Skeleton Crew by Stephen King

“I went around to the driver’s door and opened it. The inside light come on, and I looked at that special odometer that she set for trips . . . and what I seen there was 31.6.

“I looked at that for a bit, and then I went to the back door. She’d forced the screen and broke the glass by the lock so she could get her hand through and let herself in. There was a note that said: ‘Dear Homer—got here a little sooner than I thought I would. Found a shortcut, and it is a dilly! You hadn’t come yet so I let myself in like a burglar. Worth is coming day after tomorrow. Can you get the screen fixed and the door reglazed by then? Hope so. Things like that always bother him. If I don’t come out to say hello, you’ll know I’m asleep. The drive was very tiring, but I was here in no time! Ophelia.’ ‘ ‘Tirin! I took another look at that bogey-thing hangin offa the grille of her car, and I thought Yessir, it must have been tiring. By God, yes.” He paused again, and cracked a restless knuckle. “I seen her only once more. About a week later.

Worth was there, but he was swimmin out in the lake, back and forth, back and forth, like he was sawin wood or signin papers. More like he was signin papers, I guess.

” ‘Missus,’ I says, ‘this ain’t my business, but you ought to leave well enough alone. That night you corne back and broke the glass of the door to come in, I seen somethin hangin off the front of your car—’

” ‘Oh, the chuck! I took care of that,’ she says. ” ‘Christ!’ I says. ‘I hope you took some care!’ ” ‘I wore Worth’s gardening gloves,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t anything anyway, Homer, but a jumped-up woodchuck with a little poison in it.’

” ‘But missus,’ I says, ‘where there’s woodchucks there’s bears. And if that’s what the woodchucks look like along your shortcut, what’s going to happen to you if a bear shows up?’

“She looked at me, and I seen that other woman in her—that Diana-woman. She says, ‘If things are different along those roads, Homer, maybe I am different, too. Look at this.’

“Her hair was done up in a clip at the back, looked sort of like a butterfly and had a stick through it.

She let it down. It was the kind of hair that would make a man wonder what it would look like spread out over a pillow. She says, ‘It was coming in gray, Homer. Do you see any gray?’ And she spread it with her fingers so the sun could shine on it.

” ‘No’m,’ I says.

“She looks at me, her eyes all a-sparkle, and she says, ‘Your wife is a good woman, Homer Buckland, but she has seen me in the store and in the post office, and we’ve passed the odd word or two, and I have seen her looking at my hair in a kind of satisfied way that only women know. I know what she says, and what she tells her friends . . . that Ophelia Todd has started dyeing her hair. But I have not. I have lost my way looking for a shortcut more than once . . . lost my way . . . and lost my gray.’ And she laughed, not like a college girl but like a girl in high school. I admired her and longed for her beauty, but I seen that other beauty in her face as well just then . . . and I felt afraid again. Afraid for her, and afraid of her.

” ‘Missus,’ I says, ‘you stand to lose more than a little sta’ch in your hair.’

” ‘No,’ she says. ‘I tell you I am different over there … I am all myself over there. When I am going along that road in my little car I am not Ophelia Todd, Worth Todd’s wife who could never carry a child to term, or that woman who tried to write poetry and failed at it, or the woman who sits and takes notes in committee meetings, or anything or anyone else. When I am on that road I am in the heart of myself, and I feel like—’

” ‘Diana,’ I said.

“She looked at me kind of funny and kind of surprised, and then she laughed. ‘O like some goddess, I suppose,’ she said. ‘She will do better than most because I am a night person—I love to stay up until my book is done or until the National Anthem comes on the TV, and because I am very pale, like the moon—Worth is always saying I need a tonic, or blood tests or some sort of similar bosh. But in her heart what every woman wants to be is some kind of goddess, I think—men pick up a ruined echo of that thought and try to put them on pedestals (a woman, who will pee down her own leg if she does not squat! it’s funny when you stop to think of it)—but what a man senses is not what a woman wants. A woman wants to be in the clear, is all. To stand if she will, or walk …” Her eyes turned toward that little go-devil in the driveway, and narrowed. Then she smiled. ‘Or to drive, Homer. A man will not see that. He thinks a goddess wants to loll on a slope somewhere on the foothills of Olympus and eat fruit, but there is no god or goddess in that. All a woman wants is what a man wants—a woman wants to drive.’

” ‘Be careful where you drive, missus, is all,’ I says, and she laughs and give me a kiss spang in the middle of the forehead.

“She says, ‘I will, Homer,’ but it didn’t mean nothing, and I known it, because she said it like a man who says he’ll be careful to his wife or his girl when he knows he won’t . . . can’t.

“I went back to my truck and waved to her once, and it was a week later that Worth reported her missing. Her and that go-devil both. Todd waited seven years and had her declared legally dead, and then he waited another year for good measure—I’ll give the sucker that much—and then he married the second Missus Todd. the one that just went by. And I don’t expect you’ll believe a single damn word of the whole yarn.” In the sky one of those big flat-bottomed clouds moved enough to disclose the ghost of the moon— half-full and pale as milk. And something in my heart leaped up at the sight, half in fright, half in love.

“I do though,” I said. “Every frigging damned word. And even if it ain’t true, Homer, it ought to be.” He give me a hug around the neck with his forearm, which is all men can do since the world don’t let them kiss but only women, and laughed, and got up.

“Even if it shouldn’t ought to be, it is,” he said. He got his watch out of his pants and looked at it. “I got to go down the road and check on the Scott place. You want to come?”

“I believe I’ll sit here for a while,” I said, “and think.” He went to the steps, then turned back and looked at me, half-smiling. “I believe she was right,” he said. “She was different along those roads she found . . . wasn’t nothing that would dare touch her.

You or me, maybe, but not her.

“And I believe she’s young.” Then he got in his truck and set off to check the Scott place.

That was two years ago, and Homer has since gone to Vermont, as I think I told you. One night he come over to see me. His hair was combed, he had a shave, and he smelled of some nice lotion. His face was clear and his eyes were alive. That night he looked sixty instead of seventy, and I was glad for him and I envied him and I hated him a little, too. Arthritis is one buggardly great old fisherman, and that night Homer didn’t look like arthritis had any fishhooks sunk into his hands the way they were sunk into mine.

“I’m going,” he said.

“Ayuh?”

“Ayuh.”

“All right; did you see to forwarding your mail?”

“Don’t want none forwarded,” he said. “My bills are paid. I am going to make a clean break.”

“Well, give me your address. I’ll drop you a line from one time to the another, old hoss.” Already I could feel loneliness settling over me like a cloak . . . and looking at him, I knew that things were not quite what they seemed.

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