Wizard and glass - Stephen King [203]
It was Pettie the Trotter tending bar beneath The Romp’s stern glass gaze, and if allowed to do so, she would continue until Stanley appeared and banished her. Pettie had said nothing out loud to Coral—she knew better—but had made her wants clear enough just the same. Her whoring days were almost at an end. She desperately desired to go to work tending bar. There was precedent for it, Coral knew—a female bartender at Forest Trees in Pass o’ the River, and there had been another at Glencove, up the coast in Tavares, until she had died of the pox. What Pettie refused to see was that Stanley Ruiz was younger by fifteen years and in far better health. He would be pouring drinks under The Romp long after Pettie was rotting (instead of Trotting) in a pauper’s grave.
“Good even, sai Thorin,” Pettie said. And before Coral could so much as open her mouth, the whore had put a shot glass on the bar and filled it full of whiskey. Coral looked at it with dismay. Did they all know, then?
“I don’t want that,” she snapped. “Why in Eld’s name would I? Sun isn’t even down! Pour it back into the bottle, for yer father’s sake, and then get the hell out of here. Who d’ye think yer serving at five o’ the clock, anyway? Ghosts?”
Pettie’s face fell a foot; the heavy coat of her makeup actually seemed to crack apart. She took the funnel from under the bar, stuck it in the neck of the bottle, and poured the shot of whiskey back in. Some went onto the bar in spite of the funnel; her plump hands (now ringless; her rings had been traded for food at the mercantile across the street long since) were shaking. “I’m sorry, sai. So I am. I was only—”
“I don’t care what ye was only,” Coral said, then turned a bloodshot eye on Sheb, who had been sitting on his piano-bench and leafing through old sheet-music. Now he was staring toward the bar with his mouth hung open. “And what are you looking at, ye frog?”
“Nothing, sai Thorin. I—”
“Then go look at it somewhere else. Take this pig with’ee. Give her a bounce, why don’t ye? It’ll be good for her skin. It might even be good for yer own.”
“I—”
“Get out! Are ye deaf? Both of ye!”
Pettie and Sheb went away toward the kitchen instead of the cribs upstairs, but it was all the same to Coral. They could go to hell as far as she was concerned. Anywhere, as long as they were out of her aching face.
She went behind the bar and looked around. Two men playing cards over in the far corner. That hardcase Reynolds was watching them and sipping a beer. There was another man at the far end of the bar, but he was staring off into space, lost in his own world. No one was paying any especial attention to sai Coral Thorin, and what did it matter if they were? If Pettie knew, they all knew.
She ran her finger through the puddle of whiskey on the bar, sucked it, ran it through again, sucked it again. She grasped the bottle, but before she could pour, a spidery monstrosity with gray-green eyes leaped, hissing, onto the bar. Coral shrieked and stepped back, dropping the whiskey bottle between her feet . . . where, for a wonder, it didn’t break. For a moment she thought her head would break, instead—that her swelling, throbbing brain would simply split her skull like a rotten eggshell. There was a crash as the card-players overturned their table getting up. Reynolds had drawn his gun.
“Nay,” she said in a quavering voice she could hardly recognize. Her eyeballs were pulsing and her heart was racing. People could die of fright, she realized that now. “Nay, gentlemen, all’s well.”
The six-legged freak standing on the bar opened its mouth, bared its needle fangs, and hissed again.
Coral bent down (and as her head passed below the level of her waist, she was once