Luckey Quartet.pdf

Luckey Quarter

In the fall of 1996, I crossed the United States from Maine to Cal-

ifornia on my Harley-Davidson motorcycle, stopping at indepen-

dent bookstores to promote a novel called Insomnia . It was a great

trip. The high point was probably sitting on the stoop of an

abandoned general store in Kansas, watching the sun go down in

the west as the full moon rose in the east. I thought of a scene in Pat

Conroy’s The Prince of Tides where the same thing happens, and

an enraptured child cries out, “Oh, Mama, do it again!” Later,

in Nevada, I stayed in a ramshackle hotel where the turn-down

maids left two-dollar slots chips on the pillow. Beside each chip was

a little card that said something like, “Hi, I’m Marie, Good

Luck!” This story came to mind. I wrote it longhand, on hotel sta-

tionery.

“Oh you cheap son of a bitch!” she cried in the empty hotel room,

more in surprise than in anger.

Then—it was the way she was built—Darlene Pullen started to

laugh. She sat down in the chair beside the rumpled, abandoned bed

with the quarter in one hand and the envelope it had fallen out of in

the other, looking back and forth between them and laughing until

tears spilled from her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. Patsy, her older

kid, needed braces. Darlene had absolutely no idea how she was going

to pay for them, she had been worried about it all week, and if this

wasn’t the ﬁnal straw, what was? And if you couldn’t laugh, what could

you do? Find a gun and shoot yourself?

447

STEPHEN KING

Different girls had different places to leave the all-important

envelope, which they called “the honeypot.” Gerda, the Swede who’d

been a downtown corner-girl before ﬁnding Jesus the previous sum-

mer at a revival meeting in Tahoe, propped hers up against one of the

bathroom glasses; Melissa put hers under the TV controller. Darlene

always leaned hers against the telephone, and when she came in this

morning and found 322’s on the pillow instead, she had known

he’d left something for her.

Yes, he certainly had. A little copper sandwich, one quarter-dollar,

In God We Trust.

Her laughter, which had been tapering off to giggles, broke out

in full spate again.

There was printed matter on the front of the honeypot, plus the

hotel’s logo: the silhouettes of a horse and rider on top of a bluff,

enclosed in a diamond shape.

Welcome to Carson City, the friendliest town in Nevada! [said the

words below the logo]. And welcome to The Rancher’s Hotel, the

friendliest lodging in Carson City! Your room was made up by Darlene .

If anything’s wrong, please dial 0 and we’ll put it right “pronto.” This

envelope is provided should you ﬁnd everything right and care to leave

a little “extra something” for this chambermaid.

Once again, welcome to Carson, and welcome to the Rancher’s.

William Avery

Trail-Boss

Quite often the honeypot was empty—she had found envelopes

torn up in the wastebasket, crumpled up in the corner (as if the idea

of tipping the chambermaid actually infuriated some guests), ﬂoat-

ing in the toilet bowl—but sometimes there was a nice little surprise

in there, especially if the slot machines or the gaming tables had been

kind to a guest. And 322 had certainly used his; he’d left her a quar-

ter, by God! That would take care of Patsy’s braces and get that Sega

game system Paul wanted with all his heart. He wouldn’t even have

to wait until Christmas, he could have it as a . . . a . . .

448

EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL

“A Thanksgiving present,” she said. “Sure, why not? And I’ll pay

off the cable people, so we won’t have to give it up after all, we’ll even

add the Disney Channel, and I can ﬁnally go see a doctor about my

back . . . shit, I’m rich. If I could ﬁnd you, mister, I’d drop down on

my knees and kiss your fucking feet.”

No chance of that; 322 was long gone. The Rancher’s probably

was the best lodging in Carson City, but the trade was still almost

entirely transient. When Darlene came in the back door at seven

A . M ., they were getting up, shaving, taking their showers, in some

cases medicating their hangovers; while she was in Housekeeping

with Gerda, Melissa, and Jane (the head housekeeper, she of the for-

midable gunshell tits and set, red-painted mouth), ﬁrst drinking

coffee, then ﬁlling her cart and getting ready for the day, the truck-

ers and cowboys and salesmen were checking out, their honeypot

envelopes either ﬁlled or unﬁlled.

322, that gent, had dropped a quarter in his. And probably left her

a little something on his sheets as well, not to mention a souvenir or

two in the unﬂushed toilet. Because some people couldn’t seem to stop

giving. It was just their nature.

