All at once he smelled sweat, old and sour. He turned and Phil was standing right behind him, as if he had popped out of the floor. He was holding what looked like a garage door-opener in one hand. In the other was a pistol. The pistol was pointed at Andy's chest. The finger curled around the trigger was white at the knuckle and the muzzle was trembling slightly.
'Hello, Phil,' Andy said. 'Chef, I mean.'
'What are you doing here?' Chef Bushey asked. The smell of his sweat was yeasty, overpowering. His jeans and WCIK tee-shirt were grimy His feet were bare (probably accounting for his silent arrival) and caked with dirt. His hair might last have been washed a year ago. Or not. His eyes were the worst, bloody and haunted. 'You better tell me quick, old hoss, or you'll never tell anyone anything again.'
Andy, who had narrowly cheated death by pink water not long before, received Chef's threat with equanimity, if not good cheer. 'You do what you have to do, Phil. Chef, I mean.'
Chef raised his eyebrows in surprise. It was bleary but genuine. 'Yeah?'
'Absolutely.'
'Why you out here?'
'I come bearing bad news. I'm very sorry.'
Chef considered this, then smiled, revealing his few surviving teeth. 'There is no bad news. Christ is coming back, and that's the good news that swallows all bad news. That's the Good News Bonus Track. Do you agree?'
'I do, and I say hallelujah. Unfortunately - or fortunately, I guess; you'd have to say fortunately - your wife is with Him already'
'Say what?'
Andy reached out and pushed the muzzle of the gun floorward. Chef made no effort to stop him. 'Samantha's dead, Chef. I regret to say she took her own life earlier tonight.'
'Sammy? Dead?' Chef dropped the gun into the OUT basket on a nearby desk. He also lowered the garage door-opener, but kept hold of it; for the last two days it had not left his hand, even during his increasingly infrequent periods of sleep.
'I'm sorry, Phil. Chef.'
Andy explained the circumstances of Sammy's death as he understood them, concluding with the comforting news that 'the child' was fine. (Even in his despair, Andy Sanders was a glass-half-full person.)
Chef waved away Little Walter's wellbeing with his garage door opener. 'She offed two pigs?'
Andy stiffened at that. 'They were police officers, Phil. Fine human beings. She was distraught, I'm sure, but it was still a very bad thing to do. You need to take that back.'
'Say what?
'I won't have you calling our officers pigs.'
Chef considered. 'Yeah-yeah, kay-kay, I take it back.'
'Thank you.'
Chef bent down from his not-inconsiderable height (it was like being bowed to by a skeleton) and peered into Andy's face. 'Brave little motherfucker, ain't you?'
'No,' Andy said honestly. 'I just don't care.'
Chef seemed to see something that concerned him. He grasped Andy's shoulder. 'Brother, are you all right?'
Andy burst into tears and dropped onto an office chair under a sign advising that CHRIST WATCHETH EVERY CHANNEL, CHRIST LISTENETH EVERY WAVELENGTH. He rested his head on the wall below this strangely sinister slogan, crying like a child who has been punished for stealing jam. It was the brother that had done it; that totally unexpected brother.
Chef drew up a chair from behind the station manager's desk
and studied Andy with the expression of a naturalist observing some
rare animal in the wild. After awhile he said,'Sanders! Did you come
out here so I'd kill you?'?
'No,' Andy said through his sobs. 'Maybe. Yes. I can't say. But everything in my life has gone wrong. My wife and daughter are dead. I think God might be punishing me for selling this shit - '
Chef nodded. 'That could be.'
'-and I'm looking for answers. Or closure. Or something. Of course, I also wanted to tell you about your wife, it's important to do the right thing - '
Chef patted his shoulder. 'You did, bro. I appreciate it. She wasn't much shakes in the kitchen, and she didn't keep house no better than a hog on a shitheap, but she could throw an unearthly f**k when she was stoned. What did she have against those two blueboys?'
Even in his grief, Andy had no intention of bringing up the rape accusation. 'I suppose she was upset about the Dome. Do you know about the Dome, Phil? Chef?'
Chef waved his hand again, apparently in the affirmative. 'What you say about the meth is correct. Selling it is wrong. An affront. Making it, though - that is God's will.'
Andy dropped his hands and peered at Chef from his swollen eyes. 'Do you think so? Because I'm not sure that can be right.'
'Have you ever had any?'
'No!'Andy cried. It was as if Chef had asked him if he had ever enjoyed sexual congress with a cocker spaniel.
'Would you take medicine if the doctor prescribed it?'
'Well... yes, of course... but...'
'Meth is medicine.' Chef looked at him solemnly, then tapped Andy's chest with a finger for emphasis. Chef had nibbled the nail all the way to the bloody quick. 'Meth is medicine. Say it.'
'Meth is medicine,' Andy repeated, agreeably enough.
'That's right.' Chef stood up. 'It's a medicine for melancholy. That's from Ray Bradbury. You ever read Ray Bradbury?'
'No.'
'He's a f**king head. He knew. He wrote the motherfucking hook, say hallelujah. Come with me. I'm going to change your life.'
CHAPTER 19
18
The First Selectman of Chester's Mill took to meth like a frog to flies.
There was a ratty old couch behind the ranked cookers, and here Andy and Chef Bushey sat under a picture of Christ on a motorcycle (title: Your Unseen Road Buddy), passing a pipe back and forth. While burning, meth smells like three-day-old piss in an uncovered thunderjug, but after his first tentative puff, Andy felt positive that the Chef was right: selling it might be Satan's work, but the stuff itself had to be God's. The world jumped into an exquisite, delicately trembling focus he had never seen before. His heart rate spiked, the blood vessels in his neck swelled to throbbing cables, his gums tingled, and his balls crawled in the most delightfully adolescent way. Better than any of these things, the weariness that had lain on his shoulders and muddled up his thinking disappeared. He felt he could move mountains in a wheelbarrow.