All You Love Will Be Carried Away              
                       By Steven King                       

                       (part 6 of 7)                        

Alfie picked up  the notebook, flipped it closed  much as he
had flipped  the cylinder back  into the .38, and  sat there
tapping it against his leg. This was ludicrous.

Ludicrous or  not, it nagged  him. The way thinking  a stove
burner might  still be on  sometimes nagged him when  he was
home,  nagged  until  he  finally got  up  and  checked  and
found it  cold. Only  this was worse.  Because he  loved the
stuff  in the  notebook.  Amassing graffiti--thinking  about
graffiti_-had  been  his real  work  these  last years,  not
selling  price_code  readers  or frozen  dinners  that  were
really  not much  more than  Swansons or  Freezer Queens  in
fancy microwavable  dishes. The  daffy exuberance  of "Helen
Keller  fucked her  feller!"  Yet the  notebook  might be  a
real  embarrassment  once he  was  dead.  It would  be  like
accidentally hanging yourself in the closet because you were
experimenting with  a new way  of jacking off and  got found
that way with  your shorts under your feet and  shit on your
ankles. Some of  the stuff in his notebook might  show up in
the newspaper, along  with his picture. Once upon  a time he
would have scoffed at the idea, but in these days, when even
Bible Belt  newspapers routinely speculated about  a mole on
the President's penis, the notion was hard to dismiss.

Burn  it,  then?  No,  he'd set  off  the  God_damned  smoke
detector.

Put it  behind the picture on  the wall? The picture  of the
little boy with the fishing pole and the straw hat?

Alfie considered this, then nodded slowly. Not a bad idea at
all.  The  Spiral  notebook  might  stay  there  for  years.
Then,  someday in  the distant  future, it  would drop  out.
Someone-_perhaps a lodger, more likely a maid-_would pick it
up, curious. Would flip through it. What would that person's
reaction  be? Shock?  Amusement?  Plain old  head_scratching
puzzlement? Alfie rather hoped for this last. Because things
in  the notebook  were puzzling.  "Elvis killed  Big Pussy,"
someone in Hackberry Chalk, Texas, had written. "Serenity is
being  square," someone  in  Rapid City,  South Dakota,  had
opined. And  below that,  someone had written,  "No, stupid,
serenity=  (va)2  +  b, if  v=serenity,  a=satisfaction  and
b=sexual compatibility."

Behind the picture, then.

Alfie was  halfway across  the room  when he  remembered the
pills in his  coat pocket. And there were more  in the glove
compartment of  the car,  different kinds  but for  the same
thing. They  were prescription drugs,  but not the  sort the
doctor gave you  if you were feeling ... well  ... sunny. So
the cops would  search this room thoroughly  for other kinds
of drugs and when they lifted the picture away from the wall
the notebook would  drop out onto the green  rug. The things
in it  would look even  worse, even crazier, because  of the
pains he had taken to hide it.

And they'd  read the  last thing as  a suicide  note, simply
because it was  the last thing. No matter where  he left the
book, that would  happen. Sure as shit sticks to  the ass of
America, as some East Texas turnpike poet had once written.

"If they  find it," he said,  and just like that  the answer
came to him.

The snow  had thickened, the  wind had grown  even stronger,
and the spark lights across the field were gone. Alfie stood
beside his snow_covered  car at the edge of  the parking lot
with his  coat billowing out in  front of him. At  the farm,
they'd  all be  watching  TV by  now.  The whole  fam'damly.
Assuming the satellite dish hadn't  blown off the barn roof,
that was. Back at his place,  his wife and daughter would be
arriving  home from  Carlene's  basketball  game. Maura  and
Carlene lived  in a  world that  had little  to do  with the
interstates, or  fast food boxes blowing  down the breakdown
lanes  and the  sound of  semis passing  you at  seventy and
eighty and even  ninety miles an hour like  a Doppler whine.
He wasn't complaining about it  (or hoped he wasn't); he was
just  pointing  it out.  "Nobody  here  even if  there  is,"
someone in Chalk Level, Missouri, had written on a shithouse
wall, and  sometimes in those rest_area  bathrooms there was
blood, mostly  just a little, but  once he had seen  a grimy
basin under  a scratched steel  mirror half filled  with it.
Did anyone notice? Did anyone report such things?

In some rest  areas the weather report  fell constantly from
overhead speakers, and to Alfie  the voice giving it sounded
haunted,  the voice  of a  ghost running  through the  vocal
cords of a  corpse. In Candy, Kansas, on Route  283, in Ness
County, someone  had written, "Behold,  I stand at  the door
and knock,"  to which someone  else had added, "If  your not
from Pudlishers Cleering House go away you Bad Boy."