The Dead Zone (45 page)

“It's all right,” Carter said.

“You're going to be president,” Johnny said.

The agent's hand was still on Johnny's shoulder, more lightly now but still there, and he was getting something from him, too. The Secret Service guy

(eyes)

didn't like his eyes. He thought they were

(assassin's eyes, psycho's eyes)

cold and strange, and if this guy put so much as one hand in his coat pocket, if he even looked as if he might be going in that direction, he was going to put him on the sidewalk. Behind the Secret Service guy's second-to-second evaluation of the situation there ran a simple, maddening litany of thought:

(laurel maryland laurel maryland laurel maryland laurel)

“Yes,” Carter said.

“It's going to be closer than anyone thinks . . . closer than
you
think, but you'll win. He'll beat himself. Poland. Poland will beat him.”

Carter only looked at him, half-smiling.

“You've got a daughter. She's going to go to a public school in Washington. She's going to go to . . .” But it was in the dead zone. “I think . . . it's a school named after a freed slave.”

“Fellow, I want you to move on,” the agent said.

Carter looked at him and the agent subsided.

“It's been a pleasure meeting you,” Carter said. “A little disconcerting, but a pleasure.”

Suddenly, Johnny was himself again. It had passed. He was aware that his ears were cold and that he had to go to the bathroom. “Have a good morning,” he said lamely.

“Yes. You too, now.”

He had gone back to his car, aware of the Secret Service guy's eyes still on him. He drove away, bemused. Shortly after, Carter had put away the competition in New Hampshire and went on to Florida.

Walter Cronkite finished with the politicians and went on to the civil war in Lebanon. Johnny got up and freshened his glass of Pepsi. He tipped the glass at the TV.
Your good health, Walt. To the three Ds—death, destruction, and destiny. Where would we be without them?

There was a light tap at the door. “Come in,” Johnny called, expecting Chuck, probably with an invitation to the drive-in over in Somersworth. But it wasn't Chuck. It was Chuck's father.

“Hi, Johnny,” he said. He was wearing wash-faded jeans and an old cotton sports shirt, the tails out. “May I come in?”

“Sure. I thought you weren't due back until late.”

“Well, Shelley gave me a call.” Shelley was his wife. Roger came in and shut the door. “Chuck came to see her. Burst into tears, just like a little kid. He told her you were doing it. Johnny. He said he thought he was going to be all right.”

Johnny put his glass down. “We've got a ways to go,” he said.

“Chuck met me at the airport. I haven't seen him looking like he did since he was . . . what? Ten? Eleven? When I gave him the .22 he'd been waiting for for five years. He read me a story out of the newspaper. The improvement is . . . almost eerie. I came over to thank you.”

“Thank Chuck,” Johnny said. “He's an adaptable boy. A lot of what's happening to him is positive reinforcement. He's psyched himself into believing he can do it and now he's tripping on it. That's the best way I can put it.' ”

Roger sat down. “He says you're teaching him to switch-hit.”

Johnny smiled. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“Is he going to be able to take the SATs?”

“I don't know. And I'd hate to see him gamble and lose. The SATs are a heavy pressure situation. If he gets in that lecture hall with an answer sheet in front of him and an IBM pencil in his hand and then freezes up, it's going to be a real
setback for him. Have you thought about a good prep school for a year? A place like Pittsfield Academy?”

“We've kicked the idea around, but frankly I always thought of it as just postponing the inevitable.”

“That's one of the things that's been giving Chuck trouble. This feeling that he's in a make-or-break situation.”

“I've never pressured Chuck.”

“Not on purpose, I know that. So does he. On the other hand, you're a rich, successful man who graduated from college
summa cum laude.
I think Chuck feels a little bit like he's batting after Hank Aaron.”

“There's nothing I can do about that, Johnny.”

“I think a year at a prep school, away from home, after his senior year might put things in perspective for him. And he wants to go to work in one of your mills next summer. If he were my kid and if they were my mills, I'd let him.”

“Chuck wants to do that? How come he never told me?”

