"I ought to go, Mr. Clewson. In case my wife wakes up." He
paused. "I think I'll take the phone off the hook."
"That might not be a bad idea."
"Goodbye, Mr. Clewson."
"Goodbye. Once again, my sympathies."
"And mine, too."
Click.
Dale crossed the room and picked up the photograph of Squad D.
He looked at the smiling blonde boy, who was sitting cross-legged
in front of Kimberley and Gibson, sitting casually and comfortably
on the ground as if he had never had a haemorrhoid in his life, as if
he had never stood atop a stepladder in a shadowy garage and
slipped a noose around his neck.
Josh finally caught up with them.
He stood looking fixedly at the photograph for a long time before
realizing that the depth of silence In the room had deepened. The
clock had stopped.
THAT FEELING, YOU
CAN ONLY SAY WHAT
IT IS IN FRENCH
STEPHEN KING
From
The New Yorker, 1998
A second honeymoon in the Florida Keys. What could be more
relaxing?
FLOYD, what's that over there? Oh shit. The mans voice speaking
these words was vaguely familiar, but the words themselves were
just a disconnected snip of dialogue, the kind of thing you heard
when you were channel-surfing with the remote. There was no one
named Floyd in her life. Still, that was the start. Even before she
saw the little girl in the red pinafore, there were those disconnected
words.
But it was the little girl who brought it on strong. "Oh-oh, I'm
getting that feeling," Carol said.
The girl in the pinafore was in front of a country market called
Carson's "Beer, Wine, Groc, Fresh Bait, Lottery" - crouched down
with her butt between her ankles and the bright-red apron-dress
tucked between her thighs, playing with a doll. The doll was
yellow-haired and dirty the kind that's round and stuffed and
boneless in the body.
"What feeling?" Bill asked.
"You know. The one you can only say what it is in French. Help
me here."
"Deja vu," he said.
"That's it," she said, and turned to look at the little girl one more
time. She'll have the doll by one leg, Carol thought. Holding it
upside down by one leg with its grimy yellow hair hanging down.
But the little girl had abandoned the doll on the store's splintery
gray steps and had gone over to look at a dog caged up in the back
of a station wagon. Then Bill and Carol Shelton went around a
curve in the road and the store was out of sight.
"How much farther?" Carol asked.
Bill looked at her with one eyebrow raised and his mouth dimpled
at one corner - left eyebrow right dimple, always the same. The
look that said, You think I'm amused, but I'm really irritated For
the ninety-trillionth or so time in the marriage, I'm really irritated
You don't know that, though, because you can only see about two
inches into me and then your vision fails.
But she had better vision than he realized; it was one of the secrets
of the marriage. Probably he had a few secrets of his own. And
there were, of course, the ones they kept together.
"I don't know" he said. "I've never been here."
"Once you get over the causeway and onto Sanibel Island, there's
only one," he said. "It goes across to Captiva, and there it ends. But
before it does we'll come to Palin House. That I promise you."
The arch in his eyebrow began to flatten. The dimple began to fill
in. He was returning to what she thought of as the Great Level. She
had come to dislike the Great Level, too, but not as much as the
eyebrow and the dimple, or his sarcastic way of saying "Excuse
me?" when you said something he considered stupid, or his habit
of pooching out his lower lip when he wanted to appear thoughtful
and deliberative.
"Bill?"
"Do you know anyone named Floyd?"
"There was Floyd Denning. He and I ran the downstairs snack bar
at Christ the Redeemer in our senior year. I told you about him,
didn't I? He stole the Coke money one Friday and spent the
weekend in New York with his girlfriend. They suspended him and
expelled her. What made you think of him?"
"I don't know," she said. Easier than telling him that the Floyd with
whom Bill had gone to high school wasn't the Floyd the voice in
her head was speaking to. At least, she didn't think it was.
Second honeymoon, that's what you call this, she thought, looking
at the palms a that lined Highway 867, a white bird that stalked
along the shoulder like an angry preacher, and a sign that read
"Seminole Wildlife Park, Bring a Carfull for $10." Florida the
Sunshine State. Florida the Hospitality State. Not to mention
Florida the Second-Honeymoon State. Florida, where Bill Shelton
and Carol Shelton, the former Carol O'Neill, of Lynn,
Massachusetts, came on their first honeymoon twenty-five years
before. Only that was on the other side, the Atlantic side, at a little
cabin colony, and there were cockroaches in the bureau drawers.
He couldn't stop touching me. That was all right, though, in those
days I wanted to be touched Hell I wanted to he torched like
Atlanta in "Gone with the wind," and he torched me, rebuilt me,
torched me again. Now it's silver. Twenty-five is silver. And
sometimes I get that feeling.
They were approaching a curve, and she thought, Three crosses on
the right side of the road. Two small ones flanking a bigger one.
The small ones are clapped-together wood. The one in the middle
is white birch with a picture on it, a tiny photograph of the
seventeen-year-old boy who lost control of his car on this curve,
one drunk nght that was his last drunk night, and this is where his
girlfriend and her girlfriends marked the spot -
Bill drove around the curve. A pair of black crows, plump and
shiny, lifted off from something pasted to the macadam in a splat
of blood. They had eaten so well that Carol wasn't sure they were
going to get out of the way until they did. There were no crosses,
not on the left, not on the right. Just roadkill in the middle, a
woodchuck or something, now passing beneath a luxury car that
had never been north of the Mason-Dixon Line.
Floyd, what's that over there?
"What's wrong?"
"Huh?" She looked at him, bewildered, feeling a little wild.
"You're sitting bolt upright. Got a cramp in your back?"
"Just a slight one." She settled back by degrees. "I had that feeling
again. The deja vu."
"Is it gone?"
'Yes," she said, but she was lying. It had retreated a little, but that
was all. She'd had this before, but never so continuously. It came
up and went down, but it didn't go away. She'd been aware of it
ever since that thing about Floyd started knocking around in her
head - and then the little girl in the red pinafore.
But, really, hadn't she felt something before either of those things?
Hadn't it actually started when they came down the steps of the
Lear 35 into the hammering heat of the Fort Myers sunshine? Or
even before? En route from Boston?
They were coming to an intersection. Overhead was a flashing
yellow light, and she thought, To the right is a used-car lot and a
sign for the Sanibel Community Theatre.
Then she thought, No, it'll be like the crosses that weren't there. It's
a strong feeling but it's a false feeling.
Here was the intersection. On the right there was a used-car lot-
Palm-dale Motors. Carol felt a real jump at that, a stab of
something sharper than disquiet. She told herself to quit being
stupid. There had to be car lots all over Florida and if you