Riding the Bullet by STEPHEN KING

I’ve never told anyone this story, and never thought I
would—not because I was afraid of being disbelieved,
exactly, but because I was ashamed . . . and because it
was mine. I’ve always felt that telling it would
cheapen both me and the story itself, make it smaller
and more mundane, no more than a camp counselor’s
ghost story told before lights-out. I think I was also
afraid that if I told it, heard it with my own ears, I
might start to disbelieve it myself. But since my
mother died I haven’t been able to sleep very well. I
doze off and then snap back again, wide awake and
shivering. Leaving the bedside lamp on helps, but not
as much as you might think. There are so many more
shadows at night, have you ever noticed that? Even
with a light on there are so many shadows. The long
ones could be the shadows of anything, you think.
Anything at all.
•••
I was a junior at the University of Maine when Mrs.
McCurdy called about ma. My father died when I was
too young to remember him and I was an only child,
so it was just Alan and Jean Parker against the world.
Mrs. McCurdy, who lived just up the road, called at
the apartment I shared with three other guys. She had
gotten the number off the magnetic minder-board ma
kept on her fridge.
“’Twas a stroke,” she said in that long and drawling
Yankee accent of hers. “Happened at the restaurant.
But don’t you go flyin off all half-cocked. Doctor says
it wa’ant too bad. She’s awake and she’s talkin.”
“Yeah, but is she making sense?” I asked. I was trying
to sound calm, even amused, but my heart was
beating fast and the living room suddenly felt too
warm. I had the apartment all to myself; it was
Wednesday, and both my roomies had classes all day.
“Oh, ayuh. First thing she said was for me to call
you but not to scare you. That’s pretty sensible,
wouldn’t you say?”
“Yeah.” But of course I was scared. When someone
calls and tells you your mother’s been taken from
work to the hospital in an ambulance, how else are
you supposed to feel?
“She said for you to stay right there and mind your
schoolin until the weekend. She said you could come
then, if you didn’t have too much studyin t’do.”
Sure, I thought. Fat chance. I’d just stay here in this
ratty, beer-smelling apartment while my mother lay
in a hospital bed a hundred miles south, maybe dying.
“She’s still a young woman, your ma,” Mrs.
McCurdy said. “It’s just that she’s let herself get awful
heavy these last few years, and she’s got the hypertension.
Plus the cigarettes. She’s goin to have to give up
the smokes.”
I doubted if she would, though, stroke or no stroke,
and about that I was right—my mother loved her
smokes. I thanked Mrs. McCurdy for calling.
“First thing I did when I got home,” she said. “So
when are you coming, Alan? Sad’dy?” There was a sly
note in her voice that suggested she knew better.
I looked out the window at a perfect afternoon in
October: bright blue New England sky over trees that
were shaking down their yellow leaves onto Mill
Street. Then I glanced at my watch. Twenty past
three. I’d just been on my way out to my four o’clock
philosophy seminar when the phone rang.
“You kidding?” I asked. “I’ll be there tonight.”
Her laughter was dry and a little cracked around the
edges—Mrs. McCurdy was a great one to talk about
giving up the cigarettes, her and her Winstons. “Good
boy! You’ll go straight to the hospital, won’t you, then
drive out to the house?”
“I guess so, yeah,” I said. I saw no sense in telling
Mrs. McCurdy that there was something wrong with
the transmission of my old car, and it wasn’t going
anywhere but the driveway for the foreseeable future.
I’d hitchhike down to Lewiston, then out to our little
house in Harlow if it wasn’t too late. If it was, I’d
snooze in one of the hospital lounges. It wouldn’t be
the first time I’d ridden my thumb home from school.
Or slept sitting up with my head leaning against a
Coke machine, for that matter.
“I’ll make sure the key’s under the red wheel-barrow,”
she said. “You know where I mean, don’t
you?”
“Sure.” My mother kept an old red wheelbarrow by
the door to the back shed; in the summer it foamed
with flowers. Thinking of it for some reason brought
Mrs. McCurdy’s news home to me as a true fact: my
mother was in the hospital, the little house in Harlow
where I’d grown up was going to be dark tonight—
there was no one there to turn on the lights after the
sun went down. Mrs. McCurdy could say she was
young, but when you’re just twentyone yourself,
forty-eight seems ancient.
“Be careful, Alan. Don’t speed.”
My speed, of course, would be up to whoever I
hooked a ride with, and I personally hoped that whoever
it was would go like hell. As far as I was concerned,
I couldn’t get to Central Maine Medical
Center fast enough. Still, there was no sense worrying
Mrs. McCurdy.
“I won’t. Thanks.”
“Welcome,” she said. “Your ma’s going to be just
fine. And won’t she be some happy to see you.”
I hung up, then scribbled a note saying what had
happened and where I was going. I asked Hector Passmore,
the more responsible of my roommates, to call
my adviser and ask him to tell my instructors what
was up so I wouldn’t get whacked for cutting—two or
three of my teachers were real bears about that. Then
I stuffed a change of clothes into my backpack, added
my dog-eared copy of Introduction to Philosophy, and
headed out. I dropped the course the following week,
although I had been doing quite well in it. The way I
looked at the world changed that night, changed quite
a lot, and nothing in my philosophy textbook seemed
to fit the changes. I came to understand that there are
things underneath, you see—underneath—and no
book can explain what they are. I think that sometimes
it’s best to just forget those things are there. If
you can, that is.
It’s a hundred and twenty miles from the University
of Maine in Orono to Lewiston in Androscoggin
County, and the quickest way to get there is by I-95.
The turnpike isn’t such a good road to take if you’re
hitchhiking, though; the state police are apt to boot
anyone they see off—even if you’re just standing on
the ramp they give you the boot—and if the same cop
catches you twice, he’s apt to write you a ticket, as
well. So I took Route 68, which winds southwest
from Bangor. It’s a pretty well-traveled road, and if
you don’t look like an out-and-out psycho, you can
usually do pretty well. The cops leave you alone, too,
for the most part.
My first lift was with a morose insurance man and
took me as far as Newport. I stood at the intersection
of Route 68 and Route 2 for about twenty minutes,
then got a ride with an elderly gentleman who was on
his way to Bowdoinham. He kept grabbing at his
crotch as he drove. It was as if he was trying to catch
something that was running around in there.
“My wife allus told me I’d wind up in the ditch
with a knife in my back if I kept on picking up hitch-hikers,”
he said, “but when I see a young fella standin
t’side of the rud, I allus remember my own younger
days. Rode my thumb quite a bit, so I did. Rode the
rods, too. And lookit this, her dead four year and me
still a-goin, drivin this same old Dodge. I miss her
somethin turrible.” He snatched at his crotch.
“Where you headed, son?”
I told him I was going to Lewiston, and why.
“That’s turrible,” he said. “Your ma! I’m so sorry!”
His sympathy was so strong and spontaneous that it
made the corners of my eyes prickle. I blinked the
tears back. The last thing in the world I wanted was to
burst out crying in this old man’s old car, which rattled
and wallowed and smelled quite strongly of pee.
“Mrs. McCurdy—the lady who called me—said it
isn’t that serious. My mother’s still young, only forty-eight.”
“Still! A stroke!” He was genuinely dismayed. He
snatched at the baggy crotch of his green pants again,
yanking with an old man’s oversized, clawlike hand.
“A stroke’s allus serious! Son, I’d take you to the
CMMC myself—drive you right up to the front
door—if I hadn’t promised my brother Ralph I’d take
him up to the nursin home in Gates. His wife’s there,
she has that forgettin disease, I can’t think what in
the world they call it, Anderson’s or Alvarez or somethin
like that—”
“Alzheimer’s,” I said.
“Ayuh, prob’ly I’m gettin it myself. Hell, I’m
tempted to take you anyway.”
“You don’t need to do that,” I said. “I can get a ride
from Gates easy.”
“Still,” he said. “Your mother! A stroke! Only forty-eight!”
He grabbed at the baggy crotch of his pants.
“Fucking truss!” he cried, then laughed—the sound
was both desperate and amused. “Fucking rupture! If
you stick around, son, all your works start fallin
apart. God kicks your ass in the end, let me tell you.
But you’re a good boy to just drop everythin and go to
her like you’re doin.”
“She’s a good mom,” I said, and once again I felt the
tears bite. I never felt very homesick when I went
away to school—a little bit the first week, that was
all—but I felt homesick then. There was just me and
her, no other close relatives. I couldn’t imagine life
without her. Wasn’t too bad, Mrs. McCurdy had said;
a stroke, but not too bad. Damn old lady better be
telling the truth, I thought, she just better be.
