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    You Like It Darker: Stories
    You Like It Darker: Stories
    You Like It Darker: Stories
    Ebook660 pages12 hours

    You Like It Darker: Stories

    By Stephen King

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    About this ebook

    From legendary storyteller and master of short fiction Stephen King comes an extraordinary new collection of twelve short stories, many never-before-published, and some of his best EVER.

    “You like it darker? Fine, so do I,” writes Stephen King in the afterword to this magnificent new collection of twelve stories that delve into the darker part of life—both metaphorical and literal. King has, for half a century, been a master of the form, and these stories, about fate, mortality, luck, and the folds in reality where anything can happen, are as rich and riveting as his novels, both weighty in theme and a huge pleasure to read. King writes to feel “the exhilaration of leaving ordinary day-to-day life behind,” and in You Like It Darker, readers will feel that exhilaration too, again and again.

    “Two Talented Bastids” explores the long-hidden secret of how the eponymous gentlemen got their skills. In “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream,” a brief and unprecedented psychic flash upends dozens of lives, Danny’s most catastrophically. In “Rattlesnakes,” a sequel to Cujo, a grieving widower travels to Florida for respite and instead receives an unexpected inheritance—with major strings attached. In “The Dreamers,” a taciturn Vietnam vet answers a job ad and learns that there are some corners of the universe best left unexplored. “The Answer Man” asks if prescience is good luck or bad and reminds us that a life marked by unbearable tragedy can still be meaningful.

    King’s ability to surprise, amaze, and bring us both terror and solace remains unsurpassed. Each of these stories holds its own thrills, joys, and mysteries; each feels iconic. You like it darker? You got it.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribner
    Release dateMay 21, 2024
    ISBN9781668037737
    Author

    Stephen King

    Stephen King is the author of more than sixty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes the short story collection You Like It Darker, Holly (a New York Times Notable Book of 2023), Fairy Tale, Billy Summers, If It Bleeds, The Institute, Elevation, The Outsider, Sleeping Beauties (cowritten with his son Owen King), and the Bill Hodges trilogy: End of Watch, Finders Keepers, and Mr. Mercedes (an Edgar Award winner for Best Novel and a television series streaming on Peacock). His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. His epic works The Dark Tower, It, Pet Sematary, Doctor Sleep, and Firestarter are the basis for major motion pictures, with It now the highest-grossing horror film of all time. He is the recipient of the 2020 Audio Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, the 2014 National Medal of Arts, and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King. 

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    Reviews for You Like It Darker

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    • 5/5
      Stephen King had a new book coming out. You Like it Darker is a collection of fabulous stories from King. "You like it darker? Fine, so do I,” writes Stephen King in the afterword to this magnificent new collection of twelve stories that delve into the darker part of life—both metaphorical and literal".I chose to listen to You Like it Darker when I saw that Will Patton was the narrator. He's hand downs one of my favorite readers.The first story is Two Talented Bastids. It's much long than I had expected the stories to be - that's a really good thing! Stephen King can write anything - long, short and in between and I am captivated by them all. This first tale has two friends from the same small town recounting how they found fame and fortune. You'll never guess... Patton uses a spot-on Maine accent with a side of gravelly for the characters. King's detailed prose had me imagining the setting, the men, and the.....The Fifth Step is one of the shorter stories - but it packs a punch that you won't see coming....Wondering what happened to Danny Coughlin from Cujo? He can be found in a tale titled Rattlesnakes. This one was downright terrifying!Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream caught me right away and I couldn't stop listening! Danny finds something and does his best to anonymously have it taken care of. But things go sideways and Danny is in a bad place...with a antagonist you're going to love to hate. The voice meets the character perfectly. Flat, dangerous, sure of the themself and more than a little off. The voice for Danny is just right - it sounds like an every guy that just can't believe what's going on. And as listeners we can't believe it as well. This one had me shouting out loud in frustration!I do not like flying at all. I debated if I wanted to listen to The Turbulence Expert, but in the end did. And found it to be a little bit reassuring - even as I wondered if my coming flight would need this..... I love how Stephen King takes everyday events, situations, people and with a few sentences turn things upside down and inside out. There are many more, but they are the ones that stood out for me - but each and every one is brilliant. I raced through the first time and went back to savour them again.Will Patton's performances were excellent. His interpretation of the stories were spot on, upping the creepy factor with every tale.
    • 4/5
      A collection of short stories, many on the theme of growing older and confronting one's mortality, which makes sense considering King's time in life. About midway through this, with first the happy-ending reworking of Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and then the dog story "Laurie," I thought King might be turning into a softie. Where's the horror? Then I got to "Rattlesnakes"--whoa. That was some nightmare fuel, right there. And just when the reader is relaxing and thinking this isn't so dark. Good work. The final three stories were my favorites in the book, but I also really enjoyed the long one called "Danny Coughlin's Bad Dream." Some jewels, some clunkers, overall a good read.
    • 5/5
      Great CollectionKing provides insight on human nature by telling stories with uncanny background. Each story is distinct but has believable characters. The story I liked the best was the answer man. Perhaps the scariest is the story of the man who discovers a dead body, and finds himself a primary suspect.
    • 4/5
      Overall, just a solid collection of King's shorter fiction (though, to be fair, the two longest stories are my favourites).I'm not going to go over every story, but for my money, the best ones were"Two Talented Bastids" (almost a spiritual—and much improved—sequel to DREAMCATCHER)"Danny Coughlin's Bad Dream" - This one, to me, is exactly what I wanted ALL the Bill Hodges/Holly Gibney stories to be closer to, and never got. He finally nailed it."Rattlesnakes" - This one literally gave me a lump in my throat over the death of one of King's older characters.Honestly, there truly wasn't a bad story in the batch, though a couple didn't quite grab me as much. But after tow one-two stinker punch of FAIRY TALE and HOLLY, this is a welcome return to form.

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    You Like It Darker - Stephen King

    Cover: You Like It Darker: Stories, by Stephen King.

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    You Like It Darker: Stories, by Stephen King. Scribner. New York | London | Toronto | Sydney | New Delhi.

