Стивен Кинг - If It Bleeds

“You should record a new message.”

“I will.”

“And fair warning, Drew—if I don’t hear from you, I’ll come up.”

“Wouldn’t be a good idea, honey. Those last fifteen miles on Shithouse Road would tear the exhaust right out from under the Volvo. Probably the transmission, too.”

“Don’t care. Because… I’m just going to say this, okay? When stuff goes wrong with one of the short stories, you can put it aside. There’s a week or two of moping around the house, then you’re yourself again. Village on the Hill was a whole different thing, and the next year was very scary for me and the kids.”

“This one is—”

“Different, I know, you’ve said so half a dozen times, and I believe you, even though the only thing I know about it is that it’s not a bunch of randy teachers having key parties in Updike country. Just…” She took him by the forearms, looking up at him earnestly. “If it starts to go wrong, if you start to lose the words like you did with Village , come home. Do you understand me? Come home. ”

“I promise.”

“Now kiss me like you mean it.”

He did, gently parting her lips with his tongue and sliding one hand into the back pocket of her jeans. When he pulled back from her, Lucy was flushed. “Yes,” she said. “Like that.”

He got into the Suburban and had made it to the foot of the driveway when Lucy shouted “Wait! Wait!” and came running after him. She was going to tell him she’d changed her mind, she wanted him to stay and try writing the book in his upstairs office, he was sure of it, and he had to battle a desire to step on the gas and go powering down Sycamore Street without looking in the rearview mirror. Instead, he stopped with the Suburban’s back end in the street and rolled down the window.

“Paper!” she said. She was out of breath and her hair was in her eyes. She pooched out her lower lip and blew it back. “Do you have paper? Because I doubt like hell if there’s any up there.”

He grinned and touched her cheek. “Two reams. Think that’ll be enough?”

“Unless you’re planning to write The Lord of the Rings , it should be.” She gave him a level gaze. The furrow had left her brow, at least for the time being. “Go on, Drew. Get out of here and bring back a big one.”

As he turned onto the I-295 entrance ramp where he’d once upon a time seen a man changing a flat tire, Drew felt a lightening. His real life—kids, running errands, chores around the house, picking up Stacey and Brandon from their after-school activities—was behind him. He would come back to it in two weeks, three at the outside, and he supposed he would still have the bulk of the book to write amid the clanging round of that real life, but what was ahead of him was another life, one he would live in his imagination. He had never been able to fully inhabit that life while working on the other three novels, had never quite been able to get over. This time he felt he would. His body might be sitting in your basic no-frills cabin in the Maine woods, but the rest of him would be in the town of Bitter River, Wyoming, where a limping sheriff and three frightened deputies were faced with protecting a young man who’d killed an even younger woman in cold blood in front of at least forty witnesses. Protecting him from angry townspeople was only half of the lawmen’s job. The rest was getting him to the county seat where he would be tried (if Wyoming even had counties in the 1880s; he would find that out later). Drew didn’t know where old man Prescott had gotten the small army of gun thugs he was counting on to keep that move from happening, but he was sure it would come to him eventually.

Everything was eventual.

He merged onto I-95 at Gardiner. The Suburban—120K on the clock—shimmied at sixty, but once he goosed it up to seventy, the shimmy disappeared and the old girl ran smooth as silk. He still had a four-hour run ahead of him, the last hour over increasingly narrow roads culminating in the one TR locals called the Shithouse Road.

He was looking forward to the drive, but not as much as he was looking forward to opening his laptop, connecting it up to the little Hewlett-Packard printer, and creating a document he would call BITTER RIVER #1. For once, thinking about the chasm of white space under the blinking cursor didn’t fill him with a mixture of hope and fear. As he passed the Augusta town line, all he felt was impatience. This time was going to be okay. Better than okay. This time everything would come right.

He turned on the radio and began to sing along with the Who.

Late that afternoon Drew pulled up in front of TR-90’s only business, a shambling, slump-roofed establishment called the Big 90 General Store (as if somewhere there was a Small 90). He gassed the Suburban, which was almost dry, at a rusty old rotary pump where a sign announced CASH ONLY and REGULAR ONLY and “DASH-AWAYS” WILL BE PERSECUTED and GOD BLESS AMERICA. The price was $3.90 a gallon. In the north country, you paid premium prices even for regular. Drew paused on the store’s porch to lift the receiver of the bug-splattered pay phone that had been here when he was a kid, along with what he would swear was the same message, now faded almost to illegibility: DO NOT DEPOSIT COINS UNTIL YOUR PARTY ANSWERS. Drew heard the buzz of the open line, nodded, replaced the receiver in its rusty cradle, and went inside.

“Ayuh, ayuh, still works,” said the refugee from Jurassic Park sitting behind the counter. “Amazin, ain’t it.” His eyes were red, and Drew wondered if he had perhaps been smoking a little Aroostook County Gold. Then the old fella pulled a snot-clotted bandanna from his back pocket and sneezed into it. “Goddam allergies, I get em every fall.”

“Mike DeWitt, isn’t it?” Drew asked.

“Nawp, Mike was my father. He passed on in Feberary. Ninety-seven fuckin years old, and the last ten he didn’t know if he was afoot or on hossback. I’m Roy.” He stuck his hand out over the counter. Drew didn’t want to shake it—that was the one that had been manipulating the snotrag—but he had been raised to be polite, so he gave it a single pump.

DeWitt hooked his glasses down to the end of his beaky nose and studied Drew over them. “I know I look like m’dad, worse luck, and you look like yours. You are Buzzy Larson’s boy, ain’tcha? Not Ricky, t’other one.”

“That’s right. Ricky lives in Maryland now. I’m Drew.”

“Sure, that’s right. Been up with the wife and kiddies, but not for awhile. Teacher, ain’tcha?”

“Yes.” He passed DeWitt three twenties. DeWitt put them in the till and returned six limp singles.

“I heard Buzzy died.”

“He did. My mom, too.” One less question to answer.

“Sorry to hear it. What are you doing up here this time of year?”

“I’m on sabbatical. Thought I’d do a little writing.”

“Oh, ayuh? At Buzzy’s cabin?”

“If the road’s passable.” Only saying it so he wouldn’t sound like a complete flatlander. Even if the road was in bad shape, he’d find a way to bull the Suburban through. He hadn’t come this far just to turn around.

DeWitt paused to snorkel back phlegm, then said, “Well, they don’t call it Shithouse Road for nothin, you know, and there’s probably a culvert or two washed out from the spring runoff, but you got your four-wheel drive, so you should be all right. Course you know Old Bill died.”

“Yes. One of his sons dropped me a card. We couldn’t make it to the funeral. Was it his heart?”

“Head. Put a bullet through it.” Roy DeWitt said this with palpable relish. “He was comin down with the Alzheimer’s, see? Constable found a notebook in his glovebox with all kinds of stuff written down in it. Directions, phone numbers, his wife’s name. Even the fuckin dog’s name. Couldn’t take it, don’tcha see.”