Carling, soon to go on shift, had a grease-spotted McDonald’s bag on his lap and was munching a Big Mac. The two men locked eyes for a moment. Neither said hello. Dan thought Fred Carling was a lazy bastard with a sadistic streak and Carling thought Dan was a holier-than-thou meddler, so that balanced. As long as they stayed out of each other’s way, all would be well and all would be well and all manner of things would be well.
Dan got the coffees (Billy’s with four sugars), then crossed to the common, which was busy in the golden early-evening light. Frisbees soared. Mothers and dads pushed toddlers on swings or caught them as they flew off the slides. A game was in progress on the softball field, kids from the Frazier YMCA against a team with ANNISTON REC DEPARTMENT on their orange shirts. He spied Billy in the train station, standing on a stool and polishing the Riv’s chrome. It all looked good. It looked like home.
If it isn’t, Dan thought, it’s as close as I’m ever going to get. All I need now is a wife named Sally, a kid named Pete, and a dog named Rover.
He strolled up the Teenytown version of Cranmore Avenue and into the shade of Teenytown Station. “Hey Billy, I brought you some of that coffee-flavored sugar you like.”
At the sound of his voice, the first person to offer Dan a friendly word in the town of Frazier turned around. “Why, ain’t you the neighborly one. I was just thinking I could use—oh shitsky, there it goes.”
The cardboard tray had dropped from Danny’s hands. He felt warmth as hot coffee splattered his tennis shoes, but it seemed faraway, unimportant.
There were flies crawling on Billy Freeman’s face.
7
Billy didn’t want to go see Casey Kingsley the following morning, didn’t want to take the day off, and certainly didn’t want to go see no doctor. He kept telling Dan he felt fine, in the pink, absolutely tip-top. He’d even missed the summer cold that usually hit him in June or July.
Dan, however, had lain sleepless most of the previous night, and wouldn’t take no for an answer. He might have if he’d been convinced it was too late, but he didn’t think it was. He had seen the flies before, and had learned to gauge their meaning. A swarm of them—enough to obscure the person’s features behind a veil of nasty, jostling bodies—and you knew there was no hope. A dozen or so meant something might be done. Only a few, and there was time. There had only been three or four on Billy’s face.
He never saw any at all on the faces of the terminal patients in the hospice.
Dan remembered visiting his mother nine months before her death, on a day when she had also claimed to feel fine, in the pink, absolutely tickety-boo. What are you looking at, Danny? Wendy Torrance had asked. Have I got a smudge? She had swiped comically at the tip of her nose, her fingers passing right through the hundreds of deathflies that were covering her from chin to hairline, like a caul.
8
Casey was used to mediating. Fond of irony, he liked to tell people it was why he made that enormous six-figure annual salary.
First he listened to Dan. Then he listened to Billy’s protests about how there was no way he could leave, not at the height of the season with people already lining up to ride the Riv on its 8 a.m. run. Besides, no doctor would see him on such short notice. It was the height of the season for them, too.
“When’s the last time you had a checkup?” Casey asked once Billy finally ran down. Dan and Billy were standing in front of his desk. Casey was rocked back in his office chair, head resting in its accustomed place just below the cross on the wall, fingers laced together across his belly.
Billy looked defensive. “I guess back in oh-six. But I was fine then, Case. Doc said my blood pressure was ten points lower’n his.”
Casey’s eyes shifted to Dan. They held speculation and curiosity but no disbelief. AA members mostly kept their lips zipped during their various interactions with the wider world, but inside the groups, people talked—and sometimes gossiped—quite freely. Casey therefore knew that Dan Torrance’s talent for helping terminal patients die easily was not his only talent. According to the grapevine, Dan T. had certain helpful insights from time to time. The kind that can’t exactly be explained.
“You’re tight with Johnny Dalton, aren’t you?” he asked Dan now. “The pediatrician?”
“Yes. I see him most Thursday nights, in North Conway.”
“Got his number?”
“As a matter of fact, I do.” Dan had a whole list of AA contact numbers in the back of the little notebook Casey had given him, which he still carried.
“Call him. Tell him it’s important this yobbo here sees someone right away. Don’t suppose you know what kind of a doctor it is he needs, do you? Sure as hell isn’t a pediatrician at his age.”
“Casey—” Billy began.
“Hush,” Casey said, and returned his attention to Dan. “I think you do know, by God. Is it his lungs? That seems the most likely, the way he smokes.”
Dan decided he had come too far to turn back now. He sighed and said, “No, I think it’s something in his guts.”
“Except for a little indigestion, my guts are—”