    For the twins, Thomas and Edward

    TWO TALENTED BASTIDS

    1

    My father—my famous father—died in 2023, at the age of ninety. Two years before he passed, he got an email from a freelance writer named Ruth Crawford asking him for an interview. I read it to him, as I did all his personal and business correspondence, because by then he’d given up his electronic devices—first his desktop computer, then his laptop, and finally his beloved phone. His eyesight stayed good right up to the end, but he said that looking at the iPhone’s screen gave him a headache. At the reception following the funeral, Doc Goodwin told me that Pop might have suffered a series of mini-strokes leading up to the big one.

    Around the time he gave up his phone—this would have been five or six years before he died—I took early retirement from my position as Castle County School Superintendent, and went to work for my dad full-time. There was plenty to do. He had a housekeeper, but those duties fell to me at night and on the weekends. I helped him dress in the morning and undress at night. I did most of the cooking, and cleaned up the occasional mess when Pop couldn’t make it to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

    He had a handyman as well, but by then Jimmy Griggs was pushing eighty himself, and so I found myself doing the chores Jimmy didn’t get around to—everything from mulching Pop’s treasured flowerbeds to plunging out the drains when they got clogged. Assisted living was never discussed, although God knows Pop could have afforded it; a dozen mega-bestselling novels over forty years had left him very well off.

    The last of his engaging doorstoppers (Donna Tartt, New York Times) was published when Pop was eighty-two. He did the obligatory round of interviews, sat for the obligatory photos, and then announced his retirement. To the press, he did so graciously, with his trademark humor (Ron Charles, Washington Post). To me he said, Thank God the bullshit’s finished. With the exception of the informal picket-fence interview he gave Ruth Crawford, he never spoke for the record again. He was asked many times and always refused; claimed he’d said all he had to say, including some things he probably should have kept to himself.

    You give enough interviews, he told me once, and you are bound to stick your foot in your mouth a time or two. Those are the quotes that last, and the older you are, the more likely it becomes.

    Yet his books continued to sell, so his business affairs continued. I went over the contract renewals, cover concepts, and the occasional movie or TV option with him, and I dutifully read every interview proposal once he was incapable of reading them himself. He always said no, and that included Ruth Crawford’s proposal.

    Give her the standard response, Mark—flattered to be asked, but no thanks. He hesitated, though, because this one was a little different.

    Crawford wanted to write a piece about my father and his long-time friend, David Butch LaVerdiere, who died in 2019. Pop and I went to his funeral on the West Coast in a chartered Gulfstream. Pop was always close with his money—not stingy, but close—and the whopping expense of that roundtrip said a lot about his feeling for the man I grew up calling Uncle Butch. That feeling held strong, although the two men hadn’t seen each other face to face in ten years or more.

    Pop was asked to speak at the funeral. I didn’t think he would—his rejection of the public spotlight spread in all directions, not just interviews—but he did it. He didn’t go to the podium, only stood up where he was with the help of his cane. He was always a good speaker, and that didn’t change with age.

    Butch and I were kids going to a one-room schoolhouse before the Second World War. We grew up in a no-stoplight dirt-road town fixing cars, patching them up, playing sports and then coaching them. As men we took part in town politics and maintained the town dump—very similar jobs, now that I think about it. We hunted, we fished, we put out grassfires in the summer and plowed the town roads in the winter. Knocked over a right smart of mailboxes doing it, too. I knew him when no one knew his name—or mine—outside of a twenty-mile radius. I should have come to see him these last years, but I was busy with my own affairs. I thought to myself, there’s time. We always think that, I guess. Then time runs out. Butch was a fine artist, but he was also a good man. I think that’s more important. Maybe some here don’t and that’s all right, that’s all right. Thing is, I always had his back and he always had mine.

    He paused, head down, thinking.

    In my little Maine town there’s a saying for friends like that. We kep’ close.

    Yes they did, and that included their secrets.

    Ruth Crawford had a solid clip-file—I checked. She had published articles, mostly personality profiles, in a dozen places, many local or regional (Yankee, Downeast, New England Life), but a few national, including a piece on the benighted town of Derry in the New Yorker. When it came to Laird Carmody and Dave LaVerdiere, I thought she had a good hook to hang her proposed story on. Her thesis had come up glancingly in pieces about either Pop or Uncle Butch, but she wanted to drill down on it: two men from the same small town in Maine who had become famous in two different fields of cultural endeavor. Not only that, either; both Carmody and LaVerdiere had achieved fame in their mid-forties, at a time when most men and women have given over the ambitions of their youth. Who have, as Pop once put it, dug themselves a rut and begun furnishing it. Ruth wanted to explore how such an unlikely coincidence had happened… assuming it was coincidence.

    Has to be a reason? Pop asked when I finished reading him Ms. Crawford’s letter. Is that what she’s suggesting? I guess she never heard about the twin brothers who won large sums of money in their respective state lotteries on the same day.

    "Well, that might not have been a complete coincidence, I said. Assuming, that is, that you didn’t just make the story up on the spur of the moment."

    I gave him space to comment, but he only offered a smile that could have meant anything. Or nothing. So I pressed on.

    I mean, those twins might have grown up in a house where gambling was a big thing. Which would make it a little less unlikely, right? Plus, what about all the lottery tickets they bought that were losers?

    I’m not getting your point, Mark, Pop said. Still with the little smile. Do you even have one?

    Just that I can understand this woman’s interest in exploring the fact of you and Dave both coming from Nowheresville and blossoming in the middle of your lives. I raised my hands beside my head as if framing a headline. "Could it be… fate?"

    Pop considered this, rubbing one hand up the white stubble on the side of his deeply lined face. I actually thought he might be about to change his mind and say yes. Then he shook his head. Just write her one of your nice letters, tell her I’m going to pass, and wish her well on her future endeavors.

    So that was what I did, although something about the way Pop looked just then stuck with me. It was the look of a man who could say quite a lot on the subject of how he and his friend Butch had achieved fame and fortune… but who chose not to. Who chose, in fact, to keep it close.

