C H A P T E R 3 4 страница

'I could ride this bull all night, ' he said.

'Mr Hanscom, I wish you wouldn't do that anymore, ' Ricky Lee said nervously.

Annie came over to the waitresses' stand with her tray and called for a couple of Millers.

Ricky Lee drew them and took them down to her. His legs felt rubbery.

'Is Mr Hanscom all right, Ricky Lee? ' Annie asked. She was looking past Ricky Lee and he turned to follow her gaze. Mr Hanscom was leaning over the bar, carefully picking lemonslices out of the caddy where Ricky Lee kept the drink garnishes.

'I don't know, ' he said. 'I don't think so. '

'Well get your thumb out of your ass and do something about it. ' Annie was, like most other women, partial to Ben Hanscom.

'I dunno. My daddy always said that if a man's in his right mind — '

'Your daddy didn't have the brains God gave a gopher, ' Annie said. 'Never mind your daddy. You got to put a stop to that, Ricky Lee. He's going to kill himself. '

Thus given his marching orders, Ricky Lee went back down to where Ben Hanscom sat.

'Mr Hanscom, I really think you've had en — '

Hanscom tilted his head back. Squeezed. Actually sniffed the lemon-juice back this time, as if it were cocaine. He gulped whiskey as if it were water. He looked at Ricky Lee solemnly. 'Bing-bang, I saw the whole gang, dancing on my living-room rug, ' he said, and then laughed. There was maybe two inches of whiskey left in the stem.

'That is enough, ' Ricky Lee said, and reached for the stein.

Hanscom moved it gently out of his reach. 'Damage has been done, Ricky Lee, ' he said.

'The damage has been done, boy. '

'Mr Hanscom, please — '

'I've got something for your kids, Ricky Lee. Damn if I didn't almost forget! '

He was wearing a faded denim vest, and now he reached something out of one of its pockets. Ricky Lee heard a muted clink.

'My dad died when I was four, ' Hanscom said. There was no slur at all in his voice. 'Left us a bunch of debts and these. I want your kiddos to have them, Ricky Lee. ' He put three cartwheel silver dollars on the bar, where they gleamed under the soft lights. Ricky Lee caught his breath.

'Mr Hanscom, that's very kind, but I couldn't — '

'There used to be four, but I gave one of them to Stuttering Bill and the others. Bill Denbrough, that was his real name. Stuttering Bill's just what we used to call him. . . just a thing we used to say, like " You bet your fur. " He was one of the best friends I ever had — I did have a few, you know, even a fat kid like me had a few. Stuttering Bill's a writer now. ' Ricky Lee barely heard him. He was looking at the cartwheels, fascinated. 1921, 1923, and 1924. God knew what they were worth now, just in terms of the pure silver they contained.

'I couldn't, ' he said again.

'But I insist. ' Mr Hanscom took hold of the stein and drained it. He should have been flat on his keister, but his eyes never left Ricky Lee's. Those eyes were watery, and very bloodshot, but Ricky Lee would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that they were also the eyes of a sober man.

'You're scaring me a little, Mr Hanscom, ' Ricky Lee said. Two years ago Gresham Arnold, a rumdum of some local repute, had come into the Red Wheel with a roll of quarters in his hand and a twenty dollar bill stuck into the band of his hat. He handed the roll to Annie with instructions to feed the quarters into the juke-box by fours. He put the twenty on the bar and instructed Ricky Lee to set up drinks for the house. This rumdum, this Gresham Arnold, had long ago been a star basketball player for the Hemingford Rams, leading them to their first (and most likely last) high-school team championship. In 1961 that had been. An almost unlimited future seemed to lie ahead of the young man. But he had flunked out of LSU his first semester, a victim of drink, drugs, and all-night parties. He came home, cracked up the yellow convertible his folks had given him as a graduation present, and got a job as head salesman in his daddy's John Deere dealership. Five years passed. His father could not bear to fire him, and so he finally sold the dealership and retired to Arizona, a man haunted and made old before his tune by the inexplicable and apparently irreversible degeneration of his son. While the dealership still belonged to his daddy and he was at least pretending to work, Arnold had made some effort to keep the booze at arm's length; afterward, it got him completely. He could get mean, but he had been just as sweet as horehound candy the night he brought in the quarters and set up drinks for the house, and everyone had thanked him kindly, and Annie kept playing Moe Bandy songs because Gresham Arnold liked ole Moe Bandy. He sat there at the bar — on the very stool where Mr Hanscom was sitting now, Ricky Lee realized with steadily deepening unease — and drank three or four bourbon-andbitters, and sang along with the juke, and caused no trouble, and went home when Ricky Lee closed the Wheel up, and hanged himself with his belt in an upstairs closet. Gresham Arnold's eyes that night had looked a little bit like Ben Hanscom's eyes looked right now.

