The Dead Zone (33 page)

“Yes, I suppose I do.”

“I love you, Johnny,” she said. “I never stopped. I've tried to tell myself that it was an act of God that split us up. I don't know. Is a bad hot dog an act of God? Or two kids dragging on a back road in the middle of the night? All I want . . .” Her voice had taken on a peculiar flat emphasis that seemed to beat its way into the cool October afternoon like an artisan's small hammer into thin and precious foil “ . . . all I want is what was taken from us.” Her voice faltered. She looked down. “And I want it with all my heart, Johnny. Do you?”

“Yes,” he said. He put his arms out and was confused when she shook her head and stepped away.

“Not in front of Denny,” she said. “It's stupid, maybe, but that would be a little bit too much like public infidelity. I want everything, Johnny.” Her color rose again, and her pretty blush began to feed his own excitement. “I want you to hold me and kiss me and love me,” she said. Her voice faltered again, nearly broke. “I think it's wrong, but I can't help it. It's wrong but it's right. It's
fair.”

He reached out one finger and brushed away a tear that was moving slowly down her cheek.

“And it's only this once, isn't it?”

She nodded. “Once will have to put paid to everything. Everything that would have been, if things hadn't gone wrong.” She looked up, her eyes brighter green than ever, swimming with tears. “Can we put paid to everything with only the one time, Johnny?”

“No,” he said, smiling. “But we can try, Sarah.”

She looked fondly down at Denny, who was trying to climb up onto the chopping block without much success. “He'll sleep,” she said.

They sat on the porch and watched Denny play in the yard under the high blue sky. There was no hurry, no impatience between them, but there was a growing electricity that they both felt. She had opened her coat and sat on the porch glider
in a powder-blue wool dress, her ankles crossed, her hair blown carelessly on her shoulders where the wind had spilled it. The blush never really left her face. And high white clouds fled across the sky, west to east.

They talked of inconsequential things—there was no hurry. For the first time since he had come out of it, Johnny felt that time was not his enemy. Time had provided them with this little air pocket in exchange for the main flow of which they had been robbed, and it would be here for as long as they needed it. They talked about people who had been married, about a girl from Cleaves Mills who had won a Merit scholarship, about Maine's independent governor. Sarah said he looked like Lurch on the old Addams Family show and thought like Herbert Hoover, and they both laughed over that.

“Look at him,” Sarah said, nodding toward Denny.

He was sitting on the grass by Vera Smith's ivy trellis, his thumb in his mouth, looking at them sleepily.

She got his car-bed out of the Pinto's back seat.

“Will he be okay on the porch?” she asked Johnny. “It's so mild. I'd like to have him nap in the fresh air.”

“He'll be fine on the porch,” Johnny said.

She set the bed in the shade, popped him into it, and pulled the two blankets up to his chin. “Sleep, baby,” Sarah said.

He smiled at her and promptly closed his eyes.

“Just like that?” Johnny asked.

“Just like that,” she agreed. She stepped close to him and put her arms around his neck. Quite clearly he could hear the faint rustle of her slip beneath her dress. “I'd like you to kiss me,” she said calmly. “I've waited five years for you to kiss me again, Johnny.”

He put his arms around her waist and kissed her gently. Her lips parted.

“Oh, Johnny,” she said against his neck. “I love you.”

“I love you too, Sarah.”

“Where do we go?” she asked, stepping away from him. Her eyes were as clear and dark as emeralds now. “Where?”

He spread the faded army blanket, which was old but clean, on the straw of the second loft. The smell was fragrant and sweet. High above them there was the mysterious coo and flutter of the bam swallows, and then they settled down again. There was a small, dusty window which looked down on the house and porch. Sarah wiped a clean place on the glass and looked down at Denny.

“It's okay?” Johnny asked.

“Yes. Better here than in the house. That would have been like . . .” She shrugged.

“Making my dad a part of it?”

“Yes. This is between us.”

“Our business.”

