"People are surely God's most bizarre creatures."
The tales in 1997's Six Stories have since been collected in mass market books. The Philtrum edition is now a pricey item on Abe Books and EBay. The stories are of consistent quality, cooly conceived and well-executed. Each story knows what it wants to achieve, and does so.
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The Man in the Black Suit (1994)
A perfectly balanced and modulated story: extreme emotion recalled in tranquility. This is the third time I have read it in the last few years, and the missteps I previously thought King made no longer register as errors of taste. The coming-of-age tropes are not over-blown, and the prose is kept plain and close to the vest. Readers of Washington Irving's great story "The Money Diggers" will find a trace resonance here.
....and I couldn't take my eyes off the man standing on top of the bank and looking down at me-the man who had apparently walked out of thirty miles of trackless western Maine woods in fine black suit and narrow shoes of gleaming leather. I could see the watch chain looped across his vest glittering in the summer sunshine. There was not so much as a single pine needle on him. And he was smiling at me.
"Why, it's a fisherboy!" he cried in a mellow, pleasing voice. "Imagine that! Are we well met, fisherboy?"
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Lunch at the Gotham Café (1995)
King on marriage woes is a can't-miss. He does superbly exactly those situations in which husbands and wives feel the earth shifting under their feet, sense and logic and all proportion fleeing away from them down a black tunnel to doom. Very tightly observed, and then the narration gets t-boned when all hell breaks loose.
....For me the worst times were late at night. I think (but I'm not sure; all my thought processes from around the time Diane left are very blurry in my mind) I had an idea that I would sleep better if I quit, but I didn't. I lay awake some mornings until three, hands laced together under my pillow, looking up at the ceiling, listening to sirens and to the rumble of trucks headed downtown.
At those times I would think about the twenty-four-hour Korean market almost directly across the street from my building. I would think about the white fluorescent light inside, so bright it was almost like a Kubler-Ross near-death experience, and how it spilled out onto the sidewalk between the displays which, in another hour, two young Korean men in white paper hats would begin to fill with fruit. I would think about the older man behind the counter, also Korean, also in a paper hat, and the formidable racks of cigarettes behind him, as big as the stone tablets Charlton
Heston had brought down from Mount Sinai in The Ten Commandments. I would think about getting up, dressing, going over there, getting a pack of cigarettes (or maybe nine or ten of them), and sitting by the window, smoking one Marlboro after another as the sky lightened to the east and the sun came up. I never did, but on many early mornings I went to sleep counting cigarette brands instead of sheep: Winston… Winston 100s… Virginia Slims… Doral… Merit… Merit 100s… Camels… Camel Filters… Camel Lights....
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L.T.'s Theory of Pets (1997)
A modest tale about the woe that is in marriage. A slice-of-life, a modest anecdote, carefully balanced.
...."I don't like him. That's all. I don't, and I never have."
"Yeah," I said. I guess that's clear."
"And I didn't like the way he looked at Holly."
Which meant, as I found out eventually, that she hadn't liked the way Holly looked at him. When she wasn't looking down at her plate, that is.
"I'd prefer you didn't ask him back to dinner," she said.
I kept quiet. It was late. I was tired. It had been a hard day, a harder evening, and I was tired. The last thing I wanted was to have an argument with my wife when I was tired and she was worried. That's the sort of argument where one of you ends up spending the night on the couch. And the only way to stop an argument like that is to be quiet. In a marriage, words are like rain. And the land of a marriage is filled with dry washes and arroyos that can become raging rivers in almost the wink of an eye. The therapists believe in talk, but most of them are either divorced or queer. It's silence that is a marriage's best friend.
Silence.
After a while, my best friend rolled over on her side, away from me and into the place where she goes when she finally gives up the day. I lay awake a little while longer, thinking of a dusty little car, perhaps once white, parked nose-down in the ditch beside a ranch road out in the Nevada desert not too far from Caliente. The driver's side door standing open, the rearview mirror torn off its post and lying on the floor, the front seat sodden with blood and tracked over by the animals that had come in to investigate, perhaps to sample.
There was a man - they assumed he was a man, it almost always is - who had butchered five women out in that part of the world, five in three years, mostly during the time L.T. had been living with Lulubelle. Four of the women were transients. He would get them to stop somehow, then pull them out of their cars, rape them, dismember them with an axe, leave them a rise or two away for the buzzards and crows and weasels. The fifth one was an elderly rancher's wife. The police call this killer the Axe Man. As I write this, the Axe Man has not been captured. Nor has he killed again; if Cynthia Lulubelle Simms DeWitt was the Axe Man's sixth victim, she was also his last, at least so far. There is still some question, however, as to whether or not she was his sixth victim. If not in most minds' that question exists in the part of L.T.'s mind which is still allowed to hope.
The blood on the seat wasn't human blood, you see; it didn't take the Nevada State Forensics Unit five hours to determine that. The ranch hand who found Lulubelle's Subaru saw a cloud of circling birds half a mile away, and when he reached them, he found not a dismembered woman but a dismembered dog. Little was left but bones and teeth; the predators and scavengers had had their day, and there's not much meat on a Jack Russell terrier to begin with. The Axe Man most definitely got Frank; Lulubelle's fate is probable, but far from certain....
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Autopsy Room Four (1997)
A black-humored bit of nonsense, the kind of finger-exercise a tyro might delight in. King clearly enjoys this lugubrious conte cruel with a happy though semi-flaccid climax. Recalls Michael Shea's superior, masterful tale "The Autopsy."
....I am lifted. My head lolls back and for a moment I see Pete upside down, donning his own Plexi eyeshield as he stands by a steel counter, inventorying a horrifying array of tools. Chief among them are the oversized scissors. I get just a glimpse of them, of blades glittering like merciless satin. Then I am laid flat again and my shirt is gone. I'm now naked to the waist. It's cold in the room.
Look at my chest! I scream at her. You must see it rise and fall, no matter how shallow my respiration is! You're a goddam expert, for Christ's sake"
Instead, she looks across the room, raising her voice to be heard above the music. ("I like it, like it, yes I do," the Stones sing, and I think I will hear that nasal idiot chorus in the halls of hell through all eternity.) "What's your pick? Boxers or Jockeys?"
With a mixture of horror and rage, I realize what they're talking about.
"Boxers"' he calls back. "Of course! Just take a look at the guy!"
Asshole! I want to scream. You probably think everyone over forty wears boxer shorts! You probably think when you get to be forty, you'll-
She unsnaps my Bermudas and pulls down the zipper. Under other circumstances, having a woman as pretty as this (a little severe, yes, but still pretty) do that would make me extremely happy. Today, however-
"You lose, Petie-boy," she says. "Jockeys. Dollar in the kitty."
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Lucky Quarter (1995)
"Even good luck was just bad luck with its hair combed."
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Jay
22 March 2020
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