CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

1.

“No,” the Trimbull chief of police said in answer to Johnny's question, “you're not charged with anything. You're not under detention. And you don't have to answer any questions. We'd just be very grateful if you would.”

“Very grateful,” the man in the conservative business suit echoed. His name was Edgar Lancte. He was with the Boston office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He thought that Johnny Smith looked like a very sick man. There was a puffed bruise above his left eyebrow that was rapidly turning purple. When he blacked out, Johnny had come down very hard-either on the shoe of a marching-bandsman or on the squared-off toe of a motorcycle boot. Lancte mentally favored the latter possibility. And possibly the motorcycle boot had been in motion at the instant of contact.

Smith was too pale, and his hands trembled badly as he drank the paper cup of water that Chief Bass had given him. One eyelid was ticking nervously. He looked like the classic would-be assassin, although the most deadly thing in his personal effects had been a nailclipper. Still, Lancte would keep that impression in mind, because he was what he was.

“What can I tell you?” Johnny asked. He had awakened on a cot in an unlocked cell. He'd had a blinding headache. It was draining away now, leaving him feeling strangely hollow inside. He felt a little as if his legitimate innards had been scooped out and replaced with Reddi Wip. There was a high, constant sound in his ears-not precisely a ringing; more like a high, steady hum. It was nine P. M. The Stillson entourage had long since swept out of town. All the hot dogs had been eaten.

“You can tell us exactly what happened back there,” Bass said.

“It was hot. I guess I got overexcited and fainted.”

“You an invalid or something?” Lancte asked casually.

Johnny looked at him steadily. “Don't play games with me, Mr. Lancte. If you know who I am, then say so.”

“I know,” Lancte said. “Maybe you are psychic.”

“Nothing psychic about guessing an FBI agent might be up to a few games,” Johnny said.

“You're a Maine boy, Johnny. Born and bred. What's a Maine boy doing down in New Hampshire?”

“Tutoring.”

“The Chatsworth boy?”

“For the second time: if you know, why ask? Unless you suspect me of something.”

Lancte lit a Vantage Green. “Rich family.”

“Yes. They are.”

“You a Stillson fan, are you, Johnny?” Bass asked. Johnny didn't like fellows who used his first name on first acquaintance, and both of these fellows were doing it” It made him nervous.

“Are you?” he asked,

Bass made an obscene blowing sound. “About five years ago we had a day-long folk-rock concert in Trimbull. Out on Hake Jamieson's land. Town council had their doubts, but they went ahead because the kids have got to have something. We thought we were going to have maybe two hundred local kids in Hake's east pasture listening to music. Instead we got sixteen hundred, all of em smoking pot and drinking hard stuff straight out from the neck of the bottle. They made a hell of a mess and the council got mad and said there'd never be another one and they turned around all hurt arid wet-eyed and said, “Whassa matter? No one got hurt, did they?” It was supposed to be okay to make a helluva mess because no one got hurt. I feel the same way about this guy Stilison. I remember once…

“You don't have any sort of grudge against Stillson, do you, Johnny?” Lancte asked. “Nothing personal between you and him?” He smiled a fatherly, you-can-get-it-off-your-chest-if-you-want-to smile.

“I didn't even know who he was until six weeks ago.”

“Yes, well, but that really doesn't answer my question, does it?”

Johnny sat silent for a little while. “He disturbs me,” he said finally.

“That doesn't really answer my question, either.”

“Yes, I think it does.”

“You're not being as helpful as we'd like,” Lancte said regretfully.

Johnny glanced over at Bass. “Does anybody who faints in your town at a public gathering get the FBI treatment, Chief Bass?”

Bass looked uncomfortable. “Well… no. Course not.”

“You were shaking hands with Stillson when you keeled over,” Lancte said. “You looked sick. Stillson himself looked scared green. You're a very lucky young man, Johnny. Lucky his goodbuddies there didn't turn your head into a votive urn. They thought you'd pulled a piece on him.”

Johnny was looking at Lancte with dawning surprise. He looked at Bass, then back to the FBI man. “You were there,” he said. “Bass didn't call you up on the phone. You were there. At the rally.”

Lancte crushed out his cigarette. “Yes. I was.”

“Why is the FBI interested in Stillson?” Johnny nearly barked the question.

“Let's talk about you, Johnny. What's your…

“No, let's talk about Stillson. Let's talk about his good-buddies, as you call them. Is it legal for them to carry” around sawed-off pool cues?”

“It is,” Bass said. Lancte threw him a warning look, but Bass either didn't see it or ignored it. “Cues, baseball bats, golf clubs. No law against any of them.”

