All You Love Will Be Carried Away              
                       By Steven King                       

                       (part 7 of 7)                        

Alfie stood  at the edge  of the pavement, gasping  a little
because the  air was so cold  and full of snow.  In his left
hand he held the Spiral  notebook, bent almost double. There
was no need to destroy it,  after all. He would simply throw
it into Farmer  John's east field, here on the  west side of
Lincoln. The wind  would help him. The  notebook might carry
twenty feet  on the fly, and  the wind could tumble  it even
farther before it  finally fetched up against the  side of a
furrow  and  was covered.  It  would  lie there  buried  all
winter, long  after his body  had been shipped home.  In the
spring, Farmer John would come  out this way on his tractor,
the cab  filled with the  music of Patty Loveless  or George
Jones  or maybe  even Clint  Black,  and he  would plow  the
Spiral  notebook  under  without  seeing  it  and  it  would
disappear into the scheme  of things. Always supposing there
was one. "Relax, it's all just the rinse cycle," someone had
written beside  a pay  phone on I_35  not far  from Cameron,
Missouri.

Alfie drew the book back to  throw it, then lowered his arm.
He hated to  let it go, that  was the truth of  it. That was
the  bottom  line everyone  was  always  talking about.  But
things were bad, now. Everything looked like highways to him
now. He raised  his arm again and then lowered  it again. In
his distress  and indecision he  began to cry  without being
aware  of it.  The wind  rushed around  him, on  its way  to
wherever.  He couldn't  go on  living  the way  he had  been
living, he knew  that much. Not one more day.  And a shot in
the mouth  would be easier  than any living change,  he knew
that, too.  Far easier than  struggling to write a  book few
people (if  any at all) were  likely to read. He  raised his
arm again, cocked  the hand with the notebook in  it back to
his ear like  a pitcher preparing to throw  a fastball, then
stood like that. An idea had occurred to him. He would count
to sixty. If the spark lights of the farmhouse reappeared at
any time during that count, he would try to write the book.

To write a  book like that, he thought, you'd  have to begin
by talking  about how  it was to  measure distance  in green
mile markers,  and the very width  of the land, and  how the
wind sounded  when you got out  of your car at  one of those
rest  areas in  Oklahoma  or North  Dakota.  How it  sounded
almost like words. You'd have to tell about the silence, and
how  the bathrooms  always  smelled of  piss  and the  great
hollow farts of departed travelers,  and how in that silence
the voices on the walls began  to speak. The voices of those
who had written  and then moved on. The  telling would hurt,
but if  the wind dropped  and the  spark lights of  the farm
came back, he'd do it anyway.

If they didn't,  he'd throw the notebook into  the field, go
back into room  190 (just hang a left at  the Snax machine),
and shoot himself, after all.

Either way. Either way.

Alfie stood there counting to sixty inside his head, waiting
to see if the wind would drop.