All You Love Will Be Carried Away              
                       By Steven King                       

                       (part 5 of 7)                        

After the beep  he said, "Hi, it's me. I'm  in Lincoln. It's
snowing. Remember the casserole you  were going to take over
to my mother. She'll be expecting  it. And she asked for the
Red  Ball coupons.  I know  you  think she's  crazy on  that
subject, but humor her, O.K.?  She's old. Tell Carlene Daddy
says hi." He  paused, then for the first time  in about five
years added, "I love you."

He  hung up,  thought  about  another cigarette_-no  worries
about lung cancer,  not now__and decided against  it. He put
the notebook, open  to the last page,  beside the telephone.
He  picked up  the gun  and rolled  out the  cylinder. Fully
loaded. He snapped the cylinder back  in with a flick of his
wrist,  then slipped  the short  barrel into  his mouth.  It
tasted of  oil and metal. He  thought, Here I SIT,  about to
COOL it, my plan to  EAT a fuckin'BOOL-it. He grinned around
the barrel. That  was terrible. He never  would have written
that down in his book

Then another thought occurred to him and he put the gun back
in its  trench on the pillow,  drew the phone to  him again,
and once more dialed home. He waited for his voice to recite
the useless  cell_phone number, then said,  "Me again. Don't
forget Rambo's  appointment at  the vet day  after tomorrow,
O.K.? Also  the sea_jerky  strips at  night. They  really do
help his hips. Bye."

He hung up and raised the gun again. Before he could put the
barrel  in his  mouth,  his  eye fell  on  the notebook.  He
frowned and put the gun down.  The book was open to the last
four entries. The first thing  anyone responding to the shot
would see  would be his  dead body, sprawled across  the bed
closest to the bathroom, his  head hanging down and bleeding
on the nubbly green rug. The second thing, however, would be
the Spiral notebook, open to the final written page.

Alfie  imagined some  cop, some  Nebraska state  trooper who
would never  be written  about on any  bathroom wall  due to
the disciplines  of scansion,  reading those  final entries,
perhaps  turning  the  battered   old  notebook  toward  him
with  the tip  of  his  own pen.  He  would  read the  first
three entries__"Trojan Gum,"  "Poopie doopie," "Save Russian
Jews"-_and dismiss them as insanity.  He would read the last
line, "All that  you love will be carried  away," and decide
that the dead  guy had regained a little  rationality at the
end, just enough to write a halfway sensible suicide note.

Alfie  didn't  like  the  idea of  people  thinking  he  was
crazy  (further examination  of  the  book, which  contained
such  information as  "Medgar  Evers is  alive  and well  in
Disneyland," would only confirm that impression). He was not
crazy, and  the things  he had written  here over  the years
weren't crazy, either. He was convinced of it. And if he was
wrong, if these  were the rantings of  lunatics, they needed
to be  examined even  more closely.  That thing  about don't
look up  here, you're pissing  on your shoes,  for instance,
was that humor? Or a growl of rage?

He considered  using the  john to get  rid of  the notebook,
then  shook his  head. He'd  end up  on his  knees with  his
shirtsleeves rolled back, fishing around in there, trying to
get the damn  thing back out. While the fan  rattled and the
fluorescent buzzed.  And although immersion might  blur some
of the ink, it wouldn't blur all of it. Not enough. Besides,
the notebook had been with him so long, riding in his pocket
across so  many flat and  empty Midwest miles. He  hated the
idea of just flushing it away.

The last  page, then? Surely  one page, balled up,  would go
down.  But that  would leave  the rest  for them  (there was
always a  them) to discover,  all that clear evidence  of an
unsound mind. They'd say, "Lucky he didn't decide to visit a
schoolyard with an  AK_47. Take a bunch of  little kids with
him." And  it would follow  Maura like a  tin can tied  to a
dog's tail.  "Did you  hear about  her husband?"  they'd ask
each other in  the supermarket. "Killed himself  in a motel.
Left a book full of crazy  stuff. Lucky he didn't kill her."
Well, he could afford to be  a little hard about that. Maura
was  an adult,  after all.  Carlene, on  the other  hand ...
Carlene was ...

Alfie looked  at his  watch. At  her j.-v.  basketball game,
that's where Carlene was right  now. Her teammates would say
most of  the same things  the supermarket ladies  would say,
only  within  earshot  and  accompanied  by  those  chilling
seventh-grade  giggles. Eyes  full of  glee and  horror. Was
that fair?  No, of  course not, but  there was  nothing fair
about what had  happened to him, either.  Sometimes when you
were  cruising  along the  highway,  you  saw big  curls  of
rubber that  had unwound  from the recap  tires some  of the
independent truckers used.  That was what he  felt like now:
thrown tread.  The pills  made it  worse. They  cleared your
mind just enough for you to see what a colossal jam you were
in.

"But I'm not crazy," he  said. "That doesn't make me crazy."
No. Crazy might actually be better.