by Stephen King
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.
3
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 Pownal. 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 Chr
istmas 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.
4
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 Oldtown with her four cats. She was slate-hard and she wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Johnny collapsed backward. “Nope,” he panted. “Oh, I don’t think so, Eileen.”
“Up, boy!” she cried in high and sadistic good humor. “Up! Up! Just three more and you can have a Coke!”
“Give me my ten-pound ball and I’ll give you two more.”
“That ten-pound ball is going into the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s biggest suppository if you don’t give me three more. Up!”
“Urrrrrrgrah!” Johnny cried, jerking through number eight. He flopped back down, then jerked up again.
“Great!” Eileen cried. “One more, one more!”
“OOOOARRRRRRRRUNCH!” Johnny screamed, and sat up for the tenth time. He collapsed to the mat, letting the medicine ball roll away. “I ruptured myself, are you happy, all my guts just came loose, they’re floating around inside me, I’ll sue you, you goddam harpy.”
“Jeez, what a baby,” Eileen said, offering him her hand. “This is nothing compared to what I’ve got on for next time.”
“Forget it,” Johnny said. “All I’m gonna do next time is swim in the ...”
He looked at her, an expression of surprise spreading over his face. His grip tightened on her hand until it was almost painful.
“Johnny? What’s wrong? Is it a charley horse?”
“Oh gosh,” Johnny said mildly.
“Johnny?”
He was still gripping her hand, looking into her face with a faraway, dreamy contemplation that made her feel nervous. She had heard things about Johnny Smith, rumors that she had disregarded with her own brand of hard-headed Scots pragmatism. There was a story that he had predicted Marie Michaud’s boy was going to be all right, even before the doctors were one hundred percent sure they wanted to try the risky operation. Another rumor had something to do with Dr. Weizak; it was said Johnny had told him his mother was not dead but living someplace on the West Coast under another name. As far as Eileen Magown was concerned, the stories were so much eyewash, on a par with the confession magazines and sweet-savage love stories so many nurses read on station. But the way he was looking at her now made her feel afraid. It was as if he was looking inside her.
“Johnny, are you okay?” They were alone in the physical therapy room. The big double doors with the frosted glass panels which gave on the pool area were closed.
“Gosh sakes,” Johnny said. “You better ... yes, there’s still time. Just about.”
“What are you talking about?”
He snapped out of it then. He let go of her hand ... but he had gripped it tightly enough to leave white indentations along the back.
“Call the fire department,” he said. “You forgot to turn off the burner. The curtains are catching on fire.”
“What ...?”
“The burner caught the dish towel and the dish towel caught the curtains,” Johnny said impatiently. “Hurry up and call them. Do you want your house to burn down?”
“Johnny, you can’t know ...”
“Never mind what I can’t know,” Johnny said, grabbing her elbow. He got her moving and they walked across to the doors. Johnny was limping badly on his left leg, as he always did when he was tired. They crossed the room that housed the swimming pool, their heels clacking hollowly on the tiles, then went out into the first floor hallway and down to the nurses’ station. Inside, two nurses were drinking coffee and a third was on the phone, telling someone on the other end how she had redone her apartment.
“Are you going to call or should I?” Johnny asked.
Eileen’s mind was in a whirl. Her morning routine was as set as a single person’s is apt to be. She had gotten up and boiled herself a single egg while she ate a whole grapefruit, unsweetened, and a bowl of All-Bran. After breakfast she had dressed and driven to the hospital. Had she turned off the burner? Of course she had. She couldn’t specifically remember doing it, but it was habit. She must have.
“Johnny, really, I don’t know where you got the idea ...”
“Okay, I will.”
They were in the nurses’ station now, a glassed-in booth furnished with three straight-backed chairs and a hot plate. The little room was dominated by the callboard—rows of small lights that flashed red when a patient pushed his call button. Three of them were flashing now. The two nurses went on drinking their coffee and talking about some doctor who had turned up drunk at Benjamin’s. The third was apparently talking with her beautician.
“Pardon me, I have to make a call,” Johnny said.
The nurse covered the phone with her hand. “There’s a pay phone in the lob ...”
“Thanks,” Johnny said, and took the phone out of her hand. He pushed for one of the open lines and dialed 0. He got a busy signal. “What’s wrong with this thing?”
“Hey!” The nurse who had been talking to her beautician cried. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Give me that!”
Johnny remembered that he was in a hospital with its own switchboard and dialed 9 for an outside line. Then he redialed the 0.
The deposed nurse, her cheeks flaming with anger, grabbed for the phone. Johnny pushed her away. She whirled, saw Eileen, and took a step toward her. “Eileen, what’s with this crazy guy?” she asked stridently. The other two nurses had put down their coffee cups and were staring gape-mouthed at Johnny.
Eileen shrugged uncomfortably. “I don’t know, he just ...”
“Operator.”
“Operator, I want to report a fire in Oldtown,” Johnny said. “Can you give me the correct number to call, please?”
“Hey,” one of the nurses said. “Whose house is on fire?”
Eileen shifted her feet nervously. “He says mine is.”
The nurse who had been talking about her apartment to her beautician did a double take. “Oh my God, it’s that guy,” she said.
Johnny pointed at the callboard, where five or six lights were flashing now. “Why don’t you go see what those people want?”
The operator had connected him with the Oldtown Fire Dep
artment.
“My name is John Smith and I need to report a fire. It’s at ...” He looked at Eileen. “What’s your address?”
For a moment Johnny didn’t think she was going to tell him. Her mouth worked, but nothing came out. The two coffee-drinkers had now forsaken their cups and withdrawn to the station’s far corner. They were whispering together like little girls in a grammar school john. Their eyes were wide.
“Sir?” the voice on the other end asked.
“Come on,” Johnny said, “do you want your cats to fry?”
“624 Center Street,” Eileen said reluctantly. “Johnny, you’ve wigged out.”
Johnny repeated the address into the phone. “It’s in the kitchen.”
“Your name, Sir?”
“John Smith. I’m calling from the Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor.”
“May I ask how you came by your information?”
“We’d be on the phone the rest of the day. My information is correct. Now go put it out.” He banged the phone down.
“... and he said Sam Weizak’s mother was still ...” She broke off and looked at Johnny. For a moment he felt all of them looking at him, their eyes lying on his skin like tiny, hot weights, and he knew what would come of this and it made his stomach turn.
“Eileen,” he said.
“What?”
“Do you have a friend next door?”
“Yes ... Burt and Janice are next door ...”
“Either of them home?”
“I guess Janice probably would be, sure.”
“Why don’t you give her a call?”
Eileen nodded, suddenly understanding what he was getting at. She took the phone from his hand and dialed an 827 exchange number. The nurses stood by watching avidly, as if they had stepped into a really exciting TV program by accident.
“Hello? Jan? It’s Eileen. Are you in your kitchen? ... Would you take a look out your window and tell me if everything looks, well, all right over at my place? ... Well, a friend of mine says ... I’ll tell you after you go look, okay?” Eileen was blushing. “Yes, I’ll wait.” She looked at Johnny and repeated, “You’ve wigged out, Johnny.”