1.
The doctor put Vera Smith on a blood-pressure drug called Hydrodiural. It didn't lower her blood pressure much ('not a dime's worth,' she was fond of writing in her letters), but it did make her feel sick and weak. She had to sit down and rest after vacuuming the floor. Climbing a flight of stairs made her stop at the top and pant like a doggy on a hot August afternoon. If Johnny hadn't told her it was for the best, she would have thrown the pills out the window right then.
The doctor tried her on another drug, and that made her heart race so alarmingly that she did stop taking it.
'This is a trial-and-error procedure,' the doctor said. 'We'll get you fixed up eventually, Vera. Don't worry.
'I don't worry,' Vera said. 'My faith is in the Lord God.'
'Yes, of course it is. Just as it should be, too.'
By the end of June, the doctor had settled on a combination of Hydrodiural and another drug called Aldomet fat, yellow, expensive pills, nasty things. When she started taking the two drugs together, it seemed like she had to make water every fifteen minutes. She had headaches. She had heart palpitations. The doctor said her blood pressure was down into the normal range again, but she didn't believe him. What good were doctors, anyway? Look what they were doing to her Johnny, cutting him up like butcher's meat, three operations already, he looked like a monster with stitches all over his arms and legs and neck, and he still couldn't get around without one of those walkers, like old Mrs. Sylvester had to use. If her blood pressure was down, why did she feel so crummy all the time?
'You've got to give your body time enough to get used to the medication,' Johnny said. It was the first Saturday in July, and his parents were up for the weekend. Johnny had just come back from hydrotherapy, and he looked pale and haggard. In each hand he held a small lead ball, and he was raising them and then lowering them into his lap as ,they talked, flexing his elbows, building up his biceps and triceps. The healing scars which ran like slashmarks across his elbows and forearms expanded and contracted.
'Put your faith in God, Johnny,' Vera said. 'There's no need of all this foolishness. Put your faith in God and he'll help you.'
'Vera...' Herb began.
'Don't you Vera me. This is foolishness! Doesn't the Bible say, ask and it shall be given, knock and it shall be opened unto you? There's no need for me to take that evil medicine and no need for my boy to let those doctors go on torturing him. It's wrong, it's not helping, and it's sinful!'
Johnny put the balls of lead shot on the bed. The muscles in his arms were trembling. He felt sick to his stomach and exhausted and suddenly furious at his mother.
'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 I' 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.
2.
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 assistants 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 that 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.
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 byline. It happened less than a week before Johnny left the hospital.
He was in physical therapy, lying on his back on a floorpad. 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.
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 roil 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 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 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 you 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 Department.
'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.'
There was a pause that seemed to go on and on. Then Eileen began listening again. She listened for a long time and then said in a strange, subdued voice totally unlike her usual one: 'No, that's all right, Jan. They've been called. No ... I can't explain right now but I'll tell you later.' She looked at Johnny. 'Yes, it is funny how I could have known ... but I can explain. At least I think I can. Good-bye.'
She hung up the telephone. They all looked at her, the nurses with avid curiosity, Johnny with only dull certainty.
'Jan says there's smoke pouring out of my kitchen window,' Eileen said, and all three nurses sighed in unison. Their eyes, wide and somehow accusing, turned to Johnny again. Jury's eyes, he thought dismally.
'I ought to go home,' Eileen said. The aggressive, cajoling, positive physical therapist was gone, replaced by a small woman who was worried about her cats and her house and her things��.. I don't know how to thank you, Johnny ... I'm sorry I didn't believe you, but...' She began to weep.
One of the nurses moved toward her, but Johnny was there first. He put an arm around her and led her out into the hall.
'You really can,' Eileen whispered. 'What they said...'
'You go on,' Johnny said. 'I'm sure it's going to be fine. There's going to be some minor smoke and water damage, and that's all. That movie poster from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, I think you're going to lose that, but that's all.'
'Yes, okay. Thank you. Johnny. God bless you.' She kissed him on the cheek and then began to trot down the hall. She looked back once, and the expression on her face was very much like superstitious dread.
The nurses were lined up against the glass of the nurses' station, staring at him. Suddenly they reminded him of crows on a telephone line, crows staring down at something bright and shiny, something to be pecked at and pulled apart.
'Go on and answer your calls,' he said crossly, and they. flinched back at the sound of his voice. He began to limp up the hall toward the elevator, leaving them to start the gossip on its way. He was tired. His legs hurt. His hip joints felt as if they had broken glass in them. He wanted to go to bed.