The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King
Next comes a kick to his wounded side, just above the beltline. Sanderson's head hits the right front hubcap of his Subaru and bounces off. He tries to crawl out from under Tat Man's shadow. Tat Man is yelling at him, but Sanderson can't make out any words; it's just wah-wah-wah, the sound adults make when they're talking to the kids in the animated Peanuts cartoons. He wants to tell Tat Man okay, okay, you say tomato and I say tomahto, let's call the whole thing off. He wants to say no harm and no foul (although he feels he has been fouled quite badly), you go your way and I'll go mine, happy trails to you, see you tomorrow, Mouseketeers. Only he can't catch his breath. He thinks he's going to have a heart attack, may be having one already. He wants to raise his head--if he's going to die he would like to do it looking at something more interesting than the surface of Commerce Way and the front of his own wounded car--but he can't seem to do it. His neck has become a noodle.
There's another kick, this time in the high meat of his left thigh. Then Tat Man gives a guttural cry, and red drops begin to splash the composition surface of the roadway. Sanderson at first thinks it's his nose--or maybe his lips, from the double-handed blow to his face--but then more warmth splashes the back of his neck. It's like a tropical rain shower. He crawls a little farther, past the hood of his car, then manages to turn over and sit. He looks up, squinting against the dazzle of the sky, and sees Pop standing beside Tat Man. Tat Man is bent over like a man suffering serious stomach cramps. He is also groping at the side of his neck, which has sprouted a piece of wood.
At first Sanderson can't understand what has happened, but then he gets it. The piece of wood is the handle of a knife, one he's seen before. He sees it almost every week. You don't need a steak knife to cut the kind of chopped meat Pop always has at their Sunday lunches, a fork does the trick very nicely, but they bring you a knife, anyway. It's all part of Applebee's service. Pop may no longer remember which son comes to visit him, or that his wife is dead, he probably no longer even remembers his middle name, but it seems he hasn't lost all the clever ruthlessness that enabled him to rise from a no-college oilfields roughneck to an upper-middle-class jewelry merchant in San Antonio.
He got me to look at the birds, Sanderson thinks. The crows on the Dumpster. That's when he took the knife.
Tat Man has lost interest in the man sitting in the road, and never casts a single glance at the older man standing beside him. Tat Man has begun coughing. A fine red spray comes from his mouth each time he does it. One hand is on the knife in his neck, trying to pull it out. Blood pours down the side of his tee-shirt and splatters his jeans. He begins walking toward the intersection of Commerce and Airline (where all traffic has stopped), still bent over and still coughing. With his free hand he gives a jaunty little wave: Hi, Ma!
Sanderson gets to his feet. His legs are trembling, but they hold him. He can hear sirens approaching. Sure, now the cops come. Now that it's all over.
Sanderson puts an arm around his father's shoulders. "You all right, Pop?"
"That man was beating on you," Pop says matter-of-factly. "Who is he?"
"I don't know." Tears are coursing down Sanderson's cheeks. He wipes them away.
Tat Man falls on his knees. He has stopped coughing. Now he's making a low growling sound. Most people hang back, but a couple of brave souls go to him, wanting to help. Sanderson thinks Tat Man is probably beyond it, but more power to them.
"Did we eat yet, Reggie?"
"Yeah, Pop, we did. And I'm Dougie."
"Reggie's dead. Didn't you tell me that?"
"Yeah, Pop."
"That man was beating on you." His father's face twists into the face of a child who is horribly tired and needs to go to bed. "I've got a headache. Let's blow this pop stand. I want to lie down."
"We have to wait for the cops."
"Why? What cops? Who is that guy?"
Sanderson smells shit. His father has just dropped a load.
"Let's get you in the car, Pop."
His father lets Sanderson lead him around the Subaru's crumpled snout. Pop says, "That was some Halloween, wasn't it?"
