Coming Transfiguration, and God's Psychic Miracles. The Upper Room, which still came monthly, now sometimes lay unopened for as long as three weeks at a stretch, but she read these others to tatters. She found a great many things in them that seemed to bear upon Johnny's accident, and she read these nuggets to her tired husband at supper in a high, piercing voice that trembled with exaltation. Herb found himself telling her more and more frequently to be quiet, and on occasion shouting at her to shut up that drivel and let him alone. When he did that, she would give him long- suffering, compassionate, and hurt glances-then slink upstairs to continue her studies. She began to correspond with these magazines, and to exchange letters with the contributors and with other pen-friends who had had similar experiences in their lives.
Most of her correspondents were good-hearted people like Vera herself, people who wanted to help and to ease the nearly insupportable burden of her pain. They sent prayers and prayer stones, they sent charms, they sent promises to include Johnny in their nightly devotions. Yet there were others who were nothing but con-men and women, and Herb was alarmed by his wife's increasing inability to recognize these. There was an offer to send her a sliver of the One True Cross of Our Lord for just $99. 98. An offer to send a vial of water drawn from the spring at Lourdes, which would almost certainly work a miracle when rubbed into Johnny's forehead. That one was $1. 10 plus postage. Cheaper (and more attractive to Vera) was a continuously playing cassette tape of the Twenty-third Psalm and the Lord's Prayer as spoken by southern evangelist Billy Humbair… Played at Johnny's bedside over a period of weeks it would almost certainly effect a marvelous recovery, according to the pamphlet.
As an added blessing (For A Short Time Only) an autographed picture of Billy Humbarr himself would be included.
Herb was forced to step in more and more frequently as her passion for these pseudoreligious geegaws grew. Sometimes he surreptitiously tore up her checks and simply readjusted the checkbook balance upward. But when the offer specified cash and nothing but, he simply had to put his foot down-and Vera began to draw away from him, to view him with distrust as a sinner and an unbeliever.
Sarah Bracknell kept school during her days. Her afternoons and evenings were not much different than they had been following the breakup with Dan; she was in a kind of limbo, waiting for something to happen. In Paris, the peace talks were stalled. Nixon had ordered the bombing of Hanoi continued in spite of rising domestic and foreign protests. At a press conference he produced pictures proving conclusively that American planes were surely not bombing North Vietnamese hospitals, but he went everywhere by Army helicopter. The investigation into the brutal rape-murder of a Castle Rock waitress was stalled following the release of a wandering sign painter who had once spent three years in the Augusta State Mental Hospital-against everyone's expectations, the sign painter's alibi had turned out to hold water. Janis Joplin was screaming the blues. Paris decreed (for the second year in a row) that hemlines would go down, but they didn't. Sarah was aware of all these things in a vague way, like voices from another room where some incomprehensible party went on and on.
The first snow fell-just a dusting-then a second dusting, and ten days before Christmas there was a storm that closed area schools for the day and she sat home, looking out at the snow as it filled Flagg Street. Her brief thing with Johnny-she could not even properly call it an affair-was part of another season now, and she could feel him beginning to slip away from her. It was a panicky feeling, as if a part of her was drowning. Drowning in days.
She read a good deal about head injuries, comas, and brain damage. None of it was very encouraging. She found out there was a girl in a small Maryland town who had been in a coma for six years; there had been a young man from Liverpool, England, who had been struck by a grappling hook while working on the docks and had remained in a coma for fourteen years before expiring. Little by little this brawny young dock-walloper had severed his connections with the world, wasting away, losing his hair, optic nerves degenerating into oatmeal behind his closed eyes, body gradually drawing up into a fetal position as his ligaments shortened. He had reversed time, had become a fetus again, swimming in the placental waters of coma as his brain degenerated. An autopsy following his death had shown that the folds and convolutions of his cerebrum had smoothed out, leaving the frontal and prefrontal lobes almost utterly smooth and blank.
Oh, Johnny, it just isn't fair, she thought, watching the snow fall outside, filling the world up with blank whiteness, burying fallen summer and red-gold autumn. It isn't fair, they should let you go to whatever there is to go to.
