EDDIE KASPBRAK TAKES HIS MEDICINE

 

If you would know all there is to know about an American man or woman of the middle class as the millennium nears its end, you would need only to look in his or her medicine cabinet-or so it has been said. But dear Lord, get a look into this one as Eddie Kaspbrak slides it open, mercifully sliding aside his white face and wide, staring eyes.

On the top shelf there’s Anacin, Excedrin, Excedrin PM, Contac, Gelusil, Tylenol, and a large blue jar of Vicks, looking like a bit of brooding deep twilight under glass. There is a bottle of Vivarin, a bottle of Serutan (That’s “Nature’s” spelled backwards, the ads on Lawrence Welk used to say when Eddie Kaspbrak was but a wee slip of a lad), and two bottles of Phillips Milk of Magnesia-the regular, which tastes like liquid chalk, and the new mint flavor, which tastes like mint-flavored liquid chalk. Here is a large bottle of Rolaids standing chummily close to a large bottle of Turns. The Turns are standing next to a large bottle of orange-flavored Di-Gel tablets. The three of them look like a trio of strange piggy-banks, stuffed with pills instead of dimes.

Second shelf, and dig the vites: you got your E, your C, your C with rosehips. You got B-simple and B-complex and B-12. There’s L-Lysine, which is supposed to do something about those embarrassing skin problems, and lecithin, which is supposed to do something about that embarrassing cholesterol build-up in and around the Big Pump. There’s iron, calcium, and cod liver oil. There’s One-A-Day multiples, Myadec multiples, Centrum multiples. And sitting up on top of the cabinet itself is a gigantic bottle of Geritol, just for good measure.

Moving right along to Eddie’s third shelf, we find the utility infielders of the patent-medicine world. Ex-Lax. Carter’s Little Pills. Those two keep Eddie Kaspbrak moving the mail. Here, nearby, is Kaopectate, Pepto-Bismol, and Preparation H in case the mail moves too fast or too painfully. Also some Tucks in a screw-top jar just to keep everything tidy after the mail has gone through, be it just an advertising circular or two addressed to OCCUPANT or a big old special-delivery package. Here is Formula 44 for coughs, Nyquil and Dristan for colds, and a big bottle of castor oil. There’s a tin of Sucrets in case Eddie’s throat gets sore, and there’s a quartet of mouthwashes: Chloraseptic, Cepacol, Cepestat in the spray bottle, and of course good old Listerine, often imitated but never duplicated. Visine and Murine for the eyes. Cortaid and Neosporin ointment for the skin (the second line of defense if the L-Lysine doesn’t live up to expectations), a tube of Oxy-5 and a plastic bottle of Oxy-Wash (because Eddie would definitely rather have a few less cents than a few more zits), and some tetracyline pills.

And off to one side, clustered like bitter conspirators, are three bottles of coal-tar shampoo.

The bottom shelf is almost deserted, but the stuff which is here means serious business-you could cruise on this stuff, okay. On this stuff you could fly higher than Ben Hanscom’s jet and crash harder than Thurman Munson’s. There’s Valium, Percodan, Elavil, and Darvon Complex. There is also another Sucrets box on this low shelf, but there are no Sucrets in it. If you opened that one you would find six Quaaludes.

Eddie Kaspbrak believed in the Boy Scout motto.

He was swinging a blue tote-bag as he came into the bathroom. He set it on the sink, unzipped it, and then, with trembling hands, he began to spill bottles and jars and tubes and squeeze-bottles and spray-bottles into it. Under other circumstances he would have taken them out handful by careful handful, but there was no time for such niceties now. The choice, as Eddie saw it, was as simple as it was brutal: get moving and keep moving or stand in one place long enough to start thinking about what all of this meant and simply die of fright.

“Eddie?” Myra called up from downstairs. “Eddie, what are you dooooing?

Eddie dropped the Sucrets box containing the “ludes into the bag. The medicine cabinet was now entirely empty except for Myra’s Midol and a small, almost used-up tube of Blistex. He paused for a moment and then grabbed the Blistex. He started to zip the bag closed, debated, and then threw in the Midol as well. She could always buy more.

“Eddie?” from halfway up the stairs now.

Eddie zipped the bag the rest of the way closed and then left the bathroom, swinging it by his side. He was a short man with a timid, rabbity sort of face. Much of his hair was gone; what was left grew in listless, piebald patches. The weight of the bag pulled him noticeably to one side.

An extremely large woman was climbing slowly to the second floor. Eddie could hear the stairs creak protestingly under her.

“What are you DOOOOOOOOING?”

Eddie did not need a shrink to tell him that he had, in a sense, married his mother. Myra Kaspbrak was huge. She had only been big when Eddie married her five years ago, but he sometimes thought his subconscious had seen the potential for hugeness in her; God knew his own mother had been a whopper. And she looked somehow more huge than ever as she reached the second-floor landing. She was wearing a white nightgown which swelled, comberlike, at bosom and hip. Her face, devoid of make-up, was white and shiny. She looked badly frightened.

