by Stephen King
Nobody wants to give a fella a ride in town, the old man with the truss had said, and how true that was. I walked all the way across Lewiston— three dozen blocks of Lisbon Street and nine blocks of Canal Street, past all the bottle clubs with the jukeboxes playing old songs by Foreigner and Led Zeppelin and AC/DC in French—without putting my thumb out a single time. It would have done no good. It was well past eleven before I reached the DeMuth Bridge. Once I was on the Harlow side, the first car I raised my thumb to stopped. Forty minutes later I was fishing the key out from under the red wheelbarrow by the door to the back shed, and ten minutes after that I was in bed. It occurred to me as I dropped off that it was the first time in my life I’d slept in that house all by myself.
It was the phone that woke me up at quarter past noon. I thought it would be the hospital, someone from the hospital saying my mother had taken a sudden turn for the worse and had passed away only a few minutes ago, so sorry. But it was only Mrs. McCurdy, wanting to be sure I’d gotten home all right, wanting to know all the details of my visit the night before (she took me through it three times, and by the end of the third recitation I had begun to feel like a criminal being interrogated on a murder charge), also wanting to know if I’d like to ride up to the hospital with her that afternoon. I told her that would be great.
When I hung up, I crossed the room to the bedroom door. Here was a full-length mirror. In it was a tall, unshaven young man with a small potbelly, dressed only in baggy undershorts. “You have to get it together, big boy,” I told my reflection. “Can’t go through the rest of your life thinking that every time the phone rings it’s someone calling to tell you your mother’s dead.”
Not that I would. Time would dull the memory, time always did … but it was amazing how real and immediate the night before still seemed. Every edge and corner was sharp and clear. I could still see Staub’s good-looking young face beneath his turned-around cap, and the cigarette behind his ear, and the way the smoke had seeped out of the incision on his neck when he inhaled. I could still hear him telling the story of the Cadillac that was selling cheap. Time would blunt the edges and round the corners, but not for awhile. After all, I had the button, it was on the dresser by the bathroom door. The button was my souvenir. Didn’t the hero of every ghost-story come away with a souvenir, something that proved it had all really happened?
There was an ancient stereo system in the corner of the room, and I shuffled through my old tapes, hunting for something to listen to while I shaved. I found one marked FOLK MIX and put it in the tape player. I’d made it in high school and could barely remember what was on it. Bob Dylan sang about the lonesome death of Hattie Carroll, Tom Paxton sang about his own ramblin’ pal, and then Dave Van Ronk started to sing about the cocaine blues. Halfway through the third verse I paused with my razor by my cheek. Got a headful of whiskey and a bellyful of gin, Dave sang in his rasping voice. Doctor say it kill me but he don’t say when. And that was the answer, of course. A guilty conscience had led me to assume that my mother would die immediately, and Staub had never corrected that assump tion—how could he, when I had never even asked?—but it clearly wasn’t true.
Doctor say it kill me but he don’t say when.
What in God’s name was I beating myself up about? Didn’t my choice amount to no more than the natural order of things? Didn’t children usually outlive their parents? The son of a bitch had tried to scare me—to guilt-trip me—but I didn’t have to buy what he was selling, did I? Didn’t we all ride the Bullet in the end?
You’re just trying to let yourself off. Trying to find a way to make it okay. Maybe what you’re thinking is true … but when he asked you to choose, you chose her. There’s no way to think your way around that, buddy—you chose her.
I opened my eyes and looked at my face in the mirror. “I did what I had to,” I said. I didn’t quite believe it, but in time I supposed I would.
Mrs. McCurdy and I went up to see my mother and my mother was a little better. I asked her if she remembered her dream about Thrill Village, in Laconia. She shook her head. “I barely remember you coming in last night,” she said. “I was awful sleepy. Does it matter?”
“Nope,” I said, and kissed her temple. “Not a bit.”
