Bag of Bones   ::   Кинг Стивен

I would have J3und the manuscript, Was that true, though? She had made many trips down here with no apparent attempts at concealment, on one of them she had even been accompanied by a strange man, and I had only found out about these visits by accident.

“This is hard to talk about,” Bill said, “but since we’ve gotten started hard, we might as well go the rest of the way. Livin on the TR is like the way we used to sleep four or even five in a bed when it was January and true cold. If everyone rests easy, you do all right. But if one person gets restless, gets tossing and turning, no one can sleep. Right now you’re the restless one. That’s how people see it.”

He waited to see what I’d say. When almost twenty seconds passed without a word from me (Harold Oblowski would have been proud), he shuffled his feet and went on.

“There are people in town uneasy about the interest you’ve taken in Mattie Devore, for instance. Now I’m not sayin there’s anythin going on between the two of you—although there’s folks who do say it—but if you want to stay on the TR you’re makin it tough on yourself.”

“Why?”

“Comes back to what I said a week and a half ago. She’s trouble.”

“As I recall, Bill, you said she was in trouble. And she is. I’m trying to help her out of it. There’s nothing going on between us but that.”

“I seem to recall telling you that Max Devore is nuts,” he said. “If you make him mad, we all pay the price.” The pump clicked off and he racked it up. Then he sighed, raised his hands, dropped them. “You think this is easy for me to say?”

“You think it’s easy for me to listen to?”

“All right, ayuh, we’re in the same skiff. But Mattie Devore isn’t the only person on the TR livin hand-to-mouth, you know. There’s others got their woes, as well. Can’t you understand that?”

Maybe he saw that I understood too much and too well, because his shoulders slumped.

“If you’re asking me to stand aside and let Devore take Mattie’s baby without a fight, you can forget it,” I said. “And I hope that’s not it.

Because I think I’d have to be quits with a man who’d ask another man to do something like that.”

“I wouldn’t ask it now anywise,” he said, his accent thickening almost to the point of contempt. “It’d be too late, wouldn’t it?” And then, unexpectedly, he softened. “Christ, man, I’m worried about you. Let the rest of it go hang, all right? Hang high where the crows can pick it.”

He was lying again, but this time I didn’t mind so much, because I thought he was lying to himself. “But you need to have a care. When I said Devore was crazy, that was no figure of speech.