by Stephen King
Was Mike there? Shannon went, didn’t she? Are you sure? Yes, I was all ready to leave when Chuck called me. My mother was there when that guy freaked out and she said she felt like a goose was walking on her grave, she asked me to come here instead. Was Casey there? Was Ray there? Was Maureen Ontello there? Oh my God, was she? Was ...
Roger stood up slowly and turned around. “I suggest,” he said, “that we find the soberest people here to drive and that we all go down to the hospital. They’ll need blood donors.”
Johnny sat like a stone. He found himself wondering if he would ever move again. Outside, thunder rumbled. And followed on its heels like an inner clap, he heard his dying mother’s voice:
Do your duty, John.
Chapter 24
August 12, 1977
Dear Johnny,
Finding you wasn’t much of a trick—I sometimes think if you have enough free cash, you can find anyone in this country, and the cash I got. Maybe I’m risking your resentment stating it as badly as that, but Chuck and Shelley and I owe you too much to tell you less than the truth. Money buys a lot, but it can’t buy off the lightning. They found twelve boys still in the men’s room opening off the restaurant, the one where the window had been nailed shut. The fire didn’t reach there but the smoke did, and all twelve of them were suffocated I haven’t been able to get that out of my mind, because Chuck could have been one of those boys. So I had you “tracked down,” as you put it in your letter. And for the same reason, I can’t leave you alone as you requested. At least not until the enclosed check comes back canceled with your endorsement on the back.
You’ll notice that it’s a considerably smaller check than the one you received about a month ago. I got in touch with the EMMC Accounts Department and paid your outstanding hospital bills with the balance of it. You’re free and clear that way, Johnny. That I could do, and I did it-with great pleasure, I might add.
You protest you can’t take the money. I say you can and you will. You will, Johnny. I traced you to Ft. Lauderdale, and if you leave there I will trace you to the next place you go, even if you decide on Nepal. Call me a louse who won’t let go if you want to; I see myself more as “the Hound of Heaven. ” I don’t want to hound you, Johnny. I remember you telling me that day not to sacrifice my son. I almost did And what about the others? Eighty-one dead, thirty more terribly maimed and burned. I think of Chuck saying maybe we could work out some kind of a story, spin a yarn or something, and me saying with all the righteousness of the totally stupid, “I won’t do that, Chuck. Don’t ask me. ” Well I could have done something. That’s what haunts me. I could have given that butcher Carrick $3,000 to pay off his help and shut down for the night. It would have come to about $37 a life. So believe me when I say I don’t want to hound you; I’m really too busy hounding myself to want to spare the time. I think I’ll be doing it for quite a few years to come. I’m paying up for refusing to believe anything I couldn’t touch with one of my five senses. And please don’t believe that paying the bills and tendering this check is just a sop to my conscience. Money can’t buy off the lightning, and it can’t buy an end to bad dreams, either. The money is for Chuck, although he knows nothing about it.
Take the check and I’ll leave you in peace. That’s the deal. Send it on to UNICEF, if you want, or give it to a home for orphan bloodhounds, or blow it all on the ponies. I don’t care. Just take it.
I’m sorry you felt you had to leave in such a hurry, but I believe I understand. We all hope to see you soon. Chuck leaves for Stovington Prep on September 4.
Johnny, take the check. Please.
All regards,
Roger Chatsworth
September 1, 1977
Dear Johnny,
Will you believe that I’m not going to let this go? Please. Take the check.
Regards,
Roger
September 10, 1977
Dear Johnny,
Charlie and I were both so glad to know where you are, and it was a relief to get a letter from you that sounded so natural and like yourself But there was one thing that bothered me very much, son. I called up Sam Weizak and read him that part of your letter about the increasing frequency of your headaches. He advises you to see a doctor, Johnny, without delay. He is afraid that a clot may have formed around the old scar tissue. So that worries me, and it worries Sam, too. You’ve never looked really healthy since you came out of the coma, Johnny, and when I last saw you in early June, I thought you looked very tired Sam didn’t say, but I know what he’d really like you to do is to catch a plane out of Phoenix and come on home and let him be the one to look at you. You certainly can’t plead poverty now!
