'Yes, I can still do it,' Johnny said briefly. 'I wish to hell I couldn't.'
'You really mean that?'
Johnny thought of the plain, black topcoat. He had only picked at his meal, looking this way and that, trying to single the man out of the crowd, unable to do so.
'Yes,' he said. 'I mean it.'
'Best forgotten then,' Herb said, and clapped his son on the shoulder.
3.
And for the next month or so it seemed that it would be forgotten. Johnny drove north to attend a meeting at the high school for midyear teachers and to take a load of his personal things up to his new apartment, which he found small but liveable.
He went in his father's car, and as he was getting ready to leave Herb asked him, 'You're not nervous? About driving?'
Johnny shook his head. Thoughts of the accident itself troubled him very little now. If something was going to happen to him, it would. And deep down he felt confident that lightning would not strike in the same place again - when he died, he didn't believe it would be in a car accident.
In fact, the long trip was quiet and soothing, the meeting a little bit like Old Home Week. All of his old colleagues who were still teaching at CMHS dropped by to wish him the best. But he couldn't help noticing how few of them actually shook hands with him, and he seemed to sense a certain reserve, a wariness in their eyes. Drivmg home, he convinced himself it was probably imagination. And if not, well - even that had its amusing side. If they had read their Inside View, they would know he was a hoax and nothing to worry about.
The meeting over, there was nothing to do but go back to Pownal and wait for the Christmas holidays to come and go. The packages containing personal objects stopped coming, almost as if a switch had been thrown - the power of the press, Johnny told his father. They were replaced by a brief spate of angry - and mostly anonymous - letters and cards from people who seemed to feel personally cheated.
'You ort to burn in H! E! L! L! for your slimey skeems to bilk this American Republic,' a typical one read. It had been written on a crumpled sheet of Ramada Inn stationery and was postmarked York, Pennsylvania. 'You are nothing but a Con Artist and a dirty rotten cheet. I bless God for that paper that saw thru you. You Ort to be ashamed of yourself Sir. The Bible says an ordinery sinner will be cast into the Lake of F!I!R!E! and be consomed but a F!A!L!S!E P!R!O!F!I!T! shall burn forever and EVER! That's you a False Profit who sold your Immortal Soul for a few cheep bucks. So thats the end of my letter and I hope for your sake I never catch you ut on the Streets of your Home Town. Signed, A FRIEND (of God not you Sir)!'
Over two dozen letters in this approximate vein came in during the course of about twenty days following the appearance of the inside View story. Several enterprising souls expressed an interest in joining in with Johnny as partners. 'I used to be a magician's assistant,' one of these latter missives bragged, 'and I could trick an old whore out of her g-string. If you're planning a mentalist gig, you need me in!'
Then the letters dried up, as had the earlier influx of boxes and packages. On a day in late November when he had checked the mailbox and found it empty for the third afternoon in a row, Johnny walked back to the house remembering that Andy Warhol had predicted that a day would come when everyone in America would be famous for fifteen minutes. Apparently his fifteen minutes had come and gone, and no one was any more pleased about it than he was.
But as things turned out, it wasn't over yet.
4.
'Smith?' The telephone voice asked. 'John Smith?'
'Yes.' It wasn't a voice he knew, or a wrong number. That made it something of a puzzle since his father had had the phone unlisted about three months ago. This was December 17, and their tree stood in the corner of the living room, its base firmly wedged into the old tree stand Herb had made when Johnny was just a kid. Outside it was snowing.
'My name is Bannerman. Sheriff George Bannerman, from Castle Rock.' He cleared his throat. 'I've got a well, I suppose you'd say I've got a proposal for you.
'How did you get this number?'
Bannerman cleared his throat again. 'Well, I could have gotten it from the phone company, I suppose, it being police business. But actually I got it from a friend of yours. Doctor by the name of Weizak.'
'Sam Weizak gave you my number?'
'That's right.'
Johnny sat down in the phone nook, utterly perplexed. Now the name Bannerman meant something to him. He had come across the name in a Sunday supplement article only recently. He was the sheriff of Castle County, which was considerably west of Pownal, in the Lakes region. Castle Rock was the county seat, about thirty miles from Norway and twenty from Bridgton.
'Police business?' he repeated.
'Well, I guess you'd say so, ayuh. I was wondering if maybe the two of us could get together for a cup of coffee