“Because he didn't want you to think he was ass-kissing,” Johnny said.

“He told you that?”

“Yes. He wants to do it because he thinks the practical experience will be helpful to him later on. The kid wants to follow in your footsteps, Mr. Chatsworth. You've left some big ones behind you. That's what a lot of the reading block has been about. He's having buck fever.”

In a sense, he had lied. Chuck had hinted around these things, had even mentioned some of them obliquely, but he had not been as frank as Johnny had led Roger Chatsworth to believe. Not verbally, at least. But Johnny had touched him from time to time, and he had gotten signals that way. He had looked through the pictures Chuck kept in his wallet and knew how Chuck felt about his dad. There were things he could never tell this pleasant but rather distant man sitting across from him. Chuck idolized the ground his father walked on. Beneath his easy-come easy-go exterior (an exterior that was very similar to Roger's), the boy was eaten up by the secret conviction that he could never measure up. His father had built a ten percent interest in a failing woolen mill into a New England textile empire. He believed that the issue of his father's love hung on his own ability to move similar mountains. To play sports. To get into a good college. To
read.

“How sure are you about all of this?” Roger asked.

“I'm pretty sure. But I'd appreciate it if you never mentioned to Chuck that we talked this way. They're his secrets I'm telling.”
And that's truer than you'll ever know.

“All right. And Chuck and his mother and I will talk over the prep school idea. In the meantime, this is yours.” He took a plain white business envelope from his back pocket and passed it to Johnny.

“What is it?”

“Open it and see.”

Johnny opened it. Inside the envelope was a cashier's check for five hundred dollars.

“Oh, hey . . . ! I can't take this.”

“You can, and you will. I promised you a bonus if you could perform, and I keep my promises. There'll be another when you leave.”

“Really, Mr. Chatsworth, I just . . .”

“Shh. I'll tell you something, Johnny.” He leaned forward. He was smiling a peculiar little smile, and Johnny suddenly felt he could see beneath the pleasant exterior to the man who had made all of this happen—the house, the grounds, the pool, the mills. And, of course, his son's reading phobia, which could probably be classified a hysterical neurosis.

“It's been my experience that ninety-five percent of the people who walk the earth are simply inert, Johnny. One percent are saints, and one percent are assholes. The other three percent are the people who do what they say they can do. I'm in that three percent, and so are you. You earned that money. I've got people in the mills that take home eleven thousand dollars a year for doing little more than playing with their dicks. But I'm not bitching. I'm a man of the world, and all that means is I understand what powers the world. The fuel mix is one part high-octane to nine parts pure bullshit. You're no bullshitter. So you put that money in your wallet and next time try to value yourself a little higher.”

“All right,” Johnny said. “I can put it to good use, I won't lie to you about that.”

“Doctor bills?”

Johnny looked up at Roger Chatsworth, his eyes narrowed.

“I know all about you,” Roger said. “Did you think I wouldn't check back on the guy I hired to tutor my son?”

“You know about . . .”

“You're supposed to be a psychic of some kind. You helped to solve a murder case in Maine. At least, that's what the
papers say. You had a teaching job lined up for last January, but they dropped you like a hot potato when your name got in the papers.”

“You
knew?
For how long?”

“I knew before you moved in.”

“And you still hired me?”

“I wanted a tutor, didn't I? You looked like you might be able to pull it off. I think I showed excellent judgment in engaging your services.”

“Well, thanks,” Johnny said. His voice was hoarse.

“I told you you didn't have to say that.”

As they talked, Walter Cronkite had finished up with the real news of the day and had gone on to the man-bites-dog stories that sometimes turn up near the end of a newscast. He was saying, “. . . voters in western New Hampshire have an independent running in the third district this year . . .”

“Well, the cash will come in handy,” Johnny said. “That's . . .”

“Shh. I want to hear this.”

Chatsworth was leaning forward, hands dangling between his knees, a pleasant smile of expectation on his face. Johnny turned to look at the TV.

