The Dark Tower

Chip thought Mrs. T. was a more or less typical summer visitor: rich as Croesus (or at least her husband, who had one of those new dot-com businesses, was), gabby as a parrot loaded on whiskey, and as crazy as Howard Hughes on a morphine toot. She could afford a cabin cruiser (and two dozen Jet Skis to pull it, if she fancied), but she came down to the market on this end of the lake in a battered old rowboat, tying up right about where John Cullum used to tie his up, until That Day (as the years had refined his story to ever greater purity, burnishing it like an oft-polished piece of teak furniture, Chip had come more and more to convey its capital-letter status with his voice, speaking of That Day in the same reverential tones the Reverend Conveigh used when speaking of Our Lord). La Tassenbaum was talky, meddlesome, good-looking (kinda . . . he supposed . . . if you didn’t mind the makeup and the hairspray), loaded with green, and a Republican. Under the circumstances, Chip McAvoy felt perfectly justified in sneaking his thumb onto the corner of the scale . . . a trick he had learned from his father, who had told him you practically had a duty to rook folks from away if they could afford it, but you must never rook folks from the home place, not even if they were as rich as that writer, King, from over in Lovell. Why? Because word got around, and the next thing you knew, out-of-town custom was all a man had to get by on, and try doing that in the month of February when the snowbanks on the sides of Route 7 were nine feet high. This wasn’t February, however, and Mrs. Tassenbaum—a Daughter of Abraham if he had ever seen one—was not from these parts. No, Mrs. Tassenbaum and her rich-as-Croesus dot-com husband would be gone back to Jew York as soon as they saw the first colored leaf fall. Which was why he felt perfectly comfortable in turning her six-dollar order of turkey into seven dollars and eighty cents with the ball of his thumb on the scale. Nor did it hurt to agree with her when she switched topics and started talking about what a terrible man that Bill Clinton was, although in fact Chip had voted twice for Bubba and would have voted for him a third time, had the Constitution allowed him to run for another term. Bubba was smart, he was good at persuading the ragheads to do what he wanted, he hadn’t entirely forgotten the working man, and by the Lord Harry he got more pussy than a toilet seat.

“And now Gore expects to just . . . ride in on his coattails!” Mrs. Tassenbaum said, digging for her checkbook (the turkey on the scale magically gained another two ounces, and there Chip felt it prudent to lock it in). “Claims he invented the Internet! Huh! I know better! In fact, I know the man who really did invent the Internet!” She looked up (Chip’s thumb now nowhere near the scales, he had an instinct about such things, damned if he didn’t) and gave Chip a roguish little smile. She lowered her voice into its confidential just-we-two register. “I ought to, I’ve been sleeping in the same bed with him for almost twenty years!”

Chip gave a hearty laugh, took the sliced turkey off the scale, and put it on a piece of white paper. He was glad to leave the subject of Jet Skis behind, as he had one on order from Viking Motors (“The Boys with the Toys”) in Oxford himself.

“I know what you mean! That fella Gore, too slick!” Mrs. Tassenbaum was nodding enthusiastically, and so Chip decided to lay on a little more. Never hurt, by Christ. “His hair, for instance—how can you trust a man who puts that much goo in his—”

That was when the bell over the door jingled. Chip looked up. Saw. And froze. A goddamned lot of water had gone under the bridge since That Day, but Wendell “Chip” McAvoy knew the man who’d caused all the trouble the moment he stepped through the door. Some faces you simply never forgot. And hadn’t he always known, deep in his heart’s most secret place, that the man with the terrible blue eyes hadn’t finished his business and would be back?

Back for him?

That idea broke his paralysis. Chip turned and ran. He got no more than three steps along the inside of the counter before a shot rang out, loud as thunder in the store—the place was bigger and fancier than it had been in ’77, thank God for his father’s insistence on extravagant insurance coverage—and Mrs. Tassenbaum uttered a piercing scream. Three or four people who had been browsing the aisles turned with expressions of astonishment, and one of them hit the floor in a dead faint. Chip had time to register that it was Rhoda Beemer, eldest daughter of one of the two women who’d been killed in here on That Day. Then it seemed to him that time had folded back on itself and it was Ruth herself lying there with a can of creamed corn rolling free of one relaxing hand. He heard a bullet buzz over his head like an angry bee and skidded to a stop, hands raised.