'Take it the way you want to take it,' said Joe. 'That's all right.'

'Make that idiot shut up, why don't you?' the county health officer said. He was looking down the driveway at the halfwit, who was leaning against the Newall R.F.D. box and howling. Tears ran down his pudgy, dirty cheeks. Every now and then he would draw back and slap himself a good one, like he knew the whole thing was his fault.

'He's all right, too.'

'Nothing up here seems all right to me,' said the county health man, 'least of all sixteen cows layin dead on their backs with their legs stickin up like fence-posts. I can see 'em from here.'

'Good,' said Joe Newall, 'because it's as close as you'll get.'

The county health officer threw the Gates Falls vet's paper down and stamped one of his boots on it. He looked at Joe Newall, his face flushed so bright that the burst squiggles of veins on the sides of his nose stood out purple. 'I want to see those cows. Haul one away, if it comes to that.'

'No.'

'You don't own the world, Newall - I'll get a court order.'

'Let's see if you can.'

The health officer drove away. Joe watched him. Down at the end of the driveway the halfwit, clad in dung-splattered bib overalls from the Sears and Roebuck mail-order catalogue, went on leaning against the Newall R.F.D. box and howling. He stayed there all that hot August day, howling at the top of his lungs with his flat mongoloid face turned up to the yellow sky. 'Bellerin like a calf in the moonlight' was how young Gary Paulson put it.

The county health officer was Clem Upshaw, from Sirois Hill. He might have dropped the matter once his thermostat went down a little, but Brownie McKissick, who had supported him for the office he held (and who let him charge a fair amount of beer), urged him not to. Harley McKissick's dad was not the kind of man who usually resorted to cat's paws - or had to - but he'd wanted to make a point concerning private property with Joe Newall. He wanted Joe to understand that private property is a great thing, yes, an American thing, but private property is still st.i.tched to the town, and in Castle Rock people still believed the community came first, even with rich folks that could build a little more house on their house whenever the whim took them. So Clem Upshaw went on down to Lackery, which was the county seat in those days, and got the order.

While he was getting it, a large van drove up past the howling moron and to the barn. When Clem Upshaw returned with his order, only one cow remained, gazing at him with black eyes which had grown dull and distant beneath their covering of hay chaff. Clem determined that this cow at least had died of bovine meningitis, and then he went away. When he was gone, the remover's van returned for the last cow.

In 1928 Joe began another wing. That was when the men who gathered at Brownie's decided the man was crazy. Smart, yes, but crazy. Benny Ellis claimed that Joe had gouged out his daughter's one eye and kept it in a jar of what Benny called 'fubbledehyde'' on the kitchen table, along with the amputated fingers which had been poking out of the other socket when the baby was born.

Benny was a great reader of the horror pulps, magazines that showed naked ladies being carried off by giant ants and similar bad dreams on their covers, and his story about Joe Newall's jar was clearly inspired by his reading matter. As a result, there were soon people all over Castle Rock - not just the Bend - who claimed every word of it was true. Some claimed Joe kept even less mentionable things in the jar.

The second wing was finished in August of 1929 and two nights later a fast-moving jalopy with great sodium circles for eyes screamed juddering into Joe Newall's driveway and the stinking, flyblown corpse of a large skunk was thrown at the new wing. The animal splattered above one of the windows, throwing a fan of blood across the panes in a pattern almost like a Chinese ideogram.

In September of that year a fire swept the carding room of Newall's flagship mill in Gates Falls, causing fifty thousand dollars' worth of damage. In October the stock market crashed. In November Joe Newall hanged himself from a rafter in one of the unfinished rooms - probably a bedroom, it was meant to be - of the newest wing. The smell of sap in the fresh wood was still strong. He was found by Cleveland Torb.u.t.t, the a.s.sistant manager of Gates Mills and Joe's partner (or so it was rumored) in a number of Wall Street ventures that were now not worth the puke of a tubercular c.o.c.ker spaniel. The county coroner, who happened to be Clem Upshaw's brother n.o.ble, cut down the body.

