The Dead Zone Read online

  “Here!” she said, stopping him. “The whip! The whip!”

  “Of course,” Johnny said comfortingly. He passed the woman in the ticket cage a dollar bill, and she pushed back two red tickets and two dimes with barely a glance up from her Photoplay.

  “What do you mean, ‘of course’? Why are you ‘of coursing’ me in that tone of voice?”

  He shrugged. His face was much too innocent.

  “It wasn’t what you said, John Smith. It was how you said it.”

  The ride had stopped. Passengers were getting off and streaming past them, mostly teenagers in blue melton CPO shirts or open parkas. Johnny led her up the wooden ramp and surrendered their tickets to the whip’s starter, who looked like the most bored sentient creature in the universe.

  “Nothing,” he said as the starter settled them into one of the little round shells and snapped the safety bar into place. “It’s just that these cars are on little circular tracks, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And the little circular tracks are embedded on a large circular dish that spins around and around, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, when this ride is going full steam, the little car we’re sitting in whips around on its little circular track and sometimes develops up to seven g, which is only five less than the astronauts get when they lift off from Cape Kennedy. And I knew this kid ...” Johnny was leaning solemnly over her now.

  “Oh, here comes one of your big lies,” Sarah said uneasily.

  “When this kid was five he fell down the front steps and put a tiny hairline fracture in his spine at the top of his neck. Then—ten years later—he went on the whip at Topsham Fair ... and ...” He shrugged and then patted her hand sympathetically. “But you’ll probably be okay, Sarah.”

  “Ohhh ... I want to get offfff ...”

  And the whip whirled them away, slamming the fair and the midway into a tilted blur of lights and faces, and she shrieked and laughed and began to pummel him.

  “Hairline fracture!” She shouted at him. “I’ll give you a hairline fracture when we get off this, you liar!”

  “Do you feel anything giving in your neck yet?” he inquired sweetly.

  “Oh, you liar!”

  They whirled around, faster and faster, and as they snapped past the ride starter for the—tenth? fifteenth?—time, he leaned over and kissed her, and the car whistled around on its track, pressing their lips together in something that was hot and exciting and skintight. Then the ride was slowing down, their car clacked around on its track more reluctantly, and finally came to a swaying, swinging stop.

  They got out, and Sarah squeezed his neck. “Hairline fracture, you ass!” she whispered.

  A fat lady in blue slacks and penny loafers was passing them. Johnny spoke to her, jerking a thumb back toward Sarah. “That girl is bothering me, ma’am. If you see a policeman would you tell him?”

  “You young people think you’re smart,” the fat lady said disdainfully. She waddled away toward the bingo tent, holding her purse more tightly under her arm. Sarah was giggling helplessly.

  “You’re impossible.”

  “I’ll come to a bad end,” Johnny agreed. “My mother always said so.”

  They walked up the midway side by side again, waiting for the world to stop making unstable motions before their eyes and under their feet.

  “She’s pretty religious, your mom, isn’t she?” Sarah asked.

  “She’s as Baptist as you can get,” Johnny agreed. “But she’s okay. She keeps it under control. She can’t resist passing me a few tracts when I’m at home, but that’s her thing. Daddy and I put up with it. I used to try to get on her case about it—I’d ask her who the heck was in Nod for Cain to go live with if his dad and mom were the first people on earth, stuff like that—but I decided it was sort of mean and quit it. Two years ago I thought Eugene McCarthy could save the world, and at least the Baptists don’t have Jesus running for president.”

  “Your father’s not religious?”

  Johnny laughed. “I don’t know about that, but he’s sure no Baptist.” After a moment’s thought he added, “Dad’s a carpenter,” as if that explained it. She smiled.

  “What would our mother think if she knew you were seeing a lapsed Catholic?”

  “Ask me to bring you home,” Johnny said promptly, “so she could slip you a few tracts.”

  She stopped, still holding his hand. “Would you like to bring me to your house?” she asked, looking at him closely.

