Carrie Chapter Nine

Playing match nearlything care that.And Tommy went along with it? This was the part that most fascinated her.Yea, swear verboten said, and did non elaborate. After a pause I suppose the well-nigh other kids think Im stuck up.Helen popular opinion it ever soyplace. Well theyre all talking ab expose it. exactly most of them still think youre okay. Like you said, you make your own decisions. thither is, however, a small dissenting faction. She snickered dole spaciousy.The Chris Hargensen people?And the billy Nolan people. God, hes scuzzy.She doesnt like me practically? carry forth said, making it a question.Susie, she hates your guts.Susan nodded, surp hiked to find the thought both distressed and excited her.I heard her father was going to carry by the school department and therefore he changed his mind, she said.Helen shrugged. She hasnt made any friends out of this, she said. I dont know what got into us, any of us. It makes me feel like I dont n iodinetheless kn ow my own mind.They worked on in silence. Across the room, jade Barrett was rollt up an extension ladder preparatory to gilding the overhead stain beams with frizzle paper.Look, Helen said. There goes Chris now.Susan looked up clean in time to go crosswise her walking into the cubby-hole office to the left of the gym entrance. She was wearing wine-coloured velvet intense pants and a silky white blouse no bra, from the way things were jiggling up front a dirty grey-haired opuss dream, Sue thought sourly, and then wondered what Chris could want in where the Prom Committee had set up shop. Of bunk Tina Blake was on the Committee and the two of them were thicker than thieves.Stop it, she sc old(a)ed herself. Do you want her in sackcloth and ashes?Yes, she admitted. A part of her wanted just that.Helen?Hmmmm?Are they going to do something?Helens face took on an unwilling masklike quality. I dont know. The voice was light, over innocent.Oh, Sue said noncommittally.(you know yo u know something accept something goddammit if its only yourself tell me)They keep to colour, and neither spoke. She knew it wasnt as all right as Helen had said. It couldnt be she would neer be quite the same golden girl again in the eyes of her mates. She had d whiz an ungovernable, dangerous thing she had broken cover and shown her face.The after-hours afternoon sunlight, warm as oil and sweet as childhood, sloped through the high, bright gymnasium windows.From My Name Is Susan Snell (p. 40).I can bring in some of what must have take up to the prom. Awful as it was, I can understand how someone like billy club Nolan could go along, for instance. Chris Hargensen led him by the nose-at least, most of the time.His friends were just as easily led by Billy himself. Kenny Garson, who dropped out of high school when he was eighteen, had a tested third-grade reading level. In the clinical sense, Steve Deighan was smaller more than an idiot. Some of the others had police records one of them, Jackie Talbot, was first busted at the age of nine, for take hubcaps. If youve got a social-worker mentality, you can tied(p) regard these people as dispossessed victims.But what can you say for Chris Hargensen herself?It seems to me that from first to last, her one and only purpose in view was the complete and total destruction of Carrie White Im not vatical to, Tina Blake said uneasily. She was a small, pretty girl with a heave of red hair. A pencil was pushed importantly in it. And if Norma comes back, shell spill.Shes in the crapper, Chris said. grow on.Tina, a undersize shocked, giggled in spite of herself. Still, she offered token resistance wherefore do you want to see, anyway? You cant go.Never mind, Chris said. As always, she seemed to bubble with no-count humour.Here, Tina said, and pushed a sheet en confiningd in limp plastic across the desk. Im going out for a Coke. If that bitchy Norma Watson comes back and catches you I never saw you.Okay, Chris murmured, already absorbed in the floor plan. She didnt hear the entre close.George Chizmar had also done the floor plan, so it was perfect. The dance floor was distinctly marked. Twin bandstands. The stage where the fag and Queen would be crowned(id like to crown that fucking snell bitch carrie too)at the end of the evening. Ranged along the trey sides of the floor were the prom-goers tables. Card tables, actually, but covered with a froth of crepe and ribbon, each holding party favours, prom programmes, and suffrages for King and Queen.She ran a lacquered, spade-shaped fingernail down pat(p) the tables to the right of the dance floor, then the left. There Tommy R. & Carrie W. They were really going through with it. She could hardly believe it. Outrage made her tremble. Did they really think they would be allowed to get away with it? Her lips tautened grimly.She looked over her shoulder. Norma Watson was still nowhere in sight.Chris put the seating chart back and rifled quick ly through the recline of the papers on the pitted and initialwarred desk. Invoices (mostly for crepe paper and hapenny nails), a refer of parents who had loaned card tables, petty-cash vouchers, a bill from Star Printers, who had run off the prom tickets, a sample King and Queen voteBallot She snatched it up.No one was supposed to see the actual King and Queen ballot until Friday, when the whole student body would hear the candidates announced over the schools intercom. The King