Joe was buried next to his wife and child on the last day of November. It was a hard, brilliant day and the only person from Castle Rock to attend the service was Alvin Coy, who drove the Hay Peabody funeral hack. Alvin reported that one of the spectators was a young, shapely woman in a racc.o.o.n coat and a black cloche hat. Sitting in Brownie's and eating a pickle straight out of the barrel, Alvin would smile mordantly and tell his cronies that she was a jazz baby if he had ever seen one. She bore not one whit of resemblance to Cora Leonard Newall's side of the family, and she hadn't closed her eyes during the prayer.

Gary Paulson enters the store with exquisite slowness, closing the door carefully behind him.

'Afternoon,' Harley McKissick says neutrally.

'Heard you won a turkey down to the Grange last night,' says Old Clut as he prepares to light his pipe.

'Yuh,' Gary says. He's eighty-four and, like the others, can remember when the Bend was a d.a.m.ned sight livelier than it is now. He lost two sons in two wars - the two before that mess in Viet Nam - and that was a hard thing. His third, a good boy, died in a collision with a pulpwood truck up around Presque Isle - back in 1973, that was. Somehow that one was easier to take, G.o.d knows why. Gary sometimes drools from the corners of his lips these days, and makes frequent smacking sounds as he tries to suck the drool back into his mouth before it can get away and start running down his chin. He doesn't know a whole h.e.l.l of a lot lately, but he knows getting old is a lousy way to spend the last years of your life.

'Coffee?' Harley asks.

'Guess not.'

Lenny Partridge, who will probably never recover from the broken ribs he suffered in a strange road-accident two autumns ago, pulls his feet back so the older man can pa.s.s by him and lower himself carefully into the chair in the corner (Gary caned the seat of this chair himself, back in '82). Paulson smacks his lips, sucks back spit, and folds his lumpy hands over the head of his cane. He looks tired and haggard.

'It is going to rain a pretty b.i.t.c.h,' he says finally. 'I'm aching that bad.'

'It's a bad fall,' Paul Corliss says.

There is silence. The heat from the stove fills the store that will go out of business when Harley dies or maybe even before he dies if his youngest daughter has her way, it fills the store and coats the bones of the old men, tries to, anyway, and sniffs up against the dirty gla.s.s with its ancient posters looking out at the yard where there were gas-pumps until Mobil took them out in 1977. They are old men who have, for the most part, seen their children go away to more profitable places. The store does no business to speak of now, except for a few locals and the occasional through-going summer tourists who think old men like these, old men who sit by the stove in their thermal undershirts even in July, are quaint. Old Clut has always claimed that new people are going to come to this part of the Rock, but the last couple of years things have been worse than ever - it seems the whole G.o.ddam town is dying.

'Who is building the new wing on that Christly Newall house?' Gary asks finally.

They look around at him. For a moment the kitchen match Old Clut has just scratched hangs mystically over his pipe, burning down the wood, turning it black. The sulfur node at the end turns gray and curls up. At last, Old Clut dips the match into the bowl and puffs.

'New wing?' Harley asks.

'Yuh.'

A blue membrane of smoke from Old Clut's pipe drifts up over the stove and spreads there like a delicate fisherman's net. Lenny Partridge tilts his chin up to stretch the wattles of his neck taut and then runs his hand slowly down his throat, producing a dry rasp.

'No one that I know of,' Harley says, somehow indicating by his tone of voice that this includes anyone of any consequence, at least in this part of the world.

'They ain't had a buyer on that place since nineteen n eighty-one,' Old Clut says. When Old Clut says they, he means both Southern Maine Weaving and The Bank of Southern Maine, but he means more: he means The Ma.s.sachusetts Wops. Southern Maine Weaving came into ownership of Joe's three mills - and Joe's house on the ridge - about a year after Joe took his own life, but as far as the men gathered around the stove in Brownie's are concerned, that name's just a smoke-screen . . . or what they sometimes call The Legal, as in She swore out a perfection order on him n now he can't even see his own kids because of The Legal. These men hate The Legal as it impinges upon their lives and the lives of their friends, but it fascinates them endlessly when they consider how some people put it to work in order to further their own nefarious money-making schemes.

