Salem’s Lot (23 page)

SUSAN (II)

1

Susan arrived home from Portland a little after three in the afternoon, and came into the house carrying three crackling brown department-store bags-she had sold two paintings for a sum totaling just over eighty dollars and had gone on a small spree. Two new skirts and a cardigan top.

‘Suze?’ Her mother called. ‘Is that you?’

‘I’m home. I got-’

‘Come in here, Susan. I want to talk to you.’

She recognized the tone instantly, although she had not heard it to that precise degree since her high school days, when the arguments over hem lines and boy friends had gone on day after bitter day.

She put down her bags and went into the living room. Her mother had grown colder and colder on the subject of Ben Mears, and Susan supposed this was to be her Final Word.

Her mother was sitting in the rocker by the bay window, knitting. The TV was off. The two in conjunction were an ominous sign.

‘I suppose you haven’t heard the latest,’ Mrs Norton said. Her needles clicked rapidly, meshing the dark green yam she was working with into neat rows. Someone’s winter scarf. ‘You left too early this morning.’

‘Latest?’

‘Mike Ryerson died at Matthew Burke’s house last night, and who should be in attendance at the deathbed but your writer friend, Mr Ben Mears!’

‘Mike… Ben… what?’

Mrs Norton smiled grimly. ‘Mabel called around ten this morning and told me. Mr Burke
says
he met Mike down at Delbert Markey’s tavern last night-although what a teacher is doing bar-hopping I don’t know-and brought him home with him because Mike didn’t look well. He died in the night. And no one seems to know just what Mr Mears was doing there!’

‘They know each other,’ Susan said absently. ‘In fact, Ben says they hit it off really well… what happened to Mike, Mom?’

But Mrs Norton was not to be sidetracked so quickly. ‘Nonetheless, there’s some that think we’ve had a little too much excitement in ‘salem’s Lot since Mr Ben Mears showed his face. A little too much altogether.’

‘That’s foolishness!’ Susan said, exasperated. ‘Now, what did Mike-’

‘They haven’t decided that yet,’ Mrs Norton said. She twirled her ball of yarn and let out slack. ‘There’s some that think he may have caught a disease from the little Glick boy.’

‘If so, why hasn’t anyone else caught it? Like his folks?’

‘Some young people think they know everything,’ Mrs Norton remarked to the air. Her needles flashed up and down.

Susan got up. ‘I think I’ll go down street and see if-’

Sit back down a minute,’ Mrs Norton said. ‘I have a few more things to say to you.’

Susan sat down again, her face neutral.

‘Sometimes young people don’t know all there is to know,’ Ann Norton said. A spurious tone of comfort had come into her voice that Susan distrusted immediately.

‘Like what, Mom?’

‘Well, it seems that Mr Ben Mears had an accident a few years ago. Just after his second book was published. A motorcycle accident. He was drunk. His wife was killed.’

Susan stood up. ‘I don’t want to hear any more.’

‘I’m telling you for your own good,’ Mrs Norton said calmly.

‘Who told you?’ Susan asked. She felt none of the old hot and impotent anger, or the urge to run upstairs away from that calm, knowing voice and weep. She only felt cold and distant, as if drifting in space. ‘It was Mabel Werts, wasn’t it?’

‘That doesn’t matter. It’s true.’

‘Sure it is. And we won in Vietnam and Jesus Christ drives through the center of town in a gocart every day at high noon.’

‘Mabel thought he looked familiar,’ Ann Norton said, land so she went through the back issues of her newspapers box by box-’

‘You mean the scandal sheets? The ones that specialize in astrology and pictures of car wrecks and starlets’ tits? Oh, what an informed source.’ She laughed harshly.

‘No need to be obscene. The story was right there in black and white. The woman-his wife if she really was-was riding on the back seat and he skidded on the pavement and they went smack into the side of a moving van. They gave him a breathalyzer test on the spot, the article said. Right… on… the spot.’ She emphasized intensifier, preposition, and object by tapping a knitting needle against the arm of her rocker.

‘Then why isn’t he in prison?’

‘These famous fellows always know people,’ she said with calm certainty. ‘There are ways to get out of everything, if you’re rich enough. Just look at what those Kennedy boys have gotten away with.’

‘Was he tried in court?’

‘I told you, they gave him a-’

‘You said that, Mother. But was he drunk?’

‘I told you he was drunk!’ Spots of color had begun to creep into her cheeks. ‘They don’t give you a breathalyzer test if you’re sober! His wife died! It was just like that Chappaquiddick business! Just like it!’

‘I’m going to move into town,’ Susan said slowly. ‘I’ve been meaning to tell you. I should have done it a long time ago, Mom. For both of us. I was talking to Babs Griffen, and she says there’s a nice little four-room place on Sister’s Lane-’

‘Oh, she’s offended!’ Mrs Norton remarked to the air. ‘Someone just spoiled her pretty picture of Mr Ben Bigshot Mears and she’s just so mad she could
spit
.’ This line had been particularly effective some years back.

