Six Stories (9 page)

‘Also cinnamon,’ he says out loud. The three people in the elevator car with him look around, and Bill Teale grins self-consciously.

Outside, he turns toward Penn Station, registering only one thought as the snow beats full into his face and he flips up his coat collar: the Santa outside the building has fixed his beard.

11:35 P.M.

‘Share?’

‘Hmmmm?’

‘Her voice is sleepy, distant. They have made long, slow love after the Dubrays finally left at eleven o’clock, and now she is drifting way That’s all right, though; he is drifting too. He has a feeling that all of his problems are solving themselves … or that the higher power upon whom he sometimes speculates, that savior of temporarily skinless snakes, is solving them for him.

‘I may take a week or so off after Christmas. Do some inventory. Poke around some new sites. I’m thinking about changing locations.’ There is no need for her to know what he may really doing in the week before New Year’s, he reasons; she couldn’t do anything but worry and - perhaps, perhaps not, he sees no reason to find out for sure - feel guilty.

‘Good,’ she says. ‘See a few movies while you’re at it, why don’t you?’ Her hand gropes out of the dark and touches his arm briefly. ‘You work so hard.’ Pause. ‘Also, you remembered the eggnog. I really didn’t think you would. I’m very pleased with you.’

He grins in the dark at that, helpless not to. It is so perfectly Sharon.

‘The Allens are all right, but the Dubrays are boring, aren’t they? she asks.

‘A little,’ he allows.

‘If that dress of hers had been cut any lower, she could have gotten a job in a topless bar.’

He says nothing to that, but grins again.

‘It was good tonight, wasn’t it? she asks him. It’s not their little party that she’s talking about.

‘Yes, excellent.’

‘Did you have a good day? I didn’t have a chance to ask.’

‘Fine day, Share.’

‘I love you, Bill.’

‘Love you, too.’

‘Goodnight.’

‘Goodnight.’

He lies on his side, drifting into sleep while thinking about the man in the open topcoat and the bright red ski sweater. He crosses over without knowing it, thought melting effortlessly into dream. ‘Sixty-seven was a hard year,’ the man in the red sweater says. ‘I was at Loc Ninh, you know. Tory Hill. We lost a lot of good men.’ Then he brightens. ‘But I got this.’ From the lefthand pocket of his topcoat he takes a white beard hanging on a string. ‘And this.’ From the righthand pocket he takes a crumpled Styrofoam cup, which he shakes. A few loose coins rattle in the bottom like teeth. ‘So you see,’ he says, fading now, ‘there are compensations to even the blindest life.’

Then the dream fades and he sleeps deeply until 6:15 the next morning, when the clock-radio wakes him to the sound of ‘The Little Drummer Boy.’

L.T.'S THEORY OF PETS

Stephen King

My friend L.T. hardly ever talks about how his wife disappeared, or how she’s probably dead, just another victim of the Axe Man, but he likes to tell the story of how she walked out on him. He does it with just the right roll of the eyes, as if to say, “She fooled me, boys-right, good, and proper!” He’ll sometimes tell the story to a bunch of men sitting on one of the loading docks behind the plant and eating their lunches, him eating his lunch, too, the one he fixed for himself - no Lulubelle back at home to do it for him these days.

They usually laugh when he tells the story, which always ends with L.T.‘s Theory of Pets. Hell, I usually laugh. It’s a funny story, even if you do know how it turned out. Not that any of us do, not completely.

“I punched out at four, just like usual,” L.T. will say, “then went down to Deb’s Den for a couple of beers, just like most days. Had a game of pinball, then went home. That was where things stopped being just like usual. When a person gets up in the morning, he doesn’t have the slightest idea how much may have changed in his life by the time he lays his head down again that night. ‘Ye know not the day or the hour,’ the Bible says. I believe that particular verse is about dying, but it fits everything else, boys. Everything else in this world. You just never know when you’re going to bust a fiddle-string.

“When I turn into the driveway I see the garage door’s open and the little Subaru she brought to the marriage is gone, but that doesn’t strike me as immediately peculiar. She was always driving off someplace - to a yard sale or someplace - and leaving the goddam garage door open. I’d tell her, ‘Lulu, if you keep doing that long enough, someone’ll eventually take advantage of it. Come in and take a rake or a bag of peat moss or maybe even the power mower.