“I heard someone say those guys used to be iron riders. Bike gang members.”

“Some of them used to be with a New Jersey club, some used to be with a New York club, that's…”

“Chief Bass,” Lancte interrupted, “I hardly think this is the time…

“I can't see the harm of telling him,” Bass said. “They're bums, rotten apples, hairbags. Some of them ganged together in the Hamptons back four or five years ago, when they had the bad riots. A few of them were affiliated with a bike club called the Devil's Dozen that disbanded in 1972. Stillson's ramrod is a guy named Sonny Elliman. He used to be the president of the Devil's Dozen. He's been busted half a dozen times but never convicted of anything.”

“You're wrong about that, Chief,” Lancte said, lighting a fresh cigarette. “He was cited in Washington State in 1973 for making an illegal left turn against traffic. He signed the waiver and paid a twenty-five dollar fine.”

Johnny got up and went slowly across the room to the water cooler, where he drew himself a fresh cup of water. Lancte watched him go with interest.

“So you just fainted, right?” Lancte said.

“No,” Johnny said, not turning around. “I was going to shoot him with a bazooka. Then, at the critical moment, all my bionic circuits blew.”

Lancte sighed.

Bass said, “You're free to go any time.”

“Thank you.

“But I'll tell you just the same way Mr. Lancte here would tell you. In the future, I'd stay away from Stillson rallies, if I were you. If you want to keep a whole skin, that is. Things have a way of happening to people Greg Stillson doesn't like…

“Is that so?” Johnny asked. He drank his water.

“Those are matters outside your bailiwick, Chief Bass,” Lancte said. His eyes were like hazy steel and he was looking at Bass very hard.

“All right,” Bass said mildly.

“I don't see any harm in telling you that there have been other rally incidents,” Lancte said. “In Ridgeway a young pregnant woman was beaten so badly she miscarried. This was just after the Stillson rally there that CBS filmed. She said she couldn't ID her assailant, but we feel it may have been one of Stillson's bikies. A month ago a kid, he was fourteen, got himself a fractured skull. He had a little plastic squirtgun. He couldn't ID his assailant, either. But the squirtgun makes us believe it may have been a security overreaction.”

How nicely put, Johnny thought.

“You couldn't find anyone who saw it happen?”

“Nobody who would talk. “Lancte smiled humorlessly and tapped the ash off his cigarette. “He's the people's choice.”

Johnny thought of the young guy holding his son up so that the boy could see Greg Stillson. Who the hell cares? They're just for show, anyway.

“So he's got his own pet FBI agent.”

Lancte shrugged and smiled disarmingly. “Well, what can I say? Except, FYI, it's no tit assignment, Johnny. Sometimes I get scared. The guy generates one hell of a lot of magnetism. If he pointed me out from the podium and told the crowd at one of those rallies who I was, I think they'd run me up the nearest lamppost.

Johnny thought of the crowd that afternoon, and of the pretty girl hysterically waving her chunk of watermelon. “I think you might be right,” he said.

“So if there's something you know that might help me… “Lancte leaned forward. The disarming smile had become slightly predatory. “Maybe you even had a psychic flash about him. Maybe that's what messed you up.”

“Maybe I did,” Johnny said, unsmiling.

“Well?”

For one wild moment Johnny considered telling them everything. Then he rejected it. “I saw him on TV. I had nothing in particular to do today, so I thought I'd come over here and check him out in person. I bet I wasn't the only out-of-towner who did that.”

“You sure wasn't,” Bass said vehemently.

“And that's all?” Lancte asked.

“That's all,” Johnny said, and then hesitated. “Except I think he's going to win his election.”

“We're sure he is,” Lancte said. “Unless we can get something on him. In the meantime, I'm in complete agreement with Chief Bass. Stay away from Stillson rallies.”

“Don't worry. “Johnny crumpled up his paper cup and threw it away. “It's been nice talking to you two gentle men, but I've got a long drive back to Durham.”

“Going back to Maine soon, Johnny?” Lancte asked casually.

“Don't know. “He looked from Lancte, slim and impeccable, tapping out a fresh cigarette on the blank face of his digital watch, to Bass, a big, tired man with a basset hound's face. “Do either of you think he'll run for higher office? If he gets this seat in the House of Representatives?”

“Jesus wept,” Bass muttered, and rolled his eyes.

