Jack had held on to George long after he had cut most of the obvious flat tires, hoping George would work out. He remembered one late afternoon about a week before he had reluctantly dropped the ax. George had stayed after the others had filed out, and then had confronted Jack angrily.
"You s-set the timer ahead." Jack looked up from the papers he was putting back into his briefcase.
"George, what are you talking about?"
"I d-didn't get my whole five mih-minutes. You set it ahead. I was wuh- watching the clock."
"The clock and the timer may keep slightly different times, George, but I never touched the dial on the damned thing. Scout's honor."
"Yuh-yuh-you did!" The belligerent, I'm-sticking-up-for-my-rights way George was looking at him had sparked Jack's own temper. He had been off the sauce for two months, two months too long, and he was ragged. He made one last effort to hold himself in. "I assure you I did not, George. It's your stutter. Do you have any idea what causes it? You don't stutter in class."
"I duh-duh-don't s-s-st-st-stutterl"
"Lower your voice."
"You w-want to g-get met You duh-don't w-want me on your g-g-goddam team!"
"Lower your voice, I said. Let's discuss this rationally."
"F-fuh-fuck th-that!"
"George, if you control your stutter, I'd be glad to have you. You're well prepped for every practice and you're good at the background stuff, which means you're rarely surprised. But all that doesn't mean much if you can't control that—"
"I've neh-neh-never stuttered!" he cried out. "It's yuh-you! I i-if suh- someone else had the d-d-deb-debate t-team, I could—" Jack's temper slipped another notch.
"George, you're never going to make much of a lawyer, corporation or otherwise, if you can't control that. Law isn't like soccer. Two hours of practice every night won't cut it. What are you going to do, stand up in front of a board meeting and say, `Nuh-nuh-now, g-gentlemen, about this t-ttort'?" He suddenly flushed, not with anger but with shame at his own cruelty. This was not a man in front of him but a seventeen-year-old boy who was facing the first major defeat of his life, and maybe asking in the only way he could for Jack to help him find a way to cope with it.
George gave him a final, furious glance, his lips twisting and bucking as the words bottled up behind them struggled to find their way out.
"Yuh-yuh-you s-s-set it aheadl You huh-hate me b-because you nuh-nuh-nuh-know . . . you know . . . nuh-nuh—" With an articulate cry he had rushed out of the classroom, slamming the door hard enough to make the wire-reinforced glass rattle in its frame. Jack had stood there, feeling, rather than hearing, the echo of George's Adidas in the empty hall. Still in the grip of his temper and his shame at mocking George's stutter, his first thought had been a sick sort of exultation: For the first time in his life George Hatfield had wanted something he could not have. For the first time there was something wrong that all of Daddy's money could not fix.
You couldn't bribe a speech center. You couldn't offer a tongue an extra fifty a week and a bonus at Christmas if it would agree to stop flapping like a record needle in a defective groove. Then the exultation was simply buried in shame, and he felt the way he had after he had broken Danny's arm.
Dear God, I am not a son of a bitch. Please.
That sick happiness at George's retreat was more typical of Denker in the play than of Jack Torrance the playwright.
You hate me because you know . . .
Because he knew what?
What could he possibly know about George Hatfield that would make him hate him? That his whole future lay ahead of him? That he looked a little bit like Robert Redford and all conversation among the girls stopped when he did a double gainer from the pool diving board? That he played soccer and baseball with a natural, unlearned grace?
Ridiculous. Absolutely absurd. He envied George Hatfield nothing. If the truth was known, he felt worse about George's unfortunate stutter than George himself, because George really would have made an excellent debater. And if Jack had set the timer ahead—and of course he hadn't—it would have been because both he and the other members of the squad were embarrassed for George's struggle, they had agonized over it the way you agonize when the Class Night speaker forgets some of his lines. If he had set the timer ahead, it would have been just to . . . to put George out of his misery.
But he hadn't set the timer ahead. He was quite sure of it.
