Stephen King - Riding the Bullet

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Riding the Bullet by STEPHEN KING

I’ve never told anyone this story, and never thought I

would—not because I was afraid of being disbelieved,

exactly, but because I was ashamed . . . and because it

was mine. I’ve always felt that telling it would

cheapen both me and the story itself, make it smaller

and more mundane, no more than a camp counselor’s

ghost story told before lights-out. I think I was also

afraid that if I told it, heard it with my own ears, I

might start to disbelieve it myself. But since my

mother died I haven’t been able to sleep very well. I

doze off and then snap back again, wide awake and

shivering. Leaving the bedside lamp on helps, but not

as much as you might think. There are so many more

shadows at night, have you ever noticed that? Even

with a light on there are so many shadows. The long

ones could be the shadows of anything, you think.

Anything at all.

•••

I was a junior at the University of Maine when Mrs.

McCurdy called about ma. My father died when I was

too young to remember him and I was an only child,

so it was just Alan and Jean Parker against the world.

Mrs. McCurdy, who lived just up the road, called at

the apartment I shared with three other guys. She had

gotten the number off the magnetic minder-board ma

kept on her fridge.

“’Twas a stroke,” she said in that long and drawling

Yankee accent of hers. “Happened at the restaurant.

But don’t you go flyin off all half-cocked. Doctor says

it wa’ant too bad. She’s awake and she’s talkin.”

“Yeah, but is she making sense?” I asked. I was trying

to sound calm, even amused, but my heart was

beating fast and the living room suddenly felt too

warm. I had the apartment all to myself; it was

Wednesday, and both my roomies had classes all day.

“Oh, ayuh. First thing she said was for me to call

you but not to scare you. That’s pretty sensible,

wouldn’t you say?”

“Yeah.” But of course I was scared. When someone

calls and tells you your mother’s been taken from

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work to the hospital in an ambulance, how else are

you supposed to feel?

“She said for you to stay right there and mind your

schoolin until the weekend. She said you could come

then, if you didn’t have too much studyin t’do.”

Sure, I thought. Fat chance. I’d just stay here in this

ratty, beer-smelling apartment while my mother lay

in a hospital bed a hundred miles south, maybe dying.

“She’s still a young woman, your ma,” Mrs.

McCurdy said. “It’s just that she’s let herself get awful

heavy these last few years, and she’s got the hypertension.

Plus the cigarettes. She’s goin to have to give up

the smokes.”

I doubted if she would, though, stroke or no stroke,

and about that I was right—my mother loved her

smokes. I thanked Mrs. McCurdy for calling.

“First thing I did when I got home,” she said. “So

when are you coming, Alan? Sad’dy?” There was a sly

note in her voice that suggested she knew better.

I looked out the window at a perfect afternoon in

October: bright blue New England sky over trees that

were shaking down their yellow leaves onto Mill

Street. Then I glanced at my watch. Twenty past

three. I’d just been on my way out to my four o’clock

philosophy seminar when the phone rang.

“You kidding?” I asked. “I’ll be there tonight.”

Her laughter was dry and a little cracked around the

edges—Mrs. McCurdy was a great one to talk about

giving up the cigarettes, her and her Winstons. “Good

boy! You’ll go straight to the hospital, won’t you, then

drive out to the house?”

“I guess so, yeah,” I said. I saw no sense in telling

Mrs. McCurdy that there was something wrong with

the transmission of my old car, and it wasn’t going

anywhere but the driveway for the foreseeable future.

I’d hitchhike down to Lewiston, then out to our little

house in Harlow if it wasn’t too late. If it was, I’d

snooze in one of the hospital lounges. It wouldn’t be

the first time I’d ridden my thumb home from school.

Or slept sitting up with my head leaning against a

Coke machine, for that matter.

“I’ll make sure the key’s under the red wheel-barrow,”

she said. “You know where I mean, don’t

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you?”

“Sure.” My mother kept an old red wheelbarrow by

the door to the back shed; in the summer it foamed

with flowers. Thinking of it for some reason brought

Mrs. McCurdy’s news home to me as a true fact: my

mother was in the hospital, the little house in Harlow

where I’d grown up was going to be dark tonight—

there was no one there to turn on the lights after the

sun went down. Mrs. McCurdy could say she was

young, but when you’re just twentyone yourself,

forty-eight seems ancient.

“Be careful, Alan. Don’t speed.”

My speed, of course, would be up to whoever I

hooked a ride with, and I personally hoped that whoever

it was would go like hell. As far as I was concerned,

I couldn’t get to Central Maine Medical

Center fast enough. Still, there was no sense worrying

Mrs. McCurdy.

“I won’t. Thanks.”

“Welcome,” she said. “Your ma’s going to be just

fine. And won’t she be some happy to see you.”