“These guys come and go,” Lancte said. His eyes, so brown they were nearly black, had never stopped studying Johnny. “They're like one of those rare radioactive elements that are so unstable that they don't last long. Guys like Stillson have no permanent political base, just a temporary coalition that holds together for a little while and then falls apart. Did you see that crowd today? College kids and mill hands yelling for the same guy? That's not politics, that's something on the order of hula hoops or coonskin caps or Beatle wigs. He'll get his term in the House and he'll free4unch until 1978 and that'll be it. Count on it.”

But Johnny wondered.

2.

The next day, the left side of Johnny's forehead had become very colorful. Dark purple-almost black-above the eyebrow shaded to red and then to a morbidly gay yellow at the temple and hairline. His eyelid had puffed slightly, giving him a leering sort of expression, like the second banana in a burlesque review.

He did twenty laps in the pool and then sprawled in one of the deck chairs, panting. He felt terrible. He had gotten less than four hours” sleep the night before, and all of what he had gotten had been dream-haunted.

“Hi, Johnny… how you doing, man?”

He turned around. It was Ngo, smiling gently. He was dressed in his work clothes and wearing gardening gloves. Behind him was a child's red wagon filled with small pine trees, their roots wrapped in burlap. Recalling what Ngo called the pines, he said: “I see you're planting more weeds.”

Ngo wrinkled his nose. “Sorry, yes. Mr. Chatsworth is loving them. I tell him, but they are junk trees. Every-where there are these trees in New England. His face goes like this… “Now Ngo's whole face wrinkled and he looked like a caricature. of some late show monster…… and he says to me, “Just plant them. "”

Johnny laughed. That was Roger Chatsworth, all right.

He liked things done his way. “How did you enjoy the rally?”

Ngo smiled gently. “Very instructive,” he said. There was no way to read his eyes. He might not have noticed the sunrise on the side of Johnny's face. “Yes, very instructive, we are all enjoying ourselves.”

“Good.”

“And you?”

“Not so much,” Johnny said, and touched the bruise lightly with his fingertips. It was very tender.

“Yes, too bad, you should put a beefsteak on it,” Ngo said, still smiling gently.

What did you think about him, Ngo? What did your class think? Your Polish friend? Or Ruth Chen and her sister?”

“Going back we did not talk about it, at our instructors” request. Think about what you have seen, they say. Next Tuesday we will write in class, I think. Yes, I am thinking very much that we will. A class composition.”

“What will you say in your composition?”

Ngo looked at the blue summer sky. He and the sky smiled at each other. He was a small man with the first threads of gray in his hair. Johnny knew almost nothing about him; didn't know if he had been married, had fathered children, if he had fled before the Vietcong, if he had been from Saigon or from one of the rural provinces. He had no idea what Ngo's political leanings were.

“We talked of the game of the Laughing Tiger,” Ngo said. “Do you remember?”

“Yes,” Johnny said.

“I will tell you of a real tiger. When I was a boy there was a tiger who went bad near my village. He was being le manger d'homme, eater of men, you understand, except he was not that, he was an eater of boys and girls and old women because this was during the war and there were no men to eat. Not the war you know of, but the Second World War. He had gotten the taste for human meat, this tiger. Who was there to kill such an awful creature in a humble village where the youngest man is being sixty and with only one arm, and the oldest boy is myself, only seven years of age? And one day this tiger was found in a pit that had been baited with the body of a dead woman. It is a terrible thing to bait a trap with a human being made in the image of God, I will say in my composition, but it is more terrible to do nothing while a bad tiger carries away small children. And I will say in my composition that this bad tiger was still alive when we found it. It was having a stake pushed through its body but it was still alive. We beat it to death with hoes and sticks. Old men and women and children, some children so excited and frightened they are wetting themselves in their pants. The tiger fell in the pit and we beat it to death with our hoes because the men of the village had gone to fight the Japanese. I am thinking that this Stillson is like that bad tiger with its taste for human meat. I think a trap should be made for him, and I think he should be falling into it. And if he still lives, I think he should be beaten to death.”

He smiled gently at Johnny in the clear summer sunshine.

“Do you really believe that?” Johnny asked.

“Oh, yes,” Ngo said. He spoke lightly, as if it were a matter of no consequence. “What my teacher will say when I am handing in such a composition, I don't know. “He shrugged his shoulders. “Probably he will say, “Ngo, you are not ready for the American Way.” But I will say the truth of what I feel. What did you think, Johnny?” His eyes moved to the bruise, then moved away.

“I think he's dangerous,” Johnny said. “I… I know lie's dangerous.”

“Do you?” Ngo remarked. “Yes, I believe you do know it. Your fellow New Hampshires, they see him as an engaging clown. They set him the way many of this world are seeing this black man, Idi Amin Dada. But you do not.

