'Salem's Lot(19)

The widow fell on him like a vulture as soon as he stepped into the sunny kitchen.

'Say, would you like to wax that front banister for me after you have your breakfast, Weasel? You got time?' They both preserved the gentle fiction that he did these things as favors, and not as pay for his fourteen-dollar-a?-week upstairs room.

'Sure would, Eva.'

'And that rug in the front room - '

' - has got to be turned. Yeah, I remember.'

'How's your head this morning?' She asked the question in a businesslike way, allowing no pity to enter her tone . . . but he sensed its existence beneath the surface.

'Head's fine,' he said touchily, putting water on to boil for the oatmeal.

'You were out late, is why I asked.'

'You got a line on me, is that right?' He cocked a humorous eyebrow at her and was gratified to see that she could still blush like a schoolgirl, even though they had left off any funny stuff almost nine years ago.

'Now, Ed - '

She was the only one who still called him that. To everyone else in the Lot he was just Weasel. Well, that was all right. Let them call him any old thing they wanted. The bear had caught him, sure enough.

'Never mind,' he said gruffly. 'I got up on the wrong side of the bed.'

'Fell out of it, by the sound.' She spoke more quickly than she had intended, but Weasel only grunted. He cooked and ate his hateful oatmeal, then took the can of furniture wax and rags without looking back.

Upstairs, the tap-tap of that guy's typewriter went on and on. Vinnie Upshaw, who had the room upstairs across from him, said he started in every morning at nine, went till noon, started in again at three, went until six, started in again at nine and went right through until midnight. Weasel couldn't imagine having that many words in your mind.

Still, he seemed a nice enough sort, and he might be good for a few beers out to Dell's some night. He had heard most of those writers drank like fish.

He began to polish the banister methodically, and fell to thinking about the widow again. She had turned this place into a boardinghouse with her husband's insurance money, and had done quite well. Why shouldn't she? She worked like a dray horse. But she must have been used to getting it regular from her husband, and after the grief had washed out of her, that need had remained. God, she had liked to do it!

In those days, '61 and '62, people had still been calling him Ed instead of Weasel, and he had still been holding the bottle instead of the other way around. He had a good job on the B&M, and one night in January of 1962 it had happened.

He paused in the steady waking movements and looked thoughtfully out of the narrow Judas window on the second-floor landing. It was filled with the last bright foolishly golden light of summer, a light that laughed at the cold, rattling autumn and the colder winter that would follow it.

It had been part her and part him that night, and after it had happened and they were lying together in the dark?ness of her bedroom, she began to weep and tell him that what they had done was wrong. He told her it had been right, not knowing if it had been right or not and not caring, and there had been a norther whooping and coughing and screaming around the eaves and her room had been warm and safe and at last they had slept together like spoons in a silverware drawer.

Ah God and sonny Jesus, time was like a river and he wondered if that writer fella knew that.

He began to polish the banister again with long, sweep?ing strokes.

9

10:00 A.M.

It was recess time at Stanley Street Elementary School, which was the Lot's newest and proudest school building. It was a low, glassine four-classroom building that the school district was still paying for, as new and bright and modern as the Brock Street Elementary School was old and dark.

Richie Boddin, who was the school bully and proud of it, stepped out onto the playground grandly, eyes searching for that smart-ass new kid 'who knew all the answers in math. No new kid came waltzing into his school without knowing who was boss. Especially some four-eyes queer?boy teacher's pet like this one.

Richie was eleven years old and weighed 140 pounds. All his life his mother had been calling on people to see what a huge young man her son was. And so he knew he was big. Sometimes he fancied that he could feel the? ground tremble underneath his feet when he walked. And when he grew up he was going to smoke Camels, just like his old man,

The fourth- and fifth-graders were terrified of him, and the smaller kids regarded him as a schoolyard totem. When he, moved on to the seventh grade at Brock Street School, their pantheon would be empty of its devil. All this pleased him immensely.

And there was the Petrie kid, waiting to be chosen up for the recess touch football game.

'Hey!' Richie yelled.

Everyone looked around except Petrie. Every eye had a glassy sheen on it, and every pair of eyes showed relief when they saw that Richie's rested elsewhere.

'Hey you! Four-eyes!'

Mark Petrie turned and looked at Richie. His steel-rimmed glasses flashed in the morning sun. He was  as tall as Richie, which meant he towered over most of his classmates, but he was slender and his face looked defenseless and bookish.

'Are you speaking to me?'

"'Are you speaking to me?" Richie mimicked, his voice a high falsetto. 'You sound like a queer, four-eyes. You know that?'

'No, I didn't know that,' Mark Petrie said.