by Stephen King
“Was it turning black?” Bucky asks. “Necrotic?”
Alice nods. “Yes, and swollen. I said we had to get him help and he said no. I said I was going to get him a doctor and he couldn’t stop me. He said that was true, but if I did, there was a good chance I’d spend thirty or forty years in jail. By then it was on the news. About Klerke. Do you think he was just trying to scare me?”
Bucky shakes his head. “He was trying to take care of you. If the cops—and the Feebs, they’d be involved—could connect you to what went down at Klerke’s place, you’d go away for a very long time. And once the cops put you with Billy at that Hyatt, you’d be connected.”
“You’re saying that to make me feel better.”
Bucky gives her an impatient look. “Of course I am, but it happens to be the truth.” He pauses. “When did he die, Alice?”
6
Neither of them sleep worth a damn, Billy because he’s in pain that must be excruciating, Alice because she’s still feeling the remnants of speed-up pills her system has never encountered before. Around four-thirty in the morning, long before first light, he tells her they need to get going. He says she’ll have to help him to the car, and he’d like that to happen before the world wakes up.
He takes four of the remaining Oxy tens and uses the bathroom. She goes in after him. He’s flushed away the worst of the blood, but there’s still some on the rim of the toilet and on the tiles. She wipes it up and takes the plastic trash bag with them: outlaw mentality.
By then the pain pills are working, but it still takes almost ten minutes to get him to the car because he has to rest after every two or three steps. He’s leaning heavily on her and gasping like a man who’s just finished a marathon. His breath is rank. She’s terrified that he’ll faint and she’ll have to drag him (because she can’t carry him), but they make it all right.
Slowly, with a series of little whimpering cries she hates to hear, he manages to crawl into the back seat. But when he’s in as well as he can be, with his head pillowed on one arm, he manages a remarkably sunny smile.
“Fucking Marge. If she’d hit just half an inch further to the left, we could have avoided all this mishegas.”
“Fucking Marge,” she agrees.
“Keep it at sixty-five except to pass. Seventy-five once we get to Iowa and Nebraska. We don’t want to see any flashing blue lights.”
“No flashing lights, roger that,” she says, and gives him a salute.
He smiles. “I love you, Alice.”
Alice takes two of the Adderall. She considers and adds a third. Then she gets going.
The traffic south of Chicago is horrible, six or eight lanes in either direction, but with the Adderall on board Alice navigates through it fearlessly. West of the metro area the traffic thins out some and the towns roll by: LaSalle, Princeton, Sheffield, Annawan. Her heart beats in her chest nice and tight. She’s locked in, got the hammer down like a trucker in a country song. Every now and then her eyes flick to the rearview and to the prone shape folded into the back seat. And as they leave Davenport behind and enter the wide flat spaces of Iowa, its fields now gray and still, waiting for winter, he begins to talk. It makes no sense; it makes all the sense in the world. He’s in the dark, she thinks. He is in the dark and in pain and looking for the way out. Oh Billy, I am so, so sorry.
There’s a lot about Cathy. He tells her not to bake the cookies, to wait until Ma comes home to help her. He tells Cathy someone hurt Bob Raines and he’s going to come home mean. He says Corinne stuck up for him, the only one who did. He talks about Shan. There’s something about a shooting gallery. He talks about someone named Derek and someone named Danny. He tells these phantoms that he won’t take it easy on them just because he’s a grownup. Alice thinks he’s talking about Monopoly because he says to hurry up and shake the dice and the railroads are a good buy but the utilities aren’t. Once he shouts, making her jump and swerve. Don’t go in there, Johnny, he says, there’s a muj behind the door, throw in a flash-bang first and get him out of there. He talks about Peggy Pye, the girl from the foster home where he stayed after his mother lost custody. He says paint is the only thing holding the goddam house together. He talks about the girl he had a crush on, sometimes calling her Ronnie and sometimes calling her Robin, which Alice knows was her real name. He says something about a Mustang convertible and something about a jukebox (“It would play all night if you hit it in just the right place, Tac, remember?”), he talks about the toe that was partly lost and the baby shoe that was entirely lost and Bucky and Alice and someone named Thérèse Raquin. He returns again and again to his sister and to the policeman who took him away to the House of Everlasting Paint. He talks about thousands of cars with their windshields shining in the sun. He says they were smashed beauty. He is unpacking his life in the back seat of this stolen car and her heart breaks.
