The Dead Zone Read online

  Ngo wrinkled his nose. “Sorry, yes. Mr. Chatsworth is loving them. I tell him, but they are junk trees. Everywhere there are these trees in New England. His face goes like this ...” Now Ngo’s whole face wrinkled and he looked like a caricature of some late show monster. “. . . and he says to me, ‘Just plant them.’ ”

  Johnny laughed. That was Roger Chatsworth, all right. He liked things done his way. “How did you enjoy the rally?”

  Ngo smiled gently. “Very instructive,” he said. There was no way to read his eyes. He might not have noticed the sunrise on the side of Johnny’s face. “Yes, very instructive, we are all enjoying ourselves.”

  “Good.”

  “And you?”

  “Not so much,” Johnny said, and touched the bruise lightly with his fingertips. It was very tender.

  “Yes, too bad, you should put a beefsteak on it,” Ngo said, still smiling gently.

  “What did you think about him, Ngo? What did your class think? Your Polish friend? Or Ruth Chen and her sister?”

  “Going back we did not talk about it, at our instructors’ request. Think about what you have seen, they say. Next Tuesday we will write in class, I think. Yes, I am thinking very much that we will. A class composition.”

  “What will you say in your composition?”

  Ngo looked at the blue summer sky. He and the sky smiled at each other. He was a small man with the first threads of gray in his hair. Johnny knew almost nothing about him; didn’t know if he had been married, had fathered children, if he had fled before the Vietcong, if he had been from Saigon or from one of the rural provinces. He had no idea what Ngo’s political leanings were.

  “We talked of the game of the Laughing Tiger,” Ngo said. “Do you remember?”

  “Yes,” Johnny said.

  “I will tell you of a real tiger. When I was a boy there was a tiger who went bad near my village. He was being le manger d’homme, eater of men, you understand, except he was not that, he was an eater of boys and girls and old women because this was during the war and there were no men to eat. Not the war you know of, but the Second World War. He had gotten the taste for human meat, this tiger. Who was there to kill such an awful creature in a humble village where the youngest man is being sixty and with only one arm, and the oldest boy is myself, only seven years of age? And one day this tiger was found in a pit that had been baited with the body of a dead woman. It is a terrible thing to bait a trap with a human being made in the image of God, I will say in my composition, but it is more terrible to do nothing while a bad tiger carries away small children. And I will say in my composition that this bad tiger was still alive when we found it. It was having a stake pushed through its body but it was still alive. We beat it to death with hoes and sticks. Old men and women and children, some children so excited and frightened they are wetting themselves in their pants. The tiger fell in the pit and we beat it to death with our hoes because the men of the village had gone to fight the Japanese. I am thinking that this Stillson is like that bad, tiger with its taste for human meat. I think a trap should be made for him, and I think he should be falling into it. And if he still lives, I think he should be beaten to death.”

  He smiled gently at Johnny in the clear summer sunshine.

  “Do you really believe that?” Johnny asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Ngo said. He spoke lightly, as if it were a matter of no consequence. “What my teacher will say when I am handing in such a composition, I don’t know.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Probably he will say, ‘Ngo, you are not ready for the American Way.’ But 1 will say the truth of what I feel. What did you think, Johnny?” His eyes moved to the bruise, then moved away.

  “I think he’s dangerous,” Johnny said. “I ... I know he’s dangerous.”

  “Do you?” Ngo remarked. “Yes, I believe you do know it. Your fellow New Hampshires, they see him as an engaging clown. They see him the way many of this world are seeing this black man, Idi Amin Dada. But you do not.”

  “No,” Johnny said. “But to suggest he should be killed ...”

  “Politically killed,” Ngo said, smiling. “I am only suggesting he should be politically killed.”

  “And if he can’t be politically killed?”

  Ngo smiled at Johnny. He unfolded his index finger, cocked his thumb, and then snapped it down. “Bam,” he said softly. “Bam, bam, bam.”

  “No,” Johnny said, surprised at the hoarseness in his own voice “That’s never an answer. Never.”

