The Colorado Kid (13 page)

“Ayuh,” Dave said, and his tongue rounded the inside of one cheek. “Like the Coast Lights after an hour or two.”

“Or the rest of the
Lisa Cabot
’s crew,” Vince added.

“And once he got off the ferry, you don’t know where he went.”

“No, ma’am,” Vince said. “We’ve looked off n on for over twenty-five years and never found a soul who claims to have seen him before Johnny and Nancy did around quarter past six on the morning of April 24th. And for the record—not that anyone’s keepin one—I don’t believe that anyone took what remained of that steak from his hand after he choked on his last bite. I believe a seagull stole the last of it from his dead hand, just as we always surmised. And gorry, I really
do
have to get a move on.”

“And I have to get with those invoices,” Dave said. “But first, I think another little rest-stop might be in order.” That said, he lumbered toward the bathroom.

“I suppose I better get with this column,” Stephanie said. Then she burst out, half-laughing and half-serious: “But I almost wish you hadn’t told me, if you were going to leave me hanging! It’ll be
weeks
before I get this out of my mind!”

“It’s been twenty-five years, and it’s still not out of ours,” Vince said. “And at least you know why we didn’t tell that guy from the
Globe
.”

“Yes. I do.”

He smiled and nodded. “You’ll do all right, Stephanie. You’ll do fine.” He gave her shoulder a friendly squeeze, then started for the door, grabbing his narrow reporter’s notebook from his littered desk on his way by and stuffing it into his back pocket. He was ninety but still walked easy, his back only slightly bent with age. He wore a gentleman’s white shirt, its back crisscrossed with a gentleman’s suspenders. Halfway across the room he stopped and turned to her again. A shaft of late sunlight caught his baby-fine white hair and turned it into a halo.

“You’ve been a pleasure to have around,” he said. “I want you to know that.”

“Thank you.” She hoped she didn’t sound as close to tears as she suddenly felt. “It’s been wonderful. I was a little dubious at first, but…but now I guess it goes right back at you. It’s a pleasure to be here.”

“Have you thought about staying? I think you have.”

“Yes. You bet I have.”

He nodded gravely. “Dave and I have spoken about that. It’d be good to have some new blood on the staff. Some young blood.”

“You guys’ll go on for years,” she said.

“Oh yes,” he said, off-handedly, as if that were a given, and when he died six months later, Stephanie would sit in a cold church, taking notes on the service in her own narrow reporter’s book, and think:
He knew it was coming.
“I’ll be around for years yet. Still, if you wanted to stay, we’d like to have you. You don’t have to answer one way or another now, but consider it an offer.”

“All right, I will. And I think we both know what the answer will be.”

“That’s fine, then.” He started to turn, then turned back one last time. “School’s almost out for the day, but I could tell you one more thing about our business. May I?”

“Of course.”

“There are thousands of papers and
tens
of thousands of people writing stories for em, but there are only two types of stories. There are news stories, which usually aren’t stories at all, but only accounts of unfolding events. Things like that don’t
have
to be stories. People pick up a newspaper to read about the blood and the tears the way they slow down to look at a wreck on the highway, and then they move on. But what do they find inside of their newspaper?”

“Feature stories,” Stephanie said, thinking of Hanratty and his unexplained mysteries.

“Ayuh. And those
are
stories. Every one of em has a beginning, a middle, and an end. That makes em happy news, Steffi, always happy news. Even if the story is about a church secretary who probably killed half the congregation at the church picnic because her lover jilted her, that is happy news, and why?”

“I don’t know.”

“You better,” Dave said, emerging from the bathroom and still wiping his hands on a paper towel. “You better know if you want to be in this business, and understand what it is you’re doin.” He cast the paper towel into his wastebasket on his way by.

She thought about it. “Feature stories are happy stories because they’re over.”

“That’s right!” Vince cried, beaming. He threw his hands in the air like a revival preacher. “They have
resolution
! They have
closure
! But do things have a beginning, a middle, and an end in real life, Stephanie? What does your experience tell you?”

“When it comes to newspaper work, I don’t have much,” she said. “Just the campus paper and, you know, Arts ’N Things here.”

Vince waved this away. “Your heart n mind, what do they tell you?”

“That life usually doesn’t work that way.” She was thinking of a certain young man who would have to be dealt with if she decided to stay here beyond her four months…and that dealing might be messy. Probably
would
be messy. Rick would not take the news well, because in Rick’s mind, that wasn’t how the story was supposed to go.

