Стивен Кинг - If It Bleeds

By the time I started college, I hardly ever thought of Kenny Yanko at all. But I still thought of Mr. Harrigan. Not surprising, considering that he had rolled out the academic red carpet for me. But there were certain days when I thought of him more often. If I was home on one of those days, I put flowers on his grave. If I wasn’t, Pete Bostwick or Mrs. Grogan did it for me.

Valentine’s. Thanksgiving. Christmas. And my birthday.

I always bought a dollar scratch ticket on those days, too. Sometimes I won a couple of bucks, sometimes five, and once I won fifty, but I never hit anything close to a jackpot. That was okay with me. If I had, I would have given the money to some charity. I bought the tickets to remember. Thanks to him, I was already rich.

Because Mr. Rafferty was generous with the trust fund, I had my own apartment by the time I was a junior at Emerson. Just a couple of rooms and a bathroom, but it was in Back Bay, where even small apartments aren’t cheap. By then I was working on the literary magazine. Ploughshares is one of the best in the country, and it always has a hotshot editor, but someone has to read the slush pile, and that was me. I liked the job, even though many of the submissions were on a par with a memorably, even classically bad poem called “10 Reasons Why I Hate My Mother.” It cheered me up to see how many strivers out there were worse at writing than I was. Probably that sounds mean. Probably it is.

I was doing this chore one evening with a plate of Oreos by my left hand and a cup of tea by my right when my phone buzzed. It was Dad. He said he had some bad news and told me Ms. Hargensen had died.

For a moment or two I couldn’t speak. The stack of slush pile poems and stories suddenly seemed very unimportant.

“Craig?” Dad asked. “Are you still there?”

“Yes. What happened?”

He told me what he knew, and I found out more a couple of days later, when the Gates Falls Weekly Enterprise was published online. BELOVED TEACHERS KILLED IN VERMONT, the headline read. Victoria Hargensen Corliss had still been teaching biology at Gates; her husband was a math teacher at neighboring Castle Rock. They had decided to spend their spring vacation on a motorcycle trip across New England, staying at a different bed and breakfast every night. They were on their way back, in Vermont and almost to the New Hampshire border, when Dean Whitmore, thirty-one, of Waltham, Massachusetts, crossed the Route 2 centerline and struck them head-on. Ted Corliss was killed instantly. Victoria Corliss—the woman who had taken me into the teachers’ room after Kenny Yanko beat me up and gave me an illicit Aleve from her purse—had died on the way to the hospital.

I’d interned at the Enterprise the previous summer, mostly emptying the trash but also writing some sports and movie reviews. When I called Dave Gardener, the editor, he gave me some background the Enterprise hadn’t printed. Dean Whitmore had been arrested a total of four times for OUI, but his father was a big hedge fund guy (how Mr. Harrigan had hated those upstarts), and high-priced lawyers had taken care of Whitmore the first three times. On the fourth occasion, after running into the side of a Zoney’s Go-Mart in Hingham, he had avoided jail but lost his license. He’d been driving without one and operating under the influence when he struck the Corliss motorcycle. “Stone drunk” was the way Dave put it.

“He’ll get off with just a slap on the wrist,” Dave said. “Daddy will see to it. You watch and see.”

“No way.” Just the idea of that happening made me feel sick to my stomach. “If your info’s correct, it’s a clear case of vehicular homicide.”

“Watch and see,” he repeated.

The funerals were at Saint Anne’s, the church both Ms. Hargensen—it was impossible for me to think of her as Victoria—and her husband had attended for most of their lives, and the one they had been married out of. Mr. Harrigan had been rich, for years a mover and shaker in the American business world, but there were a lot more people at the funeral of Ted and Victoria Corliss. Saint Anne’s is a big church, but that day it was standing room only, and if Father Ingersoll hadn’t had a microphone, he would have been inaudible beneath all the weeping. They had both been popular teachers, they were a love-match, and of course they had been young.

So were most of the mourners. I was there; Regina and Margie were there; Billy Bogan was there; so was U-Boat, who’d made a special trip from Florida, where he was playing single-A ball. U-Boat and I sat together. He didn’t cry, exactly, but his eyes were red, and the big galoot was sniffling.

“Did you ever have her for class?” I whispered.

“Bio II,” he whispered back. “When I was a senior. Needed it to graduate. She gave me a gift C. And I was in her birdwatching club. She wrote me a recommendation on my college app.”

She had written me one, too.

“It’s just so wrong,” U-Boat said. “They weren’t doing nothing but taking a ride.” He paused. “And they were wearing helmets, too.”

Billy looked about the same, but Margie and Regina looked older, almost adult in their makeup and big-girl dresses. They hugged me outside the church when it was over, and Regina said, “Remember how she took care of you the night you got beat up?”

“Yes,” I said.

“She let me use her hand cream,” Regina said, and began to cry all over again.

“I hope they put that guy away forever,” Margie said fiercely.

“Roger that,” U-Boat said. “Lock him up and throw away the key.”

“They will,” I said, but of course I was wrong and Dave was right.

Dean Whitmore’s day in court came that July. He was given four years, sentence suspended if he agreed to go into a rehab and could pass random urine tests for those same four years. I was working for the Enterprise again, and as a paid employee (only part-time, but still). I’d been bumped up to community affairs and the occasional feature story. The day after Whitmore’s sentencing—if you could even call it that—I voiced my outrage to Dave Gardener.

“I know, it sucks,” he said, “but you gotta grow up, Craigy. We live in the real world where money talks and people listen. Money changed hands in the Whitmore case somewhere along the line. You can count on it. Now aren’t you supposed to be giving me four-hundred words on the Craft Fair?”

A rehab—possibly one with tennis courts and a putting green—wasn’t enough. Four years of piss-testing wasn’t enough, especially when you could pay someone to provide clean samples if you knew ahead of time when the tests were going to come. Whitmore probably would.

As that August burned away, I sometimes thought of an African proverb I’d read in one of my classes: When an old man dies, a library burns . Victoria and Ted hadn’t been old, but somehow that was worse, because any potential they might have had was never going to be realized. All those kids at the funeral, both current students and recent graduates like me and my friends, suggested that something had burned, and could never be rebuilt.

I remembered her drawings of leaves and tree branches on the blackboard, beautiful things done freehand. I remembered us cleaning the bio lab on Friday afternoons, then doing the chem half of the lab for good measure, both of us laughing about the stink, her wondering if some Dr. Jekyll chemistry student was going to turn into Mr. Hyde and go rampaging through the halls. I thought of her saying Don’t blame you when I told her I didn’t want to go back into the gym after Kenny beat me up. I thought of those things, and the smell of her perfume, and then I thought of the asshole who’d killed her graduating from rehab and going about his business, happy as a Sunday in Paris.