Six Stories Read online

  'I saved your life,' I said. 'Don't you realize that? Doesn't that get through? I saved your fucking life.'

  'You son of a bitch,' she whispered. 'You controlling, judgmental, small-minded, conceited, complacent son of a bitch. I hate you.'

  'Fuck that jerk-off crap. If it wasn't for the conceited, smallminded son of a bitch, you'd be dead now.'

  'If it wasn't for you, I wouldn't have been there in the first place,'

  she said as the first three police cars came screaming down 53rd Street and pulled up in front of the Gotham Cafe. Cops poured out of them like downs in a circus act. 'If you ever touch me again, I'll scratch your eyes out, Steve,' she said. 'Stay away from me.'

  I had to put my hands in my armpits. They wanted to kill her, to reach out and wrap themselves around her neck and just kill her.

  She walked seven or eight steps, then turned back to me. She was smiling. It was a terrible smile, more awful than any expression I had seen on the face of Guy the Demon Waiter. 'I had lovers,' she said, smiling her terrible smile. She was lying. The lie was all over her face, but that didn't make the lie hurt any less. She wished it was true; that was all over her face, too. 'Three of them over the last year or so. You weren't any good at it, so I found men who were.'

  She turned and walked up the street, like a woman who was sixty-five instead of twenty-seven. I stood and watched her. Just before she reached the corner I shouted it again. It was the one thing I couldn't get past; it was stuck in my throat like a chicken bone. 'I saved your life! Your.goddamn life!'

  She paused at the corner and turned back to me. The terrible smile was still on her face. 'No,' she said. 'You didn't.'

  Then she went on around the corner. I haven't seen her since, although I suppose I will. I'll see her in court, as the saying goes.

  I found a market on the next block and bought a package of Marlboros. When I got back to the corner of Madison and 53rd, 53rd had been blocked off with those blue sawhorses the cops use to protect crime scenes and parade routes. I could see the restaurant, though. I could see it just fine. I sat down on the curb, lit a cigarette, and observed developments. Half a dozen rescue vehicles arrived - a scream of ambulances, I guess you could say.

  The chef went into the first one, unconscious but apparently still alive. His brief appearance before his fans on 53rd Street was followed by a body bag on a stretcher - Humboldt. Next came Guy, strapped tightly to a stretcher and staring wildly around as he was loaded into the back of an ambulance. I thought that for just a moment his eyes met mine, but that was probably just my imagination.

  As Guy's ambulance pulled away, rolling through a hole in the sawhorse barricade provided by two uniformed cops, I tossed the cigarette I'd been smoking in the gutter. I hadn't gone through this day just to start killing myself with tobacco again, I decided.

  I looked after the departing ambulance and tried to imagine the man inside it living wherever maitre d's live - Queens or Brooklyn or maybe even Rye or Mamaroneck. I tried to imagine what his dining room might look like, what pictures might be on the walls. I couldn't do that, but I found I could imagine his bedroom with relative ease, although not whether he shared it with a woman. I could see him lying awake but perfectly still, looking up at the ceiling in the small hours while the moon hung in the black firmament like the half-lidded eye of a corpse; I could imagine him lying there and listening to the neighbor's dog bark steadily and monotonously, going on and on until the sound was like a silver nail driving into his brain. I imagined him lying not far from a closet filled with tuxedos in plastic dry-cleaning bags. I could see them hanging there in the dark like executed felons. I wondered if he did have a wife. If so, had he killed her before coming to work?

  I thought of the blob on his shirt and decided it was a possibility. I also wondered about the neighbor's dog, the one that wouldn't shut up. And the neighbor's family.

  But mostly it was Guy I thought about, lying sleepless through all the same nights I had lain sleepless, listening to the dog next door or down the street as I had listened to sirens and the rumble of trucks heading downtown. I thought of him lying there and looking up at the shadows the moon had tacked to the ceiling. Thought of that cry - Eeeeee!- building up in his head like gas in a closed room.

