The Dead Zone (23 page)

“The Lord helps those who help themselves,” he said. “You don't want the Christian God at all, Mom. You want a magic genie that's going to come out of a bottle and give you three wishes.”

“Johnny!”

“Well, it's true.”

“Those doctors put that idea in your head! All of these crazy ideas!” Her lips were trembling; her eyes wide but tearless. “God brought you out of that coma to do his will, John. These others, they're just . . .”

“Just trying to get me back on my feet so I won't have to do God's will from a wheelchair the rest of my life.”

“Let's not have an argument,” Herb said. “Families shouldn't argue.” And hurricanes shouldn't blow, but they do every year, and nothing he could say was going to stop this. It had been coming.

“If you put your trust in God, Johnny . . .” Vera began, taking no notice of Herb at all.

“I don't trust anything anymore.”

“I'm sorry to hear you say that,” she said. Her voice was stiff and distant. “Satan's agents are everywhere. They'll try to turn you from your destiny. Looks like they are getting along with it real well.”

“You have to make some kind of . . . of eternal thing out of it, don't you? I'll tell you what it was, it was a stupid accident, a couple of kids were dragging and I just happened to get turned into dog meat. You know what I want, Mom? I want to get out of here. That's all I want. And I want you to go on taking your medicine and . . . and try to get your feet back on the ground. That's all I want.”

“I'm leaving.” She stood up. Her face was pale and drawn. “I'll pray for you, Johnny.”

He looked at her, helpless, frustrated, and unhappy. His anger was gone. He had taken it out on her. “Keep taking your medicine!” he said.

“I pray that you'll see the light.”

She left the room, her face set and as grim as stone.

Johnny looked helplessly at his father.

“John, I wish you hadn't done that,” Herb said.

“I'm tired. It doesn't do a thing for my judgment. Or my temper.”

“Yeah,” Herb said. He seemed about to say more and didn't.

“Is she still planning to go out to California for that flying saucer symposium or whatever it is?”

“Yes. But she may change her mind. You never know from one day to the next, and it's still a month away.”

“You ought to do something.”

“Yeah? What? Put her away? Commit her?”

Johnny shook his head. “I don't know. But maybe it's time you thought about that seriously instead of just acting like it's out of the question. She's sick. You have to see that.”

Herb said loudly: “She was all right before you . . .”

Johnny winced, as if slapped.

“Look, I'm sorry. John, I didn't mean that.”

“Okay, Dad.”

“No, I really didn't.” Herb's face was a picture of misery. “Look, I ought to go after her. She's probably leafleting the hallways by now.”

“Okay.”

“Johnny, just try to forget this and concentrate on getting well. She does love you, and so do I. Don't be hard on us.”

“No. It's all right, dad.”

Herb kissed Johnny's cheek. “I have to go after her.”

“All right.”

Herb left. When they were gone, Johnny got up and tottered the three steps between his chair and the bed. Not much. But something. A start. He wished more than his father knew that he hadn't blown up at his mother like that. He wished it because an odd sort of certainty was growing in him that his mother was not going to live much longer.

Vera stopped taking her medication. Herb talked to her, then cajoled, finally demanded. It did no good. She showed him the letters of her “correspondents in Jesus,” most of them scrawled and full of misspellings, all of them supporting her stand and promising to pray for her. One of them was from a lady in Rhode Island who had also been at the farm in Vermont, waiting for the end of the world (along with her pet Pomeranian, Otis).
“GOD
is the best medicine,” this lady wrote, “ask
GOD
and YOU WILL BE HEALED, not DRS who OSURP the POWER of
GOD,
it is DRS who have caused all the CANCER in this evil world with there DEVIL'S MEDDLING, anyone who has had SURGERY for instance, even MINOR like TONSILS OUT, sooner or later they will end up with CANCER, this is a proven fact, so ask
GOD,
pray
GOD,
merge YOUR WILL with HIS WILL and YOU WILL BE
HEALED!!”

