Free Rage by Richard Bachman Page A

dat 1'il girl wit dat Loosyville Sluggah. Ali wants mah poor paid shrunk! Ali wants mah soul saved an' made white as snow! How does Ah do it, Rev'rund?"
        Pat Fitzgerald, who was nearly as black as the ace of spades, laughed and shook his head.
        "Charlie, Charlie," Mr. Grace said, as if very sad. "Only you can save your soul now."
        I didn't like that. I stopped shouting and put my hand on the pistol, as if for courage. I didn't like it at all. He had a way of slipping it to you. I'd seen him a lot since I bopped Mr. Carlson with the pipe wrench. He could really slip it in.
        "Mr. Grace?"
        "What, Charlie?"
        "Did Tom tell the police what I said?"
        "Don't you mean 'Mr. Denver'?"
        "Whatever. Did he…?"
        "Yes, he relayed your message."
        "Have they figured out how they're going to handle me yet?"
        "I don't know, Charlie. I'm more interested in knowing if you've figured out how you're going to handle yourself."
        Oh, he was slipping it to me, all right. Just like he kept slipping it to me after Mr. Carlson. But then I had to go see him. Now I could turn him off anytime I wanted to. Except I couldn't, and he knew I couldn't. It was too normal to be consistent. And I was being watched by my peerless peers. They were evaluating me.
        "Sweating a little?" I asked the intercom.
        "Are you?"
        "You guys," I said, an edge of bitterness creeping into my voice. "You're all the same. "
        "We are? If so, then we all want to help you."
        He was going to be a much tougher nut to strip than old Tom Denver had been. That was obvious. I called Don Grace up in my mind. Short, dapper little fuck. Bald on top, big muttonchop sideburns, as if to make up for it. He favored tweed coats with suede patches on the elbows. A pipe always stuffed with something that came from Copenhagen and smelled like cowshit. A man with a headful of sharp, prying instruments. A mind-fucker, a head-stud. That's what a shrink is for, my friends and neighbors; their job is to fuck the mentally disturbed and make them pregnant with sanity. It's a bull's job, and they go to school to learn how, and all their courses are variations on a theme: Slipping It to the Psychos for Fun and Profit, Mostly Profit. And if you find yourself someday lying on that great analyst's couch where so many have lain before you, I'd ask you to remember one thing: When you get sanity by stud, the child always looks like the father. And they have a very high suicide rate.
        But they get you lonely, and ready to cry, they get you ready to toss it all over if they will just promise to go away for a while. What do we have? What do we really have? Minds like terrified fat men, begging the eyes that look up in the bus terminal or the restaurant and threaten to meet ours to look back down, uninterested. We lie awake and picture ourselves in white hats of varying shapes. There's no maidenhead too tough to withstand the seasoned dork of modern psychiatry. But maybe that was okay. Maybe now they would play my game, all these shysters and whores.
        "Let us help you, Charlie," Mr. Grace was saying.
        "But by letting you help me, I would be helping you." I said it as if the idea had just occurred to me. "Don't want to do that."
        "Why, Charlie?"
        "Mr. Grace?"
        "Yes, Charlie?"
        "The next time you ask me a question, I'm going to kill somebody down here. " I could hear Mr. Grace suck wind, as if someone had just told him his son had been in a car crash. It was a very un-self-confident sound. It made me feel very good.
        Everyone in the room was looking at me tightly. Ted Jones raised his head slowly, as if he had just awakened. I could see the familiar, hating darkness cloud his eyes. Anne Lasky's eyes were round and frightened. Sylvia Ragan's fingers were doing a slow and dreamy ballet as they rummaged in her purse for another