The Dead Zone (4 page)

During this period she would congratulate herself from time to time on how adult she was being about the whole thing. She hardly ever thought about Dan—Dan Who, ha-ha. Later she realized that for eight months she had thought of nothing or no one else. The whole country had gone through a spasm of shudders during those eight months, but she had hardly noticed. The marches, the cops in their crash helmets and gas masks, the mounting attacks on the press by Agnew, the Kent State shootings, the summer of violence as blacks and radical groups took to the streets—those things might have happened on some TV late show. Sarah was totally wrapped up in how wonderfully she had gotten over Dan, how well she was adjusting, and how relieved she was to find that everything was just fine. What load?

Then she had started at Cleaves Mills High, and that had been a personal upheaval, being on the other side of the desk after sixteen years as a professional student. Meeting Johnny Smith at that mixer (and with an absurd name like John Smith, could he be completely for real?). Coming out of herself enough to see the way he was looking at her, not lecher-ously, but with a good healthy appreciation for the way she looked in the light-gray knitted dress she had worn.

He had asked her out to a movie—
Citizen Kane
was playing at The Shade—and she said okay. They had a good time and she was thinking to herself,
No fireworks.
She had enjoyed his kiss goodnight and had thought,
He's sure no Errol Flynn.
He had kept her smiling with his line of patter, which was outrageous, and she had thought,
He wants to be Henny Youngman when he grows up.

Later that evening, sitting in the bedroom of her apartment and watching Bette Davis play a bitchy career woman on the late movie, some of these thoughts had come back to her and she paused with her teeth sunk into an apple, rather shocked at her own unfairness.

And a voice that had been silent for the best part of a year—not so much the voice of conscience as that of perspective—spoke up abruptly.
What you mean is, he sure isn't Dan. Isn't that it?

No!
she assured herself, not just
rather
shocked now.
I don't think about Dan at all anymore. That
 . . .
was a long time ago.

Diapers,
the voice replied,
that was a long time ago. Dan left yesterday.

She suddenly realized she was sitting in an apartment by herself late at night, eating an apple and watching a movie on TV that she cared nothing about, and doing it all because it was easier than thinking, thinking was so boring really, when all you had to think about was yourself and your lost love.

Very
shocked now.

She had burst into tears.

She had gone out with Johnny the second and third time he asked, too, and that was also a revelation of exactly what she had become. She couldn't very well say that she had another date because it wasn't so. She was a smart, pretty girl, and she had been asked out a lot after the affair with Dan ended, but the only dates she had accepted were hamburger dates at the Den with Dan's roomie, and she realized now (her disgust tempered with rueful humor) that she had only gone on those completely innocuous dates in order to pump the poor guy about Dan. What load?

Most of her college girl friends had dropped over the horizon after graduation. Bettye Hackman was with the Peace Corps in Africa, to the utter dismay of her wealthy old-line-Bangor parents, and sometimes Sarah wondered what the Ugandans must make of Bettye with her white, impossible-to-tan skin and ash-blonde hair and cool, sorority good looks. Deenie Stubbs was at grad school in Houston. Rachel Jurgens had married her fella and was currently gestating somewhere in the wilds of western Massachusetts.

Slightly dazed, Sarah had been forced to the conclusion that Johnny Smith was the first new friend she had made in a long, long time—and she had been her senior high school class's Miss Popularity. She had accepted dates from a couple of the other Cleaves teachers, just to keep things in perspective. One of them was Gene Sedecki, the new math man—but obviously a veteran bore. The other, George Rounds, had immediately
tried to make her. She had slapped his face—and the next day he'd had the gall to wink at her as they passed in the hall.

But Johnny was fun, easy to be with. And he did attract her sexually—just how strongly she couldn't honestly say, at least not yet. A week ago, after the Friday they'd had off for the October teachers' convention in Waterville, he had invited her back to his apartment for a home-cooked spaghetti dinner. While the sauce simmered, he had dashed around the corner to get some wine and had come back with two bottles of Apple Zapple. Like announcing his bathroom calls, it was somehow Johnny's style.