"Yeah, Pop, it was." He helps the eighty-three-year-old Caped Crusader into the car and closes the door to keep the cool in. The first city police car is pulling up, and they'll want to see some ID. The sixty-one-year-old Boy Wonder, hands pressed to his aching side, shuffles back to the driver's side to pick it up off the street.
For John Irving
As I said in the note to "Batman and Robin," sometimes--once in a great while--you get the cup with the handle already attached. God, how I love that. You're just going about your business, thinking of nothing in particular, and then, ka-boom, a story arrives Special Delivery, perfect and complete. The only thing you have to do is transcribe it.
I was in Florida, walking our dog on the beach. Because it was January, and cold, I was the only one out there. Up ahead I saw what looked like writing in the sand. When I got closer, I saw it was just a trick of sunlight and shadow, but writers' minds are junkheaps of odd information, and it made me think of an old quote from somewhere (it turned out to be Omar Khayyam): "The Moving Finger writes, and having writ, moves on." That in turn made me think of some magical place where an invisible Moving Finger would write terrible things in the sand, and I had this story. It has one of my very favorite endings. Maybe not up there with "August Heat," by W. F. Harvey--that one's a classic--but in the same neighborhood.
The Dune
As the Judge climbs into the kayak beneath a bright morning sky, a slow and clumsy process that takes him almost five minutes, he reflects that an old man's body is nothing but a sack in which he carries aches and indignities. Eighty years ago, when he was ten, he jumped into a wooden canoe and cast off, with no bulky life jacket, no worries, and certainly with no pee dribbling into his underwear. Every trip to the little unnamed island lying like a half-submerged submarine two hundred yards out in the Gulf began with a great and uneasy excitement. Now there is only unease. And pain that seems centered deep in his guts and radiates to everywhere. But he still makes the trip. Many things have lost their allure in these shadowy later years--most things--but not the dune on the far side of the island. Never the dune.
In the early days of his exploration, he expected it to be gone after every big storm, and following the 1944 hurricane that sank the USS Warrington off Vero Beach, he was sure it would be. But when the skies cleared, the island was still there. So was the dune, although the hundred-mile-an-hour winds should have blown all the sand away, leaving only the bare rocks and knobs of coral. Over the years he has debated back and forth about whether the magic is in him or in the island. Perhaps it's both, but surely most of it is in the dune.
Since 1932 he has crossed this short stretch of water thousands of times. Usually he finds nothing but rocks and bushes and sand, but every now and then there is something else.
Settled in the kayak at last, he paddles slowly from the beach to the island, his frizz of white hair blowing around his mostly bald skull. A few turkey buzzards wheel overhead, making their ugly conversation. Once he was the son of the richest man on the Florida Gulf coast, then he was a lawyer, then he was a judge on the Pinellas County Circuit, then he was appointed to the State Supreme Court. There was talk, during the Reagan years, of a nomination to the United States Supreme Court, but that never happened, and a week after the idiot Clinton became president, Judge Harvey Beecher--just the Judge to his many acquaintances (he has no real friends) in Sarasota, Osprey, Nokomis, and Venice--retired. Hell, he never liked Tallahassee, anyway. It's cold up there.
Also, it's too far from the island, and its peculiar dune. On these early-morning kayak trips, paddling the short distance on smooth water, he's willing to admit that he's addicted to it. But who wouldn't be addicted to a thing like this?
On the rocky east side, a gnarled bush juts from the split in a guano-splattered rock. This is where he ties up, and he's always careful to tie well. It wouldn't do to be stranded out here; hi
Once upon a time Mrs. Riley might have gotten nervous when he didn't come out of the study for lunch, but now he hardly ever eats at noon (she calls him "nothing but a stuffed string," although not to his face). There's no other staff, and both Curtis and Mrs. Riley know he can be cross when he's interrupted. Not that there's really much to interrupt; he hasn't added so much as a line to the memoirs in two years, and in his heart he knows they will never be finished. The unfinished recollections of a Florida judge? No tragedy there. The one story he could write is the one he never will.
