It (13 page)

Tonight Mr. Hanscom looked a little pale, a little distracted.

“Hello, Ricky Lee,” he said, sitting down, and then fell to studying his hands.

Ricky Lee knew he was slated to spend the next six or eight months in Colorado Springs, overseeing the start of the Mountain States Cultural Center, a sprawling six-building complex which would be cut into the side of a mountain.
When it's done people are going to say it looks like a giant-kid left his toy blocks all over a flight of stairs,
Ben had told Ricky Lee.
Some will, anyway, and they'll be at least half-right. But I think it's going to work. It's the biggest thing I've ever tried and putting it up is going to be scary as hell, but I think it's going to work.

Ricky Lee supposed it was possible that Mr. Hanscom had a little touch of stage fright. Nothing surprising about that, and nothing wrong about it, either. When you got big enough to be noticed, you got big enough to come gunning for. Or maybe he just had a touch of the bug. There was a hell of a lively one going around.

Ricky Lee got a beer stein from the backbar and reached for the Olympia tap.

“Don't do that, Ricky Lee.”

Ricky Lee turned back, surprised—and when Ben Hanscom looked up from his hands, he was suddenly frightened. Because Mr. Hanscom didn't look like he had stage fright, or the virus that was going around, or anything like that. He looked like he had just taken a terrible blow and was still trying to understand whatever it was that had hit him.

Someone died. He ain't married but every man's got a fambly, and someone in his just bit the dust. That's what happened, just as sure as shit rolls downhill from a privy.

Someone dropped a quarter into the juke-box, and Barbara Mandrell started to sing about a drunk man and a lonely woman.

“You okay, Mr. Hanscom?”

Ben Hanscom looked at Ricky Lee out of eyes that suddenly looked ten—no, twenty—years older than the rest of his face, and Ricky Lee was astonished to observe that Mr. Hanscom's hair was graying. He had never noticed any gray in his hair before.

Hanscom smiled. The smile was ghastly, horrible. It was like watching a corpse smile.

“I don't think I am, Ricky Lee. No sir. Not tonight. Not at all.”

Ricky Lee set the stein down and walked back over to where Hanscom sat. The bar was as empty as a Monday-night bar far outside of football season can get. There were fewer than twenty paying customers in the place. Annie was sitting by the door into the kitchen, playing cribbage with the short-order cook.

“Bad news, Mr. Hanscom?”

“Bad news, that's right. Bad news from home.” He looked at Ricky Lee. He looked through Ricky Lee.

“I'm sorry to hear that, Mr. Hanscom.”

“Thank you, Ricky Lee.”

He fell silent and Ricky Lee was about to ask him if there was anything he could do when Hanscom said:

“What's your bar whiskey, Ricky Lee?”

“For everyone else in this dump it's Four Roses,” Ricky Lee said. “But for you I think it's Wild Turkey.”

Hanscom smiled a little at that. “That's good of you, Ricky Lee. I think you better grab that stein after all. What you do is fill it up with Wild Turkey.”

“Fill
it?” Ricky Lee asked, frankly astonished. “Christ, I'll have to roll you out of here!”
Or call an ambulance,
he thought.

“Not tonight,” Hanscom said. “I don't think so.”

Ricky Lee looked carefully into Mr. Hanscom's eyes to see if he could possibly be joking, and it took less than a second to see that he wasn't. So he got the stein from the backbar and the bottle of Wild Turkey from one of the shelves below. The neck of the bottle chattered against the rim of the stein as he began to pour. He watched the whiskey gurgle out, fascinated in spite of himself. Ricky Lee decided it was more than just a touch of the Texan that Mr. Hanscom had in him: this had to be the biggest goddamned shot of whiskey he ever had poured or ever would pour in his life.

Call an ambulance, my ass. He drinks this baby and I'll be calling Parker and Waters in Swedholm for their funeral hack.

Nevertheless he brought it back and set it down in front of Hanscom; Ricky Lee's father had once told him that if a man was in his right mind, you brought him what he paid for, be it piss or poison. Ricky Lee didn't know if that was good advice or bad, but he knew that if you tended bar for a living, it went a fair piece toward
saving you from being chomped into gator-bait by your own conscience.

Hanscom looked at the monster drink thoughtfully for a moment and then asked, “What do I owe you for a shot like that, Ricky Lee?”

Ricky Lee shook his head slowly, eyes still on the steinful of whiskey, not wanting to look up and meet those socketed, staring eyes. “No,” he said. “This one is on the house.”

