The thing with the Wheel of Fortune had happened before the second accident.
Like a warning from his own childhood
2.
The travelling 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 cornfed mid-western boy on him; in that summer of 1955, only four months after his Omaha house-painting business had gone broke, Greg Stilison 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 Truth-Way Bible, illustrated with sixteen color plates, bound with airplane glue, for $i .69 and sure to hold together for at least ten months; then for the poorer pocketbook there was The American TruthWay New
Testament for sixty-five cents, with no color plates but with the words of Our Lord Jesus printed in red; and for the big spender there was The American TruthWay Deluxe Word of God for $19.95, bound in imitation white leather, the owner’s name to be stenciled in gold leaf on the front cover, twenty-four color plates, and a section in the middle to note down births, marriages, and burials. And the Deluxe Word of God might remain in one piece for as long as two years. There was also a carton of paperbacks entitled America the Truth Way: The Communist-Jewish Conspiracy Against Our United States.
Greg did better with this paperback, printed on cheap pulp stock, than with all the Bibles put together. It told all about how the Rothschilds and the Roosevelts and the Greenblatts were taking over the U.S. economy and the U.S. government. There were graphs showing how the Jews related directly to the Communist-Marxist-Leninist-Trotskyite axis, and from there to the Antichrist Itself.
The days of McCarthyism were not long over in Washington; in the Midwest Joe
McCarthy’s star had not yet set, and Margaret Chase Smith of Maine was known as ‘that bitch’ for her famous Declaration of Conscience. In addition to the stuff about Communism, Greg Stillson’s rural farm constituency seemed to have a morbid interest in the idea that the Jews were running the world.
Now Greg turned into the dusty driveway of a farm-house some twenty miles west of Ames, Iowa. It had a deserted, shut-up look to it – the shades down and the barn doors closed – but you could never tell until you tried. That motto had served Greg Stillson well in the two years or so since he and his mother had moved up to Omaha from Oklahoma.
The house-painting business had been no great shakes, but he had needed to get the taste of Jesus out of his mouth for a little while, you should pardon the small blasphemy. But now he had come back home – not on the pulpit or revival side this time, though, and it was something of a relief to be out of the miracle business at last.
He opened the car door and as he stepped out into the dust of the driveway a big mean farm dog advanced out of the barn, its ears laid back. It volleyed barks. ‘Hello, pooch,’
Greg said in his low, pleasant, but carrying voice – at twenty-two it was already the voice of a trained spellbinder.
The pooch didn’t respond to the friendliness in his voice. It kept coming, big and mean, intent on an early lunch of traveling salesman. Greg sat back down in the car, closed the door, and honked the horn twice. Sweat rolled down his face and turned his white linen suit darker gray in circular patches under his arms and in a branching tree-shape up his back. He honked again, but there was no response. The clodhoppers had loaded
themselves into their International Harvester or their Stud~ baker and gone into town.
Greg smiled.
Instead of shifting into reverse and backing out of the driveway, he reached behind him and produced a Flit gun – only this one was loaded with ammonia instead of Flit.