We rode in silence for a little while. It wasn’t the
fast ride I’d hoped for—the old man maintained a
steady forty-five miles an hour and sometimes wandered
over the white line to sample the other lane—
but it was a long ride, and that was really just as
good. Highway 68 unrolled before us, turning its
way through miles of woods and splitting the little
towns that were there and gone in a slow blink, each
one with its bar and its selfservice gas station: New
Sharon, Ophelia, West Ophelia, Ganistan (which
had once been Afghantistan, strange but true),
Mechanic Falls, Castle View, Castle Rock. The
bright blue of the sky dimmed as the day drained
out of it; the old man turned on first his parking
lights and then his headlights. They were the high
beams but he didn’t seem to notice, not even when
cars coming the other way flashed their own high
beams at him.
“My sister’n-law don’t even remember her own
name,” he said. “She don’t know aye, yes, no, nor
maybe. That’s what that Anderson’s Disease does to
you, son. There’s a look in her eyes . . . like she’s sayin
‘Let me out of here’ . . . or would say it, if she could
think of the words. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes,” I said. I took a deep breath and wondered if
the pee I smelled was the old man’s or if he maybe had
a dog that rode with him sometimes. I wondered if he’d
be offended if I rolled down my window a little. Finally
I did. He didn’t seem to notice, any more than he
noticed the oncoming cars flashing their highs at him.
Around seven o’clock we breasted a hill in West
Gates and my chauffeur cried, “Lookit, son! The
moon! Ain’t she a corker?”
She was indeed a corker—a huge orange ball hoisting
itself over the horizon. I thought there was nevertheless
something terrible about it. It looked both
pregnant and infected. Looking at the rising moon, a
sudden and awful thought came to me: what if I got to
the hospital and my ma didn’t recognize me? What if
her memory was gone, completely shot, and she
didn’t know aye, yes, no, nor maybe? What if the doctor
told me she’d need someone to take care of her for
the rest of her life? That someone would have to be
me, of course; there was no one else. Goodbye college.
What about that, friends and neighbors?
“Make a wish on it, boyo!” the old man cried. In his
excitement his voice grew sharp and unpleasant—it
was like having shards of glass stuffed into your ear.
He gave his crotch a terrific tug. Something in there
made a snapping sound. I didn’t see how you could
yank on your crotch like that and not rip your balls
right off at the stem, truss or no truss. “Wish you
make on the ha’vest moon allus comes true, that’s
what my father said!”
So I wished that my mother would know me when I
walked into her room, that her eyes would light up at
once and she would say my name. I made that wish
and immediately wished I could have it back again; I
thought that no wish made in that fevery orange light
could come to any good.
“Ah, son!” the old man said. “I wish my wife was
here! I’d beg forgiveness for every sha’ap and unkind
word I ever said to her!”
Twenty minutes later, with the last light of the day
still in the air and the moon still hanging low and
bloated in the sky, we arrived in Gates Falls. There’s a
yellow blinker at the intersection of Route 68 and
Pleasant Street. Just before he reached it, the old man
swerved to the side of the road, bumping the Dodge’s
right front wheel up over the curb and then back
down again. It rattled my teeth. The old man looked
at me with a kind of wild, defiant excitement—everything
about him was wild, although I hadn’t seen that
at first; everything about him had that broken-glass
feeling. And everything that came out of his mouth
seemed to be an exclamation.
“I’ll take you up there! I will, yessir! Never mind
Ralph! Hell with him! You just say the word!”
I wanted to get to my mother, but the thought of
another twenty miles with the smell of piss in the air
and cars flashing their brights at us wasn’t very pleasant.
Neither was the image of the old fellow wandering
and weaving across four lanes of Lisbon Street.
Mostly, though, it was him. I couldn’t stand another
twenty miles of crotch-snatching and that excited
broken-glass voice.
“Hey, no,” I said, “that’s okay. You go on and take
care of your brother.” I opened the door and what I’d
feared happened—he reached out and took hold of my
arm with his twisted old man’s hand. It was the hand
with which he kept tearing at his crotch.
“You just say the word!” he told me. His voice was
hoarse, confidential. His fingers were pressing deep
into the flesh just below my armpit. “I’ll take you
right to the hospital door! Ayuh! Don’t matter if I
never saw you before in my life nor you me! Don’t
matter aye, yes, no, nor maybe! I’ll take you right . . .
there!”
“It’s okay,” I repeated, and all at once I was fighting
an urge to bolt out of the car, leaving my shirt behind
in his grip if that was what it took to get free. It was as
if he were drowning. I thought that when I moved, his
grip would tighten, that he might even go for the nape
of my neck, but he didn’t. His fingers loosened, then
slipped away entirely as I put my leg out. And I wondered,
as we always do when an irrational moment of
panic passes, what I had been so afraid of in the first
place. He was just an elderly carbon-based life-form in
an elderly Dodge’s pee-smelling ecosystem, looking
disappointed that his offer had been refused. Just an
old man who couldn’t get comfortable in his truss.
What in God’s name had I been afraid of?
“I thank you for the ride and even more for the
offer,” I said. “But I can go out that way—” I pointed
at Pleasant Street. “—and I’ll have a ride in no time.”
He was quiet for a moment, then sighed and nodded.
“Ayuh, that’s the best way to go,” he said. “Stay
right out of town, nobody wants to give a fella ride in
town, no one wants to slow down and get honked at.”
He was right about that; hitchhiking in town, even
a small one like Gates Falls, was futile. I guess he had
spent some time riding his thumb.
“But, son, are you sure? You know what they say
about a bird in the hand.”
I hesitated again. He was right about a bird in the
hand, too. Pleasant Street became Ridge Road a mile
or so west of the blinker, and Ridge Road ran through
fifteen miles of woods before arriving at Route 196 on
the outskirts of Lewiston. It was almost dark, and it’s
always harder to get a ride at night—when headlights
pick you out on a country road, you look like an
escapee from Wyndham Boys’ Correctional even with
your hair combed and your shirt tucked in. But I
didn’t want to ride with the old man anymore. Even
now, when I was safely out of his car, I thought there
was something creepy about him—maybe it was just
the way his voice seemed full of exclamation points.
Besides, I’ve always been lucky getting rides.
“I’m sure,” I said. “And thanks again. Really.”
“Any time, son. Any time. My wife . . .” He
stopped, and I saw there were tears leaking from the
corners of his eyes. I thanked him again, then
slammed the door shut before he could say anything
else.
I hurried across the street, my shadow appearing
and disappearing in the light of the blinker. On the far
side I turned and looked back. The Dodge was still
there, parked beside Frank’s Fountain & Fruits. By the
light of the blinker and the streetlight twenty feet or
so beyond the car, I could see him sitting slumped
over the wheel. The thought came to me that he was
dead, that I had killed him with my refusal to let him
help.
Then a car came around the corner and the driver
flashed his high beams at the Dodge. This time the
old man dipped his own lights, and that was how I
knew he was still alive. A moment later he pulled
back into the street and piloted the Dodge slowly
around the corner. I watched until he was gone, then
looked up at the moon. It was starting to lose its
orange bloat, but there was still something sinister
about it. It occurred to me that I had never heard of
wishing on the moon before—the evening star, yes,
but not the moon. I wished again I could take my own
wish back; as the dark drew down and I stood there at
the crossroads, it was too easy to think of that story
about the monkey’s paw.
I walked out Pleasant Street, waving my thumb at
cars that went by without even slowing. At first there
were shops and houses on both sides of the road, then
the sidewalk ended and the trees closed in again,
silently retaking the land. Each time the road flooded
with light, pushing my shadow out ahead of me, I’d
turn around, stick out my thumb, and put what I
hoped was a reassuring smile on my face. And each
time the oncoming car would swoosh by without
slowing. Once, someone shouted out, “Get a job,
monkeymeat!” and there was laughter.
I’m not afraid of the dark—or wasn’t then—but I
began to be afraid I’d made a mistake by not taking
the old man up on his offer to drive me straight to the
hospital. I could have made a sign reading need a
ride, mother sick before starting out, but I doubted if
it would have helped. Any psycho can make a sign,
after all.
I walked along, sneakers scuffing the gravelly dirt of
the soft shoulder, listening to the sounds of the gathering
night: a dog, far away; an owl, much closer; the
sigh of a rising wind. The sky was bright with the
moonlight, but I couldn’t see the moon itself just
now—the trees were tall here and had blotted it out
for the time being.
As I left Gates farther behind, fewer cars passed me.
