Six Stories Read online

  Lucky, she thought, she prayed. Lucky me, lucky mom, lucky girl.

  The crowd moaned, either in horror or ecstasy. That was how she knew the wheel had slowed enough to read. Darlene opened her eyes, knowing that her quarter was finally gone.

  Except it wasn't.

  The little white ball was resting in the slot marked 13 Black.

  Oh, my God, honey, a woman behind her said. Give me your hand.

  I want to rub your hand. Darlene gave it, and felt the other one gently taken as well - taken and fondled. From some distance far, far away from the deluminum mines where she was having this fantasy, she could feel two people, then four, then six, then eight, gently rubbing her hands, trying to catch her luck like a cold germ.

  Mr. Roulette was pushing piles and piles of chips over to her.

  How much? she asked faintly. How much is that?

  Seventeen hundred and 28 dollars, he said. Congratulations, ma'am. If I were you -

  But you're not, Darlene said. I want to put it all down on one number. That one. She pointed. Twenty-five. Behind her, someone screamed softly, as if in sexual rapture. Every cent of it.

  No, the pit boss said.

  But -

  No, he said again, and she had been working for men most of her life, enough to know when one of them meant exactly what he was saying. House policy, Mrs. Pullen.

  All right, she said. All right, Robin Hood. She pulled the chips back toward her, spilling some of the piles. How much will you let me put down?

  Excuse me, the pit boss said.

  He was gone for almost 5 minutes. During that time the wheel stood silent. No one spoke to Darlene, but her hands were touched repeatedly, and sometimes chafed as if she were a fainting victim.

  When the pit boss came back, he had a tall bald man with him. The tall bald man was wearing a tuxedo and gold-rimmed glasses. He did not look at Darlene so much as through her.

  Eight hundred dollars, he said. But I advise against it.

  His eyes dropped down the front of her uniform, then back up at her face. I think you should cash in your winnings, madam.

  I don't think you know jack about winning, Darlene said, and the tall bald man's mouth tightened in distaste. She shifted her gaze to Mr. Roulette. Do it, she said.

  Mr. Roulette put down a plaquette with 800 written on it, positioning it fussily so it covered the number 25. Then he spun the wheel and dropped the ball. The entire casino had gone silent now, even the persistent ratchet-and-ding of the slot machines quiet.

  Darlene looked up, across the room, and wasn't surprised to see that the bank of TVs that had been showing horse races and boxing matches were now showing the spinning roulette wheel and her.

  I'm even a TV star. Lucky me. Lucky me. Oh, so lucky me.

  The ball spun. The ball bounced. It almost caught, then spun again, a little white dervish racing around the polished wood circumference of the wheel.

  Odds! she suddenly cried. What are the odds?

  Thirty to one, the tall bald man said. Twenty-four thousand dollars should you win, madam.

  Darlene closed her eyes and opened them in 322. She was still sitting in the chair, with the envelope in one hand and the quarter that had fallen out of it in the other. Her tears of laughter were still wet on her cheeks.

  Lucky me, she said, and squeezed the envelope so she could look into it.

  No note. Just another part of the fantasy, misspellings and all.

  Sighing, Darlene slipped the quarter into her uniform pocket and began to clean up 322.

  Instead of taking Paul home, as she normally did after school, Patsy brought him to the hotel. He's sneezing all over the place, she explained, her voice dripping with disdain, which only a 13-year-old can muster in such quantities. He's, like, choking on it. I thought maybe you'd want to

  take him to the Doc in the Box.

  Paul looked at her silently from his watering, patient eyes. His nose was as red as the stripe on a candy cane. They were in the lobby; there were no guests checking in currently, and Mr. Avery (Tex to the maids, who unanimously hated the little cowboy) was away from the desk. Probably back in the office salving his saddle sores.

  Darlene put her palm on Paul's forehead, felt the warmth simmering there, and sighed. Suppose you're right, she said. How are you feeling, Paul?

  Ogay, Paul said in a distant, fog horning voice.

  Even Patsy looked depressed. He'll probably be dead by the time he's 16, she said. The only case of, like, spontaneous AIDS in the history of the world.

  You shut your dirty little mouth! Darlene said, much more sharply than she had intended, but Paul was the one who looked wounded.

  He winced and looked away from her.

  He's a baby, too, Patsy said hopelessly. I mean, really.

  No, he's not. He's sensitive, that's all. And his resistance is low.

  She fished in her uniform pocket. Paul? Want this?

  He looked back at her, saw the quarter, and smiled a little.

  What are you going to do with it, Paul? Patsy asked him as he took it. Take Deirdre McCausland out on a date? She snickered.

  I'll thing of subthing, Paul said.

  Leave him alone, Darlene said. Don't bug him for a little while.

  Could you do that?

  Yeah - but what do I get? Patsy asked her. I walked him over here safe - I always walk him safe -so what do I get?

