Four Past Midnight (59 page)

The steadily falling rain made him feel listless and stupid. He made a little fire in the woodstove, drew a chair over, and tried to read the current issue of
Harper's,
but he kept nodding off and then jerking awake again as his chin dropped, squeezing his windpipe and producing a snore.
I should have bought some cigarettes today,
he thought.
A few smokes would have kept me awake.
But he hadn't bought any smokes, and he wasn't really sure they would have kept him awake, anyway. He wasn't just tired; he was suffering from shock.

At last he walked over to the couch, adjusted the pillows, and lay back. Next to his cheek, cold rain spickle-spackled against the dark glass.

Only once, he thought. I only did it once.
And then he fell deeply asleep.

In his dream, he was in the world's biggest classroom.

The walls stretched up for miles. Each desk was a mesa, the gray tiles the endless plain which swept among them. The clock on the wall was a huge cold sun. The door to the hallway was shut, but Morton Rainey could read the words on the pebbled glass:

They spelled it wrong,
Mort thought,
too many L's.

But another voice told him this was not so.

Mort was standing on the giant blackboard's wide chalk gutter, stretching up. He had a piece of chalk the size of a baseball bat in his hand. He wanted to drop his arm, which ached ferociously, but he could not. Not until he had written the same sentence on the blackboard five hundred times:
I will not copy from John Kintner.
He must have written it four hundred times already, he thought, but four hundred wasn't enough. Stealing a man's work when a man's work was really all he had was unforgivable. So he would have to write and write and write, and never mind the voice in his mind trying to tell him that this was a dream, that his right arm ached for other reasons.

The chalk squeaked monstrously. The dust, acrid and somehow familiar—so familiar—sifted down into his face. At last he could go on no longer. His arm dropped to his side like a bag filled with lead shot. He turned on the chalk gutter, and saw that only one of the desks in the huge classroom was occupied. The occupant was a young man with a country kind of face; a face you expected to see in the north forty behind the ass end of a mule. His pale-brown hair stuck up in spikes from his head. His country-cousin hands, seemingly all knuckles, were folded on the desk before him. He was looking at Mort with pale, absorbed eyes.

I know you,
Mort said in the dream.

That's right, pilgrim,
John Kintner said in his bald, drawling Southern accent.
You just put me together wrong. Now keep on writing. It's not five hundred. It's five thousand.

Mort started to turn, but his foot slipped on the edge of the gutter, and suddenly he was spilling outward, screaming into the dry, chalky air, and John Kintner was laughing, and he—

—woke up on the floor with his head almost underneath the rogue coffee table, clutching at the carpet and crying out in high-pitched, whinnying shrieks.

He was at Tashmore Lake. Not in some weird, cyclopean classroom but at the lake ... and dawn was coming up misty in the east.

But he wasn't. Because it
hadn't
just been a dream. John Kintner had been real. How in God's name could he have forgotten John Kintner?

Mort had gone to college at Bates, and had majored in creative writing. Later, when he spoke to classes of aspiring writers (a chore he ducked whenever possible), he told them that such a major was probably the worst mistake a man or woman could make, if he or she wanted to write fiction for a living.

“Get a job with the post office,” he'd say. “It worked for Faulkner.” And they would laugh. They liked to listen to him, and he supposed he was fairly good at keeping them entertained. That seemed very important, since he doubted that he or anyone else could teach them how to write creatively. Still, he was always glad to get out at the end of the class or seminar or workshop. The kids made him nervous. He supposed John Kintner was the reason why.

Had Kintner been from Mississippi? Mort couldn't remember, but he didn't think so. But he had been from some enclave of the Deep South all the same—Alabama, Louisiana, maybe the toolies of north Florida. He didn't know for sure. Bates College had been a long time ago, and he hadn't thought of John Kintner, who had suddenly dropped out one day for reasons known only to himself, in years.

Dreamed about him, you mean,
Mort corrected himself quickly, but that hellish little voice inside would not let it go.

He didn't want to think about this. He
wouldn't
think about this. John Kintner was in the past; John Kintner had nothing to do with what was happening now. He got up and walked unsteadily toward the kitchen in the milky, early light to make strong coffee. Lots and lots of strong coffee. Except the hellish little voice wouldn't let him be. Mort looked at Amy's set of kitchen knives hanging from their magnetized steel runners and thought that if he could cut that little voice out, he would try the operation immediately.

You were thinking that you rocked the man—that you finally rocked him. You were thinking that the story had become the central issue again, the story and the accusation of plagiarism. Shooter treating you like a goddam college kid was the issue. Like a goddam college kid. Like
a—

“Shut up,” Mort said hoarsely. “Just shut the fuck up.”

The voice did, but he found himself unable to stop thinking about John Kintner anyway.

As he measured coffee with a shaking hand, he thought of his constant, strident protestations that he hadn't plagiarized Shooter's story, that he had never plagiarized
anything.

But he had, of course.

Once.

Just once.

“But that was so long ago,” he whispered. “And it doesn't have anything to do with this.”

It might be true, but that did not stop his thoughts.

He had been a junior, and it was spring semester. The creative-writing class of which he was a part was focussing on the short story that semester. The teacher was a fellow named Richard Perkins, Jr., who had written two novels which had gotten very good reviews and sold very few copies. Mort had tried one, and thought the good reviews and bad sales had the same root cause: the books were incomprehensible. But the man hadn't been a bad teacher—he had kept them entertained, at least.

There had been about a dozen students in the class. One of them was John Kintner. Kintner was only a freshman, but he had gotten special permission to take the class. And had deserved it, Mort supposed. Southern-fried cracker or not, that sucker had been good.