A week later he had cut him, and that time he had kept his temper. The shouts and the threats had all been on George's side. A week after that he had gone out to the parking lot halfway through practice to get a pile of sourcebooks that he had left in the trunk of the VW and there had been George, down on one knee with his long blond hair swinging in his face, a hunting knife in one hand. He was sawing through the VW's right front tire. The back tires were already shredded, and the bug sat on the fiats like a small, tired dog.
Jack had seen red, and remembered very little of the encounter that followed.
He remembered a thick growl that seemed to issue from his own throat: "All right, George. If that's how you want it, just come here and take your medicine." He remembered George looking up, startled and fearful. He had said: "Mr.
Torrance—" as if to explain how all this was just a mistake, the tires had been flat when he got there and he was just cleaning dirt out of the front treads with the tip of this gutting knife he just happened to have with him and— Jack had waded in, his fists held up in front of him, and it seemed that he had been grinning. But he wasn't sure of that.
The last thing be remembered was George holding up the knife and saying: "You better not come any closer—" And the next thing was Miss Strong, the French teacher, holding Jack's arms, crying, screaming: "Stop it, Jack! Stop it! You're going to kill him!" He had blinked around stupidly. There was the hunting knife, glittering harmlessly on the parking lot asphalt four yards away. There was his Volkswagen, his poor old battered bug, veteran of many wild midnight drunken rides, sitting on three fiat shoes. There was a new dent in the right front fender, he saw, and there was something in the middle of the dent that was either red paint or blood. For a moment he had been confused, his thoughts (jesus christ al we hit him after all) of that other night. Then his eyes had shifted to George, George lying dazed and blinking on the asphalt. His debate group had come out and they were huddled together by the door, staring at George. There was blood on his face from a scalp laceration that looked minor, but there was also blood running out of one of George's ears and that probably meant a concussion. When George tried to get up, Jack shook free of Miss Strong and went to him. George cringed.
Jack put his hands on George's chest and pushed him back down. "Lie still," he said. "Don't try to move." He turned to Miss Strong, who was staring at them both with horror.
"Please go call the school doctor, Miss Strong," be told her. She turned and fled toward the office. He looked at his debate class then, looked them right in the eye because he was in charge again, fully himself, and when he was himself there wasn't a nicer guy in the whole state of Vermont. Surely they knew that.
"You can go home now," he told them quietly. "We'll meet again tomorrow." But by the end of that week six of his debaters had dropped out, two of them the class of the act, but of course it didn't matter much because he had been informed by then that he would be dropping out himself.
Yet somehow he had stayed off the bottle, and he supposed that was something.
And he had not hated George Hatfield. He was sure of that. He had not acted but had been acted upon.
You hate me because you know . . .
But he had known nothing. Nothing. He would swear that before the Throne of Almighty God, just as he would swear that he had set the timer ahead no more than a minute. And not out of hate but out of pity.
Two wasps were crawling sluggishly about on the roof beside the hole in the flashing.
He watched them until they spread their aerodynamically unsound but strangely efficient wings and lumbered off into the October sunshine, perchance to sting someone else. God had seen fit to give them stingers and lack supposed they had to use them on somebody.
How long had he been sitting there, looking at that hole with its unpleasant surprise down inside, raking over old coals? He looked at his watch. Almost half an hour.
He let himself down to the edge of the roof, dropped one leg over, and felt around until his foot found the top rung of the ladder just below the overhang.
He would go down to the equipment shed where he had stored the bug bomb on a high shelf out of Danny's reach. He would get it, come back up, and then they would be the ones surprised. You could be stung, but you could also sting back.
He believed that sincerely. Two hours from now the nest would be just so much chewed paper and Danny could have it in his room if he wanted to—Jack had had one in his room when he was just a kid, it had always smelled faintly of woodsmoke and gasoline. He could have it right by the head of his bed. It wouldn't hurt him.
"I'm getting better." The sound of his own voice, confident in the silent afternoon, reassured him even though he hadn't meant to speak aloud. He was getting better. It was possible to graduate from passive to active, to take the thing that had once driven you nearly to madness as a neutral prize of no more than occasional academic interest. And if there was a place where the thing could be done, this was surely it.
