my ass, you cheap bastards,” Johnny said. He fell on his knees and began to gather up the letters, sweeping them together with his mittens. His fingers ached dully, a reminder of the frostbite, a reminder of Frank Dodd riding a dead toilet seat into eternity, blood in his all-American blond hair. I CONFESS.
He swept the letters up and heard himself muttering over and over, like a defective record: “Killing me, you people are killing me, let me alone, can’t you see you’re killing me?”
He made himself stop. This was no way to behave. Life would go on. One way or another, life would most certainly go on.
Johnny started back to the house, wondering what he could do now. Perhaps something would come along. At any rate, he had fulfilled his mother’s prophecy. If God had had a mission for him, then he had done it. No matter now that it had been a kamikaze mission. He had done it.
He was quits.
II
The Laughing Tiger
Chapter 17
1
The boy read slowly, following the words with his finger, his long brown football-player’s legs stretched out on the chaise by the pool in the bright clear light of June.
“ ‘Of course young Danny Ju ... Juniper ... young Danny Juniper was dead and I suh ... suppose that there were few in the world who would say he had not de ... duh ... dee ...’ Oh, shit, I don’t know.”
“ ‘Few in the world who would say he had not deserved his death,’ ” Johnny Smith said. “Only a slightly fancier way of saying that most would agree that Danny’s death was a good thing.”
Chuck was looking at him, and the familiar mix of emotions was crossing his usually pleasant face: amusement, resentment, embarrassment, and a trace of sullenness. Then he sighed and looked down at the Max Brand Western again.
“ ‘Deserved his death. But it was my great trah ... truhjud ...’ ”
“Tragedy,” Johnny supplied.
“ ‘But it was my great tragedy that he had died just as he was about to redeem some of his e-e-evil work by one great service to the world.
‘ “Of course that ... suh ... that sih ... sih ...’ ”
Chuck closed the book, looked up at Johnny, and smiled brilliantly.
“Let’s quit for the day, Johnny, what do you say?” Chuck’s smile was his most winning, the one that had probably tumbled cheerleaders into bed all over New Hampshire. “Doesn’t that pool look good? You bei it does. The sweat is running right off your skinny, malnourished little bod.”
Johnny had to admit—at least to himself—that the pool did look good. The first couple of weeks of the Bicentennial Summer of ’76 had been uncommonly hot and sticky. From behind them, around on the other side of the big, gracious white house, came the soporific drone of the riding lawnmower as Ngo Phat, the Vietnamese groundsman, mowed what Chuck called the front forty. It was a sound that made you want to drink two glasses of cold lemonade and then nod off to sleep.
“No derogatory comments about my skinny bod,” he said. “Besides, we just started the chapter.”
“Sure, but we read two before it.” Wheedling.
Johnny sighed. Usually he could keep Chuck at it, but not this afternoon. And today the kid had fought his way gamely through the way John Sherburne had set up his net of guards around the Amity jail and the way the evil Red Hawk had broken through and killed Danny Juniper.
“Yeah, well, just finish this page, then,” he said. “That word you’re stuck on’s ‘sickened.’ No teeth in that one, Chuck.”
“Good man!” The grin widened. “And no questions, right?”
“Well ... maybe just a few.”
Chuck scowled, but it was a put-on; he was getting off easy and knew it. He opened the paperback with the picture of the gunslinger shouldering his way through a set of saloon batwings again and began to read in his slow, halting voice ... a voice so different from his normal speaking voice that it could have belonged to a different young man altogether.
“ ‘Of course that suh ... sickened me at once. But it was ... was nothing to what waited for me at the bedside of poor Tom Keyn ... Kenyon.
“ ‘He had been shot through the body and he was fast drying when I ...’ ”
“Dying,” Johnny said quietly. “Context, Chuck. Read for context.”
“Fast drying,” Chuck said, and giggled. Then he resumed:
“ ‘ ... and he was fast dying when I ar-ar ... when I arrived.’ ”