Alfie stood at the edge of the pavement, gasping a little
because the air was so cold and full of snow. In his left
hand he held the Spiral notebook, bent almost double. There
was no need to destroy it, after all. He would simply throw
it into Farmer John's east field, here on the west side of
Lincoln. The wind would help him. The notebook might carry
twenty feet on the fly, and the wind could tumble it even
farther before it finally fetched up against the side of a
furrow and was covered. It would lie there buried all
winter, long after his body had been shipped home. In the
spring, Farmer John would come out this way on his tractor,
the cab filled with the music of Patty Loveless or George
Jones or maybe even Clint Black, and he would plow the
Spiral notebook under without seeing it and it would
disappear into the scheme of things. Always supposing there
was one. "Relax, it's all just the rinse cycle," someone had
written beside a pay phone on I_35 not far from Cameron,
Missouri.
Alfie drew the book back to throw it, then lowered his arm.
He hated to let it go, that was the truth of it. That was
the bottom line everyone was always talking about. But
things were bad, now. Everything looked like highways to him
now. He raised his arm again and then lowered it again. In
his distress and indecision he began to cry without being
aware of it. The wind rushed around him, on its way to
wherever. He couldn't go on living the way he had been
living, he knew that much. Not one more day. And a shot in
the mouth would be easier than any living change, he knew
that, too. Far easier than struggling to write a book few
people (if any at all) were likely to read. He raised his
arm again, cocked the hand with the notebook in it back to
his ear like a pitcher preparing to throw a fastball, then
stood like that. An idea had occurred to him. He would count
to sixty. If the spark lights of the farmhouse reappeared at
any time during that count, he would try to write the book.
To write a book like that, he thought, you'd have to begin
by talking about how it was to measure distance in green
mile markers, and the very width of the land, and how the
wind sounded when you got out of your car at one of those
rest areas in Oklahoma or North Dakota. How it sounded
almost like words. You'd have to tell about the silence, and
how the bathrooms always smelled of piss and the great
hollow farts of departed travelers, and how in that silence
the voices on the walls began to speak. The voices of those
who had written and then moved on. The telling would hurt,
but if the wind dropped and the spark lights of the farm
came back, he'd do it anyway.
If they didn't, he'd throw the notebook into the field, go
back into room 190 (just hang a left at the Snax machine),
and shoot himself, after all.
Either way. Either way.
Alfie stood there counting to sixty inside his head, waiting
to see if the wind would drop.
