by Stephen King
He’s crazy! Sonny realized, with dawning delight at the discovery. He’s got two public service awards on his wall, and pictures of him talking to the Rotarians and the Lions, and he’s vice president of this dipshit town’s Jaycees, and next year he’ll be president, and he’s just as crazy as a fucking bedbug!
“Okay,” he said. “You got my attention.”
“I have had what you might call a checkered career,” Greg told him. “I’ve been up, but I’ve also been down. I’ve had a few scrapes with the law. What I’m trying to say, Sonny, is that I don’t have any set feelings about you. Not like the other locals. They read in the Union-Leader about what you and your bikie friends are doing over in the Hamptons this summer and they’d like,to castrate you with a rusty Gillette razor blade.”
“That’s not the Devil’s Dozen,” Sonny said. “We came down on a run from upstate New York to get some beachtime, man. We’re on vacation. We’re not into trashing a bunch of honky-tonk bars. There’s a bunch of Hell’s Angels tearing ass, and a chapter of the Black Riders from New Jersey, but you know who it is mostly? A bunch of college kids.” Sonny’s lip curled. “But the papers don’t like to report that, do they? They’d rather lay the rap on us than on Susie and Jim.”
“You’re so much more colorful,” Greg said mildly. “And William Loeb over at the Union-Leader doesn’t like bike clubs.”
“That bald-headed creep,” Sonny muttered.
Greg opened his desk drawer and pulled out a flat pint of Leader’s bourbon. “I’ll drink to that,” he said. He cracked the seal and drank half the pint at a draught. He blew out a great breath, his eyes watering, and held the pint across the desk. “You?”
Sonny polished the pint off. Warm fire bellowed up from his stomach to his throat.
“Light me up, man,” he gasped.
Greg threw back his head and laughed. “We’ll get along, Sonny. I have a feeling we’ll get along.”
“What do you want?” Sonny asked again, holding the empty pint.
“Nothing ... not now. But I have a feeling ...” Greg’s eyes became far away, almost puzzled. “I told you I’m a big man in Ridgeway. I’m going to run for mayor next time the office comes up, and I’ll win. But that’s ...”
“Just the beginning?” Sonny prompted.
“It’s a start, anyway.” That puzzled expression was still there. “I get things done. People know it. I’m good at what I do. I feel like ... there’s a lot ahead of me. Sky’s the limit. But I’m not ... quite sure ... what I mean. You know?”
Sonny only shrugged.
The puzzled expression faded. “But there’s a story, Sonny. A story about a mouse who took a thorn out of a lion’s paw. He did it to repay the lion for not eating him a few years before. You know that story?”
“I might have heard it when I was a kid.”
Greg nodded. “Well, it’s a few years before ... whatever it is, Sonny.” He shoved the plastic Baggies across the desk. “I’m not going to eat you. I could if I wanted to, you know. A kiddie lawyer couldn’t get you off. In this town, with the riots going on in Hampton less than twenty miles away, Clarence Fucking Darrow couldn’t get you off in Ridgeway. These good people would love to see you go up.”
Elliman didn’t reply, but he suspected Greg was right. There was nothing heavy in his dope stash—two Brown Bombers was the heaviest—but the collective parents of good old Susie and Jim would be glad to see him breaking rocks in Portsmouth, with his hair cut off his head.
“I’m not going to eat you,” Greg repeated. “I hope you’ll remember that in a few years if I get a thorn in my paw ... or maybe if I have a job opportunity for you. Keep it in mind?”
Gratitude was not in Sonny Elliman’s limited catalogue of human feelings, but interest and curiosity were. He felt both ways about this man Stillson. That craziness in his eyes hinted at many things, but boredom was not one of them.
“Who knows where we’ll all be in a few years?” he murmured. “We could all be dead, man.”
“Just keep me in mind. That’s all I’m asking.”
Sonny looked at the broken shards of vase. “I’ll keep you in mind,” he said.
