CHAPTER SIXTEEN 4 page

“You want to go back?”

You bet I do. Go back and not have” to think about this hellacious business anymore”. Wish I'd never come. Not my problem. This is the guy who compared me to a two-headed cow.

“No, I'm okay,” he said.

They stepped out of the doorway and the wind grabbed them and tried to bowl them along the empty street. They struggled through the harsh, snow-choked glare of arc-sodium streetlights, bent into the wind. They turned onto a side street and five houses down Bannerman stopped in front of a small and neat New England salt-box. Like the other houses on the street, it was dark and battened down.

“This is the house,” Bannerman said, his voice oddly colorless. They worked their way through the snowdrift that the wind had thrown against the porch and mounted the steps.

14.

Mrs. Henrietta Dodd was a big woman who was carrying a dead weight of flesh on her frame. Johnny had never seen a woman who looked any sicker. Her skin was a yellowish-gray. Her hands were nearly reptilian with an eczemalike rash. And there was something in her eyes, narrowed to glittering slits in their puffy sockets, that reminded him unpleasantly of the way his mother's eyes had sometimes looked when Vera Smith was transported into one of her religious frenzies.

She had opened the door to them after Bannerman had rapped steadily for nearly five minutes. Johnny stood beside him on his aching legs, thinking that this night would never end. It would just go on and on until the snow bad piled up enough to avalanche down and bury them all.

“What do you want in the middle of the night, George Bannerman?” she asked suspiciously. Like many fat women, her voice was a high, buzzy reed instrument-it sounded a bit like a fly or a bee caught in a bottle.

“Have to talk to Frank, Henrietta.”

“Then talk to him in the morning,” Henrietta Dodd said, and started to close the door in their faces.

Bannerman stopped the door's swing with a gloved hand. “I'm sorry, Henrietta. Has to be now.”

“Well, I'm not going to wake him up!” she cried, not moving from the doorway. “He sleeps like the dead anyway! Some nights I ring my bell for him, the palpitations are terrible sometimes, and does he come? No, he sleeps right through it and he could wake up some morning to find me dead of a heart attack in my bed instead of getting him his goddam runny poached egg! Because you work him too hard!”

She grinned in a sour kind of triumph; the dirty secret exposed and hats over the windmill.

“All day, all night, swing shift, chasing after drunks in the middle of the night and any one of them could have a-gun under the seat, going out to the ginmills and honky-tonks, oh, they're a rough trade out there but a lot you mind! I guess I know what goes on in those places, those cheap slutty women that'd be happy to give a nice boy like my Frank an incurable disease for the price of a quarter beer!”

Her voice, that reed instrument, swooped and buzzed. Johnny's head pumped and throbbed in counterpoint. He wished she would shut up. It was a hallucination, he knew, just the tiredness and stress of this awful night catching up, but it began to seem more and more to him that this was his mother standing here, that at any moment she would turn from Bannerman to him and begin to huckster him about the wonderful talent God had given him.

“Mrs. Dodd… Henrietta… “Bannerman began patiently.

Then she did turn to Johnny, and regarded him with her smart-stupid little pig's eyes.

“Who's this?”

“Special deputy,” Bannerman said promptly. “Henrietta, I'll take the responsibility for waking Frank up.”

“Oooh, the responsibility!” she cooed with monstrous, buzzing sarcasm, and Johnny finally realized she was afraid. The fear was coming off her in pulsing, noisome waves-that was what was making his headache worse. Couldn't Bannerman feel it? “The ree-spon-si-bil-i-tee! Isn't that big of you, my God yes! Well, I won't have my boy waked up in the middle of the night, George Bannerman, so you and your special deputy can just go peddle your goddam papers!”

She tried to shut the door again and this time Banner-man shoved it all the way open. His voice showed tight anger and beneath that a terrible tension. “Open up, Henrietta, I mean it, now.”

“You can't do this!” she cried. “This isn't no police state! I'll have your job! Let's see your warrant!”

“No, that's right, but I'm going to talk to Frank,” Bannerman said, and pushed past her.