Roger Chatsworth has called here twice, and I tell him what I can. I think he’s telling the truth when he says it isn’t conscience-money or a reward for saving his son’s life. I believe your mother would have said that the man is doing penance the only way he knows how. Anyway, you’ve taken it, and I hope you don’t mean it when you say you only did it to “get him off your back.” I believe you have too much grit in you to do anything for a reason like that.
Now this is very hard for me to say, but I will do the best I can. Please come home, Johnny. The publicity has died down again—I can hear you saying, “Oh bullshit, it will never die down again, not after this” and I suppose you are right in a way, but you are also wrong. Over the phone Mr. Chatsworth said, “If you talk to him, try to make him understand that no psychic except Nostradamus has ever been much more than a nine-days’ wonder.” I worry about you a lot, son. I worry about you blaming yourself for the dead instead of blessing yourself for the living, the ones you saved, the ones that were at the Chatsworths’ house that night. I worry and I miss you, too. “I miss you like the dickens, as your grandmother used to say. So please come home as soon as you can.
Dad
P.S. I’m sending the clippings about the fire and about your part in it. Charlie collected them up. As you will see, you were correct in guessing that “everyone who was at that lawn party will spill their guts to the papers. ” I suppose these clippings may just upset you more, and if they do, just toss them away. But Charlie’s idea was that you may look at them and say, “That wasn’t as bad as I thought, I can face that ” hope it turns out that way.
Dad
September 29, 1977
Dear Johnny,
I got your address from my dad How is the great American desert Seen any redskins (ha-ha)? Well here I am at Stovington Prep. This place isn’t so tough. I am taking sixteen hours of credit Advanced chemistry is my favorite although it’s really something of a tit after the course at DHS. I always had the feeling that our teacher there, old Fearless Farnham, would really have been more happy making doomsday weapons and blowing up the world. In English we are reading three things by J. D. Salinger this first four weeks, Catcher in the Rye, Franny and Zooey, and Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters. I like him a lot. Our teacher told us he still lives over in N.H. but has given up writing. That blows my mind Why would someone just give up when they are going great guns? Oh well. The football team here really sucks but I’m learning to like soccer. The coach says soccer is football for smart people and football is football for assholes. I can’t figure out yet if he’s right or just jealous.
I’m wondering if it would be ok to give out your address to some people who were at our party graduation night. They want to write and say thanks. One of them is Patty Strachan’s mother, you will remember her, the one that made such a pisshead of herself when her “precious daughter” fainted at the lawn party that afternoon. She now figures that you’re an ok person. I’m not going with Patty anymore, by the way. I’m not much on long-distance courtships at my “tender age” (ha-ha), and Patty is going to Vassar, as you might have expected. I’ve met a foxy little chick right here.
Well, write when you can, my man. My dad made it sound like you were really “bummed out” for what reason I do not know since it seems to me that you did everythin
g you could to make things turn out right. He’s wrong, isn’t he, Johnny? You’re really not bummed out, are you? Please write and tell me you are ok, I worry about you. That’s a laugh, isn’t it, the original Alfred E. Neuman worried about you, but I am.
When you write, tell me why Holden Caulfield always has to have the blues so much when he isn’t even black.
Chuck
P.S. The foxy chick’s name is Stephanie Wyman, and I have already turned her on to Something Wicked This Way Comes. She also likes a punk-rock group called The Ramones, you should hear them, they are hilarious.
C
October 17, 1977
Dear Johnny,
Okay that’s better, you sound ok. Laughed my ass off about your job with the Phoenix Public Works Dept. I have no sympathy at all for your sunburn after four outings as a Stovington Tiger. Coach is right, I guess, football is football for assholes, at least at this place. Our record is 1—3 and in the game we won I scored three touchdowns, hyperventilated my stupid self and blacked out. Scared Steff into a tizzy (ha-ha).