and Queen would be voted in by those attending the prom, but whitened nomination ballots had been circulated to home rooms almost a month earlier. The results were supposed to be top secret.There was a gaining student move moving to do away with the King and Queen business all in concert some of the girls claimed it was sexist, the boys thought it was just plain stupid and a little embarrassing. Chances were good that this would be the last year the dance would be so formal or traditional.But for Chri s, this was the only year that counted. She stared at the ballot with greedy intensity.George and Frieda. No way. Frieda Jason was a Jew.Peter and Myra. No way here, either. Myra was one of the female clique dedicated to erasing the whole horse race. She wouldnt serve even if elected. Besides, she was about as good-looking as the ass end of old drayhorse Ethel.Frank and Jessica. Quite possible. Frank Grier had made the All modern England football team this year, but Jessica was another little sparrowfart with more pimples than brains.Don and Helen. Forget it. Helen Shyres couldnt get elected dog catcher.And the last pairing. Tommy and Sue. Only Sue, of of course, had been pass over out, and Carries name had been written in. There was a pairing to conjure with A kind of strange, shuffling laughter came over her, and she clapped a hand over her mouth to hold it in.Tina scurried back in. Jesus, Chris, you still here? Shes comingDont attempt it, doll, Chris said, and put the papers back on the desk. She was still grinning as she walked out, pausing to raise a mocking hand to Sue Snell, who was slaying her near butt off on that stupid mural. In the outer hall, she fumbled a dime from her bag, dropped it into the pay phone, and called Billy Nolan.From The Shadow Exploded (pp. 100- 10 1) maven wonders just how much planning went into the ruination of Carrie White was it a cautiously made plan, rehearsed and gone over many times, or just something that happened in a bumbling sort of way? I favour the last mentioned idea. I suspect that Christine Hargensen was the brains of the allair, but that she herself had only the most nebulous of ideas on how one might get a girl like Carrie. I kind of suspect it was she who suggested that William Nolan and his friends make the trip to Irwin Hentys farm in North Chamberlain. The thought of that trips imagined result would have appealed to a warped sense of poetic justice, I am sure. ..The car screamed up the rutted Stack End way in North Chamberlain at a sixty- quintuplet that was dangerous to aliveness and limb on the wash wild board unpaved hardpan. A low-hanging branch, lush with whitethorn leaves, occasionally scraped the roof of the 61 Biscayne, which was fender-dented, rusted out, jacked in the back, and equipped with dual glasspack mufflers. angiotensin-converting enzyme headlight was out the other flickered in the midnight dark when the car struck a particularly rough bump.Billy Nolan was at the pink fuzz-covered wheel. Jackie Talbot, heat content Blake, Steve Deighan, and the Garson cronys, Kenny and Lou, were also squeezed in. Three knocks were going, passing through the inner dark like the lambent eyes of some rotating Cerberus.You sure Henty aint somewhat? hydrogen asked. I got no urge to go back up, ole Sweet William. They feed you patch.Kenny Garson, who was wrack to the fifth power found this unutterably funny and emitted a backwash of high-pitched giggles.He aint around, B illy said. Even those hardly a(prenominal) words seemed to swerve out grudgingly, against his win. Funeral.Chris had found this out accidentally. Old man Henty ran one of the few successful independent farms in the Chamberlain area. Unlike the crotchety old farmer with a heart of gold that is one of the staples of pastoral literature, old man Henty was as mean as cat dirt. He did not warhead his shotgun with rock salt at apple time, but with birdshot. He had also prosecuted several fellows for pilferage. 1 of them had been a friend of these boys, a ill-starred bastard named Freddy Overlock. Freddy had been caught red-handed in old man Hentys henhouse, and had received a double dose of number-six bird where the good Lord had split him. adept ole Fred had spent four raving, cursing hours on his belly in an compulsion Wing examining room while a jovial interne picked small pellets off his butt and dropped them into a steel pan. To add insult to injury, he had been fined two hu ndred dollars for larceny and trespass. There was no love disjointed between Irwin Henty and the Chamberlain greaser squad.What about Red? Steve asked.Hes trying to get into some new waitress at The Cavalier, Billy said, swinging the wheel and snorting the Biscayne through a juddering racing drift and on to the Henty Road. Red Trelawney was old man Hentys hired hand. He was a heavy drinker and just as handy with the bird-shot as his employer. He wont be back until they close up.Hell of a risk for a joke, Jackie Talbot grumbled.Billy stiffened. You want out?No, uh-uh, Jackie said hastily. Billy had produced an ounce of good grass to split among the five of them and besides, it was nine miles back to town. Its a good joke, Billy.Kenny undetermined the manus compartment, took out an ornate scrolled roach clip (Chriss), and fixed the smouldering butt-end of a joint in it This operation struck him as highly amusing, and he let out his highpitched giggle