The Dead Zone(123)
Johnny wondered how much Greg Stillson had actually received as a result of that ad. Reports varied. But that fall, Greg had been tooling around town in a brand-new Mercury. Three years' worth of back taxes were paid on the small house left to them by Mary Loil's mother. Mary Lou herself (who was not particularly sickly and no older than forty-five), blossomed out in a new raccoon coat. Stillson had apparently discovered one of the great hidden muscles of principle which move the earth: if those who receive will not pay. those who have not often will, for no good reason at all. It may be the same principle that assures the politicians there will always be enough young men to feed the war machine.
The ranchers discovered they had stuck their collection hand into a hornets' nest. When members came in town, crowds often gathered and jeered at them. They were denounced from pulpits all across the county. They found it suddenly difficult to sell the beef the rain had saved without shipping it a considerable distance.
In November of that memorable year, two young men with brass knucks on their hands and nickel-plated .32's. in their pockets had turned up on Greg Stillson's doorstep, apparently hired by the Ranchers' and Cattlemen's Association to suggest - as strenuously as necessary - that Greg would find the climate more congenial elsewhere Both of them ended up in the hospital. One of them had a concussion. The other had lost four of his teeth was suffering a rupture. Both had been found on corner of Greg Stillson's block, sans pants. Their brass knucks bad been inserted in an anatomical location most commonly associated with sitting down, and in case of one of these two young men, minor surgery was necessary to remove the foreign objects.
The Association cried off. At a meeting in early December, an appropriation of $700 was made from its fund, and a check in that amount was forwarded to Stillson.
He got what he wanted.
In 1953 he and his mother moved to Nebraska. The rainmaking business had gone bad, and there were some who said the pool-hall hustling had also gone bad. Whatever the reason for moving, they turned up in Omaha where Greg opened a house-painting business that bust two years later. He did better as a salesman for TruthWay Bible Company of America. He crisscrossed the cornbelt, taking dinner with hundreds of hard working, God-fearing farm families, telling the story his conversion and selling Bibles, plaques, luminous Jesuses, hymn books, records; tracts, and a rabidly right-wing paperback called America the TruthWay:
Communist-Jewish Conspiracy Against Our United States
In 1957 the aging Mercury was replaced with a brand-new Ford ranch wagon.
In 1958 Mary Lou Stillson died of cancer, and late that year Greg Stillson got out of the born-again Bible business and drifted east. He spent a year in New York City before moving upstate to Albany. His year in New York been devoted to an effort at cracking the acting business. It was one of the few jobs (along with house painting) that he hadn't been able to turn a buck at. But probably not from lack of talent, Johnny thought cynically.
Albany he had gone to work for Prudential, and he stayed in the capital city until 1965. As an insurance salesman he was an aimless sort of success. There was no offer to join the company at the executive level, no outbursts of Christian fervor. During that five-year period, the brash and brassy Greg Stillson of yore seemed to have gone into hibernation. In all of his checkered career, the woman in his life had been his mother. He had never married, had not even dated regularly as far as Johnny had been able to find out.
In 1965, Prudential had offered him a position in Ridgeway, New Hampshire, and Greg had taken it. At about the same time, his period of hibernation seemed to end. The go-go Sixties were gathering steam. It was the era of the short skirt and do your own thing. Greg became active in Ridgeway community affairs. He joined the chamber of Commerce and the Rotary Club. He got state-wide coverage in 1967, during a controversy over the parking meters downtown. For six years, various factions had been wrangling over them. Greg suggested that if the meters be taken out and that collection boxes be put up in their stead. Let people pay what they want. some people had said that was the craziest idea they had ever heard. Well, Greg responded, you might just be surprised. Yes sir. He was persuasive. The town finally adopted the proposal on a provisional basis, and the ensuing flood of nickels and dimes had surprised everyone but Greg. He had discovered the principle years ago.
In 1969 he made New Hampshire news again when he suggested, in a long and carefully worked-out letter to the Ridgeway newspaper, that drug offenders be put to work on town public works projects such as parks and bike paths, even weeding the grass on the traffic islands. That's the craziest idea I ever heard, many said. Well, Greg responded, try her out and if she don't work, chuck her. The town tried it out. One pothead reorganized the en-tire town library from the outmoded Dewey decimal system to the more modern Library of Congress cataloguing system, at no charge to the town. A number of hippies busted at an hallucinogenic house party relandscaped the town park into an area showplace, complete with duckpond and a playground scientifically designed to maximize effective playtime and minimize danger. As Greg pointed out, most of these drug-users got interested in all those chemicals in college, but that was no reason why they shouldn't utilize all the other things they had learned in college.
At the same time Greg was revolutionizing his adopted home town's parking regulations and its handling of drug offenders, he was writing letters to the Manchester Union-Leader, the Boston Globe, and the New York Times, espousing hawkish positions on the war in Vietnam, mandatory felony sentences for heroin addicts, and a return to the death penalty, especially for heroin pushers. In his campaign for the House of Representatives, he had claimed on several occasions to have been against the war from 1970 on, but the man's own published statements made that a flat lie.