‘Mom, what’s happened to you?’ Susan asked a little despairingly. ‘You never used to… to get this low-’

Ann Norton’s head jerked up. Her knitting slid off her lap as she stood up, clapped her hands to Susan’s shoulders, and gave her a smart shake.

‘You listen to me! I won’t have you running around like a common trollop with some sissy boy who’s got your head all filled up with moonlight.
Do you hear me?
’

Susan slapped her across the face.

Ann Norton’s eyes blinked and then opened wide in stunned surprise. They looked at each other for a moment in silence, shocked. A tiny sound came and died in Susan’s throat.

‘I’m going upstairs,’ she said. ‘I’ll be out by Tuesday at the latest.’

‘Floyd was here,’ Mrs Norton said. Her face was still rigid from the slap. Her daughter’s finger marks stood out in red, like exclamation points.

‘I’m through with Floyd,’ Susan said tonelessly. ‘Get used to the idea. Tell your harpy friend Mabel all about it on the telephone, why don’t you? Maybe then it will seem real to you.’

‘Floyd loves you, Susan ‘ This is… ruining him. He broke down and told me everything. He poured out his heart to me.’ Her eyes shone with the memory of it. ‘He broke down at the end and cried like a baby.’

Susan thought how unlike Floyd that was. She wondered if her mother could be making it up, and knew by her eyes that she was not.

‘Is that what you want for me, mom? A crybaby? Or did you just fall in love with the idea of blond-haired grandchildren? I suppose I bother you-you can’t feel your job is complete until you see me married and settled down to a good man you can put your thumb on. Settled down with a fellow who’ll get me pregnant and turn me into a matron in a hurry. That’s the scoop, isn’t it? Well, what about what I want?’

‘Susan, you don’t know what you want.’

And she said it with such absolute, convinced certainty that for a moment Susan was tempted to believe her. An image came to her of herself and her mother, standing here in set positions, her mother by her rocker and she by the door; only they were tied together by a hank of green yarn, a cord that had grown frayed and weak from many restless tuggings. Image transformed into her mother in a nimrod’s hat, the band sportily pierced with many different flies. Trying desperately to reel in a large trout wearing a yellow print shift. Trying to reel it in for the last time and pop it away in the wicker creel. But for what purpose? To mount it? To eat it?

‘No, Mom. I know exactly what I want. Ben Mears.’ She turned and went up the stairs.

Her mother ran after her and called up shrilly: ‘You can’t get a room! You haven’t any money!’

‘I’ve got a hundred in checking and three hundred in savings,’ Susan replied calmly. ‘And I can get a job down at Spencer’s, I think. Mr Labree has offered several times.’

‘All he’ll care about is looking up your dress,’ Mrs Norton said, but her voice had gone down an octave. Much of her anger had left her and she felt a little frightened.

‘Let him,’ Susan said. ‘I’ll wear bloomers.’

‘Honey, don’t be mad.’ She came two steps up the stairs. ‘I only want what’s best for-’

‘Spare it, Mom. I’m sorry I slapped you. That was awful of me. I do love you. But I’m moving out. It’s way past time. You must see that.’

‘You think it over,’ Mrs Norton said, now clearly sorry as well as frightened. ‘I still don’t think I spoke out of turn. That Ben Mears, I’ve seen showboats like him before. All he’s interested in is-’

‘No. No more.’

She turned away.

Her mother came up another step and called after her: ‘When Floyd left here he was in an awful state. He-’

But the door to Susan’s room closed and cut off her words.

She lay down on her bed-which had been decorated with stuffed toys and a poodle dog with a transistor radio in its belly not so long ago-and lay looking at the wall, trying not to think. There were a number of Sierra Club posters on the wall, but not so long ago she had been surrounded by posters clipped from
Rolling Stone
and
Creem
and
Crawdaddy
, pictures of her idols-Jim Morrison and John Lennon and Dave van Ronk and Chuck Berry. The ghost of those days seemed to crowd in on her like bad time exposures of the mind.

She could almost see the newsprint, standing out on the cheap pulp stock. GOING-PLACES YOUNG WRITER AND YOUNG WIFE INVOLVED IN ‘MAYBE’ MOTORCYCLE FATALITY. The rest in carefully couched innuendoes. Perhaps a picture taken at the scene by a local photographer, too gory for the local paper, just right for Mabel’s kind.

And the worst was that a seed of doubt had been planted Stupid. Did you think he was in cold storage before he came back here? That he came wrapped in a germ-proof cellophane bag, like a motel drinking glass? Stupid. Yet the seed had been planted. And for that she could feel something more than adolescent pique for her mother she could feel something black that bordered on hate.

She shut the thoughts-not out but away-and put an arm over her face and drifted into an uncomfortable doze that was broken by the shrill of the telephone downstairs, then more sharply by her mother’s voice calling, ‘Susan! It’s for you!’

She went downstairs, noticing it was just after five-thirty’. The sun was in the west. Mrs Norton was in the kitchen, beginning supper. Her father wasn’t home yet.

‘Hello?’

‘Susan?’ The voice was familiar, but she could not put a name to it immediately.

‘Yes, who’s this?’