“I have to go away for awhile,” Eddie said.

“What do you mean, you have to go away? What was that telephone call?”

“Nothing,” he said, fleeing abruptly down the hallway to their walk-in closet. He put the tote-bag down, opened the closet’s fold-back door, and raked aside the half-dozen identical black suits which hung there, as conspicuous as a thundercloud among the other, more brightly colored, clothes. He always wore one of the black suits when he was working. He bent into the closet, smelling mothballs and wool, and pulled out one of the suitcases from the back. He opened it and began throwing clothes in.

Her shadow fell over him.

“What’s this about, Eddie? Where are you going? You tell me!”

“I can’t tell you.”

She stood there, watching him, trying to decide what to say next, or what to do. The thought of simply bundling him into the closet and then standing with her back against the door until this madness had passed crossed her mind, but she was unable to bring herself to do it, although she certainly could have; she was three inches taller than Eddie and outweighed him by a hundred pounds. She couldn’t think of what to do or say, because this was so utterly unlike him. She could not have been any more dismayed and frightened if she had walked into the television room and found their new big-screen TV floating in the air.

“You can’t go,” she heard herself saying. “You promised you’d get me Al Pacino’s autograph.” It was an absurdity-God knew it was-but at this point even an absurdity was better than nothing.

“You’ll still get it,” Eddie said. “You’ll have to drive him yourself.”

Oh, here was a new terror to join those already circling in her poor dazzled head. She uttered a small scream. “I can’t-I never-”

“You’ll have to,” he said. He was examining his shoes now. “There’s no one else.”

“Neither of my uniforms fit anymore! They’re too tight in the tits!”

“Have Delores let one of them out,” he said implacably. He threw two pairs of shoes back, found an empty shoebox, and popped a third pair into it. Good black shoes, plenty of use left in them still, but looking just a bit too worn to wear on the job. When you drove rich people around New York for a living, many of them famous rich people, everything had to look just right. These shoes no longer looked just right… but he supposed they would do for where he was going. And for whatever he might have to do when he got there. Maybe Richie Tozier would -

But then the blackness threatened and he felt his throat beginning to close up. Eddie realized with real panic that he had packed the whole damned drugstore and had left the most important thing of all-his aspirator-downstairs on top of the stereo cabinet.

He banged the suitcase closed and latched it. He looked around at Myra, who was standing there in the hallway with her hand pressed against the short thick column of her neck as if she were the one with the asthma. She was staring at him, her face full of perplexity and terror, and he might have felt sorry for her if his heart had not already been so filled with terror for himself.

“What’s happened, Eddie? Who was that on the telephone? Are you in trouble? You are, aren’t you? What kind of trouble are you in?”

He walked toward her, zipper-bag in one hand and suitcase in the other, standing more or less straight now that he was more evenly weighted. She moved in front of him, blocking off the stairway, and at first he thought she would not give way. Then, when his face was about to crash into the soft roadblock of her breasts, she did give way… fearfully. As he walked past, never slowing, she burst into miserable tears.

“I can’t drive Al Pacino!” she bawled. “I’ll smash into a stop-sign or something, I know I will! Eddie I’m scaaarrred!”

He looked at the Seth Thomas clock on the table by the stairs. Twenty past nine. The canned-sounding Delta clerk had told him he had already missed the last flight north to Maine-that one had left La Guardia at eight-twenty-five. He had called Amtrak and discovered there was a late train to Boston departing Perm Station at eleven-thirty. It would drop him off at South Station, where he could take a cab to the offices of Cape Cod Limousine on Arlington Street. Cape Cod and Eddie’s company, Royal Crest, had worked out a useful and friendly reciprocal arrangement over the years. A quick call to Butch Carrington in Boston had taken care of his transportation north-Butch said he would have a Cadillac limo gassed and ready for him. So he would go in style, and with no pain-in-the-ass client sitting in the back seat, stinking the air up with a big cigar and asking if Eddie knew where he could score a broad or a few grams of coke or both.

Going in style, all right, he thought. Only way you could go in more style would be if you were going in a hearse. But don’t worry, Eddie-that’s probably how you’ll come back. If there’s enough of you left to pick up, that is.

“Eddie?”

Nine-twenty. Plenty of time to talk to her, plenty of time to be kind. Ah, but it would have been so much better if this had been her whist night, if he could have just slipped out, leaving a note under one of the magnets on the refrigerator door (the refrigerator door was where he left all his notes for Myra, because there she never missed them). Leaving that way-like a fugitive-would not have been good, but this was even worse. This was like having to leave home all over again, and that had been so hard he’d had to do it three times.

