Different Seasons - Stephen King [227]
I watched him wheel the Ford wagon into the dirt parking lot beside the Mellow Tiger, get out, hitch at his pants, and walk inside. I could imagine the brief wedge of country-western as he opened the door, the brief sour whiff of Knick and Gansett on draught, the welcoming shouts of the other regulars as he closed the door and placed his large ass on the same stool which had probably held him up for at least three hours every day of his life-except Sundays-since he was twenty-one. I thought: So that's what Ace is now.
I looked to the left, and beyond the mill I could see the Castle River, not so wide now but a little cleaner, still flowing under the bridge between Castle Rock and Harlow. The trestle upstream is gone now, but the river is still around. So am I.
The End
THE BREATHING METHOD
1: The Club
I dressed a bit more speedily than normal on that snowy, windy, bitter night-I admit it. It was 23 December, 1970, and I suspect that there were other members of the club who did the same. Taxis are notoriously hard to come by in New York on stormy nights, so I called for a radio-cab. I did this at five-thirty for an eight o'clock pick-up-my wife raised an eyebrow but said nothing. I was under the awning of the apartment building on East 58th Street, where Ellen and I had lived since 1946, by quarter to eight, and when the taxi was five minutes late, I found myself pacing up and down impatiently.
The taxi arrived at 8.10 and I got in, too glad to be out of the wind to be as angry with the driver as he probably deserved. That wind, part of a cold front that had swept down from Canada the day before, meant business. It whistled and whined around the cab's window, occasionally drowning out the salsa on the driver's radio and rocking the big Checker on its springs. Many of the stores were open but the sidewalks were nearly bare of last-minute shoppers. Those that were abroad looked uncomfortable or actually pained.
It had been flurrying off and on all day, and now the snow began again, coming first in thin membranes, then twisting into cyclone shapes ahead of us in the street. Coming home that night, I would think of the combination of snow, a taxi, and New York City with considerably greater unease but I did not of course know that then.
At the corner of 3rd and Fortieth, a large tinsel Christmas bell went floating through the intersection like a spirit. 'Bad night,' the cabbie said. "They'll have an extra two dozen in the morgue tomorrow. Wino Popsicles. Plus a few bag-lady Popsicles.'
'I suppose.'
The cabbie ruminated. 'Well, good riddance,' he said finally. 'Less welfare,
right?'
'Your Christmas spirit,' I said, 'is stunning in its width and depth.'
The cabbie ruminated. 'You one of those bleeding-hear liberals?' he asked
finally.
'I refuse to answer on the grounds that my answer might tend to incriminate me,' I said.
The cabbie gave a why-do-I-always-get-the-wisenheimers snort but he shut up.
He let me out at 2nd and Thirty-Fifth, and I walked halfway down the block to the club, bent over against the whistling wind, holding my hat on my head with one gloved hand.
In almost no time at all the life-force seemed to have been driven deep into my body, a flickering blue flame about the size of the pilot-light in a gas oven. At seventy-three, a man feels the cold quicker and deeper. That man should be home in front of a fireplace or at least in front of an electric heater. At seventy-three, hot blood isn't even really a memory; it's more of an academic concept.
The latest flurry was letting up, but snow as dry as sand still beat into my face. I was glad to see that the steps leading up to the door of 249 had been sanded-that was Stevens's work, of course-Stevens knew the base alchemy of old age well enough: not lead into gold but bones into glass. When I think about