Countdown: The Top 20 Stephen King Works of American Gothic Short Fiction--#8

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#8."All That You Love Will Be Carried Away"

The setting for this short story (originally published in the New Yorker, and collected in Everything's Eventual : 14 Dark Tales) is quintessential American Gothic: the outskirts of Lincoln, Nebraska, where the wind has "that quality of empty amplification one encounters only in the country's flat midsection," and where "if you switched over to AM you could still hear angry old men calling down hellfire."  Traveling salesman Alfie Zimmer has just arrived at a Motel 6 on I-80, but plans (having been worn down by his lonely life on the open road, away from his family) to check out early via a .38 revolver.

But there are some unexpected complications to Alfie's sad, simple plan.  For the past seven years, he's been carrying around a pocket notebook, filled with the transcriptions of graffiti phrases spied on the walls of rest stops across the Midwest.  Sayings like "Here I sit, cheeks aflexin', giving birth to another Texan," "Don't chew the Trojan Gum it tastes just like rubber," "Elvis killed Big Pussy," "1380 West Avenue kill my mother TAKE HER JEWELS," "Nobody here even if there is," and the titular "All that you love will be carried away."  For Alfie, these phrases aren't just shithouse wit; he senses an underlying profundity to the poetic "messages from the interstate": "something was going on here, and it wasn't frothy."  He's never considered the scrawls the "ravings of lunatics," but now worries that the contents of his notebook will be mistaken as some bizarre suicide note (and that his wife and daughter will be subsequently stigmatized as the surviving family of a crazy man).  So Alfie decides to dispense with the notebook, even though he hates "the idea of just flushing it away"--a line that also evokes Alfie's ultimate ambivalence about killing himself.

Finally, Alfie ventures outside, prepares to toss the notebook into the snowy field of the solitary, Capote-esque farmhouse in the distance.  At the last instant, though, Alfie strikes a bargain with himself.  If the farm's spark lights reappear within the next minute, he won't blow his own brains out but rather will try to write the book (working title: "I Killed Ted Bundy": The Secret Transit Code of America's Highways) he's often contemplated composing:

To write a book like that, he thought, you'd have to begin by talking about how it was to measure distance in green mile markers, and the very width of the land, and how the wind sounded when you got out of your car at  one of those rest areas in Oklahoma or North Dakota.  How it sounded almost like words.  You'd have to explicate the silence, and how the bathrooms always smelled of piss and the great hollow farts of departed travellers, and how in that silence the voices on the walls began to speak.  The voices of those who had written and then moved  on.  The telling would hurt, but if the wind dropped and the spark lights of the farm came back, he'd do it anyway.  

"All That You Love Will Be Carried Away": understated, open-ended, and absolutely unforgettable.  At one point King writes that "to Alfie, the voice giving [the weather report over rest-area loud speakers] sounded haunted, the voice of a ghost running through the vocal cords of a corpse"; the reader might easily say the same of King's own narration in this non-supernatural masterpiece.