My decision not to take the old man up on his offer
seemed more foolish with each passing minute. I
began to imagine my mother in her hospital bed,
mouth turned down in a frozen sneer, losing her grip
on life but trying to hold on to that increasingly slippery
bark for me, not knowing I wasn’t going to make
it simply because I hadn’t liked an old man’s shrill
voice, or the pissy smell of his car.
I breasted a steep hill and stepped back into moon-light
again at the top. The trees were gone on my
right, replaced by a small country graveyard. The
stones gleamed in the pale light. Something small and
black was crouched beside one of them, watching me.
I took a step closer, curious. The black thing moved
and became a woodchuck. It spared me a single
reproachful red-eyed glance and was gone into the
high grass. All at once I became aware that I was very
tired, in fact close to exhausted. I had been running on
pure adrenaline since Mrs. McCurdy called five hours
before, but now that was gone. That was the bad part.
The good part was that the useless sense of frantic
urgency left me, at least for the time being. I had
made my choice, decided on Ridge Road instead of
Route 68, and there was no sense beating myself up
over it—fun is fun and done is done, my mother
sometimes said. She was full of stuff like that, little
Zen aphorisms that almost made sense. Sense or nonsense,
this one comforted me now. If she was dead
when I got to the hospital, that was that. Probably she
wouldn’t be. Doctor said it wasn’t too bad, according
to Mrs. McCurdy; Mrs. McCurdy had also said she
was still a young woman. A bit on the heavy side,
true, and a heavy smoker in the bargain, but still
young.
Meantime, I was out here in the williwags and I was
suddenly tired out—my feet felt as if they had been
dipped in cement.
There was a stone wall running along the road side
of the cemetery, with a break in it where two ruts ran
through. I sat on the wall with my feet planted in one
of these ruts. From this position I could see a good
length of Ridge Road in both directions. When I saw
headlights coming west, in the direction of Lewiston,
I could walk back to the edge of the road and put my
thumb out. In the meantime, I’d just sit here with my
backpack in my lap and wait for some strength to
come back into my legs.
A groundmist, fine and glowing, was rising out of
the grass. The trees surrounding the cemetery
on three sides rustled in the rising breeze. From
beyond the graveyard came the sound of running
water and the occasional plunk-plunk of a frog. The
place was beautiful and oddly soothing, like a picture
in a book of romantic poems.
I looked both ways along the road. Nothing coming,
not so much as a glow on the horizon. Putting my
pack down in the wheelrut where I’d been dangling
my feet, I got up and walked into the cemetery. A lock
of hair had fallen onto my brow; the wind blew it off.
The mist roiled lazily around my shoes. The stones at
the back were old; more than a few had fallen over.
The ones at the front were much newer. I bent, hands
planted on knees, to look at one which was surrounded
by almost-fresh flowers. By moonlight the
name was easy to read: george staub. Below it were
the dates marking the brief span of George Staub’s
life: january 19, 1977, at one end, october 12, 1998,
at the other. That explained the flowers which had
only begun to wilt; October 12th was two days ago
and 1998 was just two years ago. George’s friends and
relatives had stopped by to pay their respects. Below
the name and dates was something else, a brief
inscription. I leaned down farther to read it—
—and stumbled back, terrified and all too aware
that I was by myself, visiting a graveyard by moonlight.
FUN IS FUN AND DONE IS DONE
was the inscription.
My mother was dead, had died perhaps at that very
minute, and something had sent me a message. Something
with a thoroughly unpleasant sense of humor.
I began to back slowly toward the road, listening to
the wind in the trees, listening to the stream, listening
to the frog, suddenly afraid I might hear another
sound, the sound of rubbing earth and tearing roots as
something not quite dead reached up, groping for one
of my sneakers—
My feet tangled together and I fell down, thumping
my elbow on a gravestone, barely missing another
with the back of my head. I landed with a grassy thud,
looking up at the moon which had just barely cleared
the trees. It was white instead of orange now, and as
bright as a polished bone.
Instead of panicking me further, the fall cleared my
head. I didn’t know what I’d seen, but it couldn’t have
been what I thought I’d seen; that kind of stuff might
work in John Carpenter and Wes Craven movies, but
it wasn’t the stuff of real life.
Yes, okay, good, a voice whispered in my head. And
if you just walk out of here now, you can go on
believing that. You can go on believing it for the rest
of your life.
“Fuck that,” I said, and got up. The seat of my jeans
was wet, and I plucked it away from my skin. It
wasn’t exactly easy to reapproach the stone marking
George Staub’s final resting place, but it wasn’t as
hard as I’d expected, either. The wind sighed through
the trees, still rising, signaling a change in the weather.
Shadows danced unsteadily around me. Branches
rubbed together, a creaky sound off in the woods. I
bent over the tombstone and read:
george staub
january 19,1977–october 12, 1998
Well Begun, Too Soon Done.
I stood there, leaning down with my hands planted
just above my knees, not aware of how fast my heart
had been beating until it started to slow down. A
nasty little coincidence, that was all, and was it any
wonder that I’d misread what was beneath the name
and dates? Even without being tired and under stress,
I might have read it wrong—moonlight was a notorious
misleader. Case closed.
Except I knew what I’d read: Fun Is Fun and Done Is
Done.
My ma was dead.
“Fuck that,” I repeated, and turned away. As I did, I
realized the mist curling through the grass and around
my ankles had begun to brighten. I could hear the
mutter of an approaching motor. A car was coming.
I hurried back through the opening in the rock wall,
snagging my pack on the way by. The lights of the
approaching car were halfway up the hill. I stuck out
my thumb just as they struck me, momentarily blinding
me. I knew the guy was going to stop even before
he started slowing down. It’s funny how you can just
know sometimes, but anyone who’s spent a lot of
time hitchhiking will tell you that it happens.
The car passed me, brake lights flaring, and swerved
onto the soft shoulder near the end of the rock wall
dividing the graveyard from Ridge Road. I ran to it
with my backpack banging against the side of my
knee. The car was a Mustang, one of the cool ones
from the late sixties or early seventies. The motor
rumbled loudly, the fat sound of it coming through a
muffler that maybe wouldn’t pass inspection the next
time the sticker came due . . . but that wasn’t my
problem.
I swung the door open and slid inside. As I put my
backpack between my feet, an odor struck me, something
almost familiar and a trifle unpleasant. “Thank
you,” I said. “Thanks a lot.”
The guy behind the wheel was wearing faded jeans
and a black tee shirt with the arms cut off. His skin
was tanned, the muscles heavy, and his right bicep
was ringed with a blue barbwire tattoo. He was wearing
a green John Deere cap turned around backwards.
There was a button pinned near the round collar of his
tee shirt, but I couldn’t read it from my angle. “Not a
problem,” he said. “You headed up the city?”
“Yes,” I said. In this part of the world “up the city”
meant Lewiston, the only city of any size north of
Portland. As I closed the door, I saw one of those pine-tree
air fresheners hanging from the rearview mirror.
That was what I’d smelled. It sure wasn’t my night as
far as odors went; first pee and now artificial pine.
Still, it was a ride. I should have been relieved. And as
the guy accelerated back onto Ridge Road, the big
engine of his vintage Mustang growling, I tried to tell
myself I was relieved.
“What’s going on for you in the city?” the driver
asked. I put him at about my age, some townie who
maybe went to vocational-technical school in Auburn
or maybe worked in one of the few remaining textile
mills in the area. He’d probably fixed up this Mustang
in his spare time, because that was what townie kids
did: drank beer, smoked a little rope, fixed up their
cars. Or their motorcycles.
“My brother’s getting married. I’m going to be his
best man.” I told this lie with absolutely no premeditation.
I didn’t want him to know about my mother,
although I didn’t know why. Something was wrong
here. I didn’t know what it was or why I should think
such a thing in the first place, but I knew. I was positive.
“The rehearsal’s tomorrow. Plus a stag party
tomorrow night.”
“Yeah? That right?” He turned to look at me, wide-set
eyes and handsome face, full lips smiling slightly,
the eyes unbelieving.
“Yeah,” I said.
I was afraid. Just like that I was afraid again. Something
was wrong, had maybe started being wrong when
the old geezer in the Dodge had invited me to wish
on the infected moon instead of on a star. Or maybe
from the moment I’d picked up the telephone and listened
to Mrs. McCurdy saying she had some bad news
for me, but ’twasn’t s’bad as it could’ve been.
“Well that’s good,” said the young man in the
turned-around cap. “A brother getting married, man,
that’s good. What’s your name?”
