Salem's Lot

16

6:00 P.M.

Susan’s father, Bill Norton, the Lot’s first selectman, was surprised to find that he liked Ben Mears-liked him quite a lot. Bill was a big, tough man with black hair, built like a truck, and not fat even after fifty, He had left high school for the Navy in the eleventh grade with his father’s permission, and he had clawed his way up from there, picking up his diploma at the age of twenty-four on a high school equivalency test taken almost as an afterthought. He was not a blind, bullish anti-intellectual as some plain workingmen become when they are denied the level of learning that they may have been capable of, either through fate or their own doing, but he had no patience with ‘art farts’, as he termed some of the doe-eyed, longhaired boys Susan had brought home from school. He didn’t mind their hair or their dress. What bothered him was that none of them seemed serious-minded. He didn’t share his wife’s liking for Floyd Tibbits, the boy that Susie had been going around with the most since she graduated, but he didn’t actively dislike him, either. Floyd had a pretty good job at the executive level in the Falmouth Grant’s, and Bill Norton considered him to be moderately serious-minded. And he was a hometown boy. But so was this Mears, in a manner of speaking.

‘Now, you leave him alone about that art fart business,’ Susan said, rising at the sound of the doorbell. She was wearing a light green summer dress, her new casual hairdo pulled back and tied loosely with a hank of oversized green yarn.

Bill laughed. ‘I got to call ‘em as I see ‘em, Susie darlin’. I won’t embarrass you… never do, I?’

She gave him a pensive, nervous smile and went to open the door.

The man who came back in with her was lanky and agile-looking, with finely drawn features and a thick, almost greasy shock of black hair that looked freshly washed despite its natural oiliness. He was dressed in a way that impressed Bill favorably: plain blue jeans, very new, and a white shirt rolled to the elbows.

‘Ben, this is my dad and mom-Bill and Ann Norton. Mom, Dad, Ben Mears.’

‘Hello. Nice to meet you.’

He smiled at Mrs Norton with a touch of reserve and she said, ‘Hello, Mr Mears. This is the first time we’ve seen a real live author up close. Susan has been awfully excited.’

‘Don’t worry; I don’t quote from my own works.’ He smiled again.

‘H’lo,’ Bill said, and heaved himself up out of his chair. He had worked himself up to the union position he now held on the Portland docks, and his grip was hard and strong. But Mears’s hand did not crimp and jellyfish like that of your ordinary, garden-variety art fart, and Bill was pleased. He imposed his second testing criterion.

‘Like a beer? Got some on ice out yonder.’ He gestured toward the back patio, which he had built himself. Art farts invariably said no; most of them were potheads and couldn’t waste their valuable consciousness juicing.

‘Man, I’d love a beer,’ Ben said, and the smile became a grin. ‘Two or three, even.’

Bill’s laughter boomed out. ‘Okay, you’re my man. Come on.’

At the sound of his laughter, an odd communication seemed to pass between the two women, who bore strong resemblance to each other. Ann Norton’s brow contracted while Susan’s smoothed out-a load of worry seemed to have been transferred across the room by telepathy.

Ben followed Bill out onto the veranda. An ice chest sat on a stool in the corner, stuffed with ring-tab cans of Pabst. Bill pulled a can out of the cooler and tossed it to Ben, who caught it one-hand but lightly, so it wouldn’t fizz.

‘Nice out here,’ Ben said, looking toward the barbecue in the back yard. It was a low, businesslike construction of bricks, and a shimmer of heat hung over it.

‘Built it myself,’ Bill said. ‘Better be nice.’

Ben drank deeply and then belched, another sign in his favor.

‘Susie thinks you’re quite the fella,’ Norton said.

‘She’s a nice girl.’

‘Good practical girl,’ Norton added, and belched reflectively. ‘She says you’ve written three books. Published em, too.’

‘Yes, that’s so.’

‘They do well?’

‘The first did,’ Ben said, and said no more. Bill Norton nodded slightly, in approval of a man who had enough marbles to keep his dollars-and-cents business to himself.

‘You like to lend a hand with some burgers and hot dogs?’

‘Sure.’

‘You got to cut the hot dogs to let the squidges out of ‘em. You know about that?’

‘Yeah.’ He made diagonal slashes in the air with his right index finger, grinning slightly as he did so. The small slashes in natural-casing franks kept them from blistering.

‘You came from this neck of the woods, all right,’ Bill Norton said. ‘Goddamn well told. Take that bag of briquettes over there and I’ll get the meat. Bring your beer.’

‘You couldn’t part me from it.’

Bill hesitated on the verge of going in and cocked an eyebrow at Ben Mears. ‘You a serious-minded fella?’ he asked.

Ben smiled, a trifle grimly. ‘That I am,’ he said.

Bill nodded. ‘That’s good,’ he said, and went inside.

Babs Griffen’s prediction of rain was a million miles wrong, and the back yard dinner went well. A light breeze sprang up, combining with the eddies of hickory smoke from the barbecue to keep the worst of the late-season mosquitoes away. The women cleared away the paper plates and condiments, then came back to drink a beer each and laugh as Bill, an old hand at playing the tricky wind currents, trimmed Ben 21-6 at badminton. Ben declined a rematch with real regret, pointing at his watch.

‘I got a book on the fire,’ he said. ‘I owe another six pages. If I get drunk, I won’t even be able to read what I wrote tomorrow morning.’

Susan saw him to the front gate-he had walked up from town. Bill nodded to himself as he damped the fire. He had said he was serious-minded, and Bill was ready to take him at his word. He had not come with a big case on to impress anyone, but any man who worked after dinner was out to make his mark on somebody’s tree, probably in big letters.

Ann Norton, however, never quite unthawed.