by Stephen King
Your friend,
Dave Pelsen
16
Johnny stood beside the mailbox with Dave’s letter in his hand, looking down at it unbelievingly. It was the last day of 1975, clear and bitingly cold. His breath came out of his nostrils in fine white jets of smoke.
“Shit,” he whispered. “Oh man, oh shit.”
Numbly, still not assimilating it totally, he leaned down to see what else the mailman had brought him. As usual, the box was crammed full. It had just been luck that Dave’s letter had been sticking out at the end.
There was a white, fluttering slip of paper telling him to call at the post office for the packages, the inevitable packages. My husband deserted me in 1969, here is a pair of his socks, tell me where he is so I can get child-support out of the bastard. My baby choked to death last year, here is his rattle, please write and tell me if he is happy with the angels. I didn’t have him baptized because his father did not approve and now my heart is breaking. The endless litany.
What a talent God has given you, Johnny.
The reason: You’re too controversial to be effective as a teacher.
In a sudden vicious spasm he began to rake letters and manila envelopes out of the box, dropping some in the snow. The inevitable headache began to form around his temples like two dark clouds that would slowly draw together, enveloping him in pain. Sudden tears began to slip down his cheeks, and in the deep, still cold, they froze to glittering tracks almost immediately.
He bent and began to pick up the letters he had dropped; he saw one, doubled and trebled through the prisms of his tears, addressed in heavy dark pencil to JOHN SMITH SIKIK SEER
Sikik seer, that’s me. His hands began to tremble wildly and he dropped everything, including Dave’s letter. It fluttered down like a leaf and landed print side up among the other letters, all the other letters. Through his helpless tears he could see the letterhead, and the motto below the torch:
TO TEACH, TO LEARN, TO KNOW, TO SERVE.
“Serve my ass, you cheap bastards,” Johnny said. He fell on his knees and began to gather up the letters, sweeping them together with his mittens. His fingers ached dully, a reminder of the frostbite, a reminder of Frank Dodd riding a dead toilet seat into eternity, blood in his all-American blond hair. I CONFESS.
He swept the letters up and heard himself muttering over and over, like a defective record: “Killing me, you people are killing me, let me alone, can’t you see you’re killing me?”
He made himself stop. This was no way to behave. Life would go on. One way or another, life would most certainly go on.
Johnny started back to the house, wondering what he could do now. Perhaps something would come along. At any rate, he had fulfilled his mother’s prophecy. If God had had a mission for him, then he had done it. No matter now that it had been a kamikaze mission. He had done it.
He was quits.
II
The Laughing Tiger
Chapter 17
1
The boy read slowly, following the words with his finger, his long brown football-player’s legs stretched out on the chaise by the pool in the bright clear light of June.
“ ‘Of course young Danny Ju ... Juniper ... young Danny Juniper was dead and I suh ... suppose that there were few in the world who would say he had not de ... duh ... dee ...’ Oh, shit, I don’t know.”
“ ‘Few in the world who would say he had not deserved his death,’ ” Johnny Smith said. “Only a slightly fancier way of saying that most would agree that Danny’s death was a good thing.”
Chuck was looking at him, and the familiar mix of emotions was crossing his usually pleasant face: amusement, resentment, embarrassment, and a trace of sullenness. Then he sighed and looked down at the Max Brand Western again.
“ ‘Deserved his death. But it was my great trah ... truhjud ...’ ”
“Tragedy,” Johnny supplied.
“ ‘But it was my great tragedy that he had died just as he was about to redeem some of his e-e-evil work by one great service to the world.
‘ “Of course that ... suh ... that sih ... sih ...’ ”
Chuck closed the book, looked up at Johnny, and smiled brilliantly.
“Let’s quit for the day, Johnny, what do you say?” Chuck’s smile was his most winning, the one that had probably tumbled cheerleaders into bed all over New Hampshire. “Doesn’t that pool look good? You bei it does. The sweat is running right off your skinny, malnourished little bod.”
