The Regulators - Stephen King [93]
'You liked it well enough to write it down, didn't you?'
'I don't remember,' he had said, remembering.
'You know you did, and you've got it somewhere because you never throw anything away. Anal bastard! I always suspected you of saving your goddam boogers. In a Sucrets box, maybe, like fishing lures.'
'They'd probably make good fishing lures,' he had said, not thinking about what he was saying but wondering instead where that little story — eight or nine handwritten pages — might be. The Marinville Collection at Fordham? Possible. The house in Connecticut he and Terry had once shared, the one she was living in, talking to him from, at that very moment? Quite possible. At the time of the conversation, that house had been less than ten miles away.
'You ought to find that story,' she said. 'It was good. You wrote it at a time when you were good in ways you didn't even know about.' There was a pause. 'You there?'
'Yeah.'
'I always know when I'm telling you stuff you don't like,' she said brightly, 'because it's the only time you ever shut up. You get all broody.'
'I do not get broody.'
'Do so, do so.' And then she had said what might have been the most important thing of all. Over twenty million dollars in royalties had been generated by her casual memory of the story he had once made up to get his rotten nephew to go to sleep, and gazillions of books chronicling Pat's silly adventures had been sold around the world, but the next thing out of her mouth had seemed more important than all the bucks and all the books. Had then, still did. He supposed she'd spoken in her perfectly ordinary tone of voice, but the words had struck into his heart like those of a prophetess standing in a delphic grove.
'You need to double back,' the woman who was now Terry Alvey had said.
'Huh?' he had asked when he'd caught his breath. He hadn't wanted her to understand how her words had rocked him. Didn't want her to know she still had that sort of power over him, even after all these years. What does that mean?'
'To the time when you felt good. Were good. I remember that guy. He was all right. Not perfect, but all right.'
'You can't go home again, Terr. You must have been sick the week they took up Thomas Wolfe in American Lit.'
'Oh, spare me. We've known each other too long for Debate Society games. You were born in Connecticut, raised in Connecticut, a success in Connecticut, and a drunken, narcotized bum in Connecticut. You don't need to go home, you need to leave home.'
'That's not doubling back, that's what us AA guys call a geographic cure. And it doesn't work.'
'You need to double back in your head,' she replied — patient, as if speaking to a child. 'And your body needs some new ground to walk on, I think. Besides, you're not drinking anymore. Or drugging, either.' A slight pause. 'Are you?'
'No,' he said. 'Well, the heroin.'
'Ha-ha.'
'Where would you suggest I go?'
'The place you'd think of last,' she had replied without hesitation. 'The unlikeliest place on earth. Akron or Afghanistan, makes no difference.'
That call had made Terry rich, because he had shared his Kitty-Cat income with her, penny for penny. And that call had led him here. Not Akron but Wentworth, Ohio's Good Cheer Community. A place he had never been before. He had picked the area in the first place by shutting his eyes and sticking a pushpin into a wall-map of the United States, and Terry had turned out to be right, Bill Harris's horrified reaction notwithstanding. What he had originally regarded as a kind of sabbatical had —
Lost in his reverie, he walked straight into Jim Reed's back. The boys had stopped on the edge of the path. Jim had raised the gun and was pointing it south, his face pale and grim.
'What's — ' Johnny began, and Dave Reed clapped a hand over his mouth before he could say anymore.
5
There was a gunshot, then a scream. As if the scream had been a