He's even slower getting out of the kayak than he was getting in, and turns turtle once, wetting his shirt and pants in the little waves that run up the gravelly shingle. Beecher is not discommoded. It isn't the first time he's fallen, and there's no one to see him. He supposes he's mad to continue these trips at his age, even though the island is so close to the mainland, but stopping them isn't an option. An addict is an addict is an addict.
Beecher struggles to his feet and clutches his belly until the last of the pain subsides. He brushes sand and small shells from his pants, double-checks his mooring rope, then spots one of the turkey buzzards perched on the island's largest rock, peering down at him.
"Yi!" he shouts in the voice he now hates--cracked and wavering, the voice of an old shrew in a black dress. "Yi-yi, you bugger! Get on about your business!"
After giving a brief rustle of its raggedy wings, the turkey buzzard sits right where it is. Its beady eyes seem to say, But Judge--today you're my business.
Beecher stoops, picks up a larger shell, and shies it at the bird. This time it does fly away, the sound of its wings like rippling cloth. It soars across the short stretch of water and lands on his dock. Still, the Judge thinks, a bad omen. He remembers Jimmy Caslow of the Florida State Patrol telling him once that turkey buzzards didn't just know where carrion was, but where carrion would be.
"I can't tell you," Caslow said, "how many times I've seen those ugly bastards circling a spot on the Tamiami where there's a fatal wreck a day or two later. Sounds crazy, I know, but just about any Florida road cop will tell you the same."
There are almost always turkey buzzards out here on the little no-name island. Judge Beecher supposes it smells like death to them, and why not?
He sets off on the little path he has beaten over the years. He will check the dune on the other side, where the sand is beach-fine instead of stony and shelly, and then he will return to the kayak and drink his little jug of cold tea. He may doze awhile in the morning sun (he dozes often these days, supposes most nonagenarians do), and when he wakes (if he wakes), he'll make the return trip. He tells himself that the dune will be just a smooth blank upslope of sand, as it is most days, but he knows better.
Goddam buzzard knew better, too.
He spends a long time on the sandy side, with his age-warped fingers clasped in a knot behind him. His back aches, his shoulders ache, his hips ache, his knees ache; most of all, his gut aches. But he pays these things no mind. Perhaps later, but not now.
He looks at the dune, and at what is written there.
*
Anthony Wayland arrives at Beecher's Pelican Point estate bang on seven o'clock p.m., just as promised. One thing the Judge has always appreciated--both in the courtroom and out of it--is punctuality, and the boy is punctual. Judge Beecher reminds himself never to call Wayland boy to his face (although, this being the South, son is okay). Wayland wouldn't understand that, when you're ninety, any fellow under the age of sixty looks like a boy.
"Thanks for coming," the Judge says, ushering Wayland into his study. It's just the two of them; Curtis and Mrs. Riley have long since gone to their homes in Nokomis Village. "You brought the necessary document?"
"Yes indeed, Judge." Wayland opens his big square attorney's briefcase and removes a thick document bound by a heavy clip. The pages aren't vellum, as they would have been in the old days, but they are rich and heavy just the same. At the top of the first, in heavy and forbidding type (what the Judge has always thought of as graveyard type), are the words Last Will and Testament of HARVEY L. BEECHER.
"You know, I'm kind of surprised you didn't draft this document yourself. You've probably forgotten more Florida probate law than I've ever learned."
"That might be true," the Judge says in his driest tone. "At my age, folks tend to forget a great deal."
Wayland flushes to the roots of his hair. "I didn't mean--"
"I know what you mean, son," the Judge says. "No offense taken. But since you ask . . . you know that old saying about how a man who serves as his own lawyer has a fool for a client?"
Wayland grins. "Heard it and used it plenty of times when I'm wearing my public defender hat and some sad-sack wife abuser or hit-and-runner tells me he plans to go the DIY route in court."