I wasn’t just afraid, I was terrified. Everything was
wrong, everything, and I didn’t know why or how it
could possibly have happened so fast. I did know one
thing, however: I wanted the driver of the Mustang to
know my name no more than I wanted him to know
my business in Lewiston. Not that I’d be getting to
Lewiston. I was suddenly sure that I would never see
Lewiston again. It was like knowing the car was going
to stop. And there was the smell, I knew something
about that, as well. It wasn’t the air freshener; it was
something beneath the air freshener.
“Hector,” I said, giving him my roommate’s name.
“Hector Passmore, that’s me.” It came out of my dry
mouth smooth and calm, and that was good. Something
inside me insisted that I must not let the driver
of the Mustang know that I sensed something wrong.
It was my only chance.
He turned toward me a little, and I could read his
button: i rode the bullet at thrill village, laconia.
I knew the place; had been there, although not for
a long time.
I could also see a heavy black line which circled his
throat just as the barbwire tattoo circled his upper
arm, only the line around the driver’s throat wasn’t a
tattoo. Dozens of black marks crossed it vertically.
They were the stitches put in by whoever had put his
head back on his body.
“Nice to meet you, Hector,” he said. “I’m George
Staub.”
My hand seemed to float out like a hand in a dream.
I wish that it had been a dream, but it wasn’t; it had
all the sharp edges of reality. The smell on top was
pine. The smell underneath was some chemical, probably
formaldehyde. I was riding with a dead man.
The Mustang rushed along Ridge Road at sixty miles
an hour, chasing its high beams under the light of a
polished button moon. To either side, the trees crowding
the road danced and writhed in the wind. George
Staub smiled at me with his empty eyes, then let go of
my hand and returned his attention to the road. In
high school I’d read Dracula, and now a line from it
recurred, clanging in my head like a cracked bell: The
dead drive fast.
Can’t let him know I know. This also clanged in my
head. It wasn’t much, but it was all I had. Can’t let
him know, can’t let him, can’t. I wondered where the
old man was now. Safe at his brother’s? Or had the old
man been in on it all along? Was he maybe right
behind us, driving along in his old Dodge, hunched
over the wheel and snapping at his truss? Was he
dead, too? Probably not. The dead drive fast, according
to Bram Stoker, but the old man had never gone a
tick over forty-five. I felt demented laughter bubbling
in the back of my throat and held it down. If I laughed
he’d know. And he mustn’t know, because that was
my only hope.
“There’s nothing like a wedding,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, “everyone should do it at least
twice.”
My hands had settled on each other and were
squeezing. I could feel the nails digging the backs of
them just above the knuckles, but the sensation was
distant, news from another country. I couldn’t let him
know, that was the thing. The woods were all around
us, the only light was the heartless bone-glow of the
moon, and I couldn’t let him know that I knew he was
dead. Because he wasn’t a ghost, nothing so harmless.
You might see a ghost, but what sort of thing stopped
to give you a ride? What kind of creature was that?
Zombie? Ghoul? Vampire? None of the above?
George Staub laughed. “Do it twice! Yeah, man,
that’s my whole family!”
“Mine, too,” I said. My voice sounded calm, just the
voice of a hitchhiker passing the time of day—night,
in this case—making agreeable conversation as some
small payment for his ride. “There’s really nothing
like a funeral.”
“Wedding,” he said mildly. In the light from the
dashboard, his face was waxy, the face of a corpse
before the makeup went on. That turned-around cap
was particularly horrible. It made you wonder how
much was left beneath it. I had read somewhere that
morticians sawed off the top of the skull and took out
the brains and put in some sort of chemically treated
cotton. To keep the face from falling in, maybe.
“Wedding,” I said through numb lips, and even
laughed a little—a light little chuckle. “Wedding’s
what I meant to say.”
“We always say what we mean to say, that’s what I
think,” the driver said. He was still smiling.
Yes, Freud had believed that, too. I’d read it in Psych
101. I doubted if this fellow knew much about Freud,
I didn’t think many Freudian scholars wore sleeveless
tee shirts and baseball caps turned around backwards,
but he knew enough. Funeral, I’d said. Dear Christ, I’d
said funeral. It came to me then that he was playing
me. I didn’t want to let him know I knew he was dead.
He didn’t want to let me know that he knew I knew
he was dead. And so I couldn’t let him know that I
knew that he knew that . . .
The world began to swing in front of me. In a
moment it would begin to spin, then to whirl, and I’d
lose it. I closed my eyes for a moment. In the darkness,
the afterimage of the moon hung, turning green.
“You feeling all right, man?” he asked. The concern
in his voice was gruesome.
“Yes,” I said, opening my eyes. Things had steadied
again. The pain in the backs of my hands where my
nails were digging into the skin was strong and real.
And the smell. Not just pine air freshener, not just
chemicals. There was a smell of earth, as well.
“You sure?” he asked.
“Just a little tired. Been hitchhiking a long time.
And sometimes I get a little carsick.” Inspiration suddenly
struck. “You know what, I think you better let
me out. If I get a little fresh air, my stomach will settle.
Someone else will come along and—”
“I couldn’t do that,” he said. “Leave you out here?
No way. It could be an hour before someone came
along, and they might not pick you up when they did.
I got to take care of you. What’s that song? Get me to
the church on time, right? No way I’m letting you
out. Crack your window a little, that’ll help. I know it
doesn’t smell exactly great in here. I hung up that air
freshener, but those things don’t work worth a shit.
Of course, some smells are harder to get rid of than
others.”
I wanted to reach out for the window crank and
turn it, let in the fresh air, but the muscles in my arm
wouldn’t seem to tighten. All I could do was sit there
with my hands locked together, nails biting into the
backs of them. One set of muscles wouldn’t work;
another wouldn’t stop working. What a joke.
“It’s like that story,” he said. “The one about the
kid who buys the almost new Cadillac for seven hundred
and fifty dollars. You know that story, don’t
you?”
“Yeah,” I said through my numb lips. I didn’t know
the story, but I knew perfectly well that I didn’t want
to hear it, didn’t want to hear any story this man
might have to tell. “That one’s famous.” Ahead of us
the road leaped forward like a road in an old black-and-
white movie.
“Yeah it is, fucking famous. So the kid’s looking for
a car and he sees an almost brand-new Cadillac on
this guy’s lawn.”
“I said I—”
“Yeah, and there’s a sign that says for sale by
owner in the window.”
There was a cigarette parked behind his ear. He
reached for it, and when he did, his shirt pulled up in
the front. I could see another puckered black line
there, more stitches. Then he leaned forward to
punch in the cigarette lighter and his shirt dropped
back into place.
“Kid knows he can’t afford no Cadillac-car, can’t get
within a shout of a Caddy, but he’s curious, you
know? So he goes over to the guy and says, ‘How
much does something like that go for?’ And the guy,
he turns off the hose he’s got—cause he’s washin the
car, you know—and he says, ‘Kid, this is your lucky
day. Seven hundred and fifty bucks and you drive it
away.’ ”
The cigarette lighter popped out. Staub pulled it free
and pressed the coil to the end of his cigarette. He
drew in smoke and I saw little tendrils come seeping
out between the stitches holding the incision on his
neck closed.
“The kid, he looks in through the driver’s side window
and sees there’s only seventeen thou on the
odometer. He says to the guy, ‘Yeah, sure, that’s as
funny as a screen door in a submarine.’ The guy says,
‘No joke, kid, pony up the cash and it’s yours. Hell, I’ll
even take a check, you got a honest face.’ And the kid
says . . .”
I looked out the window. I had heard the story
before, years ago, probably while I was still in junior
high. In the version I’d been told the car was a Thunderbird
instead of a Caddy, but otherwise everything
was the same. The kid says I may only be seventeen
but I’m not an idiot, no one sells a car like this, especially
one with low mileage, for only seven hundred
and fifty bucks. And the guy tells him he’s doing it
because the car smells, you can’t get the smell out,
he’s tried and tried and nothing will take it out. You
see he was on a business trip, a fairly long one, gone
for at least . . .
“. . . a coupla weeks,” the driver was saying. He
was smiling the way people do when they’re telling a
joke that really slays them. “And when he comes
back, he finds the car in the garage and his wife in
the car, she’s been dead practically the whole time
he’s been gone. I don’t know if it was suicide or a
heart attack or what, but she’s all bloated up and the
car, it’s full of that smell and all he wants to do is
sell it, you know.” He laughed. “That’s quite a story,
huh?”
“Why wouldn’t he call home?” It was my mouth,
talking all by itself. My brain was frozen. “He’s gone
for two weeks on a business trip and he never calls
home once to see how his wife’s doing?”