Johnny had to admit—at least to himself—that the pool did look good. The first couple of weeks of the Bicentennial Summer of ’76 had been uncommonly hot and sticky. From behind them, around on the other side of the big, gracious white house, came the soporific drone of the riding lawnmower as Ngo Phat, the Vietnamese groundsman, mowed what Chuck called the front forty. It was a sound that made you want to drink two glasses of cold lemonade and then nod off to sleep.
“No derogatory comments about my skinny bod,” he said. “Besides, we just started the chapter.”
“Sure, but we read two before it.” Wheedling.
Johnny sighed. Usually he could keep Chuck at it, but not this afternoon. And today the kid had fought his way gamely through the way John Sherburne had set up his net of guards around the Amity jail and the way the evil Red Hawk had broken through and killed Danny Juniper.
“Yeah, well, just finish this page, then,” he said. “That word you’re stuck on’s ‘sickened.’ No teeth in that one, Chuck.”
“Good man!” The grin widened. “And no questions, right?”
“Well ... maybe just a few.”
Chuck scowled, but it was a put-on; he was getting off easy and knew it. He opened the paperback with the picture of the gunslinger shouldering his way through a set of saloon batwings again and began to read in his slow, halting voice ... a voice so different from his normal speaking voice that it could have belonged to a different young man altogether.
“ ‘Of course that suh ... sickened me at once. But it was ... was nothing to what waited for me at the bedside of poor Tom Keyn ... Kenyon.
“ ‘He had been shot through the body and he was fast drying when I ...’ ”
“Dying,” Johnny said quietly. “Context, Chuck. Read for context.”
“Fast drying,” Chuck said, and giggled. Then he resumed:
“ ‘ ... and he was fast dying when I ar-ar ... when I arrived.’ ”
Johnny felt a sadness for Chuck steal over him as he watched the boy, hunched over the paperback copy of Fire Brain, a good oat opera that should have read like the wind—and instead, here was Chuck, following Max Brand’s simple point-to-point prose with a laboriously moving finger. His father, Roger Chatsworth, owned Chatsworth Mills and Weaving, a very big deal indeed in southern New Hampshire. He owned this sixteen-room house in Durham, and there were five people on the staff, including Ngo Phat, who went down to Portsmouth once a week to take United States citizenship classes. Chatsworth drove a restored 1957 Cadillac convertible. His wife, a sweet, clear-eyed woman of forty-two, drove a Mercedes. Chuck had a Corvette. The family fortune was in the neighborhood of five million dollars.
And Chuck, at seventeen, was what God had really meant when he breathed life into the clay, Johnny often thought. He was a physically lovely human being. He stood six-two and weighed a good muscular one hundred and ninety pounds. His face was perhaps not quite interesting enough to be truly handsome, but it was acne- and pimple-free and set off by a pair of striking green eyes—which had caused Johnny to think that the only other person he knew with really green eyes was Sarah Hazlett. At his high school, Chuck was the apotheosis of the BMOC, almost ridiculously so. He was captain of the baseball and football teams, president of the junior class during the school year just ended, and president-elect of the student council this coming fall. And most amazing of all, none of it had gone to his head. In the words of Herb Smith, who had been down once to check out Johnny’s new digs, Chuck was “a regular guy.�
� Herb had no higher accolade in his vocabulary. In addition, he was someday going to be an exceedingly rich regular guy.
And here he sat, bent grimly over his book like a machine gunner at a lonely outpost, shooting the words down one by one as they came at him. He had taken Max Brand’s exciting, fast-moving story of drifting John “Fire Brain” Sherburne and his confrontation with the outlaw Comanche Red Hawk and had turned it into something that sounded every bit as exciting as a trade advertisement for semiconductors or radio components.
