It

Nevertheless he brought it back and set it down in front of Hanscom; Ricky Lee’s father had once told him that if a man was in his right mind, you brought him what he paid for, be it piss or poison. Ricky Lee didn’t know if that was good advice or bad, but he knew that if you tended bar for a living, it went a fair piece toward saving you from being chomped into gator-bait by your own conscience.
Hanscom looked at the monster drink thoughtfully for a moment and then asked, ‘What do I owe you for a shot like that, Ricky Lee?’
Ricky Lee shook his head slowly, eyes still on the steinful of whiskey, not wanting to look up and meet those socketed, staring eyes. ‘No,’ he said. ‘This one is on the house.’
Hanscom smiled again, this time more naturally. ‘Why, I thank you, Ricky Lee. Now I am going to show you something I learned about in Peru, in 1978. I was working with a guy named Frank Billings — understudying with him, I guess you’d say. Frank Billings was the
best damned architect in the world, I think. He caught a fever and the doctors injected about a billion different antibiotics into him and not a single one of them touched it. He burned for two weeks and then he died. What I’m going to show you I learned from the Indians who worked on the project. The local popskull is pretty potent. You take a slug and you think it’s going down pretty mellow, no problem, and then all at once it’s like someone lit a blowtorch in your mouth and aimed it down your throat. But the Indians drink it like Coca-Cola, and I rarely saw one drunk, and I never saw one with a hangover. Never had the sack to try it their way myself. But I think I’ll give it a go tonight. Bring me some of those lemon wedges there.’
Ricky Lee brought him four and laid them out neatly on a fresh napkin next to the stein of whiskey. Hanscom picked one of them up, tilted his head back like a man about to administer eyedrops to himself, and then began to squeeze raw lemon-juice into his right nostril.
‘Holy Jesus!’ Ricky Lee cried, horrified.
Hanscom’s throat worked. His face flushed . . . and then Ricky Lee saw tears running down the flat planes of his face toward his ears. Now the Spinners were on the juke, singing about the rubberband-man. ‘Oh Lord, I just don’t know how much of this I can stand,’ the Spinners sang.
Hanscom groped blindly on the bar, found another slice of lemon, and squeezed the juice into his other nostril.
‘You’re gonna fucking kill yourself,’ Ricky Lee whispered.
Hanscom tossed both of the wrung-out lemon wedges onto the bar. His eyes were fiery red and he was breathing in hitching, wincing gasps. Clear lemon-juice dripped from both of his nostrils and trickled down to the corners of his mouth. He groped for the stein, raised it, and drank a third of it. Frozen, Ricky Lee watched his adam’s apple go up and down.
Hanscom set the stein aside, shuddered twice, then nodded. He looked at Ricky Lee and smiled a little. His eyes were no longer red.
‘Works about like they said it did. You are so fucking concerned about your nose that you never feel what’s going down your throat at all.’
‘You’re crazy, Mr Hanscom,’ Ricky Lee said.
‘You bet your fur,’ Mr Hanscom said. ‘You remember that one, Ricky Lee? We used to say that when we were kids «You bet your fur.» Did I ever tell you I used to be fat?’
‘No sir, you never did,’ Ricky Lee whispered. He was now convinced that Mr Hanscom had received some intelligence so dreadful that the man really had gone crazy . . . or at least taken temporary leave of his senses.
‘I was a regular butterball. Never played baseball or basketball, always got caught first when we played tag, couldn’t keep out of my own way. I was fat, all right. And there were these fellows in my home town who used to take after me pretty regularly. There was a fellow named Reginald Huggins, only everyone called him Belch. A kid named Victor Criss. A few other guys. But the real brains of the combination was a fellow named Henry Bowers. If there has ever been a genuinely evil kid strutting across the skin of the world, Ricky Lee, Henry Bowers was that kid. I wasn’t the only kid he used to take after; my problem was, I couldn’t run as fast as some of the others.’
Hanscom unbuttoned his shirt and opened it. Leaning forward, Ricky Lee saw a funny, twisted scar on Mr Hanscom’s stomach, just above his navel. Puckered, white, and old. It was a letter, he saw. Someone had carved the letter ‘H’ into the man’s stomach, probably long before Mr Hanscom had been a man.
‘Henry Bowers did that to me. About a thousand years ago. I’m lucky I’m not wearing his whole damned name down there.’
‘Mr Hanscom — ‘
Hanscom took the other two lemon-slices, one ni each hand, tilted his head back, and took them like nose-drops.