Johnny, barely aware of what he was doing, followed. Henrietta Dodd made a grab for him. Johnny caught her Wrist-and a terrible pain flared in his head, dwarfing the sullen thud of the headache. And the woman felt it, too. The two of them stared at each other for a moment that seemed to last forever, an awful, perfect understanding. For that moment they seemed welded together. Then she fell back, clutching at her ogre's bosom.

“My heart… my heart… “She scrabbled at her robe pocket and pulled out a phial of pills. Her face had gone to the color of raw dough. She got the cap off the phial and spilled tiny pills all over the floor getting one into her palm. She slipped it under her tongue. Johnny stood staring at her in mute horror. His head felt like a swelling bladder full of hot blood.

“You knew?” he whispered.

Her fat, wrinkled mouth opened and closed, opened and closed. No sound came out. It was the mouth of a beached fish.

“All of this time you knew?”

“You're a devil!” she screamed at him. “You're a monster… devil… oh my heart… oh, I'm dying… think I'm dying… call the doctor… George Bannerman don't you go up there and wake my baby!”

Johnny let go of her, and unconsciously rubbing his hand back and forth on his coat as if to free it of a stain, he stumbled up the stairs after Bannerman. The wind outside sobbed around the eaves like a lost child. Halfway up he glanced back. Henrietta Dodd sat in a wicker chair, a sprawled mountain of meat, gasping and holding a huge breast in each hand. His head still felt as if it were swelling and he thought dreamily: Pretty soon it'll just pop and that'll be the end. Thank God.

An old and threadbare runner covered the narrow hall floor. The wallpaper was watermarked. Bannerman was pounding on a closed door. It was at least ten degrees colder up here.

“Frank? Frank! It's George Bannerman! Wake up, Frank!”

There was no response. Bannerman turned the knob and shoved the door open. His hand had fallen to the butt of his gun, but he had not drawn it. It could have been a fatal mistake, but Frank Dodd's room was empty.

The two of them stood in the doorway for a moment, looking in. It was a child's room. The wallpaper-also watermarked-was covered with dancing clowns and rocking horses. There was a child-sized chair with a Raggedy Andy sitting in it, looking back at them with its shiny blank eyes. In one corner was a toybox. In the other was a narrow maple bed with the covers thrown back. Hooked over one of the bedposts and looking out of place was Frank Dodd's holstered gun.

“My God,” Bannerman said softly. “What is this?”

“Help,” Mrs. Dodd's voice floated up. “Help me

“She knew,” Johnny said. “She knew from the very beginning, from the Frechette woman. He told her. And she covered up for him.”

Bannerman backed slowly out of the room and opened another door. His eyes were dazed and hurt. It was a guest bedroom, unoccupied. He opened the closet, which was empty except for a neat tray of D-Con rat-killer on the floor. Another door. This bedroom was unfinished and cold enough to show Bannerman's breath. He looked around. There was another door, this one at the head of the stairs. He went to it, and Johnny followed. This door was locked.

“Frank? Are you in there?” He rattled the knob. “Open it, Frank!”

There was no answer. Bannerman raised his foot and kicked out, connecting with the door just below the knob. There was a flat cracking sound that seemed to echo in Johnny's head like a steel platter dropped on a tile floor.

“Oh God,” Bannerman said in a flat, choked voice. “Frank.”

Johnny could see over his shoulder, could see too much. Frank Dodd was propped on the lowered seat of the toilet. He was naked except for a shiny black raincoat, which he had looped over his shoulders; the raincoat's black hood (executioner's hood, Johnny thought dimly) dangled down on the top of the toilet tank like some grotesque, deflated black pod. He had somehow managed to cut his own throat-Johnny would not have thought that possible. There was a package of Wilkinson Sword Blades on the edge of the washbasin. A single blade lay on the floor, glittering wickedly. Drops of blood had beaded on its edge. The blood from his severed jugular vein and carotid artery had splashed everywhere. There were pools of it caught in the folds of the raincoat which dragged on the floor. It was on the shower curtain, which had a pattern of paddling ducks with umbrellas held over their heads. It was on the ceiling.

Around Frank Dodd's neck on a string was a sign crayoned in lipstick. It read: I CONFESS.

