by Stephen King
“Reads a book,” Ralph said.
“Goes to see his friends,” Stu said.
“Plays the stereo,” Larry said, grinning.
“Sure, all those things,” Glen said. “But he’s also missing that TV. There’s a hole in his life where that TV used to be. In the back of his mind he’s still thinking At nine o’clock I’m going to pull a few beers and watch the Sox on the tube. And when he goes in there and sees that empty cabinet, he feels as disappointed as hell. A part of his accustomed life has been poured out, is it not so?”
“Yeah,” Ralph said. “Our TV went on the fritz once for two weeks and I didn’t feel right until it was back.”
“It makes a bigger hole in his life if he watched a lot of TV, a smaller hole if he only used it a little bit. But something is gone. Now take away all his books, all his friends, and his stereo. Also remove all sustenance except what he can glean along the way. It’s an emptying-out process and also a diminishing of the ego. Your selves, gentlemen—they are turning into window-glass. Or better yet, empty tumblers.”
“But what’s the point?” Ralph asked. “Why go through all the rigamarole?”
Glen said, “If you read your Bible, you’ll see that it was pretty traditional for these prophets to go out into the wilderness from time to time—Old Testament Magical Mystery Tours. The timespan given for these jaunts was usually forty days and forty nights, a Hebraic idiom that really means ‘no one knows exactly how long he was gone, but it was quite a while.’ Does that remind you of anyone?” “Sure. Mother,” Ralph said.
“Now think of yourself as a battery. You really are, you know.
Your brain runs on chemically converted electrical current. For that matter, your muscles run on tiny charges, too—a chemical called acetylcholine allows the charge to pass when you need to move, and when you want to stop, another chemical, cholinesterase, is manufactured. Cholinesterase destroys acetylcholine, so your nerves become poor conductors again. Good thing, too. Otherwise, once you started scratching your nose, you’d never be able to stop. Okay, the point is this: Everything you think, everything you do, it all has to run off the battery. Like the accessories in a car.”
They were all still listening closely.
“Watching TV, reading books, talking with friends, eating a big dinner ... all of it runs off the battery. A normal life—at least in what used to be Western civilization—was like running a car with power windows, power brakes, power seats, all the goodies. But the more goodies you have, the less the battery can charge. True?” “Yeah,” Ralph said. “Even a big Delco won’t ever overcharge when it’s sitting in a Cadillac.”
“Well, what we’ve done is to strip off the accessories. We’re on charge.”
Ralph said uneasily: “If you put a car battery on charge for too long, she’ll explode.”
“Yes,” Glen agreed. “Same with people. You can clean yourself out so much there’s nothing left. The Bible tells us about Isaiah and Job and the others, but it doesn’t say how many prophets came back from the wilderness with visions that had crisped their brains. I imagine there were some. But I have a healthy respect for human intelligence and the human psyche, in spite of an occasional throwback like East Texas here—”
“Off my case, baldy,” Stu growled.
“Anyhow, the capacity of the human mind is a lot bigger than the biggest Delco battery. I think it can take a charge almost to infinity. In certain cases, perhaps beyond infinity.”
They walked in silence for a while, thinking this over.
“Are we changing?” Stu asked quietly.
“Yes,” Glen answered. “Yes, I think we are.”
“We’ve dropped some weight,” Ralph said. “I know that just looking at you guys. And me, I used to have a helluva beergut. Now 1 can look down and see my toes again.”
“It’s a state of mind,” Larry said suddenly. When they looked at him he seemed a trifle embarrassed but went on: “I’ve had this feeling for the last week or so, and I couldn’t understand it. Maybe now
I can. I’ve been feeling high. Like I’d done half a joint of really dynamite grass or snorted just a touch of coke. But there’s none of the disorienting feeling that goes with dope. You do some dope and you feel like normal thinking is just a little bit out of your grasp. I feel like I’m thinking just fine, better than ever, in fact. But I still feel high.” Larry laughed. “Maybe it’s just hunger.”
“Hunger’s part of it,” Glen agreed, “but not all of it.”
