Salem's Lot

6

Roy McDougall pulled into the driveway of his trailer at half past eight, gunned the engine of his old Ford twice, and turned the engine off. The header pipe was just about shot, the blinkers didn’t work, and the sticker came up next month. Some car. Some life. The kid was howling in the house and Sandy was screaming at him. Great old marriage.

He got out of the car and fell over one of the flagstones he had been meaning to turn into a walk from the driveway to the steps since last summer.

‘Shitfire,’ he muttered, glowering balefully at the piece of flagging and rubbing his shin.

He was quite drunk. He had gotten off work at three and had been drinking down at Dell’s ever since with Hank Peters and Buddy Mayberry. Hank had been flush just lately, and seemed intent on drinking up the whole of his dividend, whatever it had been. He knew what Sandy thought of his buddies. Well, let her get tightassed. Begrudge a man a few beers on Saturday and Sunday even though he spent the whole week breaking his back on the goddamn picker-and getting weekend overtime to boot. Who was she to get so holy? She spent all day sitting in the house with nothing to do but take care of the place and shoot the shit with the mailman and see that the kid didn’t crawl into the oven. She hadn’t been watching him too close lately, anyway. Goddamn kid even fell off the changing table the other day.

Where were you?

I was holding him, Roy. He just wriggles so.

Wriggles. Yeah.

He went up to the door, still steaming. His leg hurt where he had bumped it. Not that he’d get any sympathy from her. So what was she doing while he was sweating his guts out for that prick of a foreman? Reading confession magazines and eating chocolate-covered cherries or watching the soap operas on the TV and eating chocolate-covered cherries or gabbing to her friends on the phone and eating chocolate-covered cherries. She was getting pimples on her ass as well as her face. Pretty soon you wouldn’t be able to tell the two of them apart.

He pushed open the door and walked in.

The scene struck him immediately and forcibly, cutting through the beer haze like the flick of a wet towel: the baby, naked and screaming, blood running from his nose; Sandy holding him, her sleeveless blouse smeared with blood, looking at him over her shoulder, her face contracting with surprise and fear; the diaper on the floor.

Randy, with the discolored marks around his eyes barely fading, raised his hands as if in supplication.

‘What’s going on around here?’ Roy asked slowly.

‘Nothing, Roy. He just-’

‘You hit him,’ he said tonelessly. ‘He wouldn’t hold still for the diapers so you smacked him.’

‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘He rolled over and bumped his nose, that’s all. That’s all.’

‘I ought to beat the shit out of you,’ he said.

‘Roy, he just bumped his nose-’

His shoulders slumped. ‘What’s for dinner?’

‘Hamburgs. They’re burnt,’ she said petulantly, and pulled the bottom of her blouse out of her Wranglers to wipe under Randy’s nose. Roy could see the roll of fat she was getting. She’d never bounced back after the baby. Didn’t care.

‘Shut him up.’

‘He isn’t-’

‘Shut him up!’ Roy yelled, and Randy, who had actually been quieting down to snuffles, began to scream again.

‘I’ll give him a bottle,’ Sandy said, getting up.

‘And get my dinner.’ He started to take off his denim jacket. ‘Christ, isn’t this place a mess. What do you do all day, beat off?’

‘Roy!’ she said, sounding shocked. Then she giggled. Her insane burst of anger at the baby who would not hold still on his diapers so she could pin them began to be far away, hazy. It might have happened on one of her afternoon stories, or ‘Medical Center’.

‘Get my dinner and then pick this frigging place up.’

‘All right. All right, sure.’ She got a bottle out of the refrigerator and put Randy down in the playpen with it. He began to suck it apathetically, his eyes moving from mother to father in small, trapped circles.

‘Roy?’

‘Hmmm? What?’

‘It’s all over.’

‘What is?’

‘You know what. Do you want to? Tonight?’

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Sure.’ And thought again: isn’t this some life. Isn’t this just some life.