He glanced at Jack, who thought of Smokey saying I've heard that ole Digger's got a taste for kids on the road. Boys, mostly, and flinched back as if guilty of something. Digger Atwell grinned a wide, slow grin. 'Decided to stick around for a while, boy?'
'Yes, sir,' Jack muttered, and squirted more Windex onto the juke's bubble front, although it was already as clean as it was going to get. He was only waiting for Atwell to go away. After a while, Atwell did. Jack turned to watch the beefy cop cross to the bar . . . and that was when the man at the far left end of the bar turned around and looked at him.
Randolph Scott, Jack thought at once, that's just who he looks like.
But in spite of the rangy and uncompromising lines of his face, the real Randolph Scott had had an undeniable look of heroism; if his good looks had been harsh, they had also been part of a face that could smile. This man looked both bored and somehow crazy.
And with real fright, Jack realized the man was looking at him, at Jack. Nor had he simply turned around during the commercial to see who might be in the bar; he had turned around to look at Jack. Jack knew this was so.
The phone. The ringing phone.
With a tremendous effort, Jack pulled his gaze away. He looked back into the bubble front of the juke and saw his own frightened face hovering, ghostlike, over the records inside.
The telephone began to shriek on the wall.
The man at the left end of the bar looked at it . . . and then looked back at Jack, who stood frozen by the jukebox with his bottle of Windex in one hand and a rag in the other, his hair stiffening, his skin freezing.
'If it's that ass**le again, I'm gonna get me a whistle to start blowing down the phone when he calls, Smokey,' Lori was saying as she walked toward it. 'I swear to God I am.'
She might have been an actress in a play, and all the customers extras paid the standard SAG rate of thirty-five dollars a day. The only two real people in the world were him and this dreadful cowboy with the big hands and the eyes Jack could not . . . quite . . . see.
Suddenly, shockingly, the cowboy mouthed these words:
Get your ass home. And winked.
The phone stopped ringing even as Lori stretched out her hand to it.
Randolph Scott turned around, drained his glass, and yelled, 'Bring me another tapper, okay?'
'I'll be damned,' Lori said. 'That phone's got the ghosts.'
4
Later on, in the storeroom, Jack asked Lori who the guy was who looked like Randolph Scott.
'Who looks like who?' she asked.
'An old cowboy actor. He was sitting down at the end of the bar.'
She shrugged. 'They all look the same to me, Jack. Just a bunch of swinging dicks out for a good time. On Thursday nights they usually pay for it with the little woman's Beano money.'
'He calls beers 'tappers.'
' Her eyes lit. 'Oh yeah! Him. He looks mean.' She said this last with actual appreciation . . . as if admiring the straightness of his nose or the whiteness of his smile.
'Who is he?'
'I don't know his name,' Lori said. 'He's only been around the last week or two. I guess the mill must be hiring again. It - '
'For Christ's sake, Jack, did I tell you to run me out a keg or not?'
Jack had been in the process of walking one of the big kegs of Busch onto the foot of the hand-dolly. Because his weight and the keg's weight were so close, it was an act requiring a good deal of careful balancing. When Smokey shouted from the doorway, Lori screamed and Jack jumped. He lost control of the keg and it went over on its side, the cap shooting out like a champagne cork, beer following in a white-gold jet. Smokey was still shouting at him but Jack could only stare at the beer, frozen . . . until Smokey popped him one.
When he got back out to the taproom perhaps twenty minutes later, holding a Kleenex against his swelling nose, Randolph Scott had been gone.
5
I'm six.
John Benjamin Sawyer is six.
Six -
Jack shook his head, trying to clear this steady, repeating thought out as the rangy millhand who was not a millhand leaned closer and closer. His eyes . . . yellow and somehow scaly. He - it - blinked, a rapid, milky, swimming blink, and Jack realized it had nictitating membranes over its eyeballs.
'You were supposed to get gone,' it whispered again, and reached toward Jack with hands that were beginning to twist and plate and harden.
The door banged open, letting in a raucous flood of the Oak Ridge Boys.
'Jack, if you don't quit lollygagging, I'm going to have to make you sorry,' Smokey said from behind Randolph Scott. Scott stepped backward. No melting, hardening hooves here; his hands were just hands again - big and powerful, their backs crisscrossed with prominent ridged veins. There was another milky, swirling sort of blink that didn't involve the eyelids at all . . . and then the man's eyes were not yellow but a simple faded blue. He gave Jack a final glance and then headed toward the men's room.
Smokey came toward Jack now, his paper cap tipped forward, his narrow weasel's head slightly inclined, his lips parted to show his alligator teeth.