his breath in a silent, whispering sigh. It was time to get out, and quickly.
He snapped another two or three “pictures” just so it wouldn’t look like a complete rout, but he was barely aware of what he was looking at through the viewfinder. Then he left.
The young man in the suede jacket—Clawson—had forgotten all about him. He had apparently flunked the written part of his exam. He was arguing strenuously with the cop, who was only shaking his head.
Johnny paused for a moment in the town hall’s entryway. To his left was a cloakroom. To his right was a closed door. He tried it and found it unlocked. A narrow flight of stairs led upward into dimness. The actual offices would be up there, of course. And the gallery.
2
He was staying at the Jackson House, a pleasant little hotel on the main drag. It had been carefully renovated and the renovations had probably cost a lot of money, but the place would pay for itself, the owners must have reckoned, because of the new Jackson Mountain ski resort. Only the resort had gone bust and now the pleasant little hotel was barely hanging on. The night clerk was dozing over a cup of coffee when Johnny went out at four o’clock on Saturday morning, the attaché case in his left hand.
He had slept little last night, slipping into a short, light doze after midnight. He had dreamed. It was 1970 again. It was carnival time. He and Sarah stood in front of the Wheel of Fortune and again he had that feeling of crazy, enormous power. In his nostrils he could smell burning rubber.
“Come on,” a voice said softly behind him, “I love to watch this guy take a beatin.” He turned and it was Frank Dodd, dressed in his black vinyl raincoat, his throat slit from ear to ear in a wide red grin, his eyes sparkling with dead vivaciousness. He turned back to the booth, scared—but now the pitchman was Greg Stillson, grinning knowingly at him, his yellow hard hat tipped cockily back on his skull. “Hey-hey-hey,” Stillson chanted, his voice deep and resonant and ominous. “Lay em down where you want em down fella. What do you say! Want to shoot the moon?”
Yes, he wanted to shoot the moon. But as Stillson set the Wheel in motion he saw that the entire outer circle had turned green. Every number was double-zero. Every number was a house number.
He had jerked awake and spent the rest of the night looking out the frost-rimmed window into darkness. The headache he’d had ever since arriving in Jackson the day before was gone, leaving him feeling weak but composed. He sat with his hands in his lap. He didn’t think about Greg Stillson; he thought about the past. He thought about his mother putting a Band-Aid on a scraped knee; he thought about the time the dog had torn off the back of Grandma Nellie’s absurd sun-dress and how he had laughed and how Vera had swatted him one and cut his forehead with the stone in her engagement ring; he thought about his father showing him how to bait a fishing hook and saying. It doesn’t hurt the worms, Johnny ... at least, I don’t think it does. He thought about his father giving him a pocketknife for Christmas when he was seven and saying very seriously, I’m trusting you, Johnny. All those memories had come back in a flood.
Now he stepped off into the deep cold of the morning, his shoes squeaking on the path shoveled through the snow. His breath plumed out in front of him The moon was down but the stars were sprawled across the black sky in idiot’s profusion. God’s jewel box, Vera always called it. You’re looking into God’s jewel box, Johnny.
He walked down Main Street, and he stopped in front of the tiny Jackson post office and fumbled the letters out of his coat pocket. Letters to his father, to Sarah, to Sam Weizak, to Bannerman. He set the attaché case down between his feet, opened the mailbox that stood in front of the neat little brick building, and after one brief moment of hesitation, dropped them in. He could hear them drop down inside, surely the first letters mailed in Jackson this new day, and the sound gave him a queer sense of finality. The letters were mailed, there was no stopping now.