Roland's stomach rumbled again. He reached over the counter (the shopkeeper cringed away from him as if he suspected Roland of carrying the red plague), grabbed the woman's pile of turkey, and folded three slices into his mouth.
The rest he handed to Jake, who ate two slices and then looked down at Oy, who was looking up at the meat with great interest.
"I'll give you your share when we get in the truck," Jake promised.
"Ruck," Oy said; then, with much greater emphasis:
"Share!"
"Holy jumping Jesus Christ," the shopkeeper said.
FOUR
The Yankee shopkeeper's accent might have been cute, but his truck wasn't. It was a standard shift, for one thing. Irene Tassenbaum of Manhattan hadn't driven a standard since she had been Irene Cantora of Staten Island. It was also a stick shift, and she had never driven one of those.
Jake was sitting beside her with his feet placed around said stick and Oy (still chewing turkey) on his lap. Roland swung into the passenger seat, trying not to snarl at the pain in his leg.
Irene forgot to depress the clutch when she keyed the ignition.
The I-H lurched forward, then stalled. Luckily it had been rolling the roads of western Maine since the mid-sixties and it was the sedate jump of an elderly mare rather than the spirited buck of a colt; otherwise Chip McAvoy would once more have lost at least one of his plate-glass windows. Oy scrabbled for balance on Jake's lap and sprayed out a mouthful of turkey along with a word he had learned from Eddie.
Irene stared at the bumbler with wide, startled eyes. "Did that creature just say f**k, young man?"
"Never mind what he said," Jake replied. His voice was shaking. The hands of the Boar's Head clock in the window now stood at five to four. Like Roland, the boy had never had a sense of time as a thing so little in their control. "Use the clutch and get us out of here."
Luckily, the shifting pattern had been embossed on the head of the stick shift and was still faintly visible. Mrs. Tassenbaum pushed in the clutch with a sneakered foot, ground the gears hellishly, and finally found Reverse. The truck backed out onto Route 7 in a series of jerks, then stalled halfway across the white line. She turned the ignition key, realizing she'd once more forgotten the clutch just a little too late to prevent another series of those spastic leaps. Roland and Jake were now bracing their hands against the dusty metal dashboard, where a faded sticker proclaimed AMERICA! LOVE IT OR LEAVE! in red white and blue. This series of jerks was actually a good thing, for at that moment a truck loaded with logs-it was impossible for Roland not to think of the one that had crashed the last time they'd been here-crested the rise to the north of the store. Had the pickup not jerked its way back into the General Store's parking lot (bashing the fender of a parked car as it came to a stop),
they would have been centerpunched. And very likely killed.
The logging truck swerved, horn blaring, rear wheels spuming up dust.
The creature in the boy's lap-it looked to Mrs. Tassenbaum like some weird mixture of dog and raccoon-barked again.
Fuck. She was almost sure of it.
The storekeeper and the other patrons were lined up on the other side of the glass, and she suddenly knew what a fish in an aquarium must feel like.
"Lady, can you drive this thing or not?" the boy yelled. He had some sort of bag over his shoulder. It reminded her of a newsboy's bag, only it was leather instead of canvas and there appeared to be plates inside.
"I can drive it, young man, don't you worry." She was terrified, and yet at the same time... was she enjoying this? She almost thought she was. For the last eighteen years she'd been little more than the great David Tassenbaum's ornament, a supporting character in his increasingly famous life, the lady who said "Try one of these" as she passed around hors d'oeuvres at parties. Now, suddenly, she was at the center of something, and she had an idea it was something very important indeed.
"Take a deep breath," said the man with the hard sunburned face. His brilliant blue eyes fastened upon hers, and when they did it was hard to think of anything else. Also, the sensation was pleasant. If this is hypnosis, she thought, they ought to teach it in the public schools. "Hold it, then let it out. And then drive us, for your father's sake."
She pulled in a deep breath as instructed, and suddenly the day seemed brighter-nearly brilliant. And she could hear faint singing voices. Lovely voices. Was the truck's radio on, tuned to some opera program? No time to check. But it was nice, whatever it was. As calming as the deep breath.