The Dead Zone Read online

  But let someone else blow the whistle.

  Someone with less to lose.

  Warren Richardson started his car and went home to his pork chops and said nothing at all. Someone else would surely put a stop to it.

  Chapter 19

  1

  On a day not long after Chuck’s first breakthrough, Johnny Smith stood in the bathroom of the guest house, running his Norelco over his cheeks. Looking at himself closeup in a mirror always gave him a weird feeling these days, as if he were looking at an older brother instead of himself. Deep horizontal lines had grooved themselves across his forehead. Two more bracketed his mouth. Strangest of all, there was that streak of white, and the rest of his hair was beginning to go gray. It seemed to have started almost overnight.

  He snapped off the razor and went out into the combination kitchen-living room. Lap of luxury, he thought, and smiled a little. Smiling was starting to feel natural again. He turned on the TV, got a Pepsi out of the fridge, and settled down to watch the news. Roger Chatsworth was due back later in the evening, and tomorrow Johnny would have the distinct pleasure of telling him that his son was beginning to make real progress.

  Johnny had been up to see his own father every two weeks or so. He was pleased with Johnny’s new job and listened with keen interest as Johnny told him about the Chatsworths, the house in the pleasant college town of Durham, and Chuck’s problems. Johnny, in turn, listened as his father told him about the gratis work he was doing at Charlene MacKenzie’s house in neighboring New Gloucester.

  “Her husband was a helluva doctor but not much of a handyman,” Herb said. Charlene and Vera had been friends before Vera’s deepening involvement in the stranger offshoots of fundamentalism. That had separated them. Her husband, a GP, had died of a heart attack in 1973. “Place was practically falling down around that woman’s ears,” Herb said. “Least I could do. I go up on Saturdays and she gives me a dinner before I come back home. I have to tell the truth, Johnny, she cooks better than you do.”

  “Looks better, too,” Johnny said blandly.

  “Sure, she’s a fine-looking woman, but it’s nothing like that, Johnny. Your mother not even in her grave a year ...”

  But Johnny suspected that maybe it was something like that, and secretly couldn’t have been more pleased. He didn’t fancy the idea of his father growing old alone.

  On the television, Walter Cronkite was serving up the evening’s political news. Now, with the primary season over and the conventions only weeks away, it appeared that Jimmy Carter had the Democratic nomination sewed up. It was Ford who was in a scrap for his political life with Ronald Reagan, the ex-governor of California and ex-host of “GE Theater.” It was close enough to have the reporters counting individual delegates, and in one of her infrequent letters Sarah Hazlett had written: “Walt’s got his fingers (and toes!) crossed that Ford gets it. As a candidate for state senate up here, he’s already thinking about coattails. And he says that, in Maine at least, Reagan hasn’t any.”

  While he was short-order cooking in Kittery, Johnny had gotten into the habit of going down to Dover or Portsmouth or any number of smaller surrounding towns in New Hampshire a couple of times a week. All of the candidates for president were in and out, and it was a unique opportunity to see those who were running closeup and without the nearly regal trappings of authority that might later surround any one of them. It became something of a hobby, although of necessity a short-lived one; when New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary was over, the candidates would move on to Florida without a glance back. And of course a few of their number would bury their political ambitions somewhere between Portsmouth and Keene. Never a political creature before—except during the Vietnam era—Johnny became an avid politician-watcher in the healing aftermath of the Castle Rock business—and his own particular talent, affliction, whatever it was, played a part in that, too.

  He shook hands with Morris Udall and Henry Jackson. Fred Harris clapped him on the back. Ronald Reagan gave him a quick and practiced politico’s double-pump and said, “Get out to the polls and help us if you can.” Johnny had nodded agreeably enough,.seeing no point in disabusing Mr. Reagan of his notion that he was a bona fide New Hampshire voter.

  He had chatted with Sarge Shriver just inside the main entrance to the monstrous Newington Mall for nearly fifteen minutes. Shriver, his hair freshly cut and smelling of after-shave and perhaps desperation, was accompanied by a single aide with his pockets stuffed full of leaflets, and a Secret Service man who kept scratching furtively at his acne. Shriver had seemed inordinately pleased to be recognized. A minute or two before Johnny said good-bye, a candidate in search of some local office had approached Shriver and asked him to sign his nominating papers. Shriver had smiled gently.

  Johnny had sensed things about all of them, but little of a specific nature. It was as if they had made the act of touching such a ritual thing that their true selves were buried beneath a layer of tough, clear lucite. Although he saw most of them—with the exception of President Ford—Johnny had felt only once that sudden, electrifying snap of knowledge that he associated with Eileen Magown—and, in an entirely different way, with Frank Dodd.

  It was a quarter of seven in the morning. Johnny had driven down to Manchester in his old Plymouth. He had worked from ten the evening before until six this morning. He was tired, but the quiet winter dawn had been too good to sleep through. And he liked Manchester, Manchester with its narrow streets and timeworn brick buildings, the gothic textile mills strung along the river like mid-Victorian beads. He had not been consciously politician-hunting that morning; he thought he would cruise the streets for a while, until they began to get crowded, until the cold and silent spell of February was broken, then go back to Kittery and catch some sacktime.

  He turned a corner and there had been three nondescript sedans pulled up in front of a shoe factory in a no-parking zone. Standing by the gate in the cyclone fencing was Jimmy Carter, shaking hands with the men and women going on shift. They were carrying lunch buckets or paper sacks, breathing out white clouds, bundled into heavy coats, their faces still asleep. Carter had a word for each of them. His grin, then not so publicized as it became later, was tireless and fresh. His nose was red with the cold.

  Johnny parked half a block down and walked toward the factory gate, his shoes crunching and squeaking on the packed snow. The Secret Service agent with Carter sized him up quickly and then dismissed him—or seemed to.

  “I’ll vote for anyone who’s interested in cutting taxes,” a man in an old ski parka was saying. The parka had a constellation of what looked like battery-acid burns in one sleeve. “The goddam taxes are killing me, I kid you not.”

  “Well, we’re gonna see about that,” Carter said. “Lookin over the tax situation is gonna be one of our first priorities when I get into the White House.” There was a serene self-confidence in his voice that struck Johnny and made him a little uneasy.

  Carter’s eyes, bright and almost amazingly blue, shifted to Johnny. “Hi there,” he said.

  “Hello, Mr. Carter,” Johnny said. “I don’t work here. I was driving by and saw you.”

  “Well I’m glad you stopped. I’m running for President.”

  “I know.”

  Carter put his hand out. Johnny shook it.

  Carter began: “I hope you’ll ...” And broke off.

  The flash came, a sudden, powerful zap that was like sticking his finger in an electric socket. Carter’s eyes sharpened. He and Johnny looked at each other for what seemed a very long time.

  The Secret Service guy didn’t like it. He moved toward Carter, and suddenly he was unbuttoning his coat. Somewhere behind them, a million miles behind them, the shoe factory’s seven o’clock whistle blew its single long note into the crisp blue morning.

  Johnny let go of Carter’s hand, but still the two of them looked at each other.

  “What the hell was that?” Carter asked, very softly.

  “You’ve
probably got someplace to go, don’t you?” the Secret Service guy said suddenly. He put a hand on Johnny’s shoulder. It was a very big hand. “Sure you do.”

  “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.

  2

  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.”