Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [190]
He remembered sitting on the seedy, beer-smelling rug of his bedroom, reading the story, and the old jealousy had come over him again.
He threw the other offprints away, but he had taken that one with him ... for reasons he wasn't sure he wanted to examine closely.
As a sophomore, Mort had submitted a story to a literary magazine called Aspen Quarterly. It came back with a note which said the readers had found it quite good 'although the ending seemed rather jejune.' The note, which Mort found both patronizing and tremendously exciting, invited him to submit other material.
Over the next two years, he had submitted four more stories. None were accepted, but a personal note accompanied each of the rejection slips. Mort went through an unpublished writer's agony of optimism alternating with deep pessimism. He had days when he was sure it was only a matter of time before he cracked Aspen Quarterly. And he had days when he was positive that the entire editorial staff - pencilnecked geeks to a man - was only playing with him, teasing him the way a man might tease a hungry dog by holding a piece of meat up over its head and then jerking the scrap out of reach when it leaps. He sometimes imagined one of them holding up one of his manuscripts, fresh out of its manila envelope, and shouting: 'Here's another one from that putz in Maine! Who wants to write the letter this time?' And all of them cracking up, perhaps even rolling around on the floor underneath their posters of Joan Baez and Moby Grape at the Fillmore.
Most days, Mort had not indulged in this sort of sad paranoia. He understood that he was good, and that it was only a matter of time. And that summer, working as a waiter in a Rockland restaurant, he thought of the story by John Kintner. He thought it was probably still in his trunk, kicking around at the bottom. He had a sudden idea. He would change the title and submit 'Crowfoot Mile' to Aspen Quarterly under his own name! He remembered thinking it would be a fine joke on them, although, looking back now, he could not imagine what the joke would have been.
He did remember that he'd had no intention of publishing the story under his own name ... or, if he had had such an intention on some deeper level, he hadn't been aware of it. In the unlikely event of an acceptance, he would withdraw the story, saying he wanted to work on it some more. And if they
rejected it, he could at least take some cheer in the thought that John Kintner wasn't good enough for Aspen Quarterly, either.
So he had sent the story.
And they had accepted it.
And he had let them accept it.
And they sent him a check for twenty-five dollars. 'An honorarium,' the accompanying letter had called it.
And then they had published it.
And Morton Rainey, overcome by belated guilt at what he had done, had cashed the check and had stuffed the bills into the poor box of St Catherine's in Augusta one day.
But guilt hadn't been all he'd felt. Oh no.
Mort sat at the kitchen table with his head propped in one hand, waiting for the coffee to perk. His head ached. He didn't want to be thinking about John Kintner and John Kintner's story. What he had done with 'Crowfoot Mile' had been one of the most shameful events of his life; was it really surprising that he had buried it for so many years? He wished he could bury it again now. This, after all, was going to be a big day - maybe the biggest of his life. Maybe even the last of his life. He should be thinking about going to the post office. He should be thinking about his confrontation with Shooter, but his mind would not let that sad old time alone.
When he'd seen the magazine, the actual magazine with his name in it above John Kintner's story, he felt like a man waking from a horrible episode of sleepwalking, an unconscious outing in which he has done some irrevocable thing. How had he let it go so far? It was supposed to have been a joke, for Christ's sake, just a little giggle
But he had let it go so far.