Bag of Bones   ::   Кинг Стивен

The rest,as they say around here, was just courtin.

The old man had three children, but Lance was the only one he seemed to care about. (“Daughter’s crazier’n a shithouse mouse,” Bill said matter-of-factly. “In some laughin academy in California. Think I heard she caught her a cancer, too.”) The fact that Lance had no interest in computers and software actually seemed to please his father. He had another son who was capable of running the business. In another way, however, Lance Devore’s older half-brother wasn’t capable at all: there would be no grandchildren from that one.

“Rump-wrangler,” Bill said. “Understand there’s a lot of that going around out there in California.”

There was a fair amount of it going around on the TR, too, I imagined, but thought it not my place to offer sexual instruction to my caretaker.

Lance Devore had been attending Reed College in Oregon, majoring in forestry—the kind of guy who falls in love with green flannel pants, red suspenders, and the sight of condors at dawn. A Brothers Grimm woodcutter, in fact, once you got past the academic jargon. In the summer between his junior and senior years, his father had summoned him to the family compound in Palm Springs, and had presented him with a boxy lawyer’s suitcase crammed with maps, aerial photos, and legal papers. These had little order that Lance could see, but I doubt that he cared. Imagine a comic-book collector given a crate crammed with rare old copies of Donald Duck. Imagine a movie collector given the rough cut of a never-released film starring Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe.

Then imagine this avid young forester realizing that his father owned not just acres or square miles in the vast unincorporated forests of western Maine, but entire realms.

Although Max Devore had left the TR in 1933, he’d kept a lively interest in the area where he’d grown up, subscribing to area newspapers and getting magazines such as Down East and the Maine Times. In the early eighties, he had begun to buy long columns of land just east of the Maine-New Hampshire border. God knew there had been plenty for sale; the paper companies which owned most of it had fallen into a recessionary pit, and many had become convinced that their New England holdings and operations would be the best place to begin retrenching. So this land, stolen from the Indians and clear-cut ruthlessly in the twenties and fifties, came into Max Devore’s hands. He might have bought it just because it was there, a good bargain he could afford to take advantage of.