Chuck grinned. “This makes no sense at all, but I started thinking about trying out for the swimming team, and there it was. What a trick. What a great trick.”
“Okay. That’s enough for today, I think.” Johnny felt tired, sweaty, and very, very good. “You just made a breakthrough, in case you didn’t notice. Let’s swim. Last one in’s a green banana.”
“Johnny?”
“What?”
“Will that always work?”
“If you make a habit of it, it will,” Johnny said. “And every time you go around that block instead of trying to bust through the middle of it, you’re going to make it a little smaller. I think you’ll begin to see an improvement in your word-to-word reading before long, also. I know a couple of other little tricks.” He fell silent. What he had just given Chuck was less the truth than a kind of hypnotic suggestion.
“Thanks,” Chuck said. The mask of long-suffering good humor was gone, replaced by naked gratitude. “If you get me over this, I’ll ... well, I guess I’d get down and kiss your feet if you wanted me to. Sometimes I get so scared, I feel like I’m letting my dad down ...”
“Chuck, don’t you know that’s part of the problem?”
“It is?”
“Yeah. You’re ... you’re overswinging. Overthrowing. Overeverything. And it may not be just a psychological block, you know. There are people who believe that some reading problems, Jackson’s Syndrome, reading phobias, all of that, may be some kind of ... mental birthmark. A fouled circuit, a faulty relay, a d . . .” He shut his mouth with a snap.
“A what?” Chuck asked.
“A dead zone,” Johnny said slowly. “Whatever. Names don’t matter. Results do. The misdirection trick really isn’t a trick at all. It’s educating a fallow part of your brain to do the work of that small faulty section. For you, that means getting into an oral-based train of thought every time you hit a snag. You’re actually changing the location in your brain from which your thought is coming. It’s learning to switch-hit.”
“But can I do it? You think I can do it?”
“I know you can,” Johnny said.
“All right. Then I will.” Chuck dived low and flat into the pool and came up, shaking water out of his long hair in a fine spray of droplets. “Come on in! It’s fine!”
“I will,” Johnny said, but for the moment he was content just to stand on the pool’s tile facing and watch Chuck swim powerfully toward the pool’s deep end and to savor this success. There had been no good feeling like this when he had suddenly known Eileen Magown’s kitchen curtains were taking fire, no good feeling like this when he had uncovered the name of Frank Dodd. If God had given him a talent, it was teaching, not knowing things he had no business knowing. This was the sort of thing he had been made for, and when he had been teaching at Cleaves Mills back in 1970, he had known it. More important, the kids had known it and responded to it, as Chuck had done just now.
“You gonna stand there like a dummy?” Chuck asked. Johnny dived into the pool.
Chapter 18
Warren Richardson came out of his small office building at quarter to five as he always did. He walked around to the parking lot and hoisted his two-hundred-pound bulk behind the wheel of his Chevy Caprice and started the engine. All according to routine. What was not according to routine was the face that appeared suddenly in the rear-view mirror—an olive-skinned, stubbled face framed by long hair and set off by eyes every bit as green as those of Sarah Hazlett or Chuck Chatsworth. Warren Richardson had not been so badly scared since he was a kid, and his heart took a great, unsteady leap in his chest.
“Howdy,” said Sonny Elliman, leaning over the seat.
“Who ...” was all Richardson managed, uttering the word in a terrified hiss of breath. His heart was pounding so hard that dark specks danced and pulsed before his eyes in rhythm with its beat. He was afraid he might have a heart attack.
“Easy,” the man who had been hiding in his back seat said. “Go easy, man. Lighten up.”
And Warren Richardson felt an absurd emotion. It was gratitude. The man who had scared him wasn’t going to scare him anymore. He must be a nice man, he must be—