4
1971 passed. The New Hampshire beach riots blew over, and the grumblings of the beachfront entrepreneurs were muted by the increased balances in their bankbooks. An obscure fellow named George McGovern declared for the presidency comically early. Anyone who followed politics knew that the nominee from the Democratic party in 1972 was going to be Edmund Muskie, and there were those who felt he might just wrestle the Troll of San Clemente off his feet and pin him to the mat.
In early June, just before school let out for the summer, Sarah met the young law student again. She was in Day’s appliance store, shopping for a toaster, and he had been looking for a gift for his parents’ wedding anniversary. He asked her if she’d like to go to the movies with him—the new Clint Eastwood, Dirty Harry, was in town. Sarah went. And the two of them had a good time. Walter Hazlett had grown a beard, and he no longer reminded her so much of Johnny. In fact, it had become increasingly difficult for her to remember just what Johnny did look like. His face only came clear in her dreams, dreams where he stood in front of the Wheel of Fortune, watching it spin, his face cold and his blue eyes darkened to that perplexing, and a little fearsome, dark violet shade, watching the Wheel as if it were his own private game preserve.
She and Walt began to see a lot of each other. He was easy to get along with. He made no demands—or, if he did, they were of such a gradually increasing nature as to be unnoticeable. In October he asked her if he could buy her a small diamond. Sarah asked him if she could have the weekend to think it over. That Saturday night she had gone to the Eastern Maine Medical Center, had gotten a special red-bordered pass at the desk, and had gone up to intensive care. She sat beside Johnny’s bed for an hour. Outside, the fall wind howled in the dark, promising cold, promising snow, promising a season of death. It lacked sixteen days of a year since the fair, the Wheel, and the head-on collision near the Bog.
She sat and listened to the wind and looked at Johnny. The bandages were gone. The scar began on his forehead an inch above his right eyebrow and twisted up under the hairline. His hair had gone white, making her think of that fictional detective in the 87th Precinct stories—Cotton Hawes, his name was. To Sarah’s eyes there seemed to have been no degeneration in him, except for the inevitable weight loss. He was simply a young man she barely knew, fast asleep.
She bent over him and kissed his mouth softly, as if the old fairy tale could be reversed and her kiss could wake him. But Johnny only slept.
She left, went back to her apartment in Veazie, lay down on her bed and cried as the wind walked the dark world outside, throwing its catch of yellow and red leaves before it. On Monday she told Walt that if he really did want to buy her a diamond—a small one, mind—she would be happy and proud to wear it.
That was Sarah Bracknell’s 1971.
In early 1972, Edmund Muskie burst into tears during an impassioned speech outside the offices of the man Sonny Elliman had referred to as “that bald-headed creep.” George McGovern upset the primary, and Loeb announced gleefully in his paper that the people of New Hampshire didn’t like crybabies. In July, McGovern was nominated. In that same month Sarah Bracknell became Sarah Hazlett. She and Walt were married in the First Methodist Church of Bangor.
Less than two miles away, Johnny Smith slept on. And the thought of him came to Sarah, suddenly and horribly, as Walt kissed her in front of the dearly beloved there assembled for the nuptials—Johnny, she thought, and saw him as she had when the lights went on, half Jekyll and half snarling Hyde. She stiffened in Walt’s arms for a moment, and then it was gone. Memory, vision, whatever it had been, it was gone.
After long thought and discussion with Walt, she had invited Johnny’s folks to the wedding. Herb had come alone. At the reception, she asked him if Vera was all right.
He glanced around, saw th
ey were alone for the moment, and rapidly downed the remainder of his Scotch and soda. He had aged five years in the last eighteen months, she thought. His hair was thinning. The lines on his face were deeper. He was wearing glasses in the careful and self-conscious way of people who have just started wearing them, and behind the mild corrective lenses his eyes were wary and hurt.
“No ... she really isn’t, Sarah. The truth is, she’s up in Vermont. On a farm. Waiting for the end of the world.”
“What?”
