When they turned to look at him--big, buggy eyes in pale faces--he waved and started walking toward them. As he did, the sun came out again, this time with authority.
The little boy started forward. The girl jerked him back. At first Pete thought she was afraid of him, then realized it was the car she was afraid of.
He made a circling gesture with his hand. "Walk around it! Walk around and come over here!"
They slipped through the guardrails on the left side of the ramp, giving the station wagon the widest berth possible, then cut across the parking lot. When they got to Pete, the little girl let go of her brother, sat down, and put her face in her hands. She had braids her mom had probably fixed for her. Looking at them and knowing the kid's mother would never fix them for her again made Pete feel horrible.
The little boy looked up solemnly. "It ate Mommy n Daddy. It ate the horse lady and Trooper Jimmy, too. It's going to eat everyone, I guess. It's going to eat the world."
If Pete Simmons had been twenty, he might have asked a lot of bullshit questions that didn't matter. Because he was only half that age, and able to accept what he had just seen, he asked something simpler and more pertinent. "Hey little girl. Are more police coming? Is that why you were yelling 'Thirty'?"
She dropped her hands and looked up at him. Her eyes were raw and red. "Yes, but Blakie's right. It will eat them, too. I told Trooper Jimmy, but he didn't believe me."
Pete believed her, because he had seen. But she was right. The police wouldn't believe. They would eventually, they'd have to, but maybe not before the monster car ate a bunch more of them.
"I think it's from space," he said. "Like on Doctor Who."
"Mommy n Daddy won't let us watch that," the little boy told him. "They say it's too scary. But this is scarier."
"It's alive." Pete spoke more to himself than to them.
"Duh," Rachel said, and gave a long, miserable sniffle.
The sun ducked briefly behind one of the unraveling clouds. When it came out again, an idea came with it. Pete had been hoping to show Normie Therriault and the rest of the Rip-Ass Raiders something that would amaze them enough to let him be part of their gang. Then George had given him a big-brother reality check: They've all seen that baby trick a thousand times.
Maybe so, but maybe that thing down there hadn't seen it a thousand times. Or even once. Maybe they didn't have magnifying glasses where it came from. Or sun, for that matter. He remembered a Doctor Who episode about a planet where it was dark all the time.
He could hear a siren in the distance. A cop was coming. A cop who wouldn't believe anything little kids said, because as far as grown-ups were concerned, little kids were all full of shit.
"You guys stay here. I'm going to try something."
"No!" The little girl grasped his wrist with fingers that felt like claws. "It'll eat you too!"
"I don't think it can move around," Pete told her, disengaging his hand. She had left a couple of bleeding scratches, but he wasn't mad and he didn't blame her. He probably would have done the same, if it had been his parents. "I think it's stuck in one place."
"It can reach," she said. "It can reach with its tires. They melt."
"I'll watch out," Pete said, "but I have to try this. Because you're right. Those cops will come, and it will eat them too. Stay put."
He walked toward the station wagon. When he was close (but not too close), he unzipped the saddlebag. I have to try this, he had told the kids, but the truth was a little balder: he wanted to try this. It would be like a science experiment. That would probably sound bizarre if he told someone, but he didn't have to tell. He just had to do it. Very . . . very . . . carefully.
He was sweating. With the sun out, the day had turned warm, but that wasn't the only reason, and he knew it. He looked up, squinting at the brightness. It made his HANGOVER ache, but so what. Don't you go back behind a cloud. Don't you dare. I need you.
He took his Richforth magnifying glass out of the saddlebag, and bent to put the saddlebag on the pavement. The joints of his knees cracked, and the station wagon's door swung open a few inches.
It knows I'm here. I don't know if it can see me, but it heard me just now. And maybe it smells me.
He took another step. Now he was close enough to touch the side of the station wagon. If he was fool enough to do so, that was.
"Watch out!" the little girl called. She and her brother were both standing now, their arms around each other. "Watch out for it!"
Carefully--like a kid reaching into a cage with a lion inside--Pete extended the magnifying glass. A circle of light appeared on the side of the station wagon, but it was too big. Too soft. He moved the glass closer.