“Well,” the driver said, “that’s sorta beside the
point, wouldn’t you say? I mean hey, what a bargain—
that’s the point. Who wouldn’t be tempted? After all,
you could always drive the car with the fuckin windows
open, right? And it’s basically just a story. Fiction.
I thought of it because of the smell in this car.
Which is fact.”
Silence. And I thought: He’s waiting for me to say
something, waiting for me to end this. And I wanted
to. I did. Except . . . what then? What would he do
then?
He rubbed the ball of his thumb over the button on
his shirt, the one reading i rode the bullet at thrill
village, laconia. I saw there was dirt under his fingernails.
“That’s where I was today,” he said. “Thrill
Village. I did some work for a guy and he gave me an
all-day pass. My girlfriend was gonna go with me, but
she called and said she was sick, she gets these periods
that really hurt sometimes, they make her sick as
a dog. It’s too bad, but I always think, hey, what’s the
alternative? No rag at all, right, and then I’m in trouble,
we both are.” He yapped, a humorless bark of
sound. “So I went by myself. No sense wasting an all-day
pass. You ever been to Thrill Village?”
“Yes,” I said. “Once. When I was twelve.”
“Who’d you go with?” he asked. “You didn’t go
alone, did you? Not if you were only twelve.”
I hadn’t told him that part, had I? No. He was playing
with me, that was all, swatting me idly back and
forth. I thought about opening the door and just
rolling out into the night, trying to tuck my head into
my arms before I hit, only I knew he’d reach over and
pull me back before I could get away. And I couldn’t
raise my arms, anyway. The best I could do was
clutch my hands together.
“No,” I said. “I went with my dad. My dad took
me.”
“Did you ride the Bullet? I rode that fucker four
times. Man! It goes right upside down!” He looked at
me and uttered another empty bark of laughter. The
moonlight swam in his eyes, turning them into white
circles, making them into the eyes of a statue. And I
understood he was more than dead; he was crazy.
“Did you ride that, Alan?”
I thought of telling him he had the wrong name, my
name was Hector, but what was the use? We were
coming to the end of it now.
“Yeah,” I whispered. Not a single light out there
except for the moon. The trees rushed by, writhing
like spontaneous dancers at a tent-show revival. The
road rushed under us. I looked at the speedometer and
saw he was up to eighty miles an hour. We were riding
the bullet right now, he and I; the dead drive fast.
“Yeah, the Bullet. I rode it.”
“Nah,” he said. He drew on his cigarette, and once
again I watched the little trickles of smoke escape
from the stitched incision on his neck. “You never.
Especially not with your father. You got into the line,
all right, but you were with your ma. The line was
long, the line for the Bullet always is, and she didn’t
want to stand out there in the hot sun. She was fat
even then, and the heat bothered her. But you
pestered her all day, pestered pestered pestered, and
here’s the joke of it, man—when you finally got to the
head of the line, you chickened. Didn’t you?”
I said nothing. My tongue was stuck to the roof of
my mouth.
His hand stole out, the skin yellow in the light of
the Mustang’s dashboard lights, the nails filthy, and
gripped my locked hands. The strength went out of
them when he did and they fell apart like a knot that
magically unties itself at the touch of the magician’s
wand. His skin was cold and somehow snaky.
“Didn’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. I couldn’t get my voice much above a
whisper. “When we got close and I saw how high it
was . . . how it turned over at the top and how they
screamed inside when it did . . . I chickened out. She
swatted me, and she wouldn’t talk to me all the way
home. I never rode the Bullet.” Until now, at least.
“You should have, man. That’s the best one. That’s
the one to ride. Nothin else is as good, at least not
there. I stopped on the way home and got some beers
at that store by the state line. I was gonna stop over
my girlfriend’s house, give her the button as a joke.”
He tapped the button on his chest, then unrolled his
window and flicked his cigarette out into the windy
night. “Only you probably know what happened.”
Of course I knew. It was every ghost story you’d
ever heard, wasn’t it? He crashed his Mustang and
when the cops got there he’d been sitting dead in the
crumpled remains with his body behind the wheel
and his head in the backseat, his cap turned around
backwards and his dead eyes staring up at the roof,
and ever since you see him on Ridge Road when the
moon is full and the wind is high, wheee-oooo, we
will return after this brief word from our sponsor. I
know something now that I didn’t before—the worst
stories are the ones you’ve heard your whole life.
Those are the real nightmares.
“Nothing like a funeral,” he said, and laughed.
“Isn’t that what you said? You slipped there, Al. No
doubt about it. Slipped, tripped, and fell.”
“Let me out,” I whispered. “Please.”
“Well,” he said, turning toward me, “we have to
talk about that, don’t we? Do you know who I am,
Alan?”
“You’re a ghost,” I said.
He gave an impatient little snort, and in the glow of
the speedometer the corners of his mouth turned
down. “Come on, man, you can do better than that.
Fuckin Casper’s a ghost. Do I float in the air? Can you
see through me?” He held up one of his hands, opened
and closed it in front of me. I could hear the dry, unlubricated
sound of his tendons creaking.
I tried to say something. I don’t know what, and it
doesn’t really matter, because nothing came out.
“I’m a kind of messenger,” Staub said. “Fuckin
FedEx from beyond the grave, you like that? Guys like
me actually come out pretty often whenever the circumstances
are just right. You know what I think? I
think that whoever runs things—God or whatever—
must like to be entertained. He always wants to see if
you’ll keep what you already got or if he can talk you
into goin for what’s behind the curtain. Things have
to be just right, though. Tonight they were. You out
all by yourself . . . mother sick . . . needin a ride . . .”
“If I’d stayed with the old man, none of this would
have happened,” I said. “Would it?” I could smell
Staub clearly now, the needlesharp smell of the
chemicals and the duller, blunter stink of decaying
meat, and wondered how I ever could have missed it,
or mistaken it for something else.
“Hard to say,” Staub replied. “Maybe this old man
you’re talking about was dead, too.”
I thought of old man’s shrill handful-of-glass voice,
the snap of his truss. No, he hadn’t been dead, and I
had traded the smell of piss in his old Dodge for something
a lot worse.
“Anyway, man, we don’t have time to talk about all
that. Five more miles and we’ll start seeing houses
again. Seven more and we’re at the Lewiston city line.
Which means you have to decide now.”
“Decide what?” Only I thought I knew.
“Who rides the Bullet and who stays on the ground.
You or your mother.” He turned and looked at me
with his drowning moonlight eyes. He smiled more
fully and I saw most of his teeth were gone, knocked
out in the crash. He patted the steering wheel. “I’m
taking one of you with me, man. And since you’re
here, you get to choose. What do you say?”
You can’t be serious rose to my lips, but what
would be the point of saying that, or anything like it?
Of course he was serious. Dead serious.
I thought of all the years she and I had spent
together, Alan and Jean Parker against the world. A
lot of good times and more than a few really bad ones.
Patches on my pants and casserole suppers. Most of
the other kids took a quarter a week to buy the hot
lunch; I always got a peanut-butter sandwich or a
piece of bologna rolled up in day-old bread, like a kid
in one of those dopey rags-to-riches stories. Her working
in God knew how many different restaurants and
cocktail lounges to support us. The time she took the
day off work to talk to the ADC man, her dressed in
her best pants suit, him sitting in our kitchen rocker
in a suit of his own, one even a nine-year-old kid like
me could tell was a lot better than hers, with a clipboard
in his lap and a fat, shiny pen in his fingers. Her
answering the insulting, embarrassing questions he
asked with a fixed smile on her mouth, even offering
him more coffee, because if he turned in the right
report she’d get an extra fifty dollars a month, a lousy
fifty bucks. Lying on her bed after he’d gone, crying,
and when I came in to sit beside her she had tried to
smile and said ADC didn’t stand for Aid to Dependent
Children but Awful Damn Crapheads. I had laughed
and then she laughed, too, because you had to laugh,
we’d found that out. When it was just you and your
fat chain-smoking ma against the world, laughing was
quite often the only way you could get through without
going insane and beating your fists on the walls.
But there was more to it than that, you know. For people
like us, little people who went scurrying through
the world like mice in a cartoon, sometimes laughing
at the assholes was the only revenge you could ever
get. Her working all those jobs and taking the overtime
and taping her ankles when they swelled and
putting her tips away in a jar marked alan’s college
fund—just like one of those dopey rags-to-riches
stories, yeah, yeah—and telling me again and again
that I had to work hard, other kids could maybe afford
to play Freddy Fuckaround at school but I couldn’t
because she could put away her tips until doomsday
cracked and there still wouldn’t be enough; in the end
it was going to come down to scholarships and loans
if I was going to go to college and I had to go to college
because it was the only way out for me . . . and for her.