My Ma got out of the hospital five days later. She walked with a limp for a little while, but that went away and a month later she was back at work again—only half shifts at first but then full-time, just as if nothing had happened. I returned to school and got a job at Pat’s Pizza in downtown Orono. The money wasn’t great, but it was enough to get my car fixed. That was good; I’d lost what little taste for hitchhiking I’d ever had.
My mother tried to quit smoking and for a little while she did. Then I came back from school for April vacation a day early, and the kitchen was just as smoky as it had ever been. She looked at me with eyes that were both ashamed and defiant. “I can’t,” she said. “I’m sorry, Al—I know you want me to and I know I should, but there’s such a hole in my life without it. Nothing fills it. The best I can do is wish I’d never started in the first place.”
Two weeks after I graduated from college, my Ma had another stroke—just a little one. She tried to quit smoking again when the doctor scolded her, then put on fifty pounds and went back to the tobacco. “As a dog returneth to its vomit,” the Bible says; I’ve always liked that one. I got a pretty good job in Portland on my first try— lucky, I guess—and started the work of convincing her to quit her own job. It was a tough sled at first. I might have given up in disgust, but I had a certain memory that kept me digging away at her Yankee defenses.
“You ought to be saving for your own life, not taking care of me,” she said. “You’ll want to get married someday, Al, and what you spend on me you won’t have for that. For your real life.”
“You’re my real life,” I said, and kissed her. “You can like it or lump it, but that’s just the way it is.”
And finally she threw in the towel.
We had some pretty good years after that—seven of them in all. I didn’t live with her, but I visited her almost every day. We played a lot of gin rummy and watched a lot of movies on the video recorder I bought her. Had a bucketload of laughs, as she liked to say. I don’t know if I owe those years to George Staub or not, but they were good years. And my memory of the night I met Staub never faded and grew dreamlike, as I always expected it would; every incident, from the old man telling me to wish on the harvest moon to the fingers fumbling at my shirt as Staub passed his button on to me, remained perfectly clear. And there came a day when I could no longer find that button. I knew I’d had it when I’d moved into my little apartment in Falmouth—I kept it in the top drawer of my bedside table, along with a couple of combs, my two sets of cufflinks, and an old political button that said BILL CLINTON, THE SAFE SAX PRESIDENT—but then it came up missing. And when the telephone rang a day or two later, I knew why Mrs. McCurdy was crying. It was the bad news I’d never quite stopped expecting; fun is fun and done is done.
*
When the funeral was over, and the wake, and the seemingly endless line of mourners had finally come to its end, I went back to the little house in Harlow where my mother had spent her final few years, smoking and eating powdered doughnuts. It had been Jean and Alan Parker against the world; now it was just me.
I went through her personal effects, putting aside the few papers that would have to be dealt with later, boxing up the things I’d want to keep on one side of the room and the things I’d want to give away to the Goodwill on the other. Near the end of the job I got down on my knees and looked under her bed and there it was, what I’d been looking for all along without quite admitting it to myself: a dusty button reading I RODE THE BULLET AT THRILL VILLAGE, LACONIA. I curled my fist tight around it. The pin dug into my flesh and I squeezed my hand even tighter, taking a bitter pleasure in the pain. When I rolled my fingers open again, my eyes had filled with tears and the words on the button had doubled, overlaying each other
in a shimmer. It was like looking at a 3-D movie without the glasses.
“Are you satisfied?” I asked the silent room. “Is it enough?” There was no answer, of course. “Why did you even bother? What was the goddam point?”
Still no answer, and why would there be? You wait in line, that’s all. You wait in line beneath the moon and make your wishes by its infected light. You wait in line and listen to them screaming—they pay to be terrified, and on the Bullet they always get their money’s worth. Maybe when it’s your turn you ride; maybe you run. Either way it comes to the same, I think. There ought to be more to it, but there’s really not—fun is fun and done is done.
Take your button and get out of here.
