small backyard in startled contemplation. Johnny’s mother had had a stroke while watching a TV report on her son’s press conference. She had died this morning, not an hour ago.
Sarah dried her hands, snapped off the radio, and pried Speedy Tomato out of Denny’s hands. She carried her boy into the living room and popped him into his playpen. Denny protested this indignity with loud, lusty howls of which she took no notice. She went to the telephone and called the EMMC. A switchboard operator who sounded tired of repeating the same piece of intelligence over and over again told her that John Smith had discharged himself the night before, slightly before midnight.
She hung up the phone and sat down in a chair. Denny continued to cry from his playpen. Water ran into the kitchen sink. After a while she got up, went into the kitchen, and turned it off.
Chapter 14
1
The man from Inside View showed up on October 16, not long after Johnny had walked up to get the mail.
His father’s house was set well back from the road; their graveled driveway was nearly a quarter of a mile long, running through a heavy stand of second-growth spruce and pine. Johnny did the total round trip every day. At first he had returned to the porch trembling with exhaustion, his legs on fire, his limp so pronounced that he was really lurching along. But now, a month and a half after the first time (when the half a mile had taken him an hour to do), the walk had become one of his day’s pleasures, something to look forward to. Not the mail, but the walk.
He had begun splitting wood for the coming winter, a chore Herb had been planning to hire out since he himself had landed a contract to do some inside work on a new housing project in Libertyville. “You know when old age has started lookin over your shoulder, John,” he had said with a smile. “It’s when you start lookin for inside work as soon as fall rolls around.”
Johnny climbed the porch and sat down in the wicker chair beside the glider, uttering a small sound of relief. He propped his right foot on the porch railing, and with a grimace of pain, used his hands to lift his left leg over it. That done, he began to open his mail.
It had tapered off a lot just lately. During the first week he had been back here in Pownal, there had sometimes been as many as two dozen letters and eight or nine packages a day, most of them forwarded through the EMMC, a few of them sent to General Delivery, Pownal (and assorted variant spellings: Pownell, Poenul, and, in one memorable case, Poonuts).
Most of them were from disassociated people who seemed to be drifting through life in search of any rudder. There were children who wanted his autograph, women who wanted to sleep with him, both men and women seeking advice to the lovelorn. Some sent lucky charms. Some sent horoscopes. A great many of the letters were religious in nature, and in these badly spelled missives, usually written in a large and careful handwriting but one step removed from the scrawl of a bright first-grader, he seemed to feel the ghost of his mother.
He was a prophet, these letters assured him, come to lead the weary and disillusioned American people out of the wilderness. He was a sign that the Last Times were at hand. To this date, October 16, he had received eight copies of Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth—his mother surely would have approved of that one. He was urged to proclaim the divinity of Christ and put a stop to the loose morals of youth.
These letters were balanced off by the negative contingent, which was smaller but just as vocal—if usually anonymous. One correspondent, writing in grubby pencil on a sheet of yellow legal paper proclaimed him the Antichrist and urged him to commit suicide. Four or five of the letter writers had inquired about how it felt to murder your own mother. A great many wrote to accuse him of perpetrating a hoax. One wit wrote, “PRECOGNITION, TELEPATHY, BULLSHIT! EAT MY DONG, YOU EXTRASENSORY TURKEY!”
And then they sent things. That was the worst of it.
Every day on his way home from work, Herb would stop at the Pownal post office and pick up the packages that were too big to fit in their mailbox. The notes