  “No? I thought it was an answer you Americans used quite often.” Ngo picked up the handle of the red wagon. “I must be planting these weeds, Johnny. So long, man.”

  Johnny watched him go, a small man in suntans and moccasins, pulling a wagonload of baby pines. He disappeared around the corner of the house.

  No. Killing only sows more dragon’s teeth. I believe that. I believe it with all my heart.

  3

  On the first Tuesday in November, which happened to be the second day in the month, Johnny Smith sat slumped in the easy chair of his combined kitchen-living room and watched the election returns. Chancellor and Brinkley were featuring a large electronic map that showed the results of the presidential race in a color-code as each state came in. Now, at nearly midnight, the race between Ford and Carter looked very close. But Carter would win; Johnny had no doubt of it.

  Greg Stillson had also won.

  His victory had been extensively covered on the local news-breaks, but the national reporters had also taken some note of it, comparing his victory to that of James Longley, Maine’s independent governor, two years before.

  Chancellor said, “Late polls showing that the Republican candidate and incumbent Harrison Fisher was closing the gap were apparently in error; NBC predicts that Stillson, who campaigned in a construction worker’s hard hat and on a platform that included the proposal that all pollution be sent into outer space, ended up with forty-six percent of the vote, to Fisher’s thirty-one percent. In a district where the Democrats have always been poor relations, David Bowes could only poll twenty-three percent of the vote.”

  “And so,” Brinkley said, “it’s hot dog time down in New Hampshire ... for the next two years, at least.” He and Chancellor grinned. A commercial came on. Johnny didn’t grin. He was thinking of tigers.

  The time between the Trimbull rally and election night had been busy for Johnny. His work with Chuck had continued, and Chuck continued to improve at a slow but steady pace. He had taken two summer courses, passed them both, and retained his sports eligibility. Now, with the football season just ending, it looked very much as if he would be named to the Gannett newspaper chain’s All New England team. The careful, almost ritualistic visits from the college scouts had already begun, but they would have to wait another year; the decision had already been made between Chuck and his father that he would spend a year at Stovington Prep, a good private school in Vermont. Johnny thought Stovington would probably be delirious at the news. The Vermont school regularly fielded great soccer teams and dismal football teams. They would probably give him a full scholarship and a gold key to the girl’s dorm in the bargain. Johnny felt that it had been the right decision. After it had been reached and the pressure on Chuck to take the SATs right away had eased off, his progress had taken another big jump.

  In late September, Johnny had gone up to Pownal for the weekend and after an entire Friday night of watching his father fidget and laugh uproariously at jokes on TV that weren’t particularly funny, he had asked Herb what the trouble was.

  “No trouble,” Herb said, smiling nervously and rubbing his hands together like an accountant who has discovered that the company he just invested his life savings with is bankrupt. “No trouble at all, what makes you think that, son?”

  “Well, what’s on your mind, then?”

  Herb stopped smiling, but he kept rubbing his hands together. “I don’t really know how to tell you, Johnny. I mean ...”

  “Is it Charlene?”
<
br />   “Well, yes. It is.”

  “You popped the question.”

  Herb looked at Johnny humbly. “How do you feel about coming into a stepmother at the age of twenty-nine, John?”

  Johnny grinned. “I feel fine about it. Congratulations. Dad.”

  Herb smiled, relieved. “Well, thanks. I was a little scared to tell you, I don’t mind admitting it. I know what you said when we talked about it before, but people sometimes feel one way when something’s maybe and another way when it’s gonna be. I loved your mom, Johnny. And I guess I always will.”

  “I know that, dad.”

  “But I’m alone and Charlene’s alone and ... well, I guess we can put each other to good use.”

  Johnny went over to his father and kissed him. “All the best. I know you’ll have it.”

  “You’re a good son, Johnny.” Herb took his handkerchief out of his back pocket and swiped at his eyes with it. “We thought we’d lost you. I did, anyway. Vera never lost hope. She always believed. Johnny, I ...”

  “Don’t, Daddy. It’s over.”