Sometimes home is where the heart is, Eddie thought randomly. I believe that. Old Bobby Frost said home’s the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. Unfortunately, it’s also the place where, once you’re in there, they don’t ever want to let you out.

He stood at the head of the stairs, forward motion temporarily spent, filled with fear, breath wheezing noisily in and out of the pinhole his throat had become, and regarded his weeping wife.

“Come on downstairs with me and I’ll tell you what I can,” he said.

Eddie put his two bags-clothes in one, medicine in the other-by the door in the front hall. He remembered something else then… or rather the ghost of his mother, who had been dead many years but who still spoke frequently in his mind, remembered for him.

You know when your feet get wet you always get a cold, Eddie-you’re not like other people, you have a very weak system, you have to be careful. That’s why you must always wear your rubbers when it rains.

It rained a lot in Derry.

Eddie opened the front-hall closet, got his rubbers off the hook where they hung neatly in a plastic bag, and put them in his clothes suitcase.

That’s a good boy, Eddie.

He and Myra had been watching TV when the shit hit the fan. Eddie went into the television room and pushed the button which lowered the screen of the MuralVision TV-its screen was so big that it made Freeman McNeil look like a visitor from Brobdingnag on Sunday afternoons. He picked up the telephone and called a taxi. The dispatcher told him it would probably be fifteen minutes. Eddie said that was no problem.

He hung up and grabbed his aspirator off the top of their expensive Sony compact-disc player. I spent fifteen hundred bucks on a state-of-the-art sound system so that Myra wouldn’t miss a single golden note on her Barry Manilow records and her “supremes Greatest Hits,” he thought, and then felt a flush of guilt. That wasn’t fair, and he damn well knew it. Myra would have been just as happy with her old scratchy records as she was with the new 45-rpm-sized laser discs, just as she would have been happy to keep on living in the little four-room house in Queens until they were both old and gray (and, if the truth were told, there was a little snow on Eddie Kaspbrak’s mountain already). He had bought the luxury sound system for the same reasons that he had bought this low fieldstone house on Long Island, where the two of them often rattled around like the last two peas in a can: because he had been able to, and because they were ways of appeasing the soft, frightened, often bewildered, always implacable voice of his mother; they were ways of saying: I made it, Ma! Look at all this! I made it! Now will you please for Christ’s sake shut up awhile?

Eddie stuffed the aspirator into his mouth and, like a man miming suicide, pulled the trigger. A cloud of awful licorice taste roiled and boiled its way down his throat, and Eddie breathed deeply. He could feel breathing passages which had almost closed start to open up again. The tightness in his chest started to ease, and suddenly he heard voices in his mind, ghost-voices.

Didn’t you get the note I sent you?

I got it, Mrs Kaspbrak, but-

Well, in case you can’t read, Coach Black, let me tell you in person. Are you ready?

Mrs Kaspbrak-

Good. Here it comes, from my lips to your ears. Ready? My Eddie cannot take physical education. I repeat: he canNOT take phys ed. Eddie is very delicate, and if he runs… or jumps…

Mrs Kaspbrak, I have the results of Eddie’s last physical on file in my office-that’s a state requirement. It says that Eddie is a little small for his age, but otherwise he’s absolutely normal. So I called your family physician just to be sure and he confirmed -

Are you saying I’m a liar, Coach Black? Is that it? Well, here he is! Here’s Eddie, standing right beside me! Can you hear the way he’s breathing? CAN you?

Mom… please… I’m all right…

Eddie, you know better than that. I taught you better than that. Don’t interrupt your elders.

I hear him, Mrs Kaspbrak, but-

Do you? Good! I thought maybe you were deaf! He sounds like a truck going uphill in low gear, doesn’t he? And if that isn’t asthma -

Mom, I’ll be-

Be quiet, Eddie, don’t interrupt me again. If that isn’t asthma, Coach Black, then I’m Queen Elizabeth!

Mrs Kaspbrak, Eddie often seems very well and happy in his physical-education classes. He loves to play games, and he runs quite fast. In my conversation with Dr Baynes, the word “psychosomatic” came up. I wonder if you’ve considered the possibility that-

–that my son is crazy? Is that what you’re trying to say? ARE YOU TRYING TO SAY THAT MY SON IS CRAZY????

No, but-

He’s delicate.

Mrs Kaspbrak-

My son is very delicate.

Mrs Kaspbrak, Dr Baynes confirmed that he could find nothing at all-“physically wrong,” Eddie finished. The memory of that humiliating encounter, his mother screaming at Coach Black in the Derry Elementary School gymnasium while he gasped and cringed at her side and the other kids huddled around one of the baskets and watched, had recurred to him tonight for the first time in years. Nor was that the only memory which Mike Hanlon’s call was going to bring back, he knew. He could feel many others, as bad or even worse, crowding and jostling like sale-mad shoppers bottlenecked in a department-store doorway. But soon the bottleneck would break and they would be along. He was quite sure of that. And what would they find on sale? His sanity? Could be. Half-Price. Smoke and Water Damage. Everything Must Go.

