The Dead Zone (14 page)

He was a man with a big thirst, and he stopped at Cathy's to slake it with a couple of beers, not to make a sale. But from force of long habit, he glanced up at the roof of the low, ranch-style building, and the unbroken line he saw standing against the blistering gunmetal sky caused him to reach back in for the scuffed suede bag that was his sample case.

Inside, Cathy's was dark and cool and silent except for the muted rumble of the color TV on the wall. A few regulars were there, and behind the bar was the owner, keeping an eye on “As The World Turns” along with his patrons.

The seller of lightning rods lowered himself onto a bar stool and put his sample case on the stool to his left. The owner came over. “Hi, friend. What'll it be?”

“A Bud,” the lightning rod salesman said. “And draw another for yourself, if you're of a mind.”

“I'm always of a mind,” the owner said. He returned with two beers, took the salesman's dollar, and left three dimes on the bar. “Bruce Carrick,” he said, and offered his hand.

The seller of lightning rods shook it. “Dohay is the name,” he said, “Andrew Dohay.” He drained off half his beer.

“Pleased to meet you,” Carrick said. He wandered off to serve a young woman with a hard face another Tequila Sunrise and eventually wandered back to Dohay. “From out of town?”

“I am,” Dohay admitted. “Salesman.” He glanced around. “Is it always this quiet?”

“No. It jumps on the weekends and I do a fair trade through the week. Private parties is where we make our dough—if we make it. I ain't starving, but neither am I driving a Cadillac.” He pointed a pistol finger at Dohay's glass. “Freshen that?”

“And another for yourself, Mr. Carrick.”

“Bruce.” He laughed. “You must want to sell me something.”

When Carrick returned with the beers the seller of lightning rods said: “I came in to lay the dust, not to sell anything. But now that you mention it . . .” He hauled his sample case up onto the bar with a practiced jerk. Things jingled inside it.

“Oh, here it comes,” Carrick said, and laughed.

Two of the afternoon regulars, an old fellow with a wart on his right eyelid and a younger man in gray fatigues, wandered over to see what Dohay was selling. The hard-faced woman went on watching “As The World Turns.”

Dohay took out three rods, a long one with a brass ball at the tip, a shorter one, and one with porcelain conductors.

“What the hell . . .” Carrick said.

“Lightning rods,” the old campaigner said, and cackled. “He wants to save this ginmill from God's wrath, Brucie. You better listen to what he says.”

He laughed again, the man in the gray fatigues joined him, Carrick's face darkened, and the lightning rod salesman knew that whatever chance he had had of making a sale had just flown away. He was a good salesman, good enough to recognize that this queer combination of personalities and circumstances sometimes got together and queered any chance of a deal even before he had a chance to swing into his pitch. He took it philosophically and went into his spiel anyway, mostly from force of habit:

“As I was getting out of my car, I just happened to notice that this fine establishment wasn't equipped with lightning conductors—and that it's constructed of wood. Now for a very small price—and easy credit terms if you should want them—I can guarantee that . . .”

“That lightning'll strike this place at four this afternoon,” the man in the gray fatigues said with a grin. The old campaigner cackled.

“Mister, no offense,” Carrick said, “but you see that?” He
pointed to a golden nail on a small wooden plaque beside the TV near the glistening array of bottles. Spiked on the nail was a drift of papers. “All of those things are bills. They got to be paid by the fifteenth of the month. They get written in red ink. Now you see how many people are in here drinking right now? I got to be careful. I got to . . .”

“Just my point,” Dohay broke in smoothly. “You have to be careful. And the purchase of three or four lightning rods is a careful purchase. You've got a going concern here. You wouldn't want it wiped out by one stroke of lightning on a summer's day, would you?”

“He wouldn't mind,” the old campaigner said. “He'd just collect the insurance and go down to Florida. Woon'tchoo, Brucie?”

Carrick looked at the old man with distaste.

“Well, then, let's talk about insurance,” the lightning rod salesman interposed. The man in the gray fatigues had lost interest and had wandered away. “Your fire insurance premiums will go down . . .”