'Scaring you a bit, am I? ' Hanscom asked, his eyes never leaving Ricky Lee's. He pushed the stein away and then folded his hands neatly in front of those three silver cartwheels. 'I

probably am. But you're not as scared as I am, Ricky Lee. Pray to Jesus you never are. '

'Well, what's the matter? ' Ricky Lee asked. 'Maybe — ' He wet his lips. 'Maybe I can give you a help. '

'The matter? ' Ben Hanscom laughed. 'Why, not too much. I had a call from an old friend tonight. Guy named Mike Hanlon. I'd forgotten all about him, Ricky Lee, but that didn't scare me much. After all, I was just a kid when I knew him, and kids forget things, don't they? Sure they do. You bet your fur. What scared me was getting about halfway over here and realizing that it wasn't just Mike I'd forgotten about — I'd forgotten everything about being a kid. '

Ricky Lee only looked at him. He had no idea what Mr Hanscom was talking about — but the man was scared, all right. No question about that. It sat funny on Ben Hanscom, but it was real.

'I mean I'd forgotten all about it, ' he said, and rapped his knuckles lightly on the bar for emphasis. 'Did you ever hear, Ricky Lee, of having an amnesia so complete you didn't even know you had amnesia? '

Ricky Lee shook his head.

'Me either. But there I was, tooling along in the Caddy tonight, and all of a sudden it hit me. I remembered Mike Hanlon, but only because he called me on the phone. I remembered Derry, but only because that was where he was calling from. '

'Derry? '

'But that was all. It hit me that I hadn't even thought about being a kid since. . . since I don't even know when. And then, just like that, it all started to flood back in. Like what we did with the fourth silver dollar. '

'What did you do with it, Mr Hanscom? '

Hanscom looked at his watch, and suddenly slipped down from his stool. He staggered a bit — the slightest bit. That was all. 'Can't let the time get away from me, ' he said. 'I'm flying tonight. '

Ricky Lee looked instantly alarmed, and Hanscom laughed.

'Flying but not driving the plane. Not this time. United Airlines, Ricky Lee. '

'Oh. ' He supposed his relief showed on his face, but he didn't care. 'Where are you going? ' Hanscom's shirt was still open. He looked thoughtfully down at the puckered white lines of the old scar on his belly and then began to button the shirt over it.

'Thought I told you that, Ricky Lee. Home. I'm going home. Give those cartwheels to your kids. ' He started toward the door, and something about the way he walked, even the way he hitched at the sides of his pants, terrified Ricky Lee. The resemblance to the late and mostly unlamented Gresham Arnold was suddenly so acute it was nearly like seeing a ghost.

'Mr Hanscom! ' he cried in alarm.

Hanscom turned back, and Ricky Lee stepped quickly backward. His ass hit the backbar and glassware gossiped briefly as the bottles knocked together. He stepped back because he was suddenly convinced that Ben Hanscom was dead. Yes, Ben Hanscom was lying dead someplace, in a ditch or an attic or possibly in a closet with a belt noosed around his neck and the toes of his four-hundred-dollar cowboy boots dangling an inch or two above the floor, and this thing standing near the juke and staring back at him was a ghost. For a moment — just a moment, but it was plenty long enough to cover his working heart with a rime of ice — he was convinced he could see tables and chairs right through the man.

'What is it, Ricky Lee? ' 'Nuh-n-nuh. Nothin. '

Ben Hanscom looked out at Ricky Lee from eyes which had dark-purple crescents beneath them. His cheeks burned with liquor; his nose looked red and sore.

'Nothin, ' Ricky Lee whispered again, but he couldn't take his eyes from that face, the face of a man who has died deep in sin and now stands hard by hell's smoking side door.

