her breasts and cupped her elbows in her palms, a characteristic gesture of nervousness with her.
“Look,” he said. “I’ll run your Pinto up there this Saturday and leave it if I have to, okay? More likely he’ll be able to get right to it. I’ll have a couple of beers with him and pat his dog. You remember that Saint Bernard?”
Donna grinned. “I even remember his name. He practically knocked Tad over licking him. You remember?”
Vic nodded. “The rest of the afternoon Tad goes around after him saying ‘Cooojo . . . heere, Cooojo.’”
They laughed together.
“I feel so damn stupid sometimes,” Donna said. “If I could use a standard shift, I could just run the Jag while you’re gone.”
“You’re just as well off. The Jag’s eccentric. You gotta talk to it.” He slammed the hood of the Pinto back down.
“Ooooh, you DUMMY!” she moaned. “Your iced tea glass was in there!”
And he looked so comically surprised that she went off into gales of laughter. After a minute he joined her. Finally it got so bad that they had to hang on to each other like a couple of drunks. Tad came back around the house to see what was going on, his eyes round. At last, convinced that they were mostly all right in spite of the nutty way they were acting, he joined them. This was about the same time that Steve Kemp mailed his letter less than two miles away.
Later, as dusk settled down and the heat slacked off a little and the first fireflies started to stitch seams in the air across the back yard, Vic pushed his son on the swing.
“Higher, Daddy! Higher!”
“If you go any higher, you’re gonna loop the loop, kid.”
“Gimme under, then, Dad! Gimme under!”
Vic gave Tad a huge push, propelling the swing toward a sky where the first stars were just beginning to appear, and ran all the way under the swing. Tad screamed joyfully, his head tilted back, his hair blowing.
“That was good, Daddy! Gimme under again!”
Vic gave his son under again, from the front this time, and Tad went soaring into the still, hot night. Aunt Evvie Chalmers lived close by, and Tad’s shouts of terrified glee were the last sounds she heard as she died; her heart gave out, one of its paper-thin walls breaching suddenly (and almost painlessly) as she sat in her kitchen chair, a cup of coffee by one hand and a straight-eight Herbert Tareyton by the other; she leaned back and her vision darkened and somewhere she heard a child crying, and for a moment it seemed that the cries were joyful, but as she went out, suddenly propelled as if by a hard but not unkind push from behind, it seemed to her that the child was screaming in fear, in agony; then she was gone, and her niece Abby would find her the following day, her coffee as cold as she was, her cigarette a perfect and delicate tube of ash, her lower plate protruding from her wrinkled mouth like a slot filled with teeth.
Just before Tad’s bedtime, he and Vic sat on the back stoop. Vic had beer. Tad had milk.
“Daddy?”
“What?”
“I wish you didn’t have to go away next week.”
“I’ll be back.”
«Yeah, but—”
Tad was looking down, struggling with tears. Vic put a hand on his neck.
“But what, big guy?”
“Who’s gonna say the words that keep the monster out of the closet? Mommy doesn’t know them! Only you know them!”
Now the tears spilled over and ran down Tad’s face.
“Is that all?” Vic asked.
The Monster Words (Vic had originally dubbed them the Monster Catechism, but Tad had trouble with that word, so it had been shortened) had come about in late spring, when Tad began to be afflicted with bad dreams and night fears. There was something in his closet, he said; sometimes at night his closet door would swing open and he would see it in there, something with yellow eyes that wanted to eat him up. Donna had thought it might have been some fallout from Maurice Sendak’s book Where the Wild Things Are. Vic had wondered aloud to Roger (but not to Donna) if maybe Tad had picked up a garbled account of the mass murders that had taken place in Castle Rock and had decided that the murderer—who had become a kind of town boogeyman—was alive and well in his closet. Roger said he supposed it was possible; with kids, anything was possible.