LADIES’ room. The next door would be the one leading to the galleries.
It opened.
There was the sound of two footfalls as Moochie approached the railing of the short gallery that ran along the back of the hall. “Okay, Sonny? You satisfied?”
“Everything look good?”
“Looks like a fucking dump,” Moochie responded, and there was a burst of laughter from below.
“Well, come on down and let’s go for coffee,” the third man said. And incredibly, that was it. The door slammed to. The footsteps retreated back down the hall, and then down the steps to the first floor.
Johnny went limp and for a moment everything swam away from him into shades of gray. The slam of the entryway door as they went out for their coffee brought him partially out of it.
Below, the custodian presented his judgment: “Bunch of whores.” Then he left, too, and for the next twenty minutes or so, there was only Johnny.
5
Around 9:30 A.M., the people of Jackson began to file into their town hall. The first to appear was a trio of old ladies dressed in formal black, chattering together like magpies. Johnny watched them pick seats close to the stove—almost entirely out of the field of his vision—and pick up the booklets that had been left on the seats. The booklets appeared to be filled with glossy pictures of Greg Stillson.
“I just love that man,” one of the three said. “I’ve gotten his autograph three times and I’ll get it again today, I’ll be bound.”
That was all the talk there was about Greg Stillson. The ladies went on to discuss the impending Old Home Sunday at the Methodist Church.
Johnny, almost directly over the stove, went from very cold to very hot. He had taken advantage of the slack tide between the departure of Stillson’s security people and the arrival of the first townsfolk, using it to shed both his jacket and his outer shirt. He kept wiping sweat from his face with a handkerchief, and the linen was streaked with blood as well as sweat. His bad eye was kicking up again, and his vision was constantly blurred and reddish.
The door below opened, there was the hearty tromp-tromptromp of men stamping snow from their pacs, and then four men in checked woolen jackets came down the aisle and sat in the front row. One of them launched immediately into a Frenchman joke.
A young woman of about twenty-three arrived with her son, who looked about four. The boy was wearing a blue snowmobile suit with bright yellow markings, and he wanted to know if he could talk into the microphone.
“No, dear,” the woman said, and they went down behind the men. The boy immediately began to kick his feet against the bench in front of him, and one of the men glanced back over his shoulder.
“Matt, stop that,” she said.
Quarter of ten now. The door was opening and closing with a steady regularity. Men and women of all types and occupations and ages were filling up the hall. There was a drifting hum of conversation, and it was edged with an indefinable sense of anticipation. They weren’t here to quiz their duly-elected representative; they were waiting for a bona-fide star turn in their small community. Johnny knew that most “meet-your-candidate” and “meet-your-representative” sessions were attended by a handful of die-hards in the nearly empty meeting halls. During the election of 1976 a debate between Maine’s Bill Cohen and his challenger, Leighton Cooney, had attracted all of twenty-six people, press aside. The skull-sessions were so much window-dressing, a self-testimonial to wave when election time came around again. Most could have been held in a middling-sized closet. But by 10 A.M., every seat in the town hall was taken, and there were twenty or thirty standees at the back. Every time the door opened, Johnny’s hands tensed down on the rifle. And he was still not positive he could do it, no matter what the stakes.
Five past, ten past. Johnny began to think Stillson had been held up, or was perhaps not coming at all. And the feeling which moved stealthily through him was one of relief.
Then the door opened again and a hearty voice called: “Hey! How ya doin, Jackson, N.H.?”
A startled, pleased murmur. Someone called ecstatically, “Greg! How are you?”
“Well, I’m feeling perky,” Stillson came right back. “How the heck are you?”
A spatter of applause quickly swelled to a roar of approval.
“Hey, all right!” Greg shouted over it. He moved quickly down the aisle, shaking hands, toward the