that real life, but what was ahead of him was another life, one he would live in his imagination. He had never been able to fully inhabit that life while working on the other three novels, had never quite been able to get over. This time he felt he would. His body might be sitting in your basic no-frills cabin in the Maine woods, but the rest of him would be in the town of Bitter River, Wyoming, where a limping sheriff and three frightened deputies were faced with protecting a young man who’d killed an even younger woman in cold blood in front of at least forty witnesses. Protecting him from angry townspeople was only half of the lawmen’s job. The rest was getting him to the county seat where he would be tried (if Wyoming even had counties in the 1880s; he would find that out later). Drew didn’t know where old man Prescott had gotten the small army of gun thugs he was counting on to keep that move from happening, but he was sure it would come to him eventually.
Everything was eventual.
He merged onto I-95 at Gardiner. The Suburban—120K on the clock—shimmied at sixty, but once he goosed it up to seventy, the shimmy disappeared and the old girl ran smooth as silk. He still had a four-hour run ahead of him, the last hour over increasingly narrow roads culminating in the one TR locals called the Shithouse Road.
He was looking forward to the drive, but not as much as he was looking forward to opening his laptop, connecting it up to the little Hewlett-Packard printer, and creating a document he would call BITTER RIVER #1. For once, thinking about the chasm of white space under the blinking cursor didn’t fill him with a mixture of hope and fear. As he passed the Augusta town line, all he felt was impatience. This time was going to be okay. Better than okay. This time everything would come right.
He turned on the radio and began to sing along with the Who.
6
Late that afternoon Drew pulled up in front of TR-90’s only business, a shambling, slump-roofed establishment called the Big 90 General Store (as if somewhere there was a Small 90). He gassed the Suburban, which was almost dry, at a rusty old rotary pump where a sign announced CASH ONLY and REGULAR ONLY and “DASH-AWAYS” WILL BE PERSECUTED and GOD BLESS AMERICA. The price was $3.90 a gallon. In the north country, you paid premium prices even for regular. Drew paused on the store’s porch to lift the receiver of the bug-splattered pay phone that had been here when he was a kid, along with what he would swear was the same message, now faded almost to illegibility: DO NOT DEPOSIT COINS UNTIL YOUR PARTY ANSWERS. Drew heard the buzz of the open line, nodded, replaced the receiver in its rusty cradle, and went inside.
“Ayuh, ayuh, still works,” said the refugee from Jurassic Park sitting behind the counter. “Amazin, ain’t it.” His eyes were red, and Drew wondered if he had perhaps been smoking a little Aroostook County Gold. Then the old fella pulled a snot-clotted bandanna from his back pocket and sneezed into it. “Goddam allergies, I get em every fall.”
“Mike DeWitt, isn’t it?” Drew asked.
“Nawp, Mike was my father. He passed on in Feberary. Ninety-seven fuckin years old, and the last ten he didn’t know if he was afoot or on hossback. I’m Roy.” He stuck his hand out over the counter. Drew didn’t want to shake it—that was the one that had been manipulating the snotrag—but he had been raised to be polite, so he gave it a single pump.
DeWitt hooked his glasses down to the end of his beaky nose and studied Drew over them. “I know I look like m’dad, worse luck, and you look like yours. You are Buzzy Larson’s boy, ain’tcha? Not Ricky, t’other one.”
“That’s right. Ricky lives in Maryland now. I’m Drew.”
“Sure, that’s right. Been up with the wife and kiddies, but not for awhile. Teacher, ain’tcha?”
“Yes.” He passed DeWitt three twenties. DeWitt put them in the till and returned six limp singles.
“I heard Buzzy died.”
“He did. My mom, too.” One less question to answer.
“Sorry to hear it. What are you doing up here this time of year?”
“I’m on sabbatical. Thought I’d do a little writing.”
“Oh, ayuh? At Buzzy’s cabin?”
“If the road’s passable.” Only saying it so he wouldn’t sound like a complete flatlander. Even if the road was in