Southern Maine Weaving, aka The Bank of Southern Maine, aka The Ma.s.sachusetts Wops, enjoyed a long and profitable run with the mills Joe Newall saved from extinction, but it's the way they have been unable to get rid of the house that fascinates the old men who spend their days in Brownie's. 'It's like a booger you can't flick off the end of your finger,' Lenny Partridge said once, and they all nodded. 'Not even those spaghetti-suckers from Maiden n Revere can get rid of that millstone.'

Old Clut and his grandson, Andy, are currently estranged, and it is the ownership of Joe Newall's ugly house, which has caused it . . . although there are other, more personal issues swirling around just below the surface, no doubt - there almost always are. The subject came up one night after grandfather and grandson - both widowers now - had enjoyed a pretty decent dinner at Young Clut's house in town.

Young Andy, who had not yet lost his job on the town's police-force, tried (rather self-indulgently) to explain to his grandfather that Southern Maine Weaving had had nothing to do with any of the erstwhile Newall holdings for years, that the actual owner of the house in the Bend was The Bank of Southern Maine, and that the two companies had nothing whatever to do with each other. Old John told Andy he was a fool if he believed that; everyone knew, he said, that both the bank and the textile company were fronts for The Ma.s.sachusetts Wops, and that the only difference between them was a couple of words. They just hid the more obvious connections with great bunches of paperwork, Old Clut explained - The Legal, in other words.

Young Clut had the bad taste to laugh at that. Old Clut turned red, threw his napkin onto his plate, and got to his feet. Laugh, he said. You just go on. Why not? The only thing a drunk does better'n laugh at what he don't understand is cry over he don't know what. That made Andy mad, and he said something about Melissa being the reason why he drank, and John asked his grandson how long he was going to blame a dead wife for his boozing. Andy turned white when the old man said that, and told him to get out of his house, and John did, and he hasn't been back since. Nor does he want to. Harsh words aside, he can't bear to see Andy going to h.e.l.l on a handcart like he is.

Speculation or not, this much cannot be denied: the house on the ridge has been empty for eleven years now, no one has ever lived there for long, and The Bank of Southern Maine is usually the organization that ends up trying to sell it through one of the local real estate firms.

'The last people to buy it come from uppa state New York, didn't they?' Paul Corliss asks, and he speaks so rarely they all turn toward him. Even Gary does.

'Yessir,' Lenny says. 'They was a nice couple. The man was gonna paint the barn red and turn it into some sort of antique store, wasn't he?'

'Ayuh,' Old Clut says. 'Then their boy got the gun they kep - '

'People are so G.o.ddam careless - ' Harley puts in.

'Did he die?' Lenny asks. 'The boy?'

Silence greets the question. It seems no one knows. Then, at last - almost reluctantly - Gary speaks up. 'No,' he said. 'But it blinded him. They moved up to Auburn. Or maybe it was Leeds.'

'They was likely people,' Lenny said. 'I really thought they might make a go of it. But they was set on that house. Believed everybody was pullin their leg about how it was bad luck, on account of they was from Away.' He pauses meditatively. 'Maybe they think better now . . . wherever they are.'

There's silence as the old men think of the people from uppa state New York, or maybe of their own failing organs and sensory equipment. In the dimness behind the stove, oil gurgles. Somewhere beyond it, a shutter claps heavily back and forth in the restless autumn air.

'There's a new wing going up on it, all right,' Gary says. He speaks quietly but emphatically, as if one of the others has contradicted this statement. 'I saw it comin down the River Road. Most of the framing's already done. d.a.m.n thing looks like it wants to be a hundred feet long and thirty feet wide. Never noticed it before. Nice maple, looks like. Where does anybody get nice maple like that in this day n age?'

No one answers. No one knows.

