Skeleton Crew (2 page)

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I’m your boogie man
that’s what I am
and I’m here to do
whatever I can ...

—K.C. and the Sunshine Band

Here’s some more short stories, if you want them. They span a long period of my life. The oldest, “The Reaper’s Image,” was written when I was eighteen, in the summer before I started college. I thought of the idea, as a matter of fact, when I was out in the back yard of our house in West Durham, Maine, shooting baskets with my brother, and reading it over again made me feel a little sad for those old times. The most recent, “The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet,” was finished in November of 1983. That is a span of seventeen years, and does not count as much, I suppose, if put in comparison with such long and rich careers as those enjoyed by writers as diverse as Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, Mark Twain, and Eudora Welty, but it is a longer time than Stephen Crane had, and about the same length as the span of H. P. Lovecraft’s career.

A friend of mine asked me a year or two ago why I still bother. My novels, he pointed out, were making very good money, while the short stories were actually losers.

“How do you figure that?” I asked.

He tapped the then-current issue of
Playboy,
which had occasioned this discussion. I had a story in it (“Word Processor of the Gods,” which you’ll find in here someplace), and had pointed it out to him with what I thought was justifiable pride.

“Well, I’ll show you,” he said, “if you don’t mind telling me how much you got for the piece.”

“I don’t mind,” I said. “I got two thousand dollars. Not exactly chicken-dirt, Wyatt.”

(His name isn’t really Wyatt, but I don’t want to embarrass him, if you can dig that.) “No, you didn’t get two thousand,” Wyatt said.

“I didn’t? Have you been looking at my bankbook?”

“Nope. But I know you got eighteen hundred dollars for it, because your agent gets ten percent.”

“Damn right,” I said. “He deserves it. He got me in
Playboy.
I’ve always wanted to have a story in
Playboy.
So it was eighteen hundred bucks instead of two thousand, big deal.”

“No, you got $1,710.”

“Well, didn’t you tell me your business manager gets five percent of the net?”

“Well, okay—eighteen hundred less ninety bucks. I still think $1,710 is not bad for—”

“Except it wasn’t,” this sadist pushed on. “It was
really
a measly $855.”

“You want to tell me you’re not in a fifty-percent tax bracket, Steve-O?”

I was silent. He knew I was.

“And,” he said gently, “it was
really
just about $769.50, wasn’t it?”

I nodded reluctantly. Maine has an income tax which requires residents in my bracket to pay ten percent of their federal taxes to the state. Ten percent of $855 is $85.50.

“How long did it take you to write this story?” Wyatt persisted.

“About a week,” I said ungraciously. It was really more like two, with a couple of rewrites added in, but I wasn’t going to tell
Wyatt
that.

“So you made $769.50 that week,” he said. “You know how much a plumber makes per week in New York, Steve-O?”

“No,” I said. I hate people who call me Steve-O. “And neither do you.”

“Sure I do,” he said. “About $769.50, after taxes. And so, far as I can see, what you got there is a dead loss.” He laughed like hell and then asked if I had any more beer in the fridge. I said no.

I’m going to send goodbuddy Wyatt a copy of this book with a little note. The note will say:
I am not going to tell you how much I was paid for this book, but I’ll tell you this, Wyatt: my total take on “Word Processor of the Gods”
—net—
is now just over twenty-three hundred dollars, not even
counting
the $769.50 you hee-hawed so over at my house at the lake.
I will sign the note
Steve-O
and add a PS:
There really was more beer in the fridge, and I drank it myself after you were gone that day.

That ought to fix him.

Except it’s not the money. I’ll admit I was bowled over to be paid $2,000 for “Word Processor of the Gods,” but I was equally as bowled over to be paid $40 for “The Reaper’s Image” when it was published in
Startling Mystery Stories
or to be sent twelve contributor’s copies when “Here There Be Tygers” was published in
Ubris,
the University of Maine college literary magazine (I am of a kindly nature and have always assumed that
Ubris
was a cockney way of spelling
Hubris).

I mean, you’re glad of the money; let us not descend into total fantasy here (or at least not yet). When I began to publish short fiction in men’s magazines such as
Cavalier, Dude,
and
Adam
with some regularity, I was twenty-five and my wife was twenty-three. We had one child and another was on the way. I was working fifty or sixty hours a week in a laundry and making $1.75 an hour.
Budget
is not exactly the word for whatever it was we were on; it was more like a modified version of the Bataan Death March. The checks for those stories (on publication, never on acceptance) always seemed to come just in time to buy antibiotics for the baby’s ear infection or to keep the telephone in the apartment for another record-breaking month. Money is, let us face it, very handy and very heady. As Lily Cavenaugh says in
The Talisman
(and it was Peter Straub’s line, not mine), “You can never be too thin or too rich.” And if you don’t believe it, you were never really fat or really poor.

All the same, you don’t do it for money, or you’re a monkey. You don’t think of the bottom line, or you’re a monkey. You don’t think of it in terms of hourly wage, yearly wage, even lifetime wage, or you’re a monkey. In the end you don’t even do it for love, although it would be nice to think so. You do it because to not do it is suicide. And while that is tough, there are compensations I could never tell Wyatt about, because he is not that kind of guy.

Take “Word Processor of the Gods” as a for-instance. Not the best story I ever wrote; not one that’s ever going to win any prizes. But it’s not too bad, either. Sort of fun. I had just gotten my own word processor a month before (it’s a big Wang, and keep your smart comments to yourself, what do you say?) and I was still exploring what it could and couldn’t do. In particular I was fascinated with the INSERT and DELETE buttons, which make cross-outs and carets almost obsolete.