The pain in Johnny's head began to climb to a sizzling, insupportable peak. He groped out with a hand and found the doorjamb.

Knew, he thought incoherently. Knew somehow when he” saw me. Knew it was all over. Came home. Did this.

Black rings overlaying his sight, spreading like evil ripples.

What a talent God has given you, Johnny.

(I CONFESS)

“Johnny?”

From far away.

“Johnny, are you all…”

Fading. Everything fading away. That was good. Would have been better if he had never come out of the coma at all. Better for all concerned. Well, he had had his chance.

“Johnny-”

Frank Dodd had come up here and somehow he had slit his throat from the ear to the proverbial ear while the storm howled outside like all the dark things of the earth let loose. Gone a gusher, as his father had said that winter twelve years or so ago, when the pipes in the basement had frozen and burst. Gone a gusher. Sure as hell had. All the way up to the ceiling.

He believed that he might have screamed then, but afterward was never sure. It might only have been in his own head that he screamed. But he had wanted to scream;

to scream out all the horror and pity and agony in his heart.

Then he was falling forward into darkness, and grateful to go. Johnny blacked out.

15.

From the New York Time's, December 19, 1975:

MAINE PSYCHIC DIRECTS SHERIFF TO KILLER DEPUTY'S HOME AFTER VISITING SCENE OF THE CRIME

(Special to the Times) John Smith of Pownal may not actually be psychic, but one would have difficulty persuading Sheriff George F. Bannerman of Castle County, Maine, to believe that. Desperate after a sixth assault-murder in the small western Maine town of Castle Rock, Sheriff Bannerman called Mr. Smith on the phone and asked him to come over to Castle Rock and lend a hand, if possible. Mr. Smith, who received national attention earlier this year when he recovered from a deep coma after fifty-five months of unconsciousness, had been condemned by the weekly tabloid Inside View as a hoaxer, but at a press conference yesterday Sheriff Bannerman would only say, “We don't put a whole lot of stock up here in Maine in what those New York reporters think.”

According to Sheriff Bannerman, Mr. Smith crawled on his hands and knees around the scene of the sixth murder, which occurred on the Castle Rock town common. He came up with a mild case of frostbite and the murderer's name-Sheriff's Deputy Franklin Dodd, who had been on the Castle County Sheriff's payroll five years, as long as Bannerman himself.

Earlier this year Mr. Smith stirred controversy in his native state when he had a psychic flash that his physical therapist's house had caught fire. The flash turned out to be nothing but the truth. At a press conference following, a reporter challenged him to…

From Newsweek, page 41, week of December 24, 1975:.

THE NEW HURKOS

It may be that the first genuine psychic since Peter Hurkos has been uncovered in this country Hurkos was the German-born seer who has been able to tell questioners all about their private lives by touching their hands, silverware, or items from their handbags.

John Smith is a shy and unassuming young man from the south-central Maine town of Pownal. Earlier this year he returned to consciousness after a period of more than four years in a deep coma following a car accident (see photo). According to the consulting neurologist in the case, Dr. Samuel Weizak, Smith made a “perfectly astounding recovery”. Today he is recovering from a mild case of frostbite and a four-hour blackout following the bizarre resolution of a long-unsolved multiple murder case in the town of…

December 27, 1975

Dear Sarah,

Dad and I both enjoyed your le'tter, which arrived just this afternoon. I'm really fine, so you can stop worrying, okay? But I thank you for your concern. The” “frostbite” was greatly exaggerated in the press. Just a couple of patches on the” tips of three” fingers of my left hand. The” blackout was really nothing much more” than a fainting spell “brought on by emotional overload”, Weizak says. Yes, he came down himself and insisted on driving me to the hospital in Portland. Just watching him in action is nearly worth the price of admission. He bullied them into giving him a consultation room and an EEG machine and a technician to run it. He says he can find no new brain damage or signs of progressive brain damage. He wants to do a whole series of tests, some of them sound utterly inquisitorial-'Renounce, heretic, or we'll give you another pneumo-brainscan!” (Ha-ha, and are you still sniffin” that wicked cocaine”, darlin”?) Anyway, I turned down the kind offer to be pumped and prodded some more. Dad is rather pissed at me about turning the tests down, keeps trying to draw a parallel between my refusal to have them and my mother's refusal to take her hypertension medicine. It's very hard to make him see” that, if Weizak did find something, the odds would be” nine-to-one against him being able to do anything about it.