“Our business,” she agreed. She lay on her stomach, her face turned to one side on the faded blanket, her legs bent at the knee. She pushed her shoes off, one by one. “Unzip me, Johnny.”

He knelt beside her and pulled the zipper down. The sound was loud in the stillness. Her back was the color of coffee with cream against the whiteness of her slip. He kissed her between the shoulder blades and she shivered.

“Sarah,” he murmured.

“What?”

“I have to tell you something.”

“What?”

“The doctor made a mistake during one of those operations and gelded me.”

She punched him on the shoulder. “Same old Johnny,” she said. “And you had a friend once who broke his neck on the crack-the-whip at Topsham Fair.”

“Sure,” he said.

Her hand touched him like silk, moving gently up and down.

“It doesn't feel like they did anything terminal to you,” she said. Her luminous eyes searched his. “Not at all. Shall we look and see?”

There was the sweet smell of the hay. Time spun out. There was the rough feel of the army blanket, the smooth feel of her flesh, the naked reality of her. Sinking into her was like sinking into an old dream that had never been quite forgotten.

“Oh, Johnny, my dear . . .” Her voice in rising excitement.
Her hips moving in a quickening tempo. Her voice was far away. The touch of her hair was like fire on his shoulder and chest. He plunged his face deeply into it, losing himself in that dark-blonde darkness.

Time spinning out in the sweet smell of hay. The rough-textured blanket. The sound of the old barn creaking gently, like a ship, in the October wind. Mild white light coming in through the roof chinks, catching motes of chaff in half a hundred pencil-thin sunbeams. Motes of chaff dancing and revolving.

She cried out. At some point she cried out his name, again and again and again, like a chant. Her fingers dug into him like spurs. Rider and ridden. Old wine decanted at last, a fine vintage.

Later they sat by the window, looking out into the yard. Sarah slipped her dress on over bare flesh and left him for a little bit. He sat alone, not thinking, content to watch her reappear in the window, smaller, and cross the yard to the porch. She bent over the baby bed and readjusted the blankets. She came back, the wind blowing her hair out behind her and tugging playfully at the hem of her dress.

“He'll sleep another half hour,” she said.

“Will he?” Johnny smiled. “Maybe I will, too.”

She walked her bare toes across his belly. “You better not.”

And so again, and this time she was on top, almost in an attitude of prayer, her head bent, her hair swinging forward and obscuring her face. Slowly. And then it was over.

“Sarah . . .”

“No, Johnny. Better not say it. Time's up.”

“I was going to say that you're beautiful.”

“Am I?”

“You are,” he said softly. “Dear Sarah.”

“Did we put paid to everything?” she asked him.

Johnny smiled. “Sarah, we did the best we could.”

Herb didn't seem surprised to see Sarah when he got home from Westbrook. He welcomed her, made much of the baby, and then scolded Sarah for not bringing him down sooner.

“He has your color and complexion,” Herb said. “And I
think he's going to have your eyes, when they get done changing.”

“If only he has his father's brains,” Sarah said. She had put an apron on over the blue wool dress. Outside, the sun was going down. Another twenty minutes and it would be dark.

“You know, the cooking is supposed to be Johnny's job,” Herb said.

“Couldn't stop her. She put a gun to my head.”

“Well, maybe it's all for the best,” Herb said. “Everything you make comes out tasting like Franco-American spaghetti.”

Johnny shied a magazine at him and Denny laughed, a high, piercing sound that seemed to fill the house.

Can he see?
Johnny wondered.
It feels like it's written all over my face.
And then a startling thought came to him as he watched his father digging in the entryway closet for a box of Johnny's old toys that he had never let Vera give away:
Maybe he understands.

They ate. Herb asked Sarah what Walt was doing in Washington and she told them about the conference he was attending, which had to do with Indian land claims. The Republican meetings were mostly wind-testing exercises, she said.

“Most of the people he's meeting with think that if Reagan is nominated over Ford next year, it's going to mean the death of the party,” Sarah said. “And if the Grand Old Party dies, that means Walt won't be able to run for Bill Cohen's seat in 1978 when Cohen goes after Bill Hathaway's Senate seat.”