  “I have to,” he said. “It’s been in my gut like a stone for a year and a half now. I prayed for you to die, Johnny. My own son, and I prayed for God to take you.” He wiped his eyes again and put his handkerchief away. “Turned out God knew a smidge more than I did. Johnny ... would you stand up with me? At my wedding?”

  Johnny felt something inside that was almost but not quite like sorrow. “That would be my pleasure,” he said.

  “Thanks. I’m glad I’ve ... that I’ve said everything that’s on my mind. I feel better than I have in a long, long time.”

  “Have you set a date?”

  “As a matter of fact, we have. How does January 2 sound to you?”

  “Sounds good,” Johnny said. “You can count on me.”

  “We’re going to put both places on the market, I guess,” Herb said. “We’ve got our eye on a farm in Biddeford. Nice place. Twenty acres. Half of it woodlot. A new start.”

  “Yes. A new start, that’s good.”

  “You wouldn’t have any objections to us selling the home place?” Herb asked anxiously.

  “A little tug,” Johnny said. “That’s all.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I feel. A little tug.” He smiled. “Somewhere around the heart, that’s where mine is. What about you?”

  “About the same,” Johnny said.

  “How’s it going down there for you?”

  “Good.”

  “Your boy’s getting along?”

  “Amazin well,” Johnny said, using one of his father’s pet expressions and grinning.

  “How long do you think you’ll be there?”

  “Working with Chuck? I guess I’ll stick with it through the school year, if they want me. Working one-on-one has been a new kind of experience. I like it. And this has been a really good job. Atypically good, I’d say.”

  “What are you going to do after?”

  Johnny shook his head. “I don’t know yet. But I know one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m going out for a bottle. of champagne. We’re going to get bombed.”

  His father had stood up on that September evening and clapped him on the back. “Make it two,” he said.

  He still got the occasional letter from Sarah Hazlett. She and Walt were expecting their second child in April. Johnny wrote back his congratulations and his good wishes for Walt’s canvass. And he thought sometimes about his afternoon with Sarah, the long, slow afternoon. It wasn’t a memory he allowed himself to take out too often; he was afraid that constant exposure to the sunlight of recollection might cause it to wash out and fade, like the reddish-tinted proofs they used to give you of your graduation portraits.

  He had gone out a few times this fall, once with the older and newly divorced sister of the girl Chuck was seeing, but nothing had developed from any of those dates.

  Most of his spare time that fall he had spent in the company of Gregory Ammas Stillson.

  He had become a Stillsonphile. He kept three loose-leaf notebooks in his bureau under his socks and underwear and T-shirts. They were filled with notes, speculations, and Xerox copies of news items.

  Doing this had made him uneasy. At night, as he wrote around the pasted-up clippings with a fine-line Pilot pen, he sometimes felt like Arthur Bremmer or the Moore woman who had tried to shoot Jerry Ford. He knew that if Edgar Lancte, Fearless Minion of the Effa Bee Eye, could see him doing this, his phone, living room, and bathroom would be tapped in a jiffy. There would be an Acme Furniture van parked across the street, only instead of being full of furniture it would be loaded with cameras and mikes and God knew what else.

  He kept telling himself that he wasn’t Bremmer, that Stillson wasn’t an obsession, but that got harder to believe after the long afternoons at the UNH library, searching through old newspapers and magazines and feeding dimes into the photocopier. It got harder to believe on the nights he burned the midnight oil, writing out his thoughts and trying to make valid connections. It grew well-nigh impossible to believe on those graveyard-ditch three A.M.S when he woke up sweating from the recurring nightmare.

  The nightmare was nearly always the same, a naked replay of his handshake with Stillson at the Trimbull rally. The sudden blackness. The feeling of being in a tunnel filled with the glare of the onrushing headlight, a headlight bolted to some black engine of doom. The old man with the humble, frightened eyes administering an unthinkable oath of office. The nuances of feeling, coming and going like tight puffs of smoke. And a series of brief images, strung together in a flapping row like the plastic pennants over a used-car dealer’s lot. His mind whispered to him that these images were all related, that they told a picture-story of a titanic approaching doom, perhaps even the Armageddon of which Vera Smith had been so endlessly confident.