“Nothing physically wrong,” he repeated, took a deep shuddery breath, and stuffed the aspirator into his pocket.

“Eddie,” Myra said. “Please tell me what all of this is about!”

Tear-tracks shone on her chubby cheeks. Her hands twisted restlessly together like a pair of pink and hairless animals at play. Once, shortly before actually proposing marriage, he had taken a picture of Myra which she had given him and had put it next to one of his mother, who had died of congestive heart-failure at the age of sixty-four. At the time of her death Eddie’s mother had topped the scales at over four hundred pounds-four hundred and six, to be exact. She had become something nearly monstrous by then-her body had seemed nothing more than boobs and butt and belly, all overtopped by her pasty, perpetually dismayed face. But the picture of her which he put next to Myra’s picture had been taken in 1944, two years before he had been born (You were a very sickly baby, the ghost-mom now whispered in his ear. Many times we despaired of your life… In 1944 his mother had been a relatively svelte one hundred and eighty pounds.

He had made that comparison, he supposed, in a last-ditch effort to stop himself from committing psychological incest. He looked from Mother to Myra and back again to Mother.

They could have been sisters. The resemblance was that close.

Eddie looked at the two nearly identical pictures and promised himself he would not do this crazy thing. He knew that the boys at work were already making jokes about Jack Sprat and his wife, but they didn’t know the half of it. The jokes and snide remarks he could take, but did he really want to be a clown in such a Freudian circus as this? No. He did not. He would break it off with Myra. He would let her down gently because she was really very sweet and had had even less experience with men than he’d had with women. And then, after she had finally sailed over the horizon of his life, he could maybe take those tennis lessons he’d been thinking of for such a long time

(Eddie often seems very well and happy in his physical-education classes)

or there were the pool memberships they were selling at the UN Plaza Hotel

(Eddie loves to play games)

not to mention that health club which had opened up on Third Avenue across from the garage…

(Eddie runs quite fast he runs quite fast when you’re not here runs quite fast when there’s nobody around to remind him of how delicate he is and I see in his face Mrs Kaspbrak that he knows even now at the age of nine he knows that the biggest favor in the world he could do himself would be to run fast in any direction you’re not going let him go Mrs Kaspbrak let him RUN)

But in the end he had married Myra anyway. In the end the old ways and the old habits had simply been too strong. Home was the place where, when you have to go there, they have to chain you up. Oh, he might have beaten his mother’s ghost. It would have been hard but he was quite sure he could have done that much, if that had been all which needed doing. It was Myra herself who had ended up tipping the scales away from independence. Myra had condemned him with solicitude, had nailed him with concern, had chained him with sweetness. Myra, like his mother, had reached the final, fatal insight into his character: Eddie was all the more delicate because he sometimes suspected he was not delicate at all; Eddie needed to be protected from his own dim intimations of possible bravery.

On rainy days Myra always took his rubbers out of the plastic bag in the closet and put them by the coat-rack next to the door. Beside his plate of unbuttered wheat toast each morning was a dish of what might have been taken at a casual glance for a multi-colored pre-sweetened children’s cereal, but which a closer look would have revealed to be a whole spectrum of vitamins (most of which Eddie had in his medicine-bag right now). Myra, like Mother, under-, stood, and there had really been no chance for him. As a young unmarried man he had left his mother three times and returned home to her three times. Then, four years after his mother had died in the front hall of her Queens apartment, blocking the front door so completely with her bulk that the Medcu guys (called by the people downstairs when they heard the monstrous thud of Mrs Kaspbrak going down for the final count) had had to break in through the locked door between the apartment’s kitchen and the service stairwell, he had returned home for a fourth and final time. At least he had believed then it was for the final time-home again, home again, jiggety-jog; home again, home again, with Myra the hog. A hog she was, but she was a sweet hog, and he loved her, and there had really been no chance for him at all. She had drawn him to her with the fatal, hypnotizing snake’s eye of understanding., Home again forever, he had thought then.

But maybe I was wrong, he thought. Maybe this isn’t home, nor ever was-maybe home is where I have to go tonight. Home is the place where when you go there, you have to finally face the thing in the dark.

He shuddered helplessly, as if he had gone outside without his rubbers and caught a terrible chill.

“Eddie, please!”

She was beginning to weep again. Tears were her final defense, just as they had always been his mother’s: the soft weapon which paralyzes, which turns kindness and tenderness into fatal chinks in one’s armor.

Not that he’d ever worn much armor anyway-suits of armor did not seem to fit him very well.

