Stephen King
Luckey Quarter
Oh, you cheap son of a gun! 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?
Different girls had different places to leave the all-important envelope, which they called the honeypot. Gerda, the Swede who'd been a downtown girl before finding Jesus the previous summer 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! [Signed,] 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), floating 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 quarter, 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 …
A Thanksgiving present, she said. Surely, 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 ... after all, I'm rich. If I could find you, mister, I'd drop down on my knees and
kiss your saintly 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 7, 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 formidable gun-shell bosoms and set, red-painted mouth), first drinking coffee, then filling her cart and getting ready for the day, the truckers and cowboys and salesmen were checking out, their honeypot envelopes either filled or unfilled.
322, that gent, had dropped a quarter into his. Darlene sighed. She was about to drop the quarter back in, then saw there was something inside: a note scrawled 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.
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 intothe envelope.
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 unpleasant little surprises, nothing stolen. There was really only the bedto 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 man left a woman who was trying to raise two kidson her own a 25-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 played in 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 youlaugh?
Right. Why else had she laughed?
Pushing her cart down 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 7, silent and afflicted with what seemed to be a perpetual case of the sniffles. Darlene also thought he might be the only 7-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 maybe she'd find a 50, 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.
There was a one-armed bandit - just that single one - in the lobby of the Rancher's, and though 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 fool-catcher. She hadn't forgotten her intention to give the quarter to Paul, but a quarter meant nothing to kids these days. 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 10 o'clock cup ofcoffee and she felt savagely 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 ormaybe the punch line 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, listening to the coins cascade into the tray. Thesound seemed to go on forever. Luckey me, she thought. Luckey, luckey me.
At last the quarters stopped falling.
Oh, goodness! Gerda said. Goodness me! And to think this cheap machine never paid me anything, after all the quarters I'm stuffing it with! Vut luck is here! There must be $15, Darl! Imagine if you'd put in treequarters!