Gerald's Game(37)

The dog licked its chops a second time, looking lovingly at Gerald as it did so. Then it stretched its neck forward, almost exactly as Jessie had stretched hers in order to finally plop her straw into the glass. The dog sniffed Gerald's face, but it did not just sniff; it allowed its nose to go on a kind of olfactory vacation there, first sampling the faint floor-polishy aroma of brown wax buried deep in the dead master's left ear, then the intermingled odors of sweat and Prell at the hairline, then the sharp, entrancingly bitter smell of clotted blood on the crown of Gerald's head. It lingered especially long at Gerald's nose, conducting a delicate investigation into those now tideless channels with its scratched, dirty, but oh-so-sensitive muzzle. Again there was that sense of gourmandizing, a feeling that the dog was choosing among many treasures. At last it sank its sharp teeth deeply into Gerald's left cheek, clamped them together, and began to pull.

On the bed, Jessie's eyes had begun to move rapidly back and forth behind her lids and now she moaned-a high, wavering sound, full of terror and recognition.

The dog looked up at once, its body dropping into an instinctive cringe of guilt and fear. It didn't last long; already it had begun to see this pile of meat as its private larder, for which it would fight-and perhaps die-if challenged. Besides, it was only the bitchmaster making that sound, and the dog was now quite sure that the bitchmaster was powerless.

It dipped its head down, seized Gerald Burlingame's cheek once more, and yanked backward, shaking its head briskly from side to side as it did so. A long strip of the dead man's cheek came free with a sound like strapping tape being pulled briskly off the dispenser roll. Gerald now wore the ferocious, predatory smile of a man who has just filled a straight-flush in a high-stakes poker game.

Jessie moaned again. The sound was followed by a string of guttural, unintelligible sleeptalk. The dog glanced up at her once more. It was sure she couldn't get off the bed and bother it, but those sounds made it uneasy, just the same. The old taboo had faded, but it hadn't disappeared. Besides, its hunger was sated; what it was doing now wasn't eating but snacking. It turned and trotted out of the room again. Most of Gerald's left cheek dangled from its mouth like the scalp of an infant.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

It is August 14th, 1965-a little over two years since the day the sun went out. It is Will's birthday; he has gone around all day solemnly telling people that he has now lived a year for each inning in a baseball game. Jessie is unable to understand why this seems like a big deal to her brother, but it clearly does, and she decides that if Will wants to compare his life to a baseball game, that's perfectly okay.

For quite awhile everything that happens at her little brother's birthday party is perfectly okay. Marvin Gaye is on the recordplayer, true, but it is not the bad song, the dangerous song. "I wouldn't be doggone," Marvin sings, mock-threatening, "I'd be long gone... bay-bee." Actually sort of a cute song, and the truth is that the day has been a lot better than okay, at least so far; it has been, in the words of Jessie's great-aunt Katherine, "finer than fiddle-music." Even her Dad thinks so, although he wasn't very keen on coming back to Falmouth for Will's birthday when the idea was first suggested. Jessie has heard him say I guessit war a pretty good idea, after all to her Mom, and that makes her feel good, because it was she-Jessie Mahout, daughter of Tom and Sally, sister of Will and Maddy, wife of nobody-who put the idea over. She's the reason they're here instead of inland, at Sunset Trails.

Sunset Trails is the family camp (although after three generations of haphazard family expansion, it is really big enough to be called a compound) on the north end of Dark Score Lake. This year they have broken their customary nine weeks of seclusion there because Will wants-just once, he has told his mother and father, speaking in the tones of a nobly suffering old grandee who knows he cannot cheat the reaper much longer-to have a birthday party with his rest-of-the-year friends as well as his family.

Tom Mahout vetoes the idea at first. He is a stock broker who divides his time between Portland and Boston, and for years he has told his family not to believe all that propaganda about how guys who go to work wearing ties and shirts with white collars spend their days goofing off-either hanging around the watercooler or dictating lunch invitations to pretty blondes from the steno pool. "No hardscrabble spud-farmer in Aroostook County works any harder than I do," he frequently tells them. "Keeping up with the market isn't easy, and it isn't particularly glamorous, either, no matter what you may have heard to the contrary." The truth is none of them have heard anything to the contrary, all of them (his wife included, most likely, although Sally would never say so) think his job sounds duller than donkeyshit, and only Maddy has the vaguest idea of what it is he does.

Tom insists that he needs that time on the lake to recover from the stresses of his job, and that his son will have plenty of birthdays with his friends later on. Will is turning nine, after all, not ninety. "Plus," Tom adds, "birthday parties with your pals really aren't much fun until you're old enough to have a keg or two."

So Will's request to have his birthday at the family's year-round home on the coast would probably have been denied if not for Jessie's sudden, surprising support of the plan (and to Will it's plenty surprising; Jessie is three years older and lots of times he's not sure she remembers she even has a brother). Following her initial soft-Voiced suggestion that maybe it would be fun to come home-just for two or three days, of course-and have a lawnparty, with croquet and badminton and a barbecue and Japanese lanterns that would come on at dusk, Tom begins to warm to the idea. He is the sort of man who thinks of himself as a "strongwilled son of a bitch" and is often thought of as a "stubborn old goat" by others; whichever way you saw it, he has always been a tough man to move once he has set his feet... and his jaw.