Darlene sighed, wiped her wet cheeks with the hem of her apron,

and squeezed open the envelope—322 had actually gone to the

trouble of sealing it, and she’d ripped off the end in her eagerness to

see what was inside. She meant to drop the quarter back into it, then

saw there was something inside: a scrawled note written on a sheet

from the desk-pad. She ﬁshed it out.

Below the horse-and-rider logo and the words JUST A NOTE FROM

THE RANCH , 322 had printed nine words, working with a blunt-

tipped pencil:

This is a luckey quarter! Its true! Luckey you!

“Good deal!” Darlene said. “I got a couple of kids and a husband

ﬁve years late home from work and I could use a little luck. Honest

to God I could.” Then she laughed again—a short snort—and

dropped the quarter into the envelope. She went into the bathroom

449

STEPHEN KING

and peeped into the toilet. Nothing there but clean water, and that

was something.

She went about her chores, and they didn’t take long. The quarter was

a nasty dig, she supposed, but otherwise, 322 had been polite enough.

No streaks or spots on the sheets, no unpleasant little surprises (on at

least four occasions in her ﬁve years as a chambermaid, the ﬁve years

since Deke had left her, she had found drying streaks of what could

only have been semen on the TV screen and once a reeking puddle of

piss in a bureau drawer), nothing stolen. There was really only the bed

to make, the sink and shower to rinse out, and the towels to replace.

As she did these things, she speculated about what 322 might have

looked like, and what kind of a man left a woman who was trying to

raise two kids on her own a twenty-ﬁve-cent tip. One who could laugh

and be mean at the same time, she guessed; one who probably had

tattoos on his arms and looked like the character Woody Harrelson

had played in that movie Natural Born Killers.

He doesn’t know anything about me, she thought as she stepped into

the hall and pulled the door closed behind her. Probably he was drunk

and it seemed funny, that’s all. And it was funny, in a way; why else did you

laugh?

Right. Why else had she laughed?

Pushing her cart across to 323, she thought she would give the

quarter to Paul. Of the two kids, Paul was the one who usually

came up holding the short end of the stick. He was seven, silent, and

afﬂicted with what seemed to be a perpetual case of the snifﬂes. Dar-

lene also thought he might be the only seven-year-old in the clean air

of this high-desert town who was an incipient asthmatic.

She sighed and used her passkey on 323, thinking that maybe she’d

ﬁnd a ﬁfty—or even a hundred—in this room’s honeypot. It was

almost always her ﬁrst thought on entering a room. The envelope was

just where she had left it, however, propped against the telephone, and

although she checked it just to be sure, she knew it would be empty,

and it was.

323 had left a little something for her in the toilet, though.

450

EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL

“Look at this, the luck’s starting to ﬂow already,” Darlene said,

and began to laugh as she ﬂushed the john—it was just the way she

was built.

There was a one-armed bandit—just that single one—in the lobby

of the Rancher’s, and although Darlene had never used it during her

ﬁve years of work here, she dropped her hand into her pocket on her

way to lunch that day, felt the envelope with the torn-off end, and

swerved toward the chrome-plated foolcatcher. She hadn’t forgotten

her intention to give the quarter to Paul, but a quarter meant noth-

ing to kids these days, and why should it? You couldn’t even get a

lousy bottle of Coke for a quarter. And suddenly she just wanted to

be rid of the damned thing. Her back hurt, she had unaccustomed

acid indigestion from her ten o’clock cup of coffee, and she felt sav-

agely depressed. Suddenly the shine was off the world, and it all

seemed the fault of that lousy quarter . . . as if it were sitting there in

her pocket and sending out little batches of rotten vibes.

Gerda came out of the elevator just in time to see Darlene plant

herself in front of the slot machine and dump the quarter out of the

envelope and into her palm.

“You?” Gerda said. “ You? No, never—I don’t believe it.”

“Just watch me,” Darlene said, and dropped the coin into the slot

which read USE 1 2 OR 3 COINS . “That baby is gone.”

She started to walk off, then, almost as an afterthought, turned

back long enough to yank the bandit’s lever. She turned away again,

not bothering to watch the drums spin, and so did not see the bells

slot into place in the windows—one, two, and three. She paused only

when she heard quarters begin to shower into the tray at the bottom

of the machine. Her eyes widened, then narrowed suspiciously, as if

this was another joke . . . or maybe the punchline of the ﬁrst one.

“You vin!” Gerda cried, her Swedish accent coming out more

strongly in her excitement. “Darlene, you vin!”

She darted past Darlene, who simply stood where she was, listen-

ing to the coins cascade into the tray. The sound seemed to go on

forever. Luckey me, she thought. Luckey, luckey me.

451

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