Tears had been more than a defense for his mother; they had been a weapon. Myra had rarely used her own tears so cynically… but, cynically or not, he realized she was trying to use them that way now… and she was succeeding.

He couldn’t let her. It would be too easy to think of how lonely it was going to be, sitting in a seat on that train as it barrelled north toward Boston through the darkness, his suitcase overhead and his tote-bag full of nostrums between his feet, the fear sitting on his chest like a rancid Vicks-pack. Too easy to let Myra take him upstairs and make love to him with aspirins and an alcohol-rub. And put him to bed, where they might or might not make a franker sort of love.

But he had promised. Promised.

“Myra, listen to me,” he said, making his voice purposely dry, purposely matter-of-fact.

She looked at him with her wet, naked, terrified eyes.

He thought he would try now to explain-as best he could; he would tell her atibut how Mike Hanlon had called and told him that it had started again, and yes, he thought most of the others were coming.

But what came out of his mouth was much saner stuff.

“Go down to the office first thing in the morning. Talk to Phil. Tell him I had to take off and that you’ll drive Pacino-”

“Eddie I just can’t!” she wailed. “He’s a big star! If I get lost he’ll shout at me, I know he will, he’ll shout, they all do when the driver gets lost… and… and I’ll cry… there could be an accident… there probably will be an accident… Eddie… Eddie you have to stay home…”

“For God’s sake! Stop it!”

She recoiled from his voice, hurt; although Eddie gripped his aspirator, he would not use it. She would see that as a weakness, one she could use against him. Dear God, if You are there, please believe me when I say I don’t want to hurt Myra. I don’t want to cut her, don’t even want to bruise her. But I promised, we all promised, we swore in blood, please help me God because I have to do this…

“I hate it when you shout at me, Eddie,” she whispered.

“Myra, I hate it when I have to,” he said, and she winced. There you go, Eddie-you hurt her again. Why don’t you just punch her around the room a few times? That would probably be kinder. And quicker.

Suddenly-probably it was the thought of punching someone around the room which caused the image to come-he saw the face of Henry Bowers. It was the first time he had thought of Bowers in years, and it did nothing for his peace of mind. Nothing at all.

He closed his eyes briefly, then opened them and said: “You won’t get lost, and he won’t shout at you. Mr Pacino is very nice, very understanding. ” He had never driven Pacino before in his life, but contented himself with knowing that at least the law of averages was on the side of this lie-according to popular myth most celebrities were shitheels, but Eddie had driven enough of them to know it usually wasn’t true.

There were, of course, exceptions to the rule-and in most cases the exceptions were real monstrosities. He hoped fervently for Myra’s sake that Pacino wasn’t one of these.

“Is he?” she asked timidly.

“Yes. He is.”

“How do you know?”

“Demetrios drove him two or three times when he worked at Manhattan Limousine,” Eddie said glibly. “He said Mr Pacino always tipped at least fifty dollars.”

“I wouldn’t care if he only tipped me fifty cents, as long as he didn’t shout at me.”

“Myra, it’s all as easy as one-two-three. One, you make the pickup at the Saint Regis tomorrow at seven P.M. and take him over to the ABC Building. They’re retaping the last act of this play Pacino’s in-American Buffalo, I think it’s called. Two, you take him back to the Saint Regis around eleven. Three, you go back to the garage, turn in the car, and sign the greensheet.”

That’s all?”

“That’s all. You can do it standing on your head, Marty.”

She usually giggled at this pet name, but now she only looked at him with a painful childlike solemnity.

“What if he wants to go out to dinner instead of back to the hotel? Or for drinks? Or for dancing?”

“I don’t think he will, but if he does, you take him. If it looks like he’s going to party all night, you can call Phil Thomas on the radio-phone after midnight. By then he’ll have a driver free to relieve you. I’d never stick you with something like this in the first place if I had a driver who was free, but I got two guys out sick, Demetrios on vacation, and everyone else booked up solid. You’ll be snug in your own bed by one in the morning, Marty-one in the morning at the very, very latest. I apple-solutely guarantee it.”

She didn’t laugh at apple-solutely, either.

He cleared his throat and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. Instantly the ghost-mom whispered: Don’t sit that way, Eddie. It’s bad for your posture, and it cramps your lungs. You have very delicate lungs.

He sat up straight again, hardly aware he was doing it.

“This better be the only time I have to drive,” she nearly moaned. “I’ve turned into such a horse in the last two years, and my uniforms look so bad now.”

“It’s the only time, I swear.”

“Who called you, Eddie?”

As if on cue, lights swept across the wall; a horn honked once as the cab turned into the driveway. He felt a surge of relief. They had spent the fifteen minutes talking about Pacino instead of Derry and Mike Hanlon and Henry Bowers, and that was good. Good for Myra, and good for him as well. He did not want to spend any time thinking or talking about those things until he had to.