  But what were the images? What were they exactly? They were hazy, impossible to see except in vague outline, because there was always that puzzling blue filter between, the blue filter that was sometimes cut by those yellow markings like tiger stripes.

  The only clear image in these dream-replays came near the end: the screams of the dying, the smell of the dead. And a single tiger padding through miles of twisted metal, fused glass, and scorched earth. This tiger was always laughing, and it seemed to be carrying something in its mouth—something blue and yellow and dripping blood.

  There had been times in the fall when he thought that dream would send him mad. Ridiculous dream; the possibility it seemed to point to was impossible, after all. Best to drive it totally out of his mind.

  But because he couldn’t, he researched Gregory Stillson and tried to tell himself it was only a harmless hobby and not a dangerous obsession.

  Stillson had been born in Tulsa. His father had been an oilfield roughneck who drifted from job to job, working more often than some of his colleagues because of his tremendous size. His mother might once have been pretty, although there was only a hint of that in the two pictures that Johnny had been able to unearth. If she had been, the times and the man she had been married to had dimmed her prettiness quickly. The pictures showed little more than another dust-bowl face, a southeast United States depression woman who was wearing a faded print dress and holding a baby—Greg—in her scrawny arms, and squinting into the sun.

  His father had been a domineering man who didn’t think much of his son. As a child, Greg had been pallid and sickly. There was no evidence that his father had abused the boy either mentally or physically, but there was the suggestion that at the very least, Greg Stillson had lived in a disapproving shadow for the first nine years of his life. The one picture Johnny had of the father and son together was a happy one, however; it showed them together in the oil fields, the father’s arm slung around the son’s neck in a careless gesture of comradeship. But it gave Johnny a little chill all the same. Harry Stillson was dressed in working clothes, twill pants and a double-breasted khaki shirt, and his hard hat
was cocked jauntily back on his head.

  Greg had begun school in Tulsa, then had been switched to Oklahoma City when he was ten. The previous summer his father had been killed in an oil-derrick flameout. Mary Lou Stillson had gone to Okie City with her boy because it was where her mother lived, and where the war work was. It was 1942, and good times had come around again.

  Greg’s grades had been good until high school, and then he began to get into a series of scraps. Truancy, fighting, hustling snooker downtown, maybe hustling stolen goods uptown, although that had never been proved. In 1949, when he had been a high-school junior, he had pulled a two-day suspension for putting a cherry-bomb firecracker in a locker-room toilet.

  In all of these confrontations with authority, Mary Lou Stillson took her son’s part. The good times—at least for the likes of the Stillsons—had ended with the war work in 1945, and Mrs. Stillson seemed to think of it as a case of her and her boy against the rest of the world. Her mother had died, leaving her the small frame house and nothing else. She hustled drinks in a roughneck bar for a while, then waited table in an all-night beanery. And when her boy got in trouble, she went to bat for him, never checking (apparently) to see if his hands were dirty or clean.

  The pale sickly boy that his father had nicknamed Runt was gone by 1949. As Greg Stillson’s adolescence progressed, his father’s physical legacy came out. The boy shot up six inches and put on seventy pounds between thirteen and seventeen. He did not play organized school sports but somehow managed to acquire a Charles Atlas body-building gym and then a.set of weights. The Runt became a bad guy to mess with.

  Johnny guessed he must have come close to dropping out of school on dozens of occasions. He had probably avoided a bust out of sheer dumb luck. If only he had taken at least one serious bust, Johnny thought often. It would have ended all these stupid worries, because a convicted felon can’t aspire to high public office.

  Stillson had graduated—near the bottom of his class, it was true—in June, 1951. Grades notwithstanding, there was nothing wrong with his brains. His eye was on the main chance. He had a glib tongue and a winning manner. He worked briefly that summer as a gas jockey. Then, in August of that year, Greg Stillson had gotten Jesus at a tent-revival in Wild-wood Green. He quit his job at the 76 station and went into business as a rainmaker “through the power of Jesus Christ our Lord.”