    Ruth Crawford might have been disappointed in Pop’s refusal to be interviewed, but she didn’t drop the project. Nor did she drop it when I also refused to be interviewed, saying my father wouldn’t want me to after he’d said no, and besides, all I knew was that my father had always enjoyed stories. He read a lot, went nowhere without a paperback jammed in his back pocket. He told me wonderful tales at bedtime, and he sometimes wrote them down in spiral notebooks. As for Uncle Butch? He painted a mural in my bedroom—boys playing ball, boys catching fireflies, boys with fishing poles. Ruth wanted to see it, of course, but it had been painted over long ago, when I outgrew such childish things. When first Pop and then Uncle Butch took off like a couple of rockets, I was at the University of Maine, getting a degree in advanced education. Because, according to the old canard, those who can’t do teach, and those who can’t teach, teach teachers. The success of my father and his best friend was, I said, as much a surprise to me as to anyone else in town. There’s another old canard about how no good can come out of Nazareth.

    I put that in a letter to Ms. Crawford, because I did feel bad—a little—about not giving her the interview. In it I said they surely had dreams, most men do, and like most men, they kept those dreams to themselves. I had assumed Pop’s stories and Uncle Butch’s cheerful paintings were just hobbies, like whittling or guitar-picking, until the money started rolling in. I typed that, then handwrote a postscript: And good for them!

    There are twenty-seven incorporated towns in Castle County. Castle Rock is the largest; Gates Falls is the second largest. Harlow, where I grew up, the son of Laird and Sheila Carmody, isn’t even in the top ten. It’s grown considerably since I was a kid, though, and sometimes my pop—who also spent his whole life in Harlow—said he could hardly recognize it. He went to a one-room school; I went to a four-roomer (two grades in each room); now there’s an eight-room school with geothermal heating and cooling.

    When Pop was a kid, all the town roads were unpaved except for Route 9, the Portland Road. When I came along, only Deep Cut and Methodist Road were dirt. These days, all of them are paved. In the sixties there was only one store, Brownie’s, where old men sat around an actual pickle barrel. Now there are two or three, and a kind of downtown (if you want to call it that) on the Quaker Hill Road. We have a pizza joint, two beauty parlors, and—hard to believe but true—a nail salon that seems to be a going concern. No high school, though; that hasn’t changed. Harlow kids have three choices: Castle Rock High, Gates Falls High, or Mountain View Secondary, most commonly known as the Christer Academy. We’re a bunch of country bumpkins out here: pickup-driving, country-music-listening, coffee-brandy-drinking, Republican-leaning hicks from the sticks. There’s nothing much to recommend us, except for two men who came from here: my pop and his friend Butch LaVerdiere. Two talented bastids, as Pop put it during his brief over-the-fence conversation with Ruth Crawford.

    Your mom and pop spent their whole lives there? a city person might ask. And then YOU spent your whole life there? What are you, crazy?

    Nope.

    Robert Frost said home is the place that, when you go there, they have to take you in. It’s also the place you start from, and if you’re one of the lucky ones, it’s where you finish up. Butch died in Seattle, a stranger in a strange land. Maybe that was okay with him, but I have to wonder if in the end he wouldn’t have preferred a little dirt road and the lakeside forest known as the 30-Mile Wood.

    Although most of Ruth Crawford’s research—her investigation—was centered in Harlow, where her subjects grew up, there are no motels there, not even a bed and breakfast, so her base of operations was the Gateway Motel, in Castle Rock. There actually is a senior living facility in Harlow, and there Ruth interviewed a fellow named Alden Toothaker, who went to school with my pop and his friend. It was Alden who told her how Dave got his nickname. He always carried a tube of Lucky Tiger Butch Wax in his hip pocket and used it frequently so his flattop would stand up straight in front. He wore his hair (what there was of it) that way his whole life. It became his trademark. As to whether he still carried Butch Wax once he got famous, your guess is as good as mine. I don’t know if they even still make it.

    They used to pal around together back in grade school, Alden told her. Just a couple of boys who liked to fish or go hunting with their daddies. They grew up around hard work and didn’t expect nothing different. You might talk to folks my age who’ll tellya those boys were going to amount to something, but I’m not one of em. They were ordinary fellas right up until they weren’t.

    Laird and Butch went to Gates Falls High. They were placed in what was then called the general education courses, which were for kids who had no plans to go to college. No one came out and said they weren’t bright enough; it was just assumed. They took something called Daily Math and Business English, where several pages of their textbook explained how to correctly fold a business letter, complete with diagrams. They spent a lot of time in woodshop and auto shop. Both played football and basketball, although my pop spent most of his time riding the bench. They both finished with B averages and graduated together on June 8th, 1951.

    Dave LaVerdiere went to work with his father, a plumber. Laird Carmody and his dad fixed cars out on the family farm and sold them on to Peewee’s Car Mart in Gates Falls. They also kept a vegetable stand on the Portland Road that brought in good money.

    Uncle Butch and his father didn’t get along so well and Dave eventually struck out on his own, fixing drains, laying pipe, and sometimes digging wells in Gates and Castle Rock. (His father had all the business in Harlow, and wasn’t about to share.) In 1954 the two friends formed L&D Haulage, which mostly meant dragging the summer people’s crappie to the dump. In 1955 they bought the dump and the town was happy to be rid of it. They cleaned it up, did controlled burns, instituted a primitive recycling program, and kept it vermin-free. The town paid them a stipend that made a nice addition to their regular jobs. Scrap metal, especially copper wire, brought in more cash. Folks in town called them the Garbage Twins, but Ruth Crawford was assured by Alden Toothaker (and other oldies with intact memories) that this was harmless ribbing, and taken as such.

    The dump was maybe five acres, and surrounded by a high board fence. Dave painted it with murals of town life, adding to it each year. Although that fence is long gone (and the dump is now a landfill), photographs remain. Those murals remind people of Dave’s later work. There were quilting bees that merged into baseball games, baseball games that merged into cartoon caricatures of long-gone Harlow residents, scenes of spring planting and fall reaping. Every aspect of smalltown life was represented, but Uncle Butch also added Jesus followed by the apostles (last in line came Judas, with a shit-eating grin on his face). There was nothing really remarkable about any of these scenes, but they were exuberant and good-humored. They were, you might say, harbingers.

