Chris had been finishing his second year of graduate studies. Me, I had been married a year and a half and was teaching high school English. My wife was pregnant and I
was trying to write a book. When I read the news item–STUDENT FATALLY
STABBED IN PORTLAND RESTAURANT -I told my wife I was going out for a
milkshake. I drove out of town, parked, and cried for him. Cried for damn near half an hour, I guess. I couldn’t have done that in front of my wife, much as I love her. It
would have been pussy.
34
‘I’m a writer now, like I said. A lot of the critics think what I write is shit. A lot of the time I think they are right… but it still freaks me out to put those words, ‘Freelance Writer’, down in the Occupation blank of the forms you have to fill out at credit desks and in doctors’ offices. My story sounds so much like a fairytale that it’s fucking
absurd. I sold the book and it was made into a movie and the movie got good reviews
and it was a smash hit besides. This all had happened by the time I was twenty-six.
The second book was made into a movie as well, as was the third. I told you–it’s
fucking absurd. Meantime, my wife doesn’t seem to mind having me around the house
and we have three kids now. They all seem perfect to me, and most of the time I’m
happy. But the writing isn’t so easy or as much fun as it used to be. The phone rings a lot. Sometimes I get headaches, bad ones, and then I have to go into a dim room and
lie down until they go away. The doctor says they aren’t true migraines; he called
them ‘stressaches’ and told me to slow down. I worry about myself sometimes. What a
stupid habit that is… and yet I can’t quite seem to stop it. And I wonder if there is really any point in what I’m doing, or what I’m supposed to make of a world where a
man can get sick playing ‘let’s pretend!.
But it’s funny how I saw Ace Merrill again. My friends are dead but Ace is
alive. I saw him pulling out of the mill parking lot just after the three o’clock whistle the last time I took my kids down home to see my dad.
The ’52 Ford had become a ’77 Ford station wagon. A faded bumper-sticker
said REAGAN/BUSH 1980. His hair was mowed into a crewcut and he’d gotten fat.
The sharp. handsome features I remembered were now buried in an avalanche of flesh.
I had left the kids with dad long enough to go downtown and get the paper. I was
standing on the corner of Main and Carbine and he glanced at me as I waited to cross.
There was no sign of recognition on the face of this thirty-two-year-old man who had
broken my nose in another dimension of time.
I watched him wheel the Ford wagon into the dirt parking lot beside the
Mellow Tiger, get out, hitch at his pants, and walk inside. I could imagine the brief
wedge of country-western as he opened the door, the brief sour whiff of Knick and
Gansett on draught, the welcoming shouts of the other regulars as he closed the door
and placed his large ass on the same stool which had probably held him up for at least three hours every day of his life–except Sundays–since he was twenty-one. I thought: So that’s what Ace is now.
I looked to the left, and beyond the mill I could see the Castle River, not so
wide now but a little cleaner, still flowing under the bridge between Castle Rock and
Harlow. The trestle upstream is gone now, but the river is still around. So am I.
The End