The Dead Zone (52 page)

Then there was his record as mayor. His performance on the job was a lot better than his campaign performances would have led anyone to expect. He was a shrewd and canny man with a rough but accurate grasp of human, corporate, and political psychology. He had wound up his term in 1975 with a fiscal surplus for the first time in ten years, much to the delight of the taxpayers. He pointed with justifiable pride to his parking program and what he called his Hippie Work-Study Program. Ridgeway had also been one of the first towns in the whole country to organize a Bicentennial Committee. A company that made filing cabinets had located in Ridgeway, and in recessionary times, the unemployment rate locally was an enviable 3.2 percent. All very admirable.

It was some of the other things that had happened while Stillson was mayor that made Johnny feel scared.

Funds for the town library had been cut from $11,500 to $8,000, and then, in the last year of Stillson's term, to $6,500. At the same time, the municipal police appropriation had risen by forty percent. Three new police cruisers had been added to the town motor pool, and a collection of riot equipment. Two new officers had also been added, and the town council had agreed, at Stillson's urging, to institute a 50 50 policy on purchasing officers' personal sidearms. As a result, several of the cops in this sleepy New England town had gone out and bought .357 Magnums, the gun immortalized by Dirty Harry Callahan. Also during Stillson's term as mayor, the teen rec center had been closed, a supposedly voluntary but police-enforced ten o'clock curfew for people under sixteen had been instituted, and welfare had been cut by thirty-five percent.

Yes, there were lots of things about Greg Stillson that scared Johnny.

The domineering father and laxly approving mother. The political rallies that felt more like rock concerts. The man's way with a crowd, his bodyguards—

Ever since Sinclair Lewis people had been crying woe and
doom and beware of the fascist state in America, and it just didn't happen. Well, there had been Huey Long down there in Louisiana, but Huey Long had—

Had been assassinated.

Johnny closed his eyes and saw Ngo cocking his finger. Bam, Bam, bam. Tiger, tiger, burning bright in the forests of the night. What fearful hand or eye—

But you don't sow dragon's teeth. Not unless you want to get right down there with Frank Dodd in his hooded vinyl raincoat. With the Oswalds and the Sirhans and the Bremmers. Crazies of the world, unite. Keep your paranoid notebooks up-to-date and thumb them over at midnight and when things start to reach a head inside you, send away the coupon for the mail-order gun. Johnny Smith, meet Squeaky Fromme. Nice to meet you, Johnny, everything you've got in that notebook makes perfect sense to me. Want you to meet my spiritual master. Johnny, meet Charlie. Charlie, this is Johnny. When you finish with Stillson, we're going to get together and off the rest of the pigs so we can save the redwoods.

His head was swirling. The inevitable headache was coming on. It always led to this. Greg Stillson always led him to this. It was time to go to sleep and please God, no dreams.

Still: The Question.

He had written it in one of the notebooks and kept coming back to it. He had written it in neat letters and then had drawn a triple circle around it, as if to keep it in. The Question was this:
If you could jump into a time machine and go back to 1932, would you kill Hitler?

Johnny looked at his watch. Quarter of one. It was November 3 now, and the Bicentennial election was a part of history. Ohio was still undecided, but Carter was leading. No contest, baby. The hurly burly's done, the election's lost and won. Jerry Ford could hang up his jock, at least until 1980.

Johnny went to the window and looked out. The big house was dark, but there was a light burning in Ngo's apartment over the garage. Ngo, who would shortly be an American citizen, was still watching the great American quadrennial ritual: Old Bums Exit There, New Bums Enter Here. Maybe Gordon Strachan hadn't given the Watergate Committee such a bad answer at that.

Johnny went to bed. After a long time he slept.

And dreamed of the laughing tiger.

Herb Smith took Charlene MacKenzie as his second wife on the afternoon of January 2, 1977, just as planned. The ceremony took place in the Congregational Church at Southwest Bend. The bride's father, an eighty-year-old gentleman who was almost blind, gave her away. Johnny stood up with his dad and produced the ring flawlessly at the proper moment. It was a lovely occasion.