Finally he falls silent and at first she thinks he’s gone to sleep, but the third or fourth time she looks in the rearview and sees him lying there so still with his knees pulled up she thinks he’s dead.
They’re in Nebraska now. She pulls off at the exit for Hemingford Home and onto two-lane county blacktop running straight as a string between walls of corn that’s finished for another year. The day is almost over. She goes a mile and comes to a dirt road and pulls onto it, driving in far enough to be hidden from the blacktop road. She gets out and opens the back door and is at first relieved to see him looking at her, next terrified by the thought that he’s died with his eyes open. Then he blinks.
“Why’d we stop?”
“I needed to stretch my legs. How are you, Billy?”
Stupid question, but what else is there to ask? Do you know who I am or do you think I’m your dead sister? Are you going to be in your right mind for awhile? And by the way, is it too late? Alice thinks she knows the answer to that one.
“Help me sit up.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good—”
“Help me sit up, Alice.”
So he knows. And he’s with her, at least for now. She takes his hands and helps him sit up with his feet on an unnamed dirt road in a town called Hemingford Home. In the mountains of Colorado it will already be almost dark. Here in the flatlands the afternoon has stretched into evening even though it’s November. Here the evening redness of the west spills over corn that rustles and sighs in a light breeze. His hands are hot and his face is burning. There are fever blisters on his lips.
“I’m pretty well done.”
“No, Billy. No. You need to hold on. I’ll give you two of the Oxys and there are a couple of those speed pills left. I’ll drive all night.”
“No you won’t.”
“I can do it, Billy. I really can.”
He’s shaking his head. She’s still holding his hands. She thinks if she let go he’d flop back onto the seat and his shirt would pull up and she’d see his belly, now blackish-gray with red tendrils of infection reaching up to his chest. To his heart.
“Listen to me now. Are you listening?”
“Yes.”
“I rescued you after those men dumped you, all right? Now I’m rescuing you again. Trying to, anyway. Bucky told me you’d follow me as long as I let you, and if I let you I’d ruin you. He was right.”
“You didn’t ruin me, you saved me.”
“Hush. You’re not ruined yet, that’s the important thing. You’re okay. I know because when I asked you how you were doing with Klerke, you said you were trying. I knew what you meant, I know that you are, and in time you’ll be able to put it behind you. Except in dreams.”
The red light, shining and shining. Painting the corn. It is so silent here and his hands are burning in hers.
“Klerke screamed, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“He screamed that it hurt.”
“Stop, Billy, it’s horrible and we have to get back on the turnpi—”
“Maybe he deserved to be hurt, but when you give pain it leaves a sc
ar. It scars your mind. It scars your spirit. And it should, because hurting someone, killing someone, is no little thing. Take it from someone who knows.”
Blood is trickling from the corner of his mouth. No, from both corners. She gives up trying to stop him from talking. She knows what this is, it’s a dying declaration, and her job is to listen as long as he’s able to speak. She says nothing even when he tells her he’s a bad man. She doesn’t believe it but this is no time to argue.
“Go to Bucky, but don’t stay with him. He cares for you and he’ll be kind to you, but he’s a bad man, too.” He coughs and blood flies from his mouth. “He’ll help you start a new life as Elizabeth Anderson, if that’s what you want. There’s money, quite a lot of it. Some is in the account of a paper man named Edward Woodley. There’s also money in the Bank of Bimini, in the name of James Lincoln. Can you remember that?”
“Yes. Edward Woodley. James Lincoln.”
“Bucky has the passwords and all the account information. He’ll tell you how to manage the flow of money into your own bank account so you don’t attract attention from the IRS. That’s important, because that’s how they’re most apt to catch you. Unreported income is a trapdoor. Do you…”
More coughing. More blood.