“Me, I’m hungry all the time,” Ralph said, “but it doesn’t seem too important. I feel good.”
“I do too,” Stu said. “Physically, I haven’t felt this good in years.” “When you empty out the vessel, you also empty out all the crap floating around in there,” Glen said. “The additives. The impurities. Sure it feels good. It’s a whole-body, whole-mind enema.”
“You got such a fancy way of puttin things, baldy.”
“It may be inelegant, but it’s accurate.”
Ralph asked, “Will it help us with him?”
“Well,” Glen said, “that’s what it’s for. I don’t have much doubt about that. But we’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?”
They came to the washout a little past noon on the twenty-third. The sky had been overcast all day, and it was cold—cold enough to snow, almost, Stu thought.
The four of them stood on the edge, Kojak at Glen’s heel, looking down and across. Somewhere north of here a dam might have given way, or there might have been a succession of hard summer rainstorms. Whatever, there had been a flash flood along the San Rafael, which was only a dry wash in some years. It had swept away a great thirty-foot slab of 1-70. The gully was about fifty feet deep, the banks crumbly, rubbly soil and sedimentary rock. At the bottom was a sullen trickle of water.
“Holy crow,” Ralph said. “Somebody oughtta call the Utah State Highway Department about this.”
Larry pointed. “Look over there,” he said. They looked out into the monolith-strewn wilderness, and about one hundred yards down the course of the San Rafael they saw a tangle of guardrails and cable, and large slabs of asphalt-composition paving. One chunk stuck up toward the cloudy, racing sky like an apocalyptic finger, complete with white broken passing line.
Glen was looking down into the rubble-strewn cut, hands stuffed into his pockets, an absent, dreaming look on his face. In a low voice, Stu said: “Can you make it, Glen?”
“Sure, I think so.”
“How’s that arthritis?”
“It’s been worse.” He cracked a smile. “But in all honesty, it’s been better, too.”
They had no rope with which to anchor each other. Stu went down first, moving carefully. He didn’t like the way the ground sometimes shifted under his feet, starting little slides of rock and dirt. Once he thought his footing was going to go out from under him completely, sending him sliding all the way to the bottom on his can. One groping hand caught a solid rock outcropping and he hung on for dear life, finding more solid ground for his feet. Then Kojak was bounding blithely past him, kicking up little puffs of dirt and sending down only small runnels of earth. A moment later he was standing on the bottom, wagging his tail and barking amiably up at Stu.
“Fucking showoff dog,” Stu growled, and carefully made his way to the bottom.
“I’m coming next,” Glen called. “I heard what you said about my dog!”
“Be careful, baldy! Be damn careful! It’s really loose underfoot.”
Glen came down slowly, moving with great deliberation from one hold to the next. Stu tensed every time he saw loose dirt start to slide out from underneath Glen’s battered Georgia Giants. His hair blew like fine silver around his ears in the light breeze that had sprung up. It occurred to him that when he had first met Glen, painting a mediocre picture beside the road in New Hampshire, Glen’s hair had still been mostly dark.
Until the moment Glen finally planted his feet on the level ground of the mudflat at the bott
om of the gully, Stu was sure he was going to fall and break himself in two. Stu sighed with relief and clapped him on the shoulder.
“No sweat, East Texas,” Glen said, and bent to ruffle Kojak’s fur.
“Plenty here,” Stu told him.
Ralph came next, jumping the last eight feet or so. “Boy,” he said. “That shit’s just as loose as a goose. Be funny if we couldn’t get up that other bank and had to walk four or five miles upstream to find shallower bank, wouldn’t it?”
“Be a lot funnier if another flash flood came along while we were looking,” Stu said.
Larry came down agilely and well, joining them less than three minutes after they had started down. “Who goes up first?” He asked.
“Why don’t you, since you’re so perky?” Glen said.
“Sure”
It took him considerably longer to get up, and twice the treacherous footing ran out beneath him and he nearly fell. But finally he gained the top and waved down at them.
“I’m next,” Glen said, and walked across to the other bank.
