The Dead Zone (51 page)

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 the 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 hometown 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 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 Lou'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 collective hand into a hornets' nest. When members came into 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 .32s 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 and was suffering a rupture. Both had been found on the corner of Greg Stillson's block,
sans
pants. Their brass knucks had been inserted in an anatomical location most commonly associated with sitting down, and in the 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 general fund, and a check in that amount was forwarded to Greg Stillson.

He got what he wanted.

In 1953 he and his mother moved to Nebraska. The rain-making 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 went bust two years later. He did better as a salesman for the TruthWay Bible Company of America. He crisscrossed the cornbelt, taking dinner with hundreds of hard-working, God-fearing farm families, telling the story of his conversion and selling Bibles, plaques, luminous plastic Jesuses, hymn books, records, tracts, and a rabidly right-wing paperback called
America the TruthWay: The 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 had 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.

In Albany he had gone to work for Prudential, and he had 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 only 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 gogo 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 all 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 entire 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 '73 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 figure-head. 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.

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-boppers only a few years ago, and people had a way of getting hurt at Stillson rallies, but no investigative reporter had done an in-depth study of that. At a campaign rally in Capital City—at that same mall Stillson had had a hand in developing—an eight-year-old 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 eyebrows.