  Johnny’s long, pleasant face became serious. “Yeah,” he said. “I’d like you to meet them ... and vice-versa.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t you know why?” he asked her gently, and suddenly her throat closed and her head throbbed as if she might cry and she squeezed his hand tightly.

  “Oh Johnny, I do like you.”

  “I like you even more than that,” he said seriously.

  “Take me on the Ferris wheel,” she demanded suddenly, smiling. No more talk like this until she had a chance to consider it, to think where it might be leading. “I want to go up high where we can see everything.”

  “Can I kiss you at the top?”

  “Twice, if you’re quick.”

  He allowed her to lead him to the ticket booth, where he surrendered another dollar bill. As he paid he told her, “When I was in high school, I knew this kid who worked at the fair, and he said most of the guys who put these rides together are dead drunk and they leave off all sorts of ...”

  “Go to hell,” she said merrily, “nobody lives forever.”

  “But everybody tries, you ever notice that?” he said, following her into one of the swaying gondolas.

  As a matter of fact he got to kiss her several times at the top, with the October wind ruffling their hair and the midway spread out below them like a glowing clockface in the dark.

  4

  After the Ferris wheel they did the carousel, even though he told her quite honestly that he felt like a horse’s ass. His legs were so long that he could have stood astride one of the plaster horses. She told him maliciously that she had known a girl in high school who had had a weak heart, except nobody knew she had a weak heart, and she had gotten on the carousel with her boyfriend and ...

  “Someday you’ll be sorry,” he told her with quiet sincerity. “A relationship based on lies is no good, Sarah.”

  She gave him a very moist raspberry.

  After the carousel came the mirror maze, a very good mirror maze as a matter of fact, it made her think of the one in Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, where the little-old-lady schoolteacher almost got lost forever. She could see Johnny in another part of it, fumbling around, waving to her. Dozens of Johnnies, dozens of Sarahs. They bypassed each other, flickered around non-Euclidian angles, and seemed to disappear. She made left turns, right turns, bumped her nose on panes of clear glass, and got giggling helplessly, partly in a nervous claustrophobic reaction. One of the mirrors turned her into a squat Tolkien dwarf. Another created the apotheosis of teenage gangliness with shins a quarter of a mile long.

  At last they escaped and he got them a couple of fried hot dogs and a Dixie cup filled with greasy french fries that tasted the way french fries hardly ever do once you’ve gotten past your fifteenth year.

  They passed a kooch joint. Three girls stood out front in sequined skirts and bras. They were shimmying to an old Jerry Lee Lewis tune while the barker hawked them through a microphone. “Come on over baby,” Jerry Lee blared, his piano boogying frankly across the sawdust-sprinkled arcades. “Come on over baby, baby got the bull by the horns ... we ain’t fakin ... whole lotta shakin goin on ...”

  “Club Playboy,” Johnny marveled, and laughed. “There used to be a place like this down at Harrison Beach. The barker used to swear the girls could take the glasses right off your nose with their hands tied behind their backs.”

  “It sounds like an interesting way to get a social disease,” Sar
ah said, and Johnny roared with laughter.

  Behind them the barker’s amplified voice grew hollow with distance, counterpointed by Jerry Lee’s pumping piano, music like some mad, dented hot rod that was too tough to die, rumbling out of the dead and silent fifties like an omen. “Come on, men, come on over, don’t be shy because these girls sure aren’t, not in the least little bit! It’s all on the inside ... your education isn’t complete until you’ve seen the Club Playboy show ...”

  “Don’t you want to go on back and finish your education?” she asked.

  He smiled. “I finished my basic course work on that subject some time ago. I guess I can wait a while to get my Ph.D.”

  She glanced at her watch. “Hey, it’s getting late, Johnny. And tomorrow’s a school day.”

  “Yeah. But at least it’s Friday.”

  She sighed, thinking of her fifth-period study hall and her seventh-period New Fiction class, both of them impossibly rowdy.

