He had gone down to Boston to participate in a PEN/New England
conference tided 'The Threat of Popularity.' You could count on
PEN to come up with such subjects, Kinnell had found; it was
actually sort of comforting. He drove the two hundred and sixty
miles from Derry rather than flying because he'd come to a plot
impasse on his latest book and wanted some quiet time to try to
work it out.
At the conference, he sat on a panel where people who should have
known better asked him where he got his ideas and if he ever
scared himself. He left the city by way of the Tobin Bridge, then
got on Route 1. He never took the turnpike when he was trying to
work out problems; the turnpike lulled him into a state that was
like dreamless, waking sleep. It was restful, but not very creative.
The stop-and-go traffic on the coast road, however, acted like grit
inside an oyster-it created a fair amount of mental activity ... and
sometimes even a pearl.
Not, he supposed, that his critics would use that word. In an issue
of Esquire last year, Bradley Simons had begun his review of
Nightmare City this way: 'Richard Kinnell, who writes like Jeffery
Dahmer cooks, has suffered a fresh bout of projectile vomiting. He
has tided this most recent mass of ejecta Nightmare City.'
Route 1 took him through Revere, Malden, Everett, and up the
coast to Newburyport. Beyond Newburyport and just south of the
Massachusetts-New Hampshire border was the tidy little town of
Rosewood. A mile or so beyond the town center, he saw an array
of cheap-looking goods spread out on the lawn of a two-story
Cape. Propped against an avocado-colored electric stove was a
sign reading YARD SALE. Cars were parked on both sides of the
road, creating one of those bottlenecks which travelers unaffected
by the yard sale mystique curse their way through. Kinnell liked
yard sales, particularly the boxes of old books you sometimes
found at them. He drove through the bottleneck, parked his Audi at
the head of the line of cars pointed toward Maine and New
Hampshire, then walked back.
A dozen or so people were circulating on the littered front lawn of
the blue-and-gray Cape Cod. A large television stood to the left of
the cement walk, its feet planted on four paper ashtrays that were
doing absolutely nothing to protect the lawn. On top was a sign
reading MAKE AN OFFER-YOU MIGHT BE SURPRISED. An
electrical cord, augmented by an extension, mailed back from the
TV and through the open front door. A fat woman sat in a lawn
chair before it, shaded by an umbrella with CINZANO printed on
the colorful scalloped flaps. There was a card table beside her with
a cigar box, a pad of paper, and another handlettered sign on it.
This sign read ALL SALES CASH, ALL SALES FINAL. The TV
was on, turned to an afternoon soap opera where two beautiful
young people looked on the verge of having deeply unsafe sex.
The fat woman glanced at Kinnell, then back at the TV. She looked
at it for a moment, then looked back at him again. This time her
