The Collective (8 page)

So this guy has a new business - North American Rook Farms, Inc. He goes to work right off incubating new rooks so London will not become a rookless city. The only thing is, the London City Council is really impatient, and every day they send him a telegram that says: " Bred Any Good Rooks lately? "

STEPHEN KING

From Contraband #2

In fields and christless allies the psalter is handed

greedily around with purple bottles of cheap port

punctuated by the sodium lightness glare of freights

rising past hobo cinder gantries and pitless bramble hollows:

Dukane, Grand Rapids, Cedar Forks, Harlow, Dover-Foxcroft,

names from the back platform of the A-train

so don't gimme that shit don't gimme that crap

I'll put the hoodoo on you, I can do it, it comes in a can

in 1954 in a back alley behind a bar they

found a lady cut in four pieces and written in her juice on the bricks above

he had scrawled PLEASE STOP ME BEFORE I KILL AGAIN in letters that leaned and

draggled so they called him The Cleveland Torso Murderer and never caught him,

it figures

all these liberals are brainless

if you want to see jeans just peak into any alabaster

gravel pit in Mestalinas

all these liberals have hairy shirts

Real life is in the back row of a 2nd run movie house in Utica, have you been

there

this guy with his hair greased back was drunk

and getting drunker when I sat down and his face kept twisting; he cried I'm a

goddamn stupid sonofabitch but doan choo try to tell me nothin I didn't he

might have come from Cleveland

if the stars are right I can witch you I can make your hair fall out

You don't need hairy jeans to stand outside a Safeway

store in Smalls Falls and watch a cloud under the high

blue sky ripple the last shadows of summer over the asphalt parking lot two

acres wide

A real hack believes blackboards are true

for myself I would turn them all soft like custard scoop

them feed them to blackbirds save corn for murderers

in huge and ancient Buicks sperm grows on seatcovers

and flows upstream toward the sound of Chuck Berry

once I saw a drunk in Redcliff and he had stuffed a newspaper in his mouth he

jigged jubilantly

around a two shadowed light pole I could gun you down with magic nose bullets There are still drugstore saints

Still virgins pedalling bikes with playing cards affixed to the rear spokes

with clothespins

The students have made things up

The liberals have shit themselves and produced a satchel-load of smelly

numbers

Radicals scratch secret sores and pore over back numbers bore a little hole in your head sez I insert a candle light a light for Charlie Starkweather and let your little light shine shine shine play bebop

buy styrofoam dice on 42nd street eat sno-cones and read Lois Lane

Learn to do magic like me and we will drive to Princeton

in an old Ford with four retread skins and a loose manifold that boils up the

graphite stink of freshcooked

exhaust we will do hexes with Budweiser pentagrams and old

Diamond matchboxes

chew some Red Man and let the juice down your chin when you spit

sprinkle sawdust on weird messes

buy some plastic puke at Atlantic City

throw away your tape player and gobble Baby Ruths

Go now. I think you are ready.

Stephen King

Published in "Ubris", 1968

"All mental disorders are simply detective strategies for handling difficult life situations.''

—Thomas Szasz

''And I feel like homemade shit.''

—Ed Sanders

- Can you do it ? She asked shrewdly

From the grass where her nylon legs in gartered splendor made motions.

- Can you do it ?

Ah!

What do I say? What are the cools? Jimmy Dean? Robert Mitchum? Soupy Sales?

Modern Screen Romances is a tent on the grass Over a dozen condoms in a quiet box and the lady used to say (before she passed away)

- If you can't be an athlete, be an athletic supporter.

The moon is set.

A cloud scum has covered the stars. A man with a gun has passed this way BUT -

we do not need your poets. Progressed beyond them to Sony

Westinghouse Cousin Brucie the Doors and do I dare

mention Sonny and Cher ?

I remember Mickey Rooney as Pretty Boy Floyd

and he was the shortest Pretty Boy Floyd on record

coughing his enthusiastic guts out in the last reel.

We have not spilt the blood. They have spilt the blood. A little girl lies dead On the hopscotch grid No matter - Can you do it? She asked shrewdly With her Playtex living bra cuddling breasts

softer than a handful of wet Fig Newtons.

Old enough to bleed Old enough to slaughter The old farmer said And grinned at the white Haystack sky With sweaty teeth

(radiation radiation your grandchildren will be monsters) I remember a skeleton In Death Valley

A cow in the sunbleached throes of antiseptic death and someone said:

- Someday there will be skeletons

on the median strip of the Hollywood Freeway staring up at exhaust-sooty pigeons amidst the flapping ruins of Botany 500

call me Ishmael. I am a semen.

- Can you do it? She asked shrewdly When the worms begin their midnight creep

and the dew has sunk white to milk the grass...

And the bitter tears Have no ducts The eyes have fleshed in. Only the nose knows that A loser is always the same.

There is a sharp report.

It slices the night cleanly

And thumps home with a tincan spannnng!

Against the Speed Limit sign down the road.

Laughter

The clean clear sound of a bolt levered back...

Silence...

Spannng!

"Aileen, if poachers poached peaches, would the poachers peel the peaches to eat with poached eggs poached before peaches?"

oh don't don't

please touch me but don't don't

and I reach for your hand

but touch only the radiating live pencils

of your bones:

-- Can you do it?

