Johnny, who thought the whole thing was strange, agreed.
The citizenship class's two instructors were calling the group together. “I'll see you later, Johnny,” Ngo said. “I've got to be tripping.”
“Going,” Johnny said.
“Yes, thanks.”
“Have a fine time, Ngo.”
“Oh, yes, I am sure I will. “And Ngo's eyes seemed to glint with a secret amusement. “I am sure it will be most entertaining, Johnny.”
The group, about forty in all, went over to the south side of the park to have their picnic lunch. Johnny went back to his own place and made himself eat one of his sandwiches. It tasted like a combination of paper and library paste.
A thick feeling of tension had begun to creep into his body.
By two-thirty the park was completely full; people were jammed together nearly shoulder to shoulder. The town police, augmented by a small contingent of State Police, had closed off the streets leading to the Trimbull town park. The resemblance to a rock concert was stronger than ever. Bluegrass music poured from the speakers, cheery and fast. Fat white clouds drifted across the innocent blue sky.
Suddenly, people started getting to their feet and craning their necks. It was a ripple effect passing through the crowd. Johnny got up too, wondering if Stillson was going to be early. Now he could hear the steady roar of motorcycle engines, the beat swelling to fill the summer afternoon as they grew closer. Johnny got an eyeful of sun-arrows reflecting off chrome, and a few moments later about ten cycles swung into the turnaround where the citizenship buses were parked. There was no car with them. Johnny guessed they were an advance guard.
His feeling of disquiet deepened. The riders were neat enough, dressed for the most part in clean, faded jeans and white shirts, but the bikes themselves, mostly Harleys and BSAs, had been customized almost beyond recognition: ape-hanger handlebars, raked chromium manifolds, and strange fairings abounded.
Their owners killed the engines, swung off, and moved away toward the bandstand in single file. Only one of them looked back. His eyes moved without haste over the big crowd; even from some distance away Johnny could see that the man's irises were a brilliant bottle green. He seemed to be counting the house. He glanced left, at four or five town cops leaning against the chain-link backstop of the Little League ballfield. He waved. One of the cops leaned over and spit. The act had a feeling of ceremony to it, and Johnny's disquiet deepened further. The man with the green eyes sauntered to the bandstand.
Above the disquiet, which now lay like an emotional floor to his other feelings, Johnny felt predominantly a wild mix of horror and hilarity. He had a dreamlike sense of having somehow entered one of those paintings where steam engines are coming out of brick fireplaces or clockfaces are lying limply over tree limbs. The cyclists looked like extras in an American-International bike movie who had all decided to Get Clean For Gene. Their fresh, faded jeans were snugged down over square-toed engineer boots, and on more than one pair Johnny could see chromed chains strapped down over the insteps. The chrome twinkled savagely in the sun. Their expressions were nearly all the same: a sort of vacuous good humor that seemed directed at the crowd. But beneath it there might have been simple contempt for the young mill workers, the summer students who had come over from UNH in Durham, and the factory workers who” were standing to give them a round of applause. Each of them wore a pair of political buttons. One of them showed a construction worker's yellow hard hat with a green ecology sticker on the front. The other bore the motto STILLSON'S GOT “EM IN A FULL-NELSON.
And sticking out of every right hip pocket was a sawed-off pool cue.
Johnny turned to the man next to him, who was with his wife and small child. “Are those things legal?” he asked.
“Who the hell cares,” the young guy responded. laughing. “They're just for show, anyway. “He was still applauding. “Go-get-em-Greg!” he yelled.
The motorcycle honor guard deployed themselves around the bandstand in a circle and stood at parade rest.
The applause tapered off, but conversation went on at a louder level. The crowd's mass mouth had received the meal's appetizer and had found it good.
Brownshirts, Johnny thought, sitting down. Brown-shirts is all they are.
Well, so what? Maybe that was even good. Americans had a rather low tolerance for the fascist approach-even rock-ribbed righties like Reagan didn't go for that stuff; nothing but a pure fact no matter how many tantrums the New Left might want to throw or how many songs Joan Baez wrote. Eight years before, the fascist tactics of the Chicago police had helped lose the election for Hubert Humphrey. Johnny didn't care how clean-cut these fellows were; if they were in the employ of a man running for the House of Representatives, then Stillson couldn't be more than a few paces from overstepping himself. If it wasn't quite so weird, it really would be funny.
All the same, he wished he hadn't come.
Just before three o'clock, the thud of a big bass drum impressed itself on the air, felt through the feet before actually heard by the ears. Other instruments gradually began to surround it, and all of them resolved into a marching band playing a Sousa tune. Small-town election hoopla, all of a summer's day.
The crowd came to its feet again and craned in the direction of the music. Soon the band came in sight-first a baton-twirler in a short skirt, high-stepping in white kidskin boots with pompons on them, then two majorettes, then two pimply boys with grimly set faces carrying a banner that proclaimed this was THE TRIMBULL HIGH SCHOOL MARCHING BAND and you had by. God better not forget it. Then the band itself, resplendent and sweaty in blinding white uniforms and brass buttons.
