Stephen King: The Dead Zone

The lesson had not been lost on Gregory Ammas Stillson.

4.

Around the Xerox clippings were Johnny’s notes and the questions he regularly asked himself. He had been over his chain of reasoning so often that now, as Chancellor and Brinkley continued to chronicle the election results, he could have spouted the whole thing word for word.

First, Greg Stillson shouldn’t have been able to get elected. His campaign promises were, by and large, jokes. His background was all wrong. His education was all wrong. It stopped at the twelfth-grade level, and, until 1965, he had been little more than a drifter.

In a country where the voters have decided that the lawyers should make the laws, Stillson’s only brushes with that force had been from the wrong side. He wasn’t married.

And his personal history was decidedly freaky.

Second, the press had left him almost completely – and very puzzlingly – alone. In an election year when Wilbur Mills had admitted to a mistress, when Wayne Hays had been dislodged from his barnacle-encrusted House seat because of his, when even those in the houses of the mighty had not been immune from the rough-and-ready frisking of the press, the reporters should have had a field day with Stillson. His colorful, controversial personality seemed to stir only amused admiration from the national press, and he seemed to make no one except maybe Johnny Smith – nervous. His bodyguards had been Harley-Davidson beach-hoppers only a few years ago, and people had a way of getting hurt at Stillson rallies, but no investigative reporter had done an indepth study of that. At a campaign rally in Capital City – at that same mall Stillson had had a hand in developing –

an eight. yearold girl had suffered a broken arm and a dislocated neck; her mother swore hysterically that one of those ‘motorcycle maniacs’ had pushed her from the stage when the girl tried to climb up on the podium and get the Great Man’s signature for her autograph book. Yet there had only been a squib in the paper – Girl Hurt at Stillson Rally

– quickly forgotten.

Stillson had made a financial disclosure that Johnny thought too good to be true. In 1975

Stillson had paid $11,000 in Federal taxes on an income of $36,000 – no state income tax at all, of course; New Hampshire didn’t have one. He claimed all of his income came from his insurance and real estate agency, plus a small pittance that was his salary as mayor. There was no mention of the lucrative Capital City mall. No explanation of the fact that Stillson lived in a house with an assessed value of $86,000, a house he owned free and clear. In a season when the president of the United States was being dunned over what amounted to greens fees, Stillson’s weird financial disclosure statement raised zero eye brows.

Then there was his record as mayor. His performance on the job was a lot better than his campaign performances would have led anyone to expect. He was a shrewd and canny man with a rough but accurate grasp of human, corporate, and political psychology. He had wound up his term in 1975 with a fiscal surplus for the first time in ten years, much to the delight of the taxpayers. He pointed with justifiable pride to his parking program and what he called his Hippie Work-Study Program. Ridgeway had also been one of the first towns in the whole country to organize a Bicentennial Committee. A company that made filing cabinets had located in Ridgeway, and in recessionary times, the

unemployment rate locally was an enviable 3.2 percent. All very admirable.

It was some of the other things that had happened while Stillson was mayor that made Johnny feel scared.

Funds for the town library had been cut from $11,500 to $8,000, and then, in the last year of Stilison’s term, to $6,500. At the same time, the municipal police appropriation had risen by forty percent. Three new police cruisers had been added to the town motor pool, and a collection of riot equipment Two new officers had also been added, and the town council had agreed, at Stillson’s urging, to institute a 50/50 policy on purchasing officers’

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *