Different Seasons by Stephen King Read Free Book Online Page A

rest. I have seen some screws that I thought were almost saintly, and I think I know why that happens—they are able to see the difference between their own lives, poor and struggling as they might be, and the lives of the men they are paid by the State to watch over. These guards are able to formulate a comparison concerning pain. Others can’t, or won’t.
    For Byron Hadley there was no basis of comparison. He could sit there, cool and at his ease under the warm May sun, and find the gall to mourn his own good luck while less than ten feet away a bunch of men were working and sweating and burning their hands on great big buckets filled with bubbling tar, men who had to work so hard in their ordinary round of days that this looked like a respite. You may remember the old question, the one that’s supposed to define your outlook on life when you answer it. For Byron Hadley the answer would always be half empty, the glass is half empty. Forever and ever, amen. If you gave him a cool drink of apple cider, he’d think about vinegar. If you told him his wife had always been faithful to him, he’d tell you it was because she was so damn ugly.
    So there he sat, talking to Mert Entwhistle loud enough for all of us to hear, his broad white forehead already starting to redden with the sun. He had one hand thrown back over the low parapet surrounding the roof. The other was on the butt of his .38.
    We all got the story along with Mert. It seemed that Hadley’s older brother had gone off to Texas some fourteen years ago and the rest of the family hadn’t heard from the son of a bitch since. They had all assumed he was dead, and good riddance. Then, a week and a half ago, a lawyer had called them long-distance from Austin. It seemed that Hadley’s brother had died four months ago, and a rich man at that (“It’s frigging incredible how lucky some assholes can get,” this paragon of gratitude on the plate-shop roof said). The money had come as a result of oil and oil-leases, and there was close to a million dollars.
    No, Hadley wasn’t a millionaire—that might have made even him happy, at least for awhile—but the brother had left a pretty damned decent bequest of thirty-five thousand dollars to each surviving member of his family back in Maine, if they could be found. Not bad. Like getting lucky and winning a sweepstakes.
    But to Byron Hadley the glass was always half empty. He spent most of the morning bitching to Mert about the bite that the goddam government was going to take out of his windfall. “They’ll leave me about enough to buy a new car with,” he allowed, “and then what happens? You have to pay the damn taxes on the car, and the repairs and maintenance, you got your goddam kids pestering you to take ’em for a ride with the top down—”
    “And to drive it, if they’re old enough,” Mert said. Old Mert Entwhistle knew which side his bread was buttered on, and he didn’t say what must have been as obvious to him as to the rest of us: If that money’s worrying you so bad, Byron old kid old sock, I’ll just take it off your hands. After all, what are friends for?
    “That’s right, wanting to drive it, wanting to learn to drive on it, for Chrissake,” Byron said with a shudder. “Then what happens at the end of the year? If you figured the tax wrong and you don’t have enough left over to pay the overdraft, you got to pay out of your own pocket, or maybe even borrow it from one of those kikey loan agencies. And they audit you anyway, you know. It don’t matter. And when the government audits you, they always take more. Who can fight Uncle Sam? He puts his hand inside your shirt and squeezes your tit until it’s purple, and you end up getting the short end. Christ.”
    He lapsed into a morose silence, thinking of what terrible bad luck he’d had to inherit that thirty-five thousand dollars. Andy Dufresne had been spreading tar with a big Padd brush less than fifteen feet away and now he tossed