The Dead Zone Read online

  “No, thanks. We’re fine.”

  “Okay. I gotta cut out anyway.” But he paused a moment longer, his shy smile widening into a grin “I love to see that guy take a beatin.”

  He trotted off into the dark.

  Sarah’s small, white station wagon was the only car left in the dark parking lot; it crouched under a sodium light like a forlorn, forgotten pup. Johnny opened the passenger door for Sarah and she folded herself carefully in. He slipped in behind the wheel and started it up.

  “It’ll take a few minutes for the heater,” he said.

  “Never mind. I’m hot now.”

  He looked at her and saw the sweat breaking on her face. “Maybe we ought to trundle you up to the emergency room at Eastern Maine Medical,” he said. “If it’s salmonella, it could be serious.”

  “No, I’m okay. I just want to go home and go to sleep, I’m going to get up just long enough tomorrow morning to call in sick at school and then go back to sleep again.”

  “Don’t even bother to get up that long. I’ll call you in, Sarah.”

  She looked at him gratefully. “Would you?”

  “Sure.”

  They were headed back to the main highway now.

  “I’m sorry I can’t come back to your place with you,” Sarah said. “Really and truly.”

  “Not your fault.”

  “Sure it is. I ate the bad hot dog. Unlucky Sarah.”

  “I love you, Sarah,” Johnny said. So it was out, it couldn’t be called back, it hung between them in the moving car waiting for someone to do something about it.

  She did what she could. “Thank you, Johnny.”

  They drove on in a comfortable silence.

  Chapter 2

  1

  It was nearly midnight when Johnny turned the wagon into her driveway. Sarah was dozing.

  “Hey,” he said, cutting the motor and shaking her gently. “We’re here.”

  “Oh ... okay.” She sat up and drew her coat more tightly about her.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Better. My stomach’s sore and my back hurts, but better. Johnny, you take the car back to Cleaves with you.”

  “No, I better not,” he said. “Someone would see it parked in front of the apartment house all night. That kind of talk we don’t need.”

  “But I was going to come back with you...”

  Johnny smiled. “And that would have made it worth the risk, even if we had to walk three blocks. Besides, I want you to have the car in case you change your mind about the emergency room.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You might. Can I come in and call a cab?”

  “You sure can.”

  They went in and Sarah turned on the lights before being attacked by a fresh bout of the shivers.

  “The phone’s in the living room. I’m going to lie down and cover up with a quilt.”

  The living room was small and functional, saved from a barracks flavor only by the splashy curtains—flowers in a psychedelic pattern and color—and a series of posters along one wall: Dylan at Forest Hills, Baez at Carnegie Hall, Jefferson Airplane at Berkeley, the Byrds in Cleveland.

  Sarah lay down on the couch and pulled a quilt up to her chin. Johnny looked at her with real concern. Her face was paper-white except for the dark circles under her eyes. She looked about as sick as a person can get.

  “Maybe I ought to spend the night here,” he said. “Just in case something happens, like ...”

  “Like a hairline fracture at the top of my spine?” She looked at him with rueful humor.

  “Well, you know. Whatever.”

  The ominous rumbling in her nether regions decided her. She had fully intended to finish this night by sleeping with John Smith. It wasn’t going to work out that way. But that didn’t mean she had to end the evening with him in attendance while she threw up, dashed for the w.c., and chugged most of a bottle of Pepto-Bismol.

  “I’ll be okay,” she said. “It was just a bad carnival hot dog, Johnny. You could have just as easily gotten it yourself. Give me a call during your free period tomorrow.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Okay, kid.” He picked up the phone with no further argument and called his cab. She closed her eyes, lulled and comforted by the sound of his voice. One of the things she liked most about him was that he would always really try to do the right thing, the best thing, with no self-serving bullshit. That was good. She was too tired and feeling too low to play little social games.

  “The deed’s done,” he said, hanging up. “They’ll have a guy over in five minutes.”

  “At least you’ve got cab fare,” she said, smiling.

  “And I plan to tip handsomely,” he replied, doing a passable W. C. Fields.