Sarah Hazlett attended with her husband and their son, who was leaving his babyhood behind now. Sarah was pregnant and radiant, a picture of happiness and fulfillment. Looking at her, Johnny was surprised by a stab of bitter jealousy like an unexpected attack of gas. After a few moments it went away, and Johnny went over and spoke to them at the reception following the wedding.

It was the first time he had met Sarah's husband. He was a tall, good-looking man with a pencil-line moustache and prematurely graying hair. His canvass for the Maine state senate had been successful, and he held forth on what the national elections had really meant, and the difficulties of working with an independent governor, while Denny pulled at the leg of his trousers and demanded more-drink, Daddy, more-drink,
more-drink!

Sarah said little, but Johnny felt her brilliant eyes on him—an uncomfortable sensation, but somehow not unpleasant. A little sad, maybe.

The liquor at the reception flowed freely, and Johnny went two drinks beyond his usual two-drink stopping point—the shock of seeing Sarah again, maybe, this time with her family, or maybe only the realization, written on Charlene's radiant face, that Vera Smith really was gone, and for all time. So when he approached Hector Markstone, father of the bride, some fifteen minutes after the Hazletts had left, he had a pleasant buzz on.

The old man was sitting in the corner by the demolished remains of the wedding cake, his arthritis-gnarled hands folded over his cane. He was wearing dark glasses. One bow had been mended with black electricians' tape. Beside him there stood two empty bottles of beer and another that was half-full. He peered closely at Johnny.

“Herb's boy, ain't you?”

“Yes, sir.”

A longer scrutiny. Then Hector Markstone said, “Boy, you don't look well.”

“Too many late nights, I guess.”

“Look like you need a tonic. Something to build you up.”

“You were in World War I, weren't you?” Johnny asked. A number of medals, including a Croix de Guerre, were pinned to the old man's blue serge suit coat.

“Indeed I was,” Markstone said, brightening. “Served under Black Jack Pershing. AEF, 1917 and 18. We went through the mud and the crud. The wind blew and the shit flew. Belleau Wood, my boy. Belleau Wood. It's just a name in the history books now. But I was there. I saw men die there. The wind blew and the shit flew and up from the trenches came the whole damn crew.”

“And Charlene said that your boy . . . her brother . . .”

“Buddy. Yep. Would have been your stepuncle, boy. Did we love that boy? I guess we did. His name was Joe, but everyone called him Buddy almost from the day he was born. Charlie's mother started to die the day the telegram came.”

“Killed in the war, wasn't he?”

“Yes, he was,” the old man said slowly. “St. Lô, 1944. Not that far from Belleau Wood, not the way we measure things over here, anyway. They ended Buddy's life with a bullet. The Nazis.”

“I'm working on an essay,” Johnny said, feeling a certain drunken cunning at having brought the conversation around to his real object at last. “I'm hoping to sell it to the
Atlantic
or maybe
Harper's . . .”

“Writer, are you?” The dark glasses glinted up at Johnny with renewed interest.

“Well, I'm trying,” Johnny said. Already he was beginning to regret his glibness.
Yes, I'm a writer. I write in my notebooks, after the dark of night his fallen.
“Anyway, the essay's going to be about Hitler.”

“Hitler? What about Hitler?”

“Well . . . suppose . . . just suppose you could hop into a time machine and go back to the year 1932. In Germany. And suppose you came across Hitler. Would you kill him or let him live?”

The old man's blank black glasses tilted slowly up to Johnny's face. And now Johnny didn't feel drunk or glib or clever at all. Everything seemed to depend on what this old man had to say.

“Is it a joke, boy?”

“No. No joke.”

One of Hector Markstone's hands left the head of his cane. It went to the pocket of his suit pants and fumbled there for what seemed an eternity. At last it came out again. It was holding a bone-handled pocket knife that had been rubbed as smooth and mellow as old ivory over the course of years. The other hand came into play, folding the knife's one blade out with all the incredible delicacy of arthritis. It glimmered with bland wickedness under the light of the Congregational parish hall: a knife that had traveled to France in 1917 with a boy, a boy who had been part of a boy-army ready and willing to stop the dirty hun from bayoneting babies and raping nuns, ready to show the Frenchies a thing or two in the bargain, and the boys had been machine-gunned, the boys had gotten dysentery and the killer flu, the boys had inhaled mustard gas and phosgene gas, the boys had come out of Belleau Wood looking like haunted scarecrows who had seen the face of Lord Satan himself. And it had all turned out to be for nothing; it turned out that it all had to be done over again.

