Free The Plant by Stephen King Page B

least until June.”
    “I can’t,” I said. “If I stayed I’d just be another millstone around your neck, and I think you’ve got enough of those already.”
    “I wouldn’t be happy to see you go either time,” he said as if he hadn’t heard. He had taken the cigarette case he carried—it was too old and scratched and beaten to seem like an affectation—from his inside jacket pocket and was selecting a Kent from among what appeared to be several plump joints. “But I could let you go in June if we look like we’re getting on our feet. If Enders swings the axe, I’d like you to stay on until the end of the year and help me wind things up in orderly fashion.” He looked at me with something in his eyes that was very close to naked pleading. “Except for me, you’re the only sane person at Zenith House. Oh, I guess none of them are as crazy as General Hecksler—although sometimes I wonder about Riddley—but it’s only a matter of degree. I’m asking you not to leave me alone in this purgatory, and that’s what Zenith House is this year.”
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    “Roger, if I could—if I—”
    “Have you made plans, then?”
    “No...not exactly...but—”
    “Not planning to go out and confront her, in spite of what this letter says?” He tapped it with a fingernail and then lighted his cigarette.
    “No.” The idea had certainly crossed my mind, but I didn’t need Ruth to tell me it was a bad idea. In a movie the girl might suddenly realize her mistake when she saw the hero of her life standing before her, one hastily packed bag in his hand, shoulders drooping and his face tired from the transcontinental flight on the redeye, but in real life I would only turn her against me completely and forever or provoke some sort of extreme guilt reaction. And I might very well provoke an extreme pugilistic reaction in Mr. Toby Anderson, whose name I have already come to cordially hate. And although I have never seen him (the only thing she forgot to include, the jilted lover said bitterly, was a picture of my replacement), I keep picturing a young cleft-chinned man, very big, who looks, in my imagination at least, as if he belongs in a Los Angeles Rams uniform. I have no problem with landing in traction for my beloved—there is, in fact, a masochistic part of me which would probably welcome it—but I would be embarrassed, and I might cry. It disgusts me to admit it, but I cry rather easily.
    Roger was watching me closely but not saying anything, merely twid-dling the stem of his drink glass.
    And there was something else, wasn’t there? Or maybe it was really the only thing, and the others are just rationalizations. In the last couple of months I’ve gotten a big dose of craziness. Not just the occasional bag-lady who rails at you on the street or the drunks in bars who want to tell you all about the nifty new betting systems with which they mean to take Atlantic City by storm, but real sicko craziness. And being exposed to that is like standing in front of the open door of a furnace in which a lot of very smelly garbage is being burned.
    Could I be driven into a rage at seeing them together, her new fella—
    he of the odious football-player name—maybe stroking her ass with the 70
     
    blasé unconcern of acknowledged ownership? Me, John Kenton, graduate of Brown and president of the blah-blah-blah? Bespectacled John Kenton?
    Could I perhaps even be driven to some really irrevocable act—an act that might be more likely if he did in fact turn out to be as big as his odious name suggests? Shrieky old John Kenton, who mistook a bunch of special effects for genuine snuff photos?
    The answer is, I don’t know. But I know this: I awoke from a terrible dream last night, a dream in which I had just thrown battery acid into her face. That was what really scared me, scared me so badly I had to sleep the rest of the night with the light on.
    Not his.
    Hers.
    Ruth’s face.
    “No,” I said again, and then poured the rest