"The tire!" the little boy screamed. "Watch out for the TII-YIII-YII-RE!"
Pete looked down and saw one of the tires melting. A gray tentacle was oozing across the pavement toward his sneaker. He couldn't back away without giving up his experiment, so he raised his foot and stood like a stork. The tentacle of gray goo immediately changed direction and headed for his other foot.
Not much time.
He moved the magnifying glass closer. The circle of light shrank to a brilliant white dot. For a moment nothing happened. Then tendrils of smoke began to drift up. The muddy white surface beneath the dot turned black.
From inside the station wagon there came an inhuman growling sound. Pete had to fight every instinct in his brain and body to keep from running. His lips parted, revealing teeth locked together in a desperate snarl. He held the Richforth steady, counting off seconds in his head. He'd reached seven when the growl rose to a glassy shriek that threatened to split his head. Behind him, Rachel and Blake had let go of each other so they could cover their ears.
At the foot of the rest area entrance ramp, Al Andrews brought Unit 12 to a sliding stop. He got out, wincing at that terrible shrieking sound. It was like an air-raid siren broadcast through a heavy metal band's amplifiers, he would say later. He saw a kid holding something out so it almost touched the surface of a muddy old Ford or Chevy station wagon. The boy was wincing in pain, determination, or both.
The smoking black spot on the flank of the station wagon began to spread. The white smoke curling up from it began to thicken. It turned gray, then black. What happened next happened fast. Pete saw tiny blue flames pop into being around the black spot. They spread, seeming to dance above the surface of the car-thing. It was the way charcoal briquettes looked in their backyard barbecue after their father doused them with lighter fluid and then tossed in a match.
The gooey gray tentacle, which had almost reached the sneakered foot still on the pavement, snapped back. The car yanked in upon itself again, but this time the spreading blue flames stood out all around it in a corona. It pulled in tighter and still tighter, becoming a fiery ball. Then, as Pete and the Lussier kids and Trooper Andrews watched, it shot up into the blue spring sky. For a moment longer it was there, glowing like a cinder, and then it was gone. Pete found himself thinking of the cold darkness above the envelope of the earth's atmosphere--those endless leagues where anything might live and lurk.
I didn't kill it, I just drove it away. It had to go so it could put itself out, like a burning stick in a bucket of water.
Trooper Andrews was staring up into the sky, dumbfounded. One of his brain's few working circuits was wondering how he was supposed to write up a report on what he had just seen.
There were more approaching sirens in the distance.
Pete walked back to the two little kids with his saddlebag in one hand and his Richforth magnifying glass in the other. He sort of wished George and Normie were here, but so what if they weren't? He'd had quite an afternoon for himself without those guys, and he didn't care if he got grounded or not. This made jumping bikes off the edge of a stupid sandpit look like Sesame Street.
You know what? I fuckin rock.
He might have laughed if the little kids hadn't been looking at him. They had just seen their parents eaten by some k
ind of alien--eaten alive--and showing happiness would be totally wrong.
The little boy held out his chubby arms, and Pete picked him up. He didn't laugh when the kid kissed his cheek, but he smiled. "Fanks," Blakie said. "You're a good kid."
Pete set him down. The little girl also kissed him, which was sort of nice, although it would have been nicer if she'd been a babe.
The trooper was running toward them now, and that made Pete think of something. He bent to the little girl and huffed into her face.
"Do you smell anything?"
Rachel Lussier looked at him for a moment, her expression far wiser than her years. "You'll be okay," she said, and actually smiled. Not a big one, but yes--a smile. "Just don't breathe on him. And maybe get some mints or something before you go home."
"I was thinking Teaberry gum," Pete said.
"Yeah," Rachel said. "That'll work."
For Nye Willden and Doug Allen, who bought my first stories.
My mother had a saying for every occasion. ("And Steve remembers them all," I can hear my wife, Tabitha, say, with an accompanying roll of her eyes.)
