He winced and looked away from her.
He’s a baby, too, Patsy said hopelessly. I mean, really.
No, he’s not. He’s sensitive, that’s all. And his resistance is low.
She fished in her uniform pocket. Paul? Want this?
He looked back at her, saw the quarter, and smiled a little.
What are you going to do with it, Paul? Patsy asked him as he took it. Take Deirdre McCausland out on a date? She snickered.
I’ll thing of subthing, Paul said.
Leave him alone, Darlene said. Don’t bug him for a little while.
Could you do that?
Yeah – but what do I get? Patsy asked her. I walked him over here safe – I always walk him safe -so what do I get?
Braces, Darlene thought, if I can ever afford them. And she was suddenly overwhelmed by unhappiness, by a sense of life as some vast cold junk pile – deluminum slag, perhaps – that was always looming over you, always waiting to fall, cutting you to screaming ribbons even before it crushed the life out of you. Luck was a joke.
Even good luck was just bad luck with its hair combed.
Mom? Mommy? Patsy sounded suddenly concerned. I don’t want anything. I was just kidding around, you know.
I’ve got a Sassy for you, Darlene said. I found it in one of my rooms and put it in my locker.
This month’s? Patsy sounded suspicious.
Actually this month’s. Come on.
They were halfway across the room when they heard the drop of the coin and the unmistakable ratchet of the handle and whir of the drums as Paul pulled the handle of the slot machine beside the
desk, then let it go.
Oh, you dumb hoser! You’re in trouble now, Patsy cried. She did not sound exactly unhappy about it. How many times has Mom told you not to throw your money away on stuff like that? Slots’re for the tourists!
But Darlene didn’t even turn around. She stood looking at the door that led back to the maids’ country, where the cheap cloth coats from Ames and Wal-Mart hung in a row like dreams that have grown seedy and been discarded, where the time clock ticked, where the air always smelled of Melissa’s perfume and Jane’s Ben-Gay. She stood listening to the drums whir, she stood waiting for the rattle of coins into the tray, and by the time they began to fall she was already thinking about how she could ask Melissa to watch the kids while she went down to the casino. It wouldn’t take long.
Lucky me, she thought, and closed her eyes. In the darkness behind her lids, the sound of the falling coins seemed very loud. It sounded like metal slag falling on top of a coffin.
It was all going to happen just the way she had imagined – she was somehow sure that it was – and yet that image of life as a huge slag heap, a pile of alien metal, remained. It was like an indelible stain that you know will never come out of some favorite piece of clothing.
Yet Patsy needed braces, Paul needed to see a doctor about his constantly running nose and constantly watering eyes, he needed a Sega system the way Patsy needed some colorful underwear that would make her feel funny and sexy, and she needed what? What did she need? Deke back?
Sure. Deke back, she thought, almost laughing. I need him back
like I need puberty back, or labor pains. I need well (nothing) Yes, that was right. Nothing, zero, empty, adios. Black days, empty nights, and laughing all the way.
I don’t need anything, because I’m lucky, she thought, her eyes still closed. Tears, squeezing out from beneath her closed lids, while behind her Patsy was screaming at the top of her lungs.
Oh, my God! Oh, you booger, you hit the jackpot. Paulie! You hit the damn jackpot!
Lucky, Darlene thought. So lucky. Oh, lucky me.
STEPHEN
KING
THE MAN IN THE BLACK SUIT
I am now a very old man and this is something that happened to me when I was very young–only nine years old. It was 1914, the summer after my brother, Dan, died in the west field and not long before America got into the First World War. I’ve never told anyone about what happened at the fork in the stream that day, and I never will. I’ve decided to write it down, though, in this book, which I will leave on the table beside my bed. I can’t write long, because my hands shake so these days and I have next to no strength, but I don’t think it will take long.
Later, someone may find what I have written. That seems likely to me, as it is pretty much human nature to look in a book marked
“Diary” after its owner has passed along. So, yes–my works will probably be read. A better question is whether anyone will believe them. Almost certainly not, but that doesn’t matter. It’s not belief I’m interested in but freedom. Writing can give that, I’ve found.
For twenty years I wrote a column called “Long Ago and Far Away” for the Castle Rock Call, and I know that sometimes it works that way–what you write down sometimes leaves you forever, like old photographs left in the bright sun, fading to nothing but white.
I pray for that sort of release.
A man in his eighties should be well past the terrors of childhood, but as my infirmities slowly creep up on me, like waves licking closer and closer to some indifferently built castle of sand, that terrible face grows clearer and clearer in my mind’s eye. It glows like a dark star in the constellations of my childhood. What I might have done yesterday, who I might have seen here in my room at the nursing home, what I might have said to them or they to my–
those things are gone, but the face of the man in the black suit grows ever clearer, ever closer, and I remember every word he said. I don’t want to think of him but I can’t help it, and sometimes
at night my old heart beats so hard and so fast I think it will tear itself right clear of my chest. So I uncap my fountain pen and force my trembling old hank to write this pointless anecdote in the diary one of my great-grandchildren–I can’t remember her name for sure, at least not right now, But I know it starts with an “S”–gave to me last Christmas, and which I have never written in until now.
Now I will write in it. I will write the story of how I met the man in the black suit on the bank of Castle Stream one afternoon in the summer of 1914.
The town of Motton was a different world in those days–more different than I could ever tell you. That was a world without airplanes droning overhead, a world almost without cars and trucks, a world where the skies were not cut into lanes and slices by overhead power lines. There was not a single paved road in the whole town, and the business district consisted of nothing but Corson’s General Store, Thut’s Livery & Hardware, the Methodist church at Christ’s Corner, the school, the town hall, and half a mile down from there, Harry’s Restaurant, which my mother called, with unfailing disdain, “the liquor house.”
Mostly, though, the difference was in how people lived–how apart they were. I’m not sure people born after the middle of the century could quite credit that, although they might say they could, to be polite to old folks like me. There were no phones in western Maine back then, for one thing. The first on wouldn’t be installed for another five years, and by the time there was a phone in our house, I was nineteen and going to college at the University of Maine in Orono.
But that is only the roof of the thing. There was no doctor closer than Casco, and there were no more than a dozen houses in what you would call town. There were no neighborhoods (I’m not even sure we knew the work, although we had a verb–“neighboring”–
that described church functions and barn dances), and open fields were the exception rather than the rule. Out of town the houses
were farms that stood far apart from each other, and from December until the middle of March we mostly hunkered down in the little pockets of stove warmth we called families. We hunkered and listened to the wind in the chimney and hoped no one would get sick or break a leg or get a headful of bad ideas, like the farmer over in Castle Rock who had chopped up his wife and kids three winters before and then said in court that the ghosts made him do it. In those days before the Great War, most of Motton was woods and bog–dark long places full of moose and mosquitoes, snakes and secrets. In those days there were ghosts everywhere.