Стивен Кинг - If It Bleeds

Take your pick.

To: drew1981@gmail.com

January 19, 2019

Drew, my love—How great to hear from you, I thought you were dead and I missed the obituary! (Joking! ☺) A novel after all these years, how exciting. Send it posthaste, dear, and we’ll see what can be done. Although I must warn you the market is barely making half-steam these days unless it’s a book about Trump and his cohorts.

XXX,

Ellie

To: drew1981@gmail.com

February 1, 2019

Drew! I finished last night! The book is WUNDERBAR! I hope you aren’t planning to get fabuloso rich from it, but I’m sure it will be published, and I feel I can get a decent advance. Perhaps more than decent. An auction is not entirely out of the question. Plus-plus-plus I feel that this book could (and should) be a reputation-maker. I believe when it’s published, the reviews of Bitter River will be sweet indeed. Thank you for a wonderful visit in the old west!

XXX,

Ellie

PS: You left me hanging! Did that rat of a rancher actually shoot Jim Averill????

E

There was indeed an auction for Bitter River . It happened on March 15th, the same day the season’s final storm hit New England (Winter Storm Tania, according to the Weather Channel). Three of New York’s Big Five publishers participated, and Putnam came out the winner. The advance was $350,000. Not Dan Brown or John Grisham numbers, but enough, as Lucy said while she hugged him, to put Bran and Stacey through college. She broke out a bottle of Dom Pérignon, which she had been saving (hopefully). This was at three o’clock, while they still felt like celebrating.

They toasted the book, and the book’s author, and the book’s author’s wife, and the amazing wonderful kids that had sprung from the loins of the book’s author and the book’s author’s wife, and were fairly tipsy when the phone rang at four. It was Kelly Fontaine, the English Department’s administrative assistant since time out of mind. She was in tears. Al and Nadine Stamper were dead.

He had been scheduled for tests at Maine Medical that day ( tests every three weeks for the first year , Drew remembered him saying). “He could have put the appointment off,” Kelly said, “but you know Al, and Nadine was the same way. A little snow wasn’t going to stop them.”

The accident happened on 295, less than a mile from Maine Med. A semi skidded on the ice, sideswiping Nadie Stamper’s little Prius and flicking it like a tiddlywink. It turned over and landed on the roof.

“Oh my God,” Lucy said. “Both of them, gone. How horrible is that? And when he was getting better!”

“Yes,” Drew said. He felt numb. “He was, wasn’t he?” Except, of course, he had that damn rat to contend with. He’d said so himself.

“You need to sit down,” Lucy said. “You’re as pale as windowglass.”

But sitting down wasn’t what Drew needed, at least not first. He rushed to the kitchen sink and vomited up the champagne. As he hung there, still heaving, barely aware of Lucy rubbing his back, he thought, Ellie says the book will be published next February. Between now and then I’ll do whatever the editor tells me, and all the publicity they want once the book comes out. I’ll play the game. I’ll do it for Lucy and the kids. But there’s never going to be another one.

“Never,” he said.

“What, honey?” She was still rubbing his back.

“The pancreatic. I thought that would get him, it gets almost everybody. I never expected anything like this.” He rinsed his mouth from the faucet, spat. “Never.”

The funeral—which Drew couldn’t help thinking of as the FUNNERAL—was held four days after the accident. Al’s younger brother asked Drew if he would say a few words. Drew declined, saying he was still too shocked to be articulate. He was shocked, no doubt about it, but his real fear was that the words would turn treacherous as they had on Village and the two aborted books before it. He was afraid—really, actually afraid—that if he stood at the podium before a chapel filled with grieving relatives, friends, colleagues, and students, what might spill from his mouth was The rat! It was the fucking rat! And I turned it loose!

Lucy cried all through the service. Stacey cried with her, not because she knew the Stampers well but in sympathy with her mother. Drew sat silent, with his arm around Brandon. He looked not at the two coffins but at the choir loft. He was sure he would see a rat running a victory lap along the polished mahogany rail up there, but he didn’t. Of course he didn’t. There was no rat. As the service wound down, he realized he’d been stupid to think there might be. He knew where the rat was, and that place was miles from here.

In August (and a mighty hot August it was), Lucy decided to take the kids down to Little Compton, Rhode Island, to spend a couple of weeks at the shore with her parents and her sister’s family, leaving Drew a quiet house where he could work through the copyedited manuscript of Bitter River . He said he would break the work in half, taking a day in the middle to drive up to Pop’s cabin. He would spend the night, he said, and come back the following day to resume work on the manuscript. They had hired Jack Colson—Young Jackie—to truck away the remains of the smashed shed; Jackie in turn had hired his ma to clean the cabin. Drew said he wanted to see what kind of job they’d done. And to retrieve his watch.

“Sure you don’t want to start a new book there?” Lucy asked, smiling. “I wouldn’t mind. The last one turned out pretty well.”

Drew shook his head. “Nothing like that. I was thinking we ought to sell the place, hon. I’m really going up there to say goodbye.”

The signs on the gas pump at the Big 90 were the same: CASH ONLY and REGULAR ONLY and “DASH-AWAYS” WILL BE PERSECUTED and GOD BLESS AMERICA. The scrawny young woman behind the counter was also pretty much the same; the chrome stud was gone but the nose ring was still there. And she’d gone blond. Presumably because blonds had more fun.

“You again,” she said. “Only you changed your ride, seems like. Didn’t you have a ’Burban?”

Drew glanced out at the Chevy Equinox—purchased outright, still less than 7,000 miles on the clock—standing at the single rusting pump. “The Suburban was never really the same after my last trip up here,” he said. Actually, neither was I .

“Gonna be up there long?”

“No, not this time. I was sorry to hear about Roy.”

“Should have gone to the doctor. Let it be a lesson to you. Need anything else?”

Drew bought some bread, some lunchmeat, and a sixpack.

All the blowdown had been trucked away from the dooryard, and the equipment shed was gone as if it had never been. Young Jackie had sodded the ground and fresh grass was growing there. Also some cheery flowers. The warped porch steps had been repaired and there were a couple of new chairs, just cheap stuff from the Presque Isle Walmart, probably, but not bad looking.

Inside, the cabin was neat and freshened up. The woodstove’s isinglass window had been cleaned of soot and the stove itself gleamed. So did the windows, the dining table, and the pine-plank floor, which looked as if it had been oiled as well as washed. The refrigerator was once more unplugged and standing open, once more empty except for a box of Arm & Hammer. Probably a fresh one. It was clear that Old Bill’s widow had done a bang-up job.