Stephen King – Rest Stop
Rest Stop
He supposed that at some point between Jacksonville and Sarasota he did a literary
version of the old Clark-Kent-in-the-phone-booth routine, but he wasn’t sure just
where or how. Which suggested it wasn’t very dramatic. So did it even matter?
Sometimes he told himself the answer to that was no, the whole Rick Hardin/John
Dykstra thing was nothing but an artificial construct, pure press agentry, no different
from Archibald Bloggert (or whatever his real name might have been) performing as
Cary Grant, or Evan Hunter (whose actual birth name had been Salvatore something-
or-other) writing as Ed McBain. And those guys had been his inspiration…along with
Donald E. Westlake, who wrote hard-boiled “caper” novels as Richard Stark, and K.
C. Constantine, who was actually…well, no one really knew, did they? As was the
case with the mysterious Mr. B. Traven, who had written Treasure of the Sierra
Madre. No one really knew, and that was a large part of the fun.
Name, name, what’s in a name?
Who, for instance, was he on his biweekly ride back to Sarasota? He was Hardin
when he left the Pot o’ Gold in Jax, for sure, no doubt. And Dykstra when he let
himself into his canal-side house on Macintosh Road, certainly. But who was he on
Route 75, as he flowed from one town to the other beneath the bright turnpike lights?
Hardin? Dykstra? No one at all? Was there maybe a magic moment when the literary
werewolf who earned the big bucks turned back into the inoffensive English professor
whose specialty was twentieth-century American poets and novelists? And did it
matter as long as he was right with God, the IRS, and the occasional football players
who took one of his two survey courses?
None of that mattered just south of Ocala. What did was that he had to piss like a
racehorse, whoever he was. He’d gone two beers over his usual limit at the Pot o’
Gold (maybe three) and had set the Jag’s cruise control at sixty-five, not wanting to
see any strobing red lights in his rearview mirror tonight. He might have paid for the
Jag with books written under the Hardin name, but it was as John Andrew Dykstra
that he lived the majority of his life, and that was the name the flashlight would shine
on if he was asked for his operator’s license. And Hardin might have drunk the beers in the Pot o’ Gold, but if a Florida state trooper produced the dreaded Breathalyzer kit
in its little blue plastic case, it was Dykstra’s intoxicated molecules that would wind
up inside the gadget’s educated guts. And on a Thursday night in June, he would be
easy pickings no matter who he was, because all the snowbirds had gone back to
Michigan and he had I-75 pretty much to himself.
Yet there was a fundamental problem with beer any undergraduate understood: You
couldn’t buy it, only rent it. Luckily, there was a rest stop just six or seven miles south of Ocala, and there he would make a little room.
Meanwhile, though, who was he?
Certainly he had come to Sarasota sixteen years before as John Dykstra, and it was
under that name that he had taught English at the Sarasota branch of FSU since 1990.
Then, in 1994, he’d decided to skip teaching summer classes and have a fling at
writing a suspense novel instead. This had not been his idea. He had an agent in New
York, not one of the superstuds, but an honest enough guy with a reasonable track
record, who had been able to sell four of his new client’s short stories (under the
Dykstra name) to various literary magazines that paid in the low hundreds. The agent’s name was Jack Golden, and while he had nothing but praise for the stories, he
dismissed the resulting checks as “grocery money.” It had been Jack who’d pointed
out that all John Dykstra’s published stories had “a high narrative line” (which was
agentese for a plot, as far as Johnny could tell) and suggested his new client might be
able to make $40,000 or $50,000 a whack writing suspense novels of a hundred