  They had worked their way back to the main part of the midway. The crowd was thinning. The Tilt-A-Whirl had shut down for the evening. Two workmen with unfiltered cigarettes jutting from the corners of their mouths were covering the Wild Mouse with a tarpaulin. The man in the Pitch-Til-U-Win was turning off his lights.

  “You doing anything Saturday?” he asked, suddenly diffident. “I know it’s short notice, but . . .”

  “I have plans,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  And she couldn’t bear his crestfallen expression, it was really too mean to tease him about that. “I’m doing something with you.”

  “You are? ... Oh, you are. Say, that’s good.” He grinned at her and she grinned back. The voice in her mind, which was sometimes as real to her as the voice of another human being, suddenly spoke up.

  You’re feeling good again, Sarah. Feeling happy. Isn’t it fine?

  “Yes, it is,” she said. She went up on tiptoe and kissed him quickly. She made herself go on before she could chicken out. “It gets pretty lonely down there in Veazie sometimes, you know. Maybe I could ... sort of spend the night with you.”

  He looked at her with warm thoughtfulness, and with a speculation that made her tingle deep inside. “Would that be what you want, Sarah?”

  She nodded. “Very much what I want.”

  “All right,” he said, and put an arm around her.

  “Are you sure?” Sarah asked a little shyly.

  “I’m just afraid you’ll change your mind.”

  “I won’t, Johnny.”

  He hugged her tighter against him. “Then it’s my lucky night.”

  They were passing the Wheel of Fortune as he said it, and Sarah would later remember that it was the only booth still open on that side of the midway for thirty yards in either direction. The man behind the counter had just finished sweeping the packed dirt inside for any spare dimes that might have fallen from the playing board during the night’s action. Probably his last chore before closing up, she thought. Behind him was his large spoked wheel, outlined by tiny electric bulbs. He must have heard Johnny’s remark, because he went into his pitch more or less automatically, his eyes still searching the dirt floor of his booth for the gleam of silver.

  “Hey-hey-hey, if you feel lucky, mister, spin the Wheel of Fortune, turn dimes into dollars. It’s all in the Wheel, try your luck, one thin dime sets this Wheel of Fortune in motion.”

  Johnny swung back toward the sound of his voice.

  “Johnny?”

  “I feel lucky, just like the man said.” He smiled down at her. “Unless you mind ... ?”

  “No, go ahead. Just don’t take too long.”

  He looked at her again in that frankly speculative way that made her feel a little weak, wondering how it would be with him. Her stomach did a slow roll-over that made her feel a bit nauseated with sudden sexual longing.

  “No, not long.” He looked at the pitchman. The midway behind them was almost completely empty now, and as the overcast had melted off above them it had turned chilly. The three of them were puffing white vapor as they breathed.

  “Try your luck, young man?”

  “Yes.”

  He had switched all his cash to his front pocket when they arrived at the fair, and now he pulled out the remains of his eight dollars. It came to a dollar eighty-five.

  The playing board was a strip of yellow plastic with numbers and odds painted on it in squares. It looked a bit like a roulette board, but Johnny saw immediately that the odds here would have turned a Las Vegas roulette player gray. A trip combination paid off at only two to one. There were two house numbers, zero and double zero. He pointed this out to the pitchman who only shrugged.

  “You want Vegas, go to Vegas. What can I say?”

  But Johnny’s good humor tonight was unshakable. Things had gotten off to a poor start with that mask, but it had been all upbeat from there. In fact, it was the best night he could remember in years, maybe the best night ever. He looked at Sarah. Her color was high, her eyes sparkling. “What do you say, Sarah?”

  She shook her head. “It’s Greek to me. What do you do?”

  “Play a number. Or red/black. Or odd/even. Or a ten-number series. They all pay differently.” He gazed at the pitchman, who gazed back blandly. “At least, they should.”

  “Play black,” she said. “It is sort of exciting, isn’t it?”

  “Black,” he said and dropped his odd dime on the black square.

  The pitchman stared at the single dime on his expanse of playboard and sighed. “Heavy plunger.” He turned to the Wheel.