The course required each of them to write either six short stories or three longer ones. Each week, Perkins dittoed off the ones he thought would make for the liveliest discussion and handed them out at the end of the class. The students were supposed to come the following week prepared to discuss and criticize. It was the usual way to run such a class. And one week Perkins had given them a story by John Kintner. It had been called ... What had it been called?

Mort had turned on the water to fill the coffeemaker, but now he only stood, looking absently out at the fog beyond the window-wall and listening to the running water.

“But it wasn't!” he yelled petulantly to the empty house. He thought furiously, determined to shut the hellish little voice up once and for all ... and suddenly it came to him.

“ ‘Crowfoot Mile'!” he shrieked. “The name of the story was ‘Crowfoot Mile,' and it doesn't have
anything
to do with
anything!”

Except that was not quite true, either, and he didn't really need the little voice hunkered down someplace in the middle of his aching head to point out the fact.

Kintner had turned in three or maybe four stories before disappearing to wherever he had disappeared to (if asked to guess, Mort would have guessed Vietnam—it was where most of them had disappeared to at the end of the sixties—the young men, anyhow). “Crowfoot Mile” hadn't been the best of Kintner's stories ... but it had been good. Kintner was clearly the best writer in Richard Perkins, Jr.'s class. Perkins treated the boy almost as an equal, and in Mort Rainey's not-so-humble estimation, Perkins had been right to do so, because he thought Kintner had been quite a bit better than Richard Perkins, Jr. As far as that went, Mort believed he had been better.

But had he been better than
Kintner?

“Huh-uh,” he said under his breath as he turned on the coffeemaker. “I was second.”

Yes. He had been second, and he had hated that. He knew that most students taking writing courses were just marking time, pursuing a whim before giving up childish things and settling into a study of whatever it was that would be their real life's work. The creative writing most of them would do in later life would consist of contributing items to the Community Calendar pages of their local newspapers or writing advertising copy for Bright Blue Breeze dish detergent. Mort had come into Perkins's class confidently expecting to be the best, because it had never been any other way with him. For that reason, John Kintner had come as an unpleasant shock.

He remembered trying to talk to the boy once ... but Kintner, who contributed in class only when asked, had proved to be almost inarticulate. When he spoke out loud, he mumbled and stumbled like a poor-white sharecropper's boy whose education had stopped at the fourth-grade level. His writing was the only voice he had, apparently.

“Shut up,” he muttered.
“Just shut up.”

Yes. True. And a year later, when he was preparing to graduate, he had been cleaning out the back closet of the sleazy Lewiston apartment he had shared with two other students, and had come upon a pile of offprints from Perkins's writing course. Only one of Kintner's stories had been in the stack. It happened to be “Crowfoot Mile.”

He remembered sitting on the seedy, beer-smelling rug of his bedroom, reading the story, and the old jealousy had come over him again.

He threw the other offprints away, but he had taken that one with him ... for reasons he wasn't sure he wanted to examine closely.

As a sophomore, Mort had submitted a story to a literary magazine called
Aspen Quarterly.
It came back with a note which said the readers had found it quite good “although the ending seemed rather jejune.” The note, which Mort found both patronizing and tremendously exciting, invited him to submit other material.

Over the next two years, he had submitted four more stories. None were accepted, but a personal note accompanied each of the rejection slips. Mort went through an unpublished writer's agony of optimism alternating with deep pessimism. He had days when he was sure it was only a matter of time before he cracked
Aspen Quarterly.
And he had days when he was positive that the entire editorial staff-pencil-necked geeks to a man—was only playing with him, teasing him the way a man might tease a hungry dog by holding a piece of meat up over its head and then jerking the scrap out of reach when it leaps. He sometimes imagined one of them holding up one of his manuscripts, fresh out of its manila envelope, and shouting: “Here's another one from that putz in Maine! Who wants to write the letter this time?” And all of them cracking up, perhaps even rolling around on the floor under their posters of Joan Baez and Moby Grape at the Fillmore.

Most days, Mort had not indulged in this sort of sad paranoia. He understood that he was good, and that it was only a matter of time. And that summer, working as a waiter in a Rockland restaurant, he thought of the story by John Kintner. He thought it was probably still in his trunk, kicking around at the bottom. He had a sudden idea. He would change the title and submit “Crowfoot Mile” to
Aspen Quarterly
under his own name! He remembered thinking it would be a fine joke on them, although, looking back now, he could not imagine what the joke would have been.

He
did
remember that he'd had no intention of
publishing
the story under his own name... or, if he had had such an intention on some deeper level, he hadn't been aware of it. In the unlikely event of an acceptance, he would withdraw ithe story, saying he wanted to work on it some more. And if they rejected it, he could at least take some cheer in the thought that John Kintner wasn't good enough for
Aspen Quarterly,
either.

So he had sent the story.

And they had accepted it.

And he had let them accept it.

And they sent him a check for twenty-five dollars. “An honorarium,” the accompanying letter had called it.

And then they had published it.

And Morton Rainey, overcome by belated guilt at what he had done, had cashed the check and had stuffed the bills into the poor box of St. Catherine's in Augusta one day.

But guilt hadn't been
all
he'd felt. Oh no.

Mort sat at the kitchen table with his head propped in one hand, waiting for the coffee to perk. His head ached. He didn't want to be thinking about John Kintner and John Kintner's story. What he had done with “Crowfoot Mile” had been one of the most shameful events of his life; was it really surprising that he had buried it for so many years? He wished he could bury it again now. This, after all, was going to be a big day—maybe the biggest of his life. Maybe even the last of his life. He should be thinking about going to the post office. He should be thinking about his confrontation with Shooter, but his mind would not let that sad old time alone.