“No,” Johnny said. “But to suggest he should be killed…

“Politically killed,” Ngo said, smiling. “I am only suggesting he should be politically killed.”

“And if he can't be politically killed?”

Ngo smiled at Johnny. He unfolded his index finger, cocked his thumb, and then snapped it down. “Bam,” he said softly. “Bam, bam, ham.”

“No,” Johnny said, surprised at the hoarseness in his own voice. “That's never an answer. Never”

“No? I thought it was an answer you Americans used quite often. “Ngo picked up the handle of the red wagon. “I must be planting these weeds, Johnny. So long, man.

Johnny watched him go, a small man in suntans and moccasins, pulling a wagonload of baby pines. He disappeared around the corner of the house.

No. Killing only sows more dragon's teeth. I believe that. I believe it with all my heart.

3.

On the first Tuesday in November, which happened to be the second day in the month, Johnny Smith sat slumped in the easy chair of his combined kitchen-living room and watched the election returns. Chancellor and Brinkley were featuring a large electronic map that showed the results of the presidential race in a color-code as each state came in. Now, at nearly midnight, the race between Ford and Carter looked very cl6se. But Carter would win; Johnny had no doubt of it.

Greg Stillson had also won.

His victory had been extensively covered on the local newsbreaks, but the national reporters had also taken some note of it, comparing his victory to that of James Longley, Maine's independent governor, two years before.

Chancellor said, “Late polls showing that the Republican candidate and incumbent Harrison Fisher was closing the gap were apparently in error; NBC predicts that Stilison, who campaigned in a construction worker's hard hat and on a platform that included the proposal that all pollution be sent into outer space, ended up with forty-six percent of the vote, to Fisher's thirty-one percent. In a district where the Democrats have always been poor relations, David Bowes could only poll twenty-three per-cent of the vote.”

“And so,” Brinkley said, “it's hot dog time down in New Hampshire… for the next two years, at least. “He and Chancellor grinned. A commercial came on. Johnny didn't grin. He was thinking of tigers.

The time between the Trimbull rally and election night had been busy for Johnny. His work with Chuck had continued, and Chuck continued to improve at a slow but steady pace. He had taken two summer courses, passed them both, and retained his sports eligibility. Now, with the football season just ending, it looked very much as if he would be named to the Gannett newspaper chain's All New England team. The careful, almost ritualistic visits from the college scouts had already begun, but they would have to wait another year; the decision had already been made between Chuck and his father that he would spend a year at Stovington Prep, a good private school in Vermont. Johnny thought Stovington would probably be delirious at the news. The Vermont school regularly fielded great soccer teams and dismal football teams. They would probably give him a full scholarship and a gold key to the girl's dorm in the bargain. Johnny felt that it had been the right decision. After it had been reached and the pressure on Chuck to take the SATs right away had eased off, his progress had taken another big jump.

In late September. Johnny had gone up to Pownal for the weekend and after an entire Friday night of watching his father fidget and laugh uproariously at jokes on TV that weren't particularly funny, he had asked Herb what the trouble was.

“No trouble,” Herb said, smiling nervously and rubbing his hands together like an accountant who has discovered that the company he just invested his life savings with is bankrupt. “No trouble at all, what makes you think that, son?”

“Well, what's on your mind, then?”

Herb stopped smiling, but he kept rubbing his hands together. “I don't really know how to tell you, Johnny. I mean…

“Is it Charlene?”

“Well, yes. It is.”

“You popped the question.”

Herb looked at Johnny humbly. “How do you feel about coming into a stepmother at the age of twenty-nine, John?”

Johnny grinned. “I feel fine about it. Congratulations, Dad.”

Herb” smiled, relieved. “Well, thanks. I was a little scared to tell you, I don't mind admitting it. I know what you said when we talked about it before, but people sometimes feel one way when something's maybe and another way when it's gonna be. I loved your mom, Johnny. And I guess I always will.”

“I know that, dad.”

“But I'm alone and Charlene's alone and… well, I guess we can put each other to good use.”

Johnny went over to his father and kissed him. “All the best. I know you'll have it.”

“You're a good son, Johnny. “Herb took his handkerchief out of his back pocket and swiped at his eyes with it. “We thought we'd lost you. I did, anyway. Vera never lost hope. She always believed. Johnny, I…”

“Don't, Daddy. It's over.

“I have to,” he said. “It's been in my gut like a stone for a year and a half now. I prayed for you to die, Johnny. My own son, and I prayed for God to take you. “He wiped his tears again and put his handkerchief away. “Turned out God knew a smidge more than I did. Johnny… would you stand up with me? At my wedding?”