But Chuck wasn’t stupid. His math grades were good, his retentive memory was excellent, and he was manually adept. His problem was that he had great difficulty storing printed words. His oral vocabulary was fine, and he could grasp the theory of phonics but apparently not its practice; and he would sometimes reel a sentence off flawlessly and then come up totally blank when you asked him to rephrase it. His father had been afraid that Chuck was dyslexic, but Johnny didn’t think so—he had never met a dyslexic child that he was aware of, although many parents seized on the word to explain or excuse the reading problems of their children. Chuck’s problem seemed more general—a loose, across-the-board reading phobia.
It was a problem that had become more and more apparent over the last five years of Chuck’s schooling, but his parents had only begun to take it seriously—as Chuck had—when his sports eligibility became endangered. And that was not the worst of it. This winter would be Chuck’s last good chance to take the Scholastic Achievement Tests, if he expected to start college in the fall of 1977. The maths were not much of a problem, but the rest of the exam ... well ... if he could have the questions read aloud to him, he would do an average-to-good job. Five hundreds, no sweat. But they don’t let you bring a reader with you when you take the SATs, not even if your dad is a biggie in the world of New Hampshire business.
“ ‘But I found him a ch ... a changed man. He knew what lay before him and his courage was supp ... supper ... superb. He asked for nothing; he regretted nothing. All the terror and the nerv ... nervousness which had puss ... possett ... possessed him so long as he was cuh ... cuh ... cuhfronted ... confronted by an unknown fate ...’ ”
Johnny had seen the ad for a tutor in the Maine Times and had applied without too much hope. He had moved down to Kittery in mid-February, needing more than anything else to get away from Pownal, from the boxful of mail each day, the reporters who had begun to find their way to the house in ever-increasing numbers, the nervous women with the wounded eyes who had just “dropped by” because “they just happened to be in the neighborhood” (one of those who had just dropped by because she just happened to be in the neighborhood had a Maryland license plate; another was driving a tired old Ford with Arizona tags). Their hands, stretching out to touch him ...
In Kittery he had discovered for the first time that an anonymous name like John-no-middle-initial-Smith had its advantages. His third day in town he had applied for a job as a short-order cook, putting down his experience in the UMO commons and one summer cooking at a boys’ camp in the Rangely Lakes as experience. The diner’s owner, a tough-as-nails widow named Ruby Pelletier, had looked over his application and said, “You’re a teensy bit overeducated for slinging hash. You know that, don’t you, slugger?”
“That’s right,” Johnny said. “I went and educated myself right out of the job market.”
Ruby Pelletier put her hands on her scrawny hips, threw her head back, and bellowed laughter. “You think you can keep your shit together at two in the morning when twelve CB cowboys pull in all at once and order scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, french toast, and flapjacks?”
“I guess maybe,” Johnny said.
“I guess maybe you don’t know what the eff I’m talking about just yet,” Ruby said, “but I’ll give you a go, college boy. Go get yourself a physical so we’re square with the board of health and bring me back a clean bill. I’ll put you right on.”
He had done that, and after a harum-scarum first two weeks (which included a painful rash of blisters on his right hand from dropping a french-fry basket into a well of boiling fat a little too fast), he had been riding the job instead of the other way around. When he saw Chatsworth’s ad, he had sent his resume to the box number. In the course of the resume he had listed his special ed credentials, which included a one-semester seminar in learning disabilities and reading problems.
In late April, as he was finishing his second month at the diner, he had gotten a letter from Roger Chatsworth, asking him to appear for an interview on May 5. He made the necessary arrangements to take the day off, and at 2:10 on a lovely midspring afternoon he had been sitting in Chatsworth’s study, a tall, ice-choked glass of Pepsi-Cola in one hand, listening to Stuart talk about his son’s reading problems.
“That sound like dyslexia to you?” Stuart asked.
“No. It sounds like a general reading phobia.”
Chatsworth had winced a little. “Jackson’s Syndrome?”
Johnny had been impressed—as he was no doubt supposed to be. Michael Carey Jackson was a reading-and-grammar specialist from the University of Southern California who had caused something of a stir nine years ago with a book called The Unlearning Reader. The book described a loose basket of reading problems that had since become known as Jackson’s Syndrome. The book was a good one if you could get past the dense academic jargon. The fact that Chatsworth apparently had done so told Johnny a good deal about the man’s commitment to solving his son’s problem.