Stu caught his arm. “Listen,” he said. “We can walk upstream and find a shallower bank, like Ralph said.”
“And lose the rest of the day? When I was a kid, I could have gone up there in forty seconds and registered a pulse-rate under seventy at the top.”
“You’re no kid now, Glen.”
“No. But I think there’s still some of him left.”
Before Stu could say more, Glen had started up. He paused to rest about a third of the way up and then pressed on. Near the halfway point he grabbed an outcrop of shale that crumbled away under his hands and Stu was sure he was going to tumble all the way to the bottom, end over arthritic end.
“Ah, shit—” Ralph breathed.
Glen flailed his arms and somehow kept his balance. He jigged to his right and went up another twenty feet, rested, then went up again. Near the top a spur of rock that he had been standing on tore loose and he would have fallen, but Larry was there. He grabbed Glen’s arm and hauled him up.
“Nothing to it,” Glen called down.
Stu grinned with relief. “How’s your pulse-rate, baldy?”
“Plus ninety, I think,” Glen admitted.
Ralph went up like a stolid mountain goat, checking each hold, shifting his hands and feet with great deliberation. When he reached the top, Stu started up.
Right up until the moment he fell, Stu was thinking that actually this slope was a little easier than the one they had descended. The holds were better, the gradient a tiny bit shallower. But the surface was a mixture of chalky soil and rock fragments that had been badly loosened by the wet weather. Stu sensed that it wanted to be evil, and he went up carefully.
His chest was over the edge when the knob of outcropping his left foot was on suddenly disappeared. He felt himself begin to slide. Larry grabbed for his hand, but this time he missed his grip. Stu grabbed the outjutting edge of the turnpike, and it came off in his hands. He stared at it stupidly for a moment as the speed of his descent began to increase. He discarded it, feeling insanely like the coyote in a Roadrunner cartoon.
His knee struck something, and there was a sudden bolt of pain. He grabbed at the gluey surface of the slope, which was now speeding past him at an alarming rate, and kept coming away with nothing but handfuls of dirt.
He slammed into a boulder and cartwheeled, the breath slapped from his body. He fell free for about ten feet, and came down on his lower leg at an angle. He heard it snap. The pain was instantaneous and huge. He yelled. He did a backward somersault. He was eating dirt now. Sharp pebbles scrawled bloody scratches across his face and arms. He came down on the hurt leg again, and felt it snap somewhere else. This time he didn’t yell. This time he screamed.
He slid the last fifteen feet on his belly, like a kid on a greasy chute-the-chute. He came to rest with his pants full of mud and his heart beating crazily in his ears. The leg was white fire.
Broken. But how bad? Pretty bad from the way it feels. Two places at least, maybe more. And the knee’s sprung.
Then Larry was coming down the slope, moving in lithe jumps that seemed almost a mockery of what had just happened to Stu. Then he was kneeling beside him, asking the question which Stu had already asked himself.
“How bad, Stu?”
Stu got up on his elbows and looked at Larry, his face white with shock and streaked brown with dirt.
“I figure I’ll be walking again in about three months,” he said. He began to feel as if he was going to puke. He looked up at the cloudy sky, balled his fists up, and shook them at it. “OHHH, SHIT!” he screamed.
Ralph and Larry splinted the leg. Glen had produced a bottle of “arthritis pills” and gave Stu one. Stu didn’t know what was in the “arthritis pills” and Glen refused to say, but the pain in his leg faded to a faraway drone. He felt very calm, even serene. It occurred to him that they were all living on borrowed time, not because they were on their way to find Flagg, necessarily, but because they had survived Captain Trips in the first place. At any rate, he knew what had to be done . . . and he was going to see that it was done. Larry had just finished speaking. They all looked at him anxiously to see what he would say.
What he said was simple enough. “No.”
“Stu,” Glen said gently, “you don’t understand—”
“I understand. I’m saying no. No trip back to Green River. No rope. No car. Against the rules of the game.”
“It’s no fucking game!” Larry cried. “You’d die here!”
“And you’re almost surely gonna die over there in Nevada. Now go on and get getting. You’ve got another four hours of daylight.” “We’re not going to leave you,” Larry said.