Hanscom smiled again, this time more naturally. “Why, I thank you, Ricky Lee. Now I am going to show you something I learned about in Peru, in 1978. I was working with a guy named Frank Billings—understudying with him, I guess you'd say. Frank Billings was the best damned architect in the world, I think. He caught a fever and the doctors injected about a billion different antibiotics into him and not a single one of them touched it. He burned for two weeks and then he died. What I'm going to show you I learned from the Indians who worked on the project. The local popskull is pretty potent. You take a slug and you think it's going down pretty mellow, no problem, and then all at once it's like someone lit a blowtorch in your mouth and aimed it down your throat. But the Indians drink it like Coca-Cola, and I rarely saw one drunk, and I
never
saw one with a hangover. Never had the sack to try it their way myself. But I think I'll give it a go tonight. Bring me some of those lemon wedges there.”

Ricky Lee brought him four and laid them out neatly on a fresh napkin next to the stein of whiskey. Hanscom picked one of them up, tilted his head back like a man about to administer eyedrops to himself, and then began to squeeze raw lemon-juice into his right nostril.

“Holy Jesus!” Ricky Lee cried, horrified.

Hanscom's throat worked. His face flushed . . . and then Ricky Lee saw tears running down the flat planes of his face toward his ears. Now the Spinners were on the juke, singing about the rubberband-man. “Oh Lord, I just don't know how much of this I can stand,” the Spinners sang.

Hanscom groped blindly on the bar, found another slice of lemon, and squeezed the juice into his other nostril.

“You're gonna fucking kill yourself,” Ricky Lee whispered.

Hanscom tossed both of the wrung-out lemon wedges onto the bar. His eyes were fiery red and he was breathing in hitching, wincing
gasps. Clear lemon-juice dripped from both of his nostrils and trickled down to the corners of his mouth. He groped for the stein, raised it, and drank a third of it. Frozen, Ricky Lee watched his adam's apple go up and down.

Hanscom set the stein aside, shuddered twice, then nodded. He looked at Ricky Lee and smiled a little. His eyes were no longer red.

“Works about like they said it did. You are so fucking concerned about your nose that you never feel what's going down your throat at all.”

“You're crazy, Mr. Hanscom,” Ricky Lee said.

“You bet your fur,” Mr. Hanscom said. “You remember that one, Ricky Lee? We used to say that when we were kids ‘You bet your fur.' Did I ever tell you I used to be fat?”

“No sir, you never did,” Ricky Lee whispered. He was now convinced that Mr. Hanscom had received some intelligence so dreadful that the man really
had
gone crazy . . . or at least taken temporary leave of his senses.

“I was a regular butterball. Never played baseball or basketball, always got caught first when we played tag, couldn't keep out of my own way. I was fat, all right. And there were these fellows in my home town who used to take after me pretty regularly. There was a fellow named Reginald Huggins, only everyone called him Belch. A kid named Victor Criss. A few other guys. But the real brains of the combination was a fellow named Henry Bowers. If there has ever been a genuinely evil kid strutting across the skin of the world, Ricky Lee, Henry Bowers was that kid. I wasn't the only kid he used to take after; my problem was, I couldn't run as fast as some of the others.”

Hanscom unbuttoned his shirt and opened it. Leaning forward, Ricky Lee saw a funny, twisted scar on Mr. Hanscom's stomach, just above his navel. Puckered, white, and old. It was a letter, he saw. Someone had carved the letter “H” into the man's stomach, probably long before Mr. Hanscom had
been
a man.

“Henry Bowers did that to me. About a thousand years ago. I'm lucky I'm not wearing his whole damned name down there.”

“Mr. Hanscom—”

Hanscom took the other two lemon-slices, one in each hand, tilted his head back, and took them like nose-drops. He shuddered wrackingly,
put them aside, and took two big swallows from the stein. He shuddered again, took another gulp, and then groped for the padded edge of the bar with his eyes closed. For a moment he held on like a man on a sailboat clinging to the rail for support in a heavy sea. Then he opened his eyes again and smiled at Ricky Lee.

“I could ride this bull all night,” he said.

“Mr. Hanscom, I wish you wouldn't do that anymore,” Ricky Lee said nervously.

Annie came over to the waitresses' stand with her tray and called for a couple of Millers. Ricky Lee drew them and took them down to her. His legs felt rubbery.