Eddie stood up. “It’s my cab.”

She got up so fast she tripped over the hem of her own nightgown and fell forward. Eddie caught her, but for a moment the issue was in grave doubt: she outweighed him by a hundred pounds.

And she was beginning to blubber again.

“Eddie, you have to tell me!”

“I can’t. There’s no time.”

“You never kept anything from me before, Eddie,” she wept.

“And I’m not now. Not really. I don’t remember it all. At least, not yet. The man who tailed was-is-an old friend. He-”

“You’ll get sick,” she said desperately, following him as he walked toward the front hall again. “I know you will. Let me come, Eddie, please, I’ll take care of you, Pacino can get a cab or something, it won’t kill him, what do you say, okay?” Her voice was rising, becoming frantic, and to Eddie’s horror she began to look more and more like his mother, his mother as she had looked in the last months before she died: old and fat and crazy. I’ll rub your back and see that you get your pills… I… I’ll help you… I won’t talk if you don’t want me to but you can tell me everything… Eddie… Eddie, please don’t go! Eddie, please! Pleeeeeease!”

He was striding down the hall to the front door now, walking blind, head down, moving as a man moves against a high wind. He was wheezing again. When he picked up the bags each of them seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. He could feel her plump pink hands on him, touching, exploring, pulling with helpless desire but no real strength, trying to seduce him with her sweet tears of concern, trying to draw him back.

I’m not going to make it! he thought desperately. The asthma was worse now, worse than it had been since he was a kid. He reached for the doorknob but it seemed to be receding from him, receding into the blackness of outer space.

“If you stay I’ll make you a sour-cream coffee-cake,” she babbled. “We’ll have popcorn… I’ll make your favorite turkey dinner… I’ll make it for breakfast tomorrow morning if you want… I’ll start right now… and giblet gravy… Eddie please I’m scared you’re scaring me so bad!”

She grabbed his collar and pulled him backward, like a beefy cop putting the grab on a suspicious fellow who is trying to flee. With a final fading effort, Eddie kept going… and when he was at the absolute end of his strength and ability to resist, he felt her grip trail away.

She gave one final wail.

His fingers closed around the doorknob-how blessedly cool it was! He pulled the door open and saw a Checker cab sitting out there, an ambassador from the land of sanity. The night was clear. The stars were bright and lucid.

He turned back to Myra, whistling and wheezing. “You need to understand that this isn’t something I want to do,” he said. “If I had a choice-any choice at all-I wouldn’t go. Please understand that, Marty. I’m going but I’ll be coming back.”

Oh but that felt like a lie.

“When? How long?”

“A week. Or maybe ten days. Surely no longer than that.”

“A week!” she screamed, clutching at her bosom like a diva in a bad opera. “A week! Ten days! Please, Eddie! Pleeeeeee-

“Marty, stop. Okay? Just stop.”

For a wonder, she did: stopped and stood looking at him with her wet, bruised eyes, not angry at him, only terrified for him and, coincidentally, for herself. And for perhaps the first time in all the years he had known her, he felt that he could love her safely. Was that part of the going away? He supposed it was. No… you could flush the supposed. He knew it was. Already he felt like something living in the wrong end of a telescope.

But it was maybe all right. Was that what he meant? That he had finally decided it was all right to love her? That it was all right even though she looked like his mother when his mother had been younger and even though she ate brownies in bed while watching Hardcastle and McCormick or Falcon Crest and the crumbs always got on his side and even though she wasn’t all that bright and even though she understood and condoned his remedies in the medicine cabinet because she kept her own in the refrigerator?

Or was it…

Could it be that…

These other ideas were all things he had considered in one way or another, at one tune or another, during his oddly entwined lives as a son and a lover and a husband; now, on the point of leaving home for what felt like the absolutely last time, a new possibility came to him, and startled wonder brushed him like the wing of some large bird.

Could it be that Myra was even more frightened than he was?

Could it be that his mother had been?

Another Derry memory came shooting up from his subconscious like a balefully fizzing firework. There had been a shoe store downtown on Center Street. The Shoeboat. His mother had taken him there one day-he thought he could have been no more than five or six-and told him to sit still and be good while she got a pair of white pumps for a wedding. So he sat still and was good while his mother talked with Mr Gardener, who was one of the shoe-clerks, but he was only five (or maybe six), and after his mother had rejected the third pair of white pumps Mr Gardener showed her, Eddie got bored and walked over to the far corner to look at something he had spotted there. At first he thought it was just a big crate standing on end. When he got closer he decided it was some kind of desk. But it sure was the kookiest desk he had ever seen. It was so narrow! It was made of bright polished wood with lots of curvy inlaid lines and carved doojiggers in it. Also, there was a little flight of three stairs leading up to it, and he had never seen a desk with stairs. When he got right up to it, he saw that there was a slot at the bottom of the desk-thing, a button on one side, and on top of it-entrancing!-was something that looked exactly like Captain Video’s Spacescope.