“I’m sorry, but you are. I’m telling you to.”
“No. I’m in charge now. Mother said if anything happened to you—”
“—that you were to go on.”
“No. No.” Larry looked around at Glen and Ralph for support. They looked back at him, troubled. Kojak sat nearby, watching all four.
“Listen to me, Larry,” Stu said. “This whole trip is based on the idea that the old lady knew what she was talking about. If you start frigging around with that, you’re putting everything on the line.” “Yeah, that’s right,” Ralph said.
“No, it ain’t right, you sodbuster,” Larry said, furiously mimicking Ralph’s flat Oklahoma accent. “It wasn’t God’s will that Stu fell down here, it wasn’t even the dark man’s doing. It was just loose dirt, that’s all, just loose dirt! I’m not leaving you, Stu. I’m done leaving people behind.”
“Yes. We are going to leave him,” Glen said quietly.
Larry stared around unbelievingly. “I thought you were his friend!”
“I am. But that doesn’t matter.”
Larry uttered a hysterical laugh and walked a little way down the gully. “You’re crazy! You know that?”
“No I’m not. We made an agreement. We stood around Mother Abagail’s deathbed and entered into it. It almost certainly meant our deaths, and we knew it. We understood the agreement. Now we’re going to live up to it.”
“Well, I want to, for Chrissake. I told you, we get a station wagon, put him in the back, and go on—”
“We’re supposed to walk.” Ralph said. He pointed at Stu. “He can’t walk.”
“Right. Fine. He’s got a broken leg. What do you propose we do? Shoot him like a horse?”
“Larry—” Stu said.
Glen grabbed Larry’s shirt and yanked him toward him. “Who are you trying to save?” His voice was cold and stern. “Stu, or yourself?” Larry looked at him, mouth working.
“It’s very simple,” Glen said. “We can’t stay . . . and he can’t go.” “I refuse to accept that,” Larry whispered. His face was dead pale. “It’s a test,” Ralph said suddenly. “That’s what it is.”
“A sanity test, maybe,” Larry said.
“Vote,” Stu said from the ground. “I vote you go on.”
“I won’t do it,” Larry said.
“It’s not Stu you’re thinking of,” Glen said. “You’re trying to save something in yourself, I think. But this time it’s right to go on, Larry. We have to.”
Larry rubbed his mouth slowly with the back of his hand.
“Let’s stay here tonight,” he said. “Let’s think this thing out.”
“No,” Stu said.
Ralph nodded. A looked passed between him and Glen, and then Glen fished the bottle of “arthritis pills” out of his pocket and put it in Stu’s hand. “These are morphine-base,” he said. “More than three or four would probably be fatal.” His eyes locked with Stu’s. “Do you understand, East Texas?”
“Yeah. I get you.”
“What are you talking about?” Larry asked shrilly. “Just what the hell are. you—”
“Don’t you know?” Ralph said with such utter contempt that for a moment Larry was silenced. Then it all rushed before him again with the nightmare speed of strangers’ faces as you ride the whip at the carnival: pills, uppers, downers, cruisers. Rita. Turning her over in her sleeping bag and seeing that she was dead and stiff, green puke coming out of her mouth like a rancid party favor.
‘Wo!" he yelled, and tried to snatch the bottle from Stu’s hand. Ralph grabbed him by the shoulders. Larry struggled.
“Let him go,” Stu said. “I want to talk to him.” Ralph still held on, looking at Stu uncertainly. “No, go on, let him go.”
Ralph let go, but looked ready to spring again.
Stu said, “Come here, Larry. Hunker down.”
Larry came over and hunkered by Stu. He looked miserably into Stu’s face. “It’s not right, man. When somebody falls down and breaks his leg, you don’t . . . you can’t just walk off and let them die. Don’t you know that? Hey, man . . He touched Stu’s face. “Please. Think.”
Stu took Larry’s hand and held it. “Do you think I’m crazy?”
“No! No, but—”
“And do you think that people who are in their right minds have the right to decide for themselves what they want to do?”