The waste lands - Stephen King [53]
The fact is, money doesn’t get anyone into The Piper School, his father had told him during that Bicentennial Summer, the summer of blue skies and bunting and Tall Ships, a summer which seemed golden in Jake’s memory because he had not yet begun to lose his mind and all he had to worry about was whether or not he could cut the mustard at The Piper School, which sounded like a nest for newly hatched geniuses. The only thing that gets you into a place like Piper is what you’ve got up here. Elmer Chambers had reached over his desk and tapped the center of his son’s forehead with a hard, nicotine-stained finger. Get me, kid?
Jake had nodded. It wasn’t necessary to talk to his father, because his father treated everyone—including his wife—the way he treated his underlings at the TV network where he was in charge of programming and an acknowledged master of The Kill. All you had to do was listen, nod in the right places, and after a while he let you go.
Good, his father said, lighting one of the eighty Camel cigarettes he smoked each and every day. We understand each other, then. You’re going to have to work your buttsky off, but you can cut it. They never would have sent us this if you couldn’t. He picked up the letter of acceptance from The Piper School and rattled it. There was a kind of savage triumph in the gesture, as if the letter was an animal he had killed in the jungle, an animal he would now skin and eat. So work hard. Make your grades. Make your mother and me proud of you. If you end the year with an A average in your courses, there’s a trip to Disney World in it for you. That’s something to shoot for, right, kiddo?
Jake had made his grades—A’s in everything (until the last three weeks, that was). He had, presumably, made his mother and father proud of him, although they were around so little that it was hard to tell. Usually there was nobody around when he came home from school except for Greta Shaw—the housekeeper—and so he ended up showing his A papers to her. After that, they migrated to a dark corner of his room. Sometimes Jake looked through them and wondered if they meant anything. He wanted them to, but he had serious doubts.
Jake didn’t think he would be going to Disney World this summer, A average or no A average.
He thought the nuthouse was a much better possibility.
As he walked in through the double doors of The Piper School at 8:45 on the morning of May 31st, a terrible vision came to him. He saw his father in his office at 70 Rockefeller Plaza, leaning over his desk with a Camel jutting from the corner of his mouth, talking to one of his underlings as blue smoke wreathed his head. All of New York was spread out behind and below his father, its thump and hustle silenced by two layers of Thermopane glass.
The fact is, money doesn’t get anyone into Sunnyvale Sanitarium, his father was telling the underling in a tone of grim satisfaction. He reached out and tapped the underling’s forehead. The only thing that gets you into a place like that is when something big-time goes wrong up here in the attic. That’s what happened to the kid. But he’s working his goddam buttsky off. Makes the best fucking baskets in the place, they tell me. And when they let him out—if they ever do—there’s a trip in it for him. A trip to—
“—the way station,” Jake muttered, then touched his forehead with a hand that wanted to tremble. The voices were coming back. The yelling, conflicting voices which were driving him mad.
You’re dead, Jake. You were run over by a car and you’re dead.
Don’t be stupid! Look—see that poster? REMEMBER THE CLASS ONE PICNIC, it says. Do you think they have Class Picnics in the afterlife?
I don’t know. But I know you were run over by a car.
No!
Yes. It happened on May 9th, at 8:25 A.M. You died less than a minute later.
No! No! No!
“John?”
He looked around, badly startled. Mr. Bissette,