Somewhere music was playing. People were laughing. People were dancing. A flashbar popped warm light. Somewhere far away. Johnny stared at the naked blade, transfixed, hypnotized by the play of the light over its honed edge.

“See this?” Markstone asked softly.

“Yes,” Johnny breathed.

“I'd seat this in his black, lying, murderer's heart,” Markstone said. “I'd put her in as far as she'd go . . . and then I'd twist her.” He twisted the knife slowly in his hand, first clock, then counterclock. He smiled, showing baby-smooth gums and one leaning yellow tooth.

“But first,” he said, “I'd coat the blade with rat poison.”

“Kill Hitler?” Roger Chatsworth said, his breath coming out in little puffs. The two of them were snowshoeing in the woods behind the Durham house. The woods were very silent. It was early March, but this day was as smoothly and coldly silent as deep January.

“Yes, that's right.”

“Interesting question,” Roger said. “Pointless, but interesting. No. I wouldn't. I think I'd join the party instead. Try to change things from within. It might have been possible to purge him or frame him, always granting the foreknowledge of what was going to happen.”

Johnny thought of the sawed-off pool cues. He thought of the brilliant green eyes of Sonny Elliman.

“It might also be possible to get yourself killed,” he said. “Those guys were doing more than singing beer-hall songs back in 1933.”

“Yes, that's true enough.” He cocked an eyebrow at Johnny. “What would you do?”

“I really don't know.” Johnny said.

Roger dismissed the subject. “How did your dad and his wife enjoy their honeymoon?”

Johnny grinned. They had gone to Miami Beach, hotel-workers' strike and all. “Charlene said she felt right at home, making her own bed. My dad says he feels like a freak, sporting a sunburn in March. But I think they both enjoyed it.”

“And they've sold the houses?”

“Yes, both on the same day. Got almost what they wanted, too. Now if it wasn't for the goddam medical bills still hanging over my head, it'd be plain sailing.”

“Johnny . . .”

“Hmmm?”

“Nothing. Let's go back. I've got some Chivas Regal, if you've got a taste.”

“I believe I do,” Johnny said.

They were reading
Jude the Obscure
now, and Johnny had been surprised at how quickly and naturally Chuck had taken to it (after some moaning and groaning over the first forty pages or so). He confessed he had been reading ahead at night on his own, and he intended to try something else by Hardy when he finished. For the first time in his life he was reading for pleasure. And like a boy who has just been initiated into the pleasures of sex by an older woman, he was wallowing in it.

Now the book lay open but facedown in his lap. They were by the pool again, but it was still drained and both he and Johnny were wearing light jackets. Overhead, mild white clouds scudded across the sky, trying desultorily to coalesce enough to make it rain. The feel of the air was mysterious and sweet; spring was somewhere near. It was April 16.

“Is this one of those trick questions?” Chuck asked.

“Nope.”

“Well, would they catch me?”

“Pardon?” That was a question none of the others had asked.

“If I killed him. Would they catch me? Hang me from a lamppost? Make me do the funky chicken six inches off the ground?”

“Well, I don't know,” Johnny said slowly. “Yes, I suppose they would catch you.”

“I don't get to escape in my time machine to a gloriously changed world, huh? Back to good old 1977?”

“No, I don't think so.”

“Well, it wouldn't matter. I'd kill him anyway.”

“Just like that?”

“Sure.” Chuck smiled a little. “I'd rig myself up with one of those hollow teeth filled with quick-acting poison or a razor blade in my shirt collar or something like that. So if I did get caught they couldn't do anything too gross to me. But I'd do it. If I didn't, I'd be afraid all those millions of people he ended up killing would haunt me to my grave.”