by Stephen King
Seated in the leatherette armchair opposite Clint, Paul Montpelier had that day worn a white sweater vest and pleated pants. He sat in a hunch with an ankle over his knee, hanging onto his dress shoe with one hand as he spoke. Clint had seen him park a candy-red sports car in the lot outside the lowslung office building. Working high up the food chain of the coal industry had made it possible for him to buy a car like that, but his long, careworn face reminded Clint of the Beagle Boys, who used to bedevil Scrooge McDuck in the old comic strips.
“My wife says—well, not in so many words, but, you know, the meaning is clear. The, uh, subtext. She wants me to let it go. Let my sexual ambition go.” He jerked his chin upward.
Clint followed his gaze. There was a fan rotating on the ceiling. If Montpelier sent his sexual ambition up there, it was going to get cut off.
“Let’s back up, Paul. How did the subject come up between you and your wife in the first place? Where did this start?”
“I had an affair. That was the precipitating incident. And Rhoda—my wife—kicked me out! I explained it wasn’t about her, it was about—I had a need, you know? Men have needs women do not always understand.” Montpelier rolled his head around on his neck. He made a frustrated hiss. “I don’t want to get divorced! There’s a part of me that feels like she’s the one who needs to come to terms with this. With me.”
The man’s sadness and desperation were real, and Clint could imagine the pain brought on by his sudden displacement—living out of a suitcase, eating watery omelets by himself in a diner. It wasn’t clinical depression, but it was significant, and deserving of respect and care even though he might have brought the situation on himself.
Montpelier leaned over his growing stomach. “Let’s be frank. I’m pushing fifty here, Dr. Norcross. My best sex days are already gone. I gave those up for her. Surrendered them to her. I changed diapers. I drove to all the games and competitions and built up the college funds. I checked every box on the questionnaire of marriage. So why can’t we come to some sort of agreement here? Why does it have to be so terrible and divisive?”
Clint hadn’t replied, just waited.
“Last week, I was at Miranda’s. She’s the woman I’ve been sleeping with. We did it in the kitchen. We did it in her bedroom. We almost managed a third time in the shower. I was happy as heck! Endorphins! And then I went home, and we had a good family dinner, and played Scrabble, and everyone else felt great, too! Where is the problem? It’s a manufactured problem, is what I think. Why can’t I have some freedom here? Is it too much to ask? Is it so outrageous?”
For a few seconds no one spoke. Montpelier regarded Clint. Good words swam and darted around in Clint’s head like tadpoles. They would be easy enough to catch, but he still held back.
Behind his patient, propped against the wall, was the framed Hockney print that Lila had given Clint to “warm the place up.” He planned to hang it later that day. Beside the print were his half-unpacked boxes of medical texts.
Someone needs to help this man, the young doctor found himself thinking, and they ought to do it in a nice, quiet room like this. But should that person be Clinton R. Norcross, MD?
He had, after all, worked awfully hard to become a doctor, and there had been no college fund to help Clint along. He had grown up under difficult circumstances and paid his own way, sometimes in more than money. To get through he had done things he had never told his wife about, and never would. Was this what he had done those things for? To treat the sexually ambitious Paul Montpelier?
A tender grimace of apology creased Montpelier’s wide face. “Oh, boy. Shoot. I’m not doing this right, am I?”
“You’re doing it fine,” Clint said, and for the next thirty minutes, he consciously put his doubts aside. They stretched the thing out; they looked at it from all sides; they discussed the difference between desire and need; they talked about Mrs. Montpelier and her pedestrian (in Montpelier’s opinion) bedroom preferences; they even took a surprisingly candid detour to visit Paul Montpelier’s earliest adolescent sexual experience, when he had masturbated using the jaws of his little brother’s stuffed crocodile.
Clint, according to his professional obligation, asked Montpelier if he’d ever considered harming himself. (No.) He wondered how Montpelier would feel if the roles were reversed? (He insisted that he’d tell her to do what she needed to do.) Where did Montpelier see himself in five years? (That’s when the man in the white sweater vest started to weep.)