  Braces, Darlene thought, if I can ever afford them. And she was suddenly overwhelmed by unhappiness, by a sense of life as some vast cold junk pile - deluminum slag, perhaps - that was always looming over you, always waiting to fall, cutting you to screaming ribbons even before it crushed the life out of you. Luck was a joke.

  Even good luck was just bad luck with its hair combed.

  Mom? Mommy? Patsy sounded suddenly concerned. I don't want anything. I was just kidding around, you know.

  I've got a Sassy for you, Darlene said. I found it in one of my rooms and put it in my locker.

  This month's? Patsy sounded suspicious.

  Actually this month's. Come on.

  They were halfway across the room when they heard the drop of the coin and the unmistakable ratchet of the handle and whir of the drums as Paul pulled the handle of the slot machine beside the desk, then let it go.

  Oh, you dumb hoser! You're in trouble now, Patsy cried. She did not sound exactly unhappy about it. How many times has Mom told you not to throw your money away on stuff like that? Slots're for the tourists!

  But Darlene didn't even turn around. She stood looking at the door that led back to the maids' country, where the cheap cloth coats from Ames and Wal-Mart hung in a row like dreams that have grown seedy and been discarded, where the time clock ticked, where the air always smelled of Melissa's perfume and Jane's Ben-Gay. She stood listening to the drums whir, she stood waiting for the rattle of coins into the tray, and by the time they began to fall she was already thinking about how she could ask Melissa to watch the kids while she went down to the casino. It wouldn't take long.

  Lucky me, she thought, and closed her eyes. In the darkness behind her lids, the sound of the falling coins seemed very loud. It sounded like metal slag falling on top of a coffin.

  It was all going to happen just the way she had imagined - she was somehow sure that it was - and yet that image of life as a huge slag heap, a pile of alien metal, remained. It was like an indelible stain that you know will never come out of some favorite piece of clothing.

  Yet Patsy needed braces, Paul needed to see a doctor about his constantly running nose and constantly watering eyes, he needed a Sega system the way Patsy needed some colorful underwear that would make her feel funny and sexy, and she needed what? What did she need? Deke back?

  Sure. Deke back, she thought, almost laughing. I need him back like I need puberty back, or labor pains. I need well (nothing) Yes, that was right. Nothing, zero, empty, adios. Black days, empty nights, and laughing all the way.

  I don't need anything, becaus
e I'm lucky, she thought, her eyes still closed. Tears, squeezing out from beneath her closed lids, while behind her Patsy was screaming at the top of her lungs.

  Oh, my God! Oh, you booger, you hit the jackpot. Paulie! You hit the damn jackpot!

  Lucky, Darlene thought. So lucky. Oh, lucky me.

  STEPHEN

  KING

  THE MAN IN THE BLACK SUIT

  I am now a very old man and this is something that happened to me when I was very young--only nine years old. It was 1914, the summer after my brother, Dan, died in the west field and not long before America got into the First World War. I’ve never told anyone about what happened at the fork in the stream that day, and I never will. I’ve decided to write it down, though, in this book, which I will leave on the table beside my bed. I can’t write long, because my hands shake so these days and I have next to no strength, but I don’t think it will take long.

  Later, someone may find what I have written. That seems likely to me, as it is pretty much human nature to look in a book marked

  "Diary" after its owner has passed along. So, yes--my works will probably be read. A better question is whether anyone will believe them. Almost certainly not, but that doesn’t matter. It’s not belief I’m interested in but freedom. Writing can give that, I’ve found.

  For twenty years I wrote a column called "Long Ago and Far Away" for the Castle Rock Call, and I know that sometimes it works that way--what you write down sometimes leaves you forever, like old photographs left in the bright sun, fading to nothing but white.

  I pray for that sort of release.

  A man in his eighties should be well past the terrors of childhood, but as my infirmities slowly creep up on me, like waves licking closer and closer to some indifferently built castle of sand, that terrible face grows clearer and clearer in my mind’s eye. It glows like a dark star in the constellations of my childhood. What I might have done yesterday, who I might have seen here in my room at the nursing home, what I might have said to them or they to my--those things are gone, but the face of the man in the black suit grows ever clearer, ever closer, and I remember every word he said. I don’t want to think of him but I can’t help it, and sometimes at night my old heart beats so hard and so fast I think it will tear itself right clear of my chest. So I uncap my fountain pen and force my trembling old hank to write this pointless anecdote in the diary one of my great-grandchildren--I can’t remember her name for sure, at least not right now, But I know it starts with an "S"--gave to me last Christmas, and which I have never written in until now.

  Now I will write in it. I will write the story of how I met the man in the black suit on the bank of Castle Stream one afternoon in the summer of 1914.

  The town of Motton was a different world in those days--more different than I could ever tell you. That was a world without airplanes droning overhead, a world almost without cars and trucks, a world where the skies were not cut into lanes and slices by overhead power lines. There was not a single paved road in the whole town, and the business district consisted of nothing but Corson’s General Store, Thut’s Livery & Hardware, the Methodist church at Christ’s Corner, the school, the town hall, and half a mile down from there, Harry’s Restaurant, which my mother called, with unfailing disdain, "the liquor house."