    Shortly after Uncle Butch died, a LaVerdiere painting of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe strolling hand-in-hand down the sawdust-floored midway of a smalltown carnival sold for three million dollars. It was a thousand times better than Uncle Butch’s dump murals, but it would have looked at home there: the same screwy sense of humor, set off by an undercurrent of despair and—maybe—contempt. Dave’s dump murals were the bud; Elvis & Marilyn was the bloom.

    Uncle Butch never married, but Pop did. He’d had a high school sweetheart named Sheila Wise, who went away to Vermont State Teachers College after graduation. When she came back to teach the fifth and sixth grades at Harlow Elementary, my father was delighted to find she was still single. He wooed and won her. They were married in August of 1957. Dave LaVerdiere was Pop’s best man. I came along a year later, and Pop’s best friend became my Uncle Butch.

    I read a review of Pop’s first book, The Lightning Storm, and the reviewer said this: Not much happens in the first hundred or so pages of Mr. Carmody’s suspenseful yarn, but the reader is drawn on anyway, because there are violins.

    I thought that was a clever way to put it. There were few violins for Ruth Crawford to hear; the background picture she got from Alden and others around town was of two men, decent and upstanding and pretty much on the dead level when it came to honesty. They were country men living country lives. One married and the other was what was called a confirmed bachelor in those days, but with not a whiff of scandal concerning his private life.

    Dave’s younger sister, Vicky, did agree to be interviewed. She told Ruth that sometimes Dave went up the city—meaning Lewiston—to visit the beer-and-boogie clubs on lower Lisbon Street. He’d be jolly at the Holly, she said, meaning the Holiday Lounge (now long gone). "He was most apt to go if Little Jonna Jaye was playing there. Oh my, such a crush he had on her. He never brought her home—no such luck!—but he didn’t always come home alone, either."

    Vicky paused there, Ruth told me later, and then added, "I know what you might be thinking, Miz Crawford, most everyone does these days when a man spends his life without a long-time woman, but it’s not so. My brother may have turned out to be a famous artist, but he sure as hell wasn’t gay."

    The two men were well liked; everyone said so. And they neighbored. When Philly Loubird had a heart attack with his field half-hayed and thunderstorms in the offing, Pop took him to the hospital in Castle Rock while Butch marshaled a few of his dump-picking buddies and they finished the job before the first drops hit. They fought grassfires and the occasional housefire with the local volunteer fire department. Pop went around with my mother collecting for what was then called the Poor Fund, if he didn’t have too many cars to fix or work to do at the dump. They coached youth sports. They cooked side by side at the VFD pork roast supper in the spring and the chicken barbecue that marked the end of summer.

    Just country men living country lives.

    No violins.

    Until there was a whole orchestra.

    I knew a lot of this. I learned more from Ruth Crawford herself at the Korner Koffee Kup, across the street from the Gateway Motel and just about a block down from the post office. That’s where Pop got his mail, and there was usually a pretty damn good budget of it. I always stopped at the Koffee Kup after grabbing the post. The Kup’s java is strictly okay, no more than that, but the blueberry muffins? You never had a better one.

    I was going through the mail, sorting out the trash from the treasure, when someone said, May I sit down?

    It was Ruth Crawford, looking slim and trim in white slacks, a pink shell top, and a matching mask—that was the second year of Covid. She was already sliding into the other side of the booth, which made me laugh. You don’t give up, do you?

    Timidity never won a fair maiden the Nobel Prize, she said, and took off her mask. How’s the coffee here?

    Not bad. As you must know, since you’re staying right across the street. The muffins are better. But still no interview. Sorry, Ms. Crawford, can’t do it.

    No interview, check. Anything we say is strictly off the record, okay?

    Which means you can’t use it.

    That’s what it means.

    The waitress came—Suzie McDonald. I asked her if she was keeping up with her night classes. She smiled behind her own mask and said she was. Ruth and I ordered coffee and muffins.

    "Do you know everyone in the three towns?" Ruth asked when Suzie was gone.

    Not everyone, no. I used to know more, and a lot more people, when I was still Superintendent of Schools. Off the record, right?

    Absolutely.

    Suzie had a baby when she was seventeen and her parents kicked her out. Holy rollers, Church of Christ the Redeemer. Went to live with her aunt in Gates. Since then she’s finished high school and is taking classes at the County Extension, associated with Bates College. Eventually she wants to be a vet. I think she’ll make it, and her little girl is doing fine. What about you? Having a good time? Learning a lot about Pop and Uncle Butch?

    She smiled. I learned your father was quite the hot-rodder before he married your mother—sorry for your loss, by the way.

    Thanks. Although in that summer of 2021, my mother had been gone five years.

    Your dad rolled some old farmer’s Dodge and lost his license for a year, did you know that?

    I hadn’t, and told her so.

    I found out Dave LaVerdiere liked the bars in Lewiston, and had a crush on a local singer who called herself Little Jonna Jaye. I found out he bolted the Republican Party after the Watergate thing, but your father never did.

    No, Pop will vote Republican until the day he dies. But… I leaned forward. Still off the record?

    Totally! Smiling, but her eyes were bright with curiosity.

    I lowered my voice to a near whisper. He didn’t vote for Trump the second time. Couldn’t bring himself to vote for Biden, but he had a bellyful of the Donald. I expect you to take that to your grave.

    I swear. I found out that Dave won the annual town fair pie-eating contest from 1960 to 1966, when he retired from competition. I learned that your father sat on the ducking stool at Old Home Days until 1972. There are amusing pictures of him in one of those old-fashioned bathing suits and a derby hat… waterproof, I assume.

    I was totally embarrassed, I said. Such a ribbing I took at school.

    I learned that when Dave went west, he packed everything he felt he needed into the saddlebags of his Harley-Davidson motorcycle and just took off. Your father and mother sold everything else he owned at a yard sale and sent him the money. Your dad also sold his house for him.

