by Stephen King
He had kissed the kids goodbye before they left for school; Lucy’s sister would be there to welcome them when they got home. Now Lucy stood in the driveway in a sleeveless blouse and her faded jeans. She looked slim and desirable, but her brow was furrowed as if she had one of her premenstrual migraines coming on.
“You need to be careful,” she said, “and not just about your work. The north country empties out between Labor Day and hunting season, and cell phone coverage stops dead forty miles out of Presque Isle. If you break a leg walking in the woods… or get lost…”
“Honey, I don’t do woods. When I walk—if I walk—I’ll stick to the road.” He took a closer look at her and didn’t care for what he saw. It wasn’t just the furrowed brow; her eyes had picked up a suspicious sheen. “If you need me to stay, I’ll stay. Just say the word.”
“Would you really?”
“Try me.” Praying she wouldn’t.
She was looking down at her sneakers. Now she raised her head and gave it a shake. “No. I understand this is important to you. So do Stacey and Bran. I heard what he said when he kissed you goodbye.”
Brandon, their twelve-year-old, had said, “Bring back a big one, Dad.”
“I want you to call me every day, Mister. No later than five, even if you’re really rolling. Your cell won’t work, but the landline does. We get a bill for it every month, and I called this morning just to be sure. Not only did it ring, I got your pop’s old answering machine message. Gave me a little bit of a chill. Like a voice from the grave.”
“I bet.” Drew’s father had been dead for ten years. They had kept the cabin, using it a few times themselves, then renting it out to hunting parties until Old Bill, the caretaker, died. After that they stopped bothering. One group of hunters hadn’t paid in full and another group had pretty well trashed the place. It hardly seemed worth the hassle.
“You should record a new message.”
“I will.”
“And fair warning, Drew—if I don’t hear from you, I’ll come up.”
“Wouldn’t be a good idea, honey. Those last fifteen miles on Shithouse Road would tear the exhaust right out from under the Volvo. Probably the transmission, too.”
“Don’t care. Because… I’m just going to say this, okay? When stuff goes wrong with one of the short stories, you can put it aside. There’s a week or two of moping around the house, then you’re yourself again. Village on the Hill was a whole different thing, and the next year was very scary for me and the kids.”
“This one is—”
“Different, I know, you’ve said so half a dozen times, and I believe you, even though the only thing I know about it is that it’s not a bunch of randy teachers having key parties in Updike country. Just…” She took him by the forearms, looking up at him earnestly. “If it starts to go wrong, if you start to lose the words like you did with Village, come home. Do you understand me? Come home.”
“I promise.”
“Now kiss me like you mean it.”
He did, gently parting her lips with his tongue and sliding one hand into the back pocket of her jeans. When he pulled back from her, Lucy was flushed. “Yes,” she said. “Like that.”
He got into the Suburban and had made it to the foot of the driveway when Lucy shouted “Wait! Wait!” and came running after him. She was going to tell him she’d changed her mind, she wanted him to stay and try writing the book in his upstairs office, he was sure of it, and he had to battle a desire to step on the gas and go powering down Sycamore Street without looking in the rearview mirror. Instead, he stopped with the Suburban’s back end in the street and rolled down the window.
“Paper!” she said. She was out of breath and her hair was in her eyes. She pooched out her lower lip and blew it back. “Do you have paper? Because I doubt like hell if there’s any up there.”
He grinned and touched her cheek. “Two reams. Think that’ll be enough?”
“Unless you’re planning to write The Lord of the Rings, it should be.” She gave him a level gaze. The furrow had left her brow, at least for the time being. “Go on, Drew. Get out of here and bring back a big one.”
