The plant - By Stephen King Page 0,19
you talk that way?"
"What way is dat, Mist Po-tuh?"
He regarded me for a moment longer and then said, "Never mind." He leaned close-close enough so I could smell cheap cigars, hair tonic, and the graywater stench of fear. "Can you get me a gun?"
For a moment I was literally without a response-which is like saying (Floyd would, anyway) that China was for a moment without manpower. I had an idea that he had changed the subject completely, and that what I had heard as Can you get me a gun? had actually been Can you get me some fun, as in ho. Definition of a ho: dahk-skin woman who do it fo money on account of de food-stamps is gone and de las fix be cookin in de spoon. My response was to either fall down, shrieking wildly with laughter, or to throttle him until his face was as purple as his tie. Then, belatedly, I began to understand he really had said gun... but in the meantime he had taken the overload in my mental switchboard for refusal. His face fell.
"You're sure?" he asked. "I thought that up there in Harlem - "
"Ah lives in Dobbs Ferry, Mist' Po'tuh!"
He merely waved this aside, as if we both knew my Dobbs Ferry address was just a convenient fiction I maintained-that I might even actually go there after work, but of course was drawn back to the velvety reaches beyond 110th as soon as the sun went down.
"Ah g'iss I could git you a gun, Mist' Po'tuh, suh," I said, "but it wouldn't be no better or wuss'n one you could git yo'sef-a . 32... maybe a . 38..." I winked at him. "And a gun you buy under de countuh in a bah, cain't never tell it ain't goan blow up in yo face fust time you pulls de triggah!"
"I don't want anything like that, anyway," Porter said morosely. "I want something with a laser sight. And exploding bullets. Did you ever see Day of the Jackal, Riddley?"
"Yassah, and it sho was fine!"
"When he shot the watermelon... plowch!" Porter tossed his arms wide to indicate how the watermelon had exploded when the assassin tried an exploding bullet on it in The Day of the Jackal, and one of his hands struck the ivy sent to Kenton by the mysterious Roberta Solrac. I had all but forgotten it, although it's been less than two weeks since I put it up there. I tried to assure Porter again that he was probably far from the top of Hecksler's perhaps infinite list of pet paranoias, and that the man was, after all, seventy-two.
"You don't know some of the stuff he did in Big Two," Porter said, his eyes beginning to move hauntedly from side to side again. "If those guys who hired the Jackal had hired Hecksler instead, DeGaulle never would have died in the rack." He wandered off then, and I was glad to see him go. The smell of cigars was beginning to make me feel mildly ill. I took down Zenith the Common Ivy and looked at him (it is ridiculous to assign a male pronoun to an ivy, and yet I did it automatically-I, who usually write with the shrewish care of a French petit bourgeoise housewife picking over fruit in the marketplace). I began this entry by saying what a difference a day makes. In the case of Zenith the Common Ivy, what a difference five days has made. The sagging stem has straightened and thickened, the four yellowish leaves have become almost wholly green, and two new ones have begun to unfurl. All of this with absolutely no help from me at all. I watered it and noticed two other things about my good old buddy Zenith-first, it's even put out its first tendril-it barely reaches to the lip of the cheap plastic pot, but it's there-and second, that swampy, unpleasant smell seems to have disappeared. In fact both the plant and the soil in which he is potted smell quite sweet.
Perhaps it's a psychic ivy. If General Hecksler shows up here at good old 490 Park, I must be sure to ask him, hee-hee! Got twenty pages done on the novel this week-not much, but think (hope!) I am approaching the halfway point. Gelb, who had a modest run of luck yesterday, tried to push it today-this was about an hour before Porter hopped in, looking for armaments. Gelb now owes me $81. 50.
March 8, 1981
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