Running with the Demon by Terry Brooks Read Free Book Online

So he does. And he comes back wearing a different dress, a fur coat, and a gorilla mask. The supervisor tells him to go home again, but this time he won’t leave. So they call the police and haul him away. Charge him with disturbing the peace or something. But this is the best part. Afterward, the supervisor tells a reporter—this is true, now, I swear—tells the reporter, with a straight face, that they are considering psychiatric evaluation for the guy.
Considering!
”
    “You know, I read about a guy who took his monkey to the emergency room a few weeks back.” Albert Garcia picked up the conversation. He was a small, solid man with thinning darkhair and close-set features, a relative newcomer to the group, having come up from Houston with his family to work at MidCon less than ten years ago. Before the strike, he set the rolls in the fourteen-inch. “The monkey was his pet, and it got sick or something. So he hauls it down to the emergency room. This was in Arkansas, I think. Tells the nurse it’s his baby. Can you imagine? His baby!”
    “Did it look anything like him?” Mel Riorden laughed.
    “This isn’t the same guy, is it?” Penny Williamson asked suddenly. He was a bulky, heavy-featured black man with skin that shone almost as blue as oiled steel. He was a foreman in the number-three plant, steady and reliable. He shifted his heavy frame slightly and winked knowingly at Old Bob. “You know, the postal-worker guy again?”
    Al Garcia looked perplexed. “I don’t think so. Do you think it could be?”
    “So what happened?” Riorden asked as he bit into a fresh Danish. His eyes blinked like a camera shutter. He rearranged the sizable mound of sweet rolls he had piled on a plate in front of him, already choosing his next victim.
    “Nothing.” Al Garcia shrugged. “They fixed up the monkey and sent him home.”
    “That’s it? That’s the whole story?” Riorden shook his head.
    Al Garcia shrugged again. “I just thought it was bizarre, that’s all.”
    “I think you’re bizarre.” Riorden looked away dismissively. “Hey, Bob, what news from the east end this fine morning?”
    Old Bob accepted with a nod the coffee and sweet roll Josie scooted in front of him. “Nothing you don’t already know. It’s hot at that end of town, too. Any news from the mill?”
    “Same old, same old. The strike goes on. Life goes on. Everybody keeps on keeping on.”
    “I been getting some yard work out at Joe Preston’s,” Richie Stoudt offered, but everyone ignored him, because if brains were dynamite he didn’t have enough to blow his nose.
    “I’ll give you some news,” Junior Elway said suddenly. “There’s some boys planning to cross the picket line if they canget their jobs back. It was just a few at first, but I think there’s more of them now.”
    Old Bob considered him wordlessly for a moment. Junior was not the most reliable of sources. “That so, Junior? I don’t think the company will allow it, after all that’s happened.”
    “They’ll allow it, all right,” Derry Howe cut in. He was a tall, angular man with close-cropped hair and an intense, suspicious stare that made people wonder. He’d been a bit strange as a boy, and two tours in Vietnam hadn’t improved things. Since Nam, he’d lost a wife, been arrested any number of times for drinking and driving, and spotted up his mill record until it looked like someone had sneezed into an inkwell. Old Bob couldn’t understand why they hadn’t fired him. He was erratic and error-prone, and those who knew him best thought he wasn’t rowing with all his oars in the water. Junior Elway was the only friend he had, which was a dubious distinction. He was allowed to hang out with this group only because he was Mel Riorden’s sister’s boy.
    “What do you mean?” Al Garcia asked quickly.
    “I mean, they’ll allow it because they’re going to start up the fourteen-inch again over the weekend and have it up and running by Tuesday.