The coroner’s verdict had been accidental death.
255
STEPHEN KING
Professor Ann Tevitch, a clinical biologist, had been in the fore-front of West Coast AIDS research. Another scientist, this one in Cal-ifornia, said that her death might set back the search for a cure five years. “She was a key player,” he said. “Smart, yes, but more—I once heard someone refer to her as ‘a natural-born facilitator,’ and that’s as good a description as any. Ann was the kind of person who holds other people together. Her death is a great loss to the dozens of people who knew and loved her, but it’s an even greater loss to this cause.”
Billy Unger was also easy enough to find. His picture topped page one of the Stovington Weekly Courant instead of getting stuck down there in The Dead Folks’ Nook, but that might have been because there weren’t many famous people in Stovington. Unger had been General William “Roll Em” Unger, winner of the Silver Star and Bronze Star in Korea. During the Kennedy administration he was an Undersecretary of Defense (Acquisition Reform), and one of the really big war-hawks of that time. Kill the Russkies, drink their blood, keep America safe for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, that sort of thing.
Then, around the time Lyndon Johnson was escalating the war in Vietnam, Billy Unger had a change of mind and heart. He began writing letters to newspapers. He started his op-ed page career by saying that we were handling the war wrong. He progressed to the idea that we were wrong to be in Vietnam at all. Then, around 1975 or so, he got to the point of saying all wars were wrong. That was okay with most Vermonters.
He served seven terms in the state legislature, starting in 1978.
When a group of Progressive Democrats asked him to run for the U.S.
Senate in 1996, he said he wanted to “do some reading and consider his options.” The implication was that he would be ready for a national career in politics by 2000, 2002 at the latest. He was getting old, but Vermonters like old guys, I guess. 1996 went past without Unger declaring himself a candidate for anything (possibly because his wife died of cancer), and before 2002 came around, he bought himself a big old dirt sandwich and ate every bite.
256
EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL
There was a small but loyal contingent in Stovington which claimed Roll Em’s death was an accident, that Silver Star winners don’t jump off their roofs even if they have lost a wife to cancer in the last year or so, but the rest pointed out that the guy probably hadn’t been repairing the shingles—not in his nightshirt, not at two o’clock in the morning.
Suicide was the verdict.
Yeah. Right. Kiss my ass and go to Heaven.
XVIII
I left the library and thought I’d head home. Instead, I went back to the same park bench again. I sat there until the sun was low and the place had pretty much emptied out of kids and Frisbee-catching dogs.
And although I’d been in Columbia City for three months by then, it was the latest I’d ever been out. That’s sad, I guess. I thought I was living a life here, finally getting away from Ma and living a life, but all I’ve been doing is throwing a shadow.
If people, certain people, were checking up on me, they might wonder why the change in routine. So I got up, went on home, boiled up a bag of that shit-on-a-shingle stuff, and turned on my TV. I’ve got cable, the full package including premium movie channels, and I’ve never seen a single bill. How’s that for an eventual deal? I turned on Cinemax. Rutger Hauer was playing a blind karate-fighter. I sat down on the couch beneath my fake Rembrandt and watched the show. I didn’t see it, but I ate my chow and looked at it.
I thought about stuff. About a newspaper columnist who had liberal ideas and a conservative readership. About an AIDS researcher who served an important linking function with other AIDS
researchers. About an old general who changed his mind. I thought about the fact that I only knew these three by name because they didn’t have modems and e-mail capability.