King Stephen - Mile 81

You know what? I fuckin rock .

He might have laughed if the little kids hadn’t been looking at him. They had just seen their parents eaten by some kind of alien—eaten alive —and showing happiness would be totally wrong.

The little boy held out his chubby arms, and Pete picked him up. He didn’t laugh when the kid kissed his cheek, but he smiled. “Fanks,” Blakie said. “You’re a good kid.”

Pete set him down. The little girl also kissed him, which was sort of nice, although it would have been nicer if she’d been a babe.

The trooper was running toward them now, and that made Pete think of something. He bent to the little girl and huffed into her face.

“Do you smell anything?”

Rachel Lussier looked at him wisely for a moment. “You’ll be okay,” she said, and actually smiled. It was only a small one, but better than no smile at all. “Just don’t breathe on him. And maybe get some mints or something before you go home.”

“I was thinking Teaberry gum,” Pete said.

“Yeah,” Rachel said. “That’ll work.”

For Nye Willden and Doug Allen, who bought my first stories.

Lee Harvey Oswald lived on Mercedes Street in Fort Worth, Texas, with his wife, Marina, and their daughter, June, for a few months in the late summer, early fall of 1962. Jake Epping, the protagonist of Stephen King’s new novel 11/22/63 , moves in across the street to monitor Oswald’s movements, intending to prevent him from assassinating JFK. Jake has fallen in love with Sadie Dunhill, a high school librarian in Jodie, a small town not far from Dallas.

Living on Mercedes Street was not an uplifting experience.

Days weren’t so bad. They resounded with the shouts of children recently released from school, all dressed in too-big hand-me-downs; housewives kvetching at mailboxes or backyard clotheslines; teenagers driving rusty beaters with glasspack mufflers and radios blaring K-Life. The hours between 2:00 and 6:00 A.M. weren’t so bad, either. Then a kind of stunned silence fell over the street as colicky babies finally slept in their cribs (or dresser drawers) and their daddies snored toward another day of hourly wages in the shops, factories, or outlying farms.

Between four and six in the afternoon, however, the street was a jangle of mommas screaming at kids to get the hell in and do their chores and poppas arriving home to scream at their wives, probably because they had no one else to scream at. Many of the wives gave back as good as they got. The drunkadaddies started to roll in around eight, and things really got noisy around eleven, when either the bars closed or the money ran out. Then I heard slamming doors, breaking glass, and screams of pain as some loaded drunkadaddy tuned up on the wife, the kiddies, or both. Often red lights would strobe in through my drawn curtains as the cops arrived. A couple of times there were gunshots, maybe fired at the sky, maybe not. And one early morning, when I went out to get the paper, I saw a woman with dried blood crusting the lower half of her face. She was sitting on the curb in front of a house four down from mine, drinking a can of Lone Star. I almost went down to check on her, even though I knew how unwise it would be to get involved with the life of this low-bottom working neighborhood. Then she saw me looking at her and hoisted her middle finger. I went back inside.

There was no Welcome Wagon, and no women named Muffy or Buffy trotting off to Junior League meetings. What there was on Mercedes Street was plenty of time to think. Time to miss my friends in Jodie. Time to miss the work that had kept my mind off what I had come here to do. Time to realize the teaching had done a lot more than pass the time; it had satisfied my mind the way work does when you care about it, when you feel like you might actually be making a difference.

There was even time to feel bad about my formerly spiffy convertible. Besides the nonfunctional radio and the wheezy valves, it now blatted and backfired through a rusty tailpipe and there was a crack in the windshield caused by a rock that had bounced off the back of a lumbering asphalt truck. I’d stopped washing it, and now—sad to say—it fit in perfectly with the other busted-up transpo on Mercedes Street.

Mostly there was time to think about Sadie.

You’re breaking that young woman’s heart, Ellie Dockerty had said, and mine wasn’t doing so well, either. The idea of spilling everything to Sadie came to me one night as I lay awake listening to a drunken argument next door: you did, I didn’t, you did, I didn’t, fuck you. I rejected the idea, but it came back the following night, rejuvenated. I could see myself sitting with her at her kitchen table, drinking coffee in the strong afternoon sunlight that slanted through the window over the sink. Speaking calmly. Telling her my real name was Jacob Epping, I wouldn’t actually be born for another fourteen years, I had come from the year 2011 via a fissure in time that my late friend Al Templeton called the rabbit-hole.

How would I convince her of such a thing? By telling her that a certain American defector who had changed his mind about Russia was shortly going to move in across the street from where I now lived, along with his Russian wife and their baby girl? By telling her that the Dallas Texans—not yet the Cowboys, not yet America’s Team—were going to beat the Houston Oilers 20-17 this fall, in double overtime? Ridiculous. But what else did I know about the immediate future? Not much, because I’d had no time to study up. I knew a fair amount about Oswald, but that was all.

She’d think I was crazy. I could sing her lyrics from another dozen pop songs that hadn’t been recorded yet, and she’d still think I was crazy. She’d accuse me of making them up myself— wasn’t I a writer, after all? And suppose she did believe it? Did I want to drag her into the shark’s mouth with me? Wasn’t it bad enough that she’d be coming back to Jodie in August, and that if John Clayton was an echo of Frank Dunning, he might come looking for her?

“All right, get out then!” a woman screamed from the street, and a car accelerated away in the direction of Winscott Road. A wedge of light probed briefly through a crack in my drawn curtains and flashed across the ceiling.

“COCKSUCKER!” she yelled after it, to which a male voice, a little more distant, yelled back: “You can suck mine, lady, maybe it’ll calm you down.”

That was life on Mercedes Street in the summer of ’62.

Leave her out of it. That was the voice of reason. It’s just too dangerous. Maybe at some point she can be a part of your life again—a life in Jodie, even—but not now.

Only there was never going to be a life for me in Jodie. Given what Ellen now knew about my past, teaching at the high school was a fool’s dream. And what else was I going to do? Pour concrete?

One morning I put on the coffeepot and went for the paper on the stoop. When I opened the front door, I saw that both of the Sunliner’s rear tires were flat. Some bored out-too-late kid had slashed them with a knife. That was also life on Mercedes Street in the summer of ’62.

On Thursday, the fourteenth of June, I dressed in jeans, a blue workshirt, and an old leather vest I’d picked up at a secondhand store on Camp Bowie Road. Then I spent the morning pacing through my house. I had no television, but I listened to the radio. According to the news, President Kennedy was planning a state trip to Mexico later in the month. The weather report called for fair skies and warm temperatures. The DJ yammered awhile, then played “Palisades Park.” The screams and roller-coaster sound effects on the record clawed at my head.