A change of gravity

"That's what I always did. They didn't know what the stakes really were, how much they had riding on me. What keeping me happy was actually worth. How much effort they oughta put in. That's why they thought they could get so high and mighty with me. They had no idea what it'd really cost 'em, what they'd be losing, if they went and got me pissed off. The pension was all they knew about, see? Well, all of my kids now, they've done pretty well thanks of course to the way that I brought them up, but you're not gonna hear that from them. They can take care of my wife, if they have to, without even breathing hard, right? So my pension for Ginny they're willing to risk, I guess, if they've even thought about that.

"So as a result, after what those pricks did to me, I'm on my way back down the office. The minute that I get there, the first thing I am gonna do is change that fuckin' pension. What they bet, they lost.

Gonna screw them right out of it. Just like they all screwed me out of the rest of my life, right to die in my own fuckin' house, when they put me out in the street.

"But by the time I get down there, I've changed my mind. "Fuck 'em 's what I've now decided. What'll I care, my wife gets the pension? I'll be dead and buried, six feet under 'fore they find out what I did to her, got even. And then they'll go out and start bad-mouthin' me. Make me look like shit, all over town: my poor widow, she ain't got a dime.

What a bastard I was; I left her destitute, all the rest of that crap.

Right here, in my very own town, which I've lived in all my life. And I wont be around to fight back. Tell all the people what they did to me, treatin' me like a sack-ah brown shit, I had the nerve to get sick.

What good is that gonna do me? '"No, better like this." That was what I decided. Better if they never know, the rotten bastards, about all the other stuff there was, they never dreamed of. The big boodle. That's where the real revenge is. Not takin' it with me, no, still can't do that, but I can keep it away from them. That's as good as you can do, at least. Almost as good in the end, Slick, wouldn't you say? Almost as good in the end."

It'd taken Larry longer than his doctors and he had expected, dying at the pace set by the cancer, but doing it his way. He hadn't finished up until just before Columbus Day in 1972, twenty-one slow, hard months later. Merrion had visited him at least once during each of eighty-two of those eighty-seven weeks that Larry Lane lived at 1692 Ike.

During the first week of March in '72 Merrion had been pretty much recovered from the flu that had sent him to bed during four days of the last week of February, but still feared he might infect Larry. Each year he had taken the same nine days of vacation that he'd started taking in 1962, the first year he'd been on actual salary with Danny the last week of June and the first week of July, combining vacation days with the holiday for the Fourth. Beginning in '66 he attended the annual clerks' conventions during his time away each June. The first week in July was his one-quarter share of the month's rental of the two-bedroom cottage he rented with Dan and Marcia Hilliard at Swift's Beach in Wareham, and he spent it there fucking Sunny Keller, when she came home on leave from the Air Force to him as the summer herself, even the July it rained.

Over twenty years later he still missed Sunny Keller, and every so often late at night in the card room at Grey Hills when he had had enough to drink, he would shake his head and say it again, right out hud but softly, that he still didn't see why she felt she had to volunteer to go and take a chance on getting herself killed, and then actually get killed, and then he would say 'fucking war," even though it hadn't really been the war that killed her just a heavy rain in Hawaii that could've fallen anywhere. But without the war it wouldn't've fallen onto her. One night Dan Hilliard'd had a few drinks too, and he'd begun to feel sad himself. "You think, you silly bastard," Danny had said, 'you think you were the only one."

"You son of a bitch, I do not," Merrion had said. '1 know very much better'n that, god damn it. I know she fucked other guys. Sunny always fucked other guys. But I couldn't help that, you know. There was nothin' I could do about that."

"Not fucking, goddammit," Hilliard had said. "Not fucking I'm talking about. I meant it was you thinking you were the one, that you were the one that was crazy about Sunny. And you were jus' wrong about that. It was everyone, all of us, ever' damn body, always liked Sunny, right off. And more'n a few of us even got so we loved her. Not that we fucked her, I didn't mean that, but we also loved her. We did. So you shouldn't think that, that it was just you, that it was just you that loved Sunny. "Cause it wasn't just you that loved Sunny. That was the way that she was."