Stephen King

First appeared in Stories Of Suspense, a.k.a. I Was A Teenage Graverobber 1966

It was like a nightmare. Like some unreal dream that you wake up from the next morning. Only this nightmare was happening. Ahead of me I could see Rankin's flashlight; a large yellow eye in the sultry summer darkness. I tripped over a gravestone and almost went sprawling. Rankin whirled on me with a hissed oath.

"Do you want to wake up the caretaker, you fool?"

I muttered a reply and we crept forward. Finally, Rankin stopped and shone the flashlight's beam on a freshly chiseled gravestone. On it, it read:

DANILE WHEATHERBY

1899 - 1962

He has joined his beloved wife in a better land.

I felt a shovel thrust into my hands and suddenly I was sure that I couldn't go through with it. But I remembered the bursar shaking his head and saying, "I'm afraid we can't give you any more time, Dan. You'll have to leave today. If I could help in any way, I would, believe me ..."

I dug into the still soft earth and lifted it over my shoulder. Perhaps fifteen minutes later my shovel came in contact with wood. The two of us quickly excavated the hole until the coffin stood revealed under Rankin's flashlight. We jumped down and heaved the coffin up.

Numbed, I watched Rankin swing the spade at the locks and seals. After a few blows it gave and we lifted the lid. The body of Daniel Wheatherby looked up at us with glazed eyes. I felt horror gently wash over me. I had always thought that the eyes closed when one died.

"Don't just stand there," Rankin whispered, "it's almost four. We've got to get out of here!"

We wrapped the body in a sheet and lowered the coffin back into the earth. We shoveled rapidly and carefully replaced the sod. The dirt we had missed was scattered.

By the time we picked up the white-sheeted body, the first traces of dawn were beginning to lighten the sky in the east. We went through the hedge that skirted the cemetery and entered the woods that fronted it on the west. Rankin expertly picked his way through it for a quarter of a mile until we came to the car, parked where we had left it on an overgrown and unused wagon track that had once been a road. The body was put into the trunk. Shortly thereafter, we joined the stream of commuters hurrying for the 6.00 train.

I looked at my hands as if I had never seen them before. The dirt under my fingernails had been piled up on top of a man's final resting place not twenty-four hours ago. It felt unclean.

Rankin's attention was directed entirely on his driving. I looked at him and realized that he didn't mind the repulsive act that we had just performed. To him it was just another job. We turned off the main road and began to climb the twisting, narrow dirt road. And then we came out into the open and I could see it, the huge rambling Victorian mansion that sat on the summit of the steep grade. Rankin drove around back and wordlessly up to the steep rock face of a bluff that rose another forty feet upward, slightly to the right of the house.

There was a hideous grinding noise and a portion of the hill large enough to carve an entrance for the car slid open. Rankin drove in and killed the engine. We were in a small, cube-like room that served as a hidden garage. Just then, a door at the far end slid open and a tall, rigid man approached us.

Steffen Weinbaum's face was much like a skull; his eyes were deep-set and the skin was stretched so tautly over his cheekbones that his flesh was almost transparent.

"Where is it?" His voice was deep, ominous.

Wordlessly, Rankin got out and I followed his lead. Rankin opened the trunk and we pulled the sheet-swaddled figure out.

Weinbaum nodded slowly.

"Good, very good. Bring him into the lab."

CHAPTER TWO

When I was thirteen, my parents were killed in an automobile crash. It left me an orphan and should have landed me in an orphan's home. But my father's will disclosed the fact that he had left me a substantial sum of money and I was self-reliant. The welfare people never came around and I was left in the somewhat bizarre role as the sole tenant of my own house at thirteen. I paid the mortgage out of the bank account and tried to stretch a dollar as far as possible.

By the time I was eighteen and was out of school, the money was low, but I wanted to go to college. I sold the house for $10,000.00 through a real estate buyer. In early September, the roof fell in. I received a very nice letter from Erwin, Erwin and Bradstreet, attorneys at law. To put it in layman's language, it said that the department store at which my father had been employed had just got around to a general audit of their books. It seemed that there was $15,000.00 missing and that they had proof that my father had stolen it. The rest of the letter merely stated that if I didn't pay up the $15,000.00 we'd got to court and they would try to get double the amount.

It shook me up and a few questions that should have stood out in my mind just didn't register as a result. Why didn't they uncover the error earlier? Why were they offering to settle out of court?

I went down to the office of Erwin, Erwin, & Bradstreet and talked the matter over. To make a long story short, I paid the sum there were asking, I had no more money.

The next day I looked up the firm of Erwin, Erwin & Bradstreet in the phone book. It wasn't listed. I went down to their office and found a For Rent sign on the door. It was then that I realized that I had been conned like gullible kid - which, I reflected miserably was what I was.

I bluffed my way through the first for months of college but finally they discovered that I hadn't been properly registered.

That same day I met Rankin at a bar. It was my first experience in a tavern. I had a forged driver's license and I bough enough whiskey to get drunk. I figured that it would take about two straight whiskeys since I had never had anything but a bottle of beer now and then prior to that night.

One felt good, two made my trouble seem rather inconsequential. I was nursing my third when Rankin entered the bar.

He sat on the stool next to me and looked attentively at me.