Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [338]
'The first week I paid Pop fifty dollars - forty was interest, and ten was on the four hundred, which left three hundred and ninety owing. I was like a walking zombie. On the road job I'd sit in my car at lunch, eat my sandwich, and then sleep until the foreman rang his goddamned bell. I hated that bell.
'I paid him fifty dollars the second week - thirty-nine was interest, eleven was on the principal - and I had it down to three hundred and seventy-nine dollars. I felt like a bird trying to eat a mountain one peck at a time.
'The third week I almost went into the roller myself, and it scared me so bad I woke up for a few minutes - enough to have an idea, anyway, so I guess it was a blessing in disguise. I had to give up smoking. I couldn't understand why I hadn't seen it before. In those days a pack of smokes cost forty cents.
I smoked two packs a day. That was five dollars and sixty cents a week!
'We had a cigarette break every two hours and I looked at my pack of Tareytons and saw I had ten, maybe twelve. I made those cigarettes last a week and a half, and I never bought another pack.
'I spent a month not knowing if I could make it or not. There were days when the alarm went off at six o'clock and I knew I couldn't, that I'd just have to tell Mary and take whatever she wanted to dish out. But by the time the second month started, I knew I was probably going to be all right. I think to this day it was the extra five sixty a week - that, and all the returnable beer and soda bottles I could pick up along the sides of the road - that made the difference. I had the principal down to three hundred, and that meant I could knock off twenty-five, twenty-six dollars a week from it, more as time went on.
'Then, in late April, we finished the road project and got a week off, with pay. I told Mary I was getting ready to quit my job at the mill and she said thank God, and I spent that week off from my regular job working all the hours I could get at the mill, because it was time and a half. I never had an accident. I saw them, saw men fresher and more awake than I was have them, but I never did. I don't know why. At the end of that week I gave Pop Merrill a hundred dollars and gave my week's notice at the paper mill. After that last week I had whittled the nut down enough so I could chip the rest off my regular pay-check without your mother noticing.'
He fetched a deep sigh.
'Now you know how I know Pop Merrill, and why I don't trust him. I spent ten weeks in hell and he reaped the sweat off my forehead and my ass, too, in ten-dollar bills that he undoubtedly took out of that Crisco can or another one and passed on to some other sad sack who had got himself in the same kind of mess I did.'
'Boy, you must hate him.'
'No,' Mr Delevan said, getting up. 'I don't hate him and I don't hate myself. I got a fever, that's all. It could have been worse. My marriage could have died of it, and you and Meg never would have been born ' Kevin. Or I might have died of it myself. Pop Merrill was the cure. He was a hard cure, but he worked. What's hard to forgive is how he worked. He took every damned cent and wrote it down in a book in a drawer under his cash register and looked at the circles under my eyes and the way my pants had gotten a way of hanging off my hip-bones and he said nothing.'
They walked toward the Emporium Galorium, which was painted the dusty faded yellow of signs left too long in country store windows, its false front both obvious and unapologetic. Next to it, Polly Chalmers was sweeping her walk and talking to Alan Pangborn, the county sheriff. She looked young and fresh with her hair pulled back in a horsetail; he looked young and heroic in his neatly pressed uniform. But things were not always the way they looked; even Kevin, at fifteen, knew that. Sheriff Pangborn had lost his wife and youngest son in a car accident that spring, and Kevin had heard that Ms Chalmers, young or not, had a bad case of arthritis and might be crippled up with it before too many more years passed.