Herb talked to Johnny on the phone, and the next day Johnny called his mother and apologized for being so short with her. He asked her to please start taking the medicine again—for him. Vera accepted his apology, but refused to go back to the medication. If God needed her treading the earth, then he would see she continued to tread it. If God wanted to call her home, he would do that even if she took a barrel of pills a day. It was a seamless argument, and Johnny's only possible rebuttal was the one that Catholics and Protestants alike have rejected for eighteen hundred years: that God works His will through the mind of man as well as through the spirit of man.

“Momma,” he said, “haven't you thought that God's will was for some doctor to invent that drug so you could live longer? Can't you even consider that idea?”

Long distance was no medium for theological argument. She hung up.

The next day Marie Michaud came into Johnny's room, put her head on his bed, and wept.

“Here, here,” Johnny said, startled and alarmed. “What's this? What's wrong?”

“My boy,” she said, still crying. “My Mark. They operated on him and it was just like you said. He's fine. He's going to see out of his bad eye again. Thank God.”

She hugged Johnny and he hugged her back as best he could. With her warm tears on his own cheek, he thought that whatever had happened to him wasn't all bad. Maybe some things should be told, or seen, or found again. It wasn't even so farfetched to think that God
was
working through him, although his own concept of God was fuzzy and ill-defined. He held Marie and told her how glad he was. He told her to remember that he wasn't the one who had operated on Mark, and that he barely remembered what it was that he had told her. She left shortly after that, drying her eyes as she went, leaving Johnny alone to think.

Early in August, Dave Pelsen came to see Johnny. The Cleaves Mills High assistant principal was a small, neat man who wore thick glasses and Hush Puppies and a series of loud sports jackets. Of all the people who came to see Johnny during that almost endless summer of 1975, Dave had changed
the least. The gray was speckled a little more fully through his hair, but that was all.

“So how are you doing? Really?” Dave asked, when they had finished the amenities.

“Not so bad,” Johnny said. “I can walk alone now if I don't overdo it. I can swim six laps in the pool. I get headaches sometimes, real killers, but the doctors say I can expect that to go on for some time. Maybe the rest of my life.”

“Mind a personal question?”

“If you're going to ask me if I can still get it up,” Johnny said with a grin, “that's affirmative.”

“That's good to know, but what I wanted to know about is the money. Can you pay for this?”

Johnny shook his head. “I've been in the hospital for going on five years. No one but a Rockefeller could pay for that. My father and mother got me into some sort of state-funded program. Total Disaster, or something like that.”

Dave nodded. “The Extraordinary Disaster program. I figured that. But how did they keep you out of the state hospital, Johnny? That place is the pits.”

“Dr. Weizak and Dr. Brown saw to that. And they're largely responsible for my having been able to come back as far as I have. I was a . . . a guinea pig, Dr. Weizak says. How long can we keep this comatose man from turning into a total vegetable? The physical therapy unit was working on me the last two years I was in coma. I had megavitamin shots . . . my ass still looks like a case of smallpox. Not that they expected any return on the project from me personally. I was assumed to be a terminal case almost from the time I came in. Weizak says that what he and Brown did with me is ‘aggressive life support.' He thinks it's the beginning of a response to all the criticism about sustaining life after hope of recovery is gone. Anyway, they couldn't continue to use me if I'd gone over to the state hospital, so they kept me here. Eventually, they would have finished with me and then I
would
have gone to the state hospital.”

“Where the most sophisticated care you would have gotten would have been a turn every six hours to prevent bedsores,” Dave said. “And if you'd waked up in 1980, you would have been a basket case.”

“I think I would have been a basket case no matter what,” Johnny said. He shook his head slowly. “I think if someone proposes one more operation on me, I'll go nuts. And I'm
still going to have a limp and I'll never be able to turn my head all the way to the left.”

“When are they letting you out?”

“In three weeks, God willing.”

“Then what?”