After the meal they had watched TV and that had turned to necking and God knew what
that
might have turned into if a couple of his friends, instructors from the university, hadn't turned up with a faculty position paper on academic freedom. They wanted Johnny to look it over and see what he thought. He had done so, but with noticeably less good will than was usual with him. She had noticed that with a warm, secret delight, and the ache in her own loins—the
unfulfilled ache
—had also delighted her, and that night she hadn't killed it with a douche.

She turned away from the window and walked over to the sofa where Johnny had left the mask.

“Happy Halloween,” she snorted, and laughed a little.

“What?” Johnny called out.

“I said if you don't come pretty quick I'm going without you.”

“Be right out.”

“Swell!”

She ran a finger over the Jekyll-and-Hyde mask, kindly Dr. Jekyll the left half, ferocious, subhuman Hyde the right half. Where will we be by Thanksgiving? she wondered. Or by Christmas?

The thought sent a funny, excited little thrill shooting through her.

She liked him. He was a perfectly ordinary, sweet man.

She looked down at the mask again, horrible Hyde growing out of Jekyll's face like a lumpy carcinoma. It had been treated with fluorescent paint so it would glow in the dark.

What's ordinary? Nothing, nobody. Not really. If he was so ordinary, how could he be planning to wear something like that into his homeroom and still be confident of keeping
order? And how can the kids call him Frankenstein and still respect and like him? What's ordinary?

Johnny came out, brushing through the beaded curtain that divided the bedroom and bathroom off from the living room.

If he wants me to go to bed with him tonight, I think I'm going to say okay.

And it was a warm thought, like coming home.

“What are you grinning about?”

“Nothing,” she said, tossing the mask back to the sofa.

“No, really. Was it something good?”

“Johnny,” she said, putting a hand on his chest and standing on tiptoe to kiss him lightly, “some things will never be told. Come on, let's go.”

They paused downstairs in the foyer while he buttoned his denim jacket, and she found her eyes drawn again to the STRIKE! poster with its clenched fist and flaming background.

“There'll be another student strike this year,” he said, following her eyes.

“The war?”

“That's only going to be part of it this time. Vietnam and the fight over ROTC and Kent State have activated more students than ever before. I doubt if there's ever been a time when there were so few grunts taking up space at the university.”

“What do you mean, grunts?”

“Kids just studying to make grades, with no interest in the system except that it provides them with a ten-thousand-dollar-a-year job when they get out. A grunt is a student who gives a shit about nothing except his sheepskin. That's over. Most of them are awake. There are going to be some big changes.”

“Is that important to you? Even though you're out?”

He drew himself up. “Madam, I am an alumnus. Smith, class of '70. Fill the steins to dear old Maine.”

She smiled. “Come on, let's go. I want a ride on the whip before they shut it down for the night.”

“Very good,” he said, taking her arm. “I just happen to have your car parked around the corner.”

“And eight dollars. The evening fairly glitters before us.”

The night was overcast but not rainy, mild for late October. Overhead, a quarter moon was struggling to make it through
the cloud cover. Johnny slipped an arm around her and she moved closer to him.

“You know, I think an awful lot of you, Sarah.” His tone was almost offhand, but only almost. Her heart slowed a little and then made speed for a dozen beats or so.

“Really?”

“I guess this Dan guy, he hurt you, didn't he?”

“I don't know what he did to me,” she said truthfully. The yellow blinker, a block behind them now, made their shadows appear and disappear on the concrete in front of them.

Johnny appeared to think this over. “I wouldn't want to do that,” he said finally.

“No, I know that. But Johnny . . . give it time.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Time. We've got that, I guess.”

And that would come back to her, awake and even more strongly in her dreams, in tones of inexpressible bitterness and loss.

