the harvest moon to the fingers fumbling at my shirt as Staub passed
his button on to me remained perfectly clear. And there came a day
when I could no longer find that button. I knew I'd had it when
I moved into my little apartment in Falmouth--I kept it in the top
drawer of my bedside table, along with a couple of combs, my two
sets of cuff links, and an old political button that SAID
BILL CLINTON, THE SAFE SAX PRESIDENT--but then it came up
missing. And when the telephone rang a day or two later, I knew
why Mrs. McCurdy was crying. It was the bad news I'd never quite
stopped expecting; fun is fun and done is done.
When
the funeral was over, and the wake, and the seemingly endless line
of mourners had finally come to its end, I went back to the little
house in Harlow where my mother had spent her final few years, smoking
and eating powdered doughnuts. It had been Jean and Alan Parker
against the world; now it was just me.
I went through her personal effects, putting
aside the few papers that would have to be dealt with later, boxing
up the things I'd want to keep on one side of the room and the things
I'd want to give away to the Goodwill on the other. Near the end
of the job I got down on my knees and looked under her bed and there
it was, what I'd been looking for all along with-out quite admitting
it to myself: a dusty button reading I RODE THE
BULLET AT THRILL VILLAGE, LACONIA. I curled my fist tight
around it. The pin dug into my flesh and I squeezed my hand even
tighter, taking a bitter pleasure in the pain. When I rolled my
fingers open again, my eyes had filled with tears and the words
on the button had doubled, overlaying each other in a shimmer. It
was like looking at a 3-D movie without the glasses.
"Are you satisfied?" I asked the silent
room. "Is it enough?" There was no answer, of course. "Why did you
even bother? What was the goddamn point?"
Still no answer, and why would there be?
You wait in line, that's all. You wait in line beneath the moon
and make your wishes by its infected light. You wait in line and
listen to them screaming--they pay to be terrified, and on the Bullet
they always get their money's worth. Maybe when it's your turn you
ride; maybe you run. Either way it comes to the same, I think. There
ought to be more to it, but there's really not--fun is fun and done
is done.
Take your button and get out of here.
Stephen King is the author of more than thirty
books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. Among his
most recent are Hearts in Atlantis, The Girl Who
Loved Tom Gordon, The Green
Mile, and the audio-
only release, Blood and Smoke. In August, Pocket
Books will release the paperback edition of Hearts in
Atlantis, followed by the October publication from
Scribner of On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.
Information about Stephen King and his writing can
be found at the official King website: http://www.StephenKing.com
