They walked in silence for a bit. Little birds—peeps, Danny’s mother called them—ran in and out of the waves.
“Did it ever strike you funny, how I showed up when you needed me?” He looked down at Danny and smiled. “No. It didn’t. Why would it? You was just a child, but you’re a little older now. A lot older in some ways. Listen to me, Danny. The world has a way of keeping things in balance. I believe that. There’s a saying: When the pupil is ready, the teacher will appear. I was your teacher.”
“You were a lot more than that,” Danny said. He took Dick’s hand. “You were my friend. You saved us.”
Dick ignored this . . . or seemed to. “My gramma also had the shining—do you remember me telling you that?”
“Yeah. You said you and her could have long conversations without even opening your mouths.”
“That’s right. She taught me. And it was her great-gramma that taught her, way back in the slave days. Someday, Danny, it will be your turn to be the teacher. The pupil will come.”
“If Mrs. Massey doesn’t get me first,” Danny said morosely.
They came to a bench. Dick sat down. “I don’t dare go any further; I might not make it back. Sit beside me. I want to tell you a story.”
“I don’t want stories,” Danny said. “She’ll come back, don’t you get it? She’ll come back and come back and come back.”
“Shut your mouth and open your ears. Take some instruction.” Then Dick grinned, displaying his gleaming new dentures. “I think you’ll get the point. You’re far from stupid, honey.”
7
Dick’s mother’s mother—the one with the shining—lived in Clearwater. She was the White Gramma. Not because she was Caucasian, of course, but because she was good. His father’s father lived in Dunbrie, Mississippi, a rural community not far from Oxford. His wife had died long before Dick was born. For a man of color in that place and time, he was wealthy. He owned a funeral parlor. Dick and his parents visited four times a year, and young Dick Hallorann hated those visits. He was terrified of Andy Hallorann, and called him—only in his own mind, to speak it aloud would have earned him a smack across the chops—the Black Grampa.
“You know about kiddie-fiddlers?” Dick asked Danny. “Guys who want children for sex?”
“Sort of,” Danny said cautiously. Certainly he knew not to talk to strangers, and never to get into a car with one. Because they might do stuff to you.
“Well, old Andy was more than a kiddie-fiddler. He was a damn sadist, as well.”
“What’s that?”
“Someone who enjoys giving pain.”
Danny nodded in immediate understanding. “Like Frankie Listrone at school. He gives kids Indian burns and Dutch rubs. If he can’t make you cry, he stops. If he can, he never stops.”
“That’s bad, but this was worse.”
Dick lapsed into what would have looked like silence to a passerby, but the story went forward in a series of pictures and connecting phrases. Danny saw the Black Grampa, a tall man in a suit as black as he was, who wore a special kind of
( fedora)
hat on his head. He saw how there were always little buds of spittle at the corners of his mouth, and how his eyes were red-rimmed, like he was tired or had just gotten over crying. He saw how he would take Dick—younger than Danny was now, probably the same age he’d been that winter at the Overlook—on his lap. If they weren’t alone, he might only tickle. If they were, he’d put his hand between Dick’s legs and squeeze his balls until Dick thought he’d faint with the pain.
“Do you like that?” Grampa Andy would pant in his ear. He smelled of cigarettes and White Horse scotch. “Coss you do, every boy likes that. But even if you don’t, you dassn’t tell. If you do, I’ll hurt you. I’ll burn you.”
“Holy shit,” Danny said. “That’s gross.”