“. . . Stillson,” Cronkite said. “This forty-three-year-old insurance and real estate agent is surely running one of the most eccentric races of Campaign '76, but both the third-district Republican candidate, Harrison Fisher, and his Democratic opponent, David Bowes, are running scared, because the polls have Greg Stillson running comfortably ahead. George Herman has the story.”

“Who's Stillson?” Johnny asked.

Chatsworth laughed. “Oh, you gotta see this guy, Johnny. He's as crazy as a rat in a drainpipe. But I do believe the sober-sided electorate of the third district is going to send him to Washington this November. Unless he actually falls down and starts frothing at the mouth. And I wouldn't completely rule that out.”

Now the TV showed a picture of a handsome young man in a white open-throated shirt. He was speaking to a small crowd from a bunting-hung platform in a supermarket parking lot. The young man was exhorting the crowd. The crowd looked less than thrilled. George Herman voiced over: “This is David Bowes, the Democratic candidate—sacrificial offering, some would say—for the third-district seat in New
Hampshire. Bowes expected an uphill fight because New Hampshire's third district has
never
gone Democratic, not even in the great LBJ blitz of 1964. But he expected his competition to come from this man.”

Now the TV showed a man of about sixty-five. He was speaking to a plushy fund-raising dinner. The crowd had that plump, righteous, and slightly constipated look that seems the exclusive province of businessmen who belong to the GOP. The speaker bore a remarkable resemblance to Edward Gurney of Florida, although he did not have Gurney's slim, tough build.

“This is Harrison Fisher,” Herman said. “The voters of the third district have been sending him to Washington every two years since 1960. He is a powerful figure in the House, sitting on five committees and chairing the House Committee on Parks and Waterways. It had been expected that he would beat young David Bowes handily. But neither Fisher nor Bowes counted on a wild card in the deck. This wild card.”

The picture switched.

“Holy God!” Johnny said.

Beside him, Chatsworth roared laughter and slapped his thighs. “Can you
believe
that guy?”

No lackadaisical supermarket parking-lot crowd here. No comfy fund raiser in the Granite State Room of the Portsmouth Hilton, either. Greg Stillson was standing on a platform outside in Ridgeway, his home town. Behind him there loomed the statue of a Union soldier with his rifle in his hand and his kepi tilted down over his eyes. The street was blocked off and crowded with wildly cheering people, predominantly young people. Stillson was wearing faded jeans and a two-pocket Army fatigue shirt with the words GIVE PEACE A CHANCE embroidered on one pocket and MOM'S APPLE PIE on the other. There was a hi-impact construction worker's helmet cocked at an arrogant, rakish angle on his head, and plastered to the front of it was a green American flag ecology sticker. Beside him was a stainless steel cart of some kind. From the twin loudspeakers came the sound of John Denver singing “Thank God I'm a Country Boy.”

“What's that cart?” Johnny asked.

“You'll see,” Roger said, still grinning hugely.

Herman said: “The wild card is Gregory Ammas Stillson, forty-three, ex-salesman for the TruthWay Bible Company
of America, ex-housepainter, and, in Oklahoma, where he grew up, one-time rainmaker.”

“Rainmaker,” said Johnny, bemused.

“Oh, that's one of his planks,” Roger said. “If he's elected, we'll have rain whenever we need it.”

George Herman went on: “Stillson's platform is . . . well, refreshing.”

John Denver finished singing with a yell that brought answering cheers from the crowd. Then Stillson started talking, his voice booming at peak amplification. His PA system at least was sophisticated; there was hardly any distortion. His voice made Johnny vaguely uneasy. The man had the high, hard, pumping delivery of a revival preacher. You could see a fine spray of spittle from his lips as he talked.

“What are we gonna do in Washington? Why do we want to go to Washington?” Stillson roared. “What's our platform? Our platform got five boards, my friends n neighbors, five old boards! And what are they? I'll tell you up front! First board:
THROW THE BUMS OUT!”

A tremendous roar of approval ripped out of the crowd. Someone threw double handfuls of confetti into the air and someone else yelled,
“Yaaaah-HOO!”
Stillson leaned over his podium.