So I had worked hard, you want to believe I did,
because I wasn’t blind—I saw how heavy she was, I
saw how much she smoked (it was her only private
pleasure . . . her only vice, if you’re one of those who
must take that view), and I knew that some day our
positions would reverse and I’d be the one taking
care of her. With a college education and a good job,
maybe I could do that. I wanted to do that. I loved her.
She had a fierce temper and an ugly mouth on her—
that day we waited for the Bullet and then I chickened
out wasn’t the only time she ever yelled at me and
then swatted me—but I loved her in spite of it. Partly
even because of it. I loved her when she hit me as
much as when she kissed me. Do you understand
that? Me either. And that’s all right. I don’t think you
can sum up lives or explain families, and we were a
family, she and I, the smallest family there is, a tight
little family of two, a shared secret. If you had asked, I
would have said I’d do anything for her. And now that
was exactly what I was being asked to do. I was being
asked to die for her, to die in her place, even though
she had lived half her life, probably a lot more. I had
hardly begun mine.
“What say, Al?” George Staub asked. “Time’s wasting.”
“I can’t decide something like that,” I said hoarsely.
The moon sailed above the road, swift and brilliant.
“It’s not fair to ask me.”
“I know, and believe me, that’s what they all say.”
Then he lowered his voice. “But I gotta tell you something—
if you don’t decide by the time we get back to
the first house lights, I’ll have to take you both.” He
frowned, then brightened again, as if remembering
there was good news as well as bad. “You could ride
together in the backseat if I took you both, talk over
old times, there’s that.”
“Ride to where?”
He didn’t reply. Perhaps he didn’t know.
The trees blurred by like black ink. The headlights
rushed and the road rolled. I was twenty-one. I wasn’t
a virgin but I’d only been with a girl once and I’d been
drunk and couldn’t remember much of what it had
been like. There were a thousand places I wanted to
go—Los Angeles, Tahiti, maybe Luchenbach, Texas—
and a thousand things I wanted to do. My mother was
forty-eight and that was old, goddammit. Mrs.
McCurdy wouldn’t say so but Mrs. McCurdy was old
herself. My mother had done right by me, worked all
those long hours and taken care of me, but had I chosen
her life for her? Asked to be born and then
demanded that she live for me? She was forty-eight. I
was twenty-one. I had, as they said, my whole life
before me. But was that the way you judged? How did
you decide a thing like this? How could you decide a
thing like this?
The woods bolting by. The moon looking down like
a bright and deadly eye.
“Better hurry up, man,” George Staub said. “We’re
running out of wilderness.”
I opened my mouth and tried to speak. Nothing
came out but an arid sigh.
“Here, got just the thing,” he said, and reached
behind him. His shirt pulled up again and I got
another look (I could have done without it) at the
stitched black line on his belly. Were there still guts
behind that line or just packing soaked in chemicals?
When he brought his hand back, he had a can of beer
in it—one of those he’d bought at the state line store
on his last ride, presumably.
“I know how it is,” he said. “Stress gets you dry in
the mouth. Here.”
He handed me the can. I took it, pulled the ringtab,
and drank deeply. The taste of the beer going down
was cold and bitter. I’ve never had a beer since. I just
can’t drink it. I can barely stand to watch the commercials
on TV.
Ahead of us in the blowing dark, a yellow light
glimmered.
“Hurry up, Al—got to speed it up. That’s the first
house, right up at the top of this hill. If you got something
to say to me, you better say it now.”
The light disappeared, then came back again, only
now it was several lights. They were windows.
Behind them were ordinary people doing ordinary
things—watching TV, feeding the cat, maybe beating
off in the bathroom.
I thought of us standing in line at Thrill Village,
Jean and Alan Parker, a big woman with dark patches
of sweat around the armpits of her sundress and her
little boy. She hadn’t wanted to stand in that line,
Staub was right about that . . . but I had pestered
pestered pestered. He had been right about that, too.
She had swatted me, but she had stood in line with
me, too. She had stood with me in a lot of lines, and I
could go over all of it again, all the arguments pro and
con, but there was no time.
“Take her,” I said as the lights of the first house
swept toward the Mustang. My voice was hoarse and
raw and loud. “Take her, take my ma, don’t take me.”
I threw the can of beer down on the floor of the car
and put my hands up to my face. He touched me then,
touched the front of my shirt, his fingers fumbling,
and I thought—with sudden brilliant clarity—that it
had all been a test. I had failed and now he was going
to rip my beating heart right out of my chest, like an
evil djinn in one of those cruel Arabian fairy tales. I
screamed. Then his fingers let go—it was as if he’d
changed his mind at the last second—and he reached
past me. For one moment my nose and lungs were so
full of his deathly smell that I felt positive I was dead
myself. Then there was the click of the door opening
and cold fresh air came streaming in, washing the
death smell away.
“Pleasant dreams, Al,” he grunted in my ear and
then pushed. I went rolling out into the windy October
darkness with my eyes closed and my hands
raised and my body tensed for the bone-breaking
smashdown. I might have been screaming, I don’t
remember for sure.
The smashdown didn’t come and after an endless
moment I realized I was already down—I could feel
the ground under me. I opened my eyes, then
squeezed them shut almost at once. The glare of the
moon was blinding. It sent a bolt of pain through my
head, one that settled not behind my eyes, where you
usually feel pain after staring into an unexpectedly
bright light, but in the back, way down low just above
the nape of my neck. I became aware that my legs and
bottom were cold and wet. I didn’t care. I was on the
ground, and that was all I cared about.
I pushed up on my elbows and opened my eyes
again, more cautiously this time. I think I already
knew where I was, and one look around was enough
to confirm it: lying on my back in the little graveyard
at the top of the hill on Ridge Road. The moon was
almost directly overhead now, fiercely bright but
much smaller than it had been only a few moments
before. The mist was deeper as well, lying over the
cemetery like a blanket. A few markers poked up
through it like stone islands. I tried getting to my feet
and another bolt of pain went through the back of my
head. I put my hand there and felt a lump. There was
sticky wetness, as well. I looked at my hand. In the
moonlight, the blood streaked across my palm looked
black.
On my second try I succeeded in getting up, and
stood there swaying among the tombstones, knee-deep
in mist. I turned around, saw the break in the
rock wall and Ridge Road beyond it. I couldn’t see my
pack because the mist had overlaid it, but I knew it
was there. If I walked out to the road in the lefthand
wheelrut of the lane, I’d find it. Hell, would likely
stumble over it.
So here was my story, all neatly packaged and tied
up with a bow: I had stopped for a rest at the top of
this hill, had gone inside the cemetery to have a little
look around, and while backing away from the grave
of one George Staub had tripped over my own large
and stupid feet. Fell down, banged my head on a
marker. How long had I been unconscious? I wasn’t
savvy enough to tell time by the changing position of
the moon with to-the-minute accuracy, but it had to
have been at least an hour. Long enough to have a
dream that I’d gotten a ride with a dead man. What
dead man? George Staub, of course, the name I’d read
on a grave-marker just before the lights went out. It
was the classic ending, wasn’t it? Gosh-What-an-Awful-
Dream-I-Had. And when I got to Lewiston and
found my mother had died? Just a little touch of precognition
in the night, put it down to that. It was the
sort of story you might tell years later, near the end of
a party, and people would nod their heads thoughtfully
and look solemn and some dinkleberry with
leather patches on the elbows of his tweed jacket
would say there were more things in heaven and earth
than were dreamed of in our philosophy and then—
“Then shit,” I croaked. The top of the mist was
moving slowly, like mist on a clouded mirror. “I’m
never talking about this. Never, not in my whole life,
not even on my deathbed.”
But it had all happened just the way I remembered
it, of that I was sure. George Staub had come along
and picked me up in his Mustang, Ichabod Crane’s old
pal with his head stitched on instead of under his arm,
demanding that I choose. And I had chosen—faced
with the oncoming lights of the first house, I had
bartered away my mother’s life with hardly a pause. It
might be understandable, but that didn’t make the
guilt of it any less. No one had to know, however; that
was the good part. Her death would look natural—
hell, would be natural—and that’s the way I intended
to leave it.
I walked out of the graveyard in the lefthand rut,
and when my foot struck my pack, I picked it up and
slung it back over my shoulders. Lights appeared at
the bottom of the hill as if someone had given them
the cue. I stuck out my thumb, oddly sure it was the
old man in the Dodge—he’d come back this way looking
for me, of course he had, it gave the story that
final finishing roundness.