Eddie walked around to the other side and there was a sign. He must have been at least six, because he had been able to read it, softly whispering each word aloud:

 

 

DO YOUR SHOES FIT RIGHT? CHECK AND SEE!

He went back around, climbed the three steps to the little platform, and then stuck his foot into the slot at the bottom of the shoe-checker. Did his shoes fit right"? Eddie didn’t know, but he was wild to check and see. He socked his face into the rubber faceguard and thumbed the button. Green light flooded his eyes. Eddie gasped. He could see a foot floating inside a shoe filled with green smoke. He wiggled his toes, and the toes he was looking at wiggled right back-they were his, all right, just as he had suspected. And then he realized it was not just his toes he could see; he could see his bones, too! The bones in his foot! He crossed his great toe over his second toe (as if sneakily warding off the consequences of telling a lie) and the eldritch bones in the scope made an X that was not white but goblin-green. He could see -

Then his mother shrieked, a rising sound of panic that cut through the quiet shoe store like a runaway reaper-blade, like a firebell, like doom on horseback. He jerked his startled, dismayed face out of the viewer and saw her pelting toward him across the store in her stocking feet, her dress flying out behind her. She knocked a chair over and one of those shoe-measuring things that always tickled his feet went flying. Her bosom heaved. Her mouth was a scarlet O of horror. Faces turned to follow her progress.

“Eddie get off there!” she screamed. “Get off there! Those machines give you cancer! Get off there! Eddie! Eddieeeeeee-”

He backed away as if the machine had suddenly grown red-hot. In his startled panic he forgot the little flight of stairs behind him. His heels dropped over the top one and he stood there, slowly falling backward, his arms pinwheeling wildly in a losing battle to retain his departing balance. And hadn’t he thought with a kind of mad joy I’m going to fall! I’m going to find out what it feels like to fall and bump my head! Goody for me!…? Hadn’t he thought that? Or was it only the man imposing his own self-serving adult ideas over whatever his child’s mind, always roaring with confused surmises and half-perceived images (images which lost their sense in their very brightness), had thought… or tried to think?

Either way, it was a moot question. He had not fallen. His mother had gotten there in time. His mother had caught him. He had burst into tears, but he had not fallen.

Everyone had been looking at them. He remembered that. He remembered Mr Gardener picking up the shoe-measuring thing and checking the little sliding gadgets on it to make sure they were still okay while another clerk righted the fallen chair and then flapped his arms once, in amused disgust, before putting on his pleasantly neutral salesman’s face again. Mostly he remembered his mother’s wet cheek and her hot, sour breath. He remembered her whispering over and over in his ear, “don’t you ever do that again, don’t you ever do that again, don’t you ever. ” It was what his mother chanted to ward off trouble. She had chanted the same thing a year earlier when she discovered the baby-sitter had taken Eddie to the public pool in Derry Park one stiflingly hot summer day-this had been when the polio scare of the early fifties was just beginning to wind down. She had dragged him out of the pool, telling him he must never do that, never, never, and all the kids had looked as all the clerks and customers were looking now, and her breath had had that same sour tang.

She dragged him out of The Shoeboat, shouting at the clerks that she would see them all in court if there was anything wrong with her boy. Eddie’s terrified tears had continued off and on for the rest of the morning, and his asthma had been particularly bad all day. That night he had lain awake for hours past the time he was usually asleep, wondering exactly what cancer was, if it was worse than polio, if it killed you, how long it took if it did, and how bad it hurt before you died. He also wondered if he would go to hell afterward.

The threat had been serious, he knew that much.

She had been so scared. That was how he knew.

So terrified.

“Marty,” he said across this gulf of years, “would you give me a kiss?”

She kissed him and hugged him so tightly while she was doing it that the bones in his back groaned. If we were in water, he thought, she’d drown us both.

“Don’t be afraid,” he whispered in her ear.

“I can’t help it!” she wailed.

“I know,” he said, and realized that, even though she was hugging him with rib-breaking tightness, his asthma had eased. That whistling note in his breathing was gone. “I know, Marty.”

The taxi-driver honked again.

“Will you call?” she asked him tremulously.

“If I can.”

“Eddie, can’t you please tell me what it is?”

And suppose he did? How far would it go toward setting her mind at rest?

Many, I got a call from Mike Hanlon tonight, and we talked for awhile, but everything we said boiled down to two things. “It’s started again,” Mike said; “Will you come?” Mike said. And now I’ve got a fever, Marty, only it’s a fever you can’t damp down with aspirin, and I’ve got a shortness of breath the goddamned aspirator won’t touch, because that shortness of breath isn’t in my throat or my lungs-it is around my heart. I’ll come back to you if I can, Marty, but I feel like a man standing at the mouth of an old mine-shaft that is full of cave-ins waiting to happen, standing there and saying goodbye to the daylight.

