doctor?” Chuck asked Bill Gendron. “He don’t know what he’s sayin.”
“Give him a minute,” Bill advised.
They gave him a minute, and Johnny’s head did clear. “I’m okay,” he muttered. “Lemme up.” Timmy Benedix was still smirking, damn him. Johnny decided he would show Timmy a thing or two. He would be skating rings around Timmy by the end of the week ... backward and forward.
“You come on over and sit down by the fire for a while,” Chuck said. “You took a hell of a knock.”
Johnny let them help him over to the fire. The smell of melting rubber was strong and pungent, making him feel a little sick to his stomach. He had a headache. He felt the lump over his left eye curiously. It felt as though it stuck out a mile.
“Can you remember who you are and everything?” Bill asked.
“Sure. Sure I can. I’m okay.”
“Who’s your dad and mom?”
“Herb and Vera. Herb and Vera Smith.”
Bill and Chuck looked at each other and shrugged.
“I think he’s okay,” Chuck said, and then, for the third time, “but he sure took a hell of a knock, didn’t he? Wow.”
“Kids,” Bill said, looking fondly out at his eight-year-old twin girls, skating hand in hand, and then back at Johnny. “It probably would have killed a grown-up.”
“Not a Polack,” Chuck replied, and they both burst out laughing. The bottle of Bushmill’s began making its rounds again.
Ten minutes later Johnny was back out on the ice, his headache already fading, the knotted bruise standing out on his forehead like a weird brand. By the time he went home for lunch, he had forgotten all about the fall, and blacking out, in the joy of having discovered how to skate backward.
“God’s mercy!” Vera Smith said when she saw him. “How did you get that?”
“Fell down,” he said, and began to slurp up Campbell’s tomato soup.
“Are you all right, John?” she asked, touching it gently.
“Sure, Mom.” He was, too—except for the occasional bad dreams that came over the course of the next month or so ... the bad dreams and a tendency to sometimes get very dozy at times of the day when he had never been dozy before. And that stopped happening at about the same time the bad dreams stopped happening.
He was all right.
In mid-February, Chuck Spier got up one morning and found that the battery of his old ’48 De Soto was dead. He tried to jump it from his farm truck. As he attached the second clamp to the De Soto’s battery, it exploded in his face, showering him with fragments and corrosive battery acid. He lost an eye. Vera said it was God’s own mercy he hadn’t lost them both. Johnny thought it was a terrible tragedy and went with his father to visit Chuck in the Lewiston General Hospital a week after the accident. The sight of Big Chuck lying in that hospital bed, looking oddly wasted and small, had shaken Johnny badly—and that night he had dreamed it was him lying there.
From time to time in the years afterward, Johnny had hunches—he would know what the next record on the radio was going to be before the DJ played it, that sort of thing—but he never connected these with his accident on the ice. By then he had forgotten it.
And the hunches were never that startling, or even very frequent. It was not until the night of the county fair and the mask that anything very startling happened. Before the second accident.
Later, he thought of that often.
The thing with the Wheel of Fortune had happened before the second accident.
Like a warning from his own childhood.
2
The traveling salesman crisscrossed Nebraska and Iowa tirelessly under the burning sun in that summer of 1955. He sat behind the wheel of a ’53 Mercury sedan that already had better than seventy thousand miles on it. The Merc was developing a marked wheeze in the valves. He was a big man who still had the look of a comfed midwestern boy on him; in that summer of 1955, only four months after his Omaha house-painting business had gone broke, Greg Stillson was only twenty-two years old.
The trunk and the back seat of the Mercury were filled with cartons, and the cartons were filled with books. Most of them were Bibles. They came in all shapes and sizes. There was your basic item, The American TruthWay Bible, illustrated with sixteen color plates, bound with airplane glue, for $1.69 and sure to hold together for