'Salem's Lot(17)

Which was, she saw with dismay, exactly what Ran y had smeared all over his hands, on the wall, and in his hair.  

She stood looking at him dully, holding the cold bottle in one hand.

This was what she had given up high school for, her friends for, her hopes of becoming a model for. For this crummy trailer stuck out in the Bend, Formica already peeling off the counters in strips, for a husband that worked all day at the mill and went off drinking or playing poker with his no-good gas-station buddies at night. For a kid who looked just like his no-good old man and smeared kukka all over everything.

He was screaming at the top of his lungs.

'You shut up!' she screamed back suddenly, and threw the plastic bottle at him. It struck his forehead and he toppled on his back in the crib, wailing and thrashing his arms. There was a red circle just below the hairline, and she felt a horrid surge of gratification, pity, and hate in her throat. She plucked him out of the crib like a rag.

'Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!' She had punched him twice before she could stop herself and Randy's screams of pain bad become too great for sound. He lay gasping in his crib, his face purple.

'I'm sorry,' she muttered. 'Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. I'm sorry. You okay, Randy? Just a minute, Momma's going to clean you up.'

By the time she came back with a wet rag, both of Randy's eyes had swelled shut and were discoloring. But he took the bottle and when she began to wipe his face with a damp rag, he smiled toothlessly at her.

I'll tell Roy he fell off the changing table, she thought. He'll believe that. Oh God, let him believe that.

6

6:45 A.M.

Most of the blue-collar population of 'salem's Lot was on its way to work. Mike Ryerson was one of the few who worked in town. In the annual town report he was listed as a grounds keeper, but be was actually in charge of maintaining the town's three cemeteries. In the summer this was almost a full-time job, but even in the winter it was no walk, as some folks, such as that prissy George Middler down at the hardware store, seemed to think. He worked part-time for Carl Foreman, the Lot's undertaker, and most of the old folks seemed to poop off in the winter.

Now he was on his way out to the Burns Road in his pickup truck, which was loaded down with clippers, a battery-driven hedge-trimmer, a box of flag stands, a crow?bar for lifting gravestones that might have fallen over, a ten-gallon gas can, and two Briggs & Stratton lawn mowers.

He would mow the grass at Harmony Hill this morning, and do any maintenance on the stones and the rock wall that was necessary, and this afternoon he would cross town to the Schoolyard Hill Cemetery, where schoolteachers sometimes came to do rubbings, on account of an extinct colony of Shakers who had once buried their dead there. But he liked Harmony Hill best of all three. It was not as old as the Schoolyard Hill bone yard, but it was pleasant and shady. He hoped that someday he could be buried there himself - in a hundred years or so.

He was twenty-seven, and had gone through three years of college in the course of a rather checkered career. He hoped to go back someday and finish up. He was good-looking in an open, pleasant way, and he had no trouble connecting with unattached females on Saturday nights out at Dell's or in Portland. Some of them were turned off by his job, and Mike found this honestly hard to understand. It was pleasant work, there was no boss always looking over your shoulder, and the work was in the open air, under God's sky; and so what if he dug a few graves or on occasion drove Carl Foreman's funeral hack? Somebody had to do it. To his way of thinking, the only thing more natural than death was sex.

Humming, he turned off onto the Bums Road and shifted to second going up the hill. Dry dust spurned out behind him. Through the choked summer greenery on both sides of the road he could see the skeletal, leafless trunks of the trees that had burned in the big fire of '51, like old and moldering bones. There were deadfalls back in there, he knew, where a man could break his leg if he wasn't careful. Even after twenty-five years, the scar of that great burning was there. Well, that was just it. In the midst of life, we are in death.

The cemetery was at the crest of the hill, and Mike turned in the drive, ready to get out and unlock the gate . . . and then braked the truck to a shuddering stop.

. The body of a dog hung head-down from the wrought ?iron gate, and the ground beneath was muddy with its blood.

Mike got out of the truck and hurried over to it. He pulled his work gloves out of his back pockets and lifted the dog's head with one hand. It came up with horrible, boneless ease, and he was staring into the blank, glazed eyes of Win Purinton's mongrel cocker, Doc. The dog had been hung on one of the gate's high spikes like a slab of beef on a meat hook. Flies, slow with the coolness of early morning, were already crawling sluggishly over the body.

Mike struggled and yanked and finally pulled it off, feeling sick to his stomach at the wet sounds that ac?companied his efforts. Graveyard vandalism was an old story to him, especially around Halloween, but that was still a month and a half away and he had never seen anything like this. Usually they contented themselves with knocking over a few gravestones, scrawling a few obscenit?ies, or hanging a paper skeleton from the gate. But if this slaughter was the work of kids, then they were real bastards. Win was going to be heartbroken.

He debated taking the dog directly back to town and showing it to Parkins Gillespie, and decided it wouldn't gain anything, He could take poor old Doc back to town when he went in to eat his lunch - not that he was going to have much appetite today.