    At a pretty nice profit, I said. Which was good. By then Uncle Butch was painting full-time, and he used that money until he started selling his work.

    And by then your father was writing full-time.

    Yes, and still ran the dump. Did until he sold it back to the town in the early nineties. That’s when it became a landfill.

    He also bought Peewee’s Car Mart and sold that. Gave the proceeds to the town.

    Seriously? He never told me. Although I was sure my mom knew.

    He did, and why not? He didn’t need the money, did he? By then writing was his job and all the town stuff was just a hobby.

    Good works, I said, are never a hobby.

    Your father taught you that?

    My mother.

    "What did she think of the sudden change in your fortunes? Not to mention your Uncle Butch’s change in his?"

    I considered her question while Suzie brought our muffins and coffee. Then I said, I don’t really want to go there, Ms. Crawford.

    Call me Ruth.

    Ruth, then… but I still don’t want to go there.

    She buttered her muffin. She was looking at me with a kind of sharp-eyed bewilderment—I don’t know what else to call it—that made me uncomfortable.

    "With what I’ve got I can write a good piece and sell it to Yankee magazine, she said. Ten thousand words, full of local color and amusing anecdotes. All the Maine shit people like, lots of ayuh and I sh’d smile and kiss a pig. I’ve got pictures of Dave LaVerdiere’s dump murals. I’ve got pictures of your father—the famous author—wearing a 1920s-style bathing suit while townies try to dump him into a tank of water."

    Two bucks for three throws at the big Ducking Lever. All profits to various town charities. They cheered every time he went kersplash.

    I have photos of them serving chicken dinners to tourists and summer people, the two of them wearing aprons and joke toques that said YOU MAY KISS THE COOK.

    Plenty of women did.

    "I’ve got fishing stories, hunting stories, good deeds done—like getting in the hay for the man who had the heart attack. I’ve got the story of Laird joyriding and losing his license. I’ve got all of that, and I’ve got nothing. Which is to say nothing of real substance. People love to tell stories about them—I knew Laird Carmody when, I knew Butchie LaVerdiere when, but none of them explain what they became. Do you see what I’m getting at?"

    I said I did.

    "You must know some of those things, Mark. What the fuck happened? Won’t you tell me?"

    There’s nothing to tell, I said. I was lying, and I think she knew it.

    I remember a call I got in the fall of 1978, the dormitory mom (there actually were such things back then) puffing up to the third floor of Roberts Hall and telling me my mother was on the phone and sounded upset. I hurried down to Mrs. Hathaway’s little suite, afraid of what I might hear.

    Mom? Everything okay?

    Yes. No. I don’t know. Something happened to your father while they were on their hunting trip in the 30-Mile Wood. Then, as if an afterthought: And to Butch.

    My stomach dropped; my testicles seemed to rise up to meet it. Was there an accident? Are they hurt? Is someone… I couldn’t finish, as if to ask if someone was dead would make it so.

    They’re all right. Physically all right. But something happened. Your father looks like he saw a ghost. And Butch… the same. They told me they got lost, but that’s hogwash. Those two men know the 30-Mile like the back of their hand. I wish you’d come home, Mark. Not right now, this weekend. Maybe you can get it out of him.

    But when I asked, Pop insisted that they’d just gotten lost, finally found their way back to Jilasi Creek (a slurred, Americanized version of the Micmac word for hello), and came out behind the Harlow Cemetery, pretty as you please.

    I didn’t believe that crap story any more than Mom did. I went back to school, and before Christmas break, a terrible idea surfaced in my mind: that one of them had shot another hunter—which happens several times a year during hunting season—and killed him, and buried him in the woods.

    On Christmas Eve, after Mom had gone to bed, I finally summoned the nerve to ask him about that idea. We were sitting in the living room, looking at the tree. Pop looked startled… then he laughed. God, no! If something like that had happened, we would have reported it and taken our medicine. We just got lost. It happens to the best of us, kiddo.

    My mother’s word came to me, and I almost said it: hogwash.

    My father had a dry sense of humor, and it was never on better display than when his accountant came up from New York—this was around the time Pop’s last novel was published—and told Pop his net worth was just over ten million dollars. Not J.K. Rowling numbers (or even James Patterson’s), but considerable. Pop thought it over and then said, I guess books do a lot more than furnish a room.

    The accountant looked puzzled, but I got the reference and laughed.

    I won’t be leaving you broke, Markey, Pop said.

    He must have seen me wince, or maybe just realized the implication of what he’d said. He leaned over and patted my hand, as he had when I was a child and something was troubling me.

    I wasn’t a child any longer, but I was alone. In 1988 I married Susan Wiggins, a lawyer in the county attorney’s office. She said she wanted kids but kept putting it off. Shortly before our twelfth wedding anniversary (for which I’d purchased a string of pearls), she told me she was leaving me for another man. There’s a lot more to the story, I suppose there always is, but that’s all you need to know, because this story isn’t about me—not really. But when my father said that thing about not leaving me broke, what I thought of—what I believe we both thought of—is to whom I would leave that ten million, or whatever remained of it, when my time came?

    Probably Maine School Administrative District 19. Schools always need money.

    You must know, Ruth said to me that day in the Koffee Kup. "You must. Off the record, remember?"

    Off the record or on it, I really don’t, I said. All I knew was something happened to Pop and Uncle Butch in November of 1978, on their annual hunting trip. After that Pop became a bestselling writer of thick novels, the kind critics used to call three-deckers, and Dave LaVerdiere gained fame first as an illustrator and then as a painter who combines the surrealism of Frida Kahlo with the American romance of Norman Rockwell (ArtReview).

    Maybe they went down to the crossroads, she said. You know, like Robert Johnson was supposed to have done. Made a deal with the devil.

    I laughed, although I would be lying if I hadn’t had the same idea cross my mind, mostly on stormy summer nights when the rolls of thunder kept me awake. "If they did, the contract must have been for a lot more than seven years. Pop’s first book was published in 1980, the same year Uncle Butch’s portrait of John Lennon was on the cover of Time."