  He came over to the couch, sat beside her, held her hand.

  “Johnny, how did you do it?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “The Wheel. How could you do that?”

  “It was a streak, that’s all,” he said, looking a little uncomfortable. “Everybody has a streak once in a while. Like at the racetrack or playing blackjack or just matching dimes.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “I don’t think everybody does have a streak once in a while. It was almost uncanny. It ... scared me a little.”

  “Did it?”

  “Yes.”

  Johnny sighed. “Once in a while I get feelings, that’s all. For as long as I can remember, since I was just a little kid. And I’ve always been good at finding things people have lost. Like that little Lisa Schumann at school. You know the girl I mean?”

  “Little, sad, mousy Lisa?” She smiled. “I know her. She’s wandering in clouds of perplexity through my business grammar course.”

  “She lost her class ring,” Johnny said, “and came to me in tears about it. I asked her if she’d checked the back comers of the top shelf in her locker. Just a guess. But it was there.”

  “And you’ve always been able to do that?”

  He laughed and shook his head. “Hardly ever.” The smile slipped a little. “But it was strong tonight, Sarah. I had that Wheel ...” He closed his fists softly and looked at them, now frowning. “I had it right here. And it had the strangest goddam associations for me.”

  “Like what?”

  “Rubber,” he said slowly. “Burning rubber. And cold. And ice. Black ice. Those things were in the back of my mind. God knows why. And a bad feeling. Like to beware.”

  She looked at him closely, saying nothing, and his face slowly cleared.

  “But it’s gone now, whatever it was. Nothing probably.”

  “It was five hundred dollars worth of good luck, anyway,” she said. Johnny laughed and nodded. He didn’t talk anymore and she drowsed, glad to have him there. She came back to wakefulness when headlights from outside splashed across the wall. His cab.

  “I’ll call,” he said, and kissed her face gently. “You sure you don’t want me to hang around?”

  Suddenly she did, but she shook her head.

  “Call me,” she said.

  “Period three,” he promised. He went to the door.

  “Johnny?”

  He turned back.

  “I love you, Johnny,” she said, and his face lit up like a lamp.

  He blew a kiss. “Feel better,” he said, “and we’ll talk.”

  She nodded, but it was four-and-a-half years before she talked to Johnny Smith again.

  2

  “Do you mind if I sit up front?” Johnny asked the cab driver.

  “Nope. Just don’t bump your knee on the meter. It’s delicate.”

  Johnny slid his long legs under the meter with some effort and slammed the door. The cabbie, a middle-aged man with a bald head and a paunch, dropped his flag and the cab cruised up Flagg Street.

  “Where to?”

  “Cleaves Mills,” Johnny said. “Main Street. I’ll show you where.”

  “I go
t to ask you for fare-and-a-half,” the cabbie said. “I don’t like to, but I got to come back empty from there.”

  Johnny’s hand closed absently over the lump of bills in his pants pocket. He tried to remember if he had ever had so much money on him at one time before. Once. He had bought a two-year-old Chevy for twelve hundred dollars. On a whim, he had asked for cash at the savings bank, just to see what all that cash looked like. It hadn’t been all that wonderful, but the surprise on the car dealer’s face when Johnny pumped twelve one-hundred-dollar bills into his hand had been wonderful to behold. But this lump of money didn’t make him feel good at all, just vaguely uncomfortable, and his mother’s axiom recurred to him: Found money brings bad luck.

  “Fare-and-a-half’s okay,” he told the cabbie.

  “Just as long’s we understand each other,” the cabbie said more expansively. “I got over so quick on account of I had a call at the Riverside and nobody there would own up when I got over there.”

  “That so?” Johnny asked without much interest. Dark houses flashed by outside. He had won five hundred dollars, and nothing remotely like it had ever happened to him before. That phantom smell of rubber burning ... the sense of partially reliving something that had happened to him when he was very small ... and that feeling of bad luck coming to balance off the good was still with him.

