Salem's Lot - Stephen King [79]
‘Listen,’ Matt said as they went out onto the stoop, ‘what have you got on the stove for Friday night?’
‘I don’t know,’ Ben said. ‘I thought Susan and I might go to a movie. That’s about the long and short of it around here.’
‘I can think of something else,’ Matt said. ‘Perhaps we should form a committee of three and take a drive up to the Marsten House and introduce ourselves to the new squire. On behalf of the town, of course.’
‘Of course,’ Ben said. ‘It would be only common courtesy, wouldn’t it?’
‘A rustic welcome wagon,’ Matt agreed.
‘I’ll mention it to Susan tonight. I think she’ll go for it.’
‘Good.’
Matt raised his hand and waved as Ben’s Citroën purred away. Ben tooted twice in acknowledgment, and then his taillights disappeared over the hill.
Matt stood on his stoop for almost a full minute after the sound of the car had died away, his hands poked into his jacket pockets, his eyes turned toward the house on the hill.
3
There was no play practice Thursday night, and Matt drove over to Dell’s around nine o’clock for two or three beers. If that damn snip Jimmy Cody wouldn’t prescribe for his insomnia, he would prescribe for himself.
Dell’s was sparsely populated on nights when no band played. Matt saw only three people he knew: Weasel Craig, nursing a beer along in the corner; Floyd Tibbits, with thunderclouds on his brow (he had spoken to Susan three times this week, twice on the phone and once in person, in the Norton living room, and none of the conversations had gone well); and Mike Ryerson, who was sitting in one of the far booths against the wall.
Matt walked over to the bar, where Dell Markey was polishing glasses and watching ‘Ironside’ on a portable TV.
‘Hi, Matt. How’s it going?’
‘Fair. Slow night.’
Dell shrugged. ‘Yeah. They got a couple of motorcycle pictures over to the drive-in in Gates. I can’t compete with that. Glass or pitcher?’
‘Make it a pitcher.’
Dell drew it, cut the foam off, and added another two inches. Matt paid, and after a moment’s hesitation, walked over to Mike’s booth. Mike had filtered through one of Matt’s English classes, like almost all the young people in the Lot, and Matt had enjoyed him. He had done above-average work with an average intelligence because he worked hard and had asked over and over about things he didn’t understand until he got them. In addition to that, he had a clear, free-running sense of humor and a pleasant streak of individualism that made him a class favorite.
‘Hi, Mike,’ he said. ‘Mind if I join you?’
Mike Ryerson looked up and Matt felt shock hit him like a live wire. His first reaction: Drugs. Heavy drugs.
‘Sure, Mr Burke. Sit down.’ His voice was listless. His complexion was a horrid, pasty white, darkening to deep shadows under his eyes. The eyes themselves seemed overlarge and hectic. His hands moved slowly across the table in the tavern’s semigloom like ghosts. A glass of beer stood untouched before him.
‘How are you doing, Mike?’ Matt poured himself a glass of beer, controlling his hands ‘ which wanted to shake.
His life had always been one of sweet evenness, a graph with modulate highs and lows (and even those had sunk to foothills since the death of his mother thirteen years before), and one of the things that disturbed it was the miserable ends some of his students came to. Billy Royko dying in a Vietnam helicopter crash two months before the cease-fire; Sally Greer, one of the brightest and most vivacious girls he had ever had, killed by her drunken boy friend when she told him she wanted to break up; Gary Coleman, who had gone blind due to some mysterious optic nerve degeneration; Buddy Mayberry’s brother Doug, the only good kid in that whole half-bright clan, drowning at Old Orchard Beach; and drugs, the little death. Not all of them who waded into the waters of Lethe found it necessary to take a bath in it, but there were enough-kids who had made