There was a letter from Herb Smith every ten days to two weeks-Vera had her pen-friends, and he had his. He wrote in a large, sprawling hand, using an old-fashioned fountain pen. “We are both fine and well. Waiting to see what will happen next as you must be. Yes, I have been doing some reading and I know what you are too kind and thoughtful to” say in your letter, Sarah. It looks bad. But of course we hope. I don't believe in God the way Vera does, but I do believe in him after my fashion, and wonder why he didn't take John outright if he was going to. Is there a reason? No one knows, I guess. We only hope.”
In another letter:
“I'm having to do most of the Xmas shopping this year as Vera has decided Xmas presents are a sinful custom. This is what I mean about her getting worse all the time. She's always thought it was a holy day instead of a holiday-if you see what I mean-and if she saw me calling it Xmas instead of Christmas I guess she'd “shoot me for a hoss-thief.” She was always saying how we should remember it is the birthday of Jesus Christ and not Santa Claus, but she never minded the shopping before. In fact, she used to like it. Now ragging against it is all she talks about, seems like. She gets a lot of these funny ideas from the people she writes back and forth to. Golly I do wish she'd stop and get back to normal. But otherwise we are both fine and well. Herb. “.
And a Christmas card that she had wept over a little:
“Best to you from both of us this holiday season, and if you'd like to come down and spend Xmas with a couple of “old fogies”, the spare bedroom is made up. Vera and I are both fine and well. Hope the New Year is better for all of us, and am sure it will be. Herb and Vera.”
She didn't go down to Pownal over the Christmas vacation, partly because of Vera's continued withdrawal into her own world-her progress into that world could be read pretty accurately between the lines of Herb's letters-and partly because their mutual tie now seemed so strange and distant to her. The still figure in the Bangor hospital bed had once been seen in close-up, but now she always seemed to be looking at him through the wrong end of memory's telescope; like the balloon man, he was far and wee. So it seemed best to keep her distance.
Perhaps Herb sensed it as well. His letters became less frequent as 1970 became 1971. In one of them he came as close as he could to saying it was time for her to go on with her life, and closed by saying that he doubted a girl as pretty as she was lacked for dates.
But she hadn't had any dates, hadn't wanted them. Gene Sedecki, the math teacher who had once treated her to an evening that had seemed at least a thousand years long, had begun asking her out indecently soon after Johnny's accident, and he was a hard man to discourage, but she believed that he was finally beginning to get the point. It should have happened sooner.
Occasionally other men would ask her, and one of them, a law student named Walter Hazlett, attracted her quite a bit. She met him at Anne Strafford's New Year's Eve party. She had meant only to make an appearance, but she had stayed quite a while, talking primarily to Hazlett. Saying no had been surprisingly hard, but she had, because she understood the source of attraction too well-Walt Hazlett was a tall man with an unruly shock of brown hair and a slanted, half-cynical smile, and he reminded her strongly of Johnny. That was no basis on which to get interested in a man.
Early in February she was asked out by the mechanic who worked on her car at the Cleaves Mills Chevron. Again she almost said yes, and then backed away. The man's name was Arnie Tremont. He was tall, olive-skinned, and handsome in a smiling, predatory way. He reminded her a bit of James Brolin, the second banana on that Dr. Welby program, and even more of a certain Delta Tau Delta named Dan.
Better to wait. Wait and see if something was going to happen.
But nothing did.
In that summer of 1971, Greg Stillson, sixteen years older and wiser than the Bible salesman who had kicked a dog to death in a deserted Iowa dooryard, sat in the back room of his newly incorporated insurance and real estate business in Ridgeway, New Hampshire. He hadn't aged much in the years between. There was a net of wrinkles around his eyes now, and his hair was longer (but still quite conservative). He was still a big man, and his swivel chair creaked when he moved.
He sat smoking a Pall Mall cigarette and looking at the man sprawled comfortably in the chair opposite. Greg was looking at this man the way a zoologist might look at an interesting new specimen.
