Salem's Lot

2

‘Is that Miss Coogan?’

Ben asked it, low-voiced. He was looking at a tall, spare woman who was wearing a red nylon duster over her white uniform. Her blue-rinsed hair was done in a steplike succession of finger waves.

‘That’s her. She’s got a little cart she takes to the library every Thursday night. She fills out reserve cards by the ton and drives Miss Starcher crazy.’

They were seated on red leather stools at the soda fountain. He was drinking a chocolate soda; hers was strawberry. Spencer’s also served as the local bus depot and from where they sat they could look through an old-fashioned scrolled arch and into the waiting room, where a solitary young man in Air Force blues sat glumly with his feet planted around his suitcase.

‘Doesn’t look happy to be going wherever he’s going, does he?’ she said, following his glance.

‘Leave’s over, I imagine,’ Ben said. Now, he thought, she’ll ask if I’ve ever been in the service.

But instead: ‘I’ll be on that ten-thirty bus one of these days. Good-by, ‘salem’s Lot. Probably I’ll be looking just as glum as that boy.’

‘Where?’

‘New York, I guess. To see if I can’t finally become self-supporting.’

‘What’s wrong with right here?’

‘The Lot? I love it. But my folks, you know. They’d always be sort of looking over my shoulder. That’s a bummer. And the Lot doesn’t really have that much to offer the young career girl.’ She shrugged and dipped her head to suck at her straw. Her neck was tanned, beautifully muscled. She was wearing a colorful print shift that hinted at a good figure.

‘What kind of job are you looking for?’

She shrugged. ‘I’ve got a BA from Boston University… not worth the paper it’s printed on, really. Art major, English minor. The original dipso duo. Strictly eligible for the educated idiot category. I’m not even trained to decorate an office. Some of the girls I went to high school with are holding down plump secretarial jobs now. I never got beyond Personal Typing I, myself.’

‘So what does that leave?’

‘Oh… maybe a publishing house,’ she said vaguely. ‘Or some magazine… advertising, maybe. Places like that can always use someone who can draw on command. I can do that. I have a portfolio.’

‘Do you have offers?’ he asked gently.

‘No… no. But…’

‘You don’t go to New York without offers,’ he said.

‘Believe me. You’ll wear out the heels on your shoes.’

She smiled uneasily. ‘I guess you should know.’

‘Have you sold stuff locally?’

‘Oh yes.’ She laughed abruptly. ‘My biggest sale to date was to the Cinex Corporation. They opened a new triple cinema in Portland and bought twelve paintings at a crack to hang in their lobby. Paid seven hundred dollars. I made a down payment on my little car.’

‘You ought to take a hotel room for a week or so in New York,’ he said, ‘and hit every magazine and publishing house you can find with your portfolio. Make your appointments six months in advance so the editors and personnel guys don’t have anything on their calendars. But for God’s sake, don’t just haul stakes for the big city.’

‘What about you?’ she asked, leaving off the straw and spooning ice cream. ‘What are you doing in the thriving community of Jerusalem’s Lot, Maine, population thirteen hundred?’

He shrugged. ‘Trying to write a novel.’

She was instantly alight with excitement. ‘In the Lot? What’s it about? Why here? Are you -’

He looked at her gravely. ‘You’re dripping.’

‘I’m-? Oh, I am. Sorry.’ She mopped the base of her glass with a napkin. ‘Say, I didn’t mean to pry. I’m really not gushy as a rule.’

‘No apology needed,’ he said. ‘All writers like to talk about their books. Sometimes when I’m lying in bed at night I make up a Playboy interview about me. Waste of time. They only do authors if their books are big on campus.’

The Air Force youngster stood up. A Greyhound was pulling up to the curb out front, air brakes chuffing.

‘I lived in ‘salem’s Lot for four years as a kid. Out on the Burns Road.’

‘The Burns Road? There’s nothing out there now but the Marshes and a little graveyard. Harmony Hill, they call it.’

‘I lived with my Aunt Cindy. Cynthia Stowens. My dad died, see, and my mom went through a… well, kind of a nervous breakdown. So she farmed me out to Aunt Cindy while she got her act back together. Aunt Cindy put me on a bus back to Long Island and my mom just about a month after the big fire.’ He looked at his face in the mirror behind the soda fountain. ‘I cried on the bus going away from Mom, and I cried on the bus going away from Aunt Cindy and Jerusalem’s Lot.’

‘I was born the year of the fire,’ Susan said. ‘The biggest damn thing that ever happened to this town and I slept through it.’

Ben laughed. ‘That makes you about seven years older than I thought in the park.’

