. The other two were already out in the car, drunkenly singing the New Hampshire fight song. Jack was down on one knee, owlishly fumbling with the lacings of his moccasins.
"Jack," she said, "you shouldn"t. You can"t even tie your shoes, let alone drive." He stood up and put his hands calmly on her shoulders. "Tonight I could fly to the moon if I wanted to."
"No," she said. "Not for all the Esquire stories in the world."
"I"ll be home early." But he hadn"t been home until four in the morning, stumbling and mumbling his way up the stairs, waking Danny up when he came in. He had tried to soothe the baby and dropped him on the floor. Wendy had rushed out, thinking of what her mother would think if she saw the bruise before she thought of anything else- G.o.d help her, G.o.d help them both-and then picked Danny up, sat in the rocking chair with him, soothed him. She had been thinking of her mother for most of the five hours Jack had been gone, her mother"s prophecy that Jack would never come to anything. Big ideas, her mother had said. Sure. The welfare lines are full of educated fools with big ideas. Did the Esquire story make her mother wrong or right? Winnifred, you"re not holding that baby right. Give him to me. And was she not holding her husband right? Why else would he take his joy out of the house? A helpless kind of terror had risen up in her and it never occurred to her that he had gone out for reasons that had nothing to do with her.
"Congratulations," she said, rocking Danny-he was almost asleep again. "Maybe you gave him a concussion."
"It"s just a bruise." He sounded sulky, wanting to be repentant: a little boy.
For an instant she hated him.
"Maybe," she said tightly. "Maybe not." She heard so much of her mother talking to her departed father in her own voice that she was sickened and afraid.
"Like mother like daughter," Jack muttered.
"Go to bed!" she cried, her fear coming out sounding like anger. "Go to bed, you"re drunk!"
"Don"t tell me what to do."
"Jack... please, we shouldn"t... it..." There were no words.
"Don"t tell me what to do," he repeated sullenly, and then went into the bedroom. She was left alone in the rocking chair with Danny, who was sleeping again. Five minutes later Jack"s snores came floating out to the living room.
That had been the first night she had slept on the couch.
Now she turned restlessly on the bed, already dozing. Her mind, freed of any linear order by encroaching sleep, floated past the first year at Stovington, past the steadily worsening times that had reached low ebb when her husband had broken Danny"s arm, to that morning in the breakfast nook.
Danny outside playing trucks in the sandpile, his arm still in the cast. Jack sitting at the table, pallid and grizzled, a cigarette jittering between his fingers. She had decided to ask him for a divorce. She had pondered the question from a hundred different angles, had been pondering it in fact for the six months before the broken arm. She told herself she would have made the decision long ago if it hadn"t been for Danny, but not even that was necessarily true.