The Dead Zone(27)

And a Christmas card that she had wept over a little:

'Best to you from both of us this holiday season, and if you'd like to come down and spend Xmas with a couple of "old fogies", the spare bedroom is made up. Vera and I are both fine and well. Hope the New Year is better for all of us, and am sure it will be. Herb and Vera.'

She didn't go down to Pownal over the Christmas vacation, partly because of Vera's continued withdrawal into her own world - her progress into that world could be read pretty accurately between the lines of Herb's letters - and partly because their mutual tie now seemed so strange and distant to her. The still figure in the Bangor hospital bed had once been seen in close-up, but now she always seemed to be looking at him through the wrong end of memory's telescope; like the balloon man, he was far and wee. So it seemed best to keep her distance.

Perhaps Herb sensed it as well. His letters became less frequent as 1970 became 1971. In one of them he came as close as he could to saying it was time for her to go on with her life, and closed by saying that he doubted a girl as pretty as she was lacked for dates.

But she hadn't had any dates, hadn't wanted them. Gene Sedecki, the math teacher who had once treated her to an evening that had seemed at least a thousand years long, had begun asking her out indecently soon after Johnny's accident, and he was a hard man to discourage, but she believed that he was finally beginning to get the point. It should have happened sooner.

Occasionally other men would ask her, and one of them, a law student named Walter Hazlett, attracted her quite a bit. She met him at Anne Strafford's New Year's Eve party. She had meant only to make an appearance, but she had stayed quite a while, talking primarily to Hazlett. Saying no had been surprisingly hard, but she had, because she understood the source of attraction too well - Walt Hazlett was a tall man with an unruly shock of brown hair and a slanted, half-cynical smile, and he reminded her strongly of Johnny. That was no basis on which to get interested in a man.

Early in February she was asked out by the mechanic who worked on her car at the Cleaves Mills Chevron. Again she almost said yes, and then backed away. The man's name was Arnie Tremont. He was tall, olive-skinned, and handsome in a smiling, predatory way. He reminded her a bit of James Brolin, the second banana on that Dr. Welby program, and even more of a certain Delta Tau Delta named Dan.

Better to wait. Wait and see if something was going to happen.

But nothing did.

3.

In that summer of 1971, Greg Stillson, sixteen years older and wiser than the Bible salesman who had kicked a dog to death in a deserted Iowa dooryard, sat in the back room of his newly incorporated insurance and real estate business in Ridgeway, New Hampshire. He hadn't aged much in the years between. There was a net of wrinkles around his eyes now, and his hair was longer (but still quite conservative). He was still a big man, and his swivel chair creaked when he moved.

He sat smoking a Pall Mall cigarette and looking at the man sprawled comfortably in the chair opposite. Greg was looking at this man the way a zoologist might look at an interesting new specimen.

'See anything green?' Sonny Elliman asked. Elliman topped six feet, five inches. He wore an ancient, grease-stiffened jeans jacket with the arms and buttons cut off. There was no shirt beneath. A Nazi iron cross, black dressed in white chrome, hung on his bare chest. The buckle of the belt running just below his considerable beer-belly was a great ivory skull. From beneath the pegged cuffs of his jeans poked the scuffed, square toes of a pair of Desert Driver boots. His hair was shoulder-length, tangled, and shining with an accumulation of greasy sweat and engine oil. From one earlobe there dangled a swastika earring, also black dressed in white chrome. He spun a coal-scuttle helmet on the tip of one blunt finger. Stitched on the back of his jacket was a leering red devil with a forked tongue. Above the devil was The Devil's Dozen. Below it: Sonny Elliman, Prez.

'No,' Greg Stillson said. 'I don't see anything green, but I do see someone who looks suspiciously like a walking ass**le.'

Elliman stiffened a little, then relaxed and laughed. In spite of the dirt, the almost palpable body odor, and Nazi regalia, his eyes, a dark green, were not without intelligence and even a sense of humor.

'Rank me to the dogs and back, man,' he said. 'It's been done before. You got the power now.

'You recognize that, do you?'

'Sure. I left my guys back in the Hamptons, came here alone. Be it on my own head, man.' He smiled. 'But if we should ever catch you in a similar position, you want to hope your kidneys are wearing combat boots.'

'I'll chance it,' Greg said. He measured Elliman. They were both big men. He reckoned Elliman had forty pounds on him, but a lot of it was beer muscle. 'I could take you, Sonny.'

Elliman's face crinkled in amiable good humor again. 'Maybe. Maybe not. But that's not the way we play it, man. All that good American John Wayne stuff.' He leaned forward, as if to impart a great secret. 'Me personally, now, whenever I get me a piece of mom's apple pie, I make it my business to shit on it.'

'Foul mouth, Sonny,' Greg said mildly.

'What do you want with me?' Sonny asked. 'Why don't you get down to it? You'll miss your Jaycee's meeting.'

'No,' Greg said, still serene. 'The Jaycees meet Tuesday nights. We've got all the time in the world.'

Elliman made a disgusted blowing sound.