At the end of the session, Montpelier said he was already looking forward to the next, and as soon as he departed, Clint rang his service. He directed them to refer all of his calls to a psychiatrist in Maylock, the next town over. The operator asked him for how long.
“Until snow flurries are reported in hell,” said Clint. From the window he watched Montpelier back up his candy-red sports car and pull out of the lot, never to be seen again.
Next, he called Lila.
“Hello, Dr. Norcross.” The feeling her voice gave him was what people meant—or should have meant—when they said their hearts sang. She asked him how his second day was going.
“The least self-aware man in America dropped in for a visit,” he said.
“Oh? My father was there? I bet the Hockney print confused him.”
She was quick, his wife, as quick as she was warm, and as tough as she was quick. Lila loved him, but she never stopped bumping him off his mark. Clint thought he probably needed that. Probably most men did.
“Ha-ha,” Clint had said. “Listen, though: that opening you mentioned at the prison. Who did you hear about that from?”
There was a second or two of silence while his wife thought over the question’s implications. She responded with a question of her own: “Clint, is there something you need to tell me?”
Clint had not even considered that she might be disappointed by his decision to dump the private practice for the government one. He was sure she wouldn’t be.
Thank God for Lila.
3
To apply the electric shaver to the gray stubble under his nose, Clint had to twist his face up so he looked like Quasimodo. A snow-white wire poked out from his left nostril. Anton could juggle barbells all he wanted, but white nostril hairs waited for every man, as did those that appeared in the ears. Clint managed to buzz this one away.
He had never been built like Anton, not even his last year in high school when the court granted him his independence and he lived on his own and ran track. Clint had been rangier, skinnier, stomach toneless but flat, like his son Jared. In his memory, Paul Montpelier was pudgier than the version of himself that Clint saw this morning. But he looked more like one than the other. Where was he now, Paul Montpelier? Had the crisis been resolved? Probably. Time healed all wounds. Of course, as some wag had pointed out, it also wounds all heels.
Clint had no more than the normal—i.e., healthy, totally conscious, and fantasy-based—longing to screw outside of his marriage. His situation wasn’t, contra Paul Montpelier, a crisis of any kind. It was normal life as he understood it: a second look on the street at a pretty girl; an instinctive peek at a woman in a short skirt exiting a car; an almost subconscious lunging of lust for one of the models decorating The Price Is Right. It was a doleful thing, he supposed, doleful and perhaps a bit comic, the way age dragged you farther and farther from the body you liked the best and left those old instincts (not ambitions, thank God) behind, like the smell of cooking long after dinner has been consumed. And was he judging all men by himself? No. He was a member of the tribe, that was all. It was women who were the real riddles.
Clint smiled at himself in the mirror. He was clean-shaven. He was alive. He was about the same age as Paul Montpelier had been in 1999.
To the mirror he said, “Hey, Anton: go fuck yourself.” The bravado was false, but at least he made the effort.
From the bedroom beyond the bathroom door he heard a lock click, a drawer open, a thump as Lila deposited her gunbelt in the dr
awer, shut it, and clicked it locked again. He heard her sigh and yawn.
In case she was already asleep, he dressed without speaking, and instead of sitting on the bed to put on his shoes, Clint picked them up to carry downstairs.
Lila cleared her throat. “It’s okay. I’m still awake.”
Clint wasn’t sure that was entirely true: Lila had gotten as far as unsnapping the top button of her uniform pants before flopping on the bed. She hadn’t even climbed under the blankets.
“You must be exhausted. I’ll be right out. Everyone all right on Mountain?”
The previous night she’d texted that there was a crack-up on the Mountain Rest Road—Don’t stay up. While this wasn’t unheard of, it was unusual. He and Jared had grilled steaks and polished off a couple of Anchor Steams on the deck.
“Trailer came unhitched. From Pet-Whatever. The chain store? Went over on its side, blocked the whole road. Cat litter and dog food all over. We ended up having to bulldoze it out of the way.”