I hung up, then scribbled a note saying what had

happened and where I was going. I asked Hector Passmore,

the more responsible of my roommates, to call

my adviser and ask him to tell my instructors what

was up so I wouldn’t get whacked for cutting—two or

three of my teachers were real bears about that. Then

I stuffed a change of clothes into my backpack, added

my dog-eared copy of Introduction to Philosophy, and

headed out. I dropped the course the following week,

although I had been doing quite well in it. The way I

looked at the world changed that night, changed quite

a lot, and nothing in my philosophy textbook seemed

to fit the changes. I came to understand that there are

things underneath, you see—underneath—and no

book can explain what they are. I think that sometimes

it’s best to just forget those things are there. If

you can, that is.

It’s a hundred and twenty miles from the University

of Maine in Orono to Lewiston in Androscoggin

County, and the quickest way to get there is by I-95.

The turnpike isn’t such a good road to take if you’re

hitchhiking, though; the state police are apt to boot

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anyone they see off—even if you’re just standing on

the ramp they give you the boot—and if the same cop

catches you twice, he’s apt to write you a ticket, as

well. So I took Route 68, which winds southwest

from Bangor. It’s a pretty well-traveled road, and if

you don’t look like an out-and-out psycho, you can

usually do pretty well. The cops leave you alone, too,

for the most part.

My first lift was with a morose insurance man and

took me as far as Newport. I stood at the intersection

of Route 68 and Route 2 for about twenty minutes,

then got a ride with an elderly gentleman who was on

his way to Bowdoinham. He kept grabbing at his

crotch as he drove. It was as if he was trying to catch

something that was running around in there.

“My wife allus told me I’d wind up in the ditch

with a knife in my back if I kept on picking up hitch-hikers,”

he said, “but when I see a young fella standin

t’side of the rud, I allus remember my own younger

days. Rode my thumb quite a bit, so I did. Rode the

rods, too. And lookit this, her dead four year and me

still a-goin, drivin this same old Dodge. I miss her

somethin turrible.” He snatched at his crotch.

“Where you headed, son?”

I told him I was going to Lewiston, and why.

“That’s turrible,” he said. “Your ma! I’m so sorry!”

His sympathy was so strong and spontaneous that it

made the corners of my eyes prickle. I blinked the

tears back. The last thing in the world I wanted was to

burst out crying in this old man’s old car, which rattled

and wallowed and smelled quite strongly of pee.

“Mrs. McCurdy—the lady who called me—said it

isn’t that serious. My mother’s still young, only forty-eight.”

“Still! A stroke!” He was genuinely dismayed. He

snatched at the baggy crotch of his green pants again,

yanking with an old man’s oversized, clawlike hand.

“A stroke’s allus serious! Son, I’d take you to the

CMMC myself—drive you right up to the front

door—if I hadn’t promised my brother Ralph I’d take

him up to the nursin home in Gates. His wife’s there,

she has that forgettin disease, I can’t think what in

the world they call it, Anderson’s or Alvarez or somethin

like that—”

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“Alzheimer’s,” I said.

“Ayuh, prob’ly I’m gettin it myself. Hell, I’m

tempted to take you anyway.”

“You don’t need to do that,” I said. “I can get a ride

from Gates easy.”

“Still,” he said. “Your mother! A stroke! Only forty-eight!”

He grabbed at the baggy crotch of his pants.

“Fucking truss!” he cried, then laughed—the sound

was both desperate and amused. “Fucking rupture! If

you stick around, son, all your works start fallin

apart. God kicks your ass in the end, let me tell you.

But you’re a good boy to just drop everythin and go to

her like you’re doin.”

“She’s a good mom,” I said, and once again I felt the

tears bite. I never felt very homesick when I went

away to school—a little bit the first week, that was

all—but I felt homesick then. There was just me and

her, no other close relatives. I couldn’t imagine life

without her. Wasn’t too bad, Mrs. McCurdy had said;

a stroke, but not too bad. Damn old lady better be

telling the truth, I thought, she just better be.

We rode in silence for a little while. It wasn’t the

fast ride I’d hoped for—the old man maintained a

steady forty-five miles an hour and sometimes wandered

over the white line to sample the other lane—

but it was a long ride, and that was really just as

good. Highway 68 unrolled before us, turning its

way through miles of woods and splitting the little

towns that were there and gone in a slow blink, each

one with its bar and its selfservice gas station: New

Sharon, Ophelia, West Ophelia, Ganistan (which

had once been Afghantistan, strange but true),

Mechanic Falls, Castle View, Castle Rock. The

bright blue of the sky dimmed as the day drained

out of it; the old man turned on first his parking

lights and then his headlights. They were the high

beams but he didn’t seem to notice, not even when

cars coming the other way flashed their own high

beams at him.

“My sister’n-law don’t even remember her own

name,” he said. “She don’t know aye, yes, no, nor

maybe. That’s what that Anderson’s Disease does to

you, son. There’s a look in her eyes . . . like she’s sayin

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Stephen King - Riding the Bullet

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