again.Now they were flashing past No Tresspassing signs on either side of the road, barbed wire, newly turned fields. The tonus of sweet-smelling earth was heavy and gravid and sweet on the warm may air.Billy popped the headlights off as they breasted the next hill, dropped the gearshift into soggy and killed the ignition. They rolled, a silent hulk of metal, toward the Henty driveway.Billy negotiated the turn with no trouble, and most of their speed bled away as they breasted another small rise and passed the dark and empty house. Now they could see the huge bulk of barn and beyond it, moonlight glittering dreamily on the cow kitty and the apple orchard.In the horseshitpen, two sows poked their flat snouts through the bars. In the bar, one cow lowed softly, perhaps in sleep.Billy stopped the car with the essential brake not really necessary since the ignition was off, but it was a nice Commando touch and they got out.Lou Garson reached past Kenny and got something out of the glove compartment. Billy and heat content went around to the trunk and opened it.The bastard is going to shit where he stands when he comes back and gets a look, Steve said with soft glee.For Freddy, henry said, taking the hammer out of the trunk.Billy said nothing, but of course it was not for Freddy Overlock, who was an asshole. It was for Chris Hargensen, just as everything was for Chris, and had been since the day she swept down from her high-minded collegecourse Olympus and made herself vulnerable to him He would have done murder for her, and more. heat content was swinging the nine-pound sledge experimentally in one hand. The heavy close of its business end made a portentous swishing noise in the night air, and the other boys gathered around as Billy opened the lid of the ice chest and took out the two galvanized steel pads. They were numbingly moth-eaten to the touch, lightly traced with frostOkay, he said.The six of them walked quickly to the hogpen, their respiration trim with excitement. The two sows were both as tame as tabbies, and the old boar lay asleep on his side at the far end. Henry swung the sledge once more through the air, but this time with no conviction. He handed it to Billy.I cant, he said sickly. You.Billy took it and looked quizzically at Lou, who held the broad butcher knife he had taken from the glove compartment.Dont engage, he said, and touched the ball of his thumb to the honed edge.The throat, Billy reminded.I know.Kenny was sing and grinning as he fed the remains of a bended bag of potato chips to the pigs. Doan worry, piggies, doan worry, big Bills gonna bash your fuckin heads in and you woan have to worry about the bomb any more. He scratched their bristly chins, and the pigs grunted and munched contentedly.Here it comes, Billy remarked, and the sledge flashed down.There was a sound that reminded him of the time he and Henry had dropped a pumpkin off Claridge Road overpass, which crossed 495 west of town. One of the sows dropped dead with i ts tongue protruding, eyes still open, potato chip crumbs around its snoutKenny giggled. She didnt even have time to burp.Do it quick, Lou, Billy said.Kennys brother slid between the slates, lifted the pigs head toward the moon-the glazing eyes regarded the crescent with rapt lightlessness and slashed.The flow of wrinkle was immediate and motherling. Several of the boys were splattered and jumped back with little cries of disgust.Billy leaned through and put one of the lays under the main flow. The bucketful filled up rapidly, and he set it aside. The second was half full when the flow trickled and died.The other one, he said.Jesus, Billy, Jackie whined. Isnt that en-The other one, Billy repeated.Soo-ee, pig-pig-pig, Kenny called, grinning and refreshing the empty potato-chip bag. After a pause, the sow returned to the fence, the sledge flashed, the second bucket was filled and the remainder of the blood allowed to flow into the ground. A rank, coppery smell hung on the air. B illy found he was slimed in pig blood to the forearms.Carrying the pails back to the trunk, his mind made a dim, symbolic connection. bullshit blood. That was good. Chris was right. It was really good. It made everything solidify.Pig blood for a pig.He nest the galvanized steel pails into the crushed ice and slammed the lid of the chest. Lets go, he said.Billy got rotter the wheel and released the emergency brake. The five boys got behind, put their shoulders into it, and the car turned in a tight, noiseless circle and trundled up past the barn to the top of the hill across from Hentys house.When the car began to roll on its own, they trotted up beside the doors and climbed in panting.The car gained speed enough to slew a little as Billy whipped it out of the long driveway and on to the Henty Road. At the bottom(a) of the hill he dropped the transmission into third and popped the clutch. The engine hitched and grunted into life.Pig blood for a pig. Yes, that was good, all right . That was really good. He smiled, and Lou Garson felt a start of surprise and fear. He was not sure he could recall ever having seen Billy Nolan smile before. There had not even been rumours.Whose funeral did ole man Henty go to? Steve asked.His mothers, Billy said.His mother? Jackie Talbot said, stunned. Jesus Christ, she musta been oldern God.Kennys high-pitched cackle drifted back on the redolent darkness that trembled at the edge of summer.