"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
