（外文电子版资料）King, Stephen - Rest Stop.doc

STEPHEN KING Rest Stop He supposed that at some point between Jacksonville and Sarasota he did a literary version of the old Clark-Kent-in-the-phone-booth routine, but he wasnt sure just where or how. Which suggested it wasnt very dramatic. So did it even matter? Sometimes he told himself the answer to that was no, the whole Rick Hardin/ John Dykstra thing was nothing but an artificial construct, pure press agentry, no different from Archibald Bloggert (or whatever his real name might have been) performing as Cary Grant, or Evan Hunter (whose actual birth name had been Salvatore something-or-other) writing as Ed McBain. And those guys had been his inspiration . . . along with Donald E. Westlake, who wrote hard-boiled caper novels as Richard Stark, and K. C. Constantine, who was actually . . . well, no one really knew, did they? As was the case with the mysterious Mr. B. Traven, who had written Treasure of the Sierra Madre. No one really knew, and that was a large part of the fun. Name, name, whats in a name? Who, for instance, was he on his biweekly ride back to Sarasota? He was Hardin when he left the Pot o Gold in Jax, for sure, no doubt. And Dykstra when he let himself into his canal-side house on Macintosh Road, certainly. But who was he on Route 75, as he flowed from one town to the other beneath the bright turnpike lights? Hardin? Dykstra? No one at all? Was there maybe a magic moment when the literary werewolf who earned the big bucks turned back into the inoffensive English professor whose specialty was twentieth-century American poets and novelists? And did it matter as long as he was right with God, the IRS, and the occasional football players who took one of his two survey courses? None of that mattered just south of Ocala. What did was that he had to piss like a racehorse, whoever he was. Hed gone two beers over his usual limit at the Pot o Gold (maybe three) and had set the Jags cruise control at sixty-five, not wanting to see any strobing red light