Luckey Quarter
In the fall of 1996, I crossed the United States from Maine to California on my Harley-Davidson motorcycle, stopping at independent bookstores to promote a novel called Insomnia. It was a great trip. The high point was probably sitting on the stoop of an abandoned general store in Kansas, watching the sun go down in the west as the full moon rose in the east. I thought of a scene in Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides where the same thing happens, and an enraptured child cries out, “Oh, Mama, do it again!” Later, in Nevada, I stayed in a ramshackle hotel where the turn-down maids left two-dollar slots chips on the pillow. Beside each chip was a little card that said something like, “Hi, I’m Marie, Good Luck!” This story came to mind. I wrote it longhand, on hotel stationery.
——
“Oh you cheap son of a bitch!” she cried in the empty hotel room, more in surprise than in anger.
Then—it was the way she was built—Darlene Pullen started to laugh. She sat down in the chair beside the rumpled, abandoned bed with the quarter in one hand and the envelope it had fallen out of in the other, looking back and forth between them and laughing until tears spilled from her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. Patsy, her older kid, needed braces. Darlene had absolutely no idea how she was going to pay for them, she had been worried about it all week, and if this wasn’t the final straw, what was? And if you couldn’t laugh, what could you do? Find a gun and shoot yourself?
Different girls had different places to leave the all-important envelope, which they called “the honeypot.” Gerda, the Swede who’d been a downtown corner-girl before finding Jesus the previous summer at a revival meeting in Tahoe, propped hers up against one of the bathroom glasses; Melissa put hers under the TV controller. Darlene always leaned hers against the telephone, and when she came in this morning and found 322’s on the pillow instead, she had known he’d left something for her.
Yes, he certainly had. A little copper sandwich, one quarter-dollar, In God We Trust.
Her laughter, which had been tapering off to giggles, broke out in full spate again.
There was printed matter on the front of the honeypot, plus the hotel’s logo: the silhouettes of a horse and rider on top of a bluff, enclosed in a diamond shape.
Welcome to Carson City, the friendliest town in Nevada! [said the words below the logo]. And welcome to The Rancher’s Hotel, the friendliest lodging in Carson City! Your room was made up by Darlene. If anything’s wrong, please dial 0 and we’ll put it right “pronto.” This envelope is provided should you find everything right and care to leave a little “extra something” for this chambermaid.
Once again, welcome to Carson, and welcome to the Rancher’s.
William Avery
Trail-Boss
Quite often the honeypot was empty—she had found envelopes torn up in the wastebasket, crumpled up in the corner (as if the idea of tipping the chambermaid actually infuriated some guests), floating in the toilet bowl—but sometimes there was a nice little surprise in there, especially if the slot machines or the gaming tables had been kind to a guest. And 322 had certainly used his; he’d left her a quarter, by God! That would take care of Patsy’s braces and get that Sega game system Paul wanted with all his heart. He wouldn’t even have to wait until Christmas, he could have it as a … a …
“A Thanksgiving present,” she said. “Sure, why not? And I’ll pay off the cable people, so we won’t have to give it up after all, we’ll even add the Disney Channel, and I can finally go see a doctor about my back … shit, I’m rich. If I could find you, mister, I’d drop down on my knees and kiss your fucking feet.”
No chance of that; 322 was long gone. The Rancher’s probably was the best lodging in Carson City, but the trade was still almost entirely transient. When Darlene came in the back door at seven A.M., they were getting up, shaving, taking their showers, in some cases medicating their hangovers; while she was in Housekeeping with Gerda, Melissa, and Jane (the head housekeeper, she of the formidable gunshell tits and set, red-painted mouth), first drinking coffee, then filling her cart and getting ready for the day, the truckers and cowboys and salesmen were checking out, their honeypot envelopes either filled or unfilled.
322, that gent, had dropped a quarter in his. And probably left her a little something on his sheets as well, not to mention a souvenir or two in the unflushed toilet. Because some people couldn’t seem to stop giving. It was just their nature.