  'Eeeee,' I said . . . just to see how it sounded. I dropped the package of Marlboros into the gutter and began stamping it methodically as I sat there on the curb. 'Eeeee. Eeeee. Eeeeee.'

  One of the cops standing by the sawhorses looked over at me.

  'Hey, buddy, want to stop being a pain in the butt?' he called over.

  'We got us a situation here.'

  Of course you do, I thought. Don't we all.

  I didn't say anything, though. I stopped stamping - the cigarette pack was pretty well flattened by then, anyway - and stopped making the noise. I could still hear it in my head, though, and why not? It makes as much sense as anything else.

  Eeeeeee.

  Eeeeeee.

  Eeeeeee.

  Lucky Quarter

  STEPHEN KING

  Oh, you cheap son of a gun! she cried in the empty hotel room, more in surprise than in anger. Then - it was the way she was built

  - Darlene Pullen started to laugh. She sat down in the chair beside the rumpled, abandoned bed with the quarter in one hand and the envelope it had fallen out of in the other, looking back and forth between them and laughing until tears spilled from her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. Patsy, her older kid, needed braces -

  Darlene had absolutely no idea how she was going to pay for them; she had been worried about it all week - and if this wasn't the final straw, what was? And if you couldn't laugh, what could you do?

  Find a gun and shoot yourself?

  Different girls had different places to leave the all-important envelope, which they called the honeypot. Gerda, the Swede who'd been a downtown girl before finding Jesus the previous summer at a revival meeting in Tahoe, propped hers up against one of the bathroom glasses; Melissa put hers under the TV controller.

  Darlene always leaned hers against the telephone, and when she came in this morning and found 322's on the pillow instead, she had known he'd left something for her.

  Yes, he certainly had. A little copper sandwich, one quarter-dollar, In God We Trust.

  Her laughter, which had been tapering off to giggles, broke out in full spate again.

  There was printed matter on the front of the honeypot, plus the hotel's logo: the silhouettes of a horse and rider on top of a bluff, enclosed in a diamond shape. Welcome to Carson City, the friendliest town in Nevada! said the words below the logo. And welcome to The Rancher's Hotel, the friendliest lodging in Carson City! Your room was made up by Darlene. If anything's wrong, please dial 0 and we'll put it right 'pronto.' This envelope is provided should you find everything right and care to leave a little

  'extra something' for this chambermaid. Once again, welcome to Carson, and welcome to the Rancher's! [Signed,] William Avery, Trail-Boss.

  Quite often the honeypot was empty - she had found envelopes torn up in the wastebasket, crumpled up in the corner (as if the idea of tipping the chambermaid actually infuriated some guests), floating in the toilet bowl - but sometimes there was a nice little surprise in there, especially if the slot machines or the gaming tables had been kind to a guest. And 322 had certainly used his; he'd left her a quarter, by God! That would take care of Patsy's braces and get that Sega game system Paul wanted with all his heart. He wouldn't even have to wait until Christmas; he could have it as a a …

  A Thanksgiving present, she said. Surely, why not? And I'll pay off the cable people, so we won't have to give it up after all, we'll even add the Disney Channel, and I can finally go see a doctor about my back ... after all, I'm rich. If I could find you, mister, I'd drop down on my knees and

  kiss your saintly feet.

  No chance of that; 322 was long gone. The Rancher's probably was the best lodging in Carson City, but the trade was still almost enti
rely transient. When Darlene came in the back door at 7, they were getting up, shaving, taking their showers, in some cases medicating their hangovers; while she was in Housekeeping with Gerda, Melissa and Jane (the head housekeeper, she of the formidable gun-shell bosoms and set, red-painted mouth), first drinking coffee, then filling her cart and getting ready for the day, the truckers and cowboys and salesmen were checking out, their honeypot envelopes either filled or unfilled.

  322, that gent, had dropped a quarter into his. Darlene sighed. She was about to drop the quarter back in, then saw there was something inside: a note scrawled on a sheet from the desk pad.