Johnny felt something inside that was almost but not quite like sorrow. “That would be my pleasure,” he said.

“Thanks. I'm glad I've… that I've said everything that's on my mind. I feel better than I have in a long, long time.”

“Have you set a date?”

“As a matter of fact, we have. How does January 2 sound to you?”

“Sounds good,” Johnny said. “You can count on me.”

“We're going to put both places on the market, I guess,” Herb” said. “We've got our eye on a farm in Biddeford. Nice place. Twenty acres. Half of it woodlot. A new start.”

“Yes. A new start, that's good.”

“You wouldn't have any objections to us selling the home place?” Herb asked anxiously.

“A little tug,” Johnny said. “That's all.”

“Yeah, that's what I feel. A little tug. “He smiled. “Somewhere around the heart, that's where mine is. What about you?”

“About the same,” Johnny said.

“How's it going down there for you?”

“Good.”

“Your boy's getting along?”

“Amazin well,” Johnny said, using one of his father's pet expressions and grinning.

“How long do you think you'll be there?”

“Working with Chuck? I guess I'll stick with it through the school year, if they want me. Working one-on one has been a new kind of experience. I like it. And this has been a really good job. Atypically good, I'd say.”

“What are you going to do after?”

Johnny shook his head. “I don't know yet. But I know one thing.”

“What's that?”

“I'm going out for a bottle of champagne. We're going to get bombed.”

His father had stood up on that September evening and clapped him on the back. “Make it two,” he said.

He still got the occasional letter from Sarah Hazlett. She and Walt were expecting their second child in April. Johnny wrote back his congratulations and his good wishes for Walt's canvass. And he thought sometimes about his afternoon with Sarah, the long, slow afternoon.

It wasn't a memory he allowed himself to take out too often; he was afraid that constant exposure to the sunlight of recollection might cause it to wash out and fade, like the reddish-tinted proofs they used to give you of your graduation portraits.

He had gone out a few times this fall, once with the older and newly divorced sister of the girl Chuck was seeing, but nothing had developed from any of those dates.

Most of his spare time that fall he had spent in the company of Gregory Ammas Stillson.

He had become a Stillsonphile. He kept three looseleaf notebooks in his bureau under his socks and underwear and T-shirts. They were filled with notes, speculations, and Xerox copies of news items.

Doing this had made him uneasy. At night, as he wrote around the pasted-up clippings with a fine-line Pilot pen, he sometimes felt like Arthur Bremmer or the Moore woman who had tried to shoot Jerry Ford. He knew that if Edgar Lancte, Fearless Minion of the Effa Bee Eye, could see him doing this, his phone, living room, and bathroom would be tapped in a jiffy. There would be an Acme Furniture van parked across the street, only instead of being full of furniture it would be loaded with cameras and mikes and God knew what else.

He kept telling himself that he wasn't Bremmer, that Stilison wasn't an obsession, but that got harder to believe after the long afternoons at the UNH library, searching through old newspapers and magazines and feeding dimes into the photocopier. It got harder to believe on the nights he burned the midnight oil, writing out his thoughts and trying to make valid connections. It grew well-nigh impossible to believe on those graveyard-ditch three A. M. “s when he woke up sweating from the recurring nightmare.

The nightmare was nearly always the same, a naked replay of his handshake with Stillson at the Trimbull rally. The sudden blackness. The feeling of being in a tunnel filled with the glare of the onrushing headlight, a head-light bolted to some black engine of doom. The old man with the humble, frightened eyes administering an unthinkable oath of office. The nuances of feeling, coming and going like tight puffs of smoke. And a series of brief images, strung together in a flapping row like the plastic pennants over a used-car dealer's lot. His mind whispered to him that these images were all related, that they told a picture-story of a titanic approaching doom, perhaps even the Armageddon of which Vera Smith had been so endlessly confident.

But what were the images? What were they exactly? They were hazy, impossible to see except in vague outline, because there was always that puzzling blue filter between, the blue filter that was sometimes cut by those yellow markings like tiger stripes.

The only clear image in these dream-replays came near the end: the screams of the dying, the smell of the dead. And a single tiger padding through miles of twisted metal, fused glass, and scorched earth. This tiger was always laughing, and it seemed to be carrying something in its mouth-something blue and yellow and dripping blood.

There had been times in the fall when he thought that dream would send him mad. Ridiculous dream; the possibility it seemed to point to was impossible, after all. Best to drive it totally out of his mind.

