Four Past Midnight

Kintner had turned in three or maybe four stories before disappearing to wherever he had disappeared to (if asked to guess, Mort would have guessed Vietnam - it was where most of them had disappeared to at the end of the sixties -the young men, anyhow). 'Crowfoot Mile' hadn't been the best of Kintner's stories ... but it had been good. Kintner was clearly the best writer in Richard Perkins, Jr's class. Perkins treated the boy almost as an equal, and in Mort Rainey's not-so-humble estimation, Perkins had been right to do so, because he thought Kintner had been quite a bit better than Richard Perkins, Jr. As far as that went, Mort believed he had been better.

But had he been better than Kintner?

'Huh-uh,' he said under his breath as he turned on the coffeemaker. 'I was second.'

Yes. He had been second, and he had hated that. He knew that most students taking writing courses were just marking time, pursuing a whim before giving up childish things and settling into a study of whatever it was that would be their real life's work. The creative writing most of them would do in later life would consist of contributing items to the Community Calendar pages of their local newspapers or writing advertising copy for Bright Blue Breeze dish detergent. Mort had come into Perkins's class confidently expecting to be the best, because it had never been any other way with him. For that reason, John Kintner had come as an unpleasant shock.

He remembered trying to talk to the boy once ... but Kintner, who contributed in class only when asked, had proved to be almost inarticulate. When he spoke out loud, he mumbled and stumbled like a poor-white sharecropper's boy whose education had stopped at the fourth-grade level. His writing was the only voice he had, apparently.

And you stole it.

'Shut up,' he muttered. 'Just shut up.'

You were second best and you hated it. You were glad when he was gone, because then you could be first again. Just like you always had been.

Yes. True. And a year later, when he was preparing to graduate, he had been cleaning out the back closet of the sleazy Lewiston apartment he had shared with two other students, and had come upon a pile of offprints from Perkins's writing course. Only one of Kintner's stories had been in the stack. It happened to be 'Crowfoot Mile.'

He remembered sitting on the seedy, beer-smelling rug of his bedroom, reading the story, and the old jealousy had come over him again.

He threw the other offprints away, but he had taken that one with him ... for reasons he wasn't sure he wanted to examine closely.

As a sophomore, Mort had submitted a story to a literary magazine called Aspen Quarterly. It came back with a note which said the readers had found it quite good 'although the ending seemed rather jejune.' The note, which Mort found both patronizing and tremendously exciting, invited him to submit other material.

Over the next two years, he had submitted four more stories. None were accepted, but a personal note accompanied each of the rejection slips. Mort went through an unpublished writer's agony of optimism alternating with deep pessimism. He had days when he was sure it was only a matter of time before he cracked Aspen Quarterly. And he had days when he was positive that the entire editorial staff - pencilnecked geeks to a man - was only playing with him, teasing him the way a man might tease a hungry dog by holding a piece of meat up over its head and then jerking the scrap out of reach when it leaps. He sometimes imagined one of them holding up one of his manuscripts, fresh out of its manila envelope, and shouting: 'Here's another one from that putz in Maine! Who wants to write the letter this time?' And all of them cracking up, perhaps even rolling around on the floor underneath their posters of Joan Baez and Moby Grape at the Fillmore.

Most days, Mort had not indulged in this sort of sad paranoia. He understood that he was good, and that it was only a matter of time. And that summer, working as a waiter in a Rockland restaurant, he thought of the story by John Kintner. He thought it was probably still in his trunk, kicking around at the bottom. He had a sudden idea. He would change the title and submit 'Crowfoot Mile' to Aspen Quarterly under his own name! He remembered thinking it would be a fine joke on them, although, looking back now, he could not imagine what the joke would have been.

He did remember that he'd had no intention of publishing the story under his own name ... or, if he had had such an intention on some deeper level, he hadn't been aware of it. In the unlikely event of an acceptance, he would withdraw the story, saying he wanted to work on it some more. And if they

rejected it, he could at least take some cheer in the thought that John Kintner wasn't good enough for Aspen Quarterly, either.

So he had sent the story.

And they had accepted it.

And he had let them accept it.

And they sent him a check for twenty-five dollars. 'An honorarium,' the accompanying letter had called it.

And then they had published it.

And Morton Rainey, overcome by belated guilt at what he had done, had cashed the check and had stuffed the bills into the poor box of St Catherine's in Augusta one day.

But guilt hadn't been all he'd felt. Oh no.

Mort sat at the kitchen table with his head propped in one hand, waiting for the coffee to perk. His head ached. He didn't want to be thinking about John Kintner and John Kintner's story. What he had done with 'Crowfoot Mile' had been one of the most shameful events of his life; was it really surprising that he had buried it for so many years? He wished he could bury it again now. This, after all, was going to be a big day - maybe the biggest of his life. Maybe even the last of his life. He should be thinking about going to the post office. He should be thinking about his confrontation with Shooter, but his mind would not let that sad old time alone.

When he'd seen the magazine, the actual magazine with his name in it above John Kintner's story, he felt like a man waking from a horrible episode of sleepwalking, an unconscious outing in which he has done some irrevocable thing. How had he let it go so far? It was supposed to have been a joke, for Christ's sake, just a little giggle

But he had let it go so far. The story had been published, and there were at least a dozen other people in the world who knew it wasn't his - including Kintner himself. And if one of them happened to pick up Aspen Quarterly

He himself told no one - of course. He simply waited, sick with terror. He slept and ate very little that late summer and early fall; he lost weight and dark shadows brushed themselves under his eyes. His heart began to triphammer every time the telephone rang. If the call was for him, he would approach the instrument with dragging feet and cold sweat on his brow, sure it would be Kintner, and the first words out of Kintner's mouth would be, You stole my story, and something has got to be done about it. I think I'll start by telling everybody what kind of thief you are.

The most incredible thing was this: he had known better. He had known the possible consequences of such an act for a young man who hoped to make a career of writing. It was like playing Russian roulette with a bazooka. Yet still ... still ...

But as that fall slipped uneventfully past, he began to relax a little. The issue of Aspen Quarterly had been replaced by a new issue. The issue was no longer lying out on tables in library periodical rooms all across the country; it had been tucked away into the stacks or transferred to microfiche. It might still cause trouble - he bleakly supposed he would have to live with that possibility for the rest of his life - but in most cases, out of sight meant out of mind.

Then, in November of that year, a letter from Aspen Quarterly came.

Mort held it in his hands, looking at his name on the envelope, and began to shake all over. His eyes filled with some liquid that felt too hot and corrosive to be tears, and the envelope first doubled and then trebled.

Caught. They caught me. They'll want me to respond to a letter they have from Kintner