“The insurance is all lumped together,” Carrick said flatly. “Look, I just can't afford the outlay. Sorry. Now if you was to talk to me again next year . . .”

“Well, perhaps I will,” the lightning rod salesman said, giving up. “Perhaps I will.” No one thought they could be struck by lightning until they were struck; it was a constant fact of this business. You couldn't make a fellow like this Carrick see that it was the cheapest form of fire insurance he could buy. But Dohay was a philosopher. After all, he had told the truth when he said he came in to lay the dust.

To prove it, and to prove there were no hard feelings, he ordered another beer. But this time he did not match it with one for Carrick.

The old campaigner slid onto the stool beside him.

“About ten years ago there was a fella got hit by lightning out on the golf course,” he said. “Killed him just as dead as shit. Now, there's a man could have used a lightning rod right up on his head, am I right?” He cackled, sending out a lot of stale beer-breath into Dohay's face. Dohay smiled dutifully. “All the coins in his pockets were fused together. That's what I heard. Lightning's a funny thing. Sure is. Now, I remember one time . . .”

A funny thing, Dohay thought, letting the old man's words flow harmlessly over him, nodding in the right places out of
instinct. A funny thing, all right, because it doesn't care who or what it hits. Or when.

He finished his beer and went out, carrying his satchelful of insurance against the wrath of God—maybe the only kind ever invented—with him. The heat struck him like a ham-merblow, but still he paused for a moment in the mostly deserted parking lot, looking up at the unbroken line of roof-ridge. $19.95, $29.95 tops, and the man couldn't afford the outlay. He'd save seventy bucks on his combined insurance the first year, but he couldn't afford the outlay—and you couldn't tell him different with those clowns standing around yukking it up.

Maybe some day he would be sorry.

The seller of lightning rods got into his Buick, cranked up the air conditioning, and drove away west toward Concord and Berlin, his sample case on the seat beside him, running ahead of whatever storms might be whistling up the wind behind.

In early 1974 Walt Hazlett passed his bar exams. He and Sarah threw a party for all of his friends, her friends, and their mutual friends—more than forty people in all. The beer flowed like water, and after it was over Walt said they could count themselves damn lucky not to have been evicted. When the last of the guests were seen out (at three in the morning), Walt had come back from the door to find Sarah in the bedroom, naked except for her shoes and the diamond chip earrings he had gone into hock to give her for her birthday. They had made love not once but twice before falling into sodden slumber from which they awoke at nearly noon, with paralyzing hangovers. About six weeks later Sarah discovered that she was pregnant. Neither of them ever doubted that conception had occurred on the night of the big party.

In Washington, Richard Nixon was being pressed slowly into a corner, wrapped in a snarl of magnetic tapes. In Georgia, a peanut farmer, ex-Navy man and current governor named James Earl Carter had begun talking with a number of close friends about running for the job Mr. Nixon would soon be vacating.

In Room 619 of the Eastern Maine Medical Center, Johnny Smith still slept. He had begun to pull into a fetal shape.

Dr. Strawns, the doctor who had talked to Herb and Vera and Sarah in the conference room on the day following the accident, had died of burns in late 1973. His house had caught fire on the day after Christmas. The Bangor fire department had determined that the fire had been caused by a faulty set of Christmas tree ornaments. Two new doctors, Weizak and Brown, interested themselves in Johnny's case.

Four days before Nixon resigned, Herb Smith fell into the foundation of a house he was building in Gray, landed on a wheelbarrow, and broke his leg. The bone was a long time healing, and it never really felt good again. He limped, and on wet days he began to use a cane. Vera prayed for him, and insisted that he wrap a cloth that had been personally blessed by the Reverend Freddy Coltsmore of Bessemer, Alabama, around the leg each night when he went to bed. The price of the Blessed Coltsmore Cloth (as Herb called it) was $35. It did no good that he was aware of.

