Alfie picked up the notebook, flipped it closed much as he
had flipped the cylinder back into the .38, and sat there
tapping it against his leg. This was ludicrous.
Ludicrous or not, it nagged him. The way thinking a stove
burner might still be on sometimes nagged him when he was
home, nagged until he finally got up and checked and
found it cold. Only this was worse. Because he loved the
stuff in the notebook. Amassing graffiti--thinking about
graffiti_-had been his real work these last years, not
selling price_code readers or frozen dinners that were
really not much more than Swansons or Freezer Queens in
fancy microwavable dishes. The daffy exuberance of "Helen
Keller fucked her feller!" Yet the notebook might be a
real embarrassment once he was dead. It would be like
accidentally hanging yourself in the closet because you were
experimenting with a new way of jacking off and got found
that way with your shorts under your feet and shit on your
ankles. Some of the stuff in his notebook might show up in
the newspaper, along with his picture. Once upon a time he
would have scoffed at the idea, but in these days, when even
Bible Belt newspapers routinely speculated about a mole on
the President's penis, the notion was hard to dismiss.
Burn it, then? No, he'd set off the God_damned smoke
detector.
Put it behind the picture on the wall? The picture of the
little boy with the fishing pole and the straw hat?
Alfie considered this, then nodded slowly. Not a bad idea at
all. The Spiral notebook might stay there for years.
Then, someday in the distant future, it would drop out.
Someone-_perhaps a lodger, more likely a maid-_would pick it
up, curious. Would flip through it. What would that person's
reaction be? Shock? Amusement? Plain old head_scratching
puzzlement? Alfie rather hoped for this last. Because things
in the notebook were puzzling. "Elvis killed Big Pussy,"
someone in Hackberry Chalk, Texas, had written. "Serenity is
being square," someone in Rapid City, South Dakota, had
opined. And below that, someone had written, "No, stupid,
serenity= (va)2 + b, if v=serenity, a=satisfaction and
b=sexual compatibility."
Behind the picture, then.
Alfie was halfway across the room when he remembered the
pills in his coat pocket. And there were more in the glove
compartment of the car, different kinds but for the same
thing. They were prescription drugs, but not the sort the
doctor gave you if you were feeling ... well ... sunny. So
the cops would search this room thoroughly for other kinds
of drugs and when they lifted the picture away from the wall
the notebook would drop out onto the green rug. The things
in it would look even worse, even crazier, because of the
pains he had taken to hide it.
And they'd read the last thing as a suicide note, simply
because it was the last thing. No matter where he left the
book, that would happen. Sure as shit sticks to the ass of
America, as some East Texas turnpike poet had once written.
"If they find it," he said, and just like that the answer
came to him.
The snow had thickened, the wind had grown even stronger,
and the spark lights across the field were gone. Alfie stood
beside his snow_covered car at the edge of the parking lot
with his coat billowing out in front of him. At the farm,
they'd all be watching TV by now. The whole fam'damly.
Assuming the satellite dish hadn't blown off the barn roof,
that was. Back at his place, his wife and daughter would be
arriving home from Carlene's basketball game. Maura and
Carlene lived in a world that had little to do with the
interstates, or fast food boxes blowing down the breakdown
lanes and the sound of semis passing you at seventy and
eighty and even ninety miles an hour like a Doppler whine.
He wasn't complaining about it (or hoped he wasn't); he was
just pointing it out. "Nobody here even if there is,"
someone in Chalk Level, Missouri, had written on a shithouse
wall, and sometimes in those rest_area bathrooms there was
blood, mostly just a little, but once he had seen a grimy
basin under a scratched steel mirror half filled with it.
Did anyone notice? Did anyone report such things?
In some rest areas the weather report fell constantly from
overhead speakers, and to Alfie the voice giving it sounded
haunted, the voice of a ghost running through the vocal
cords of a corpse. In Candy, Kansas, on Route 283, in Ness
County, someone had written, "Behold, I stand at the door
and knock," to which someone else had added, "If your not
from Pudlishers Cleering House go away you Bad Boy."
