But Bannerman noticed. They stopped in the doorway of the Castle Rock Western Auto.
“Son, what's the matter with you?”
“Nothing,” Johnny said. His head was starting to ache again, too.
“It sure is something. You act like you're walking on two broken legs.”
“They had to operate on my legs after I came out of the coma. The muscles had atrophied. Started to melt is how Dr. Brown put it. The joints were decayed. They fixed it up the best they could with synthetics…
“Like the Six Million Dollar Man, huh?”
Johnny thought of the neat piles of hospital hills back home, sitting in the top drawer of the dining room hutch.
“Yes, something like that. When I'm on them too long, they stiffen up. That's all.”
“You want to go back?”
You bet I do. Go back and not have” to think about this hellacious business anymore”. Wish I'd never come. Not my problem. This is the guy who compared me to a two-headed cow.
“No, I'm okay,” he said.
They stepped out of the doorway and the wind grabbed them and tried to bowl them along the empty street. They struggled through the harsh, snow-choked glare of arc-sodium streetlights, bent into the wind. They turned onto a side street and five houses down Bannerman stopped in front of a small and neat New England salt-box. Like the other houses on the street, it was dark and battened down.
“This is the house,” Bannerman said, his voice oddly colorless. They worked their way through the snowdrift that the wind had thrown against the porch and mounted the steps.
Mrs. Henrietta Dodd was a big woman who was carrying a dead weight of flesh on her frame. Johnny had never seen a woman who looked any sicker. Her skin was a yellowish-gray. Her hands were nearly reptilian with an eczemalike rash. And there was something in her eyes, narrowed to glittering slits in their puffy sockets, that reminded him unpleasantly of the way his mother's eyes had sometimes looked when Vera Smith was transported into one of her religious frenzies.
She had opened the door to them after Bannerman had rapped steadily for nearly five minutes. Johnny stood beside him on his aching legs, thinking that this night would never end. It would just go on and on until the snow bad piled up enough to avalanche down and bury them all.
“What do you want in the middle of the night, George Bannerman?” she asked suspiciously. Like many fat women, her voice was a high, buzzy reed instrument-it sounded a bit like a fly or a bee caught in a bottle.
“Have to talk to Frank, Henrietta.”
“Then talk to him in the morning,” Henrietta Dodd said, and started to close the door in their faces.
Bannerman stopped the door's swing with a gloved hand. “I'm sorry, Henrietta. Has to be now.”
“Well, I'm not going to wake him up!” she cried, not moving from the doorway. “He sleeps like the dead anyway! Some nights I ring my bell for him, the palpitations are terrible sometimes, and does he come? No, he sleeps right through it and he could wake up some morning to find me dead of a heart attack in my bed instead of getting him his goddam runny poached egg! Because you work him too hard!”
She grinned in a sour kind of triumph; the dirty secret exposed and hats over the windmill.
“All day, all night, swing shift, chasing after drunks in the middle of the night and any one of them could have a-gun under the seat, going out to the ginmills and honky-tonks, oh, they're a rough trade out there but a lot you mind! I guess I know what goes on in those places, those cheap slutty women that'd be happy to give a nice boy like my Frank an incurable disease for the price of a quarter beer!”
Her voice, that reed instrument, swooped and buzzed. Johnny's head pumped and throbbed in counterpoint. He wished she would shut up. It was a hallucination, he knew, just the tiredness and stress of this awful night catching up, but it began to seem more and more to him that this was his mother standing here, that at any moment she would turn from Bannerman to him and begin to huckster him about the wonderful talent God had given him.
“Mrs. Dodd… Henrietta… “Bannerman began patiently.
Then she did turn to Johnny, and regarded him with her smart-stupid little pig's eyes.
“Who's this?”
“Special deputy,” Bannerman said promptly. “Henrietta, I'll take the responsibility for waking Frank up.”
“Oooh, the responsibility!” she cooed with monstrous, buzzing sarcasm, and Johnny finally realized she was afraid. The fear was coming off her in pulsing, noisome waves-that was what was making his headache worse. Couldn't Bannerman feel it? “The ree-spon-si-bil-i-tee! Isn't that big of you, my God yes! Well, I won't have my boy waked up in the middle of the night, George Bannerman, so you and your special deputy can just go peddle your goddam papers!”
She tried to shut the door again and this time Banner-man shoved it all the way open. His voice showed tight anger and beneath that a terrible tension. “Open up, Henrietta, I mean it, now.”
“You can't do this!” she cried. “This isn't no police state! I'll have your job! Let's see your warrant!”
“No, that's right, but I'm going to talk to Frank,” Bannerman said, and pushed past her.
Johnny, barely aware of what he was doing, followed. Henrietta Dodd made a grab for him. Johnny caught her Wrist-and a terrible pain flared in his head, dwarfing the sullen thud of the headache. And the woman felt it, too. The two of them stared at each other for a moment that seemed to last forever, an awful, perfect understanding. For that moment they seemed welded together. Then she fell back, clutching at her ogre's bosom.
“My heart… my heart… “She scrabbled at her robe pocket and pulled out a phial of pills. Her face had gone to the color of raw dough. She got the cap off the phial and spilled tiny pills all over the floor getting one into her palm. She slipped it under her tongue. Johnny stood staring at her in mute horror. His head felt like a swelling bladder full of hot blood.
“You knew?” he whispered.
Her fat, wrinkled mouth opened and closed, opened and closed. No sound came out. It was the mouth of a beached fish.
“All of this time you knew?”
“You're a devil!” she screamed at him. “You're a monster… devil… oh my heart… oh, I'm dying… think I'm dying… call the doctor… George Bannerman don't you go up there and wake my baby!”
Johnny let go of her, and unconsciously rubbing his hand back and forth on his coat as if to free it of a stain, he stumbled up the stairs after Bannerman. The wind outside sobbed around the eaves like a lost child. Halfway up he glanced back. Henrietta Dodd sat in a wicker chair, a sprawled mountain of meat, gasping and holding a huge breast in each hand. His head still felt as if it were swelling and he thought dreamily: Pretty soon it'll just pop and that'll be the end. Thank God.
An old and threadbare runner covered the narrow hall floor. The wallpaper was watermarked. Bannerman was pounding on a closed door. It was at least ten degrees colder up here.
“Frank? Frank! It's George Bannerman! Wake up, Frank!”
There was no response. Bannerman turned the knob and shoved the door open. His hand had fallen to the butt of his gun, but he had not drawn it. It could have been a fatal mistake, but Frank Dodd's room was empty.
The two of them stood in the doorway for a moment, looking in. It was a child's room. The wallpaper-also watermarked-was covered with dancing clowns and rocking horses. There was a child-sized chair with a Raggedy Andy sitting in it, looking back at them with its shiny blank eyes. In one corner was a toybox. In the other was a narrow maple bed with the covers thrown back. Hooked over one of the bedposts and looking out of place was Frank Dodd's holstered gun.