At last, very tentatively, Paul Corliss says, 'Sure you're not thinking of another house, Gary? Could be you - '

'Could be s.h.i.t,' Gary says, just as quietly but even more forcefully. 'It's the Newall place, a new wing on the Newall place, already framed up, and if you still got doubts, just step outside and have a look for yourself.'

With that said, there is nothing left to say - they believe him. Neither Paul nor anyone else rushes outside to crane up at the new wing being added to the Newall house, however. They consider it a matter of some importance, and thus nothing to hurry over. More time pa.s.ses - Harley McKissick has reflected more than once that if time was pulpwood, they'd all be rich. Paul goes to the old water-cooled soft-drink chest and gets an Orange Crush. He gives Harley sixty cents and Harley rings up the purchase. When he slams the cash-drawer shut again, he realizes the atmosphere in the store has changed somehow. There are other matters to discuss.

Lenny Partridge coughs, winces, presses his hands lightly against his chest where the broken ribs have never really healed, and asks Gary when they are going to have services for Dana Roy.

'Tomorrow,' Gary says, 'down Gorham. That's where his wife is laid to rest.'

Lucy Roy died in 1968; Dana, who was until 1979 an electrician for U.S. Gypsum over in Gates Falls (these men routinely and with no prejudice refer to the company as U.S. Gyp Em), died of intestinal cancer two days before. He lived in Castle Rock all his life, and liked to tell people that he'd only been out of Maine three times in his eighty years, once to visit an aunt in Connecticut, once to see the Boston Red Sox play at Fenway Park ('And they lost, those b.u.ms,' he always added at this point), and once to attend an electricians' convention in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. 'd.a.m.n waste of time,' he always said of the convention. 'Nothin but drinkin and wimmin, and none of the wimmin even worth lookin at, let alone that other thing.' He was a crony of these men, and in his pa.s.sing they feel a queer mixture of sorrow and triumph.

'They took out four feet of his underpinnin,' Gary tells the other men. 'Didn't do no good. It was all through him.'

'He knew Joe Newall,' Lenny says suddenly. 'He was up there with his dad when his dad was puttin in Joe's lectricity - couldn't have been more'n six or eight, I'd judge. I remember he said Joe give him a sucker one time, but he pitched it out'n his daddy's truck on the ride home. Said it tasted sour and funny. Then, later, after they got all the mills runnin again - the late thirties, that would've been - he was in charge of the rewirin. You member that, Harley?'

'Yup.'

Now that the subject has come back to Joe Newall by way of Dana Roy, the men sit quietly, conning their brains for anecdotes Concerning either man. But when Old Clut finally speaks, he says a startling thing. ' 'It was Dana Roy's big brother, Will, who throwed that skunk at the side of the house that time. I'm almost sure 'twas.'

'Will?' Lenny raises his eyebrows. 'Will Roy was too steady to do a thing like that, I would have said.'

Gary Paulson says, very quietly: 'Ayuh, it was Will.'

They turn to look at him.

'And 'twas the wife that give Dana a sucker that day he came with his dad,' Gary says. 'Cora, not Joe. And Dana wa'ant no six or eight; the skunk was throwed around the time of the Crash, and Cora was dead by then. No, Dana maybe remembered some of it, but he couldn't have been no more than two. It was around 1916 that he got that sucker, because it was in ' 16 that Eddie Roy wired the house. He was never up there again. Frank - the middle boy, he's been dead ten or twelve year now - he would have been six or eight then, maybe. Frank seen what Cora done to the little one, that much I know, but not when he told Will. It don't matter. Finally Will decided to do somethin about it. By then the woman was dead, so he took it out on the house Joe built for her.'

'Never mind that part,' Harley says, fascinated. 'What'd she do to Dana? That's what I want to know.'

Gary speaks calmly, almost judiciously. 'What Frank told me one night when he'd had a few was that the woman give him the sucker with one hand and reached into his didies with the other. Right in front of the older boy.'

'She never!' Old Clut says, shocked in spite of himself.

Gary only looks at him with his yellowed, fading eyes and says nothing.