Johnny shrugged. “I'm going down home, I guess. To Pow-nal. My mother's going to be in California for a while on a . . . a religious thing. Dad and I can use the time to get reacquainted. I got a letter from one of the big literary agents in New York . . . well, not
him,
exactly, but one of his assistants. They think there might be a book in what happened to me. I thought I'd try to do two or three chapters and an outline, maybe this guy or his assistant can sell it. The money would come in pretty damn handy, no kidding there.”

“Has there been any other media interest?”

“Well, the guy from the Bangor
Daily News
who did the original story . . .”

“Bright? He's good.”

“He'd like to come down to Pownal after I blow this joint and do a feature story. I like the guy, but right now I'm holding him off. There's no money in it for me, and right now, frankly, that's what I'm looking for. I'd go on ‘To Tell the Truth' if I thought I could make two hundred bucks out of it. My folks' savings are gone. They sold their car and bought a clunker. Dad took a second mortgage on the house when he should have been thinking about retiring and selling it and living on the proceeds.”

“Have you thought about coming back into teaching?”

Johnny glanced up. “Is that an offer?”

“It ain't chopped liver.”

“I'm grateful,” Johnny said. “But I'm just not going to be ready in September, Dave.”

“I wasn't thinking about September. You must remember Sarah's friend, Anne Strafford?” Johnny nodded. “Well, she's Anne Beatty now, and she's going to have a baby in December. So we need an English teacher second semester. Light schedule. Four classes, one senior study hall, two free periods.”

“Are you making a firm offer, Dave?”

“Firm.”

“That's pretty damn good of you,” Johnny said hoarsely.

“Hell with that,” Dave said easily. “You were a pretty damn good teacher.”

“Can I have a couple of weeks to think it over?”

“Until the first of October, if you want,” Dave said. “You'd still be able to work on your book, I think. If it looks like there might be a possibility there.”

Johnny nodded.

“And you might not want to stay down there in Pownal too long,” Dave said. “You might find it . . . uncomfortable.”

Words rose to Johnny's lips and he had to choke them off.

Not for long, Dave. You see, my mother's in the process of blowing her brains out right now. She's just not using a gun. She's going to have a stroke. She'll be dead before Christmas unless my father and I can persuade her to start taking her medicine again, and I don't think we can. And I'm a part of it—how much of a part I don't know. I don't think I want to know.

Instead he replied, “News travels, huh?”

Dave shrugged. “I understand through Sarah that your mother has had problems adjusting. She'll come around, Johnny. In the meantime, think about it.”

“I will. In fact, I'll give you a tentative yes right now. It would be good to teach again. To get back to normal.”

“You're my man,” Dave said.

After he left, Johnny lay down on his bed and looked out the window. He was very tired.
Get back to normal.
Somehow he didn't think that was ever really going to happen.

He felt one of his headaches coming on.

The fact that Johnny Smith had come out of his coma with something extra finally did get into the paper, and it made page one under David Bright's by-line. It happened less than a week before Johnny left the hospital.

He was in physical therapy, lying on his back on a floor-pad. Resting on his belly was a twelve-pound medicine ball. His physical therapist, Eileen Magown, was standing above him and counting off situps. He was supposed to do ten of them, and he was currently struggling over number eight. Sweat was streaming down his face, and the healing scars on his neck stood out bright red.

Eileen was a small, homely woman with a whipcord body, a nimbus of gorgeous, frizzy red hair, and deep green eyes flecked with hazel. Johnny sometimes called her—with a
mixture of irritation and amusement—the world's smallest Marine D.I. She had ordered and cajoled and demanded him back from a bed-fast patient who could barely hold a glass of water to a man who could walk without a cane, do three chinups at a time, and do a complete turn around the hospital pool in fifty-three seconds—not Olympic time, but not bad. She was unmarried and lived in a big house on Center Street in Old-town with her four cats. She was slate-hard and she wouldn't take no for an answer.