by Stephen King
He was held back a year for repeated absences, tardies, and the attendant flunked courses . . . but he did graduate. He had an ancient Chevrolet Bel Air, and he used to hang around the places where Ace and Fuzzy and the rest had hung around before him: the pool hall, the dance hall, Sukey’s Tavern, which is closed now, and The Mellow Tiger, which isn’t. He eventually got a job with the Castle Rock Public Works Department, filling up holes with hotpatch.
The crash happened over in Harlow. Teddy’s Bel Air was full of his friends (two of them had been part of that group he and Vern took to bossing around way back in 1960), and they were all passing around a couple of joints and a couple of bottles of Popov. They hit a utility pole and sheared it off and the Chevrolet rolled six times. One girl came out technically still alive. She lay for six months in what the nurses and orderlies at Central Maine General call the C&T Ward—Cabbages and Turnips. Then some merciful phantom pulled the plug on her respirator. Teddy Duchamp was posthumously awarded the Dogpiss of the Year Award.
Chris enrolled in the college courses in his second year of junior high—he and I both knew that if he waited any longer it would be too late; he would never catch up. Everyone jawed at him about it: his parents, who thought he was putting on airs, his friends, most of whom dismissed him as a pussy, the guidance counsellor, who didn’t believe he could do the work, and most of all the teachers, who didn’t approve of this duck-tailed, leather-jacketed, engineer-booted apparition who had materialized without warning in their classrooms. You could see that the sight of those boots and that many-zippered jacket offended them in connection with such high-minded subjects as algebra, Latin, and earth science; such attire was meant for the shop courses only. Chris sat among the well-dressed, vivacious boys and girls from the middle class families in Castle View and Brickyard Hill like some silent, brooding Grendel that might turn on them at any moment, produce a horrible roaring like the sound of dual glass-pack mufflers, and gobble them up, penny loafers, Peter Pan collars, button-down paisley shirts, and all.
He almost quit a dozen times that year. His father in particular hounded him, accusing Chris of thinking he was better than his old man, accusing Chris of wanting “to go up there to the college so you can turn me into a bankrupt.” He once broke a Rhinegold bottle over the back of Chris’s head and Chris wound up in the CMG Emergency Room again, where it took four stitches to close his scalp. His old friends, most of whom were now majoring in Smoking Area, catcalled him on the streets. The guidance counsellor huckstered him to take at least some shop courses so he wouldn’t flunk the whole slate. Worst of all, of course, was just this: he’d been fucking off for the entire first seven years of his public education, and now the bill had come due with a vengeance.
We studied together almost every night, sometimes for as long as six hours at a stretch. I always came away from those sessions exhausted, and sometimes I came away frightened as well—frightened by his incredulous rage at just how murderously high that bill was. Before he could even begin to understand introductory algebra, he had to re-learn the fractions that he and Teddy and Vern had played pocket-pool through in the fifth grade. Before he could even begin to understand Pater noster qui est in caelis, he had to be told what nouns and prepositions and objects were. On the inside of his English grammar, neatly lettered, were the words FUCK GERUNDS. His compositional ideas were good and not badly organized, but his grammar was bad and he approached the whole business of punctuation as if with a shotgun. He wore out his copy of Warriner’s and bought another in a Portland bookstore—it was the first hardcover book he actually owned, and it became a queer sort of Bible to him.
But by our junior year in high school, he had been accepted. Neither of us made top honors, but I came out seventh and Chris stood nineteenth. We were both accepted at the University of Maine, but I went to the Orono campus while Chris enrolled at the Portland campus. Pre-law, can you believe that? More Latin.
We both dated through high school, but no girl ever came between us. Does that sound like we went faggot? It would have to most of our old friends, Vern and Teddy included. But it was only survival. We were clinging to each other in deep water. I’ve explained about Chris, I think; my reasons for clinging to him were less definable. His desire to get away from Castle Rock and out of the mill’s shadow seemed to me to be my best part, and I could not just leave him to sink or swim on his own. If he had drowned, that part of me would have drowned with him, I think.
Near the end of 1971, Chris went into a Chicken Delight in Portland to get a three-piece Snack Bucket. Just ahead of him, two men started arguing about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife. Chris, who had always been the best of us at making peace, stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat. The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions; he had been released from Shawshank State Prison only the week before. Chris died almost instantly.
I read about it in the paper—Chris had been finishing his second year of graduate studies. Me, I had been married a year and a half and was teaching high school English. My wife was pregnant and I was trying to write a book. When I read the news item—STUDENT FATALLY STABBED IN PORTLAND RESTAURANT—I told my wife I was going out for a milkshake. I drove out of town, parked, and cried for him. Cried for damn near half an hour, I guess. I couldn’t have done that in front of my wife, much as I love her. It would have been pussy.
34
Me?
I’m a writer now, like I said. A lot of critics think what I write is shit. A lot of the time I think they are right . . . but it still freaks me out to put those words, “Freelance Writer,” down in the Occupation blank of the forms you have to fill out at credit desks and in doctors’ offices. My story sounds so much like a fairytale that it’s fucking absurd.
