Bag of Bones by Stephen King Read Free Book Online Page B

the spring, checked the generator and took care to see that all the maintenance tags were current, anchoredthe swimming float fifty yards or so off our little lick of beach after each Memorial Day.
    Bill had the chimney cleaned in the early summer of ’96, although there hadn’t been a fire in the fireplace for two years or more. I paid him quarterly, as is the custom with caretakers in that part of the world; Bill Dean, an old Yankee from a long line of them, cashed my checks and didn’t ask why I never used my place anymore. I’d only been down two or three times since Jo died, and not a single overnight. Good thing Bill didn’t ask, because I don’t know what answer I would have given him. I hadn’t even really thought about Sara Laughs until my conversation with Harold.
    Thinking of Harold, I looked away from the photo and back at the phone. Imagined saying to him, So I go down, so what? The world comes to an end? Please. It isn’t as if I had a wife and family to support—the wife died in a drugstore parking lot, if you please (or even if you don’t please), and the kid we wanted so badly and tried for so long went with her. I don’t crave the fame, either—if writers who fill the lower slots on the Times bestseller list can be said to be famous—and I don’t fall asleep dreaming of book club sales. So why? Why does it even bother me?
    But that last one I could answer. Because it felt like giving up. Because without my wife and my work, I was a superfluous man living alone in a big house that was all paid for, doing nothing but the newspaper crossword over lunch.
    *   *   *
    I pushed on with what passed for my life. I forgot about Sara Laughs (or some part of me that didn’t want to go there buried the idea) and spent another sweltering, miserable summer in Derry. I put a cruciverbalistprogram on my PowerBook and began making my own crossword puzzles. I took an interim appointment on the local YMCA’s board of directors and judged the Summer Arts Competition in Waterville. I did a series of TV ads for the local homeless shelter, which was staggering toward bankruptcy, then served on that board for awhile. (At one public meeting of this latter board a woman called me a friend of degenerates, to which I replied, “Thanks! I needed that.” This resulted in a loud outburst of applause which I still don’t understand.) I tried some one-on-one counselling and gave it up after five appointments, deciding that the counsellor’s problems were far worse than mine. I sponsored an Asian child and bowled with a league.
    Sometimes I tried to write, and every time I did, I locked up. Once, when I tried to force a sentence or two (any sentence or two, just as long as they came fresh-baked out of my own head), I had to grab the wastebasket and vomit into it. I vomited until I thought it was going to kill me . . . and I did have to literally crawl away from the desk and the computer, pulling myself across the deep-pile rug on my hands and knees. By the time I got to the other side of the room, it was better. I could even look back over my shoulder at the VDT screen. I just couldn’t get near it. Later that day, I approached it with my eyes shut and turned it off.
    More and more often during those late-summer days I thought of Dennison Carville, the creative-writing teacher who’d helped me connect with Harold and who had damned Being Two with such faint praise. Carville once said something I never forgot,attributing it to Thomas Hardy, the Victorian novelist and poet. Perhaps Hardy did say it, but I’ve never found it repeated, not in Bartlett’s, not in the Hardy biography I read between the publications of All the Way from the Top and Threatening Behavior. I have an idea Carville may have made it up himself and then attributed it to Hardy in order to give it more weight. It’s a ploy I have used myself from time