But because he couldn't, he researched Gregory Still-son and tried to tell himself it was only a harmless hobby and not a dangerous obsession.

Stillson had been born in Tulsa. His father had been an oil-field roughneck who drifted from job to job, working more often than some of his colleagues because of his tremendous size. His mother might once have been pretty, although there was only a hint of that in the two pictures that Johnny had been able to unearth. If she had been, the times and the man she had been married to had dimmed her prettiness quickly. The pictures showed little more than another dustbowl face, a southeast United States depression woman who was wearing a faded print dress and holding a baby-Greg-in her scrawny arms, and squinting into the sun.

His father had been a domineering man who didn't think much of his son. As a child, Greg had been pallid and sickly. There was no evidence that his father had abused the boy either mentally or physically, but there was the suggestion that at the very least, Greg Stillson had lived in a disapproving shadow for the first nine years of his life. The one picture Johnny had of the father and son t6gether was a happy one, however; it showed them together in the oil fields, the father's arm slung around the son's neck in a careless gesture of comradeship. But it gave Johnny a little chill all the same. Harry” Stilison was dressed in working clothes, twill pants and a double-breasted khaki shirt, and his hard hat was cocked jauntily back on his head.

Greg had begun school in Tulsa, then had been switched to Oklahoma City when he was ten. The previous summer his father had been killed in an oil-derrick flameout. Mary Lou Stillson had gone to Okie City with her boy because it was where her mother lived, and where the war work was. It was 1942, and good times had come around again.

Greg's grades had been good until high school, and then he began to get into a series of scrapes. Truancy, fighting, hustling snooker downtown, maybe hustling stolen goods uptown, although that had never been proved. In 1949, when he had been a high-school junior, he had pulled a two-day suspension for putting a cherry'-bomb fire-cracker in a locker-room toilet.

In all of these confrontations with authority, Mary Lou Stillson took her son's part. The good times-at least for the likes of the Stillsons-had ended with the war work in 1945, and Mrs. Stillson seemed to think of it as a case of her and her boy against the rest of the world. Her mother had died, leaving her the small frame house and nothing else. She hustled drinks in a roughneck bar for a while, then waited table in an all-light beanery. And when her boy got in trouble, she went to bat for him, never checking (apparently) to see if his hands were dirty or clean.

The pale sickly boy that his father had nicknamed Runt was gone by 1949. As Greg Stillson's adolescence progressed, his father's physical legacy came out. The boy shot up six inches and put on seventy pounds between thirteen and seventeen. He did not play organized school sports but somehow managed to acquire a Charles Atlas bodybuilding gym and then a set of weights. The Runt became a bad guy to mess with.

Johnny guessed he must have come close to dropping out of school on dozens of occasions. He had probably avoided a bust out of sheer dumb luck. If only he had taken at least one serious bust, Johnny thought often. It would have ended all these stupid worries, because a convicted felon can't aspire to high public office.

Stillson had graduated-near the bottom of his class, it was true-in June. 1951. Grades notwithstanding, there was nothing wrong with his brains. His eye was on the main chance. He had a glib tongue and a winning manner. He worked briefly that summer as a gas jockey. Then, in August of that year, Greg Stillson had gotten Jesus at a tent-revival in Wildwood Green. He quit his job at the 76 station and went into business as a rainmaker “through the power of Jesus Christ our Lord”.

Coincidentally or otherwise, that had been one of the driest summers in Oklahoma since the days of the dust bowl. The crops were already a dead loss, and the livestock would soon follow if the shallowing wells went dry. Greg had been invited to a meeting of the local ranchers association. Johnny had found a great many stories about what had followed; it was one of the high points of Stillson's career. None of these Stories completely jibed, and Johnny could understand why. It had all the attributes of an American myth, not much different from some of the stories about Davy Crockett, Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan. That something had happened was undeniable. But the strict truth of it was already beyond reach.

One thing seemed sure. That meeting of the ranchers” association must have been one of the strangest ever held. The ranchers had invited over two dozen rainmakers from various parts of the southeast and southwest. About half of them were Negroes. Two were Indians-a half-breed Pawnee and a full-blooded Apache. There was a peyote-chewing Mexican. Greg was one of about nine white fellows, and the only home-town boy.

The ranchers heard the proposals of the rainmakers and dowsers one by one. They gradually and naturally divided themselves into two groups: those who would take half of their fee up front (nonrefundable) and those who wanted their entire fee up front (nonrefundable).

