Salem's Lot - Stephen King [109]
‘Goddamn no-account hunchbacked pisswah, looks like he ain’t plowed nor burned all the week long,’ Franklin said. He jammed both feet on the brake pedal, which sank all the way to the floor with a mechanical scream. After a while the truck stopped. ‘He’s laid up with a case, that’s what.’
‘I never knew Dud to drink much,’ Virgil said, tossing his empty out the window and pulling another from the brown bag on the floor. He opened it on the door latch, and the beer, crazied up from the bumps, bubbled out over his hand.
‘All them hunchbacks do,’ Franklin said wisely. He spat out the window, discovered it was closed, and swiped his shirt sleeve across the scratched and cloudy glass. ‘We’ll go see him. Might be somethin’ in it.’
He backed the truck around in a huge wandering circle and pulled up with the tailgate hanging over the latest accumulation of the Lot’s accumulated throwaway. He switched off the ignition, and silence pressed in on them suddenly. Except for the restless calling of the gulls, it was complete.
‘Ain’t it quiet,’ Virgil muttered.
They got out of the truck and went around to the back. Franklin unhooked the S-bolts that held the tailgate and let it drop with a crash. The gulls that had been feeding at the far end of the dump rose in a cloud, squalling and scolding.
The two of them climbed up without a word and began heaving the Crappie off the end. Green plastic bags spun through the clear air and smashed open as they hit. It was an old job for them. They were a part of the town that few tourists ever saw (or cared to)-firstly, because the town ignored them by tacit agreement, and secondly, because they had developed their own protective coloration. If you met Franklin’s pickup on the road, you forgot it the instant it was gone from your rear-view mirror. If you happened to see their shack with its tin chimney sending a pencil line of smoke into the white November sky, you overlooked it. If you met Virgil coming out of the Cumberland greenfront with a bottle of welfare vodka in a brown bag, you said hi and then couldn’t quite remember who it was you had spoken to; the face was familiar but the name just slipped your mind. Franklin’s brother was Derek Boddin, father of Richie (lately deposed king of Stanley Street Elementary School), and Derek had nearly forgotten that Franklin was still alive and in town. He had progressed beyond black sheepdom; he was totally gray.
Now, with the truck empty, Franklin kicked out a last can-clink!-and hitched up his green work pants. ‘Let’s go see Dud,’ he said.
They climbed down from the truck and Virgil tripped over one of his own rawhide lacings and sat down hard. ‘Christ, they don’t make these things half-right,’ he muttered obscurely.
They walked across to Dud’s tarpaper shack. The door was closed.
‘Dud!’ Franklin bawled. ‘Hey, Dud Rogers!’ He thumped the door once, and the whole shack trembled. The small hook-and-eye lock on the inside of the door snapped off, and the door tottered open. The shack was empty but filled with a sickish-sweet odor that made them look at each other and grimace-and they were barroom veterans of a great many fungoid smells. It reminded Franklin fleetingly of pickles that had lain in a dark crock for many years, until the fluid seeping out of them had turned white.
‘Son of a whore,’ Virgil said. ‘Worse than gangrene.’
Yet the shack was astringently neat. Dud’s extra shirt was hung on a hook over the bed, the splintery kitchen chair was pushed up to the table, and the cot was made up Army-style. The can of red paint, with fresh drips down the sides, was placed on a fold of newspaper behind the door.
‘I’m about to puke if we don’t get out of here,’ Virgil