'Salem's Lot(7)

She smiled uneasily. 'I guess you should know.'

'Have you sold stuff locally?'

'Oh yes.' She laughed abruptly. 'My biggest sale to date was to the Cinex Corporation. They opened a new triple cinema in Portland and bought twelve paintings at a crack to hang in their lobby. Paid seven hundred dollars. I made a down payment on my little car.'

'You ought to take a hotel room for a week or so in New York,' he said, 'and hit every magazine and publishing house you can find with your portfolio. Make your appoint?ments six months in advance so the editors and personnel guys don't have anything on their calendars. But for God's sake, don't just haul stakes for the big city.'

'What about you?' she asked, leaving off the straw and spooning ice cream. 'What are you doing in the thriving community of Jerusalem's Lot, Maine, population thirteen hundred?'

He shrugged. 'Trying to write a novel.'

She was instantly alight with excitement. 'in the Lot? What's it about? Why here? Are you -'

He looked at her gravely. 'You're dripping.'

'I'm - ? Oh, I am. Sorry.' She mopped the base of her glass with a napkin. 'Say, I didn't mean to pry. I'm really not gushy as a rule.'

'No apology needed,' he said. 'All writers like to talk about their books. Sometimes when I'm lying in bed at night I make up a Playboy interview about me. Waste of time. They only do authors if their books are big on campus.'

The Air Force youngster stood up. A Greyhound was pulling up to the curb out front, air brakes chuffing.

'I lived in 'salem's Lot for four years as a kid. Out on the Burns Road.'

'The Burns Road? There's nothing out there now but the Marshes and a little graveyard. Harmony Hill, they call it.'

'I lived with my Aunt Cindy. Cynthia Stowens. My dad died, see, and my mom went through a . . . well, kind of a nervous breakdown. So she farmed me out to Aunt Cindy while she got her act back together. Aunt Cindy put me on a bus back to Long Island and my mom just about a month after the big fire.' He looked at his face in the mirror behind the soda fountain. 'I cried on the bus going away from Mom, and I cried on the bus going away from Aunt Cindy and Jerusalem's Lot.'

'I was born the year of the fire,' Susan said. 'The biggest damn thing that ever happened to this town and I slept through it.'

Ben laughed. 'That makes you about seven years older than I thought in the park.'

'Really?' She looked pleased. 'Thank you . . . I think. Your aunt's house must have burned down.'

'Yes,' he said. 'That night is one of my clearest memor?ies. Some men with Indian pumps on their backs came to the door and said we'd have to leave. It was very exciting. Aunt Cindy dithered around, picking things up and loading them into her Hudson. Christ, what a night.'

'Was she insured?'

'No, but the house was rented and we got just about everything valuable into the car, except for the TV. We tried to lift it and couldn't even budge it off the floor. It was a Video King with a seven-inch screen and a magnify?ing glass over the picture tube. Hell on the eyes. We only got one channel anyway - lots of country music, farm reports, and Kitty the Klown.'

'And you came back here to write a book,' she marveled.

Ben didn't reply at once. Miss Coogan was opening cartons of cigarettes and filling the display rack by the cash register. The pharmacist, Mr Labree, was puttering around behind the high drug counter like a frosty ghost. The Air Force kid was standing by the door to the bus, waiting for the driver to come back from the bathroom.

'Yes,' Ben said. He turned and looked at her, full in the face, for the first time. She had a very pretty face, with candid blue eyes and a high, clear, tanned forehead. 'Is this town your childhood?' he asked.

'Yes.'

He nodded. 'Then you know. I was a kid in 'salem's Lot and it's haunted for me. When I came back, I almost drove right by because I was afraid it would be different.'

'Things don't change here,' she said. 'Not very much.'

'I used to play war with the Gardener kids down in the Marshes. Pirates out by Royal's Pond. Capture-the-flag and hide-and-go-seek in the park. My mom and I knocked around some pretty hard places after I left Aunt Cindy. She killed herself when I was fourteen, but most of the magic dust had rubbed off me long before that. What there was of it was here, And it's still here. The town hasn't changed that much. Looking out on Jointner Avenue is like looking through a thin pane of ice - like the one you can pick off the top of the town cistern in November if you knock it around the edges first - looking through that at your childhood. It's wavy and misty and in some places it trails off into nothing, but most of it is still all there.'

He stopped, amazed. He had made a speech.

'You talk just like your books,' she said, awed.

He laughed. 'I never said anything like that before. Not out loud.'

'What did you do after your mother . . . after she died?'

'Knocked around,' he said briefly. 'Eat your ice cream.'

She did.

'Some things have changed,' she said after a while. 'Mr Spencer died. Do you remember him?'

'Sure. Every Thursday night Aunt Cindy came into town to do her shopping at Crossen's store and she'd send me in here to have a root beer. That was when it was on draft, real Rochester root beer. She'd give me a handkerchief with a nickel wrapped up in it.'