Jake thought, The bean supper will be starting in an hour or so. They 'II already be putting down the tablecloths and setting the places.
Taped to the right of the door was a more startling message to the public: ist Lovell-Stoneham Church of the Walk-Ins Will YOU join us for Worship?
Sunday services: io AM
Thursday services: y PM
EVERY WEDNESDAY IS YOUTH NIGHT!!! 7-9 PM!
Games! Music! Scripture!
NEWS OF WALK-INS!
Hey, Teens!
"Be There or Be Square!!!".
We Seek the Doorway to Heaven-Will You Seek With Us?"
Take found himself thinking of Harrigan, the street-preacher on the corner of Second Avenue and Forty-sixth Street, and wondering to which of these two churches he might have been attracted. His head might have told him First Congo, but his heart-
"Hurry, Jake," Roland repeated, and there was a jingle as the gunslinger opened the door. Good smells wafted out, reminding Jake (as they had reminded Eddie) of Took's on the Calla high street: coffee and peppermint candy, tobacco and salami, olive oil, the salty tang of brine, sugar and spice and most things nice.
He followed Roland into the store, aware that he had brought at least two things with him, after all. The Coyote machine-pistol was stuffed into the waistband of his jeans, and the bag of Orizas was still slung over his shoulder, hanging on his left side so that the half a dozen plates remaining inside would be within easy reach of his right hand.
TWO
Wendell "Chip" McAvoy was at the deli counter, weighing up a pretty sizable order of sliced honey-cured turkey for Mrs. Tassenbaum, and until the bell over the door rang, once more turning Chip's life upside down (You 've turned turtle, the oldtimers used to say when your car rolled in the ditch), they had been discussing the growing presence of Jet Skis on Keywadin Pond...
or rather Mrs. Tassenbaum had been discussing it.
Chip thought Mrs. T. was a more or less typical summer visitor: rich as Croesus (or at least her husband, who had one of those new dot-com businesses, was), gabby as a parrot loaded on whiskey, and as crazy as Howard Hughes on a morphine toot.
She could afford a cabin cruiser (and two dozen Jet Skis to pull it, if she fancied), but she came down to the market on this end of the lake in a battered old rowboat, tying up right about where John Cullum used to tie his up, until That Day (as the years had refined his story to ever greater purity, burnishing it like an oft-polished piece of teak furniture, Chip had come more and more to convey its capital-letter status with his voice, speaking of That Day in the same reverential tones the Reverend Conveigh used when speaking of Our Lord). La Tassenbaum was talky, meddlesome, good-looking (kinda... he supposed...
if you didn't mind the makeup and the hairspray), loaded with green, and a Republican. Under the circumstances, Chip McAvoy felt perfectlyjustified in sneaking his thumb onto the corner of the scale... a trick he had learned from his father, who had told him you practically had a duty to rook folks from away if they could afford it, but you must never rook folks from the home place, not even if they were as rich as that writer, King, from over in Lovell. Why? Because word got around, and the next thing you knew, out-of-town custom was all a man had to get by on, and try doing that in the month of February when the snowbanks on the sides of Route 7 were nine feet high. This wasn't February, however, and Mrs. Tassenbaum-a Daughter of Abraham if he had ever seen one-was not from these parts.
No, Mrs. Tassenbaum and her rich-as-Croesus dot-com husband would be gone back to Jew York as soon as they saw the first colored leaf fall. Which was why he felt perfecdy comfortable in turning her six-dollar order of turkey into seven dollars and eighty cents with the ball of his thumb on the scale. Nor did it hurt to agree with her when she switched topics and started talking about what a terrible man that Bill Clinton was, although in fact Chip had voted twice for Bubba and would have voted for him a third time, had the Constitution allowed him to run for another term. Bubba was smart, he was good at persuading the ragheads to do what he wanted, he hadn't entirely forgotten the working man, and by the Lord Harry he got more pu**y than a toilet seat.
"And now Gore expects to just... ride in on his coattails!"
Mrs. Tassenbaum said, digging for her checkbook (the turkey on the scale magically gained another two ounces, and there Chip felt it prudent to lock it in). "Claims he invented the Internet! Huh! I know better! In fact, I know the man who really did invent the Internet!" She looked up (Chip's thumb now nowhere near the scales, he had an instinct about such things, damned if he didn't) and gave Chip a roguish litde smile. She lowered her voice into its confidential just-we-two register. "I ought to, I've been sleeping in the same bed with him for almost twenty years!"