The Shining

“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 Da

“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!” Da

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. Da

She was looking at the roof, and Da

“Look, Daddy, look!”

Jack took the box from his son. It was a model car, one of the Big Daddy Roth caricatures that Da

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. Da

“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 Da

“Get up, you ox,” Wendy said, and prodded him with the toe of her sneaker.

“See?” he said to Da

“Witness, witness!” Da

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 Da

“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” Da

“What is it?” Wendy asked him as they walked up from the parking lot, hand in hand.

“Forgot,” Jack said.

“Oh, you'll get yours,” she said, and elbowed him. “See if you don't.”

“I was hoping I'd get it tonight,” he remarked, and she laughed. A moment later he asked, “Is Da

“You ought to know. You're the one who has a long talk with him every night before bed.”

“That's usually about what he wants to be when he grows up or if Santa Claus is really real. That's getting to be a big thing with him. I think his old buddy Scott let some pe

“Me either,” she said. They were climbing the porch steps now. “But he's very quiet a lot of the time. And I think he's lost weight, Jack, I really do.”

“He's just getting tall.”

Da

“He's not eating as well, either. He used to be the original steam shovel. Remember last year?”