One of her favorites was "Milk always takes the flavor of what it sits next to in the icebox." I don't know if that's true about milk, but it's certainly true when it comes to the stylistic development of young writers. When I was a young man, I wrote like H. P. Lovecraft when I was reading Lovecraft, and like Ross Macdonald when I was reading the adventures of PI Lew Archer.
Stylistic copying eventually wanes. Little by little, writers develop their own styles, each as unique as a fingerprint. Traces of the writers one reads in one's formative years remain, but the rhythm of each writer's thoughts--an expression of his or her very brainwaves, I think--eventually becomes dominant. In the end, no one sounds like Elmore Leonard but Leonard, and no one sounds like Mark Twain but Twain. Yet every now and then stylistic copying recurs, always when the writer encounters some new and wonderful mode of expression that shows him a new way of seeing and saying. 'Salem's Lot was written under the influence of James Dickey's poetry, and if Rose Madder sounds in places as if it were written by Cormac McCarthy, it's because while I was writing that book, I was reading everything by McCarthy I could get my hands on.
In 2009, an editor at The New York Times Book Review asked if I would do a double review of Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life, by Carol Sklenicka, and Carver's own collected stories, as published by Library of America. I agreed, mostly so I could explore some new territory. Although I am an omnivorous reader, I had somehow missed Carver. A large blind spot for a writer who came of literary age at roughly the same time Carver did, you might say, and you would be right. All I can say in my own defense is quot libros, quam breve tempus--so many books, so little time (and yes, I have the tee-shirt).
In any case, I was stunned by the clarity of Carver's style, and by the beautiful tension of his prose line. Everything is on the surface, but that surface is so clear that the reader can see a living universe just beneath. I loved those stories, and I loved the American losers Carver wrote about with such knowledge and tenderness. Yes, the man was a drunk, but he had a sure touch and a great heart.
I wrote "Premium Harmony" shortly after reading more than two dozen Carver stories, and it should come as no surprise that it has the feel of a Carver story. If I had written it at twenty, I think it would have been no more than a blurred copy of a much better writer. Because it was written at sixty-two, my own style bleeds through, for better or worse. Like many great American writers (Philip Roth and Jonathan Franzen come to mind), Carver seemed to have little sense of humor. I, on the other hand, see the humor in almost everything. The humor here is black, but in my opinion, that's often the best kind. Because--dig it--when it comes to death, what can you do but laugh?
Premium Harmony
They've been married for ten years and for a long time everything was okay--swell--but now they argue. Now they argue quite a lot. It's really all the same argument. It has circularity. It is, Ray sometimes thinks, like a dog track. When they argue they're like greyhounds chasing the mechanical rabbit. You go past the same scenery time after time, but you don't see the landscape. You see the rabbit.
He thinks it might be different if they'd had kids, but she couldn't have kids. They finally got tested, and that's what the doctor said. It was her problem. Something in her. A year or so after that, he bought her a dog, a Jack Russell she named Biznezz. Mary would spell it for people who asked. She wants everyone to get the joke. She loves that dog, but now they argue anyway.
They're going to Walmart for grass seed. They've decided to sell the house--they can't afford to keep it--but Mary says they won't get far until they do something about the plumbing and make the lawn nice. She says those bald patches make it look shanty Irish. It's been a hot summer with no rain to speak of. Ray tells her grass seed won't grow the lawn without rain no matter how good the grass seed is. He says they should wait.
"Then another year goes by and we're still there," she says. "We can't wait another year, Ray. We'll be bankrupts."
When she talks, Biz looks at her from his place in the backseat. Sometimes he looks at Ray when Ray talks, but not always. Mostly he looks at Mary.
"What do you think?" he says. "It's going to rain so you don't have to worry about going bankrupt?"
"We're in it together, unless you forgot," she says. They're driving through Castle Rock now. It's pretty dead. What Ray calls "the economy" has disappeared from this part of Maine. The Walmart is on the other side of town, near the high school where Ray is a janitor. The Walmart has its own stoplight. People joke about it.
"Penny wise and pound foolish," he says. "You ever hear that one?"