    Almost forty years for LaVerdiere, she mused, and your father’s retired but still going strong.

    Strong might be too strong a word for it, I said, thinking about the pissy sheets I’d changed just that morning before setting sail for the Rock. "But he is still going. What about you? How much longer are you going to spend in our neck of the woods, ferreting out dirt on Carmody and LaVerdiere?"

    That’s kind of a shitty way of putting it.

    I’m sorry. Bad joke.

    She had eaten her muffin (I told you they were good) and was mashing up the few remaining crumbs with a forefinger. Another day or two. I want to go back to the elder care place in Harlow, and maybe talk to LaVerdiere’s sis again, if she’s willing. I’ll come out of this with a very salable piece, but no way is it the piece I wanted.

    Maybe what you wanted is something that can’t be found. Maybe creativity is supposed to remain a mystery.

    She wrinkled her nose and said, Save your metaphysics to cool your porridge. Can I pick up the check?

    No.

    Everyone in Harlow knows our house on Benson Street. Sometimes fans of Pop’s books from away stop by for a peek if they happen to be on vacation, although they tend to be disappointed by it; just your typical New England saltbox in a town that’s full of them. A little bigger than most, set back from a good-sized lawn dotted with flowerbeds. My mother planted those and tended them until she died. Now Jimmy Griggs, our handyman, keeps them watered and pruned. Except for the daylilies growing along the picket fence out front, that is. Pop likes to see to them himself, because Mom loved them best. When Pop waters them, or just walks their length, limping slowly along on his cane, I think he does it to remember the woman he always called my dear Sheila. Sometimes he bends to caress one of the blossoms—crowns that form on leafless stems called scapes. The blooms are yellow, pink, and orange, but he particularly likes the red ones, which he says remind him of her cheeks when she blushed. His public persona was crusty and a bit cynical—plus there was that dry sense of humor—but at heart he was always a romantic and could be a bit corny. He told me once that he kept that part hidden, because it bruised easily.

    Ruth knew where the house was, of course. I’d seen her cruise past in her little Corolla several times, and once she stopped to snap pictures. I’m sure she also knew that Pop was most apt to walk our picket fence, looking at the daylilies, at midmorning, and if you don’t know by this point that she was a very determined lady, I haven’t done my job.

    Two days after our off-the-record talk in the Koffee Kup, she came slow-rolling down Benson Street, and instead of driving past, she pulled over and stopped right next to the little signs on either side of the gate. One says PLEASE RESPECT OUR PRIVACY. The other says MR. CARMODY DOES NOT GIVE AUTOGRAPHS. I was walking with Pop as I usually did when he inspected the daylilies; he turned eighty-eight in that summer of 2021, and even with the cane he sometimes tottered.

    Ruth got out and approached the fence, although she made no effort to try the gate. Persistent, but also mindful of boundaries. I liked her for that. Hell, I liked her, period. She was wearing a flower-printed mask. Pop wasn’t, claimed they made it hard to breathe, but he’d had no objections to the vaccinations.

    Pop looked at her with curiosity, but also with a faint smile. She was good-looking, especially in the light of a summer morning. Checked shirt, denim skirt, white socks and sneakers, hair pulled back in a teenager’s ponytail.

    As the sign says, Miss, I don’t give autographs.

    Oh, I don’t think that’s what she wants, I said. I was amused by her chutzpah.

    My name is Ruth Crawford, sir. I wrote and asked for an interview. You turned me down, but I thought I’d try one more time in person before getting on the road to Boston.

    Ah, Pop said. Me and Butch, right? And is serendipity still your angle?

    Yes. Although I don’t feel I ever really got to the heart of the matter.

    The heart of darkness, he said, and laughed. Literary joke. I’ve got a bunch of them, although they have been gathering dust since I retired from giving interviews. A vow I intend to keep even though you seem like a nice woman, and Mark here tells me you’re well about it.

    I was both surprised and pleased to see him extend a hand over the fence. She seemed surprised, too, but she shook it, being careful not to squeeze too hard.

    Thank you, sir. I felt I had to try. Your flowers are beautiful, by the way. I love daylilies.

    Do you really, or are you just saying that?

    I do really.

    My wife did, as well. And since you’ve been kind enough to compliment what my dear Sheila loved, I’m going to offer you a fairy tale deal. His eyes were sparkling. Her good looks—and maybe her chutzpah—had perked him up the way a splash of water seemed to perk up his dear Sheila’s blooms.

    She smiled. What would that be, Mr. Carmody?

    You get three questions, and you can put my answers in your article. How is that?

    I was delighted, and Ruth Crawford looked the same. Totally excellent, she said.

    Ask away, young lady.

    Give me a second. You’re putting me under pressure.

    True, but pressure creates diamonds from coal.

    She didn’t ask if she could record him, which I thought was smart. She tapped her lips with a forefinger, maintaining eye contact with Pop as she did it. Okay, question one. What did you like best about Mr. LaVerdiere?

    He didn’t stop to consider. Loyalty. Trustworthiness. They come to the same, I suppose, or almost. Men are lucky to have even one good friend. Women, I suspect, have more… but you would know better than I.

    She considered. I think I have two friends I’d trust with my deepest secrets. No… three.

    Then you’re lucky. Next question.

    She hesitated, because she probably had at least a hundred of them and this short interview over our picket fence, for which she hadn’t prepared, was going to be her only shot. And Pop’s smile—not entirely kind—said he knew the position he’d put her in.

    Time is ticking away, Miss Crawford. Soon I’ll have to go inside and rest my tired old pins.

    All right. What’s your best memory of time you spent with your friend? I’d like to know the worst time, too, but I want to save my last question.

    Pop laughed. I’ll give you that one for free, because I like your persistence, and because you are easy on the eyes. The worst time was out in Seattle, the last cross-country trip I imagine I’ll ever make, looking at a coffin and knowing my old friend was inside. His talented right hand stilled forever.

    And the best?

