One of the things that had most surprised Johnny on coming out of his coma was to discover that Maine and about a dozen other states had instituted a legal numbers game.
‘In the last month I’ve gotten sixteen letters from people who want me to tell them what the number’s going to be. It’s insane. Even if I could tell them, which I couldn’t, what
good would it do them? You can’t pick your own number in the Maine lottery, you get what they give you. But still I get the letters.’
‘I don’t see what that has to do with this crappy article.
‘If people think I’m a phony, maybe they’ll leave me alone.’
‘Oh,’ Herb said. ‘Yeah, I see what you mean.’ He lit his pipe. ‘You’ve never really been comfortable with it, have you?’
‘No,’ Johnny said. ‘We never talk much about it, either, which is something of a relief. It seems like the only thing other people do want to talk about.’ And it wasn’t just that they wanted to talk; that wouldn’t have bothered him so much. But when he was in Slocum’s Store for a sixpack or a loaf of bread, the girl would try to take his money without touching his hand, and the frightened, skittish look in her eyes was unmistakable. His father’s friends would give him a little wave instead of a handshake. In October Herb had hired a local high school girl to come in once a week to do some dusting and vacuum the floors. After three weeks she had quit for no stated reason at all probably someone at her high school had told her who she was cleaning for. It seemed that for everyone who was anxious to be touched, to be informed, to be in contact with Johnny’s peculiar talent, there was another who regarded him as a kind of leper. At times like these, Johnny would think of the nurses staring at him the day he had told Eileen Magown that her house was on fire, staring at him like magpies on a telephone wire. He would think of the way the TV
reporter had drawn back from him after the press conference’s unexpected conclusion, agreeing with everything he said but not wanting to be touched. Unhealthy either way.
‘No, we don’t talk about it,’ Herb agreed. ‘It makes me think of your mother, I suppose.
She was so sure you’d been given the … the whatever-it-is for some reason. Sometimes I wonder if she wasn’t right.’
Johnny shrugged. ‘All I want is a normal life. I want to bury the whole damn thing. And if this little squib helps me do it, so much the better.’
‘But you still can do it, can’t you?’ Herb asked. He was looking closely at his son.
Johnny thought about a night not quite a week ago. They had gone out to dinner, a rare happening on their strapped budget. They had gone to Cole’s Farm in Gray, probably the best restaurant in the area, a place that was always packed. The night had been cold, the dining room cheery and warm. Johnny had taken his father’s coat and his own into the cloakroom, and as he thumbed through the racked coats, looking for empty hangers, a whole series of clear impressions had cascaded through his mind. It was like that sometimes, and on another occasion he could have handled every coat for twenty minutes and gotten nothing at all. Here was a lady’s coat with a fur collar. She was having an affair with one of her husband’s poker buddies, was scared sick about it, but didn’t know how to close it off. A man’s denim jacket, sheepskin-lined. This guy was also worried –
about his brother, who had been badly hurt on a construction project the week before. A
small boy’s parka – his grandmother in Durham had given him a Snoopy transistor radio just today and he was mad because his father hadn’t let him bring it into the dining room with him. And another one, a plain, black topcoat, that had turned him cold with terror and robbed him of his appetite. The man who owned this coat was going mad. So far he had kept up appearances – not even his wife suspected – but his vision of the world was being slowly darkened by a series of increasingly paranoid fantasies. Touching that Coat had been like touching a writhing coil of snakes.