The Dead Zone (12 page)

Oh, Johnny, it just isn't fair,
she thought, watching the snow fall outside, filling the world up with blank whiteness, burying fallen summer and red-gold autumn.
It isn't fair, they should let you go to whatever there is to go to.

There was a letter from Herb Smith every ten days to two weeks—Vera had her pen-friends, and he had his. He wrote in a large, sprawling hand, using an old-fashioned fountain pen. “We are both fine and well. Waiting to see what will happen next as you must be. Yes, I have been doing some reading and I know what you are too kind and thoughtful to say in your letter, Sarah. It looks bad. But of course we hope. I don't believe in God the way Vera does, but I do believe in him after my fashion, and wonder why he didn't take John outright if he was going to. Is there a reason? No one knows, I guess. We only hope.”

In another letter:

“I'm having to do most of the Xmas shopping this year as Vera has decided Xmas presents are a sinful custom. This is what I mean about her getting worse all the time. She's always thought it was a holy day instead of a holiday—if you see what I mean—and if she saw me calling it Xmas instead of Christmas I guess she'd 'shoot me for a hossthief.' She was always saying how we should remember it is the birthday of Jesus Christ and not Santa Claus, but she never minded the shopping before. In fact, she used to like it. Now ragging against it is all she talks about, seems like. She gets a lot of these funny ideas from the people she writes back and forth to. Golly I do wish she'd stop and get back to normal. But otherwise we are both fine and well.
Herb.”

And a Christmas card that she had wept over a little: “Best to you from both of us this holiday season, and if you'd like to come down and spend Xmas with a couple of ‘old fogies,' the spare bedroom is made up. Vera and I are both fine and well. Hope the New Year is better for all of us, and am sure it will be.
Herb
and
Vera.”

She didn't go down to Pownal over the Christmas vacation, partly because of Vera's continued withdrawal into her own world—her progress into that world could be read pretty accurately between the lines of Herb's letters—and partly because their mutual tie now seemed so strange and distant to her. The still figure in the Bangor hospital bed had once been seen in close-up, but now she always seemed to be looking at him through the wrong end of memory's telescope; like the balloon man, he was far and wee. So it seemed best to keep her distance.

Perhaps Herb sensed it as well. His letters became less frequent as 1970 became 1971. In one of them he came as close as he could to saying it was time for her to go on with her life, and closed by saying that he doubted a girl as pretty as she was lacked for dates.

But she hadn't had any dates, hadn't wanted them. Gene Sedecki, the math teacher who had once treated her to an evening that had seemed at least a thousand years long, had begun asking her out indecently soon after Johnny's accident, and he was a hard man to discourage, but she believed that he was finally beginning to get the point. It should have happened sooner.

Occasionally other men would ask her, and one of them, a law student named Walter Hazlett, attracted her quite a bit. She met him at Anne Strafford's New Year's Eve party. She had meant only to make an appearance, but she had stayed quite a while, talking primarily to Hazlett. Saying no had been surprisingly hard, but she had, because she understood the source of attraction too well—Walt Hazlett was a tall man with an unruly shock of brown hair and a slanted, half-cynical smile, and he reminded her strongly of Johnny. That was no basis on which to get interested in a man.

Early in February she was asked out by the mechanic who worked on her car at the Cleaves Mills Chevron. Again she had almost said yes, and then backed away. The man's name was Arnie Tremont. He was tall, olive-skinned, and handsome in a smiling, predatory way. He reminded her a bit of James Brolin, the second banana on that Dr. Welby program, and even more of a certain Delta Tau Delta named Dan.

Better to wait. Wait and see if something was going to happen.

But nothing did.

In that summer of 1971, Greg Stillson, sixteen years older and wiser than the Bible salesman who had kicked a dog to death in a deserted Iowa dooryard, sat in the back room of his newly incorporated insurance and real estate business in Ridgeway, New Hampshire. He hadn't aged much in the years between. There was a net of wrinkles around his eyes now, and his hair was longer (but still quite conservative). He was still a big man, and his swivel chair creaked when he moved.