They went around the corner and Johnny opened the passenger door for her. He went around and got in behind the wheel. “You cold?”

“No,” she said. “It's a great night for it.”

“It is,” he agreed, and pulled away from the curb. Her thoughts went back to that ridiculous mask. Half Jekyll with Johnny's blue eye visible behind the widened-O eyesocket of the surprised doctor—
Say, that's some cocktail I invented last night, but I don't think they'll be able to move it in the bars—
and that side was all right because you could see a bit of Johnny inside. It was the Hyde part that had scared her silly, because that eye was closed down to a slit. It could have been anybody. Anybody at all. Dan, for instance.

But by the time they reached the Esty fairgrounds, where the naked bulbs of the midway twinkled in the darkness and the long spokes of the Ferris wheel neon revolved up and down, she had forgotten the mask. She was with her guy, and they were going to have a good time.

They walked up the midway hand in hand, not talking much, and Sarah found herself reliving the county fairs of her youth. She had grown up in South Paris, a paper town in western Maine, and the big fair had been the one in Fryeburg. For
Johnny, a Pownal boy, it probably would have been Topsham. But they were all the same, really, and they hadn't changed much over the years. You parked your car in a dirt parking lot and paid your two bucks at the gate, and when you were barely inside the fairgrounds you could smell hot dogs, frying peppers and onions, bacon, cotton candy, sawdust, and sweet, aromatic horseshit. You heard the heavy, chain-driven rumble of the baby roller coaster, the one they called The Wild Mouse. You heard the popping of .22s in the shooting galleries, the tinny blare of the Bingo caller from the PA system strung around the big tent filled with long tables and folding chairs from the local mortuary. Rock 'n' roll music vied with the calliope for supremacy. You heard the steady cry of the barkers—two shots for two bits, win one of these stuffed doggies for your baby, hey-hey-over-here, pitch till you win. It didn't change. It turned you into a kid again, willing and eager to be suckered.

“Here!” she said, stopping him. “The whip! The whip!”

“Of course,” Johnny said comfortingly. He passed the woman in the ticket cage a dollar bill, and she pushed back two red tickets and two dimes with barely a glance up from her
Photoplay.

“What do you mean, ‘of course'? Why are you ‘of coursing' me in that tone of voice?”

He shrugged. His face was much too innocent.

“It wasn't what you said, John Smith. It was how you said it.”

The ride had stopped. Passengers were getting off and streaming past them, mostly teenagers in blue melton CPO shirts or open parkas. Johnny led her up the wooden ramp and surrendered their tickets to the whip's starter, who looked like the most bored sentient creature in the universe.

“Nothing,” he said as the starter settled them into one of the little round shells and snapped the safety bar into place. “It's just that these cars are on little circular tracks, right?”

“Right.”

“And the little circular tracks are embedded on a large circular dish that spins around and around, right?”

“Right.”

“Well, when this ride is going full steam, the little car we're sitting in whips around on its little circular track and sometimes develops up to seven g, which is only five less than the
astronauts get when they lift off from Cape Kennedy. And I knew this kid . . .” Johnny was leaning solemnly over her now.

“Oh, here comes one of your big lies,” Sarah said uneasily.

“When this kid was five he fell down the front steps and put a tiny hairline fracture in his spine at the top of his neck. Then—
ten years later
—he went on the whip at Topsham Fair . . . and . . .” He shrugged and then patted her hand sympathetically. “But you'll probably be okay, Sarah.”

“Ohhh . . . I want to get
offfff . . .”

And the whip whirled them away, slamming the fair and the midway into a tilted blur of lights and faces, and she shrieked and laughed and began to pummel him.

“Hairline fracture!” She shouted at him. “I'll give
you
a hairline fracture when we get off this, you liar!”

“Do you feel anything giving in your neck yet?” he inquired sweetly.

“Oh, you liar!”