‘Really?’ She looked pleased. ‘Thank you… I think. Your aunt’s house must have burned down.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That night is one of my clearest memories. Some men with Indian pumps on their backs came to the door and said we’d have to leave. It was very exciting. Aunt Cindy dithered around, picking things up and loading them into her Hudson. Christ, what a night.’

‘Was she insured?’

‘No, but the house was rented and we got just about everything valuable into the car, except for the TV. We tried to lift it and couldn’t even budge it off the floor. It was a Video King with a seven-inch screen and a magnifying glass over the picture tube. Hell on the eyes. We only got one channel anyway-lots of country music, farm reports, and Kitty the Klown.’

‘And you came back here to write a book,’ she marveled.

Ben didn’t reply at once. Miss Coogan was opening cartons of cigarettes and filling the display rack by the cash register. The pharmacist, Mr Labree, was puttering around behind the high drug counter like a frosty ghost. The Air Force kid was standing by the door to the bus, waiting for the driver to come back from the bathroom.

‘Yes,’ Ben said. He turned and looked at her, full in the face, for the first time. She had a very pretty face, with candid blue eyes and a high, clear, tanned forehead. ‘Is this town your childhood?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

He nodded. ‘Then you know. I was a kid in ‘salem’s Lot and it’s haunted for me. When I came back, I almost drove right by because I was afraid it would be different.’

‘Things don’t change here,’ she said. ‘Not very much.’

‘I used to play war with the Gardener kids down in the Marshes. Pirates out by Royal’s Pond. Capture-the-flag and hide-and-go-seek in the park. My mom and I knocked around some pretty hard places after I left Aunt Cindy. She killed herself when I was fourteen, but most of the magic dust had rubbed off me long before that. What there was of it was here, and it’s still here. The town hasn’t changed that much. Looking out on Jointner Avenue is like looking through a thin pane of ice-like the one you can pick off the top of the town cistern in November if you knock it around the edges first-looking through that at your childhood. It’s wavy and misty and in some places it trails off into nothing, but most of it is still all there.’

He stopped, amazed. He had made a speech.

‘You talk just like your books,’ she said, awed.

He laughed. ‘I never said anything like that before. Not out loud.’

‘What did you do after your mother… after she died?’

‘Knocked around,’ he said briefly. ‘Eat your ice cream.’

She did.

‘Some things have changed,’ she said after a while. ‘Mr Spencer died. Do you remember him?’

‘Sure. Every Thursday night Aunt Cindy came into town to do her shopping at Crossen’s store and she’d send me in here to have a root beer. That was when it was on draft, real Rochester root beer. She’d give me a handkerchief with a nickel wrapped up in it.’

‘They were a dime when I came along. Do you remember what he always used to say?’

Ben hunched forward, twisted one hand into an arthritic claw, and turned one corner of his mouth down in a paralytic twist. ‘Your bladder,’ he whispered. ‘Those rut beers will destroy your bladder, bucko.’

Her laughter pealed upward toward the slowly rotating fan over their heads. Miss Coogan looked up suspiciously. ‘That’s perfect! Except he used to call me lassie.’

They looked at each other, delighted.

‘Say, would you like to go to a movie tonight?’ he asked.

‘I’d love to.’

‘What’s closest?’

She giggled. ‘The Cinex in Portland, actually. Where the lobby is decorated with the deathless paintings of Susan Norton.’

‘Where else? What kind of movies do you like?’

‘Something exciting with a car chase in it.’

‘Okay. Do you remember the Nordica? That was right here in town.’

‘Sure. It closed in 1968. 1 used to go on double dates there when I was in high school. We threw popcorn boxes at the screen when the movies were bad.’ She giggled. ‘They usually were.’

‘They used to have those old Republic serials,’ he said. ‘Rocket Man. The Return of Rocket Man. Crash Callahan and the Voodoo Death God.’

‘That was before my time.’

‘Whatever happened to it?’

‘That’s Larry Crockett’s real estate office now,’ she said. ‘The drive-in over in Cumberland killed it, I guess. That and TV.’

They were silent for a moment, thinking their own thoughts. The Greyhound clock showed 10:45 A.M.

They said in chorus: ‘Say, do you remember-’

They looked at each other, and this time Miss Coogan looked up at both of them when the laughter rang out. Even Mr Labree looked over.

They talked for another fifteen minutes, until Susan told him reluctantly that she had errands to run but yes, she could be ready at seven-thirty. When they went different ways, they both marveled over the easy, natural, coincidental impingement of their lives.

Ben strolled back down Jointner Avenue, pausing at the corner of Brock Street to look casually up at the Marsten House. He remembered that the great forest fire of 1951 had burned almost to its very yard before the wind had changed.

He thought: Maybe it should have burned. Maybe that would have been better.