The first time it rang, Jack felt no fear at all - and it turned out to be only a solicitor for the United Fund.
Two hours later, as Jack was bagging up the last of the previous night's bottles, the telephone began to shrill again. This time his head snapped up like an animal which scents fire in a dry forest . . . except it wasn't fire he sensed, but ice. He turned toward the telephone, which was only four feet from where he was working, hearing the tendons in his neck creak. He thought he must see the pay phone caked with ice, ice that was sweating through the phone's black plastic case, extruding from the holes in the earpiece and the mouthpiece in lines of blue ice as thin as pencil-leads, hanging from the rotary dial and the coin return in icicle beards.
But it was just the phone, and all the coldness and death was on the inside.
He stared at it, hypnotized.
'Jack!' Smokey yelled. 'Answer the goddam phone! What the f**k am I paying you for?'
Jack looked toward Smokey, as desperate as a cornered animal . . . but Smokey was staring back with the thin-lipped, out-of-patience expression that he got on his face just before he popped Lori one. He started toward the phone, barely aware that his feet were moving; he stepped deeper and deeper into that capsule of coldness, feeling the gooseflesh run up his arms, feeling the moisture crackle in his nose.
He reached out and grasped the phone. His hand went numb.
He put it to his ear. His ear went numb.
'Oatley Tap,' he said into that deadly blackness, and his mouth went numb.
The voice that came out of the phone was the cracked, rasping croak of something long dead, some creature which could never be seen by the living: the sight of it would drive a living person insane, or strike him dead with frost-etchings on his lips and staring eyes blinded by cataracts of ice. 'Jack,' this scabrous, rattling voice whispered up out of the earpiece, and his face went numb, the way it did when you needed to spend a heavy day in the dentist's chair and the guy needled you up with a little too much Novocain. 'You get your ass back home, Jack.'
From far away, a distance of light-years, it seemed, he could hear his voice repeating: 'Oatley Tap, is anyone there? Hello? . . . Hello? . . . ' Cold, so cold.
His throat was numb. He drew breath and his lungs seemed to freeze. Soon the chambers of his heart would ice up and he would simply drop dead.
That chilly voice whispered, 'Bad things can happen to a boy alone on the road, Jack. Ask anybody.'
He hung the phone up with a quick, clumsy reaching gesture. He pulled his hand back and then stood looking at the phone.
'Was it the ass**le, Jack?' Lori asked, and her voice was distant . . . but a little closer than his own voice had seemed a few moments ago. The world was coming back. On the handset of the pay phone he could see the shape of his hand, outlined in a glittering rime of frost. As he looked, the frost began to melt and run down the black plastic.
3
That was the night - Thursday night - that Jack first saw Genny County's answer to Randolph Scott. The crowd was a little smaller than it had been Wednesday night - very much a day-before-payday crowd - but there were still enough men present to fill the bar and spill over into the tables and booths.
They were town men from a rural area where the plows were now probably rusting forgotten in back sheds, men who perhaps wanted to be farmers but had forgotten how. There were a lot of John Deere caps in evidence, but to Jack, very few of these men looked as if they would be at home riding a tractor. These were men in gray chinos and brown chinos and green chinos; men with their names stitched on blue shirts in gold thread; men in square-toed Dingo Boots and men in great big clumping Survivors. These men carried their keys on their belts. These men had wrinkles but no laugh-lines; their mouths were dour. These men wore cowboy hats and when Jack looked at the bar from in back of the stools, there were as many as eight who looked like Charlie Daniels in the chewing-tobacco ads. But these men didn't chew; these men smoked cigarettes, and a lot of them.
Jack was cleaning the bubble front of the jukebox when Digger Atwell came in. The juke was turned off; the Yankees were on the cable, and the men at the bar were watching intently. The night before, Atwell had been in the Oatley male's version of sports clothes (chinos, khaki shirt with a lot of pens in one of the two big pockets, steel-toed workboots). Tonight he was wearing a blue cop's uniform. A large gun with wood grips hung in a holster on his creaking leather belt.