Silence again, except for the wind and the clapping shutter. The children on the bandstand have taken their firetruck and gone somewhere else with it and still the depthless afternoon continues on and on, the light that of an Andrew Wyeth painting, white and still and full of idiot meaning. The ground has given up its meager yield and waits uselessly for snow.

Gary would like to tell them of the sickroom at c.u.mberland Memorial Hospital where Dana Roy lay dying with black snot caked around his nostrils and smelling like a fish left out in the sun. He would like to tell them of the cool blue tiles and of nurses with their hair drawn back in nets, young things for the most part with pretty legs and firm young b.r.e.a.s.t.s and no idea that 1923 was a real year, as real as the pains which haunt the bones of old men. He feels he would like to sermonize on the evil of time and perhaps even the evil of certain places, and explain why Castle Rock is now like a dark tooth which is finally ready to fall out. Most of all he would like to inform them that Dana Roy sounded as if someone had stuffed his chest full of hay and he was trying to breathe through it, and that he looked as if he had already started to rot. Yet he can say none of these things because he doesn't know how, and so he only sucks back spit and says nothing.

'No one liked old Joe much,' Old Clut says . . . and then his face brightens suddenly. 'But by G.o.d, he grew on you!'

The others do not reply.

Nineteen days later, a week before the first snow comes to cover the useless earth, Gary Paulson has a surprisingly s.e.xual dream . . . except it is mostly a memory.

On August 14, 1923, while driving by the Newall house in his father's farm truck, thirteen-year-old Gary Martin Paulson happened to observe Cora Leonard Newall turning away from her mailbox at the end of the driveway. She had the newspaper in one hand. She saw Gary and reached down with her free hand to grasp the hem of her housedress. She did not smile. That tremendous moon of a face was pallid and empty as she raised the dress, revealing her s.e.x to him - it was the first time he had ever seen that mystery so avidly discussed by the boys he knew. And, still not smiling but only looking at him gravely, she pistoned her hips at his gaping, amazed face as he pa.s.sed her by. And as he pa.s.sed, his hand dropped into his lap and moments later he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed into his flannel pants.

It was his first o.r.g.a.s.m. In the years since, he has made love to a good many women, beginning with Sally Ouelette underneath the Tin Bridge back in '26, and every time he has neared the moment of o.r.g.a.s.m - every single one - he has seen Cora Leonard Newall: has seen her standing beside her mailbox under a hot gunmetal sky, has seen her lifting her dress to reveal an almost non-existent thatch of gingery hair beneath the creamy ground-swell of her belly, has seen the exclamatory slit with its red lips tinting toward what he knows would be the most deliriously delicate coral (Cora).

pink. Yet it is not the sight of her v.u.l.v.a below that somehow promiscuous swell of gut that has haunted him through all the years, so that every woman became Cora at the moment of release; or it is not just that. What always drove him mad with l.u.s.t when he remembered (and when he made love he was helpless not to) was the way she had pumped her hips at him . . . once, twice, three times. That, and the lack of expression on her face, a neutrality so deep it seemed more like idiocy, as if she were the sum of every very young man's limited s.e.xual understanding and desire - a tight and yearning darkness, no more than that, a limited Eden glowing Cora-pink.

His s.e.x-life has been both delineated and delimited by that experience - a seminal experience if ever there was one - but he has never mentioned it, although he has been tempted more than once when in his cups. He has h.o.a.rded it. And it is of this incident that he is dreaming, p.e.n.i.s perfectly erect for the first time in almost nine years, when a small blood vessel in his cerebellum ruptures, forming a clot which kills him quietly, considerately sparing him four weeks or four months of paralysis, the flexible tubes in the arms, the catheter, the noiseless nurses with their hair in nets and their fine high b.r.e.a.s.t.s. He dies in his sleep, p.e.n.i.s wilting, the dream fading like the afterimage of a television picture tube switched off in a dark room. His cronies would be puzzled, however, if any of them were there to hear the last two words he speaks - gasped out but still clear enough: 'The moon!'

The day after he is laid to rest in Homeland, a new cupola starts to go up on the new wing on the Newall house.

