Chuck was looking at him in almost total surprise.
'Red Hawk got into the attic through the skylight. Kicked open the trapdoor. Shot Danny Jupiter. Shot Tom Kenyon, too.'
'That's right, Chuck.'
'I remembered,' he muttered, and then looked up at Johnny, eyes widening, a grin starting at the corners of his mouth. 'You tricked me into remembering!'
'I just took you by the hand and led you around the side of whatever has been in your way all this time,' Johnny said. 'But whatever it is, it's still there, Chuck. Don't kid yourself. Who was the girl Sherburne fell for?'
'It was ...' His eyes clouded a little, and he shook his head reluctantly. 'I don't remember.' He struck his thigh with sudden viciousness. 'I can't remember anything! I'm so f**king stupid!'
'Can you remember ever having been told how your dad and mom met?'
Chuck looked up at him and smiled a little. There was an angry red place on his thigh where he had struck himself. 'Sure. She was working for Avis down in Charleston, South Carolina. She rented my dad a car with a fiat tire.' Chuck laughed. 'She still claims she only married him because number two tries harder.
'And who was that girl Sherburne got interested in?'
'Jenny Langhorne. Big-time trouble for him. She's Gresham's girl. A redhead. Like Beth. She...' He broke off, staring at Johnny as if he had just produced a rabbit from the breast pocket of his shirt. 'You did it again!'
'No. You did it. It's a simple trick of misdirection. Why do you say Jenny Langhorne is big-time trouble for John Sherburne?'
'Well, because Gresham's the big wheel there in that town...'
'What town?'
Chuck opened his mouth, but nothing came out. Suddenly he cut his eyes away from Johnny's face and looked at the pool. Then he smiled and looked back. 'Amity. The same as in the flick Jaws.'
'Good! How did you come up with the name?'
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 king 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 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 Eighteen