Bag of Bones   ::   Кинг Стивен

Listen to the old-timers who remember the rich and successful in their salad days (and all the old-timers claim they do), and you’ll hear that they ate the wallpaper, fucked the dog, and showed up at church suppers wearing nothing but their pee-stained BVDS. Even if all that was true in Devore’s case, and even if he was Scrooge Mcduck in the bargain, I doubted that he’d allow two of his closer relatives to live in a doublewide trailer.

I drove up the lane above the lake, then paused at the head of my driveway, looking at the sign there: SAK LAUGHS burned into a length of varnished board nailed to a handy tree. It’s the way they do things down here. Looking at it brought back the last dream of the Manderley series.

In that dream someone had slapped a radio-station sticker on the sign, the way you’re always seeing stickers slapped on turnpike toll-collection baskets in the exact-change lanes.

I got out of my car, went to the sign, and studied it. No sticker. The sunflowers had been down there, growing out of the stoop—I had a photo in my suitcase that proved it—but there was no radio-station sticker on the house sign. Proving exactly what? Come on, Noonan, get a grip.

I started back to the car—the door was open, the Beach Boys spilling out of the speakers—then changed my mind and went back to the sign again. In the dream, the sticker had been pasted just above the of SAK and the LAU of LAUGHS. I touched my fingers to that spot and thought they came away feeling slightly sticky. Of course that could have been the feel of varnish on a hot day. Or my imagination.

I drove down to the house, parked, set the emergency brake (on the slopes around Dark Score and the dozen or so other lakes in western Maine, you always set your brake), and listened to the rest of “Don’t Worry, Baby,” which I’ve always thought was the best of the Beach Boys’ songs, great not in spite of the sappy lyrics but because of them. If you knew how much I love you, baby, Brian Wilson sings, nothing could go wrong with you. And oh folks, wouldn’t that be a world.

I sat there listening and looked at the cabinet set against the right side of the stoop. We kept our garbage in there to foil the neighborhood raccoons. Even cans with snap-down lids won’t always do that; if the coons are hungry enough, they somehow manage the lids with their clever little hands.

You’re not going to do what you’re thinking of doing, I told myself. I mean… are you?

It seemed I was-or that I was at least going to have a go.