Six Stories (17 page)

I turned, shoved Diane aside, and drew the bolts holding the door shut. I opened the door and sunlight hit me like a hammer. And the smell of the air. I can’t remember air ever smelling better, not even when I was a kid and it was the first day of summer Vacation.

I grabbed Diane’s arm and pulled her out into a narrow alley lined with padlocked trash bins. At the far end of this narrow stone slit, like a vision of heaven, was 5 3rd Street with traffic going heedlessly back and forth. I looked over my shoulder and through the open kitchen door. Guy lay on his back with carbonized mushrooms circling his head like an existential diadem. The skillet had slid off to one side, revealing a face that was red and swelling with blisters. One of his eyes was open, but it looked unseeingly up at the fluorescent lights. Behind him, the kitchen was empty. There was a pool of blood on the floor and bloody handprints on the white enamel front of the walk-in fridge, but both the chef and Gimpel the Fool were gone.

I slammed the door shut and pointed down the alley. ‘Go on.’

She didn’t move, only looked at me.

I shoved her lightly on her left shoulder. ‘Go!’

She raised a hand like a traffic cop, shook her head, then pointed a finger at me. ‘Don’t you touch me.’

‘What’ll you do? Sic your therapist on me? I think he’s dead, sweetheart.’

‘Don’t you patronize me like that. Don’t you dare, And don’t touch me, Steven, I’m warning you.’

The kitchen door burst open. Moving, not thinking but just moving, I slammed it shut again. I heard a muffled cry - whether anger or pain I didn’t know and didn’t care - just before it clicked shut-I leaned my back against it and braced my feet. ‘Do you want to stand here and discuss it?’ I asked her. ‘He’s still pretty lively, by the sound.’ He hit the door again. I rocked with it, then slammed it shut. I waited for him to try again, but he didn’t.

Diane gave me a long look, glarey and uncertain, and then started walking up the alleyway with her head down and her hair hanging at the sides of her neck. I stood with my back against the door until she got about three-quarters of the way to the street, then stood away from it, watching it warily. No one came out, but I decided that wasn’t going to guarantee any peace of mind.

I dragged one of the trash bins in front of the door, then set off after Diane, jogging.

When I got to the mouth of the alley, she wasn’t there anymore. I looked right, toward Madison, and didn’t see her. I looked left and there she was, wandering slowly across 53rd on a diagonal, her head still down and her hair still hanging like curtains at the sides of her face. No one paid any attention to her; the people in front of the Gotham Cafe were gawking through the plate glass windows like people in front of the Boston Seaquarium shark tank at feeding time. Sirens were approaching, a lot of them.

I went across the street, reached for her shoulder, thought better of it. I settled for calling her name instead.

She turned around, her eyes dulled with horror and shock. The front of her dress had turned into a grisly purple bib. She stank of blood and spent adrenaline.

‘Leave me alone,’ she said. ‘I never want to see you again.’

‘You kicked my ass in there, you bitch,’ I said. ‘You kicked my ass and almost got me killed. Both of us. I can’t believe you.’

‘I’ve wanted to kick your ass for the last fourteen months,’ she said.

‘When it comes to fulfilling our dreams, we can’t always pick our times, can w-‘

I slapped her across the face. I didn’t think about it, I just hauled off and did it, and few things in my adult life have given me so much pleasure. I’m ashamed of that, but I’ve come too far in this story to tell a lie, even one of omission.

Her head rocked back. Her eyes widened in shock and pain, losing that dull, traumatized look.

‘You bastard!’ she cried, her hand going to her cheek. Now tears were brimming in her eyes. ‘Oh, you bastard!’

‘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, smallminded, 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.

LUCKEY 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 entirely 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.