“That sounds like a shit-show.” He bent down and put a kiss on her cheek. “Hey. You want to start jogging together?” The idea had just occurred to him and he was immediately cheered. You couldn’t stop your body from breaking down and thickening, but you could fight back.
Lila opened her right eye, pale green in the dimness of the room with the curtains pulled. “Not this morning.”
“Of course not,” Clint said. He hung over her, thinking she was going to kiss him back, but she just told him to have a good day, and make sure Jared took out the trash. The eye rolled closed. A flash of green . . . and gone.
4
The smell in the shed was almost too much to bear.
Evie’s bare skin pebbled up and she had to fight not to retch. The stench was a mingling of scorched chemicals, old leaf smoke, and food that had spoiled.
One of the moths was in her hair, nestled and pulsing reassurance against her scalp. She breathed as shallowly as she could and scanned around.
The prefab shed was set up for cooking drugs. In the center of the space was a gas stove attached by yellowish tubes to a pair of white canisters. On a counter against the wall there were trays, jugs of water, an open package of Ziploc bags, test tubes, pieces of cork, countless dead matches, a one-hitter with a charred bowl, and a utility sink connected to a hose that ran away and out under the netting that Evie had pulled back to enter. Empty bottles and dented cans on the floor. A wobbly-looking lawn chair with a Dale Earnhardt Jr. logo stamped on the back. Balled up in the corner, a gray checked shirt.
Evie shook the stiffness and at least some of the filth from the shirt, then drew it on. The tails hung down over her bottom and thighs. Until recently, this garment had belonged to someone disgusting. A California-shaped stain running down the chest area reported that the disgusting person liked mayonnaise.
She squatted down by the tanks and yanked the yellowing tubes loose. Then she turned the knobs on the propane tanks a quarter inch each.
Outside the shed again, netting drawn closed behind her, Evie paused to take deep breaths of the fresher air.
Three hundred feet or so down the wooded embankment stood a trailer fronted by a gravel apron with a truck and two cars parked on it. Three gutted rabbits, one of which was still dripping, hung from a clothesline alongside a few faded pairs of panties and a jean jacket. Puffs of woodsmoke rose from the trailer’s chimney.
Back the way she came, through the thin forest and across the field, the Tree was no longer visible. She wasn’t alone, though: moths furred the roof of the shed, fluttering and shifting.
Evie started down the embankment. Deadwood branches stabbed her feet, and a rock cut her heel. She didn’t break stride. She was a fast healer. By the clothesline, she paused to listen. She heard a man laughing, a television playing, and ten thousand worms in the little patch of ground around her, sweetening the soil.
The rabbit that was still bleeding rolled its foggy eyes at her. She asked it what the deal was.
“Three men, one woman,” the rabbit said. A single fly flew from its tattered black lips, buzzed around, and zoomed into the cavity of a limp ear. Evie heard the fly pinging around in there. She didn’t blame the fly—it was doing what a fly was made to do—but she mourned the rabbit, who did not deserve such a dirty fate. While Evie loved all animals, she was especially fond of the smaller ones, those creepers of meadow and leapers of deadfall, the fragile-winged and the scuttling.
She cupped her hand behind the dying rabbit’s head, and gently brought its crusted black mouth to hers. “Thank you,” Evie whispered, and let it be quiet.
5
One benefit of living in this particular corner of Appalachia was that you could afford a decent-sized home on two government salaries. The Norcross home was a three-bedroom contemporary in a development of similar houses. The houses were handsome, spacious without being grotesque, had lawns adequate for playing catch, and views that, in the green seasons, were lush, hilly, and leafy. What was a little depressing about the development was that even at reduced prices almost half of its rather attractive houses were empty. The demonstrator home at the top of the hill was the one exception; that one was kept clean and shiny and furnished. Lila said it was just a matter of time before a meth-head broke into it and tried to set up shop. Clint had told her not to worry, he knew the sheriff. In fact, they had a semi-regular thing.
(“She’s into old guys?” Lila had replied, batting her eyes and pressing herself to his hip.)