Only it wasn’t the old guy. It was a tobacco-chewing
farmer in a Ford pick-up truck filled with apple baskets,
a perfectly ordinary fellow: not old and not dead.
“Where you goin, son?” he asked, and when I told
him he said, “That works for both of us.” Less than
forty minutes later, at twenty minutes after nine, he
pulled up in front of the Central Maine Medical Center.
“Good luck. Hope your ma’s on the mend.”
“Thank you,” I said, and opened the door.
“I see you been pretty nervous about it, but she’ll
most likely be fine. Ought to get some disinfectant on
those, though.” He pointed at my hands.
I looked down at them and saw the deep, purpling
crescents on the backs. I remembered clutching them
together, digging in with my nails, feeling it but unable
to stop. And I remembered Staub’s eyes, filled up with
moonlight like radiant water. Did you ride the Bullet?
he’d asked me. I rode that fucker four times.
“Son?” the man driving the pick-up asked. “You all
right?”
“Huh?”
“You come over all shivery.”
“I’m okay,” I said. “Thanks again.” I slammed the
door of the pickup and went up the wide walk past the
line of parked wheelchairs gleaming in the moonlight.
I walked to the information desk, reminding myself
that I had to look surprised when they told me she
was dead, had to look surprised, they’d think it was
funny if I didn’t . . . or maybe they’d just think I was in
shock . . . or that we didn’t get along . . . or . . .
I was so deep in these thoughts that I didn’t at first
grasp what the woman behind the desk had told me. I
had to ask her to repeat it.
“I said that she’s in room 487, but you can’t go up
just now. Visiting hours end at nine.”
“But . . .” I felt suddenly woozy. I gripped the edge of
the desk. The lobby was lit by fluorescents, and in
that bright even glare the cuts on the backs of my
hands stood out boldly—eight small purple crescents
like grins, just above the knuckles. The man in the
pick-up was right, I ought to get some disinfectant on
those.
The woman behind the desk was looking at me
patiently. The plaque in front of her said she was
yvonne ederle.
“But is she all right?”
She looked at her computer. “What I have here is S.
Stands for satisfactory. And four is a general population
floor. If your mother had taken a turn for the
worse, she’d be in ICU. That’s on three. I’m sure if
you come back tomorrow, you’ll find her just fine.
Visiting hours begin at—”
“She’s my ma,” I said. “I hitchhiked all the way
down from the University of Maine to see her. Don’t
you think I could go up, just for a few minutes?”
“Exceptions are sometimes made for immediate
family,” she said, and gave me a smile. “You just hang
on a second. Let me see what I can do.” She picked up
the phone and punched a couple of buttons, no doubt
calling the nurse’s station on the fourth floor, and I
could see the course of the next two minutes as if I
really did have second sight. Yvonne the Information
Lady would ask if the son of Jean Parker in 487 could
come up for a minute or two—just long enough to
give his mother a kiss and an encouraging word—and
the nurse would say oh God, Mrs. Parker died not fifteen
minutes ago, we just sent her down to the
morgue, we haven’t had a chance to update the computer,
this is so terrible.
The woman at the desk said, “Muriel? It’s Yvonne. I
have a young man here down here at the desk, his
name is—” She looked at me, eyebrows raised, and I
gave her my name. “—Alan Parker. His mother is Jean
Parker, in 487? He wonders if he could just . . .”
She stopped. Listened. On the other end the nurse
on the fourth floor was no doubt telling her that Jean
Parker was dead.
“All right,” Yvonne said. “Yes, I understand.” She
sat quietly for a moment, looking off into space, then
put the mouthpiece of the telephone against her
shoulder and said, “She’s sending Anne Corrigan
down to peek in on her. It will only be a second.”
“It never ends,” I said.
Yvonne frowned. “I beg pardon?”
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s been a long night and—”
“—and you’re worried about your mom. Of course. I
think you’re a very good son to drop everything the
way you did and come on the run.”
I suspected Yvonne Ederle’s opinion of me would
have taken a drastic drop if she’d heard my conversation
with the young man behind the wheel of the
Mustang, but of course she hadn’t. That was a little
secret, just between George and me.
It seemed that hours passed as I stood there under
the bright fluorescents, waiting for the nurse on the
fourth floor to come back on the line. Yvonne had
some papers in front of her. She trailed her pen down
one of them, putting neat little check marks beside
some of the names, and it occurred to me that if there
really was an Angel of Death, he or she was probably
just like this woman, a slightly overworked functionary
with a desk, a computer, and too much paperwork.
Yvonne kept the phone pinched between her
ear and one raised shoulder. The loudspeaker said that
Dr. Farquahr was wanted in radiology, Dr. Farquahr.
On the fourth floor a nurse named Anne Corrigan
would now be looking at my mother, lying dead in her
bed with her eyes open, the stroke-induced sneer of
her mouth finally relaxing.
Yvonne straightened as a voice came back on the
line. She listened, then said: “All right, yes, I understand.
I will. Of course I will. Thank you, Muriel.”
She hung up the telephone and looked at me
solemnly. “Muriel says you can come up, but you can
only visit for five minutes. Your mother’s had her
evening meds, and she’s very soupy.”
I stood there, gaping at her.
Her smile faded a little bit. “Are you sure you’re all
right, Mr. Parker?”
“Yes,” I said. “I guess I just thought—”
Her smile came back. It was sympathetic this time.
“Lots of people think that,” she said. “It’s understandable.
You get a call out of the blue, you rush to get
here . . . it’s understandable to think the worst. But
Muriel wouldn’t let you up on her floor if your mother
wasn’t fine. Trust me on that.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Thank you so much.”
As I started to turn away, she said: “Mr. Parker? If
you came from the University of Maine up north,
may I ask why you’re wearing that button? Thrill Village
is in New Hampshire, isn’t it?”
I looked down at the front of my shirt and saw the
button pinned to the breast pocket: i rode the bullet
at thrill village, laconia. I remembered thinking
he intended to rip my heart out. Now I understood: he
had pinned his button on my shirt just before pushing
me into the night. It was his way of marking me, of
making our encounter impossible not to believe. The
cuts on the backs of my hands said so, the button on
my shirt said so, too. He had asked me to choose and I
had chosen.
So how could my mother still be alive?
“This?” I touched it with the ball of my thumb,
even polished it a little. “It’s my good luck charm.”
The lie was so horrible that it had a kind of splendor.
“I got it when I was there with my mother, a long
time ago. She took me on the Bullet.”
Yvonne the Information Lady smiled as if this were
the sweetest thing she had ever heard. “Give her a
nice hug and kiss,” she said. “Seeing you will send her
off to sleep better than any of the pills the doctors
have.” She pointed. “The elevators are over there,
around the corner.”
With visiting hours over, I was the only one waiting
for a car. There was a litter basket off to the left, by
the door to the newsstand, which was closed and
dark. I tore the button off my shirt and threw it in the
basket. Then I rubbed my hand on my pants. I was
still rubbing it when one of the elevator doors opened.
I got in and pushed for four. The car began to rise.
Above the floor buttons was a poster announcing a
blood drive for the following week. As I read it, an
idea came to me . . . except it wasn’t so much an idea
as a certainty. My mother was dying now, at this very
second, while I rode up to her floor in this slow industrial
elevator. I had made the choice; it therefore fell
to me to find her. It made perfect sense.
The elevator door opened on another poster. This one
showed a cartoon finger pressed to big red cartoon
lips. Beneath it was a line reading our patients
appreciate your quiet! Beyond the elevator lobby
was a corridor going right and left. The odd-numbered
rooms were to the left. I walked down that way, my
sneakers seeming to gain weight with every step. I
slowed in the four-seventies, then stopped entirely
between 481 and 483. I couldn’t do this. Sweat as cold
and sticky as half-frozen syrup crept out of my hair in
little trickles. My stomach was knotted up like a fist
inside a slick glove. No, I couldn’t do it. Best to turn
around and skedaddle like the cowardly chickenshit I
was. I’d hitchhike out to Harlow and call Mrs.
McCurdy in the morning. Things would be easier to
face in the morning.
I started to turn, and then a nurse poked her head
out of the room two doors up . . . my mother’s room.
“Mr. Parker?” she asked in a low voice.
For a wild moment I almost denied it. Then I nodded.
“Come in. Hurry. She’s going.”
They were the words I’d expected, but they still
sent a cramp of terror through me and buckled my
knees.
The nurse saw this and came hurrying toward me,
her skirt rustling, her face alarmed. The little gold pin
on her breast read anne corrigan. “No, no, I just
meant the sedative . . . She’s going to sleep. Oh my
God, I’m so stupid. She’s fine, Mr. Parker, I gave her
her Ambien and she’s going, to sleep, that’s all I
meant. You aren’t going to faint, are you?” She took
my arm.