In the middle of October, shortly after Gerald Ford had pardoned the ex-president, Vera became sure that the world was going to end again. Herb realized what she was about barely in time; she had made arrangements to give what little cash and savings they had recouped since Johnny's accident to the Last Times Society of America. She had tried to put the house up for sale, and had made an arrangement with the Goodwill, which was going to send a van out in two days' time to pick up all the furniture. Herb found out when the realtor called him to ask if a prospective buyer could come and look at the house that afternoon.

For the first time he had genuinely lost his temper with Vera.

“What in
Christ's
name did you think you were doing?” he roared, after dragging the last of the incredible story out of her. They were in the living room. He had just finished calling Goodwill to tell them to forget the van. Outside, rain fell in monotonous gray sheets.

“Don't blaspheme the name of the Savior, Herbert. Don't . . .”

“Shut up! Shut up! I'm tired of listening to you rave about that
crap!”

She drew in a startled gasp.

He limped over to her, his cane thumping the floor in
counterpoint. She flinched back a little in her chair and then looked up at him with that sweet martyr's expression that made him want, God forgive him, to bust her one across the head with his own damn walking stick.

“You're not so far gone that you don't know what you're doing,” he said. “You don't have that excuse. You snuck around behind my back, Vera. You . . .”

“I did not! That's a lie! I did no such . . .”

“You did!”
he bellowed. “Well, you listen to me, Vera. This is where I'm drawing the line. You pray all you want. Praying's free. Write all the letters you want, a stamp still only costs thirteen cents. If you want to take a bath in all the cheap, shitty lies those Jesus-jumpers tell, if you want to go on with the delusions and the make-believe, you go on. But I'm not a part of it. Remember that.
Do you understand me?”

“Our-father-who-art-in-heaven-hallow'd-be-thy-name . . .”

“Do you understand me?”

“You think I'm crazy!”
she shouted at him, and her face crumpled and squeezed together in a terrible way. She burst into the braying, ugly tears of utter defeat and disillusion.

“No,” he said more quietly. “Not yet. But maybe it's time for a little plain talk, Vera, and the truth is, I think you will be if you don't pull out of this and start facing reality.”

“You'll see,” she said through her tears. “You'll see. God knows the truth but waits.”

“Just as long as you understand that he's not going to have our furniture while he's waiting,” Herb said grimly. “As long as we see eye to eye on that.”

“It's Last Times!” she told him. “The hour of the Apocalypse is at hand.”

“Yeah? That and fifteen cents will buy you a cup of coffee, Vera.”

Outside the rain fell in steady sheets. That was the year Herb turned fifty-two, Vera fifty-one, and Sarah Hazlett twenty-seven.

Johnny had been in his coma for four years.

The baby came on Halloween night. Sarah's labor lasted nine hours. She was given mild whiffs of gas when she needed them, and at some point in her extremity it occurred to her
that she was in the same hospital as Johnny, and she called his name over and over again. Afterward she barely remembered this, and certainly never told Walt. She thought she might have dreamed it.

The baby was a boy. They named him Dennis Edward Hazlett. He and his mother went home three days later, and Sarah was teaching again after the Thanksgiving holiday. Walt had landed what looked like a fine job with a Bangor firm of lawyers, and if all went well they planned for Sarah to quit teaching in June of 1975. She wasn't all that sure she wanted to. She had grown to like it.

On the first day of 1975, two small boys, Charlie Norton and Norm Lawson, both from Otisfield, Maine, were in the Nortons' back yard, having a snowball fight. Charlie was eight, Norm was nine. The day was overcast and drippy.

Sensing that the end of the snowball fight was nearing—it was almost time for lunch—Norm charged Charlie, throwing a barrage of snowballs. Ducking and laughing, Charlie was at first forced back, and then turned tail and ran, jumping the low stone wall that divided the Norton back yard from the woods. He ran down the path that led toward Strimmer's Brook. As he went, Norm caught him a damn good one on the back of the hood.

Then Charlie disappeared from sight.

Norm jumped the wall and stood there for a moment, looking into the snowy woods and listening to the drip of melt-water from the birches, pines, and spruces.