Herb was watching Denny eat string beans, seriously, one by one, using all six of his teeth on them. “I don't think Cohen will be able to wait until '78 to get in the Senate. He'll run against Muskie next year.”

“Walt says Bill Cohen's not that big a dope,” Sarah said. “He'll wait. Walt says his own chance is coming, and I'm starting to believe him.”

After supper they sat in the living room, and the talk turned away from politics. They watched Denny play with the old wooden cars and trucks that a much younger Herb Smith had made for his own son over a quarter of a century ago. A younger Herb Smith who had been married to a tough, good-humored woman who would sometimes drink a bottle of Black Label beer in the evening. A man with no gray in his hair and nothing but the highest hopes for his son.

He does understand,
Johnny thought, sipping his coffee.
Whether he knows what went on between Sarah and me this afternoon, whether or not he suspects what might have gone on, he understands the basic cheat. You can't change it or rectify it, the best you can do is try to come to terms. This afternoon she and I consummated a marriage that never was. And tonight he's playing with his grandson.

He thought of the Wheel of Fortune, slowing, stopping.

House number. Everyone loses.

Gloom was trying to creep up, a dismal sense of finality, and he pushed it away. This wasn't the time; he wouldn't let it be the time.

By eight-thirty Denny had begun to get scratchy and cross and Sarah said, “Time for us to go, folks. He can suck a bottle on our way back to Kennebunk. About three miles from here, he'll have corked off. Thanks for haying us.” Her eyes, brilliant green, found Johnny's for a moment.

“Our pleasure entirely,” Herb said, standing up. “Right, Johnny?”

“Right,” he said. “Let me carry that car-bed out for you, Sarah.”

At the door, Herb kissed the top of Denny's head (and Denny grabbed Herb's nose in his chubby fist and honked it hard enough to make Herb's eyes water) and Sarah's cheek. Johnny carried the car-bed down to the red Pinto and Sarah gave him the keys so he could put everything in the back.

When he finished, she was standing by the driver's side door, looking at him. “It was the best we could do,” she said, and smiled a little. But the brilliance of her eyes told him the tears were close again.

“It wasn't so bad at all,” Johnny said.

“We'll stay in touch?”

“I don't know, Sarah. Will we?”

“No, I suppose not. It would be too easy, wouldn't it?”

“Pretty easy, yes.”

She stepped close and stretched to kiss his cheek. He could smell her hair, clean and fragrant.

“Take care,” she whispered. “I'll think about you.”

“Be good, Sarah,” he said, and touched her nose.

She turned then, got in behind the wheel, a smart young matron whose husband was on the way up. I doubt like hell if they'll be driving a Pinto next year, Johnny thought.

The lights came on, then the little sewing machine motor roared. She raised a hand to him and then she was pulling
out of the driveway. Johnny stood by the chopping block, hands in his pockets, and watched her go. Something in his heart seemed to have closed. It was not a major feeling. That was the worst of it—it wasn't a major feeling at all.

He watched until the taillights were out of sight and then he climbed the porch steps and went back into the house. His dad was sitting in the big easy chair in the living room. The TV was off. The few toys he had found in the closet were scattered on the rug and he was looking at them.

“Good to see Sarah,” Herb said. “Did you and she have . . .” there was the briefest, most minute hesitation . . . “a nice visit?”

“Yes,” Johnny said.

“She'll be down again?”

“No, I don't think so.”

He and his father were looking at each other.

“Well now, maybe that's for the best,” Herb said finally.

“Yes. Maybe so.”

“You played with these toys,” Herb said, getting down on his knees and beginning to gather them up. “I gave a bunch of them to Lottie Gedreau when she had her twins, but I knew I had a few of them left. I saved a few back.”

He put them back in the box one by one, turning each of them over in his hands, examining them. A race car. A bulldozer. A police car. A small hook-and-ladder truck from which most of the red paint had been worn away where a small hand would grip. He took them back to the entryway closet and put them away.