“Do you understand?”
“Yes, Billy.”
“Some of the money goes to Bucky. The rest is yours. Enough to go to college and a start in life after that. He’ll treat you fair. Okay?”
“Okay. Maybe you should lie back now.”
“I’m going to, but if you try to drive all night you’ll be an accident waiting to happen. Check your phone for the next town big enough to have a Walmart. Park where the RVs are. Sleep. You’ll be fresh in the morning and back at Bucky’s by late afternoon. Up in the mountains. You like the mountains, right?”
“Yes.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise to stop for the night.”
“All that corn,” he says, looking over her shoulder. “And the sun. Ever read Cormac McCarthy?”
“No, Billy.”
“You should. Blood Meridian.” He smiles at her. “Fucking Marge, huh?”
“That’s right,” Alice says. “Fucking Marge.”
“I wrote the password to my laptop on a piece of paper and stuck it in your purse.”
That said, he lets go of her hands and falls back. She lifts his calves and manages to get his legs into the car. If it hurts him, he gives no sign. He’s looking at her.
“Where are we?”
“Nebraska, Billy.”
“How did we get here?”
“Never mind. Close your eyes. Rest up.”
He frowns. “Robin? Is that you?”
“Yes.”
“I love you, Robin.”
“I love you, too, Billy.”
“Let’s go down cellar and see if there are any apples left.”
7
Another knot pops in the woodstove. Alice gets up, walks to the refrigerator, and gets a beer. She twists off the cap and drinks half of it.
“That was the last thing he said to me. When I parked with the RVs at the Kearney Walmart, he was still alive. I know, because I could hear him breathing. Rasping. When I woke up the next morning at five, he was dead. Do you want a beer?”
“Yes. Thanks.”
Alice brings him a beer and sits down. She looks tired. “ ‘Let’s go down cellar and see if there are any apples left.’ Maybe talking to Robin, or to his friend Gad. Not much of an exit line. Life would be better if Shakespeare wrote it, that’s what I think. Although… when you think about Romeo and Juliet…” She drinks the rest of her beer and some color comes into her cheeks. Bucky thinks she looks a little better.
“I waited until the Walmart opened, then went inside and bought some stuff—blankets, pillows, I think a sleeping bag.”
“Yes,” Bucky says. “There was a sleeping bag.”
“I covered him up and got back on the highway. Keeping no more than five miles an hour over the speed limit, just like he told me. Once a Colorado State Patrol car came up behind with its flashers going and I thought I was cooked but it went by and on down the road, lickety-split. I got here. And we buried him, along with most of his things. There wasn’t much.” She pauses. “But not too near the summerhouse cabin. He didn’t like it. He worked there but he said he never liked it.”
“He told me he thought it was haunted,” Bucky says. “What comes next for you, darlin?”
“Sleep. I just can’t seem to get enough. I thought it would be better when I finished writing his story, but…” She shrugs, then stands up. “I’ll figure it out later. You know what Scarlett O’Hara said, don’t you?”
Bucky Hanson grins. “ ‘I’ll think about it tomorrow, for tomorrow is another day.’ ”
“That’s right.” Alice starts toward the bedroom where she has spent most of her time since coming back here, writing and sleeping, then turns back. She’s smiling. “I bet Billy would have hated that line.”
“You could be right.”
Alice sighs. “I can never publish it, can I? His book. Not even as a roman à clef. Not five years from now, not ten. No sense fooling myself.”
“Probably not,” Bucky agrees. “It’d be like D.B. Cooper writing his autobiography and calling it Here’s How I Did It.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“No one does, that’s the point. Guy hijacked a plane, got a bunch of money, jumped out with a parachute, was never seen again. Kind of like Billy in your version of his story.”
“Do you think he’d be glad that I did it? That I let him live?”
“He’d fucking love it, Alice.”
“I think so, too. If I could publish it, you know what I’d call it? Billy Summers: The Story of a Lost Man. What do you think?”