“See anything green?” Sonny Elliman asked. Elliman topped six feet, five inches. He wore an ancient, grease-stiffened jeans jacket with the arms and buttons cut off. There was no shirt beneath. A Nazi iron cross, black dressed in white chrome, hung on his bare chest. The buckle of the belt running just below his considerable beer-belly was a great ivory skull. From beneath the pegged cuffs of his jeans poked the scuffed, square toes of a pair of Desert Driver boots. His hair was shoulder-length, tangled, and shining with an accumulation of greasy sweat and engine oil. From one earlobe there dangled a swastika earring, also black dressed in white chrome. He spun a coal-scuttle helmet on the tip of one blunt finger. Stitched on the back of his jacket was a leering red devil with a forked tongue. Above the devil was The Devil's Dozen. Below it: Sonny Elliman, Prez.
“No,” Greg Stillson said. “I don't see anything green, but I do see someone who looks suspiciously like a walking asshole.”
Elliman stiffened a little, then relaxed and laughed. In spite of the dirt, the almost palpable body odor, and Nazi regalia, his eyes, a dark green, were not without intelligence and even a sense of humor.
“Rank me to the dogs and back, man,” he said. “It's been done before. You got the power now.
“You recognize that, do you?”
“Sure. I left my guys back in the Hamptons, came here alone. Be it on my own head, man. “He smiled. “But if we should ever catch you in a similar position, you want to hope your kidneys are wearing combat boots.”
“I'll chance it,” Greg said. He measured Elliman. They were both big men. He reckoned Elliman had forty pounds on him, but a lot of it was beer muscle. “I could take you, Sonny.”
Elliman's face crinkled in amiable good humor again. “Maybe. Maybe not. But that's not the way we play it, man. All that good American John Wayne stuff. “He leaned forward, as if to impart a great secret. “Me personally, now, whenever I get me a piece of mom's apple pie, I make it my business to shit on it.”
“Foul mouth, Sonny,” Greg said mildly.
“What do you want with me?” Sonny asked. “Why don't you get down to it? You'll miss your Jaycee's meeting.”
“No,” Greg said, still serene. “The Jaycees meet Tuesday nights. We've got all the time in the world.”
Elliman made a disgusted blowing sound.
“Now what I thought,” Greg went on, “is that you'd want something from me. “He opened his desk drawer and from it took three plastic Baggies of marijuana. Mixed in with the weed were a number of gel capsules. “Found this in your sleeping bag,” Greg said. “Nasty, nasty, nasty, Sonny. Bad boy. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. Go directly to New Hampshire State Prison.”
“You didn't have any search warrant,” Elliman said. “Even a kiddy lawyer could get me off, and you know it.”
“I don't know any such thing,” Greg Stillson said. He leaned back in his swivel chair and cocked his loafers, bought across the state line at L. L. Bean's in Maine, up on his desk. “I'm a big man in this town, Sonny. I came into New Hampshire more or less on my uppers a few years back, and now I've got a nice operation here. I've helped the town council solve a couple of problems, including just what to do about all these kids the chief of police catches doing dope… oh, I don't mean bad-hats like you, Sonny, drifters like you we know what to do with when we catch them with a little treasure trove like that one right there on my desk… I mean the nice local kids. Nobody really wants to do anything to them at all, you know? I figured that out for them. Put them to work on community projects instead of sending them to jail, I said. It worked out real good. Now we've got the biggest head in the town area coaching Little League and doing a real good job at it.”
Elliman was looking bored. Greg suddenly brought his feet down with a crash, grabbed a vase with a UNH logo on the side, and threw it past Sonny Elliman's nose. It missed him by less than an inch, flew end over end across the room, and shattered against the file cabinets in the corner. For the first time Elliman looked startled. And for just a moment the face of this older, wiser Greg Still- son was the face of the younger man, the dog-bludgeoner.
“You want to listen when I talk,” he said softly. “Because what we're discussing here is your career over the next ten years or so. Now if you don't have any interest in making a career out of stamping LIVE FREE OR DIE on license plates, you want to listen up, Sonny. You want to pretend this is the first day of school again, Sonny. You want to get it all right the first time. Sonny.”