“I never read a feature story that wasn’t a lie,” Vince said mildly, “but usually you can make a lie fit on the page. This one would never fit. Unless…” He gave a little shrug.

For a moment she didn’t know what that shrug meant. Then she remembered something Dave had said not long after they’d gone out to sit on the deck to sit in the late August sunshine.
It’s ours,
he’d said, sounding almost angry.
A guy from the
Globe
, a guy from away—he’d only muck it up.

“If you’d given this to Hanratty, he
would’ve
used it, wouldn’t he?” she asked them.

“Wasn’t ours to give, because we don’t own it,” Vince said. “It belongs to whoever tracks it down.”

Smiling a little, Stephanie shook her head. “I think that’s disingenuous. I think you and Dave are the last two people alive who know the whole thing.”

“We were,” Dave said. “Now there’s you, Steffi.”

She nodded to him, acknowledging the implicit compliment, then turned her attention back to Vince Teague, eyebrows raised. After a second or two, he chuckled.

“We didn’t tell him about the Colorado Kid because he would have taken a true unexplained mystery and made it into just another feature story,” Vince said. “Not by changin any of the facts, but by emphasizing one thing—the concept of muscle-relaxants making it hard or impossible to swallow, let’s say—and leavin something else out.”

“That there was absolutely no sign of anything like that in this case, for instance,” Stephanie said.

“Ayuh, maybe that, maybe something else. And maybe he would have written it that way on his own, simply because making a story out of things that ain’t quite a story on their own gets to be a habit after a certain number of years in this business, or maybe his editor would have sent it back to him to do on a rewrite.”

“Or the editor might’ve done it himself, if time was tight,” Dave put in.

“Yep, editors have been known to do that, as well,” Vince agreed. “In any case, the Colorado Kid would most likely have ended up bein installment number seven or eight in Hanratty’s Unexplained Mysteries of New England series, something for people to marvel over for fifteen minutes or so on Sunday and line their kitty-litter boxes with on Monday.”

“And it wouldn’t be yours anymore,” Stephanie said.

Dave nodded, but Vince waved his hand as if to say
Oh, pish-tush.
“That I could put up with, but it would’ve hung a lie around the neck of a man who ain’t alive to refute it, and that I
won’t
put up with. Because I don’t have to.” He glanced at his watch. “In any case, I’m on my horse. Whichever one of you’s last out the door, be sure to lock it behind you, all right?”

Vince left. They watched him go, then Dave turned back to her. “Any more questions?”

She laughed. “A hundred, but none you or Vince could answer, I guess.”

“Just as long as you don’t get tired of askin em, that’s fine.” He wandered off to his desk, sat down, and pulled a stack of papers toward him with a sigh. Stephanie started back toward her own desk, then something caught her eye on the wall-length bulletin board at the far end of the room, opposite Vince’s cluttered desk. She walked over for a closer look.

The left half of the bulletin board was layered with old front pages of the
Islander
, most yellowed and curling. High in the corner, all by itself, was the front page from the week of July 9th, 1952. The headline read
MYSTERY LIGHTS OVER HANCOCK FASCINATE THOUSANDS
. Below was a photograph credited to one Vincent Teague—who would have been just thirty-seven back then, if she had her math right. The crisp black-and-white showed a Little League field with a billboard in deep center reading
HANCOCK LUMBER
ALWAYS
KNOWS THE SCORE!
To Stephanie the photo looked as if it had been snapped at twilight. The few adults in the single set of sagging bleachers were standing and looking up into the sky. So was the ump, who stood straddling home plate with his mask in his right hand. One set of players—the visiting team, she assumed—was bunched tightly together around third base, as if for comfort. The other kids, wearing jeans and jerseys with the words
HANCOCK LUMBER
printed on the back, stood in a rough line across the infield, all staring upward. And on the mound the little boy who had been pitching held his glove up to one of the bright circles which hung in the sky just below the clouds, as if to touch that mystery, and bring it close, and open its heart, and know its story.

Depending on whether you liked or hated
The Colorado Kid
(I think for many people there’ll be no middle ground on this one, and that’s fine with me), you have my friend Scott to thank or blame. He brought me the news clipping that got it going.

Every writer of fiction has had somebody bring him or her a clipping from time to time, sure that the subject will make a wonderful story. “You’ll only have to change it around a little,” the clipping-bearer says with an optimistic smile. I don’t know how this works with other writers, but it had never worked with me, and when Scott handed me an envelope with a cutting from a Maine newspaper inside, I expected more of the same. But my mother raised no ingrates, so I thanked him, took it home, and tossed it on my desk. A day or two later I tore the envelope open, read the feature story inside, and was immediately galvanized.