‘Eva Miller, Susan. I’ve got some bad news.’

‘Has something happened to Ben?’ All the spit seemed to have gone out of her mouth. Her band came up and touched her throat. Mrs Norton had come to the kitchen door and was watching, a spatula held in one hand.

‘Well, there was a fight. Floyd Tibbits showed up here this afternoon-’

‘Floyd!’

Mrs Norton winced at her tone.

‘-and I said Mr Mears was sleeping. He said all right, just as polite as ever, but he was dressed awful funny. I asked him if he felt all right. He had on an old-fashioned overcoat and a funny hat and he kept his hands in his pockets. I never thought to mention it to Mr Mears when he got up. There’s been so much excitement-’

‘What happened?’ Susan nearly screamed.

‘Well, Floyd beat him up,’ Eva said unhappily. ‘Right out in my parking lot. Sheldon Corson and Ed Craig went out and dragged him off.’

‘Ben. Is Ben all right?’

‘I guess not.’

‘What is it?’ She was holding the phone very tightly.

‘Floyd got in one last crack and sent Mr Mears back against that little foreign car of his, and he hit his head. Carl Foreman took him over to Cumberland Receiving, and he was unconscious. I don’t know anything else. If you-’

She hung up, ran to the closet, and pulled her coat off the hanger.

‘Susan, what is it?’

‘That nice boy Floyd Tibbits,’ Susan said, hardly aware that she had begun to cry. ‘He’s put Ben in the hospital.’

She ran out without waiting for a reply.

2

She got to the hospital at six-thirty and sat in an uncomfortable plastic contour chair, staring blankly at a copy of
Good Housekeeping
. And I’m the only one, she thought. How damned awful. She had thought of calling Matt Burke, but the thought of the doctor coming back and finding her gone had stopped her.

The minutes crawled by on the waiting room clock, and at ten minutes of seven, a doctor with a sheaf of papers in one hand stepped through the door and said, ‘Miss Norton?’

‘That’s right. Is Ben all right?’

‘That’s not an answerable question at this point.’ He saw the dread come into her face and added: ‘He seems to be, but we’ll want him here for two or three days. He’s got a hairline fracture, multiple bruises, contusions, and one hell of a black eye.’

‘Can I see him?’

‘No, not tonight. He’s been sedated.’

‘For a minute? Please? One minute?’

He sighed. ‘You can look in on him, if you like. He’ll probably be asleep. I don’t want you to say anything to him unless he speaks to you.’

He took her up to the third floor and then down to a room at the far end of a medicinal-smelling corridor. The man in the other bed was reading a magazine and looked up at them desultorily.

Ben was lying with his eyes closed, a sheet pulled up to his chin. He was so pale and still that for one terrified moment Susan was sure he was dead; that he had just slipped away while she and the doctor had been talking downstairs. Then she marked the slow, steady rise and fall of his chest and felt a relief so great that she swayed a little on her feet. She looked at his face closely, hardly noticing the way it had been marked. Sissy boy, her mother had called him, and Susan could see how she might have gotten that idea. His features were strong but sensitive (she wished there was a better word than ‘sensitive’; that was the word you used to describe the local librarian who wrote stilted Spenserian sonnets to daffodils in his spare time; but it was the only word that fit). Only his hair seemed virile in the traditional sense. Black and heavy, it seemed almost to float above his face. The white bandage on the left side above the temple stood out in sharp, telling contrast.

I love the man, she thought. Get well, Ben. Get well and finish your book so we can go away from the Lot together, if you want me. The Lot has turned bad for both of us.

‘I think you’d better leave now,’ the doctor said. ‘Perhaps tomorrow-’

Ben stirred and made a thick sound in his throat. His eyelids opened slowly, closed, opened again. His eyes were dark with sedation, but the knowledge of her presence was in them. He moved his hand over hers. Tears spilled out of her eyes and she smiled and squeezed his hand.

He moved his lips and she bent to hear.

‘They’re real killers in this town, aren’t they?’

‘Ben, I’m so sorry.’

‘I think I knocked out two of his teeth before he decked me,’ Ben whispered. ‘Not bad for a writer fella.’

‘Ben-’

‘I think that will be enough, Mr Mears,’ the doctor said. ‘Give the airplane glue a chance to set.’

Ben shifted his eyes to the doctor. ‘Just a minute.’ The doctor rolled his eyes. ‘That’s what she said.’ Ben’s eyelids slipped down again, then came up with difficulty. He said something unintelligible.

Susan bent closer. ‘What, darling?’

‘Is it dark yet?’

‘Yes.’

‘Want you to go see… ’

‘Matt?’

He nodded. ‘Tell him… I said for you to be told everything. Ask him if he… knows Father Callahan. He’ll understand.’

‘Okay,’ Susan said. ‘I’ll give him the message. You sleep now. Sleep well, Ben.’

‘‘Kay. Love you.’ He muttered something else, twice, and then his eyes closed. His breathing deepened.

‘What did he say?’ the doctor asked.

Susan was frowning. ‘It sounded like "Lock the windows,"‘ she said.