When Greg Stillson's turn came, he stood up, hooked his thumbs into the belt loops of his jeans, and was supposed to have said: “I guess you fellows know I got in the way of being able to make it rain after I gave my heart to Jesus. Before that I was deep in sin and the ways of sin. Now one of the main ways of sin is the way we've seen tonight, and you spell that kind of sinning mostly with dollar signs.”

The ranchers were interested. Even at nineteen Stillson had been something of a comic spellbinder. And he had made them an offer they couldn't refuse. Because he was a born-again Christian and because he knew that the love of money was the root of all evil, he would make it rain and afterward they could pay him whatever they thought the job had been worth.

He was hired by acclamation, and two days later he was down on his knees in the back of a flatbed farm truck, cruising slowly along the highways and byways of central Oklahoma, dressed in a black coat and a preacher's low-crowned hat, praying for rain through a pair of loudspeakers hooked up to a Delco tractor battery. People turned out by the thousands to get a look at him.

The end of the story was predictable but satisfying. The skies grew cloudy during the afternoon of Greg's second day on the job, and the next morning the rains came. The rains came for three days and two nights, flash floods killed four people. whole houses with chickens perched on the roof peaks were washed down the Greenwood River, the wells were filled, the livestock was saved, and The Oklahoma Ranchers” and Cattlemen's Association decided it probably would have happened anyway. They passed the hat for Greg at their next meeting and the young rainmaker was given the princely sum of seventeen dollars.

Greg was not put out of countenance. He used the seventeen dollars to place an ad in the Oklahoma City Herald. The ad pointed out that about the same sort of thing had happened to a certain rat-catcher in the town of Hamlin. Being a Christian, the ad went on, Greg Stillson was not in the way of taking children, and he surely knew he had no legal recourse against a group as large and powerful as the Oklahoma Ranchers” and Cattlemen's Association. But fair was fair, wasn't it? He had his elderly mother to support, and she was in failing health. The ad suggested that he had prayed his ass off for a bunch of rich, ungrateful snobs, the same sort of men that had tractored poor folks like the Joads off their land in the thirties. The ad suggested that he had saved tens of thousands of dollars” worth of livestock and had got seventeen dollars in return. Because he was a good Christian, this sort of ingratitude didn't bother him, but maybe it ought to give the good citizens of the county some pause. Right-thinking people could send contributions to Box 471. care of the Herald.

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.

In 1970, Greg Stillson had opened his own insurance and realty company. He was a great success. In 1973 he and three other businessmen had financed and built a shopping mall on the outskirts of Capital City, the county seat of the district he now represented. That was the year of the Arabian oil boycott, also the year Greg started driving a Lincoln Continental. It was also the year he ran for mayor of Ridgeway.

The mayor enjoyed a two-year term, and two years before, in 1971, he had been asked by both the Republicans and Democrats of the largish (population 8,500) New England town to run. He had declined both of them with smiling thanks. In “78 he ran as an independent, taking on a fairly popular Republican who was vulnerable because of his fervent support of President Nixon, and a Democratic figurehead. He donned his construction helmet for the first time. His campaign slogan was Let's Build A Better Ridgeway! He won in a landslide. A year later, in New Hampshire's sister state of Maine, the voters turned away from both the Democrat, George Mitchell, and the Republican, James Erwin, and elected an insurance man from Lewiston named James Longley their governor.

The lesson had not been lost on Gregory Ammas Stillson.

4.

Around the Xerox clippings were Johnny's notes and the questions he regularly asked himself. He had been over his chain of reasoning so often that now, as Chancellor and Brinkley continued to chronicle the election results, he could have spouted the whole thing word for word.

First, Greg Stillson shouldn't have been able to get elected. His campaign promises were, by and large, jokes. His background was all wrong. His education was all wrong. It stopped at the twelfth-grade level, and, until 1965, he had been little more than a drifter. In a country where the voters have decided that the lawyers should make the laws, Stillson's only brushes with that force had been from the wrong side. He wasn't married. And his personal history was decidedly freaky.

Second, the press had left him almost completely-and very puzzlingly-alone. In an election year when Wilbur Mills had admitted to a mistress, when Wayne Hays had been dislodged from his barnacle-encrusted House seat because of his, when even those in the houses of the mighty had not been immune from the rough-and-ready frisking of the press, the reporters should have had a field day with Stillson. His colorful, controversial personality seemed to stir only amused admiration from the national press, and he seemed to make no one except maybe Johnny Smith-nervous. His bodyguards had been Harley-Davidson beach-hoppers only a few years ago, and people had a way of getting hurt at Stillson rallies, but no investigative reporter had done an indepth study of that. At a campaign rally in Capital City-at that same mall Stillson had had a hand in developing-an eight. yearold girl had suffered a broken arm and a dislocated neck; her mother swore hysterically that one of those “motorcycle maniacs” had pushed her from the stage when the girl tried to climb up on the podium and get the Great Man's signature for her autograph book. Yet there had only been a squib in the paper-Girl Hurt at Stillson Rally-quickly forgotten.