5
As he turned onto the I-295 entrance ramp where he’d once upon a time seen a man changing a flat tire, Drew felt a lightening. His real life—kids, running errands, chores around the house, picking up Stacey and Brandon from their after-school activities—was behind him. He would come back to it in two weeks, three at the outside, and he supposed he would still have the bulk of the book to write amid the clanging round of that real life, but what was ahead of him was another life, one he would live in his imagination. He had never been able to fully inhabit that life while working on the other three novels, had never quite been able to get over. This time he felt he would. His body might be sitting in your basic no-frills cabin in the Maine woods, but the rest of him would be in the town of Bitter River, Wyoming, where a limping sheriff and three frightened deputies were faced with protecting a young man who’d killed an even younger woman in cold blood in front of at least forty witnesses. Protecting him from angry townspeople was only half of the lawmen’s job. The rest was getting him to the county seat where he would be tried (if Wyoming even had counties in the 1880s; he would find that out later). Drew didn’t know where old man Prescott had gotten the small army of gun thugs he was counting on to keep that move from happening, but he was sure it would come to him eventually.
Everything was eventual.
He merged onto I-95 at Gardiner. The Suburban—120K on the clock—shimmied at sixty, but once he goosed it up to seventy, the shimmy disappeared and the old girl ran smooth as silk. He still had a four-hour run ahead of him, the last hour over increasingly narrow roads culminating in the one TR locals called the Shithouse Road.
He was looking forward to the drive, but not as much as he was looking forward to opening his laptop, connecting it up to the little Hewlett-Packard printer, and creating a document he would call BITTER RIVER #1. For once, thinking about the chasm of white space under the blinking cursor didn’t fill him with a mixture of hope and fear. As he passed the Augusta town line, all he felt was impatience. This time was going to be okay. Better than okay. This time everything would come right.
He turned on the radio and began to sing along with the Who.
6
Late that afternoon Drew pulled up in front of TR-90’s only business, a shambling, slump-roofed establishment called the Big 90 General Store (as if somewhere there was a Small 90). He gassed the Suburban, which was almost dry, at a rusty old rotary pump where a sign announced CASH ONLY and REGULAR ONLY and “DASH-AWAYS” WILL BE PERSECUTED and GOD BLESS AMERICA. The price was $3.90 a gallon. In the north country, you paid premium prices even for regular. Drew paused on the store’s porch to lift the receiver of the bug-splattered pay phone that had been here when he was a kid, along with what he would swear was the same message, now faded almost to illegibility: DO NOT DEPOSIT COINS UNTIL YOUR PARTY ANSWERS. Drew heard the buzz of the open line, nodded, replaced the receiver in its rusty cradle, and went inside.
“Ayuh, ayuh, still works,” said the refugee from Jurassic Park sitting behind the counter. “Amazin, ain’t it.” His eyes were red, and Drew wondered if he had perhaps been smoking a little Aroostook County Gold. Then the old fella pulled a snot-clotted bandanna from his back pocket and sneezed into it. “Goddam allergies, I get em every fall.”
“Mike DeWitt, isn’t it?” Drew asked.
“Nawp, Mike was my father. He passed on in Feberary. Ninety-seven fuckin years old, and the last ten he didn’t know if he was afoot or on hossback. I’m Roy.” He stuck his hand out over the counter. Drew didn’t want to shake it—that was the one that had been manipulating the snotrag—but he had been raised to be polite, so he gave it a single pump.
DeWitt hooked his glasses down to the end of his beaky nose and studied Drew over them. “I know I look like m’dad, worse luck, and you look like yours. You are Buzzy Larson’s bo
y, ain’tcha? Not Ricky, t’other one.”
“That’s right. Ricky lives in Maryland now. I’m Drew.”
“Sure, that’s right. Been up with the wife and kiddies, but not for awhile. Teacher, ain’tcha?”
“Yes.” He passed DeWitt three twenties. DeWitt put them in the till and returned six limp singles.
“I heard Buzzy died.”
“He did. My mom, too.” One less question to answer.
“Sorry to hear it. What are you doing up here this time of year?”
“I’m on sabbatical. Thought I’d do a little writing.”
“Oh, ayuh? At Buzzy’s cabin?”
