All You Love Will Be Carried Away              
                       By Steven King                       

                       (part 4 of 7)                        

"Breathing," he  said, and  smiled. He picked  his cigarette
out of the  ashtray, smoked, returned it to  the groove, and
thumbed back  through the  book again. The  entries recalled
thousands  of truck  stops and  roadside chicken  shacks and
highway rest  areas the way  certain songs on the  radio can
bring back specific memories of  a place, a time, the person
you  were  with,  what  you were  drinking,  what  you  were
thinking.

"Here I sit, brokenhearted, tried  to shit but only farted."
Everyone  knew  that  one,   but  here  was  an  interesting
variation from Double D Steaks  in Hooker, Oklahoma: "Here I
sit, I'm  at a loss, trying  to shit out taco  sauce. I know
I'm going  to drop a load,  only hope I don't  explode," And
from Casey, Iowa, where SR  25 crossed 1_80: "My mother made
me a  whore." To which  someone had added in  very different
penmanship: "If I supply the yarn will she make me one?"

He  had started  collecting when  he was  selling the  UPCs,
noting  various  bits of  graffiti  in  the Spiral  notebook
without  at first  knowing why  he was  doing it.  They were
just  amusing,  or  disconcerting,   or  both  at  the  same
time. Yet  little by  little he  had become  fascinated with
these  messages from  the interstate,  where the  only other
communications  seemed  to  be dipped  headlights  when  you
passed in the rain, or maybe somebody in a bad mood flipping
you the bird when you went  by in the passing lane pulling a
rooster_tail  of  snow  behind  you. He  came  gradually  to
see__or perhaps  only to  hope-_that something was  going on
here.  The e.  e. cummings  lilt  of "Poopie  doopie you  so
loopy," for instance, or the inarticulate rage of "1380 West
Avenue kill my mother TAKE HER JEWELS."

Or take  this oldie: "Here  I sit, cheeks  a-flexin', giving
birth to another Texan." The  metre, when you considered it,
was odd.  Not iambs  but some odd  triplet formula  with the
stress on the  third: "Here I sit,  cheeks a_flexin', giving
birth to  another Texan." O. K.,  it broke down a  little at
the end, but that somehow added to its memorability, gave it
that final  mnemonic twist  of the tail.  He had  thought on
many occasions  that he could  go back to school,  take some
courses, get  all that  feet_and_metre stuff down  pat. Know
what he was talking about  instead of running on a tightrope
of intuition.  All he really remembered  clearly from school
was iambic  pentameter: "To  be or  not to  be, that  is the
question."  He  had seen  that  in  a  men's room  on  1_70,
actually, to which someone had  added, "The real question is
who your father was, dipstick."

These  triplets,  now.  What  were  they  called?  Was  that
trochaic? He didn't know. The fact that he could find out no
longer seemed important, but he  could find out, yes. It was
something people taught; it was no big secret.

Or take this  variation, which Alfie had also  seen all over
the country: "Here  I sit, on the pooper, giving  birth to a
Maine state trooper."  It was always Maine,  no matter where
you were it was always Maine State Trooper, and why? Because
no other  state would scan.  Maine was  the only one  of the
fifty whose name consisted of  a single syllable. Yet again,
it was in triplets: "Here I sit, on the pooper."

He had  thought of writing  a book.  Just a little  one. The
first title  to occur to him  had been "Don't Look  up Here,
You're Pissing on Your Shoes,"  but you couldn't call a book
that.  Not and  reasonably  hope someone  would  put it  out
for  sale  in  a  store,  anyway.  And,  besides,  that  was
light. Frothy. He  had become convinced over  the years that
something was going on here, and it wasn't frothy. The title
he had  finally decided  on was  an adaptation  of something
he'd seen  in a rest_area  toilet stall outside  Fort Scott,
Kansas,  on Highway  54.  "I Killed  Ted  Bundy: The  Secret
Transit Code of America's  Highways." By Alfred Zimmer. That
sounded  mysterious and  ominous, almost  scholarly. But  he
hadn't done  it. And although he  had seen "If I  supply the
yarn, will  she make me one"  added to "My mother  made me a
whore"  all over  the country,  he had  never expounded  (at
least in  writing) on  the startling  lack of  sympathy, the
"just deal  with it"  sensibility of  the response.  Or what
about  "Mammon is  the  King  of New  Jersey"?  How did  one
explain why  New Jersey made it  funny and the name  of some
other  state probably  wouldn't? Even  to try  seemed almost
arrogant. He was just a little man, after all, with a little
man's  job.  He  sold  things. A  line  of  frozen  dinners,
currently.

And now, of course ... now ...

Alfie took  another deep  drag on  his cigarette,  mashed it
out,  and called  home. He  didn't expect  to get  Maura and
didn't. It  was his  own recorded  voice that  answered him,
ending with the number of his cell phone. A lot of good that
would do; the cell phone was  in the trunk of the Chevrolet,
broken. He had never had good luck with gadgets.