I waited to write so I could answer your question about how the Home Folks feel about Greg Stillson now that he is “on the job. ” I was home this last weekend, and I’ll tell you all I can. Asked my dad first and he said, “Is Johnny still interested in that guy?” Isaid, “He’s showing his fundamental bad taste by wanting your opinion. ” Then he goes to my mother, “See, prep school is turning him into a smartass. I thought it would. ”
Well, to make a long story short, most people are pretty surprised by how well Stillson’s doing. My dad said this: “If people of a congressman’s home district had to give a report card on how well the guy was doing after 10 months, Stillson would get mostly Bs, plus an A for his work on Carter’s energy bill and his own home heating-oil ceiling bill. Also an A for effort.” Dad told me to tell you that maybe he was wrong about Stillson being the village fool.
Other comments from people I talked to when I was home: they like it around here that he doesn’t dress up in a business suit. Mrs. Jarvis who runs the Quik-Pik (sorry about the spelling, man, but that’s what they call it) says she thinks Stillson is not afraid of “the big interests. ” Henry Burke, who runs The Bucket—that el scuzzo tavern downtown—says he thinks Stillson has done “a double-damn good job. ” Most other comments are similar. They contrast what Stillson has done with what Carter hasn’t done, most of them are really disappointed in him and are kicking themselves for having voted for him. I asked some of them if they weren’t worried that those iron horsemen were still hanging around and that fellow Sonny Elliman was serving as one of Stillson’s aides. None of them seemed too upset. The guy who runs the Record Rock put it to me this way: “If Tom Hayden can go straight and Eldridge Cleaver can get Jesus, why can’t some bikies join the establishment? Forgive and forget.”
So there you are. I would write more, but football practice is coming up. This weekend we are scheduled to be trounced by the Barre Wildcats. I just hope I survive the season. Keep well, my man.
Chuck
From the New York Times, March 4, 1978:FBI AGENT MURDERED IN OKLAHOMA
Special to the Times—Edgar Lancte, 37, a ten-year veteran of the FBI, was apparently murdered last night in an Oklahoma City parking garage. Police say that a dynamite bomb wired to the ignition of his car exploded when Mr. Lancte turned the key. The gangland-style execution was similar in style to the murder of Arizona investigative reporter Don Bolles two years ago, but FBI chief William Webster would not speculate on any possible connection. Mr. Webster would also neither confirm nor deny that Mr. Lancte had been investigating shady land deals and possible links to local politicians.
There appears to be some mystery surrounding exactly what Mr. Lancte’s current assignment was, and one source in the Justice Department claims that Mr. Lancte was not investigating possible land fraud at all but a national security matter.
Mr. Lancte joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1968 and ...
Chapter 25
1
The notebooks in Johnny’s bureau drawer grew from four to five, and by the fall of 1978 to seven. In the fall of 1978, between the deaths of two Popes in rapid succession, Greg Stillson had become national news.
He was reelected to the House of Representatives in a landslide, and with the country tending toward Proposition 13 conservatism, he had formed the America Now party. Most startling, several members of the House had reneged on their original party standing and had “jined up,” as Greg liked to put it. Most of them held very similar beliefs, which Johnny had defined as superficially liberal on domestic issues and moderate to very conservative on issues of foreign policy. There was not a one of them who had voted on the Carter side of the Panama Canal treaties. And when you peeled back the liberal veneer on domestic positions, they turned out to be pretty conservative, too. The America Now party wanted bad trouble for big-time dopers, they wanted the cities to have to sink or swim on their own (“There is no need for a struggling dairy farmer to have to subsidize New York City’s methadone programs with his taxes,” Greg proclaimed), they wanted a crackdown on welfare benefits to whores, pimps, bums, and people with a felony bust on their records, they wanted sweeping tax reforms to be paid for by sweeping social services cutbacks. All of it was an old song, but Greg’s America Now party had set it to a pleasing new tune.
Seven congressmen swung over before the off-year elections, and two senators. Six of the congressmen were reelected, and both of the senators. Of the nine, eight had been Republicans whose base had been whittled away to a pinhead. Their switch of party and subsequent reelections, one wag had quipped, was a better trick than the one that had followed “Lazarus, come forth!”