“If the road’s passable.” Only saying it so he wouldn’t sound like a complete flatlander. Even if the road was in bad shape, he’d find a way to bull the Suburban through. He hadn’t come this far just to turn around.
DeWitt paused to snorkel back phlegm, then said, “Well, they don’t call it Shithouse Road for nothin, you know, and there’s probably a culvert or two washed out from the spring runoff, but you got your four-wheel drive, so you should be all right. Course you know Old Bill died.”
“Yes. One of his sons dropped me a card. We couldn’t make it to the funeral. Was it his heart?”
“Head. Put a bullet through it.” Roy DeWitt said this with palpable relish. “He was comin down with the Alzheimer’s, see? Constable found a notebook in his glovebox with all kinds of stuff written down in it. Directions, phone numbers, his wife’s name. Even the fuckin dog’s name. Couldn’t take it, don’tcha see.”
“Jesus,” Drew said. “That’s terrible.” And it was. Bill Colson had been a nice man, soft-spoken, always combed and tucked in and smelling of Old Spice, always careful to tell Drew’s pop—and later, Drew himself—when something needed repairs, and just how much it would cost.
“Ayuh, ayuh, and if you didn’t know that, I don’t s’pose you know he done it in the dooryard of your cabin.”
Drew stared. “Are you kidding?”
“Wouldn’t kid about…” The bandanna appeared, more damp and bedraggled than ever. DeWitt sneezed into it. “…about a thing like that. Yessir. Parked his pickup, put the barrel of his .30-30 under his chin, and pulled the trigger. Bullet went right through and broke the back winda. Constable Griggs was standin right where you are now when he told me.”
“Christ,” Drew said, and in his mind, something changed. Instead of holding his pistol to the dancehall girl’s temple, Andy Prescott—the wastrel son—was now holding it beneath her chin… and when he pulled the trigger, the bullet would exit the back of her skull and break the mirror behind the bar. Using this elderly gore-crow’s story of Old Bill’s death in his own story had an undoubted element of expediency, even strip-mining, but that wouldn’t stop him. It was too good.
“Lousy thing, all right,” DeWitt said. He was trying to sound sad, maybe even philosophical, but there was an unmistakable twinkle in his voice. He also knew when something was too good, Drew thought. “But you know he was Old Bill right to the very end.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning he made his mess in the truck, not in Buzzy’s cabin. He’d never do a thing like that, at least not while he still had some of his right mind left.” He began to hitch and snort again, and scrambled for the bandanna, but this time was a little late to catch all of the sneeze. Which was a juicy one. “He caretook that place, don’tcha see?”
7
Five miles north of the Big 90, the tar gave out. After five more miles on oiled hardpan, Drew came to a fork in the road. He bore left, onto rough gravel that thumped and pinged off the Suburban’s undercarriage. This was Shithouse Road, unchanged, so far as he could tell, since his childhood. Twice he had to slow to two or three miles an hour in order to waddle the Suburban across washouts where culverts had indeed been plugged in the spring runoffs. Twice more he had to stop, get out, and move fallen trees off the road. Luckily they were birches, and light. One broke apart in his hands.
He came to the Cullum camp—deserted, boarded up, the driveway chained off—and then began counting phone-and-power poles, just as he and Ricky had as kids. A few were leaning drunkenly to starboard or port, but there were still exactly sixty-six between the Cullum camp and the overgrown driveway—also chained off—with the sign out front that Lucy had made when the kids were small: CHEZ LARSON. Beyond this driveway, he knew, were seventeen more poles, ending at the Farrington camp on the shore of Agelbemoo Lake.
Beyond the Farringtons’ place lay a huge swath of unelectrified wilderness, at least a hundred miles on either side of the Canadian border. Sometimes he and Ricky had gone up to look at what they called Last Pole. It held a kind of fascination for them. Beyond that one there was nothing to hold back the night. Drew had once taken Stacey and Brandon to look at Last Pole, and Drew had not missed the so what expression that passed between them. They assumed electricity—not to mention Wi-Fi—went on forever.