He went down the ladder to get the bug bomb. They would pay. They would pay for stinging him.
<< 15 >>
DOWN IN THE FRONT YARD
Jack had found a huge white-painted wicker chair in the back of the equipment shed two weeks ago, and had dragged it around to the porch over Wendy's objections that it was really the ugliest thing she had ever seen in her whole life. He was sitting in it now, amusing himself with a copy of E. L. Doctorow's Welcome to Hard Times, when his wife and son rattled up the driveway in the hotel truck.
Wendy parked it in the turn-around, raced the engine sportily, and then turned it off. The truck's single taillight died. The engine rumbled grumpily with post-ignition and finally stopped. Jack got out of his chair and ambled down to meet them.
"Hi, Dad!" Danny called, and raced up the hill. He had a box in one hand.
"Look what Mommy bought me!" Jack picked his son up, swung him around twice, and kissed him heartily on the mouth.
"Jack Torrance, the Eugene O'Neill of his generation, the American Shakespeare!" Wendy said, smiling. "Fancy meeting you here, so far up in the mountains."
"The common ruck became too much for me, dear lady," he said, and slipped his arms around her. They kissed. "How was your trip?"
"Very good. Danny complains that I keep jerking him but I didn't stall the truck once and . . . oh, Jack, you finished it!" She was looking at the roof, and Danny followed her gaze. A faint frown touched his face as he looked at the wide swatch of fresh shingles atop the Overlook's west wing, a lighter green than the rest of the roof. Then he looked down at the box in his hand and his face cleared again. At night the pictures Tony had showed him came back to haunt in all their original clarity, but in sunny daylight they were easier to disregard.
"Look, Daddy, look!" Jack took the box from his son. It was a model car, one of the Big Daddy Roth caricatures that Danny bad expressed an admiration for in the past. This one was the Violent Violet Volkswagen, and the picture on the box showed a huge purple VW` with long '59 Cadillac Coupe de Ville taillights burning up a dirt track.
The VW had a sunroof, and poking up through it, clawed hands on the wheel down below, was a gigantic warty monster with popping bloodshot eyes, a maniacal grin, and a gigantic English racing cap turned around backward.
Wendy was smiling at him, and Jack winked at her.
"That's what I like about you, doc," Jack said, handing the box back. "Your taste runs to the quiet, the sober, the introspective. You are definitely the child of my loins."
"Mommy said you'd help me put it together as soon as I could read all of the first Dick and Jane."
"That ought to be by the end of the week," Jack said. "What else have you got in that fine-looking truck, ma'am?"
"Uh-uh." She grabbed his arm and pulled him back. "No peeking. Some of that stuff is for you. Danny and I will take it in. You can get the milk. It's on the floor of the cab."
"That's all I am to you," Jack cried, clapping a hand to his forehead. "Just a dray horse, a common beast of the field. Dray here, dray there, dray everywhere."
"Just dray that milk right into the kitchen, mister."
"It's too much!" he cried, and threw himself on the ground while Danny stood over him and giggled.
"Get up, you ox," Wendy said, and prodded him with the toe of her sneaker.
"See?" he said to Danny. "She called me an ox. You're a witness."
"Witness, witness!" Danny concurred gleefully, and broadjumped his prone father.
Jack sat up. "That reminds me, chumly. I've got something for you. too. On the porch by my ashtray."
"What is it?"
"Forgot. Go and see." Jack got up and the two of them stood together, watching Danny charge up the lawn and then take the steps to the porch two by two. He put an arm around Wendy's waist.
"You happy, babe?" She looked up at him solemnly. "This is the happiest I've been since we were married."
"Is that the truth?"
"God's honest." He squeezed her tightly. "I love you." She squeezed him back, touched. Those had never been cheap words with John Torrance; she could count the number of times he had said them to her, both before and after marriage, on both her hands.
"I love you too."
"Mommy! Mommyl" Danny was on the porch now, shrill and excited. "Come and see!