Yes-my, yes! That would surely set her mind at rest!

“No,” he said. “I guess I can’t tell you what it is.”

And before she could say more, before she could begin again (Eddie, get out of that taxi! They give you cancer!), he was striding away from her, faster and faster. By the time he got to the cab he was almost running.

She was still standing in the doorway when the cab backed into the street, still standing there when they started for the city-a big black woman-shadow cut out of the light spilling from their house. He waved, and thought she raised her hand in return.

“Where we headed tonight, my friend?” the cabbie asked.

“Penn Station,” Eddie said, and his hand relaxed on the aspirator. His asthma had gone to wherever it went to brood between its assaults on his bronchial tubes. He felt… almost well.

But he needed the aspirator worse than ever four hours later, coming out of a light doze all in a single spasmodic jerk that caused the fellow in the business suit across the way to lower his paper and look at him with faintly apprehensive curiosity.

I’m back, Eddie! the asthma yelled gleefully. I’m back and oh, I dunno, this time I just might killya! Why not? Gotta do it sometime, you know! Can’t fuck around with you forever!

Eddie’s chest surged and pulled. He groped for the aspirator, found it, pointed it down his throat, and pulled the trigger. Then he sat back in the tall Amtrak seat, shivering, waiting for relief, thinking of the dream from which he had just awakened. Dream? Christ, if that was all. He was afraid it was more memory than dream. In it there had been a green light like the light inside a shoe-store X-ray machine, and a rotting leper had pursued a screaming boy named Eddie Kaspbrak through tunnels under the earth. He ran and ran

(he runs quite fast Coach Black had told his mother and he ran plenty fast with that rotting thing after him oh yes you better believe it you bet your fur)

in this dream where he was eleven years old, and then he had smelled something like the death of time, and someone lit a match and he had looked down and seen the decomposing face of a boy named Patrick Hockstetter, a boy who had disappeared in July of 1958, and there were worms crawling in and out of Patrick Hockstetter’s cheeks, and that gassy, awful smell was coming from inside of Patrick Hockstetter, and in that dream that was more memory than dream he had looked to one side and had seen two schoolbooks that were fat with moisture and overgrown with green mold: Roads to Everywhere, and Understanding Our America. They were in their current condition because it was a foul wetness down here (’How I Spent My Summer Vacation,” a theme by Patrick Hockstetter-’I spent it dead in a tunnel! Moss grew on my books and they swelled up to the size of Sears catalogues!’). Eddie opened his mouth to scream and that was when the scabrous fingers of the leper clittered around his cheek and plunged themselves into his mouth and that was when he woke up with that back-snapping jerk to find himself not in the sewers under Derry, Maine, but in an Amtrak club-car near the head of a train speeding across Rhode Island under a big white moon.

The man across the aisle hesitated, almost thought better of speaking, and then did. “Are you all right, sir?”

“Oh yes,” Eddie said. “I fell asleep and had a bad dream. It got my asthma going.”

“I see.” The paper went up again. Eddie saw it was the paper his mother had sometimes referred to as The Jew York Times.

Eddie looked out the window at a sleeping landscape litten only by the fairy moon. Here and there were houses, or sometimes clusters of them, most dark, a few showing lights. But the lights seemed little, and falsely mocking, compared to the moon’s ghost-glow.

He thought the moon talked to him, he thought suddenly. Henry Bowers. God, he was so crazy. He wondered where Henry Bowers was now. Dead? In prison? Drifting across empty plains somewhere in the middle of the country like an incurable virus, sticking up Seven-Elevens in the deep slumbrous hours between one and four in the morning or maybe killing some of the people stupid enough to slow down for his cocked thumb in order to transfer the dollars in their wallets to his own?

Possible, possible.

In a state asylum somewhere? Looking up at this moon, which was approaching the full? Talking to it, listening to answers which only he could hear?

Eddie considered this somehow even more possible. He shivered. I am remembering my boyhood at last, he thought. I am remembering how I spent my own summer vacation in that dim dead year of 1958. He sensed that now he could fix upon almost any scene from that summer he wanted to, but he did not want to. Oh God if I could only forget it all again.

He leaned his forehead against the dirty glass of the window, his aspirator clasped loosely in one hand like a religious artifact, watching as the night flew apart around the train.

Going north, he thought, but that was wrong.

Not going north. Because it’s not a train; it’s a time machine. Not north; back. Back in time.

He thought he heard the moon mutter.

Eddie Kaspbrak held his aspirator tightly and closed his eyes against sudden vertigo.

 

5

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