    Hunting in the 30-Mile, he said promptly. "We went the second week of November from the time we were teenagers right up until Butch mounted his steel pony and set sail for the golden west. We stayed at a little cabin in the woods that my grandfather built. Butch claimed that his grandfather pitched in when it came to the roofing, which might or might not have been true. It was a quarter-mile or so beyond Jilasi Creek. We had an old Willys jeep, and until ’54 or ’55, we drove it across the plank bridge, parked on the other side, and humped it to the cabin with our packs and our rifles. Then we got so we didn’t trust the Willys on the bridge because floods had undercut it some, so we’d park on the town side and walk across."

    He sighed, looking off into the distance.

    "What with all the clear-cutting by Diamond Match, and that housing development on Dark Score Lake where the Noonan place used to be, 30-Mile Wood is more like 20-Mile Wood now. But back then there was plenty of forest for two boys… then two young men… to ramble around in. We sometimes shot a deer, and once we shot a turkey that turned out tough and sour, but the hunting was the least of it. We just liked being on our own for those five or six or seven days. I guess a lot of men take to the woods so they can drink and smoke, maybe go out to the bars and bring back a night’s worth of poontang, but we never did those things. Oh well, yes, we did drink a little, but if we brought a bottle of Jack it’d last us the whole week with some left over, which we pitched into the fire to watch the flames shoot up. We talked about God and the Red Sox and politics and how the world might end in nuclear fire.

    "I remember once we were sitting on a log, and a buck, biggest one I ever saw, an eighteen-pointer, maybe the biggest one anybody ever saw, at least in these parts… it came walking through the marsh below us, as delicate as you please. I raised my rifle and Butch put his hand on my arm. ‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Please don’t. Not that one.’ And so I didn’t.

    "Nights we’d lay a fire in the fireplace and have us a knock or two of Jack. Butch brought a pad and he’d draw. Sometimes while he did, he’d ask me to tell him a story, and I did. One of those stories eventually became my first book, The Lightning Storm."

    I could see her trying to remember it all. It was like gold to her, and it was like gold to me. Pop never talked about the cabin.

    I don’t suppose you’ve read an essay called ‘Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!,’ have you?

    Ruth shook her head.

    No? No, of course not. Nobody reads Leslie Fiedler anymore, which is a shame. He was outrageous, a slayer of sacred cows, and that made him fun. He argued in the essay that homoeroticism was the great engine of American literature—that stories of male bonding were actually stories of suppressed sexual desire. Bullshit, of course, probably says more about Fiedler than it does male sexuality. Because… why? Can either of you tell me?

    Ruth looked like she was afraid to break the spell (the one he’d cast over himself as well as her), so I spoke up. It’s shallow. Turns male friendship into a dirty joke.

    Oversimplified but not wrong, Pop said. Butch and I were friends, not lovers, and during those weeks in the woods we enjoyed that friendship in its purest state. Which is a kind of love. It wasn’t that I loved Sheila less, or that Butch didn’t enjoy his trips up the city less—he was so crazy about rock and roll music, which he called bop—but in the 30-Mile, all the bump, bustle, and roar of the world fell away.

    You kep’ close, I said.

    We did indeed. Time for your last question, Miss.

    She didn’t hesitate. What happened? How was it that you stopped being men of the town and became men of the world? Cultural icons?

    Something in his face changed, and I remembered my mother’s distress call when I was in college: Your father looks like he saw a ghost. If so, I thought he was seeing it again. Then he smiled, and the ghost was gone.

    We were just two talented bastids, he said. Leave it at that. Now I need to get inside and out of this bright sun.

    But—

    No. He spoke curtly, and she recoiled a little. We’re done.

    I think you got more than you expected, I told her. Be content with that.

    I guess I’ll have to. Thank you, Mr. Carmody.

    Pop lifted one arthritic hand in acknowledgement. I guided him back to the house and helped him up the porch steps. Ruth Crawford stood there for a bit, then got in her car and drove away. I never saw her again, but of course I read the article she wrote about Pop and Uncle Butch. It was lively and full of amusing anecdotes, if short on real insight. It was in Yankee magazine, and twice the length they usually allowed for their articles. I’m sure she really did get more than she expected when she stopped by the house on her way out of town, and that included the title: Two Talented Bastids.

    My mother—Sheila Wise Carmody, Our Lady of the Daylilies—died in 2016, at the age of seventy-eight. It came as a shock to everyone who knew her. She didn’t smoke, she only drank the rare glass of wine on special occasions, she was neither over nor underweight. Her mother lived to ninety-seven, her grandmother to ninety-nine, but Mom suffered a massive heart attack while driving home from the Castle Rock IGA with a load of groceries in the trunk of her car. She pulled over on the shoulder of Sirois Hill, set the emergency brake, turned off the engine, folded her hands in her lap, and went into the darkness that surrounds this bright flash we call life. My father was shaken by the death of his old friend Dave LaVerdiere, but his wife’s death left him inconsolable.

    She should have lived, he said at her funeral. Someone in the clerical department has made a terrible mistake. Not very eloquent, not his best, but he was in shock.

    For six months, Pop slept downstairs on the pullout couch. Finally, at my urging, we cleaned out the bedroom where they had spent over 21,000 nights. Most of her clothes went to the Goodwill in Lewiston, which was a favorite charity. He shared her jewelry out among her friends, with the exception of her engagement ring and her wedding ring, which he carried in the watch pocket of his jeans until the day he died.

    The cleaning out was a hard job for him (for both of us), but when it came to clearing her little study, hardly more than a closet adjacent to the mudroom, he flat refused.

    I can’t, Mark, he said. I just can’t. It would break me. You’ll have to do it. Box up her papers and put them in the basement. I’ll look at them eventually, and decide what needs to be kept.

    But so far as I know, he never did look. Those boxes are still where I put them, under the Ping-Pong table that nobody has used since Mom and I used to have spirited games down there, Mom swearing colorfully every time I hit a smash she couldn’t handle. Cleaning out her little think room, as she called it, was hard. Looking at the dusty Ping-Pong table with its sagging green net was even harder.