He sat smoking a Pall Mall cigarette and looking at the man sprawled comfortably in the chair opposite. Greg was looking at this man the way a zoologist might look at an interesting new specimen.

“See anything green?” Sonny Elliman asked.

Elliman topped six feet, five inches. He wore an ancient, grease-stiffened jeans jacket with the arms and buttons cut off. There was no shirt beneath. A Nazi iron cross, black dressed in white chrome, hung on his bare chest. The buckle of the belt running just below his considerable beer-belly was a great ivory skull. From beneath the pegged cuffs of his jeans poked the scuffed, square toes of a pair of Desert Driver boots. His hair was shoulder-length, tangled, and shining with an accumulation of greasy sweat and engine oil. From one earlobe there dangled a swastika earring, also black dressed in white chrome. He spun a coal-scuttle helmet on the tip of one blunt finger. Stitched on the back of his jacket was a leering red devil with a forked tongue. Above the devil was
The Devil's Dozen.
Below it:
Sonny Elliman, Prez.

“No,” Greg Stillson said. “I don't see anything green, but I do see someone who looks suspiciously like a walking asshole.”

Elliman stiffened a little, then relaxed and laughed. In spite of the dirt, the almost palpable body odor, and Nazi regalia, his eyes, a dark green, were not without intelligence and even a sense of humor.

“Rank me to the dogs and back, man,” he said. “It's been done before. You got the power now.”

“You recognize that, do you?”

“Sure. I left my guys back in the Hamptons, came here alone. Be it on my own head, man.” He smiled. “But if we
should ever catch you in a similar position, you want to hope your kidneys are wearing combat boots.”

“I'll chance it,” Greg said. He measured Elliman. They were both big men. He reckoned Elliman had forty pounds on him, but a lot of it was beer muscle. “I could take you, Sonny.”

Elliman's face crinkled in amiable good humor again. “Maybe. Maybe not. But that's not the way we play it, man. All that good American John Wayne stuff.” He leaned forward, as if to impart a great secret. “Me personally, now, whenever I get me a piece of mom's apple pie, I make it my business to shit on it.”

“Foul mouth, Sonny,” Greg said mildly.

“What do you want with me?” Sonny asked. “Why don't you get down to it? You'll miss your Jaycee's meeting.”

“No,” Greg said, still serene. “The Jaycees meet Tuesday nights. We've got all the time in the world.”

Elliman made a disgusted blowing sound.

“Now what I thought,” Greg went on, “is that
you'd
want something from
me.”
He opened his desk drawer and from it took three plastic Baggies of marijuana. Mixed in with the weed were a number of gel capsules. “Found this in your sleeping bag,” Greg said. “Nasty, nasty, nasty, Sonny. Bad boy. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. Go directly to New Hampshire State Prison.”

“You didn't have any search warrant,” Elliman said. “Even a kiddy lawyer could get me off, and you know it.”

“I don't know any such thing,” Greg Stillson said. He leaned back in his swivel chair and cocked his loafers, bought across the state line at L.L. Bean's in Maine, up on his desk. “I'm a big man in this town Sonny. I came into New Hampshire more or less on my uppers a few years back, and now I've got a nice operation here. I've helped the town council solve a couple of problems, including just what to do about all these kids the chief of police catches doing dope . . . oh, I don't mean bad-hats like you, Sonny, drifters like you we know what to do with when we catch them with a little treasure trove like that one right there on my desk . . . I mean the nice local kids. Nobody really wants to do anything to them at all, you know? I figured that out for them. Put them to work on community projects instead of sending them to jail, I said. It worked out real good. Now we've got the biggest
head in the tri-town area coaching Little League and doing a real good job at it.”

Elliman was looking bored. Greg suddenly brought his feet down with a crash, grabbed a vase with a UNH logo on the side, and threw it past Sonny Elliman's nose. It missed him by less than an inch, flew end over end across the room, and shattered against the file cabinets in the corner. For the first time Elliman looked startled. And for just a moment the face of this older, wiser Greg Stillson was the face of the younger man, the dog-bludgeoner.

