Firestarter(67)

When he had finished, he gave one of the letters to Charlie to read. She went through it slowly and carefully, taking almost an hour. It was the first time she had got the entire story, from beginning to end.

"You're going to mail these?" she asked when she finished.

"Yes," he said. "Tomorrow. I think tomorrow will be the last time I dare go across the pond." It had at last begun to warm up a little. The ice was still solid, but it creaked constantly now, and he didn't know how much longer it would be safe.

"What will happen, Daddy?"

He shook his head. "I don't know for sure. All I can do is hope that once the story is out, those people who have been chasing us will have to give it up."

Charlie nodded soberly. "You should have done it before."

"Yes," he said, knowing that she was thinking of the near cataclysm at the Manders farm last October. "Maybe I should have. But I never had a chance to think much, Charlie. Keeping us going was all I had time to think about. And what thinking you do get a chance to do when you're on the run... well, mostly it's stupid thinking. I kept hoping they'd give up and leave us alone. That was a terrible mistake."

"They won't make me go away, will they?" Charlie asked. "From you, I mean. We can stay together, can't we, Daddy?" "Yes," he said, not wanting to tell her that his conception of what might happen after the letters were mailed and received was probably as vague as hers. It was just "after."

"Then that's all I care about. And I'm not going to make anymore fires."

"All right," he said, and touched her hair. His throat was suddenly thick with a premonitory dread, and something that had happened near here suddenly occurred to him, something that he hadn't thought of for years. He had been out with his father and Granther, and Granther had given Andy his.22, which he called his varmint rifle, when Andy clamored for it. Andy had seen a squirrel and wanted to shoot it. His dad had started to protest, and Granther had hushed him with an odd little smile.

Andy had aimed the way Granther taught him; he squeezed the trigger rather than just jerking back on it (as Granther had also taught him), and he shot the squirrel. It tumbled off its limb like a stuffed toy, and Andy ran excitedly for it after handing the gun back to Granther. Up close, he had been struck dumb by what he saw. Up close, the squirrel was no stuffed toy. It wasn't dead. He had got it in the hindquarters and it lay there dying in its own bright dapples of blood, its black eyes awake and alive and full of a horrible suffering. Its fleas, knowing the truth already, were trundling off the body in three busy little lines.

His throat had closed with a snap, and at the age of nine, Andy tasted for the first time that bright, painty flavor of self-loathing. He stared numbly at his messy kill, aware that leis father and grandfather were standing behind him, their shadows lying over him-three generations of McGees standing over a murdered squirrel in the Vermont woods. And behind him, Granther said softly, Well, you done it, Andy. How do you like it? And the tears had come suddenly, overwhelming him, the hot tears of horror and realization-the realization that once it's done, it's done. He swore suddenly that he would never kill anything with a gun again. He swore it before God.

I'm not going to make anymore fires, Charlie had said, and in his mind Andy heard Granther's reply to him on the day he had shot the squirrel, the day he had sworn to God he would never do anything like that again. Never say that, Andy. God loves to make a man break a vow. It keeps him properly humble about his place in the world and his sense of self-control. About what Irv Manders had said to Charlie.

Charlie had found a complete set of Bomba the Jungle Boy books in the attic and was working her way slowly but surely through them. Now Andy looked at her, sitting in a dusty shaft of sunlight in the old black rocker, sitting just where his grandmother had always sat, usually with a basket of mending between her feet, and he struggled with an urge to tell her to take it back, to take it back while she still could, to tell her that she didn't understand. the terrible temptation: if the gun was left there long enough, sooner or later you would pick it up again.

God loves to make a man break a vow.

8

No one saw Andy mail his letters except Charles Payson, the fellow who had moved into Bradford in November and had since been trying to make a go of the old Bradford Notions "n" Novelties shop. Payson was a small, sad-faced man who had tried to buy Andy a drink on one of his visits to town. In the town itself, the expectation was that if Payson didn't make it work during the coming summer, Notions "n" Novelties would have a FOR SALE OR LEASE sign back in the window by September 15. He was a nice enough fellow, but he was having a hard scrabble. Bradford wasn't the town it used to be.

Andy walked up the street-he had left his skis stuck in the snow at the head of the road leading down to the Bradford Town Landing-and approached the general store. Inside, the oldsters watched him with mild interest. There had been a fair amount of talk about Andy that winter. The consensus about yonder man there was that he was on the run from something-a bankruptcy, maybe, or a divorce settlement. Maybe an angry wife who had been cheated out of custody of the kid: the small clothes Andy had bought hadn't been-lost on them. The consensus was also that he and the kid had maybe broken into one of the camps across the Pond and were spending the winter there. Nobody brought this possibility up to Bradford's constable, a Johnny-come-lately who had lived in town for only twelve years and thought he owned the place. Yonder man came from across the lake, from Tashmore, from Vermont. None of the old-timers who sat around Jake Rowley's stove in the Bradford general store had much liking for Vermont ways, them with their income tax and their snooty bottle law and that f**king Russian laid up in his house like a Czar, writing books no one could understand.