“No,” I said, not knowing if I was going to faint or
not. The world was swooping and there was a buzzing
in my ears. I thought of how the road had leaped
toward the car, a black-and-white movie road in all
that silver moonlight. Did you ride the Bullet? Man, I
rode that fucker four times.
Anne Corrigan lead me into the room and I saw my
mother. She had always been a big woman, and the
hospital bed was small and narrow, but she still
looked almost lost in it. Her hair, now more gray than
black, was spilled across the pillow. Her hands lay on
top of the sheet like a child’s hands, or even a doll’s.
There was no frozen stroke-sneer such as the one I’d
imagined on her face, but her complexion was yellow.
Her eyes were closed, but when the nurse beside me
murmured her name, they opened. They were a deep
and iridescent blue, the youngest part of her, and perfectly
alive. For a moment they looked nowhere, and
then they found me. She smiled and tried to hold out
her arms. One of them came up. The other trembled,
rose a little bit, then fell back. “Al,” she whispered.
I went to her, starting to cry. There was a chair by
the wall, but I didn’t bother with it. I knelt on the
floor and put my arms around her. She smelled warm
and clean. I kissed her temple, her cheek, the corner
of her mouth. She raised her good hand and patted her
fingers under one of my eyes.
“Don’t cry,” she whispered. “No need of that.”
“I came as soon as I heard,” I said. “Betsy McCurdy
called.”
“Told her . . . weekend,” she said. “Said the weekend
would be fine.”
“Yeah, and to hell with that,” I said, and hugged
her.
“Car fixed?”
“No,” I said. “I hitchhiked.”
“Oh gorry,” she said. Each word was clearly an
effort for her, but they weren’t slurred, and I sensed no
bewilderment or disorientation. She knew who she
was, who I was, where we were, why we were here.
The only sign of anything wrong was her weak left
arm. I felt an enormous sense of relief. It had all been
a cruel practical joke on Staub’s part . . . or perhaps
there had been no Staub, perhaps it had all been a
dream after all, corny as that might be. Now that I
was here, kneeling by her bed with my arms around
her, smelling a faint remnant of her Lanvin perfume,
the dream idea seemed a lot more plausible.
“Al? There’s blood on your collar.” Her eyes rolled
closed, then came slowly open again. I imagined her
lids must feel as heavy to her as my sneakers had to
me, out in the hall.
“I bumped my head, ma, it’s nothing.”
“Good. Have to . . . take care of yourself.” The lids
came down again; rose even more slowly.
“Mr. Parker, I think we’d better let her sleep now,”
the nurse said from behind me. “She’s had an
extremely difficult day.”
“I know.” I kissed her on the corner of the mouth
again. “I’m going, ma, but I’ll be back tomorrow.”
“Don’t . . . hitchhike . . . dangerous.”
“I won’t. I’ll catch a ride in with Mrs. McCurdy.
You get some sleep.”
“Sleep . . . all I do,” she said. “I was at work, unloading
the dishwasher. I came over all headachey. Fell
down. Woke up . . . here.” She looked up at me. “Was
a stroke. Doctor says . . . not too bad.”
“You’re fine,” I said. I got up, then took her hand.
The skin was fine, as smooth as watered silk. An old
person’s hand.
“I dreamed we were at that amusement park in
New Hampshire,” she said.
I looked down at her, feeling my skin go cold all
over. “Did you?”
“Ayuh. Waiting in line for the one that goes . . . way
up high. Do you remember that one?”
“The Bullet,” I said. “I remember it, ma.”
“You were afraid and I shouted. Shouted at you.”
“No, ma, you—”
Her hand squeezed down on mine and the corners
of her mouth deepened into near dimples. It was a
ghost of her old impatient expression.
“Yes,” she said. “Shouted and swatted you. Back . . .
of the neck, wasn’t it?”
“Probably, yeah,” I said, giving up. “That’s mostly
where you gave it to me.”
“Shouldn’t have,” she said. “It was hot and I was
tired, but still . . . shouldn’t have. Wanted to tell you I
was sorry.”
My eyes started leaking again. “It’s all right, ma.
That was a long time ago.”
“You never got your ride,” she whispered.
“I did, though,” I said. “In the end I did.”
She smiled up at me. She looked small and weak,
miles from the angry, sweaty, muscular woman who
had yelled at me when we finally got to the head of
the line, yelled and then whacked me across the nape
of the neck. She must have seen something on someone’s
face—one of the other people waiting to ride the
Bullet—because I remember her saying What are you
looking at, beautiful? as she lead me away by the
hand, me snivelling under the hot summer sun, rubbing
the back of my neck . . . only it didn’t really hurt,
she hadn’t swatted me that hard; mostly what I
remember was being grateful to get away from that
high, twirling construction with the capsules at either
end, that revolving scream machine.
“Mr. Parker, it really is time to go,” the nurse said.
I raised my mother’s hand and kissed the knuckles.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said. “I love you, ma.”
“Love you, too. Alan . . . sorry for all the times I
swatted you. That was no way to be.”
But it had been; it had been her way to be. I didn’t
know how to tell her I knew that, accepted it. It was
part of our family secret, something whispered along
the nerve endings.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, ma. Okay?”
She didn’t answer. Her eyes had rolled shut again,
and this time the lids didn’t come back up. Her chest
rose and fell slowly and regularly. I backed away from
the bed, never taking my eyes off her.
In the hall I said to the nurse, “Is she going to be all
right? Really all right?”
“No one can say that for sure, Mr. Parker. She’s
Dr. Nunnally’s patient. He’s very good. He’ll be on
the floor tomorrow afternoon and you can ask
him—”
“Tell me what you think.”
“I think she’s going to be fine,” the nurse said, leading
me back down the hall toward the elevator lobby.
“Her vital signs are strong, and all the residual effects
suggest a very light stroke.” She frowned a little.
“She’s going to have to make some changes, of course.
In her diet . . . her lifestyle . . .”
“Her smoking, you mean.”
“Oh yes. That has to go.” She said it as if my
mother quitting her lifetime habit would be no more
difficult than moving a vase from a table in the living
room to one in the hall. I pushed the button for the
elevators, and the door of the car I’d ridden up in
opened at once. Things clearly slowed down a lot at
CMMC once visiting hours were over.
“Thanks for everything,” I said.
“Not at all. I’m sorry I scared you. What I said was
incredibly stupid.”
“Not at all,” I said, although I agreed with her.
“Don’t mention it.”
I got into the elevator and pushed for the lobby. The
nurse raised her hand and twiddled her fingers. I twiddled
my own in return, and then the door slid
between us. The car started down. I looked at the fingernail
marks on the backs of my hands and thought
that I was an awful creature, the lowest of the low.
Even if it had only been a dream, I was the lowest of
the goddam low. Take her, I’d said. She was my
mother but I had said it just the same: Take my ma,
don’t take me. She had raised me, worked overtime
for me, waited in line with me under the hot summer
sun in a dusty little New Hampshire amusement
park, and in the end I had hardly hesitated. Take her,
don’t take me. Chickenshit, chickenshit, you fucking
chickenshit.
When the elevator door opened I stepped out, took
the lid off the litter basket, and there it was, lying in
someone’s almost-empty paper coffee cup: i rode the
bullet at thrill village, laconia.
I bent, plucked the button out of the cold puddle of
coffee it was lying in, wiped it on my jeans, put it in
my pocket. Throwing it away had been the wrong
idea. It was my button now—good luck charm or bad
luck charm, it was mine. I left the hospital, giving
Yvonne a little wave on my way by. Outside, the
moon rode the roof of the sky, flooding the world with
its strange and perfectly dreamy light. I had never felt
so tired or so dispirited in my whole life. I wished I
had the choice to make again. I would have made a
different one. Which was funny—if I’d found her dead,
as I’d expected to, I think I could have lived with it.
After all, wasn’t that the way stories like this one
were supposed to end?
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 turnedaround
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
old 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 lead me to assume that my
mother would die immediately, and Staub had never
corrected that assumption—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. Nothin 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 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 cuff links, 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 goddamn 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.
Stephen King is the author of more than thirty
books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. Among his
most recent are Hearts in Atlantis, The Girl Who
Loved Tom Gordon, The Green Mile, and the audio-only
release, Blood and Smoke. In August, Pocket
Books will release the paperback edition of Hearts in
Atlantis, followed by the October publication from
Scribner of On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.
Information about Stephen King and his writing can
be found at the official King website:
http://www.StephenKing.com