'I was fat and we were poor, ' Ben Hanscom said. 'I remember that now. And I remember that either a girl named Beverly or Stuttering Bill saved my life with a silver dollar. I'm scared almost insane by whatever else I may remember before tonight's over, but how scared I am doesn't matter, because it's going to come anyway. It's all there, like a great big bubble that's growing in my mind. But I'm going, because all I've ever gotten and all I have now is somehow due to what we did then, and you pay for what you get in this world. Maybe that's why God made us kids first and built us close to the ground, because He knows you got to fall down a lot and bleed a lot before you learn that one simple lesson. You pay for what you get, you own what you pay for. . . and sooner or later whatever you own comes back home to you. '

'You gonna be back this weekend, though, ain't you? ' Ricky Lee asked through numbed lips. In his increasing distress this was all he could find to hold on to. 'You gonna be back this weekend just like always, ain't you? '

'I don't know, ' Mr Hanscom said, and smiled a terrible smile. 'I'm going a lot farther than

London this time, Ricky Lee. '

'Mr Hanscom —! '

'You give those cartwheels to your kids, ' he repeated, and slipped out into the night.

'What the blue hell? Annie asked, but Ricky Lee ignored her. He flipped up the bar's partition and ran over to one of the windows which looked out on the parking lot. He saw the headlights of Mr Hanscom's Caddy come on, heard the engine rev. It pulled out of the dirt lot, kicking up a rooster-tail of dust behind it. The taillights dwindled away to red points down Highway 63, and the Nebraska nightwind began to pull the hanging dust apart.

'He took on a boxcar full of booze and you let him get in that big car of his and drive away, ' Annie said. 'Way to go, Ricky Lee. '

'Never mind. '

'He's going to kill himself. '

And although this had been Ricky Lee's own thought less than five minutes ago, he turned to her when the taillights winked out of sight and shook his head.

'I don't think so, ' he said. 'Although the way he looked tonight, it might be better for him if he did. '

'What did he say to you? '

He shook his head. It was all confused in his mind, and the sum total of it seemed to mean nothing. 'It doesn't matter. But I don't think we're ever going to see that old boy again. '

Eddie Kaspbrak Takes His Medicine

If you would know all there is to know about an American man or woman of the middle class as the millennium nears tis end, you would need only to look in his or her medicine cabinet — or so it has been said. But dear Lord, get a look into this one as Eddie Kaspbrak slides it open, mercifully sliding aside his white face and wide, staring eyes.

On the top shelf there's Anacin, Excedrin, Excedrin PM, Contac, Gelusil, Tylenol, and a large blue jar of Vicks, looking like a bit of brooding deep twilight under glass. There is a bottle of Vivarin, a bottle of Serutan (That's 'Nature's' spelled backwards, the ads on Lawrence Welk used to say when Eddie Kaspbrak was but a wee slip of a lad), and two bottles of Phillips Milk of Magnesia — the regular, which tastes like liquid chalk, and the new mint flavor, which tastes like mint-flavored liquid chalk. Here is a large bottle of Rolaids standing chummily close to a large bottle of Turns. The Turns are standing next to a large bottle of orange-flavored Di-Gel tablets. The three of them look like a trio of strange piggybanks, stuffed with pills instead of dimes.

Second shelf, and dig the vites: you got your E, your C, your C with rosehips. You got Bsimple and B-complex and B-12. There's L-Lysine, which is supposed to do something about those embarrassing skin problems, and lecithin, which is supposed to do something about that embarrassing cholesterol build-up in and around the Big Pump. There's iron, calcium, and cod liver oil. There's One-A-Day multiples, Myadec multiples, Centrum multiples. And sitting up on top of the cabinet itself is a gigantic bottle of Geritol, just for good measure.

Moving right along to Eddie's third shelf, we find the utility infielders of the patentmedicine world. Ex-Lax. Carter's Little Pills. Those two keep Eddie Kaspbrak moving the mail. Here, nearby, is Kaopectate, Pepto-Bismol, and Preparation H in case the mail moves too fast or too painfully. Also some Tucks in a screw-top jar just to keep everything tidy after the mail has gone through, be it just an advertising circular or two addressed to OCCUPANT or a big old special-delivery package. Here is Formula 44 for coughs, Nyquil and Dristan for colds, and a big bottle of castor oil. There's a tin of Sucrets in case Eddie's throat gets sore, and there's a quartet of mouthwashes: Chloraseptic, Cepacol, Cepestat in the spray bottle, and of course good old Listerine, often imitated but never duplicated. Visine and Murine for the eyes. Cortaid and Neosporin ointment for the skin (the second line of defense if the L-Lysine doesn't live up to expectations), a tube of Oxy-5 and a plastic bottle of Oxy-Wash (because Eddie would definitely rather have a few less cents than a few more zits), and some tetracyline pills.

