"Yes," he said, reflecting that he had believed the same thing-hell, Peter had probably believed the same thing on the night Jesus had been taken into custody.
Sleeping on sentry duty. "Yes, you can. Rachel, if you doze off behind the wheel of that damn rent-a-car and go off the road and get yourself killed, what's going to happen to Louis then? And Ellie?"
"Tell me what's going on! If you tell me that, Jud, maybe I'll take your advice.
But I have to know!"
"When you get to Ludlow, I want you to come here," Jud said. "Not over to your house. Come here first. I'll tell you everything I know, Rachel. And I am watching for Louis."
"Tell me," she said.
"No, ma'am. Not over the phone. I won't. Rachel, I can't. You go on now. Drive up to Portland and lay over."
There was a long, considering pause.
"All right," she said at last. "Maybe you're right. Jud, tell me one thing. Tell me how bad it is."
"I can handle it," Jud said calmly. "Things have got as bad as they're going to get."
Outside the headlights of a car appeared, moving slowly. Jud hall-stood, watching it, and then sat down again when it accelerated past the Creed house and out of sight.
"All right," she said. "I guess. The rest of this drive has seemed like a stone on my head."
"Let the stone roll off, my dear," Jud said. "Please. Save yourself for tomorrow. Things here will be all right."
"You promise you'll tell me the whole story?"
"Yes. We'll have us a beer, and I'll tell you the whole thing."
"Goodbye, then," Rachel said, "for now."
"For now," Jud agreed. "I'll see you tomorrow, Rachel."
Before she could say anything else, Jud hung up the telephone.
He thought there were caffeine pills in the medicine cabinet, but he could not find them. He put the rest of the beer back in the refrigerator-not without regret-and settled for a cup of black coffee. He took it back to the bow window and sat down again, sipping and watching.
The coffee-and the conversation with Rachel-kept him awake and alert for three quarters of an hour, but then he began to nod once more.
No sleeping on sentry duty, old man. You let it get hold of you; you bought something, and now you have to pay for it. So no sleeping on sentry duty.
He lit a fresh cigarette, drew deep, and coughed an old man's rasping cough. He put the cigarette on the groove of the ashtray and rubbed his eyes with both hands. Outside a ten-wheeler blasted by, running lights glaring, cutting through the windy, uneasy night.
He caught himself dozing off again, snapped awake, and abruptly slapped himself across the face, forehand and backhand, causing his ears to ring. Now terror awakened in his heart, a stealthy visitor who had broken into that secret place.
It's puttin me to sleep... hypnotizin me... somethin. It doesn't want me awake. Because he'll be comin back pretty soon. Yeah, I feel that. And it wants me out of the way.
"No," he said grimly. "No way at all. You hear me? I'm puttin a stop to this.
This has gone far enough."
The wind whined around the eaves, and the trees on the other side of the road shook their leaves in hypnotic patterns. His mind went back to that night around the Defiant stove in the coupling shed, which had stood right where the Evarts Furniture Mart stood in Brewer now. They had talked the night away, he and George and Renй Michaud, and now he was the only one left-Renй crushed between two boxcars on a stormy night in March of 1939, George Chapin dead of a heart attack just last year. Of so many, he was the only one left, and the old get stupid. Sometimes the stupidity masquerades as kindness, and sometimes it masquerades as pride-a need to tell old secrets, to pass things on, to pour from the old glass to the new one, to.
So dis Jew peddler come in and he say "I got sumpin you never seen before. These pos'cards, dey jus look like wimmin in bathin suits until you rub dem wit a wet cloth, and den-"
Jud's head nodded. His chin settled slowly, gently, against his chest.
"-dey's as nakid as the day dey was born! But when dey dry, the clo'es, dey come back on! And dat ain't all! I got-"
Renй telling this story in the coupling shed, leaning forward, smiling, and Jud holds the bottle-he feels the bottle and his hand closes around it on thin air.
In the ashtray, the cigarette ash on the end of the cigarette grew longer. At last it tipped forward into the ashtray and burned out, its shape recalled in the neat roll of ash like a rune.
Jud slept.
And when the taillights flashed outside and Louis turned the Honda Civic into his driveway some forty minutes later and drove it into the garage, Jud did not hear, stir, or awaken, any more than Peter awoke when the Roman soldiers came to take a tramp named Jesus into their custody.
53
Louis found a fresh dispenser of strapping tape in one of the kitchen drawers, and there was a coil of rope in the corner of the garage near last winter's snow tires. He used the tape to bind the pick and shovel together in a single neat bundle and the rope to fashion a rough sling.