  “Yeah, these drunks call and then they change their minds,” the cabbie said. “Damn drunks, I hate em. They call and decide what the hell, they’ll have a few more beers. Or they drink up the fare while they’re waitin and when I come in and yell ‘Who wants the cab?’ they don’t want to own up.”

  “Yeah,” Johnny said. On their left the Penobscot River flowed by, dark and oily. Then Sarah getting sick and saying she loved him on top of everything else. Probably just caught her in a weak moment, but God! if she had meant it! He had been gone on her almost since the first date. That was the luck of the evening, not beating that Wheel. But it was the Wheel his mind kept coming back to, worrying at it. In the dark he could still see it revolving, and in his ears he could hear the slowing ticka-ticka-ticka of the marker bumping over the pins like something heard in an uneasy dream. Found money brings bad luck.

  The cabbie turned off onto Route 6, now well-launched into his own monologue.

  “So I says, ‘Blow it outcha you-know-where.’ I mean, the kid is a smart-aleck, right? I don’t have to take a load of horseshit like that from anyone, including my own boy. I been drivin this cab twenty-six years. I been held up six times. I been in fender-benders without number, although I never had a major crash, for which I thank Mary Mother of Jesus and Saint Christopher and God the Father Almighty, know what I mean? And every week, no matter how thin that week was, I put five bucks away for his college. Ever since he was nothin but a pipsqueak suckin a bottle. And what for? So he can come home one fine day and tell me the president of the United States is a pig. Hot damn! The kid probably thinks I’m a pig, although he knows if he ever said it I’d rearrange his teeth for him. So that’s today’s young generation for you. So I says, ‘Blow it outcha you-know-where.’ ”

  “Yeah,” Johnny said. Now woods were floating by. Carson’s Bog was on the left. They were seven miles from Cleaves Mills, give or take. The meter kicked over another dime.

  One thin dime, one tenth of a dollar. Hey-hey-hey.

  “What’s your game, might I ask?” the cabbie said.

  “I teach high school in Cleaves.”

  “Oh, yeah? So you know what I mean. What the hell’s wrong with these kids, anyway?”

  Well, they ate a bad hot dog called Vietnam and it gave them ptomaine. A guy named Lyndon Johnson sold it to them. So they went to this other guy, see, and they said, “Jesus, mister, I’m sick as hell.” And this other guy, his name was Nixon, he said, “I know how to fix that. Have a few more hot dogs.” And that’s what’s wrong with the youth of America.

  “I don’t know,” Johnny said.

  “You plan all your life and you do what you can,” the cabbie said, and now there was honest bewilderment in his voice, a bewilderment which would not last much longer because the cabbie was embarked upon the last minute of his life. And Johnny, who didn’t know that, felt a real pity for the man, a sympathy for his inability to understand.

  Come on over baby, whole lotta shakin goin on.

  “You never want nothing but the best, and the kid comes home with hair down to his asshole and says the president of the United States is a pig. A pig! Sheeyit, I don’t ...”

  “Look out!” Johnny yelled.

  The cabbie had half-turned to face him, his pudgy American Legionnaire’s face earnest and angry and miserable in the dashlights and in the sudden glow of oncoming headlights. Now he snapped forward again, but too late.

  “Jeeesus ...”

  There were two cars, one on each side of the white line. They had been dragging, side by side, coming up over the hill, a Mustang and a Dodge Charger. Johnny could hear the rewed-up whine of their engines. The Charger was boring straight down at them. It never tried to get out of the way and the cabbie froze at the wheel.

  “Jeeeeee ...”

  Johnny was barely aware of the Mustang flashing by on their left. Then the cab and the Charger met head-on and Johnny felt himself being lifted up and out. There was no pain, although he was marginally aware that his thighs had connected with the taximeter hard enough to rip it out of its frame.

  There was the sound of smashing glass. A huge gout of flame stroked its way up into the night. Johnny’s head collided with the cab’s windshield and knocked it out. Reality began to go down a hole. Pain, faint and far away, in his shoulders and arms as the rest of him followed his head through the jagged windshield. He was flying. Hying into the October night.

  Dim flashing thought: Am I dying? Is this going to kill me?

