It

So he flipped the loose end of the belt over once and pulled the loop snug. Then he closed h is fist over it. It felt good. It made him feel like a grownup. The strip of leather hung from his clenched fist like a dead blacksnake. His headache was gone.

She had found that one last thing in the back of the drawer: an old white cotton bra with gunshell cups. The thought that this early-morning call might have been from a lover surfaced briefly in his mind and then sank again. That was ridiculous. A woman going away to meet her lover did not pack her faded Ship 'n Shore blouses and her cotton K-Mart undies with the pops and snarls in the elastic. Also, she wouldn't dare.

'Beverly,' he said softly, and she turned at once, startled, her eyes wide, her long hair swinging.

The belt hesitated . . . dropped a little. He stared at her, feeling that l i t t l e b l o o m o f uneasiness again. Yes, she had looked this way before the big shows, and then he hadn't gotten in her way, understanding that she was so filled with a mixture of fear and competitive aggressiveness that it was as if her head was full of illuminating gas: a single spark and she would explode. She had seen the shows not as a chance to split off from Delia Fashions, to make a living-or even a fortune — on her own. If that had been all, she would have been fine. But if that were all, she also would not have been so ungodly talented. She had seen those

shows as a kind of super-exam on which she would be graded by fierce teachers. What she saw on those occasions was some creature without a face. It had no face, but it did have a name — Authority.

All of that wide-eyed nerviness was on her face now. But not just there; it was all around her, an aura that seemed almost visible, a high-tension charge which made her suddenly both more alluring and more dangerous than she had seemed to him in years. He was afraid because she was here, all here, the essential she as apart from the she Tom Rogan wanted her to be, the she he had made.

Beverly looked shocked and frightened. She also looked almost madly exhilarated. Her cheeks glowed with hectic color, yet there were stark white patches below her lower lids which looked almost like a second pair of eyes. Her forehead glowed with a creamy resonance.

And the cigarette was still jutting out of her mouth, now at a slight up-angle, as if she thought she was goddam Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The cigarette! Just looking at it caused dull fury to wash over him again in a green wave. Faintly, far back in his mind, he remembered her saying something to him one night out of the dark, speaking in a dull and list less voice: Someday you're going to kill me, Tom. Do you know that? Someday you're justgoing to go too far and that will be the end. You'll snap.

He had answered: You do it my way, Bev, and that day will never come.

Now, before the rage blotted out everything, he wondered if that day hadn't come after all.

The cigarette. Never mind the call, the packing, the weird look on her face. They would deal with the cigarette. Then he would fuck her. Then they could discuss the rest. By then it might even seem important.

'Tom,' she said. 'Tom, I have to — '

'You're smoking,' he said. His voice seemed to come from a distance, as if over a pretty good radio. 'Looks like you forgot, babe. Where you been hiding them?'

'Look, I'll put it out,' she said, and went to the bathroom door. She flipped the cigarette — even from here he could see the teeth-marks driven deep into the filter — into the bowl of the John. Fsssss. She came back out. 'Tom, that was an old friend. An old old friend. I have to — '

'Shut up, that's what you have to do!' he shouted at her. 'Just shut up!' But the fear he wanted to see — the fear of him — was not on her face. There was fear, but it had come out of the telephone, and fear was not supposed to come to Beverly from that direction. It was almost as if she didn't see the belt, didn't see him, and Tom felt a trickle of unease. Was he here? It was a stupid question, but was he?

This question was so terrible and so elemental that for a moment he felt in danger of coming completely unwrapped from the root of himself and just floating off like a tumbleweed in a high breeze. Then he caught hold of himself. He was here, all right, and that was quite enough fucking psycho-babble for one night. He was here, he was Tom Rogan, Tom by-God Rogan, and if this dippy cunt didn't straighten up and fly right in the next thirty seconds or so, she was going to look like she got pushed out of a fast-moving boxcar by a mean railroad dick.

'Got to give you a whuppin,' he said. 'Sorry about that, babe.'

He had seen that mixture of fear and aggressiveness before, yes. Now for the first time ever it flashed out at him.

'Put that thing down,' she said. 'I have to get out to O'Hare as fast as I can.'

Are you here, Tom? Are you?

He pushed the thought away. The strip of leather which had once been a belt swung slowly before him like a pendulum. His eyes flickered and then held fast to her face.

'Listen to me, Tom. There's been some trouble back in my home town. Very bad trouble. I had a friend in those days. I guess he would have been my boyfriend, except we weren't quite old enough for that. He was only an eleven-year-old kid with a bad stutter back then. He's a novelist now. You even read one of his books, I think . . . The Black Rapids?'

She searched his face but his face gave no sign. There was only the belt penduluming back and forth, back and forth. He stood with his head lowered and his stocky legs slightly apart. Then she ran her hand restlessly through her hair — distractedly — as if she had many important things to think of and hadn't seen the belt at all, and that haunting, awful question resurfaced in his head again: Are you there? Are you sure?

'That book laid around here for weeks and I never made the connection. Maybe I should have, but we're all older and I haven't even thought about Derry in a long, long time. Anyway, Bill had a brother, George, and George was killed before I really knew Bill. He was murdered. And then, the next summer — '

But Tom had ilstened to enough craziness from within and from without. He moved in on her fast, cocking his right arm back over his shoulder like a man about to throw a javelin. The belt hissed a path through the air. Beverly saw it coming and tried to duck away, but he r right shoulder struck the bathroom doorway and there was a meaty whapl as the belt struck her left forearm, leaving a red weal.

'Gonna whup you,' Tom repeated. His voice was sane, even regretful, but his teeth showed in a white and frozen smile. He wanted to see that look in her eyes, that look of fear and terror and shame, that look that said Yes you're right I deserved it, that look that said Yes you're there all right, I feel your presence. Then love could come back, and that was right and good, because he did love her. They could even have a discussion, if she wanted it, of exactly who had called and what all this was about. But that must come later. For now, school was in session. The old one-two. First the whuppin, then the fuckin.

'Sorry, babe.'

'Tom, don't do th — '

He swung the belt sidearm and saw it lick around her hip. There was a satisfying snap as it finished on her buttock. And . . .

And Jesus, she was grabbing at it! She was grabbing at the belt!

For a moment Tom Rogan was so astounded by this unexpected act of insubordination that he almost lost his punisher, would have lost it except for the loop, which was tucked securely into his fist.

He jerked it back.

'Don't you ever try to grab something away from me,' he said hoarsely. 'You hear me? You ever do that again and you'll spend a month pissing raspberry juice.'