I sold the book and it was made into a movie and the movie got good reviews and it was a smash hit besides. This all had happened by the time I was twenty-six. The second book was made into a movie as well, as was the third. I told you—it’s fucking absurd. Meantime, my wife doesn’t seem to mind having me around the house and we have three kids now. They all seem perfect to me, and most of the time I’m happy.
But like I said, the writing isn’t so easy or as much fun as it used to be. The phone rings a lot. Sometimes I get headaches, bad ones, and then I have to go into a dim room and lie down until they go away. The doctors say they aren’t true migraines; he called them “stressaches” and told me to slow down. I worry about myself sometimes. What a stupid habit that is . . . and yet I can’t quite seem to stop it. And I wonder if there is really any point to what I’m doing, or what I’m supposed to make of a world where a man can get rich playing “let’s pretend.”
But it’s funny how I saw Ace Merrill again. My friends are dead but Ace is alive. I saw him pulling out of the mill parking lot just after the three o’clock whistle the last time I took my kids down home to see my dad.
The ’52 Ford had become a ’77 Ford station wagon. A faded bumper-sticker said REAGAN/BUSH 1980. His hair was mowed into a crewcut and he’d gotten fat. The sharp, handsome features I remembered were buried in an avalanche of flesh. I had left the kids with Dad long enough to go downtown and get the paper. I was standing on the corner of Main and Carbine and he glanced at me as I waited to cross. There was no sign of recognition on the face of this thirty-two-year-old man who had broken my nose in another dimension of time.
I watched him wheel the Ford wagon into the dirt parking lot beside The Mellow Tiger, get out, hitch at his pants, and walk inside. I could imagine the brief wedge of country-western as he opened the door, the brief sour whiff of Knick and Gansett on draft, the welcoming shouts of the other regulars as he closed the door and placed his large ass on the same stool which had probably held him up for at least three hours every day of his life—except Sundays—since he was twenty-one.
I thought: So that’s what Ace is now.
I looked to the left, and beyond the mill I could see the Cas
tle River not so wide now but a little cleaner, still flowing under the bridge between Castle Rock and Harlow. The trestle upstream is gone, but the river is still around. So am I.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint copyrighted material.
Beechwood Music Corporation and Castle Music Pty. Limited: Portions of lyrics from “Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport,” by Rolf Harris. Copyright © Castle Music Pty. Limited, 1960. Assigned to and copyrighted Beechwood Music Corp., 1961 for the United States and Canada. Copyright © Castle Music Pty. Limited for other territories. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Big Seven Music Corporation: Portions of lyrics from “Party Doll,” by Buddy Knox and Jimmy Bowen. Copyright © Big Seven Music Corp., 1956. Portions of lyrics from “Sorry (I Ran All the Way Home)” by Zwirn/Giosasi. Copyright © Big Seven Music Corp., 1959. All rights reserved.
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Publishers; Jonathan Cape Ltd.; and the Estate of Robert Frost: Two lines from “Mending Wall” from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright © Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1930, 1939, 1969. Copyright © Robert Frost, 1958. Copyright © Lesley Frost Ballantine, 1967.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© SHANE LEONARD
Stephen King is the author of more than fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes The Outsider; Sleeping Beauties (co-written with his son Owen King); the short story collection The Bazaar of Bad Dreams; the Bill Hodges Trilogy—End of Watch, Finders Keepers, and Mr. Mercedes (an Edgar Award winner for Best Novel and now an AT&T Audience Network original television series); Doctor Sleep; and Under the Dome. His novel 11/22/63—a Hulu original television series event—was named a top ten book of 2011 by the New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. His epic works The Dark Tower and It are the basis for major motion pictures. He is the recipient of the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, the 2014 National Medal of Arts, and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King.
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Also by Stephen King
FICTION
Carrie
’Salem’s Lot
The Shining
Night Shift
The Stand
The Dead Zone
Firestarter
Cujo
Creepshow
Different Seasons
Cycle of the Werewolf
Christine
Pet Sematary
IT
Skeleton Crew
The Mist
The Eyes of the Dragon
Misery
The Tommyknockers
The Dark Half
Four Past Midnight
Needful Things
Gerald’s Game
Dolores Claiborne
Nightmares & Dreamscapes
Insomnia
Rose Madder
The Green Mile
Desperation
Bag of Bones
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
Hearts in Atlantis
Dreamcatcher
Everything’s Eventual
From a Buick 8
The Colorado Kid
Cell
Lisey’s Story
Duma Key
Just After Sunset
Stephen King Goes to the Movies
Under the Dome
Full Dark, No Stars
11/22/63
Doctor Sleep
Mr. Mercedes
Revival
Finders Keepers
The Bazaar of Bad Dreams
End of Watch
The Outsider
NOVELS IN THE DARK TOWER SERIES
The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger
The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three
The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands
The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass
The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla
The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah
The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower
The Wind Through the Keyhole: A Dark Tower Novel
BY STEPHEN KING AS RICHARD BACHMAN
Thinner
The Running Man
The Long Walk
Roadwork
The Regulators
Blaze
WITH OWEN KING
Sleeping Beauties
WITH PETER STRAUB
The Talisman
Black House
NONFICTION
Danse Macabre
On Writing (A Memoir of the Craft)
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
This story was previously published in Different Seasons copyright © 1982 by Stephen King
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