  Interior voice answering: Yes, this is probably it.

  Flying. October stars flung across the night. Racketing boom of exploding gasoline. An orange glow. Then darkness.

  His trip through the void ended with a hard thump and a splash. Cold wetness as he went into Carson’s Bog, twenty-five feet from where the Charger and the cab, welded together, pushed a pyre of flame into the night sky.

  Darkness.

  Fading.

  Until all that was left seemed to be a giant red-and-black wheel revolving in such emptiness as there may be between the stars, try your luck, first time fluky, second time lucky, hey-hey-hey. The wheel revolved up and down, red and black, the marker ticking past the pins, and he strained to see if it was going to come up double zero, house number, house spin, everybody loses but the house. He strained to see but the wheel was gone. There was only blackness and that universal emptiness, negatory, good buddy, el zilcho. Cold limbo.

  Johnny Smith stayed there a long, long time.

  Chapter 3

  1

  At some time a little past two A.M, on the morning of October 30, 1970, the telephone began to ring in the downstairs hall of a small house about a hundred and fifty miles south of Cleaves Mills.

  Herb Smith sat up in bed, disoriented, dragged halfway across the threshold of sleep and left in its doorway, groggy and disoriented.

  Vera’s voice beside him, muffled by the pillow. “Phone.”

  “Yeah,” he said, and swung out of bed. He was a big, broad-shouldered man in his late forties, losing his hair, now dressed in blue pajama bottoms. He went out into the upstairs hall and turned on the light. Down below, the phone shrilled away.

  He went down to what Vera liked to call “the phone nook.” It consisted of the phone and a strange little desk-table that she had gotten with Green Stamps about three years ago. Herb had refused from the first to slide his two-hundred-and-forty-pound bulk into it. When he talked on the phone, he stood up. The drawer of the desk-table was full of Upper Rooms, Reader’s Digests, and Fate magazine.

  Herb reached for the phone, then let it ring again.

  A phone call in the middle of the nig
ht usually meant one of three things: an old friend had gotten totally shitfaced and had decided you’d be glad to hear from him even at two in the morning; a wrong number; bad news.

  Hoping for the middle choice, Herb picked up the phone. “Hello?”

  A crisp male voice said: “Is this the Herbert Smith residence?”

  “Yes?”

  “To whom am I speaking, please?”

  “I’m Herb Smith. What ...”

  “Will you hold for a moment?”

  “Yes, but who ...”

  Too late. There was a faint clunk in his ear, as if the party on the other end had dropped one of his shoes. He had been put on hold. Of the many things he disliked about the telephone—bad connections, kid pranksters who wanted to know if you had Prince Albert in a can, operators who sounded like computers, and smoothies who wanted you to buy magazine subscriptions—the thing he disliked the most was being on hold. It was one of those insidious things that had crept into modem life almost unnoticed over the last ten years or so. Once upon a time the fellow on the other end would simply have said, “Hold the phone, willya?” and set it down. At least in those days you were able to hear faraway conversations, a barking dog, a radio, a crying baby. Being on hold was a totally different proposition. The line was darkly, smoothly blank. You were nowhere. Why didn’t they just say, “Will you hold on while I bury you alive for a little while?”

  He realized he was just a tiny bit scared.

  “Herbert?”

  He turned around, the phone to his ear. Vera was at the top of the stairs in her faded brown bathrobe, hair up in curlers, some sort of cream hardened to a castlike consistency on her cheeks and forehead.

  “Who is it?”

  “I don’t know yet. They’ve got me on hold.”

  “On hold? At quarter past two in the morning?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s not Johnny, is it? Nothing’s happened to Johnny?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, struggling to keep his voice from rising. Somebody calls you at two in the morning, puts you on hold, you count your relatives and inventory their condition. You make lists of old aunts. You tot up the ailments of grandparents, if you still have them. You wonder if the ticker of one of your friends just stopped ticking. And you try not to think that you have one son you love very much, or about How these calls always seem to come at two in the morning, or how all of a sudden your calves are getting stiff and heavy with tension ...