Some were already saying that Greg Stillson might be a power to be reckoned with, and not that many years down the road, either. He had not been able to send all the world’s pollution out to Jupiter and the rings of Saturn, but he had succeeded in running at least two of the rascals out—one of them a congressman who had been feathering his nest as the silent partner in a parking-lot kickback scheme, and one of them a presidential aide with a penchant for gay bars. His oil-ceiling bill had shown vision and boldness, and his careful guidance of its passage from committee to final vote had shown a down-home country-boy shrewdness. Nineteen-hundred eighty would be too early for Greg, and 1984 might be too tempting to resist, but if he managed to stay cool until 1988, if he continued to build his base and the winds of change did not shift radically enough to blow his fledgling party away, why, anything might happen. The Republicans had fallen to squabbling splinters, and assuming that Mondale or Jerry Brown or even Howard Baker might follow Carter as president, who was to follow then? Even 1992 might not be too late for him. He was a relatively young man. Yes, 1992 sounded about right ...
There were several political cartoons in Johnny’s notebooks. All of them showed Stillson’s infectious slantwise grin, and in all of them he was wearing his construction helmet. One by Oliphant showed Greg rolling a barrel of oil marked PRICE CEILINGS straight down the middle aisle of the House, the helmet cocked back on his head. Up front was Jimmy Carter, scratching his head and looking puzzled; he was not looking Greg’s way at all and the implication seemed to be that he was going to get run down. The caption read: OUTTA MY WAY, JIMMY!
The helmet. The helmet somehow bothered Johnny more than anything else. The Republicans had their elephant, the Democrats their donkey, and Greg Stillson had his construction helmet. In Johnny’s dreams it sometimes seemed that Stillson was wearing a motorcycle helmet. And sometimes it was a coal-scuttle helmet.
2
In a separate notebook he kept the clippings his father had sent him concerning the fire at Cathy’s. He had gone over them again and again, although for reasons that Sam, Roger, or even his father could not have suspected. PSYCHIC PREDICTS FIRE. “MY DAUGHTER WOULD HAVE DIED TOO,” TEARFUL, THANKFUL MOM PROCLAIMS (the tearful, thankful mom in question had been Patty Strachan’s). Psychic Wh
o Cracked Castle Rock Murders Predicts Flash Fire. ROADHOUSE DEATH-TOLL REACHES 90. FATHER SAYS JOHN SMITH HAS LEFT NEW ENGLAND, REFUSES TO SAY WHY. Pictures of him. Pictures of his father. Pictures of that long-ago wreck on Route 6 in Cleaves Mills, back in the days when Sarah Bracknell had been his girl. Now Sarah was a woman, the mother of two, and in his last letter Herb had said Sarah was showing a few gray hairs. It seemed impossible to believe that he himself was thirty-one. Impossible, but true.
Around all these clippings were his own jottings, his painful efforts to get it straight in his mind once and for all. None of them understood the true importance of the fire, its implication on the much larger matter of what to do about Greg Stillson.
He had written: “I have to do something about Stillson. I have to. I was right about Cathy’s, and I’m going to be right about this. There is absolutely no question in my mind. He is going to become president and he is going to start a war—or cause one through simple mismanagement of the office, which amounts to the same thing.
“The question is: How drastic are the measures that need to be taken?
“Take Cathy’s as a test-tube case. It almost could have been sent to me as a sign, God I’m starting to sound like my mother, but there it is. Okay, I knew there was going to be a fire and that people were going to die. Was that sufficient to save them? Answer: it was not sufficient to save all of them, because people only truly believe after the fact. The ones who came to the Chatsworth house instead of going to Cathy’s were saved, but it’s important to remember that R.C. didn’t have the party because he believed my prediction. He was very upfront about that. He had the party because he thought it would help me have peace of mind. He was ... humoring me. He believed after. Patty Strachan’s mother believed after. After-after-after. By then it was too late for the dead and the burned.