  She fished it out. Below the horse-and-rider logo and the words JUST A NOTE FROM THE RANCH, 322 had printed nine words, working with a blunt-tipped pencil.

  Good deal! Darlene said. I got a couple of kids and a husband five years late home from work and I could use a little luck. Honest to God, I could. Then she laughed again - a short snort - and dropped the quarter into the envelope.

  She went about her chores, and they didn't take long. The quarter was a nasty dig, she supposed, but otherwise 322 had been polite enough. No unpleasant little surprises, nothing stolen. There was really only the bed to make, the sink and shower to rinse out and the towels to replace. As she did these things, she speculated about what 322 might have looked like and what kind of man left a woman who was trying to raise two kids on her own a 25-cent tip.

  One who could laugh and be mean at the same time, she guessed; one who probably had tattoos on his arms and looked like the character Woody Harrelson played in Natural Born Killers.

  He doesn't know anything about me, she thought as she stepped into the hall and pulled the door closed behind her. Probably he was drunk and it seemed funny, that's all. And it was funny, in a way; why else did you laugh?

  Right. Why else had she laughed?

  Pushing her cart down to 323, she thought she would give the quarter to Paul. Of the two kids, Paul was the one who usually came up holding the short end of the stick. He was 7, silent and afflicted with what seemed to be a perpetual case of the sniffles.

  Darlene also thought he might be the only 7-year-old in the clean air of this high-desert town who was an incipient asthmatic.

  She sighed and used her passkey on 323, thinking maybe she'd find a 50, or even a hundred, in this room's honeypot. It was almost always her first thought on entering a room. The envelope was just where she had left it, however - propped against the telephone -

  and although she checked it just to be sure, she knew it would be empty, and it was.

  There was a one-armed bandit - just that single one - in the lobby of the Rancher's, and though Darlene had never used it during her five years of work here, she dropped her hand into her pocket on her way to lunch that day, felt the envelope with the torn-off end and swerved toward the chrome-plated fool-catcher. She hadn't forgotten her intention to give the quarter to Paul, but a quarter meant nothing to kids these days. Why should it? You couldn't even get a lousy bottle of Coke for a quarter. And suddenly she just wanted to be rid of the damned thing. Her back hurt, she had unaccustomed acid indigestion from her 10 o'clock cup of coffee and she felt savagely depressed. Suddenly the shine was off the world, and it all seemed the fault of that lousy quarter as if it were sitting there in her pocket and sending out little batches of rotten vibes.

  Gerda came out of the elevator just in time to see Darlene plant herself in front of the slot machine and dump the quarter out of the envelope and into her palm.

  You? Gerda said. You? No, never - I don't believe it.

  Just watch me, Darlene said, and dropped the coin into the slot, which read USE 1 2 OR 3 COINS. That baby is gone.

  She started to walk off, then, almost as an afterthought, turned back long enough to yank the bandit's lever. She turned away again, not bothering to watch the drums spin, and so did not see the bells slot into place in the windows - one, two, and three. She paused only when she heard quarters begin to shower into the tray at the bottom of the machine. Her eyes widened, then narrowed suspiciously, as if this was another joke or maybe the punch line of the first one.

  You vin! Gerda cried, her Swedish accent coming out more strongly in her excitement. Darlene, you vin! She darted past Darlene, who simply stood where she was, listening to the coins cascade into the tray. The sound seemed to go on forever. Lucky me, she thought. Lucky, lucky me.

  At last the quarters stopped falling.

  Oh, goodness! Gerda said. Goodness me! And to think this cheap machine never paid me anything, after all the quarters I'm stuffing it with! Vut luck is here! There must be $15, Darl! Imagine if you'd put in tree quarters!

  That would have been more luck than I could have stood, Darlene said. She felt like crying. She didn't know why that should be, but it was; she could feel the tears burning the backs of her eyeballs like weak acid. Gerda helped her scoop the quarters out of the tray, and when they were all in Darlene's uniform pocket, that side of her dress sagged comically. The only thought to cross her mind was that she ought to get Paul something nice, some toy. Fifteen dollars wasn't enough for the Sega system he wanted, not by a long shot, but it might buy one of the electronic things he was always looking at in the window of Radio Shack at the mall. Not asking -

  he knew better; he was sickly, but that didn't make him stupid -

  just staring with eyes that always seemed to be inflamed and watering.

