The Dead Zone Read online

  “Gonna use the bathroom,” he called to her.

  “Uh-huh.” She smiled a little. Johnny was one of those people who invariably mentioned their nature calls—God knew why.

  She went over to the window and looked out on Main Street. Kids were pulling into the parking lot next to O’Mike’s, the local pizza-and-beer hangout. She suddenly wished she were back with them, one of them, with this confusing stuff behind her—or still ahead of her. The university was safe. It was a kind of never-never land where everybody, even the teachers, could be a part of Peter Pan’s band and never grow up. And there would always be a Nixon or an Agnew to play Captain Hook.

  She had met Johnny when they started teaching in September, but she had known his face from the Ed courses they had shared. She had been pinned to a Delta Tau Delta, and none of the judgments that applied to Johnny had applied to Dan. He had been almost flawlessly handsome, witty in a sharp and restless way that always made her a trifle uncomfortable, a heavy drinker, a passionate lover. Sometimes when he drank he turned mean. She remembered a night in Bangor’s Brass Rail when that had happened. The man in the next booth had taken joking issue with something Dan had been saying about the UMO football team, and Dan had asked him if he would like to go home with his head on backward. The man had apologized, but Dan hadn’t wanted an apology; he had wanted a fight. He began to make personal remarks about the woman with the other man. Sarah had put her hand on Dan’s arm and asked him to stop. Dan had shaken her hand off and had looked at her with a queer flat light in his grayish eyes that made any other words she might have spoken dry up in her throat. Eventually, Dan and the other guy went outside and Dan beat him up. Dan had beaten him until the other man, who was in his late thirties and getting a belly, had screamed. Sarah had never heard a man scream before—she never wanted to hear it again. They had to leave quickly because the bartender saw how it was going and called the police. She would have gone home alone that night (Oh? are you sure? her mind asked nastily), but it was twelve miles back to the campus and the buses had stopped running at six and she was afraid to hitch.

  Dan didn’t talk on the way back. He had a scratch on one cheek. Just one scratch. When they got back to Hart Hall, her dorm, she told him she didn’t want to see him anymore. “Any way you want it, babe,” he said with an indifference that had chilled her—and the second time he called after the Brass Rail incident she had gone out with him. Part of her had hated herself for that.

  It had continued all that fall semester of her senior year. He had frightened and attracted her at the same time. He was her first real lover, and even now, two days shy of Halloween 1970, he had been her only real lover. She and Johnny had not been to bed.

  Dan had been very good. He had used her, but he had been very good. He would not take any precautions and so she had been forced to go to the university infirmary, where she talked fumblingly about painful menstruation and got the pill. Sexually, Dan had dominated her all along. She did not have many orgasms with him, but his very roughness brought her some, and in the weeks before it had ended she had begun to feel a mature woman’s greediness for good sex, a desire that was bewilderingly intermixed with other feelings: dislike for both Dan and herself, a feeling that no sex that depended so much on humiliation and domination could really be called “good sex,” and self-contempt for her own inability to call a halt to a relationship that seemed based on destructive feelings.

  It had ended swiftly, early this year. He flunked out.

  “Where will you be going?” she asked him timidly, sitting on his roomie’s bed as he threw things into two suitcases. She had wanted to ask other, more personal questions. Will you be near here? Will you take a job? Take night classes? Is there a place for me in your plans? That question, above all others, she had not been able to ask. Because she wasn’t prepared for any answer. The answer he gave to her one neutral question was shocking enough.

  “Vietnam, I guess.”

  “What?”

  He reached onto a shelf, thumbed briefly through the papers there, and tossed her a letter. It was from the induction center in Bangor: an order to report for his physical exam.

  “Can’t you get out of it?”

  “No. Maybe. I don’t know.” He lit a cigarette. “I don’t think I even want to try.”

  She had stared at him, shocked.

  “I’m tired of this scene. College and get a job and find a little wifey. You’ve been applying for the little wifey spot, I guess. And don’t think I haven’t thought it over. It wouldn’t work. You know it wouldn’t and so do I. We don’t fit, Sarah.”

  She had fled then, all her questions answered, and she never saw him again. She saw his roommate a few times. He got three letters from Dan between January and June. He was inducted and sent down south somewhere for basic training. And that was the last the roommate had heard. It was the last Sarah Bracknell heard, too.

  At first she thought she was going to be okay. All those sad, torchy songs, the ones you always seem to hear on the car radio after midnight, they didn’t apply to her. Or the clichés about the end of the affair or the crying jags. She didn’t pick up a guy on the rebound or start doing the bars. Most evenings that spring she spent studying quietly in her dorm room. It was a relief. It wasn’t messy.

  It was only after she met Johnny—at a freshman mixer dance last month; they were both chaperoning, purely by luck of the draw—that she realized what a horror her last semester at school had been. It was the kind of thing you couldn’t see when you were in it, it was too much a part of you. Two donkeys meet at a hitching rail in a western town. One of them is a town donkey with nothing on his back but a saddle. The other is a prospector’s donkey, loaded down with packs, camping and cooking gear, and four fifty-pound sacks of ore. His back is bent into a concertina shape from the weight. The town donkey says, That’s quite a load you got there. And the prospector’s donkey says, What load?

  In retrospect it was the emptiness that horrified her, it had been five months of Cheyne-Stokes respiration. Eight months if you counted this summer, when she took a small apartment on Flagg Street in Veazie and did nothing but apply for teaching jobs and read paperback novels. She got up, ate breakfast, went out to class or to whatever job interviews she had scheduled, came home, ate, took a nap (the naps were sometimes four hours long), ate again, read until eleven-thirty or so, watched Cavett until she got sleepy, went to bed. She could not remember thinking during that period. Life was routine. Sometimes there was a vague sort of ache in her loins, an unfulfilled ache, she believed the lady novelists sometimes called it, and for this she would either take a cold shower or a douche. After a while the douches grew painful, and this gave her a bitter, absent sort of satisfaction.

  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 lecherously, 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. T
hey 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.”

  2

  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.

  3

  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.