Chattery Teeth.

Looking into the display case was like looking through a dirty pane of gla.s.s into the middle third of his boyhood, those years from seven to fourteen when he had been fascinated by stuff like this. Hogan leaned closer, forgetting the rising whine of the wind outside and the gritty spick-s.p.a.ck sound of sand hitting the windows. The case was full of fabulous junk, most of it undoubtedly made in Taiwan and Korea, but there was no doubt at all about the pick of the litter. They were the largest Chattery Teeth he'd ever seen. They were also the only ones he'd ever seen with feet - big orange cartoon shoes with white spats. A real scream.

Hogan looked up at the fat woman behind the counter. She was wearing a tee-shirt that said NEVADA IS G.o.d'S COUNTRY on top (the words swelling and receding across her enormous b.r.e.a.s.t.s) and about an acre of jeans on the bottom. She was selling a pack of cigarettes to a pallid young man whose long blonde hair had been tied back in a ponytail with a sneaker shoelace. The young man, who had the face of an intelligent lab-rat, was paying in small change, counting it laboriously out of a grimy hand.

'Pardon me, ma'am?' Hogan asked.

She looked at him briefly, and then the back door banged open. A skinny man wearing a bandanna over his mouth and nose came in. The wind swirled desert grit around him in a cyclone and rattled the pin-up cutie on the Valvoline calendar thumb-tacked to the wall. The newcomer was pulling a handcart. Three wire-mesh cages were stacked on it. There was a tarantula in the one on top.

In the cages below it were a pair of rattlesnakes. They were coiling rapidly back and forth and shaking their rattles in agitation.

'Shut the d.a.m.n door, Scooter, was you born in a barn?' the woman behind the counter bawled.

He glanced at her briefly, eyes red and irritated from the blowing sand. 'Gimme a chance, woman! Can't you see I got my hands full here? Ain't you got eyes? Christ!' He reached over the dolly and slammed the door. The dancing sand fell dead to the floor and he pulled the dolly toward the storeroom at the back, still muttering.

'That the last of em?' the woman asked.

'All but Wolf.' He p.r.o.nounced it Woof. 'I'm gonna stick him in the lean-to back of the gas-pumps.'

'You ain't not!' the big woman retorted. 'Wolfs our star attraction, in case you forgot. You get him in here. Radio says this is gonna get worse before it gets better. A lot worse.'

'Just who do you think you're foolin?' The skinny man (her husband, Hogan supposed) stood looking at her with a kind of weary truculence, his hands on his hips. 'd.a.m.n thing ain't nothin but a Minnesota coydog, as anyone who took more'n half a look could plainly see.'

The wind gusted, moaning along the eaves of Scooter's Grocery Roadside Zoo, throwing sheaves of dry sand against the windows. It was getting worse, and Hogan could only hope he would be able to drive out of it. He had promised Lita and Jack he'd be home by seven, eight at the latest, and he was a man who liked to keep his promises.

'Just take care of him,' the big woman said, and turned irritably back to the rat-faced boy.

'Ma'am?' Hogan said again.

'Just a minute, hold your water,' Mrs. Scooter said. She spoke with the air of one who is all but drowning in impatient customers, although Hogan and the rat-faced boy were in fact the only ones present.

'You're a dime short, Sunny Jim,' she told the blonde kid after a quick glance at the coins on the counter-top.

The boy regarded her with wide, innocent eyes. 'I don't suppose you'd trust me for it?'

'I doubt if the Pope of Rome smokes Merit 100's, but if he did, I wouldn't trust him for it.'

The look of wide-eyed innocence disappeared. The rat-faced boy looked at her with an expression of sullen dislike for a moment (this expression looked much more at home on the kid's face, Hogan thought), and then slowly began to investigate his pockets again.

Just forget it and get out of here, Hogan thought. You'll never make it to LA by eight if you don't get moving, windstorm or no windstorm. This is one of those places that have only two speeds - slow and stop. You got your gas and paid for it, so just count yourself ahead of the game and get back on the road before the storm gets any worse.