was strange to feel sympathy for a man who had almost killed you, but the sympathy was there. Had people felt it necessary to tell his father not to fuck up? Probably. And Jack Torrance had fucked up anyway. Spectacularly. Five stars. Drinking was undoubtedly a part of it, but when you were down, some guys just seemed to feel an urge to walk up your back and plant a foot on your neck instead of helping you to stand. It was lousy, but so much of human nature was. Of course when you were running with the bottom dogs, what you mostly saw were paws, claws, and assholes.
“And see if Billy can find some boots that’ll fit you. He’s squirreled away about a dozen pairs in the equipment shed, although the last time I looked, only half of them matched.”
The day was sunny, the air balmy. Dan, who was working in jeans and a Utica Blue Sox t-shirt, looked up at the nearly cloudless sky and then back at Casey Kingsley.
“Yeah, I know how it looks, but this is mountain country, pal. NOAA claims we’re going to have a nor’easter, and it’ll drop maybe a foot. Won’t last long—poor man’s fertilizer is what New Hampshire folks call April snow—but there’s also gonna be gale-force winds. So they say. I hope you can use a snowblower as well as a leaf blower.” He paused. “I also hope your back’s okay, because you and Billy’ll be picking up plenty of dead limbs tomorrow. Might be cutting up some fallen trees, too. You okay with a chainsaw?”
“Yes, sir,” Dan said.
“Good.”
8
Dan and Mrs. Robertson came to amicable terms; she even offered him an egg salad sandwich and a cup of coffee in the communal kitchen. He took her up on it, expecting all the usual questions about what had brought him to Frazier and where he had been before. Refreshingly, there were none. Instead she asked him if he had time to help her close the shutters on the downstairs windows in case they really did get what she called “a cap o’ wind.” Dan agreed. There weren’t many mottoes he lived by, but one was always get in good with the landlady; you never know when you might have to ask her for a rent extension.
Back on the common, Billy was waiting with a list of chores. The day before, the two of them had taken the tarps off all the kiddie rides. That afternoon they put them back on, and shuttered the various booths and concessions. The day’s final job was backing the Riv into her shed. Then they sat in folding chairs beside the Teenytown station, smoking.
“Tell you what, Danno,” Billy said, “I’m one tired hired man.”
“You’re not the only one.” But he felt okay, muscles limber and tingling. He’d forgotten how good outdoors work could be when you weren’t also working off a hangover.
The sky had scummed over with clouds. Billy looked up at them and sighed. “I hope to God it don’t snow n blow as hard as the radio says, but it probably will. I found you some boots. They don’t look like much, but at least they match.”
Dan took the boots with him when he walked across town to his new accommodations. By then the wind was picking up and the day was growing dark. That morning, Frazier had felt on the edge of summer. This evening the air held the face-freezing dampness of coming snow. The side streets were deserted and the houses buttoned up.
Dan turned the corner from Morehead Street onto Eliot and paused. Blowing down the sidewalk, attended by a skeletal scutter of last year’s autumn leaves, was a battered tophat, such as a magician might wear. Or maybe an actor in an old musical comedy, he thought. Looking at it made him feel cold in his bones, because it wasn’t there. Not really.
He closed his eyes, slow-counted to five with the strengthening wind flapping the legs of his jeans around his shins, then opened them again. The leaves were still there, but the tophat was gone. It had just been the shining, producing one of its vivid, unsettling, and usually senseless visions. It was always stronger when he’d been sober for a little while, but never as strong as it had been since coming to Frazier. It was as if the air here were different, somehow. More conducive to those strange transmissions from Planet Elsewhere. Special.