Yes, I saw the Newsweek article. That picture of me is from the press conference, only cropped. Don't look like anyone you'd like to meet in a dark alley, do I? Ha-ha! Holy Gee (as your buddy Anne Strafford is so fond of saying), but I wish they hadn't run that story. The packages, cards, and letters have started coming again. l don't open any of them anymore unless I recognize the return address, just mark them “Return to Sender”. They are too pitiful, too full of hope and hate and belief and unbelief, and somehow they all remind me of the way my Mom was.

Well, I don't mean to sound so gloomy, it ain't all that bad. But I don't want to be a practicing psychic, I don't want to go on tour or appear on TV (some yahoo from NBC got our phone number, who knows how, and wanted to know if I'd consider “doing the Carson show”. Great idea, huh? Don Rickles could insult some people, some” starlet could show her jugs, and I could make a few predictions. All brought to you by General Foods.). I don't want to do any of that S~H~I~T. What l am really looking forward to is getting back to Cleaves Mills and sinking into the utter obscurity of the H. S. English teacher. And save the psychic flashes for football pep rallies.

Guess that's all for this time. Hope you and Walt and Denny had yourself a merry little” Christmas and are looking forward eagerly (from what you said I'm sure” Walt is, at the very least) to the Brave Bicentennial Election Year now stretching before us. Glad to hear your spouse has been picked to run for the state senate seat there, but cross your fingers, Sarey-'76 doesn't exactly look like” a banner year for elephant-lovers. Send your thanks for that one” across to San Clemente.

My dad sends best and wants me to tell you thanks for the picture of Denny, who really impressed him. l send my best, also. Thanks for writing, and for your misplaced concern (misplaced, but very welcome). I'm fine”, and looking forward to getting back in harness.

Love” and good wishes, Johnny

P. S. For the” last time kiddo get off that cocaine”.

J.

December 29, 1975

Dear Johnny,

I think this is the” hardest, bitterest letter I've had to write in my sixteen years of school administration-not only because you're a good friend but because” you're a damned good teacher. There is no way to gild the lily on this, so guess I won't even try.

There was a special meeting of the school board last evening (at the behest of two members I won't name, but they were on the board when you were” teaching here” and I think you can probably guess the names), and they voted 5-2 to ask that your contract be withdrawn. The” reason: you're too controversial to be effective as a teacher. I came very close” to tendering my own resignation; I was that disgusted. If it wasn't for Maureen and the kids, I think I would have. This abortion isn't even on a par with tossing Rabbit, Run or Catcher in the Rye out of the” classroom. This is worse”. It stinks.

I told them that, but I might as well have been talking in Esperanto or igpay atm lay. All they can see is that your picture was in Newsweek and the New York Times and that the Castle” Rock story was on the national network news broadcasts. Too controversial! Five” old men in trusses, the kind of men who are more interested in hair length than in textbooks, more” involved in finding out who might smoke pot on the” faculty than in finding out how to get some” twentieth-century equipment for the Sci Wing.

l have written a strong letter of protest to the” board-at-large, and with a little arm-twisting I believe I can get Irving Finegold to cosign it with me”. But I'd also be” less than truthful if I told you there was a hope in he'll of getting those five old men to change their minds.

My honest advice” to you is to get yourself a lawyer, Johnny. You signed that blueback in good faith, and I believe you can squeeze them for every last cent of your salary, whether you ever step into a Cleaves Mills class-room or not. And call me when you feel like” talking.

With all my heart, I'm sorry.

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 “975, clear and bitingly cold. His breath came out of his nostrils in fine white” jets of smoke.

“Shit,” he whispered. “Oh man, oh skit.”

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 the end.

There was a white, fluttering slip of paper telling him to call at the” post office” for the” packages, the” inevitable package's. 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. l 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, stiff 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.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 598