I caught myself a nasty little bug one day. What the hell, happens to the best of us. Everything inside me that wasn’t nailed down came out from one end or the other, most of it at roughly the speed of sound. By nightfall I felt very bad indeed—chills, fever, joints full of spun glass. Most of the muscles in my stomach were sprung, and my back ached.

I spent that night in the guest bedroom (which is only four running steps from the bathroom) and slept from nine until about two in the morning. I woke up knowing that was it for the night. I only stayed in bed because I was too sick to get up. So there I lay, and I got thinking about my word processor, and INSERT and DELETE. And I thought, “Wouldn’t it be funny if this guy wrote a sentence, and then, when he pushed DELETE, the subject of the sentence was deleted from the world?” That’s the way just about all of my stories start; “Wouldn’t it be funny if—?” And while many of them are scary, I never
told
one to people (as opposed to writing it down) that didn’t cause at least some laughter, no matter what I saw as the final
intent
of that story.

Anyway, I started imaging on DELETE to begin with, not exactly making up a story so much as seeing pictures in my head. I was watching this guy (who is always to me just the I-Guy until the story actually starts coming out in words, when you have to give him a name) delete pictures hanging on the wall, and chairs in the living room, and New York City, and the concept of war. Then I thought of having him
insert
things and having those things just pop into the world.

Then I thought, “So give him a wife that’s bad to the bone—he can delete her, maybe—and someone else who’s good to maybe insert.” And then I fell asleep, and the next morning I was pretty much okay again. The bug went away but the story didn’t. I wrote it, and you’ll see it didn’t turn out exactly as the foregoing might suggest, but then—they never do.

I don’t need to draw you a picture, do I? You don’t do it for money; you do it because it saves you from feeling bad. A man or woman able to turn his or her back on something like that is just a monkey, that’s all. The story paid me by letting me get back to sleep when I felt as if I couldn’t. I paid the story back by getting it concrete, which it wanted to be. The rest is just side effects.

I hope you’ll like this book, Constant Reader. I suspect you won’t like it as well as you would a novel, because most of you have forgotten the real pleasures of the short story. Reading a good long novel is in many ways like having a long and satisfying affair. I can remember commuting between Maine and Pittsburgh during the making of
Creepshow,
and going mostly by car because of my fear of flying coupled with the air traffic controllers’ strike and Mr. Reagan’s subsequent firing of the strikers (Reagan, it appears, is really only an ardent unionist if the unions in question are in Poland). I had a reading of
The Thorn Birds,
by Colleen McCullough, on eight cassette tapes, and for a space of about five weeks I wasn’t even having an affair with that novel; I felt
married
to it (my favorite part was when the wicked old lady rotted and sprouted maggots in about sixteen hours).

A short story is a different thing altogether—a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger. That is not, of course, the same thing as an affair or a marriage, but kisses can be sweet, and their very brevity forms their own attraction.

Writing short stories hasn’t gotten easier for me over the years; it’s gotten harder. The time to do them has shrunk, for one thing. They keep wanting to bloat, for another (I have a real problem with bloat—I write like fat ladies diet). And it seems harder to find the voice for these tales—all too often the I-Guy just floats away.

The thing to do is to keep trying, I think. It’s better to keep kissing and get your face slapped a few times than it is to give up altogether.

All right; that’s just about it from this end. Can I thank a few people (you can skip this part if you want to)?

Thanks to Bill Thompson for getting this going. He and I put
Night Shift,
the first book of short stories, together, and it was his idea to do this one. He’s moved on to Arbor House since, but I love him just as well there as anywhere else. If there really is a gentleman left in the gentleman’s profession of book publishing, it’s this guy. God bless yer Irish heart, Bill.

Thanks to Phyllis Grann at Putnam for taking up the slack.

Thanks to Kirby McCauley, my agent, another Irishman, who sold most of these, and who pulled the longest of them, “The Mist,” out of me with a chain fall.

This is starting to sound like an Academy Awards acceptance speech, but fuck it.

Thanks are due to magazine editors, as well—Kathy Sagan at
Redbook,
Alice Turner at
Playboy,
Nye Willden at
Cavalier,
the folks at
Yankee,
to Ed Ferman—my man!—at
Fantasy
&
Science Fiction.

I owe just about everybody, and I could name them, but I won’t bore you with any more. Most thanks are to you, Constant Reader, just like always—because it all goes out to you in the end. Without you, it’s a dead circuit. If any of these do it for you, take you away, get you over the boring lunch hour, the plane ride, or the hour in detention hall for throwing spitballs, that’s the payback.

Okay—commercial’s over. Grab onto my arm now. Hold tight. We are going into a number of dark places, but I think I know the way. Just don’t let go of my arm. And if I should kiss you in the dark, it’s no big deal; it’s only because you are my love.

Now listen:

 

 

April 15th, 1984
Bangor, Maine

This is what happened. On the night that the worst heat wave in northern New England history finally broke—the night of July 19—the entire western Maine region was lashed with the most vicious thunderstorms I have ever seen.

We lived on Long Lake, and we saw the first of the storms beating its way across the water toward us just before dark. For an hour before, the air had been utterly still. The American flag that my father put up on our boathouse in 1936 lay limp against its pole. Not even its hem fluttered. The heat was like a solid thing, and it seemed as deep as sullen quarry-water. That afternoon the three of us had gone swimming, but the water was no relief unless you went out deep. Neither Steffy nor I wanted to go deep because Billy couldn’t. Billy is five.

We ate a cold supper at five-thirty, picking listlessly at ham sandwiches and potato salad out on the deck that faces the lake. Nobody seemed to want anything but Pepsi, which was in a steel bucket of ice cubes.