Herb told her that six months ago Vera had begun to correspond with a group of about ten people who called themselves The American Society of the Last Times. They were led by Mr. and Mrs. Harry L. Stonkers from Racine, Wisconsin. Mr. and Mrs. Stonkers claimed to have been picked up by a flying saucer while they were on a camping trip. They had been taken away to heaven, which was not out in the constellation Orion but on an earth-type planet that circled Arcturus. There they had communed with the society of angels and had seen Paradise. The Stonkerses had been informed that the Last Times were at hand. They were given the power of telepathy and had been sent back to Earth to gather a few faithful together—for the first shuttle to heaven, as it were. And so the ten of them had gotten together, bought a farm north of St. Johnsbury, and had been settled in there for about seven weeks, waiting for the saucer to come and pick them up.
“It sounds. : .” Sarah began, and then closed her mouth.
“I know how it sounds,” Herb said. “It sounds crazy. The place cost them nine thousand dollars. It’s nothing but a crashed-in farmhouse with two acres of scrubland. Vera’s share was seven hundred dollars—all she could put up. There was no way I could stop her ... short of committal.” He paused, then smiled. “But this is nothing to talk about at your wedding party, Sarah. You and your fellow are going to have all the best. I know you will.”
Sarah smiled back as best she could. “Thank you, Herb. Will you ... I mean, do you think she’ll ...”
“Come back? Oh yes. If the world doesn’t end by winter, I think she’ll be back.”
“Oh, I only wish you the best,” she said. and embraced him.
5
The farm in Vermont had no furnace, and when the saucer had still not arrived by late October, Vera came home. The saucer had not come, she said, because they were not yet perfect—they had not burned away the nonessential and sinful dross of their lives. But she was uplifted and spiritually exalted. She had had a sign in a dream. She was perhaps not meant to go to heaven in a saucer. She felt more and more strongly that she would be needed to guide her boy, show him the proper way. when he came out of his trance.
Herb took her in, loved her as best he could—and life went on. Johnny had been in his coma for two years.
6
Nixon was reinaugurated. The American boys started coming home from Vietnam. Walter Hazlett took his bar exam and was invited to take it again at a later date. Sarah Hazlett kept school while he crammed for his tests. The students who had been silly, gawky freshmen the year she started teaching were now juniors. Flat-chested girls had become bosomy. Shrimps who hadn’t been able to find their way around the building were now playing varsity basketball.
The second Arab-Israeli war came and went. The oil boycott came and went. Bruisingly high gasoline prices came and did not go. Vera Smith became convinced that Christ would return from below the earth at the South Pole. This intelligence was based on a new pamphlet (seventeen pages, price $4.50) entitled God’s Tropical Underground. The startling hypothesis of the pamphleteer was that heaven was actually below our very feet, and that the easiest point of ingress was the South Pole. One of the sections of the pamphlet was “Psychic Experiences of the South Pole Explorers.”
Herb pointed out to her that less than a year before she had been convinced that heaven was somewhere Out There, most probably circling Arcturus. “I’d surely be more apt to believe that than this crazy South Pole stuff,” he told her. “After all, the Bible says heaven’s in the sky. That tropical place below the ground is supposed to be ...”
“Stop it!” she said sharply, lips pressed into thin white lines. “No need to mock what you don’t understand.”
“I wasn’t mocking, Vera,” he said quietly.
“God knows why the unbeliever mocks and the heathen rages,” she said. That blank light was in her eyes. They were sitting at the kitchen table, Herb with an old plumbing J-bolt in front of him, Vera with a stack of old National Geographics which she had been gleaning for South Pole pictures and stories. Outside, restless clouds fled west to east and the leaves showered off the trees. It was early October again, and October always seemed to be her worst month. It was the month when that blank light came more frequently to her eyes and stayed longer. And it was always in October that his thoughts turned treacherously to leaving them both. His possibly certifiable wife and his sleeping son, who was probably already dead by any practical definition. Just now he had been turning the J-bolt over in his hands and looking out the window at that restless sky and thinking, I could pack up. Just throw my things into the back of the pickup and go. Florida, maybe. Nebraska. California. A good carpenter can make good money any damn place. Just get up and go.