    A day or two after Pop’s extraordinary picket-fence interview with Ruth Crawford, I found myself remembering how I’d fortified myself with a Valium before going into her think room with a couple of empty banker’s boxes. When I got to the bottom drawer of her desk, I found a stack of spiral notebooks, and when I opened one, I’d seen my father’s unmistakable backslanted printing. They predated his breakthrough, after which every book, even the first, became a bestseller.

    His first three novels, written before word processors and computers became commonplace, were composed on an IBM Selectric, which he lugged home each afternoon from the Harlow Town Office. He gave me those typed manuscripts to read and I remembered them well. There were places where he’d scratched out words and added different ones between the lines, and he’d make a pen-slash through a paragraph or two if they went long—that’s how it was done before the delete button was invented. Sometimes he used the x key, where A beautiful lovely day might become A xxxxxxxxx lovely day.

    I’m going on about this because there were few strike-outs or strike-overs in the finished manuscripts of The Lightning Storm, The Terrible Generation, and Highway 19. The spiral notebooks, on the other hand, were full of cross-outs, some so heavy they had torn the pages. Other pages had been entirely scribbled over, as if in a fury. There were marginal notes, like What happens to Tommy? and Remember the bureau!!! There were a dozen of those notebooks in all, and the one at the bottom was pretty clearly a trial run at The Lightning Storm. It wasn’t terrible… but it wasn’t very good, either.

    Thinking of Ruth’s final question—also of my mother’s distress call in 1978—I found the banker’s box containing those old notebooks. I dug out the one I wanted and read some of it sitting crosslegged beneath a naked lightbulb.

    A storm was coming!

    Jason Jack stood on the porch watching black clouds form in the west. Thunder rolled! Lightning hit everywhere! smashed the ground like battering rams of fire! The wind began to blow howl. Jack was wicked scared but he couldn’t stop looking. Fire before rain, he thought. FIRE BEFORE RAIN!

    There was a picture in those words, and there was narration, but it was hackneyed at best. On that page and the ones that followed, I could see Pop straining to say what he saw. As if he knew what he was doing wasn’t very good and kept trying, trying, trying to make it better. It was painful because it wanted to be good… and wasn’t.

    I went downstairs and got a copy of The Lightning Storm from the shelf of proofs in Pop’s office. I turned to the first page and read this:

    A storm was on the way.

    Jack Elway stood on the porch, hands in his pockets, watching as black clouds rose in the west like smoke, blotting out the stars as they came. Thunder muttered. Lightning lit the clouds, making them look like brains, or so he thought. The wind began to pick up. Fire before rain, the boy thought. Fire before rain. The idea terrified him, but he couldn’t stop looking.

    Comparing the bad (but trying so hard to be good) handwritten copy to the version in the finished book, I found myself thinking first of Butch LaVerdiere’s dump murals, then of his painting of Elvis and Marilyn on the midway, which had sold for three million dollars. I thought again that one was the bud and one was the bloom.

    All over this country—all over the world—men and women are painting pictures, writing stories, playing instruments. Some of these wannabes go to seminars and workshops and art classes. Some hire teachers. The fruit of their labors is dutifully admired by friends and relatives, who say things like Wow, really good! and then forget it. I always enjoyed my father’s stories when I was a kid. They enthralled me and I thought Wow, really good, Pop! As I’m sure people passing on Dump Road saw Uncle Butch’s brash and busy murals of town life and thought Wow, really good! and then went on their way. Because someone is always painting pictures, someone is always telling stories, someone is always playing Call Me the Breeze on the guitar. Most are forgettable. Some are competent. A very few are indelible. Why that should be I don’t know. And how those two country men made the leap from good to good enough to great—I didn’t know that, either.

    But I found out.

    Two years after his brief interview with Ruth Crawford, Pop was once more inspecting the daylilies growing along the picket fence. He was showing me how outliers had begun to pop up on the other side of the fence, even on the other side of Benson Street, when I heard a muffled crack. I thought he might have stepped on a fallen branch. He looked at me with wide eyes, his mouth open, and I thought (I remember this clearly) This is what Pop looked like when he was a kid. Then he tilted to the side. He grabbed for the fence. I grabbed his arm. We both missed our holds. He fell to the grass and began screaming.

    I didn’t always carry my cell—I’m not of the generation that would no more go without a phone than without underwear—but that day I had it. I called 911 and told them I needed an ambulance at 29 Benson because my father had had an accident.

    I knelt next to Pop and tried to straighten his leg. He shrieked and said no-no-no, it hurts, Markey, it hurts. His face was as white as fresh snow, as Moby-Dick’s underbelly, as amnesia. I didn’t often feel old, probably because the man I lived with was so much older, but I felt plenty old then. I told myself not to pass out. I told myself not to have a heart attack. And I hoped the Harlow EMT wagon (which my father and Butch had paid for) was in the area, because an ambulance from Gates Falls would take half an hour and one from the Rock might take even longer.

    I can still hear my father’s screams. Just before the Harlow EMT vehicle showed up, he passed out. That was a relief. They got him in the back with a power lift and took him to St. Stephen’s, where he was stabilized—supposing a ninety-year-old man can be stabilized—and took X-rays. His left hip had snapped. There was no attributable cause; it just happened. Nor was it a mere break, the orthopedist told me. It had exploded.

    I’m not sure how to proceed, Dr. Patel said. If he was your age, I would of course recommend a hip replacement, but Mr. Carmody is suffering from advanced osteoporosis. His bones are like glass. All of them. And he is, of course, of an advanced age. He spread his hands above the X-rays. You must advise me.

    Is he awake?

    Patel made a call. Asked. Listened. Hung up. He’s soupy from the pain medication but conscious and able to respond to questions. He wants to speak to you.

    Even with Covid on the decline, space was at a premium in St. Stevie’s. Still, my father was given a single room. This was because he could pay, but also because he was a celebrity. And loved in Castle County. I once gave him a tee-shirt that said ROCK STAR WRITER, and he wore it.

    He was no longer as white as Moby-Dick’s belly, but he looked shrunken. His face was haggard and shiny with sweat. His hair was every whichway. Broke my goddam hip, Markey. His voice was little more than a whisper. "That Pakistani doc says it’s

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