  Johnny’s hand wandered absently to his forehead and touched it. “Wait,” he said abruptly. He pushed one of his quarters onto the square reading 11-20.

  “That it?”

  “Sure,” Johnny said.

  The pitchman gave the Wheel a twist and it spun inside its circle of lights, red and black merging. Johnny absently rubbed at his forehead. The Wheel began to slow and now they could hear the metronomelike tick-tock of the small wooden clapper sliding past the pins that divided the numbers. It reached 8, 9, seemed about to stop on 10, and slipped into the 11 slot with a final click and came to rest.

  “The lady loses, the gentleman wins,” the pitchman said.

  “You won, Johnny?”

  “Seems like it,” Johnny said as the pitchman added two quarters to his original one. Sarah gave a little squeal, barely noticing as the pitchman swept the dime away.

  “Told you, my lucky night,” Johnny said.

  “Twice is luck, once is just a fluke,” the pitchman remarked. “Hey-hey-hey.”

  “Go again, Johnny,” she said.

  “All right. Just as it is for me.”

  “Let it ride?”

  “Yes.”

  The pitchman spun the Wheel again, and as it slid around, Sarah murmured quietly to him, “Aren’t all these carnival wheels supposed to be fixed?”

  “They used to be. Now the state inspects them and they just rely on their outrageous odds system.”

  The Wheel had slowed to its final unwinding tick-tock. The pointer passed 10 and entered Johnny’s trip, still slowing.

  “Come on, come on!” Sarah cried. A couple of teenagers on their way out paused to watch.

  The wooden clapper, moving very slowly now, passed 16 and 17, then came to a stop on 18.

  “Gentleman wins again.” The pitchman added six more quarters to Johnny’s pile.

  “You’re rich!” Sarah gloated, and kissed him on the cheek.

  “You’re streaking, fella,” the pitchman agreed enthusiastically. “Nobody quits a hot stick. Hey-hey-hey.”

  “Should I go again?” Johnny asked her.

  “Why not?”

  “Yeah, go ahead, man,” one of the teenagers said. A button on his jacket bore the face of Jimi Hendrix. “That guy took me for four bucks tonight. I love to see him take a beatin.”

  “You too then,” Johnny told Sarah. He gave her the odd quarter off his stack of nine. After a moment�
�s hesitation she laid it down on 21. Single numbers paid off ten to one on a hit, the board announced.

  “You’re riding the middle trip, right, fella?”

  Johnny looked down at the eight quarters stacked on the board, and then he began to rub his forehead again, as if he felt the beginnings of a headache. Suddenly he swept the quarters off the board and jingled them in his two cupped hands.

  “No. Spin for the lady. I’ll watch this one.”

  She looked at him, puzzled. “Johnny?”

  He shrugged. “Just a feeling.”

  The pitchman rolled his eyes in a heaven-give-me-strength-to-bear-these-fools gesture and set his Wheel going again. It spun, slowed, and stopped. On double zero. “House numbah, house numbah,” the pitchman chanted, and Sarah’s quarter disappeared into his apron.

  “Is that fair, Johnny?” Sarah asked, hurt.

  “Zero and double zero only pay the house,” he said.

  “Then you were smart to take your money off the board.”

  “I guess I was.”

  “You want me to spin this Wheel or go for coffee?” the pitchman asked.

  “Spin it,” Johnny said, and put his quarters down in two stacks of four on the third trip.

  As the Wheel buzzed around in its cage of lights, Sarah asked Johnny, never taking her eyes from the spin, “How much can a place like this take in on one night?”

  The teenagers had been joined by a quartet of older people, two men and two women. A man with the build of a construction worker said, “Anywheres from five to seven hundred dollars.”

  The pitchman rolled his eyes again. “Oh, man, I wish you was right,” he said.

  “Hey, don’t give me that poor mouth,” the man who looked like a construction worker said. “I used to work this scam twenty years ago. Five to seven hundred a night, two grand on a Saturday, easy. And that’s running a straight Wheel.”