Hell, even a Seventh Day Adventist fresh out of college and doing his merit badge rounds will steal if you put enough temptation in his way, and that’s the worst kind of person to tempt, because they feel it more than the rest of us.’ Anyway, she’d always say, ‘I’ll do better, L.T., try, anyway, I really will, honey.’ And she did do better, just backslid from time to time like any ordinary sinner.

“I park off to the side so she’ll be able to get her car in when she comes back from wherever, but I close the garage door. Then I go in by way of the kitchen. I cheek the mailbox, but it’s empty, the mail inside on the counter, so she must have left after eleven, because he don’t come until at least then. The mailman, I mean.

‘“Well, Lucy’s right there by the door, crying in that way Siamese have - I like that cry, think it’s sort of cute, but Lulu always hated it, maybe because it sounds like a baby’s cry and she didn’t want anything to do with babies. ‘What would I want with a rugmonkey?’ she’d say.

“Lucy being at the door wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, either.

That cat loved my ass. Still does. She’s two years old now. We got her at the start of the last year we were married. Right around.

Seems impossible to believe Lulu’s been gone a year, and we were only together three to start with. But Lulubelle was the type to make an impression on you. Lulubelle had what I have to call star quality. You know who she always reminded me of? Lucille Ball.

Now that I think of it, I guess that’s why I named the cat Lucy, although I don’t remember thinking it at the time. It might have been what you’d call a subconscious association. She’d come into a room-Lulubelle, I mean, not the cat-and just light it up somehow.

A person like that, when they’re gone you can hardly believe it, and you keep expecting them to come back.

“Meanwhile, there’s the cat. Her name was Lucy to start with, but Lulubelle hated the way she acted so much that she started calling her Screwlucy, and it kind of stuck. Lucy wasn’t nuts, though, she only wanted to be loved. Wanted to be loved more than any other pet I ever had in my life, and I’ve had quite a few.

“Anyway, I come in the house and pick up the cat and pet her a little and she climbs up onto my shoulder and sits there, purring and talking her Siamese talk. I check the mail on the counter, put the bills in the basket, then go over to the fridge to get Lucy something to eat. I always keep a working can of cat food in there, with a piece of tinfoil over the top. Saves having Lucy get excited and digging her claws into my shoulder when she hears the can opener. Cats are smart, you know. Much smarter than dogs.

They’re different in other ways, too. It might be that the biggest division in the world isn’t men and women but folks who like cats and folks who like dogs. Did any of you pork-packers ever think of that?

“Lulu bitched like hell about having an open can of cat food in the fridge, even one with a piece of foil over the top, said it made everything in there taste like old tuna, but I wouldn’t give in on that one. On most stuff I did it her way, but that cat food business was one of the few places where I really stood up for my rights. It didn’t have anything to do with the cat food, anyway. It had to do with the cat. She just didn’t like Lucy, that was all. Lucy was her cat, but she didn’t like it.

“Anyway, I go over to the fridge, and I see there’s a note on it, stuck there with one of the vegetable magnets. It’s from Lulubelle.

Best as I can remember, it goes like this:

” ‘Dear L.T. - I am leaving you, honey. Unless you come home early, I will be long gone by the time you get this note. I don’t think you will get home early, you have never got home early in all the time we have been married, but at least I know you’ll get this almost as soon as you get in the door, because the first thing you always do when you get home isn’t to come see me and say, “Hi sweet girl I’m home” and give me a kiss but go to the fridge and get whatever’s left of the last nasty can of Calo you put in there and feed Screwlucy. So at least I know you won’t just go upstairs and get shocked when you see my Elvis Last Supper picture is gone and my half of the closet is mostly empty and think we had a burglar who likes ladies’ dresses (unlike some who only care about what is under them).

” ‘I get irritated with you sometimes, honey, but I still think you re sweet and kind and nice, you will always be my little maple duff and sugar dumpling, no matter where our paths may lead. It’s just that I have decided I was never cut out to be a Spam-packer’s wife.