Darlene sighed, wiped her wet cheeks with the hem of her apron, and squeezed open the envelope—322 had actually gone to the trouble of sealing it, and she’d ripped off the end in her eagerness to see what was inside. She meant to drop the quarter back into it, then saw there was something inside: a scrawled note written on a sheet from the desk-pad. She fished it out.
Below the horse-and-rider logo and the words JUST A NOTE FROM THE RANCH, 322 had printed nine words, working with a blunttipped pencil:
This is a luckey quarter! Its true! Luckey you!
“Good deal!” Darlene said. “I got a couple of kids and a husband five years late home from work and I could use a little luck. Honest to God I could.” Then she laughed again—a short snort—and dropped the quarter into the envelope. She went into the bathroom and peeped into the toilet. Nothing there but clean water, and that was something.
She went about her chores, and they didn’t take long. The quarter was a nasty dig, she supposed, but otherwise, 322 had been polite enough. No streaks or spots on the sheets, no unpleasant little surprises (on at least four occasions in her five years as a chambermaid, the five years since Deke had left her, she had found drying streaks of what could only have been semen on the TV screen and once a reeking puddle of piss in a bureau drawer), nothing stolen. There was really only the bed to make, the sink and shower to rinse out, and the towels to replace. As she did these things, she speculated about what 322 might have looked like, and what kind of a man left a woman who was trying to raise two kids on her own a twenty-five-cent tip. One who could laugh and be mean at the same time, she guessed; one who probably had tattoos on his arms and looked like the character Woody Harrelson had played in that movie Natural Born Killers.
He doesn’t know anything about me, she thought as she stepped into the hall and pulled the door closed behind her. Probably he was drunk and it seemed funny, that’s all. And it was funny, in a way; why else did you laugh?
Right. Why else had she laughed?
Pushing her cart across to 323, she thought she would give the quarter to Paul. Of the two kids, Paul was the one who usually came up holding the short end of the stick. He was seven, silent, and afflicted with what seemed to be a perpetual case of the sniffles. Darlene also thought he might be the only seven-year-old in the clean air of this high-desert town who was an incipient asthmatic.
She sighed and used her passkey on 323, thinking that maybe she’d find a fifty—or even a hundred—in this room’s honeypot. It was almost always her first thought on entering a room. The envelope was just where she had left it, however, propped against the telephone, and although she checked it just to be sure, she knew it would be empty, and it was.
323 had left a little something for her in the toilet, though.
“Look at this, the luck’s starting to flow already,” Darlene said, and began to
laugh as she flushed the john—it was just the way she was built.
There was a one-armed bandit—just that single one—in the lobby of the Rancher’s, and although Darlene had never used it during her five years of work here, she dropped her hand into her pocket on her way to lunch that day, felt the envelope with the torn-off end, and swerved toward the chrome-plated foolcatcher. She hadn’t forgotten her intention to give the quarter to Paul, but a quarter meant nothing to kids these days, and why should it? You couldn’t even get a lousy bottle of Coke for a quarter. And suddenly she just wanted to be rid of the damned thing. Her back hurt, she had unaccustomed acid indigestion from her ten o’clock cup of coffee, and she felt savagely depressed. Suddenly the shine was off the world, and it all seemed the fault of that lousy quarter … as if it were sitting there in her pocket and sending out little batches of rotten vibes.
Gerda came out of the elevator just in time to see Darlene plant herself in front of the slot machine and dump the quarter out of the envelope and into her palm.
“You?” Gerda said. “You? No, never—I don’t believe it.”
“Just watch me,” Darlene said, and dropped the coin into the slot which read USE 1 2 OR 3 COINS. “That baby is gone.”
She started to walk off, then, almost as an afterthought, turned back long enough to yank the bandit’s lever. She turned away again, not bothering to watch the drums spin, and so did not see the bells slot into place in the windows—one, two, and three. She paused only when she heard quarters begin to shower into the tray at the bottom of the machine. Her eyes widened, then narrowed suspiciously, as if this was another joke … or maybe the punchline of the first one.