“Is Mr. Hanscom all right, Ricky Lee?” Annie asked. She was looking past Ricky Lee and he turned to follow her gaze. Mr. Hanscom was leaning over the bar, carefully picking lemon-slices out of the caddy where Ricky Lee kept the drink garnishes.

“I don't know,” he said. “I don't think so.”

“Well get your thumb out of your ass and do something about it.” Annie was, like most other women, partial to Ben Hanscom.

“I dunno. My daddy always said that if a man's in his right mind—”

“Your daddy didn't have the brains God gave a gopher,” Annie said. “Never mind your daddy. You got to put a stop to that, Ricky Lee. He's going to kill himself.”

Thus given his marching orders, Ricky Lee went back down to where Ben Hanscom sat. “Mr. Hanscom, I really think you've had en—”

Hanscom tilted his head back. Squeezed. Actually
sniffed
the lemon-juice back this time, as if it were cocaine. He gulped whiskey as if it were water. He looked at Ricky Lee solemnly. “Bing-bang, I saw the whole gang, dancing on my living-room rug,” he said, and then laughed. There was maybe two inches of whiskey left in the stein.

“That
is
enough,” Ricky Lee said, and reached for the stein.

Hanscom moved it gently out of his reach. “Damage has been done, Ricky Lee,” he said. “The damage has been done, boy.”

“Mr. Hanscom, please—”

“I've got something for your kids, Ricky Lee. Damn if I didn't almost forget!”

He was wearing a faded denim vest, and now he reached something out of one of its pockets. Ricky Lee heard a muted clink.

“My dad died when I was four,” Hanscom said. There was no slur at all in his voice. “Left us a bunch of debts and these. I want your kiddos to have them, Ricky Lee.” He put three cartwheel silver dollars on the bar, where they gleamed under the soft lights. Ricky Lee caught his breath.

“Mr. Hanscom, that's very kind, but I couldn't—”

“There used to be four, but I gave one of them to Stuttering Bill and the others. Bill Denbrough, that was his real name. Stuttering Bill's just what we used to call him . . . just a thing we used to say, like ‘You bet your fur.' He was one of the best friends I ever had—I did have a few, you know, even a fat kid like me had a few. Stuttering Bill's a writer now.”

Ricky Lee barely heard him. He was looking at the cartwheels, fascinated. 1921, 1923, and 1924. God knew what they were worth now, just in terms of the pure silver they contained.

“I couldn't,” he said again.

“But I insist.” Mr. Hanscom took hold of the stein and drained it. He should have been flat on his keister, but his eyes never left Ricky Lee's. Those eyes were watery, and very bloodshot, but Ricky Lee would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that they were also the eyes of a sober man.

“You're scaring me a little, Mr. Hanscom,” Ricky Lee said. Two years ago Gresham Arnold, a rumdum of some local repute, had come into the Red Wheel with a roll of quarters in his hand and a twenty-dollar bill stuck into the band of his hat. He handed the roll to Annie with instructions to feed the quarters into the juke-box by fours. He put the twenty on the bar and instructed Ricky Lee to set up drinks for the house. This rumdum, this Gresham Arnold, had long ago been a star basketball player for the Hemingford Rams, leading them to their first (and most likely last) high-school team championship. In 1961 that had been. An almost unlimited future seemed to lie ahead of the young man. But he had flunked out of L.S.U. his first semester, a victim of drink, drugs, and all-night parties. He came home, cracked up the yellow convertible his folks had given him as a graduation present, and got a job as head salesman in his daddy's John Deere dealership. Five years passed. His father could not bear to fire him, and so he finally sold the dealership and retired to Arizona, a man haunted and made old before his time
by the inexplicable and apparently irreversible degeneration of his son. While the dealership still belonged to his daddy and he was at least pretending to work, Arnold had made some effort to keep the booze at arm's length; afterward, it got him completely. He could get mean, but he had been just as sweet as horehound candy the night he brought in the quarters and set up drinks for the house, and everyone had thanked him kindly, and Annie kept playing Moe Bandy songs because Gresham Arnold liked ole Moe Bandy. He sat there at the bar—on the very stool where Mr. Hanscom was sitting now, Ricky Lee realized with steadily deepening unease—and drank three or four bourbon-and-bitters, and sang along with the juke, and caused no trouble, and went home when Ricky Lee closed the Wheel up, and hanged himself with his belt in an upstairs closet. Gresham Arnold's eyes that night had looked a little bit like Ben Hanscom's eyes looked right now.