He got out of the Suburban and unlocked the chain, having to push and diddle the key before it would finally turn. He should have gotten some 3-in-1 at the store, but you couldn’t think of everything.
The driveway was almost a quarter of a mile long, with branches brushing at the sides and roof of the Suburban the whole way. Overhead were the two lines for the electric and the phone. He remembered them being taut back in the old days, but now they sagged along the diagonal Northern Maine Power cut running in from the road.
He came to the cabin. It looked desolate, forgotten. The green paint was peeling away with no Bill Colson to refresh it, the galvanized steel roof was drifted with fir needles and fallen leaves, and the satellite dish on the roof (its cup also filled with leaves and needles) looked like a joke out here in the woods. He wondered if Luce had been paying the monthly charge on the dish as well as the phone. If so, it was probably money for nothing, because he doubted if it still worked. He also doubted that DirecTV would send the check back with a note saying whoops, we are returning your payment because your dish has shit the bed. The porch was weatherbeaten but appeared sturdy enough (although it wouldn’t do to take that for granted). Beneath it he could see a faded green tarp covering what Drew assumed was a cord or two of wood—maybe the last wood Old Bill had ever brought in.
He got out and stood by the Suburban, one hand on the warm hood. Somewhere a crow cawed. Distant, another crow answered. Other than the babble of Godfrey Brook on its way to the lake, those were the only sounds.
Drew wondered if he was parked on the very spot where Bill Colson had parked his own four-wheel drive and blown his brains out. Wasn’t there a school of thought—maybe back in medieval England—that the ghosts of suicides were forced to remain in the places where they had ended their lives?
He started for the cabin, telling himself (scolding himself) that he was too old for campfire stories, when he heard something blundering toward him. What emerged from the screening pines between the cabin’s clearing and the brook wasn’t a ghost or a zombie apparition but a moose calf tottering on absurdly long legs. It came as far as the little equipment shed beside the house, then saw him and stopped. They stared at each other, Drew thinking that moose—whether young or full-grown—were among God’s ugliest and most unlikely creatures, the calf thinking who knew what.
“No harm here, bud,” Drew said softly, and the calf pricked its ears.
Now came more crashing and blundering, much louder, and the calf’s mother shouldered her way through the trees. A branch fell on her neck and she shook it away. She stared at Drew, lowered her head, and pawed at the ground. Her ears went back and lay flat against her head.
It means to charge me, Drew thought. It sees me as a threat to her baby, and it means to charge me.
He thought of running for the Suburban, but it might be—probably was—too far. And running, even away from the calf, might set the mother off. So he simply stood where he was, trying to send soothing thoughts to the thousand-pound creature no more than thirty yards away. Nothing to w
orry about here, moms, I’m harmless.
She considered him for maybe fifteen seconds, head lowered and one hoof pawing the ground. It seemed longer. Then she went to her calf (never taking her eyes from the interloper) and put herself between it and Drew. She gave him another long look, seeming to debate her next move. Drew stood motionless. He was badly frightened, but also weirdly exalted. He thought, If she charges me from this distance, I’m either going to be dead or so badly hurt I’ll probably die anyway. If she doesn’t, I’m going to do brilliant work here. Brilliant.
He knew it was a false equivalency even at this moment, with his life at risk—he might as well have been a child believing he would get a bike for his birthday if a certain cloud blotted out the sun—but at the same time he felt it was absolutely true.
Moose Mom suddenly swung her head, butting the calf in the hindquarters. It gave an almost sheeplike cry, nothing like the hoarse blat of Pop’s old moose-call, and trotted toward the woods. The mom followed, pausing to give Drew one final, baleful look: follow me and die.
Drew let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding (a hoary suspense novel cliché that turned out to be true) and started for the porch. The hand holding the keys was shaking slightly. He was already telling himself that he hadn’t been in any danger, not really; if you didn’t bother a moose—even a protective Moose Mom—it wouldn’t bother you.
Besides, it could have been worse. It could have been a bear.
8