Stillson had made a financial disclosure that Johnny thought too good to be true. In 1975 Stillson had paid $11,000 in Federal taxes on an income of $36,000-no state income tax at all, of course; New Hampshire didn't have one. He claimed all of his income came from his insurance and real estate agency, plus a small pittance that was his salary as mayor. There was no mention of the lucrative Capital City mall. No explanation of the fact that Stillson lived in a house with an assessed value of $86,000, a house he owned free and clear. In a season when the president of the United States was being dunned over what amounted to greens fees, Stillson's weird financial disclosure statement raised zero eye brows.

Then there was his record as mayor. His performance on the job was a lot better than his campaign performances would have led anyone to expect. He was a shrewd and canny man with a rough but accurate grasp of human, corporate, and political psychology. He had wound up his term in 1975 with a fiscal surplus for the first time in ten years, much to the delight of the taxpayers. He pointed with justifiable pride to his parking program and what he called his Hippie Work-Study Program. Ridgeway had also been one of the first towns in the whole country to organize a Bicentennial Committee. A company that made filing cabinets had located in Ridgeway, and in recessionary times, the unemployment rate locally was an enviable 3. 2 percent. All very admirable.

It was some of the other things that had happened while Stillson was mayor that made Johnny feel scared.

Funds for the town library had been cut from $11,500 to $8,000, and then, in the last year of Stilison's term, to $6,500. At the same time, the municipal police appropriation had risen by forty percent. Three new police cruisers had been added to the town motor pool, and a collection of riot equipment Two new officers had also been added, and the town council had agreed, at Stillson's urging, to institute a 50/50 policy on purchasing officers” personal sidearms. As a result, several of the cops in this sleepy New England town had gone out and bought. 357 Magnums, the gun immortalized by Dirty Harry Callahan. Also during Stillson's term as mayor, the teen rec center had been closed, a supposedly voluntary but police-enforced ten o'clock curfew for people under sixteen had been instituted, and welfare had been cut by thirty-five percent.

Yes, there were lots of things about Greg Stillson that scared Johnny.

The domineering father and laxly approving mother. The political rallies that felt more like rock concerts. The man's way with a crowd, his bodyguards -Ever since Sinclair Lewis people had been crying woe and doom and beware of the fascist state in America, and it just didn't happen. Well, there had been Huey Long down there in Louisiana, but Huey Long had -

Had been assassinated.

Johnny closed his eyes and saw Ngo cocking his finger. Bam, bam, bam. Tiger, tiger, burning bright, in the forests of the night. What fearful hand or eye -But you don't sow dragon's teeth. Not unless you want to get right down there with Frank Dodd in his hooded vinyl raincoat. With the Oswalds and the Sirhans and the Bremmers. Crazies of the world, unite. Keep your paranoid notebooks up-to-date and thumb them over at midnight and when things start to reach a head inside you, send away the coupon for the mail-order gun. Johnny Smith, meet Squeaky Fromme, Nice to meet you, Johnny, everything you've got in that notebook makes perfect sense to me. Want you to meet my spiritual master. Johnny, meet Charlie. Charlie, this is Johnny. When you finish with Stillson, we're going to get off together and off the rest of the pigs so we can save the redwoods.

His head was swirling. The inevitable headache was coming on. It always led to this. Greg Stilison always led him to this. It was time to go to sleep and please God, no dreams.

Still: The Question.

He had written it in one of the notebooks and kept coming back to it. He had written it in neat letters and then had drawn a triple circle around it, as if to keep it in. The Question was this: If you could jump into a time machine and go back to 1932, would you kill Hitler?

Johnny looked at his watch. Quarter of one. It was November 3 now, and the Bicentennial election was a part of history. Ohio was still undecided, but Carter was leading. No contest, baby. The hurly burly's done, the election's lost and won. Jerry Ford could hang up his jock, at least until 1980.

Johnny went to the window and looked out. The big house was dark, but there was a light burning in Ngo's apartment over the garage. Ngo, who would shortly be an American citizen, was still watching the great American quadrennial ritual: Old Bums Exit There, New Bums Enter Here. Maybe Gordon Strachan hadn't given the Watergate Committee such a bad answer at that Johnny went to bed. After a long time he slept.

And dreamed of the laughing tiger.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 630