Jack could only shake his head.

“Your party does not answer,” the operator said. “Would you like me to keep on trying?”

“A couple more rings, operator. Do you mind?”

“No, sir,” the voice said dutifully.

Come on, Al!

Al had hiked across the bridge to the nearest pay phone, called a bachelor friend and told him it would be worth fifty dollars if the friend would get the Jag's snow tires out of the garage and bring them down to the Highway 31 bridge outside of Barre. The friend showed up twenty minutes later, wearing a pair of jeans and his pajama top. He surveyed the scene.

“Kill anybody?” he asked.

Al was already jacking up the back of the car and Jack was loosening lug nuts. “Providentially, no one,” Al said.

“I think I'll just head on back anyway. Pay me in the morning.”

“Fine,” Al said without looking up.

The two of them had gotten the tires on without incident, and together they drove back to AI Shockley's house. Al put the Jag in the garage and killed the motor.

In the dark quiet he said: “I'm off drinking, Jacky-boy. It's all over. I've slain my last martian.”

And now, sweating in this phonebootb, it occurred to lack that he had never doubted Al's ability to carry through. He had driven back to his own house in the VW with the radio turned up, and some disco group chanted over and over again, talismanic in the house before dawn: Do it anyway… you wanta do it… do it anyway you want… No matter how loud he heard the squealing tires, the crash. When he blinked his eyes shut, he saw that single crushed wheel with its broken spokes pointing at the sky.

When he got in, Wendy was asleep on the couch. He looked in Danny's room and Danny was in his crib on his back, sleeping deeply, his arm still buried in the cast. In the softly filtered glow from the streetlight outside he could see the dark lines on its plastered whiteness where all the doctors and nurses in pediatrics had signed it.

It was an accident. He fell down the stairs.

(o you dirty liar)

It was an accident. l lost my temper.

(you fucking drunken waste god wiped snot out of his nose and that was you)

Listen, hey, come on, please, just an accident-

But the last plea was driven away by the image of that bobbing flashlight as they hunted through the dry late November weeds, looking for the sprawled body that by all good rights should have been there, waiting for the police. It didn't matter that Al had been driving. There had been other nights when he had been driving.

He pulled the covers up over Danny, went into their bedroom, and took the Spanish Llama. 38 down from the top shelf of the closet. It was in a shoe box. He sat on the bed with it for nearly an hour, looking at it, fascinated by its deadly shine.

It was dawn when he put it back in the box and put the box back in the closet.

That morning he had called Bruckner, the department head, and told him to please post his classes. He had the flu. Bruckner agreed, with less good grace than was common. Jack Torrance had been extremely susceptible to the flu in the last year.

Wendy made him scrambled eggs and coffee. They ate in silence. The only sound came from the back yard, where Danny was gleefully running his trucks across the sand pile with his good hand.

She went to do the dishes. Her back to him, she said: “Jack. I've been thinking.”

“Have you?” He lit a cigarette with trembling hands. No hangover this morning, oddly enough. Only the shakes. He blinked. In the instant's darkness the bike flew up against the windshield, starring the glass. The tires shrieked. The flashlight bobbed.

“I want to talk to you about… about what's best for me and Danny. For you too, maybe. I don't know. We should have talked about it before, I guess.”

“Would you do something for me?” he asked, looking at the wavering tip of his cigarette. “Would you do me a favor?”

“What?” Her voice was dull and neutral. He looked at her back.

“Let's talk about it a week from today. If you still want to…,

Now she turned to him, her hands lacy with suds, her pretty face pale and disillusioned. “Jack, promises don't work with you. You just go right on with-”

She stopped, looking in his eyes, fascinated, suddenly uncertain.

“In a week,” he said. His voice had lost all its strength and dropped to a whisper. “Please. I'm not promising anything. If you still want to talk then, we'll talk. About anything you want.”

They looked across the sunny kitchen at each other for a long time, and when she turned back to the dishes without saying anything more, he began to shudder. God, he needed a drink. Just a little pick-me-up to put things in their true perspective-

“Danny said he dreamed you had a car accident,” she said abruptly. “He has funny dreams sometimes. He said it this morning, when I got him dressed. Did you, Jack? Did you have an accident?”

“No.”

By noon the craving for a drink had become a low-grade fever. He went to Al's.

“You dry?” Al asked before letting him in. Al looked horrible.

“Bone dry. You look like Lon Chaney in Phantom of the Opera.”

“Come on in.”

They played two-handed whist all afternoon. They didn't drink.

A week passed. He and Wendy didn't speak much. But he knew she was watching, not believing. He drank coffee black and endless cans of Coca-Cola. One night he drank a whole six-pack of Coke and then ran into the bathroom and vomited it up. The level of the bottles in the liquor cabinet did not go down. After his classes he went over to Al Shockley's-she hated Al Shockley worse than she had ever hated anyone-and when he came home she would swear she smelled scotch or gin on his breath, but he would talk lucidly to her before supper, drink coffee, play with Danny after supper, sharing a Coke with him, read him a bedtime story, then sit and correct themes with cup after cup of black coffee by his hand, and she would have to admit to herself that she had been wrong.

Weeks passed and the unspoken word retreated further from the back of her lips. Jack sensed its retirement but knew it would never retire completely. Things began to get a little easier. Then George Hatfield. He had lost his temper again, this time stone sober.

“Sir, your party still doesn't-”

“Hello?” Al's voice, out of breath.

“Go ahead,” the operator said dourly.

“Al, this is Jack Torrance.”

“Jacky-boy!” Genuine pleasure. “How are you?”

“Good. I just called to say thanks. I got the job. It's perfect. If I can't finish that goddam play snowed in all winter, I'll never finish it.”

“You'll finish.”

“How are things?” Jack asked hesitantly.

“Dry,” Al responded. “You?”

“As a bone.”

“Miss it much?”

“Every day.”

Al laughed. “I know that scene. But I don't know how you stayed dry after that Hatfield thing, Jack. That was above and beyond.”

“I really bitched things up for myself,” he said evenly.

“Oh, hell. I'll have the Board around by spring. Effinger's already saying they might have been too hasty. And if that play comes to something-”

“Yes. Listen, my boy's out in the car, Al. He looks like he might be getting restless-”

“Sure. Understand. You have a good winter up there, Jack. Glad to help.”

“Thanks again, Al.” He hung up, closed his eyes in the hot booth, and again saw the crashing bike, the bobbing flashlight. There had been a squib in the paper the next day, no more than a space-filler really, but the owner had not been named. Why it had been out there in the night would always be a mystery to them, and perhaps that was as it should be.

He went back out to the car and gave Danny his slightly melted Baby Ruth.

“Daddy?”

“What, doc?”

Danny hesitated, looking at his father's abstracted face.

“When I was waiting for you to come back from that hotel, I had a bad dream. Do you remember? When I fell asleep?”