The Eyes of the Dragon - Stephen King [34]
He would have only a single glass of wine at night-the glass which Peter brought him-but after Peter left, he drank what seemed to Thomas huge amounts of beer (it was only years later that Thomas came to realize that his father hadn't wanted Peter to see him drunk), and when he needed to urinate, he rarely used the commode in the corner. Most times he simply stood up and pissed into the fire, often farting as he did so.
He talked to himself. He would sometimes walk around the long room like a man who was not sure where he was, speaking either to the air or to the mounted heads.
"I remember that day we got you, Bonsey," he would say to one of the elk heads (another of his eccentricities was that he had named every one of the trophies). "I was with Bill Squathings and that fellow with the great lump on the side of his face. I remember how you come through the trees and Bill let loose, and then that fellow with the lump let loose, then I let loose-"
Then his father would demonstrate how he had let loose by raising his leg and farting, even as he mimed drawing back a bowstring and letting fly. And he would laugh an old man's shrill, unpleasant cackle.
Thomas would slide the little panels back after awhile and slink down the corridor again, his head pounding and an uneasy grin on his face-the head and grin of a boy who has been eating green apples and knows he may be sicker by morning than he is now.
This was the father he had always loved and feared?
He was an old man who farted out stinking clouds of steam.
This was the King his loyal subjects called Roland the Good?
He pissed into the fire, sending up more clouds of steam.
This was the man who made his heart break by not liking his boat?
He talked to the stuffed heads on his walls, calling them silly names like Bonsey and Stag-Pool and Puckerstring; he picked his nose and sometimes ate the boogers.
I don't care for you anymore, Thomas would think, checking the peephole to make sure the corridor was empty and then creeping back to his room like a felon. You're a filthy, silly old man and you're nothing to me! Nothing at all! No!
But he was something to Thomas. Some part of him went on loving Roland just the same-some part of him wanted to go to his father so his father would have something better to talk to than a bunch of stuffed heads on the walls.
Still, there was that other part of him that liked spying better.
The night that Flagg came to King Roland's private rooms with the glass of poisoned wine was the first occasion in a very long time that Thomas had dared spy. There was a good reason for this.
One night about three months before, Thomas found himself unable to sleep. He tossed and turned until he heard the keep watchman cry eleven. Then he got up, dressed, and left his rooms. Less than ten minutes later, he was looking down into his father's den. He had thought his father might be asleep, but he was not. Roland was awake, and very, very drunk.
Thomas had seen his father drunk many times before, but he had never seen him in anything remotely like his current state. The boy was flabbergasted and badly frightened.
There are people much older than Thomas was then who harbor the idea that old age is always a gentle time-that an old person may exhibit gentle wisdom, gentle crabbiness or craftiness, perhaps the gentle confusion of senility. They will grant these, but find it hard to credit any real fire. They have an illusion that by the seventies, any real fire must have faded to coals. That may be true, but on this night Thomas discovered that coals may sometimes flare up violently.
His father was striding rapidly up and down the length of hi sitting room, his fur robe flying out behind him. His nightcap had fallen off; his remaining hair hung down in tangled locks,