And off to one side, clustered like bitter conspirators, are three bottles of coal-tar shampoo.

The bottom shelf is almost deserted, but the stuff which is here means serious business — you could cruise on this stuff, okay. On this stuff you could fly higher than Ben Hanscom's jet and crash harder than Thurman Munson's. There's Valium, Percodan, Elavil, and Darvon Complex. There is also another Sucrets box on this low shelf, but there are no Sucrets in it. If you opened that one you would find six Quaaludes.

Eddie Kaspbrak believed in the Boy Scout motto.

He was swinging a blue tote-bag as he came into the bathroom. He set it on the sink, unzipped it, and then, with trembling hands, he began to spill bottles and jars and tubes and squeeze-bottles and spray-bottles into it. Under other circumstances he would have taken them out handful by careful handful, but there was no time for such niceties now. The choice, as Eddie saw it, was as simple as it was brutal: get moving and keep moving or stand in one place long enough to start thinking about what all of this meant and simply die of fright.

'Eddie? ' Myra called up from downstairs. 'Eddie, what are you dooooing?

Eddie dropped the Sucrets box containing the 'ludes into the bag. The medicine cabinet was now entirely empty except for Myra's Midol and a small, almost used-up tube of Blistex. He paused for a moment and then grabbed the Blistex. He started to zip the bag closed, debated, and then threw in the Midol as well. She could always buy more.

'Eddie? ' from halfway up the stairs now.

Eddie zipped the bag the rest of the way closed and then left the bathroom, swinging it by his side. He was a short man with a timid, rabbity sort of face. Much of his hair was gone; what was left grew in listless, piebald patches. The weight of the bag pulled him noticeably to one side.

An extremely large woman was climbing slowly to the second floor. Eddie could hear the stairs creak protestingly under her.

'What are you DOOOOOOOOING? '

Eddie did not need a shrink to tell him that he had, in a sense, married his mother. Myra Kaspbrak was huge. She had only been big when Eddie married her five years ago, but he sometimes thought his subconscious had seen the potential for hugeness in her; God knew his own mother had been a whopper. And she looked somehow more huge than ever as she reached the second-floor landing. She was wearing a white nightgown which swelled, comberlike, at bosom and hip. Her face, devoid of make-up, was white and shiny. She looked badly frightened.

'I have to go away for awhile, ' Eddie said.

'What do you mean, you have to go away? What was that telephone call? '

'Nothing, ' he said, fleeing abruptly down the hallway to their walk-in closet. He put the tote-bag down, opened the closet's fold-back door, and raked aside the half-dozen identical black suits which hung there, as conspicuous as a thundercloud among the other, more brightly colored, clothes. He always wore one of the black suits when he was working. He bent into the closet, smelling mothballs and wool, and pulled out one of the suitcases from the back. He opened it and began throwing clothes in.

Her shadow fell over him.

'What's this about, Eddie? Where are you going? You tell me! '

'I can't tell you. '

She stood there, watching him, trying to decide what to say next, or what to do. The thought of simply bundling him into the closet and then standing with her back against the door until this madness had passed crossed her mind, but she was unable to bring herself to do it, although she certainly could have; she was three inches taller than Eddie and outweighed him by a hundred pounds. She couldn't think of what to do or say, because this was so utterly unlike him. She could not have been any more dismayed and frightened if she had walked into the television room and found their new big-screen TV floating in the air.

'You can't go, ' she heard herself saying. 'You promised you'd get me Al Pacino's autograph. ' It was an absurdity — God knew it was — but at this point even an absurdity was better than nothing.

