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Tom grabbed Dinny’s wrists and began to spin him around, faster and faster. Centrifugal force pulled the boy’s body out until his whizzing legs were parallel to the ground. He shrieked with laughter. After two or three spins, Tom set him gently on his feet.
Dinny wobbled around, laughing and trying to get his balance back.
“Do it again, Tom! Do it again some more!”
“No, you’ll puke if I do. And Tom’s got to get to his home. Laws, yes.”
“Kay, Tom. ‘Bye!”
Angie said, “I think Dinny loves Lloyd Henreid and Tom Cullen more than anyone else in town. Tom Cullen is simple, but—” She looked at the girl and broke off. She was watching Tom, her eyes narrowed and thoughtful.
“Did he come in with another man?” she asked.
“Who? Tom? No—as far as I know, he came in all by himself about a week and a half ago. He was with those other people in their Zone, but they drove him out. Their loss is our gain, that’s what I say.”
“And he didn’t come in with a dummy? A deaf-and-dummy?”
“A deaf-mute? No, I’m pretty sure he came in alone. Dinny just loves him.”
The girl watched Tom out of sight. She thought of Pepto-Bismol in a bottle. She thought of a scrawled note that said: We don’t need you. That had been back in Kansas, a thousand years ago. She had shot at them. She wished she had killed them, particularly the dummy.
“Julie? Are you all right?”
Julie Lawry didn’t answer. She stared after Tom Cullen. In a little while, she began to smile.
Chapter 64
The dying man opened the Permacover notebook, uncapped his pen, paused a moment, and then began to write.
It was strange; where once the pen had flown over the paper, seeming to cover each sheet from top to bottom by a process of benign magic, the words now straggled and draggled, the letters large and tottery, as if he was regressing back to early grammar school days in his own private time machine.
In those days, his mother and father had still had some love left over for him. Amy had not yet blossomed, and his own future as The Amazing Ogunquit Fat Boy and Possible Hommasexshul was not yet decided. He could remember sitting at the sun-washed kitchen table, slowly copying one of the Tom Swift books word for word ...
It’s just baby fat, the doctor says so. There’s nothing wrong with his glands, thank God. And he’s so bright!
Watching the words grow, letter by letter. Watching the sentences grow, word by word. Watching the paragraphs grow, each one a brick in the great walled bulwark that was language.
“It’s to be my greatest invention,” Tom said forcefully. “Watch what happens when I pull out the plate, but for gosh sakes, don’t forget to shield your eyes! ”
The bricks of language. A stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Words. Worlds. Magic. Life and immortality. Power.
I don’t know where he gets it, Rita. Maybe from his grandfather. He was an ordained minister and they say he gave the most wonderful sermons…
Watching the letters improve as time passed. Watching them connect with each other, printing left behind, writing now. Assembling thoughts and plots. That was the whole world, after all, nothing but thoughts and plots. He had gotten a typewriter finally (and by then there wasn’t much else left over for him; Amy was in ...
He had developed the writing Frannie had seen in his ledger over years of practice—no paragraphs, no line breaks, no pause for the eye. It was work—terrible, hand-cramping work—but it was a labor of love. He had used the typewriter willingly and gratefully, but thought he had always saved the best of himself for longha...
And now he would transcribe the last of himself that same way.
He looked up and saw buzzards circling slowly in the sky, like something from a Saturday matinee movie with Randolph Scott, or from a novel by Max Brand. He thought of it written in a novel: Harold saw the buzzards circling in the sky, waiting. He looked at them calmly for a moment, and then bent to his journal again.
He bent to his journal again.
At the end, he had been forced to return to the straggling letters which had been the best his shaky motor control could produce at the beginning. He was reminded achingly of the sunny kitchen, the cold glass of Coke, the old and mildewy Tom Swift books. And now, at last, he thought (and wrote), he might have been able...
He opened his mouth and croaked, “Top of the world, Ma.”
He was halfway down the page. He looked at what he had written, then looked at his leg, which was twisted and broken. Broken? That was too kind a word. It was shattered. He had been sitting in the shade of this rock for five days now. The last of his food was gone. He would have died of thirst yesterday or the day befo...
Nadine was long gone.
Harold picked up the gun that had been lying by his side, and checked the loads. He had checked them a hundred times or more just this day. During the rainstorms, he had been careful to keep the gun dry. There were three cartridges left in it. He had fired the first two at Nadine when she looked down and told him she w...
They had been coming around a hairpin turn, Nadine on the inside, Harold on the outside aboard his Triumph cycle. They were on the Colorado Western Slope, about seventy miles from the Utah border. There had been an oilslick on the outer part of the curve, and in the days since, Harold had pondered much on this oilslick...
The Triumph had slid into the guardrail, and Harold had been flicked over the side like a bug. There had been an excruciating pain in his right leg. He had heard the wet snap as it broke. He screamed. Then hardscrabble was coming up to meet him, hardscrabble that was falling away at a steep, sickening angle toward the ...
He hit the ground, cartwheeled high into the air, screamed again, came down on his right leg once more, heard it break someplace else, went flying into the air again, came down, rolled, and suddenly fetched up against a dead tree that had heeled over in some years-ago thunderstorm. If it hadn’t been there, he would hav...
He wrote in his notebook, still marveling at the straggling, child-size letters: I don’t blame Nadine. That was true. But he had blamed her then.
Shocked, shaken, scraped raw, his right leg a bolt of agony, he had picked himself up and had crawled a little way up the slope. Far above him, he saw Nadine looking over the guardrail. Her face was white and tiny, a doll’s face.
“Nadine!” he cried. His voice came out in a hard croak. “The rope! It’s in the left saddlebag!”
She only looked down at him. He had begun to think she hadn’t heard him and he was preparing to repeat when he saw her head move to the left, to the right, to the left again. Very slowly. She was shaking her head.
“Nadine! I can’t get up without the rope! My leg’s broken! ”
She didn’t answer. She was only looking down at him, not even shaking her head now. He began to have the feeling he was down in a deep hole, and she was looking at him over the rim of it.
“Nadine, toss me the rope! ”
That slow headshaking again, as terrible as the door of a crypt swinging slowly shut on a man not yet dead but rather in the grip of some terrible catalepsy.
“NADINE! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD! ”
At last her voice drifted down to him, small but perfectly audible in the great mountain stillness. “All of this was arranged, Harold. I have to go on. I’m very sorry.”
But she made no move to go; she remained at the guardrail, watching him where he lay some two hundred feet below. Already there were flies, busily sampling his blood on the various rocks where he had hit and scraped off some of himself.
Harold began to crawl upward, dragging his shattered leg behind him. At first there was no hate, no need to put a bullet in her. It only seemed vital that he get close enough to read her expression.
It was a little past noon. It was hot. Sweat dripped from his face and onto the sharp pebbles and rocks he was climbing over. He moved by dragging himself upward on his elbows and pushing with his left leg, like a crippled insect. His breath rasped in and out of his throat, a hot file. He had no idea how long it went o...
At last he became stupidly aware that he could go no farther. The shadows had changed. Three hours had passed. He could not remember the last time he had looked up toward the guardrail and the road; over an hour ago, surely. In his pain, he had been completely absorbed in whatever minute progress he was making. Nadine ...