Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [289]
'Joe stared up at him and says, "You mean in person, Uncle Dave?" That's what he called him - Uncle Dave.
"'I can't do that," Dave said, "but I can do somethin almost as good."'
Soames drove up to the Civil Air Terminal gate and blew the horn. The gate rumbled back on its track and he drove out to where the Navajo was parked. He turned off the engine and just sat behind the wheel for a moment, looking down at his hands.
'I always knew Dave was a talented bastard,' he said finally. 'What I don't know is how he did what he did so damned fast. All I can figure is that he must have worked days and nights both, because he was done in ten days ... and those suckers were good.
'He knew he had to go fast, though. The doctors had told me and Laura the truth, you see, and I'd told Dave. Joe didn't have much chance of pulling through. They'd caught onto what was wrong with him too late. It was roaring in his blood like a grassfire.
'About ten days after Dave made that promise, he comes into my son's hospital room with a paper shopping-bag in each arm. "What you got there, Uncle Dave?" Joe asks, sitting up in bed. He had been pretty low all that day - mostly because he was losing his hair, I think; in those days if a kid didn't have hair most of the way down his back, he was considered to be pretty low-class - but when Dave came in, he brightened right up.
'The Royals, a course," Dave says back. "Didn't I tell you?"
'Then he put those two shopping-bags down on the bed and spilled em out. And you never, ever, in your whole life, saw such an expression on a little boy's face. It lit up like a Christmas tree ... and ... and shit, I dunno . . .'
Stan Soames's voice had been growing steadily thicker. Now he leaned forward against the steering wheel of Dawson's Buick so hard that the horn honked. He pulled a large bandanna from his back pocket, wiped his eyes with it. then blew his nose.
Naomi had also leaned forward. She pressed one of her hands against Soames's cheek. 'If this is too hard for you, Mr Soames -'
'No,' he said, and smiled a little. Sam watched as a tear Stan Soames had missed ran its sparkling, unnoticed course down his cheek in the late-afternoon sun. 'It's just that it brings him back so. How he was. That hurts, miss, but it feels good, too. Those two feelings are all wrapped up together.'
'I understand,' she said.
'When Dave tipped over those bags, what spilled out was baseballs - over two dozen of them. But they weren't just baseballs, because there was a face painted on every one, and each one was the face of a player on the 1980 Kansas City Royals baseball team. They weren't those whatdoyoucallums, caricatures, either. They were as good as the faces Norman Rockwell used to paint for the covers of the Saturday Evening Post. I've seen Dave's work - the work he did before he got drinking real heavy - and it was good, but none of it was as good as this. There was Willie Aikens and Frank White and U. L. Washington and George Brett ... Willie Wilson and Amos Otis . . . Dan Quisenberry, lookin as fierce as a gunslinger in an old Western movie ... Paul Splittorff and Ken Brett ... I can't remember all the names, but it was the whole damned roster, including Jim Frey, the field manager.
'And sometime between when he finished em and when he gave em to my son, he took em to KC and got all the players but one to sign em. The one who didn't was Darrell Porter, the catcher. He was out with the flu, and he promised to sign the ball with his face on it as soon as he could. He did, too.'
'Wow,' Sam said softly.
'And it was all Dave's doing - the man I hear people in town laugh about and call Dirty Dave. I tell you, sometimes when I hear people say that and I remember what he did for Joe when Joey was dying of the leukemia, I could -'
Soames didn't finish, but his hands curled themselves into fists on his broad thighs. And Sam - who had