But he knew he wouldn’t. It was just that October was his month to think about running away, as it seemed to be Vera’s month to discover some new pipeline to Jesus and the eventual salvation of the only child she had been able to nurture in her substandard womb.
Now he reached across the table and took her hand, which was thin and terribly bony—an old woman’s hand. She looked up, surprised. “I love you very much, Vera,” he said.
She smiled back, and for a glimmering moment she was a great deal like the girl he had courted and won, the girl who had goosed him with a hairbrush on their wedding night. It was a gentle smile, her eyes briefly clear and warm and loving in return. Outside, the sun came out from behind a fat cloud, dived behind another one, and came out again, sending great shutter-shadows fleeing across their back field.
“I know you do, Herbert. And I love you.”
He put his other hand over hers and clasped it.
“Vera,” he said.
“Yes?” Her eyes were so clear ... suddenly she was with him, totally with him, and it made him realize how dreadfully far apart they had grown over the last three years.
“Vera, if he never does wake up ... God forbid, but if he doesn’t ... we’ll still have each other, won’t we? I mean ...”
She jerked her hand away. His two hands, which had been holding it lightly, clapped on nothing.
“Don’t you ever say that. Don’t you ever say that Johnny isn’t going to wake up.”
“All I meant was that we ...”
“Of course he’s going to wake up,” she said, looking out the window to the field, where the shadows still crossed and crossed. “It’s God’s plan for him. Oh yes. Don’t you think I know? I know, believe me. God has great things in store for my Johnny. I have heard him in my heart.”
“Yes, Vera,” he said. “Okay.”
Her fingers groped for the National Geographics, found them, and began to turn the pages again.
“I know,” she said in a childish, petulant voice.
“Okay,” he said quietly.
She looked at her magazines. Herb propped his chin in his palms and looked out at the sunshine and shadow and thought how soon winter came after golden. treacherous October. He wished Johnny would die. He had loved the boy from the very first. He had seen the wonder on his tiny face when Herb had brought a tiny tree frog to the boy’s carriage and had put the small living thing in the boy’s hands. He had taught Johnny how to fish and skate and shoot. He had sat up with him all night during his terrible bout with the flu in 1951, when the boy’s temperature had crested at a giddy one hundred and five degrees. He had hidden tears in his hand when Johnny graduated salutatorian of his high school class and had made his speech from memory without a slip. So many memories of him—teaching him to drive, st
anding on the bow of the Bolero with him when they went to Nova Scotia on vacation one year, Johnny eight years old, laughing and excited by the screwlike motion of the boat, helping him with his homework, helping him with his treehouse, helping him get the hang of his Silva compass when he had been in the Scouts. All the memories were jumbled together in no chronological order at all—Johnny was the single unifying thread, Johnny eagerly discovering the world that had maimed him so badly in the end. And now he wished Johnny would die, oh how he wished it, that he would die, that his heart would stop beating, that the final low traces on the EEG would go flat, that he would just flicker out like a guttering candle in a pool of wax: that he would die and release them.
7
The seller of lightning rods arrived at Cathy’s roadhouse in Somersworth, New Hampshire, in the early afternoon of a blazing summer’s day less than a week after the Fourth of July in that year of 1973; and somewhere not so far away there were, perhaps, storms only waiting to be born in the warm elevator shafts of summer’s thermal updrafts.
He was a man with a big thirst, and he stopped at Cathy’s to slake it with a couple of beers, not to make a sale. But from force of long habit, he glanced up at the roof of the low, ranch-style building, and the unbroken line he saw standing against the blistering gunmetal sky caused him to reach back in for the scuffed suede bag that was his sample case.
Inside, Cathy’s was dark and cool and silent except for the muted rumble of the color TV on the wall. A few regulars were there, and behind the bar was the owner, keeping an eye on “As The World Turns” along with his patrons.