The upstairs of the Norcross house contained the master bedroom, Jared’s room, and a third bedroom, which the two adults used as a home office. On the first floor the kitchen was wide and open, separated from the family room by a counter bar. At the right side of the family room, behind closed French doors, was their little-used dining room.
Clint drank coffee and read the New York Times on his iPad at the kitchen bar. An earthquake in North Korea had caused an untold number of casualties. The North Korean government insisted that the damage was minor due to “superior architecture,” but there was cell phone footage of dusty bodies and rubble. An oil rig was burning in the Gulf of Aden, probably as a result of sabotage, but no one was claiming responsibility. Every country in the region had done the diplomatic equivalent of a bunch of boys who knock out a window playing baseball and run home without looking back. In the New Mexico desert the FBI was on day forty-four of its standoff with a militia led by Kinsman Brightleaf (nee Scott David Winstead Jr.). This happy band refused to pay its taxes, accept the legality of the Constitution, or surrender its stockpile of automatic weapons. When people learned that Clint was a psychiatrist, they often entreated him to diagnose the mental diseases of politicians, celebrities, and other notables. He usually demurred, but in this instance he felt comfortable making a long-distance diagnosis: Kinsman Brightleaf was suffering from some kind of dissociative disorder.
At the bottom of the front page was a photo of a hollow-faced young woman standing in front of an Appalachian shack with an infant in her arms: “Cancer in Coal Country.” This made Clint recall the chemical spill in a local river five years ago. It had caused a week-long shutdown of the water supply. Everything was supposedly fine now, but Clint and his family stuck to bottled drinking water just to be sure.
Sun warmed his face. He looked out toward the big twin elm trees at the back of the yard, beyond the edge of the pool deck. The elms made him think of brothers, of sisters, of husbands and wives—he was sure that, beneath the ground, their roots were mortally entwined. Dark green mountains knuckled up in the distance. Clouds seemed to be melting on the pan of the fair blue sky. Birds flew and sang. Wasn’t it a hell of a shame, the way good country got wasted on folks. That was another thing that an old wag had told him.
Clint liked to believe it wasn’t wasted on him. He had never expected to own a view like this one. He wondered how decrepit and soft he’d have to grow before it made sense, the good luck that some people got, and the bad luck that saddled others.
“Hey, Dad. How’s the world? Anything good happening?”
Clint turned from the window to see Jared stroll into the kitchen zipping up his backpack.
“Hold on—” He flicked through a couple of electronic pages. He didn’t want to send his son off to school with an oil spill, a militia, or cancer. Ah, just the thing. “Physicists are theorizing that the universe might go on forever.”
Jared pawed through the snack cabinet, found a Nutribar, stuck it in his pocket. “And you think that’s good? Can you explain what you mean?”
Clint considered for a second before he realized that his son was busting his balls. “I see what you did there.” As he looked over at Jared he used his middle finger to scratch at his eyelid.
“You don’t have to be shy about this, Dad. You have son-father privilege. It all stays between us.” Jared helped himself to the coffee. He took it black, the way Clint used to when his stomach was young.
The coffeemaker was near the sink, where the window opened on to the deck. Jared sipped and took in the view. “Wow. Are you sure you should leave Mom here alone with Anton?”
“Please go,” Clint said. “Go to school and learn something.”
His son had grown up on him. “Dog!” had been Jared’s first word, spoken so that it rhymed with brogue. “Dog! Dog!” He had been a likable boy, inquisitive and well-intentioned, and he had developed into a likable young man, still inquisitive and well-intentioned. Clint took pride in how the safe, secure home they had provided Jared had allowed him to become more and more himself. It hadn’t been like that for Clint.
He had been toying with the idea of giving the kid condoms, but he didn’t want to talk to Lila about it and he didn’t want to encourage anything. He didn’t want to be thinking about it at all. Jared insisted he and Mary were just friends, and maybe Jared even believed it. Clint saw how he looked at the girl, though, and it was the way you looked at someone you wanted to be your very, very close friend.