“You want to listen when I talk,” he said softly. “Because what we're discussing here is your career over the next ten years or so. Now if you don't have any interest in making a career out of stamping LIVE FREE OR DIE on license plates, you want to listen up, Sonny. You want to pretend this is the first day of school again, Sonny. You want to get it all right the first time.
Sonny.”

Elliman looked at the smashed fragments of vase, then back at Stillson. His former uneasy calm was being replaced by a feeling of real interest. He hadn't been really interested in anything for quite a while now. He had made the run for beer because he was bored. He had come by himself because he was bored. And when this big guy had pulled him over, using a flashing blue light on the dashboard of his station wagon, Sonny Elliman had assumed that what he had to deal with was just another small-town Deputy Dawg, protecting his territory and rousting the big bad biker on the modified Harley-Davidson. But this guy was something else. He was . . . was . . .

He's crazy!
Sonny realized, with dawning delight at the discovery.
He's got two public service awards on his wall, and pictures of him talking to the Rotarians and the Lions, and he's vice president of this dipshit town's Jaycees, and next year he'll be president, and he's just as crazy as a fucking bedbug!

“Okay,” he said. “You got my attention.”

“I have had what you might call a checkered career,” Greg told him. “I've been up, but I've also been down. I've had a few scrapes with the law. What I'm trying to say, Sonny, is that I don't have any set feelings about you. Not like the other locals. They read in the
Union-Leader
about what you and your bikie friends are doing over in the Hamptons this summer and they'd like to castrate you with a rusty Gillette razor blade.”

“That's not the Devil's Dozen,” Sonny said. “We came down on a run from upstate New York to get some beachtime, man. We're on vacation. We're not into trashing a bunch of honky-tonk bars. There's a bunch of Hell's Angels tearing ass, and a chapter of the Black Riders from New Jersey, but you know who it is mostly? A bunch of college kids.” Sonny's lip curled. “But the papers don't like to report that, do they? They'd rather lay the rap on us than on Susie and Jim.”

“You're so much more colorful,” Greg said mildly. “And William Loeb over at the
Union-Leader
doesn't like bike clubs.”

“That bald-headed creep,” Sonny muttered.

Greg opened his desk drawer and pulled out a flat pint of Leader's bourbon. “I'll drink to that,” he said. He cracked the seal and drank half the pint at a draught. He blew out a great breath, his eyes watering, and held the pint across the desk. “You?”

Sonny polished the pint off. Warm fire bellowed up from his stomach to his throat.

“Light me up, man,” he gasped.

Greg threw back his head and laughed. “We'll get along, Sonny. I have a feeling we'll get along.”

“What do you want?” Sonny asked again, holding the empty pint.

“Nothing . . . not now. But I have a feeling . . .” Greg's eyes became far away, almost puzzled. “I told you I'm a big man in Ridgeway. I'm going to run for mayor next time the office comes up, and I'll win. But that's . . .”

“Just the beginning?” Sonny prompted.

“It's a start, anyway.” That puzzled expression was still there. “I get things done. People know it. I'm good at what I do. I feel like . . . there's a lot ahead of me. Sky's the limit. But I'm not . . . quite sure . . . what I mean. You know?”

Sonny only shrugged.

The puzzled expression faded. “But there's a story, Sonny. A story about a mouse who took a thorn out of a lion's paw. He did it to repay the lion for not eating him a few years before. You know that story?”

“I might have heard it when I was a kid.”

Greg nodded. “Well, it's a few years before . . . whatever it is, Sonny.” He shoved the plastic Baggies across the desk. “I'm not going to eat you. I could if I wanted to, you know.
A kiddie lawyer couldn't get you off. In this town, with the riots going on in Hampton less than twenty miles away, Clarence Fucking Darrow couldn't get you off in Ridgeway. These good people would love to see you go up.”

Elliman didn't reply, but he suspected Greg was right. There was nothing heavy in his dope stash—two Brown Bombers was the heaviest—but the collective parents of good old Susie and Jim would be glad to see him breaking rocks in Portsmouth, with his hair cut off his head.

“I'm not going to eat you,” Greg repeated. “I hope you'll remember that in a few years if I get a thorn in my paw . . . or maybe if I have a job opportunity for you. Keep it in mind?”