I don t mean that in any conceited way, either. I even called the Psychic Hotline last week as I struggled with this decision, lying awake night after night (and listening to you snore, boy, I don’t mean to hurt your feelings but have you ever got a snore on you), and I was given this message: “A broken spoon may become a fork.” I didn’t understand that at first, but I didn’t give up on it. I am not smart like some people (or like some people think they are smart), but I work at things. The best mill grinds slow but exceedingly fine, my mother used to say, and I ground away at this like a pepper mill in a Chinese restaurant, thinking late at night while you snored and no doubt dreamed of how many pork-snouts you could get in a can of Spam. And it came to me that saying about how a broken spoon can become a fork is a beautiful thing to behold. Because a fork has tines. And those tines may have to separate, like you and me must now have to separate, but still they have the same handle. So do we. We are both human beings, L.T., capable of loving and respecting one another. Look at all the fights we had about Frank and Screwlucy, and still, we mostly managed to get along. Yet the time has now come for me to seek my fortune along different lines from yours, and to poke into the great roast of life with a different point from yours. Besides, I miss my mother.”’

(I can’t say for sure if all this stuff was really in the note L.T. found on his fridge; it doesn’t seem entirely likely, I must admit, but the men listening to his story would be rolling in the aisles by this point - or around on the loading dock, at least-and it did sound like Lulubelle, that I can testify to.)

” ‘Please do not try to follow me, L.T., and although I’ll be at MY

mother’s and I know you have that number, I would appreciate you not calling but waiting for me to call you. In time I will, but in the meanwhile I have a lot of thinking to do, and although I have gotten on a fair way with it, I’m not “out of the fog” yet. I suppose I will be asking you for a divorce eventually, and think it is only fair to tell you SO. I have never been one to hold out false hope, believing it better to tell the truth and smoke out the devil.” Please remember that what I do I do in love, not in hatred and resentment.

And please remember what was told to me and what I now tell to you: a broken spoon may be a fork in disguise. All my love, Lulubelle Simms.’ “

L.T. would pause there, letting them digest the fact that she had gone back to her maiden name, and giving his eyes a few of those patented L.T. DeWitt rolls. Then he’d tell them the P.S. she’d tacked on the note.

” ‘I have taken Frank with me and left Screwlucy for you. I thought this would probably be the way you’d want it. Love, Lulu.’ “

If the DeWitt family was a fork, Screwlucy and Frank were the other two tines on it. If there wasn’t a fork (and speaking for myself, I’ve always felt marriage was more like a knife - the dangerous kind with two sharp edges), Screwlucy and Frank could still be said to sum up everything that went wrong in the marriage of L.T. and Lulubelle. Because, think of it - although Lulubelle bought Frank for L.T. (first wedding anniversary) and L.T. bought Lucy, soon to be Screwlucy, for Lulubelle (second wedding anniversary), they each wound up with the other. one’s pets when Lulu walked out on the marriage.

“She got me that dog because I liked the one on Frasier,” L.T.

would say. “That kind of dog’s a terrier, but I don’t remember now what they call that kind. A Jack something. Jack Sprat? Jack Robinson? Jack Shit? You know how a thing like that gets on the tip of your tongue?”

Somebody would tell him that Frasier’s dog was a Jack Russell terrier and L.T. would nod emphatically.

“That’s right!” he’d exclaim. “Sure! Exactly! That’s what Frank was, all right, a Jack Russell terrier. But you want to know the cold hard truth? An hour from now, that will have slipped away from me again - it’ll be there in my brain, but like something behind a rock. An hour from now, I’ll be going to myself, ‘What did that guy say Frank was? A Jack Handle terrier? A Jack Rabbit terrier?

That’s close, I know that’s close…‘And so on. Why? I think because I just hated that little fuck so much. That barking rat. That fur-covered shit machine. I hated it from the first time I laid eyes on it. There. It’s out and I’m glad. And do you know what? Frank felt the same about me. It was hate at first sight.

“You know how some men train their dog to bring them their slippers? Frank wouldn’t bring me my slippers, but he’d puke in them. Yes. The first time he did it, I stuck my right foot right into it. It was like sticking your foot into warm tapioca with extra big lumps in it. Although I didn’t see him, my theory is that he waited outside the bedroom door until he saw me coming - fucking lurked outside the bedroom door - then went in, unloaded in my right slipper, then hid under the bed to watch the fun. I deduce that on the basis of how it was still warm. Fucking dog. Man’s best friend, my ass. I wanted to take it to the pound after that, had the leash out and everything, but Lulu threw an absolute shit fit. You would have thought she’d come into the kitchen and caught me trying to give the dog a drain-cleaner enema.