'You'll still get it, ' Eddie said. 'You'll have to drive him yourself. '

Oh, here was a new terror to join those already circling in her poor dazzled head. She uttered a small scream. 'I can't — I never — '

'You'll have to, ' he said. He was examining his shoes now. 'There's no one else. '

'Neither of my uniforms fit anymore! They're too tight in the tits! '

'Have Delores let one of them out, ' he said implacably. He threw two pairs of shoes back, found an empty shoebox, and popped a third pair into it. Good black shoes, plenty of use left in them still, but looking just a bit too worn to wear on the job. When you drove rich people around New York for a living, many of them famous rich people, everything had to look just right. These shoes no longer looked just right. . . but he supposed they would do for where he was going. And for whatever he might have to do when he got there. Maybe Richie Tozier would —

But then the blackness threatened and he felt his throat beginning to close up. Eddie realized with real panic that he had packed the whole damned drugstore and had left the most important thing of all — his aspirator — downstairs on top of the stereo cabinet.

He banged the suitcase closed and latched it. He looked around at Myra, who was standing there in the hallway with her hand pressed against the short thick column of her neck as if she were the one with the asthma. She was staring at him, her face full of perplexity and terror, and he might have felt sorry for her if his heart had not already been so filled with terror for himself.

'What's happened, Eddie? Who was that on the telephone? Are you in trouble? You are, aren't you? What kind of trouble are you in? '

He walked toward her, zipper-bag in one hand and suitcase in the other, standing more or less straight now that he was more evenly weighted. She moved in front of him, blocking off the stairway, and at first he thought she would not give way. Then, when his face was about to crash into the soft roadblock of her breasts, she did give way. . . fearfully. As he walked past, never slowing, she burst into miserable tears.

'I can't drive Al Pacino! ' she bawled. 'I'll smash into a stop-sign or something, I know I will! Eddie I'm scaaarrred! '

He looked at the Seth Thomas clock on the table by the stairs. Twenty past nine. The canned-sounding Delta clerk had told him he had already missed the last flight north to Maine — that one had left La Guardia at eight-twenty-five. He had called Amtrak and discovered there was a late train to Boston departing Perm Station at eleven-thirty. It would drop him off at South Station, where he could take a cab to the offices of Cape Cod Limousine on Arlington Street. Cape Cod and Eddie's company, Royal Crest, had worked out a useful and friendly reciprocal arrangement over the years. A quick call to Butch Carrington in Boston had taken care of his transportation north — Butch said he would have a Cadillac limo gassed and ready for him. So he would go in style, and with no pain-in-the-ass client sitting in the back seat, stinking the air up with a big cigar and asking if Eddie knew where he could score a broad or a few grams of coke or both.

Going in style, all right, he thought. Only way you could go in more style would be if you were going in a hearse. But don't worry, Eddie — that's probably how you'll come back. If there's enough of you left to pick up, that is.

'Eddie? '

Nine-twenty. Plenty of time to talk to her, plenty of time to be kind. Ah, but it would have been so much better if this had been her whist night, if he could have just slipped out, leaving a note under one of the magnets on the refrigerator door (the refrigerator door was where he left all his notes for Myra, because there she never missed them). Leaving that way — like a fugitive — would not have been good, but this was even worse. This was like having to leave home all over again, and that had been so hard he'd had to do it three times.

Sometimes home is where the heart is, Eddie thought randomly. I believe that. Old Bobby Frost said home's the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Unfortunately, it's also the place where, once you're in there, they don't ever want to let you out.

He stood at the head of the stairs, forward motion temporarily spent, filled with fear, breath wheezing noisily in and out of the pinhole his throat had become, and regarded his weeping wife.

'Come on downstairs with me and I'll tell you what I can, ' he said.

Eddie put his two bags — clothes in one, medicine in the other — by the door in the front hall. He remembered something else then. . . or rather the ghost of his mother, who had been dead many years but who still spoke frequently in his mind, remembered for him.

You know when your feet get wet you always get a cold, Eddie — you're not like other people, you have a very weak system, you have to be careful. That's why you must always wear your rubbers when it rains.

It rained a lot in Derry.

Eddie opened the front-hall closet, got his rubbers off the hook where they hung neatly in a plastic bag, and put them in his clothes suitcase.

That's a good boy, Eddie.

He and Myra had been watching TV when the shit hit the fan. Eddie went into the television room and pushed the button which lowered the screen of the MuralVision TV — its screen was so big that it made Freeman McNeil look like a visitor from Brobdingnag on Sunday afternoons. He picked up the telephone and called a taxi. The dispatcher told him it would probably be fifteen minutes. Eddie said that was no problem.

