Salem's Lot

There were, however, pictures.

Snapshots and photos were everywhere—tacked, stapled, or taped to every available surface. Some were new Polaroid prints, others were colored Kodak shots taken a few years back, still more were curled and yellowing black-and-whites, some going back fifteen years. Beneath each was a typed caption: Fine Country Living! Six Rms.or Hilltop Location! Taggart Stream Road, $32,000—Cheap! or Fit for a Squire! Ten-Rm. Farmhouse, Burns Road. It looked like a dismal, fly-by-night operation and so it had been until 1957, when Larry Crockett, who was regarded by the better element in Jerusalem’s Lot as only one step above shiftless, had decided that trailers were the wave of the future. In those dim dead days, most people thought of trailers as those cute silvery things you hooked on the back of your car when you wanted to go to Yellowstone National Park and take pictures of your wife and kids standing in front of Old Faithful. In those dim dead days, hardly anyone—even the trailer manufacturers themselves—foresaw a day when the cute silvery things would be replaced by campers, which hooked right over the bed of your Chevy pickup or which could come complete and motorized in themselves.

Larry, however, had not needed to know these things. A bush-league visionary at best, he had simply gone down to the town office (in those days he was not a selectman; in those days he couldn’t have gotten elected dogcatcher) and looked up the Jerusalem’s Lot zoning laws. They were tremendously satisfactory. Peering between the lines, he could see thousands of dollars. The law said you could not maintain a public dumping ground, or have more than three junked cars in your yard unless you also had a junk yard permit, or have a chemical toilet—a fancy and not very accurate term for outhouse—unless it was approved by the Town Health Officer. And that was it.

Larry had mortgaged himself to the hilt, had borrowed more, and had bought three trailers. Not cute little silvery things but long, plush, thyroidal monsters with plastic wood paneling and Formica bathrooms. He bought one-acre plots for each in the Bend, where land was cheap, had set them on cheap foundations, and had gone to work selling them. He had done so in three months, overcoming some initial resistance from people who were dubious about living in a home that resembled a Pullman car, and his profit had been close to ten thousand dollars. The wave of the future had arrived in ’salem’s Lot, and Larry Crockett had been right up there shooting the curl.

On the day R.T. Straker had walked into his office, Crockett had been worth nearly two million dollars. He had done this as a result of land speculation in a great many neighboring towns (but not in the Lot; you don’t shit where you eat was Lawrence Crockett’s motto), based on the conviction that the mobile-home industry was going to grow like a mad bastard. It did, and my God how the money rolled in.

In 1965 Larry Crockett became the silent partner of a contractor named Romeo Poulin, who was building a supermarket plaza in Auburn. Poulin was a veteran corner-cutter, and with his on-the-job know-how and Larry’s way with figures, they made $750,000 apiece and only had to report a third of that to Uncle. It was all extremely satisfactory, and if the supermarket roof had a bad case of the leaks, well, that was life.

In 1966–68 Larry bought controlling interests in three Maine mobile-home businesses, going through any number of fancy ownership shuffles to throw the tax people off. To Romeo Poulin he described this process as going into the tu

Deals with the devil, all right, Larry thought, shuffling his papers. When you deal with him, notes come due in brimstone.

The people who bought trailers were lower-middle-class blue- or white-collar workers, people who could not raise a down payment on a more conventional house, or older people looking for ways to stretch their social security. The idea of a brand-new six-room house was something to conjure with for these people. For the elderly, there was another advantage, something that others missed but Larry, always astute, had noticed: Trailers were all on one level and there were no stairs to climb.

Financing was easy, too. A $500 down payment was usually enough to do business on. And in the bad old barracuda-financing days of the sixties, the fact that the other $9,500 was financed at 24 percent rarely struck these house-hungry people as a pitfall.

And my God! how the money rolled in.

Crockett himself had changed very little, even after playing “Let’s Make a Deal” with the unsettling Mr Straker. No fag decorator came to redo his office. He still got by with the cheap electric fan instead of air conditioning. He wore the same shiny-seat suits or glaring sports jacket combinations. He smoked the same cheap cigars and still dropped by Dell’s on Saturday night to have a few beers and shoot some bumper pool with the boys. He had kept his hand in hometown real estate, which had borne two fruits: First, it had gotten him elected selectman, and second, it wrote off nicely on his income tax return, because each year’s visible operation was one rung below the breakeven point. Besides the Marsten House, he was and had been the selling agent for perhaps three dozen other decrepit manses in the area. There were some good deals of course. But Larry didn’t push them. The money was, after all, rolling in.

Too much money, maybe. It was possible, he supposed, to outsmart yourself. To go into the tu

That was when the telephone rang.

FOUR

“Mr Crockett,” the familiar, accentless voice said.

“Straker, isn’t it?”

“Indeed.”

“I was just thinkin’ about you. Maybe I’m psychic.”

“How very amusing, Mr Crockett. I need a service, please.”

“I thought you might.”

“You will procure a truck, please. A big one. A rental truck, perhaps. Have it at the Portland docks tonight at seven sharp. Custom House Wharf. Two movers will be sufficient, I think.”

“Okay.” Larry drew a pad over by his right hand and scrawled: H. Peters, R. Snow. Henry’s U-Haul. 6 at latest. He did not stop to consider how imperative it seemed to follow Straker’s orders to the letter.

“There are a dozen boxes to be picked up. All save one go to the shop. The other is an extremely valuable sideboard—a Hepplewhite. Your movers will know it by its size. It is to be taken to the house. You understand?”

“Yeah.”

“Have them put it down cellar. Your men can enter through the outside bulkhead below the kitchen windows. You understand?”

“Yeah. Now, this sideboard—”

“One other service, please. You will procure five stout Yale padlocks. You are familiar with the brand Yale?”

“Everybody is. What—”

“Your movers will lock the shop’s back door when they leave. At the house, they will leave the keys to all five locks on the basement table. When they leave the house, they will padlock the bulkhead door, the front and back doors, and the shed-garage. You understand?”

“Yeah.”

“Thank you, Mr Crockett. Follow all directions explicitly. Good-by.”

“Now, wait just a minute—”

Dead line.

FIVE

It was two minutes of seven when the big orange-and-white truck with “Henry’s U-Haul” printed on the sides and back pulled up to the corrugated-steel shack at the end of Custom House Wharf at the Portland docks. The tide was on the turn and the gulls were restless with it, wheeling and crying overhead against the sunset-crimson sky.