"I'm sure you have, but here's the unabridged version: a lawyer who serves as his own lawyer has a great fool for a client. Goes for criminal, civil, and probate law. So shall we get down to business? Time is short." This is something he means in more ways than one.
They get down to business. Mrs. Riley has left decaf coffee, which Wayland rejects in favor of a Co'-Cola. He makes copious notes as the Judge dictates the changes in his dry courtroom voice, adjusting old bequests and adding new ones. The major new one--four million dollars--is to the Sarasota County Beach and Wildlife Preservation Society. In order to qualify, they must successfully petition the state legislature to have a certain island just off the coast of Pelican Point declared forever wild.
"They won't have a problem getting that done," the Judge says. "You can handle the legal for them yourself. I'd prefer pro bono, but of course that's up to you. One trip to Tallahassee should do it. It's a little spit of a thing, nothing growing there but a few bushes. Governor Scott and his Tea Party cronies will be delighted."
"Why's that, Judge?"
"Because the next time Beach and Preservation comes to them, begging money, they can say, 'Didn't old Judge Beecher just give you four million? Get out of here, and don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.' "
Wayland agrees that this is probably just how it will go, and the two men move on to the smaller bequests.
"Once I get a clean draft, we'll need two witnesses, and a notary," Wayland says when they've finished.
"I'll get all that done with this draft here, just to be safe," the Judge says. "If anything happens to me in the interim, it should stand up. There's no one to contest it; I've outlived them all."
"A wise precaution, Judge. It would be good to take care of it tonight. I don't suppose your caretaker and housekeeper--"
"Won't be back until eight tomorrow," Beecher says, "but I'll make it the first order of business. Harry Staines on Vamo Road's a notary, and he'll be glad to come over before he goes in to his office. He owes me a favor or six. You give that document to me, son. I'll lock it in my safe."
"I ought to at least make a . . ." Wayland looks at the gnarled, outstretched hand and trails off. When a state Supreme Court judge (even a retired one) holds out his hand, demurrals must cease. What the hell, it's only an annotated draft, anyway, soon to be replaced by a clean version. He passes the unsigned will over and watches as Beecher rises (painfully) and swings a picture of the Florida Everglades out on a hidden hinge. The Judge enters the correct combination, making no attempt to hide the touchpad from view, and deposits the will on top of what looks to Wayland like a large and untidy heap of cash. Yikes.
"There!" Beecher says. "All done and buttoned up! Except for the signing part, that
"Well . . . I guess one wouldn't hurt."
"It never hurt me, although it does now, so you'll have to pardon me for not joining you. Decaf coffee and a little sweet tea are the strongest drinks I take these days. Stomach woes. Ice?"
Wayland holds up two fingers, and Beecher adds two cubes to the drink with the slow ceremony of old age. Wayland takes a sip, and color immediately dashes into his cheeks. It is the flush, Judge Beecher thinks, of a man who enjoys his tipple. As Wayland sets his glass down, he says, "Do you mind if I ask what the hurry is? You're all right, I take it? Stomach woes aside?"
The Judge doubts if young Wayland takes it that way at all. He's not blind.
"A-country fair," he says, seesawing one hand in the air and sitting down with a grunt and a wince. Then, after consideration, he says, "Do you really want to know what the hurry is?"
Wayland considers the question, and Beecher likes him for that. Then he nods.
"It has to do with that island we took care of just now. Probably never even noticed it, have you?"
"Can't say that I have."
"Most folks don't. It barely sticks up out of the water. The sea turtles don't even bother with that old island. Yet it's special. Did you know my grandfather fought in the Spanish-American War?"
"No, sir, I did not." Wayland speaks with exaggerated respect, and Beecher knows the boy believes his mind is wandering. The boy is wrong. Beecher's mind has never been clearer, and now that he's begun, he finds that he wants to tell this story at least once before . . .