Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [189]
There had been about a dozen students in the class. One of them was John Kintner. Kintner was only a freshman, but he had gotten special permission to take the class. And had deserved it, Mort supposed. Southern-fried cracker or not, that sucker had been good.
The course required each of them to write either six short stories or three longer ones. Each week, Perkins dittoed off the ones he thought would make for the liveliest discussion and handed them out at the end of the class. The students were supposed, to come the following week prepared to discuss and criticize. It was the usual way to run such a class. And one week Perkins had given them a story from John Kintner. It had been called ... What had it been called?
Mort had turned on the water to fill the coffeemaker, but now he only stood, looking absently out at the fog beyond the window-wall and listening to the running water.
You know damned well what It was called. 'Secret Window, Secret Garden.'
'But it wasn't!' he yelled petulantly to the empty house. He thought furiously, determined to shut the hellish little voice up once and for all ... and suddenly it came to him.
'"Crowfoot Mile!" he shrieked. 'The name of the story was "Crowfoot Mile," and it doesn't have anything to do with anything!'
Except that was not quite true, either, and he didn't really need the little, voice hunkered down someplace in the middle of his aching head to point out the fact.
Kintner had turned in three or maybe four stories before disappearing to wherever he had disappeared to (if asked to guess, Mort would have guessed Vietnam - it was where most of them had disappeared to at the end of the sixties -the young men, anyhow). 'Crowfoot Mile' hadn't been the best of Kintner's stories ... but it had been good. Kintner was clearly the best writer in Richard Perkins, Jr's class. Perkins treated the boy almost as an equal, and in Mort Rainey's not-so-humble estimation, Perkins had been right to do so, because he thought Kintner had been quite a bit better than Richard Perkins, Jr. As far as that went, Mort believed he had been better.
But had he been better than Kintner?
'Huh-uh,' he said under his breath as he turned on the coffeemaker. 'I was second.'
Yes. He had been second, and he had hated that. He knew that most students taking writing courses were just marking time, pursuing a whim before giving up childish things and settling into a study of whatever it was that would be their real life's work. The creative writing most of them would do in later life would consist of contributing items to the Community Calendar pages of their local newspapers or writing advertising copy for Bright Blue Breeze dish detergent. Mort had come into Perkins's class confidently expecting to be the best, because it had never been any other way with him. For that reason, John Kintner had come as an unpleasant shock.
He remembered trying to talk to the boy once ... but Kintner, who contributed in class only when asked, had proved to be almost inarticulate. When he spoke out loud, he mumbled and stumbled like a poor-white sharecropper's boy whose education had stopped at the fourth-grade level. His writing was the only voice he had, apparently.
And you stole it.
'Shut up,' he muttered. 'Just shut up.'
You were second best and you hated it. You were glad when he was gone, because then you could be first again. Just like you always had been.
Yes. True. And a year later, when he was preparing to graduate, he had been cleaning out the back closet of the sleazy Lewiston apartment he had shared with two other students, and had come upon a pile of offprints from Perkins's writing course. Only one of Kintner's