"A million times, from you."
He grunts. He can see the dog in the rearview mirror, watching her. Sometimes he hates the way Biz does that. It comes to him that neither of them knows what they are talking about. It is a depressing thought.
"And pull in at the Quik-Pik," she says. "I want to get a kickball for Tallie's birthday." Tallie is her brother's little girl. Ray supposes that makes her his niece, although he's not sure that's right, since all the blood is on Mary's side.
"They have balls at Walmart," Ray says, "and everything's cheaper at Wally World."
"The ones at Quik-Pik are purple. Purple is her favorite color. I can't be sure there'll be purple at Walmart."
"If there aren't, we'll stop at the Quik-Pik on the way back." He feels like a great weight is pressing down on his head. She'll get her way. She always does on things like this. Marriage is like a football game and he's quarterbacking the underdog team. He has to pick his spots. Make short passes.
"It'll be on the wrong side coming back," she says--as if they are caught in a torrent of city traffic instead of rolling through an almost deserted little town where most of the stores are for sale. "I'll just dash in and get the ball and dash right back out."
At two hundred pounds, Ray thinks, your dashing days are over, honey.
"They're only ninety-nine cents," she says. "Don't be such a pinchpenny."
Don't be so pound foolish, he thinks, but what he says is, "Buy me a pack of smokes while you're in there. I'm out."
"If you quit, we'd have an extra forty dollars a week."
He saves up and pays a friend in South Carolina to ship him a dozen cartons at a time. They're twenty dollars a carton cheaper in South Carolina. That's a lot of money, even in this day and age. It's not like he doesn't try to economize. He has told her this before and will again, but what's the point? In one ear, out the other. Nothing to slow down what he says in the middle.
"I used to smoke two packs a day," he says. "Now I smoke less than half a pack." Actually, most days he smokes more. She knows it, and Ray knows she knows it. That's marriage after awhile. That weight on his head gets a little heavier. Also, he can see Biz still looking at her. He feeds the damn thing, and he makes the money that pays for the food, but it's her she's looking at. And Jack Russells are suppo
sed to be smart.
He turns in to the Quik-Pik.
"You ought to buy them on Indian Island if you've got to have them," she says.
"They haven't sold tax-free smokes on the rez for ten years," he says. "I've told you that, too. You don't listen." He pulls past the gas pumps and parks beside the store. There's no shade. The sun is directly overhead. The car's air conditioner only works a little. They are both sweating. In the backseat, Biz is panting. It makes him look like he's grinning.
"Well, you ought to quit," Mary says.
"And you ought to quit those Little Debbies," he says. He doesn't want to say this, he knows how sensitive she is about her weight, but out it comes. He can't hold it back. It's a mystery.
"I ain't had one in a year," she says.
"Mary, the box is on the top shelf. A twenty-four-pack. Behind the flour."
"Were you snooping?" she cries. A flush is rising in her cheeks, and he sees how she looked when she was still beautiful. Good-looking, anyway. Everybody said she was good-looking, even his mother, who didn't like her otherwise.
"I was looking for the bottle opener," he says. "I had a bottle of cream soda. The kind with the old-fashioned cap."
"Looking for a bottle opener on the top shelf of the goddam cupboard!"
"Go in and get the ball," he says. "And get me some smokes. Be a sport."
"Can't you wait until we get home? Can't you even wait that long?"
"You can get the cheap ones," he says. "That off-brand. Premium Harmony, they're called." They taste like old stale cowshit, but all right. If she'll only shut up about it. It's too hot to argue.
"Where are you going to smoke, anyway? In the car, I suppose, so I have to breathe it."
"I'll open the window, I always do."
"I'll get the ball. Then I'll come back. If you feel you have to spend four dollars and fifty cents to poison your lungs, you can go in. I'll sit with the baby."
Ray hates it when she calls Biz the baby. He's a dog, and he may be as bright as Mary likes to boast, but he still shits outside and licks where his balls used to be.
"Buy a few Twinkies while you're at it," he tells her. "Or maybe they're having a special on Ho Hos."