The Dead Zone(31)

'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 dread-fully 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, dapped 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, standing 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.

The seller of lightning rods lowered himself onto a bar stool and put his sample case on the stool to his left. The owner came over. 'Hi, friend. What'll it be?'

'A Bud,' the lightning rod salesman said. 'And draw another for yourself, if you're of a mind.'

'I'm always of a mind,' the owner said. He returned with two beers, took the salesman's dollar, and left three dimes on the bar. 'Bruce Carrick,' he said, and offered his hand.

The seller of lightning rods shook it. 'Dohay is the name,' he said, 'Andrew Dohay.' He drained off half his beer.

'Pleased to meet you,' Carrick said. He wandered off to serve a young woman with a hard face another Tequila Sunrise and eventually wandered back to Dohay. 'From out of town?'

'I am,' Dohay admitted. 'Salesman.' He glanced around. 'Is it always this quiet?'

'No. It jumps on the weekends and I do a fair trade through the week. Private parties is where we make our dough - if we make it. I ain't starving, but neither am I driving a Cadillac.' He pointed a pistol finger at Dohay's glass. 'Freshen that?'

'And another for yourself, Mr. Carrick.'

'Bruce.' He laughed. 'You must want to sell me some-thing.'

When Carrick returned with the beers the seller of lightning rods said: 'I came in to lay the dust, not to sell anything. But now that you mention it...' He hauled his sample case up onto the bar with a practiced jerk. Things jingled inside it.

'Oh, here it comes,' Carrick said, and laughed.

Two of the afternoon regulars, an old fellow with a wart on his right eyelid and a younger man in gray fatigues, wandered over to see what Dohay was selling. The hard-faced woman went on watching 'As The World Turns'.

Dohay took out three rods, a long one with a brass ball at the tip, a shorter one, and one with porcelain conductors.