The Shining

Cautious looks from his colleagues at any party where alcohol was served, even wine. The slowly dawning realization that he was being talked about. The knowledge that he was producing nothing at his Underwood but balls of mostly blank paper that ended up in the wastebasket. He had been something of a catch for Stovington, a slowly blooming American writer perhaps, and certainly a man well qualified to teach that great mystery, creative writing. He had published two dozen short stories. He was working on a play, and thought there might be a novel incubating in some mental back room. But now he was not producing and his teaching had become erratic.
It had finally ended one night less than a month after Jack had broken his son’s arm. That, it seemed to him, had ended his marriage. All that remained was for Wendy to gather her will… if her mother hadn’t been such a grade A bitch, he knew, Wendy would have taken a bus back to New Hampshire as soon as Danny had been okay to travel. It was over.
It had been a little past midnight. Jack and Al were coming into Barre on U. S. 31, Al behind the wheel of his Jag, shifting fancily on the curves, sometimes crossing the double yellow line. They were both very drunk; the martians had landed that night in force. They came around the last curve before the bridge at seventy, and there was a kid’s bike in the road, and then the sharp, hurt squealing as rubber shredded from the Jag’s tires, and Jack remembered seeing Al’s face looming over the steering wheel like a round white moon. Then the jingling crashing sound as they hit the bike at forty, and it had flown up like a bent and twisted bird, the handlebars striking the windshield, and then it was in the air again, leaving the starred safety glass in front of Jack’s bulging eyes. A moment later he heard the final dreadful smash as it landed on the road behind them. Something thumped underneath them as the tires passed over it. The Jag drifted around broadside, Al still jockeying the wheel, and from far away Jack heard himself saying: “Jesus, Al. We ran him down. I felt it.”
In his ear the phone kept ringing. Come on, Al. Be home. Let me get this over with.
Al had brought the car to a smoking halt not more than three feet from a bridge stanchion. Two of the Jag’s tires were flat. They had left zigzagging loops of burned rubber for a hundred and thirty feet. They looked at each other for a moment and then ran back in the cold darkness.
The bike was completely ruined. One wheel was gone, and looking back over his shoulder Al had seen it lying in the middle of the road, half a dozen spokes sticking up like piano wire. Al had said hesitantly: “I think that’s what we ran over, Tacky-boy.”
“Then where’s the kid?”
“Did you see a kid?”
Jack frowned. It had all happened with such crazy speed. Coming around the corner. The bike looming in the Jag’s headlights. Al yelling something. Then the collision and the long skid.
They moved the bike to one shoulder of the road. Al went back to the Jag and put on its four-way flashers. For the next two hours they searched the sides of the road, using a powerful four-cell flashlight. Nothing. Although it was late, several cars passed the beached Jaguar and the two men with the bobbing flashlight. None of them stopped. Jack thought later that some queer providence, bent on giving them both a last chance, had kept the cops away, had kept any of the passersby from calling them.
At quarter past two they returned to the Jag, sober but queasy. “If there was nobody riding it, what was it doing in the middle of the road?” Al demanded. “It wasn’t parked on the side; it was right in the fucking middle!”
Jack could only shake his head.
“Your party does not answer,” the operator said. “Would you like me to keep on trying?”
“A couple more rings, operator. Do you mind?”
“No, sir,” the voice said dutifully.
Come on, Al!
Al had hiked across the bridge to the nearest pay phone, called a bachelor friend and told him it would be worth fifty dollars if the friend would get the Jag’s snow tires out of the garage and bring them down to the Highway 31 bridge outside of Barre. The friend showed up twenty minutes later, wearing a pair of jeans and his pajama top. He surveyed the scene.
“Kill anybody?” he asked.
Al was already jacking up the back of the car and Jack was loosening lug nuts. “Providentially, no one,” Al said.
“I think I’ll just head on back anyway. Pay me in the morning.”
“Fine,” Al said without looking up.
The two of them had gotten the tires on without incident, and together they drove back to AI Shockley’s house. Al put the Jag in the garage and killed the motor.
In the dark quiet he said: “I’m off drinking, Jacky-boy. It’s all over. I’ve slain my last martian.”