He hung up and grabbed his aspirator off the top of their expensive Sony compact-disc player. I spent fifteen hundred bucks on a state-of-the-art sound system so that Myra wouldn't miss a single golden note on her Barry Manilow records and her 'Supremes Greatest Hits, ' he thought, and then felt a flush of guilt. That wasn't fair, and he damn well knew it. Myra would have been just as happy with her old scratchy records as she was with the new 45-rpm-sized laser discs, just as she would have been happy to keep on living in the little four-room house in Queens until they were both old and gray (and, if the truth were told, there was a little snow on Eddie Kaspbrak's mountain already). He had bought the luxury sound system for the same reasons that he had bought this low fieldstone house on Long Island, where the two of them often rattled around like the last two peas in a can: because he had been able to, and because they were ways of appeasing the soft, frightened, often bewildered, always implacable voice of his mother; they were ways of saying: I made it, Ma! Look at all this! I made it! Now will you please for Christ's sake shut up awhile?

Eddie stuffed the aspirator into his mouth and, like a man miming suicide, pulled the trigger. A cloud of awful licorice taste roiled and boiled its way down his throat, and Eddie breathed deeply. He could feel breathing passages which had almost closed start to open up again. The tightness in his chest started to ease, and suddenly he heard voices in his mind, ghost-voices.

Didn't you get the note I sent you?

I got it, Mrs Kaspbrak, but —

Well, in case you can't read, Coach Black, let me tell you in person. Are you ready?

Mrs Kaspbrak —

Good. Here it comes, from my lips to your ears. Ready? My Eddie cannot take physical education. I repeat: he canNOT take phys ed. Eddie is very delicate, and if he runs. . . or jumps. . .

Mrs Kaspbrak, I have the results of Eddie's last physical on file in my office — that's a state requirement. It says that Eddie is a little small for his age, but otherwise he's absolutely normal. So I called your family physician just to be sure and he confirmed —

Are you saying I'm a liar, Coach Black? Is that it? Well, here he is! Here's Eddie, standing right beside me! Can you hear the way he's breathing? CAN you?

Mom. . . please. . . I'm all right. . .

Eddie, you know better than that. I taught you better than that. Don't interrupt your elders. I hear him, Mrs Kaspbrak, but —

Do you? Good! I thought maybe you were deaf! He sounds like a truck going uphill in low gear, doesn't he? And if that isn't asthma —

Mom, I'll be —

Be quiet, Eddie, don't interrupt me again. If that isn't asthma, Coach Black, then I'm Queen Elizabeth!

Mrs Kaspbrak, Eddie often seems very well and happy in his physical-education classes.

He loves to play games, and he runs quite fast. In my conversation with Dr Baynes, the word 'psychosomatic' came up. I wonder if you've considered the possibility that —

— that my son is crazy? Is that what you're trying to say? ARE YOU TRYING TO SAY THAT MY SON IS CRAZY????

No, but — He's delicate.

Mrs Kaspbrak —

My son is very delicate.

Mrs Kaspbrak, Dr Baynes confirmed that he could find nothing at all —

' — physically wrong, ' Eddie finished. The memory of that humiliating encounter, his mother screaming at Coach Black in the Derry Elementary School gymnasium while he gasped and cringed at her side and the other kids huddled around one of the baskets and watched, had recurred to him tonight for the first time in years. Nor was that the only memory which Mike Hanlon's call was going to bring back, he knew. He could feel many others, as bad or even worse, crowding and jostling like sale-mad shoppers bottlenecked in a department-store doorway. But soon the bottleneck would break and they would be along. He was quite sure of that. And what would they find on sale? His sanity? Could be. Half-Price. Smoke and Water Damage. Everything Must Go.

'Nothing physically wrong, ' he repeated, took a deep shuddery breath, and stuffed the aspirator into his pocket.

'Eddie, ' Myra said. 'Please tell me what all of this is about! '

Tear-tracks shone on her chubby cheeks. Her hands twisted restlessly together like a pair of pink and hairless animals at play. Once, shortly before actually proposing marriage, he had taken a picture of Myra which she had given him and had put it next to one of his mother, who had died of congestive heart-failure at the age of sixty-four. At the time of her death Eddie's mother had topped the scales at over four hundred pounds — four hundred and six, to be exact. She had become something nearly monstrous by then — her body had seemed nothing more than boobs and butt and belly, all overtopped by her pasty, perpetually dismayed face. But the picture of her which he put next to Myra's picture had been taken in

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