  The hell you will, she told herself. You'll put it toward a pair of shoes or Patsy's damn braces. Paul wouldn't mind that, and you know it.

  No, Paul wouldn't mind, and that was the worst of it, she thought, sifting her fingers through the weight of quarters in her pocket and listening to them jingle. You minded things for them. Paul knew the radio-controlled boats and cars and planes in the store window were as out of reach as the Sega system. To him that stuff existed to be appreciated in the imagination only, like pictures in a gallery or sculptures in a museum. To her, however…

  Well, maybe she would get him something silly with her windfall.

  Surprise him. Surprise herself.

  She surprised herself, all right. Plenty.

  That night she decided to walk home instead of taking the bus.

  Halfway down North Street, she turned into the Silver City Casino, where she had never been before in her life. She had changed the quarters - $18 in all -into bills at the hotel desk, and now, feeling like a visitor inside her own body, she approached the roulette wheel and held these bills out to the croupier with a hand entirely void of feeling. Nor was it just her hand; every nerve below the surface of her skin seemed to have gone dead, as if this sudden aberrant behavior had blown them out like overloaded fuses.

  It doesn't matter, she told herself as she put all 18 of the unmarked pink dollar chips on the space marked odd. It's just a quarter. That's really all it is, no matter what it looks like on that runner of felt. It's only someone's bad joke on a chambermaid he'd never actually have to look in the eye. It's only a quarter, and you're still just trying to get rid of it, because it's multiplied and changed its shape, but it's still sending out bad vibes.

  No more bets, no more bets, the wheel's minder chanted as the ball revolved counterclockwise to the spinning wheel. The ball dropped, bounced, caught, and Darlene closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, she saw the ball riding around in the slot marked 15.

  The croupier pushed 18 more pink chips - to Darlene they looked like squashed Canada Mints - over to her. Darlene put them all back down on the red. The croupier looked at her, eyebrows raised, asking without saying a word if she was sure. She nodded that she was, and he spun. When red came up, she shifted her growing pile of chips to the black.

  Then the odd.

  Then the even.

  She had $576 in front of her after the last one, and her head had gone to some other planet. It was not black and green and pink chips she saw in front of her, not precisely; it was braces and a radio-controlled submarine.
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br />   Lucky me. Darlene Pullen thought. Oh, lucky, lucky me.

  She put the chips down again, all of them, and the crowd that always forms behind and around sudden hot-streak winners in gambling towns, even at 5 o'clock in the afternoon, groaned.

  Ma'am, I can't allow that bet without the pit boss' OK, the roulette wheel's minder said. He looked considerably more awake now than when Darlene had walked up in her blue-and-white-striped rayon uniform. She had put her money down on the second triple - the numbers from 13 to 24.

  Better get him over here then, hon, Darlene said, and waited, calm, her feet on Mother Earth here in Carson City, Nevada, seven miles from where the first big silver mine opened up in 1878, her head somewhere deep in the deluminum mines of the Planet Chumpadiddle, as the pit boss and the minder conferred and the crowd around her murmured. At last the pit boss came over and asked her to write down her name and address and telephone number on a piece of pink memo paper. Darlene did it, interested to see that her handwriting hardly looked like her own. She felt calm, as calm as the calmest deluminum miner who had ever lived, but her hands were shaking badly.

  The pit boss turned to Mr. Roulette Minder and twirled his finger in the air: Spin it, son.

  This time the rattle of the little white ball was clearly audible in the area around the roulette table; the crowd had fallen entirely silent, and Darlene's was the only bet on the felt. This was Carson City, not Monte Carlo, and for Carson, this was a monster bet. The ball rattled, fell into a slot, jumped, fell into another, then jumped again. Darlene closed her eyes.