Roadwork by Stephen King, Richard Bachman Read Free Book Online Page B

them last Christmas. He didn’t mind the clock, but he had never been able to get used to the click when the numbers changed. 4:23 click, 4:24 click, a person could go nuts.
    He went down to the bathroom, turned on the light, and urinated. It made his heart thump heavily in his chest. Lately when he urinated his heart thumped like a fucking bass drum. Are you trying to tell me something, God?
    He went back to bed and lay down, but sleep didn’t come for a long time. He had thrashed around while he slept, and the bed had been remolded into enemy territory. He couldn’t get it right again. His arms and legs also seemed to have forgotten which way they arranged themselves when he slept.
    The dream was easy enough to figure out. No sweat there, Fred. A person could work that circuit breaker trick easy enough when he was awake; he could go on coloring in some picture piece by piece and pretending he couldn’t see the whole thing. You could bury the big picture under the floor of your mind. But there was a trapdoor. When you were asleep, sometimes it banged open and something crawled up out of the darkness. Click.
    4:42 A.M.
    In the dream he had been at Pierce Beach with Charlie (funny, when he had given Vinnie Mason that little thumb-nail autobiography he had forgotten to mention Charlie—isn’t that funny, Fred? No, I don’t think it’s too funny, George. Neither do I, Fred. But it’s late. Or early. Or something.).
    He and Charlie were on that long white beach and it was a fine day for the beach—bright blue sky and the sun beaming down like the face on one of those idiotic smiley-smile buttons. People on bright blankets and under umbrellas of many different hues, little kids dibbling around the water’s edge with plastic pails. A lifeguard on his whitewashed tower, his skin as brown as a boot, the crotch of his white Latex swim trunks bulging, as if penis and testicle size were somehow a job prerequisite and he wanted everyone in the area to know they were not being let down. Someone’s transistor radio blaring rock and roll and even now he could remember the tune:
    But I love that dirty water,
Owww, Boston, you’re my home.
    Two girls walking by in bikinis, safe and sane inside beautiful screwable bodies, never for you but for boy-friends nobody ever saw, their toes kicking up tiny fans of sand.
    Only it was funny, Fred, because the tide was coming and there was no tide at Pierce Beach because the nearest ocean was nine hundred miles away.
    He and Charlie were making a sand castle. But they had started too near the water and the incoming waves kept coming closer and closer.
    We have to build it farther back, Dad, Charlie said, but he was stubborn and kept building. When the tide brought the water up to the first wall, he dug a moat with his fingers, spreading the wet sand like a woman’s vagina. The water kept coming.
    Goddam it! He yelled at the water.
    He rebuilt the wall. A wave knocked it down. People started to scream about something. Others were running. The lifeguard’s whistle blew like a silver arrow. He didn’t look up. He had to save the castle. But the water kept coming, lapping his ankles, slurping a turret, a roof, the back of the castle, all of it. The last wave withdrew, showing only bland sand, smooth and flat and brown and shining.
    There were more screams. Someone was crying. He looked up and saw the lifeguard was giving Charlie mouth-to-mouth. Charlie was wet and white except for his lips and eyelids, which were blue. His chest was not rising and falling. The lifeguard stopped trying. He looked up. He was smiling.
    He was out over his head, the lifeguard was saying through his smile. Isn’t it time you went?
    He screamed: Charlie! and that was when he had wakened, afraid he might really have screamed.
    He lay in the darkness for a long time, listening to the digital clock click, and tried not to think of the dream. At last he got up to get a glass of milk in the kitchen, and it was not