“I think it sounds about right.”
8
There’s snow in the night, just an inch or two, and it’s stopped by the time Alice gets up at seven, the morning sky so clear it’s almost transparent. Bucky is still asleep; she can hear him snoring even through the bedroom door. She puts on the coffee, gets wood from the pile beside the house, and builds up the fire in the stove. By then the coffee is hot and she drinks a cup before putting on her coat, boots, and a wooly hat that covers her ears.
She goes into the room set aside for her use, touches Billy’s laptop, then picks up the paperback lying beside it and puts it in the back pocket of her jeans. She lets herself out and walks up the path. There are deer tracks in the fresh snow, lots of them, and the weird hand-shaped tracks of a raccoon or two, but the snow in front of the summerhouse is conspicuously unmarked. The deer and coons have steered clear of the place. Alice does, too.
There’s an old cottonwood with a split trunk not too far from where the path ends. It’s her marker. Alice turns into the woods and starts walking, counting the steps off under her breath. It was two hundred and ten on the day they brought Billy here, but because the going is a trifle slippery this morning she’s up to two hundred and forty before she comes to the little clearing. She has to clamber over a fallen lodgepole pine to get into it. In the center of the clearing there’s a square of brown earth upon which they have scattered a mixture of pine needles and fallen leaves. Even with the light fall of snow added to the needles and leaves, it’s pretty clear it’s a grave. Time will take care of that, Bucky has assured her. He says that by next November a random hiker could walk over that patch with no idea of what lay beneath.
“Not that there’ll be any. This is my land, and I keep it posted. Maybe when I wasn’t here people took advantage, probably used the path to stare across to where the Overlook used to be, but now I’m here, and I plan to stay. Thanks to Billy, I’m retired. Just another old mountain man. There are thousands of them between here and the Western Slope, growing their hair down to their asses and listening to their old Steppenwolf records.”
Now Alice stands at the foot of the grave and says,
“Hey, Billy.” It feels natural to talk to him, natural enough. She wasn’t sure it would. “I finished your story. Gave it a different ending. Bucky says you wouldn’t have minded. It’s on the same thumb drive you were using when you started in that office building. Once I get to Fort Collins, I’ll rent a safe deposit box and put it inside with my Alice Maxwell ID.”
She goes back to the fallen lodgepole pine and sits down on it, first taking the paperback out of her pocket and putting it in her lap. It’s good to be here. It’s a peaceful place. Before wrapping the body in a tarpaulin, Bucky did something to it. He wouldn’t tell her what, but he said there wouldn’t be much smell when the hot weather came back, if any. The animals wouldn’t disturb him. Bucky said it was the way such things were done in the old days of wagon trains and silver mines.
9
“Fort Collins is where I’ve decided to go to school. Colorado State University. I’ve seen the pictures and it’s beautiful there. Remember when you asked me what I wanted to study? I said maybe history, maybe sociology, maybe even theater arts. I was too shy to tell you what I really wanted to do, but I bet you can guess. Maybe you even guessed then. I thought about it sometimes when I was in high school because English was always my best class, but finishing your story made it seem possible.”
She stops, because the rest of it is hard to say out loud even when she’s alone. It sounds pretentious. Her mother would say she was getting above herself. But she needs to say it, she owes him.
“I’d like to write stories of my own.”
She stops again and wipes her eyes with the sleeve of her jacket. It’s cold out here. But the stillness is exquisite. This early even the crows are asleep.
“When I was doing it, when I was…” She hesitates. Why is the word so hard to say? Why should it be? “When I was writing, I forgot to be sad. I forgot to worry about the future. I forgot where I was. I didn’t know that could happen. I could pretend we were in the Bide-A-Wee Motel outside of Davenport, Iowa. Only it wasn’t like pretending, even though there’s no such place. I could see the fake wood walls and the blue bedspread and the bathroom glass in its plastic bag with writing on it that said SANITIZED FOR YOUR HEALTH. But that wasn’t the most important part.”