I have lost the clipping since, and for once Google, that twenty-first century idiot savant, has been of no help, so all I can do is summarize from memory, a notoriously unreliable reference source. Yet in this case that hardly matters, since the feature story was only the spark that lit the little fire that burns through these pages, and not the fire itself.

What caught my eye immediately upon unfolding the clipping was a drawing of a bright red purse. The story was of the young woman who had owned it. She was seen one day walking the main street of a small island community off the coast of Maine with that red purse over her arm. The next day she was found dead on one of the island beaches,
sans
purse or identification of any kind. Even the cause of her death was a mystery, and although it was eventually put down to drowning, with alcohol perhaps a contributing factor, that diagnosis remains tentative to this day.

The young woman was eventually identified, but not until her remains had spent a long, lonely time in a mainland crypt. And I was left again with a smack of that mystery the Maine islands like Cranberry and Monhegan have always held for me—their contrasting yet oddly complimentary atmospheres of community and solitariness. There are few places in America where the line between the little world Inside and all the great world Outside is so firmly and deeply drawn. Islanders are full of warmth for those who belong, but they keep their secrets well from those who do not. And—as Agatha Christie shows so memorably in
Ten Little Indians
—there is no locked room so grand as an island, even one where the mainland looks just a long step away on a clear summer afternoon; no place so perfectly made for a mystery.

Mystery is my subject here, and I am aware that many readers will feel cheated, even angry, by my failure to provide a solution to the one posed. Is it because I had no solution to give? The answer is no. Should I have set my wits to work (as Richard Adams puts it in his forenote to
Shardik
), I could likely have provided half a dozen, three good, two a-country fair, and one fine as paint. I suspect many of you who have read the case know what some or all of them are. But in this one case—this very
hard
case, if I may be allowed a small pun on the imprint under whose cover the tale lies—I’m really not interested in the solution but in the mystery. Because it was the mystery that kept bringing me back to the story, day after day.

Did I care about those two old geezers, gnawing ceaselessly away at the case in their spare time even as the years went by and they grew ever more geezerly? Yes, I did. Did I care about Stephanie, who’s clearly undergoing a kind of test, and being judged by kind but hard judges? Yes—I wanted her to pass. Was I happy with each little discovery, each small ray of light shed? Of course. But mostly what drew me on was the thought of the Colorado Kid, propped there against that trash barrel and looking out at the ocean, an anomaly that stretched even the most flexible credulity to the absolute snapping point. Maybe even a little beyond. In the end, I didn’t care how he got there; like a nightingale glimpsed in the desert, it just took my breath away that he
was
.

And, of course, I wanted to see how my characters coped with the fact of him. It turned out they did quite well. I was proud of them. Now I will wait for my mail, both e- and of the snail variety, and see how
you
guys do with him.

I don’t want to belabor the point, but before I leave you, I ask you to consider the fact that we live in a
web
of mystery, and have simply gotten so used to the fact that we have crossed out the word and replaced it with one we like better, that one being
reality
. Where do we come from? Where were we before we were here? Don’t know. Where are we going? Don’t know. A lot of churches have what they assure us are the answers, but most of us have a sneaking suspicion all that might be a con-job laid down to fill the collection plates. In the meantime, we’re in a kind of compulsory dodgeball game as we free-fall from Wherever to Ain’t Got A Clue. Sometimes bombs go off and sometimes the planes land okay and sometimes the blood tests come back clean and sometimes the biopsies come back positive. Most times the bad telephone call doesn’t come in the middle of the night but sometimes it does, and either way we know we’re going to drive pedal-to-the-metal into the mystery eventually.

It’s crazy to be able to live with that and stay sane, but it’s also beautiful. I write to find out what I think, and what I found out writing
The Colorado Kid
was that maybe—I just say
maybe
—it’s the beauty of the mystery that allows us to live sane as we pilot our fragile bodies through this demolition-derby world. We always want to reach for the lights in the sky, and we always want to know where the Colorado Kid (the world is full of Colorado Kids) came from. Wanting might be better than knowing. I don’t say that for sure; I only suggest it. But if you tell me I fell down on the job and didn’t tell all of this story there was to tell, I say you’re all wrong.

On that I
am
sure.

Stephen King
January 31, 2005