  Mostly, though, the difference was in how people lived--how apart they were. I’m not sure people born after the middle of the century could quite credit that, although they might say they could, to be polite to old folks like me. There were no phones in western Maine back then, for one thing. The first on wouldn’t be installed for another five years, and by the time there was a phone in our house, I was nineteen and going to college at the University of Maine in Orono.

  But that is only the roof of the thing. There was no doctor closer than Casco, and there were no more than a dozen houses in what you would call town. There were no neighborhoods (I’m not even sure we knew the work, although we had a verb--"neighboring"--that described church functions and barn dances), and open fields were the exception rather than the rule. Out of town the houses were farms that stood far apart from each other, and from December until the middle of March we mostly hunkered down in the little pockets of stove warmth we called families. We hunkered and listened to the wind in the chimney and hoped no one would get sick or break a leg or get a headful of bad ideas, like the farmer over in Castle Rock who had chopped up his wife and kids three winters before and then said in court that the ghosts made him do it. In those days before the Great War, most of Motton was woods and bog--dark long places full of moose and mosquitoes, snakes and secrets. In those days there were ghosts everywhere.

  This thing I’m telling about happened on a Saturday. My father gave me a whole list of chores to do, including some that would have been Dan’s, if he’d still been alive. He was my only brother, and he’d died of a bee sting. A year had gone by, and still my mother wouldn’t hear that. She said it was something else, had to have been, that no one ever died of being stung be a bee. When Mama Sweet, the oldest lady in the Methodist Ladies’ Aid, tried to tell her--at the church supper the previous winter, this was--that the same thing had happened to her favorite uncle back in ‘73, my mother clapped her hanks over her ears, got up, and walked out of the church basement. She’d never been back since, and nothing my father could say to her would change her mind. She claimed she was done with church, and that if she ever had to see Helen Robichaud again (that was Mama Sweet’s real name) she would slap her eyes out. She wouldn’t be able to help herself, she said.

  That day Dad wanted me to lug wood for the cookstove, weed the beans and the cukes, pitch hay out of the loft, get two jugs of water to put in the cold pantry, and scrape as much old paint off the cellar bulkhead as I could. Then, he said, I could go fishing, if I didn’t mind going by myself--he had to go over and see Bill Eversham about some cows. I said I sure didn’t mind going by myself, and my dad smiled as if that didn’t surprise him so very much. He’d given me a bamboo pole the week before--not because it was my birthday or anything but just because he liked to give me things sometimes--and I was wild to try it in Castle Stream, which was by far the troutiest brook I’d ever fished.

  "But don’t you go too far in the woods," he told me. "Not beyond were the water splits."

  No, sir."

  "Promise me."

  "Yessir, I promise."

  "Now promise your mother."

  We were standing on the back stoop; I had been bound for the springhouse with the water jugs when my dad stopped me. Now he turned me around to face my mother, who was standing at the marble counter in a flood of strong morning sunshine falling through the double windows over the sink. There was a curl of hair lying across the side of her forehead and touching her eyebrow--you see how well I remember it all? The bright light turned that little curl to filaments of gold and that instant I saw her as a woman, saw her as my father must have seen her. She was wearing a housedress with little red roses all over it, I remember, and she was kneading bread. Candy Bill, out little black Scottie dog, was standing alertly beside her feet, looking up, waiting for anything that might drop. My mother was looking at me.

  "I promise," I said.

  She smiled, but it was the worried kind of smile she always seemed to make since my father brought Dan back from the west field in his arms. My father had come sobbing and barechested. He had taken off his shirt and draped it over Dan’s face, which had swelled and turned color. My boy! he had been crying. Oh, look at my boy! Jesus, look at my boy! I remember that as if it were yesterday. It was the only time I ever heard my dad take the Saviour’s name in vain.

  "What do you promise, Gary?" she asked.

  "Promise not to go no further than where the stream forks, Ma’am."

  "Any further."

  "Any."

  She gave me a patient look, saying nothing as her hands went on working in the dough, which now had a smooth, silky look.

  "I promise not to go any further than where the
stream forks, Ma’am"

  "Thank you, Gary," she said. "And try to remember that grammar is for the world as well as for school."

  "Yes, Ma’am."

  Candy Bill followed me as I did my chores, and sat between my feet as I bolted my lunch, looking up at me with the same attentiveness he had shown my mother while she was kneading her bread, but when I got my new bamboo pole and my old, splintery creel and started out of the dooryard, he stopped and only stood in the dust by an old roll of snow fence, watching. I called him but he wouldn’t come. He yapped a time or two, as if telling me to come back, but that was all.

  "Stay, then," I said, trying to sound as if I didn’t care. I did, though, at least a little. Candy Bill always went fishing with me.

  My mother came to the door and looked out at me with her left hand held up to shade her eyes. I can see her that way still, and it’s like looking at a photograph of someone who later became unhappy, or died suddenly. "You mind your dad now, Gary!"

  "Yes Ma’am, I will."