“Something like it,” Johnny agreed. “But you understand I haven’t even met your son yet, or listened to him read.”
“He’s got course work to make up from last year. American Writers, a nine-week history block, and civics, of all things. He flunked his final exam there because he couldn’t read the beastly thing. Have you got a New Hampshire teacher’s certificate?”
“No,” Johnny said, “but getting one is no problem.”
“And how would you handle the situation?”
Johnny outlined the way he would deal with it. A lot of oral reading on Chuck’s part, leaning heavily on high-impact materials such as fantasy, science fiction, Westerns, and boy-meets-car juvenile novels. Constant questioning on what had just been read. And a relaxation technique described in Jackson’s book. “High achievers often suffer the most,” Johnny said. “They try too hard and reinforce the block. It’s a kind of mental stutter that ...”
“Jackson says that?” Chatsworth interposed sharply.
Johnny smiled. “No, I say that,” he said.
“Okay. Go on.”
“Sometimes, if the student can totally blank his mind right after reading and not feel the pressure to recite back right away, the circuits seem to clear themselves. When that begins to happen, the student begins to rethink his line of attack. It’s a positive thinking kind of thing . . .”
Chatsworth’s eyes had gleamed. Johnny had just touched on the linchpin of his own personal philosophy—probably the linchpin for the beliefs of most self-made men. “Nothing succeeds like success,” he said.
“Well, yes. Something like that.”
“How long would it take you to get a New Hampshire certificate?”
“No longer than it takes them to process my application. Two weeks, maybe.”
“Then you could start on the twentieth?”
Johnny blinked. “You mean I’m hired?”
“If you want the job, you’re hired. You can stay in the guest house, it’ll keep the goddam relatives at bay this summer, not to mention Chuck’s friends—and I want him to really buckle down. I’ll pay you six hundred dollars a month, not a king’s ransom, but if Chuck gets along, I’ll pay you a substantial bonus. Substantial.”
Chatsworth removed his glasses and rubbed a hand across his face. “I love my boy, Mr. Smith. I only want the best for him. Help us out a little if you can.”
“I’ll try.”
Chatsworth put his glasses back on and picked up Johnny’s resumé again. “You haven
’t taught for a helluva long time. Didn’t agree with you?”
Here it comes, Johnny thought.
“It agreed,” he said, “but I was in an accident.”
Chatsworth’s eyes had gone to the scars on Johnny’s neck where the atrophied tendons had been partially repaired. “Car crash?”
“Yes.”
“Bad one?”
“Yes.”
“You seem fine now,” Chatsworth said. He picked up the resumé, slammed it into a drawer and, amazingly, that had been the end of the questions. So after five years Johnny was teaching again, although his student load was only one.
2
“ ‘As for me, who had i ... indirectly br ... brog ... brought his death upon him, he took my hand with a weak grip and smiled his for ... forgiveness up to me. It was a hard moment, and I went away feeling that I had done more harm in the world than I could ever ma ... make up to it.’ ”
Chuck snapped the book closed. “There. Last one in the pool’s a green banana.”
“Hold it a minute, Chuck.”
“Ahhhhhhh ...” Chuck sat down again, heavily, his face composing itself into what Johnny already thought of as his now the questions expression. Long-suffering good humor predominated, but beneath it he could sometimes see another Chuck: sullen, worried, and scared. Plenty scared. Because it was a reader’s world, the unlettered of America were dinosaurs lumbering down a blind alley, and Chuck was smart enough to know it. And he was plenty afraid of what might happen to him when he got back to school this fall.
“Just a couple of questions, Chuck.”
“Why bother? You know I won’t be able to answer them.”
“Oh yes. This time you’ll be able to answer them all.”
“I can never understand what I read, you ought to know that by now.” Chuck looked morose and unhappy. “I don’t even know what you stick around for, unless it’s the chow.”