The crowd cleared a path for them, and then broke into a wave of applause as they began to march in place. Behind them was a white Ford van, and standing spread-legged on the roof, face sunburned and split into a mammoth grin under his cocked-back construction hat, was the candidate himself. He raised a battery-powered bullhorn and shouted into it with leather-lunged enthusiasm: “HI, Y'ALL!”
“Hi, Greg!” The crowd gave it right back.
Greg, Johnny thought a little hysterically. We're on first-name terms with the guy.
Stillson leaped down from the roof of the van, managing to make it look easy. He was dressed as Johnny had seen him on the news, jeans and a khaki shirt. He began to work the crowd on his way to the bandstand, shaking hands, touching other hands outstretched over the heads of those in the first ranks. The crowd lurched and swayed deliriously toward him, and Johnny felt an answering lurch in his own guts.
I'm not going to touch him. No way.
But in front of him the crowd suddenly parted a little and he stepped into the gap and suddenly found himself in the front row. He was close enough to the tuba player in the Trimbull High School Marching Band to have reached out and rapped his knuckles on the bell of his horn, had he wanted to.
Stillson moved quickly through the ranks of the band to shake hands on the other side, and Johnny lost complete sight of him except for the bobbing yellow helmet. He felt relief. That was all right, then. No harm, no foul. Like the pharisee in that famous story, he was going to pass by on the other side. Good. Wonderful. And when he made the podium, Johnny was going to gather up his stuff and steal away into the afternoon. Enough was enough.
The bikies had moved up on both sides of the path through the crowd to keep it from collapsing in on the candidate and drowning him in people. All the chunks of pool cue were still in the back pockets, but their owners looked tense and alert” for trouble. Johnny didn't know exactly what sort of trouble they expected-a Brownie Delight thrown in the candidate's face, maybe-but for the first time the bikies looked really interested.
Then something did happen, but Johnny was unable to tell exactly what it had been. A female hand reached for the bobbing yellow hard hat, maybe just to touch it for good luck, and one of Stillson's fellows moved in quickly. There was a yell of dismay and the woman's hand disappeared quickly. But it was all on the other side of the marching band.
The din from the crowd was enormous, and he thought again of the rock concerts he had been to. This was what it would be like if Paul McCartney or Elvis Presley decided to shake hands with the crowd.
They were screaming his name, chanting it: “GREG… GREG… GREG…”
The young guy who had billeted his family next to Johnny was holding his son up over his head so the kid could see. A young man with a large, puckered burn scar on one side of his face was waving a sign that read:
LIVE FREE OR DIE, HERE'S GREG IN YER EYE!
An achingly beautiful girl of maybe eighteen was waving a chunk of watermelon, and pink juice was running down her tanned arm. It was all mass confusion. Excitement was humming through the crowd like a series of high-voltage electrical cables.
And suddenly there was Greg Stillson, darting back through the band, back to Johnny's side of the crowd. He didn't pause, but still found time to give the tuba player a hearty clap on the back.
Later, Johnny mulled it over and tried to tell himself that there really hadn't been any chance or time to melt back into the crowd; he tried to tell himself that the crowd had practically heaved him into Stilison's arms. He tried to tell himself that Stillson had done everything but abduct his hand. None of it was true. There was time, because a fat woman in absurd, yellow damdiggers threw her arms around Stillson's neck and gave him a hearty kiss. which Stillson returned with a laugh and a “You bet I'll remember you, hon. “The fat woman screamed laughter.
Johnny felt the familiar compact coldness come over him, the trance feeling. The sensation that nothing mattered except to know. He even smiled a little, but it wasn't his smile. He put his hand out, and Stilison seized it in both of his and began to pump it up and down.
“Hey, man, hope you're gonna support us in…”
Then Stillson broke off. The way Eileen Magown had. The way Dr. James (just like the soul singer) Brown had. The way Roger Dussault had. His eyes went wide, and then they filled with-fright? No. It was terror in Still-son's eyes.
The moment was endless. Objective time was replaced by something else, a perfect cameo of time as they stared into each other's eyes. For Johnny it was like being in that dull chrome corridor again, only this time Stilison was with him and they were sharing… sharing
(everything)
For Johnny it had never been this strong, never. Everything came at him at once, crammed together and screaming like some terrible black freight train highballing through a narrow tunnel, a speeding engine with a single glaring headlamp mounted up front, and the headlamp was knowing everything, and its light impaled Johnny Smith like a bug on a pin. There was nowhere to run and perfect knowledge ran him down, plastered him as flat as a sheet of paper while that night-running train raced over him.
He felt like screaming, but had no taste for it, no voice for it.
The one image he never escaped
(as the blue filter began to creep in)
was Greg Stillson taking the oath of office. It was being administered by an old man with the humble, frightened eyes of a fieldmouse trapped by a terribly proficient, battlescarred
(tiger)
barnyard tomcat. One of Stillson's hands clapped over a Bible, one upraised. It was years in the future because Stillson had lost most of his hair. The old man was speaking, Stillson was following.
