1.
The boy read slowly, following the words with his finger, his long brown football-player's legs stretched out on the chaise by the pool in the bright clear light of June.
'"Of course young Danny Ju ... Juniper ... young Danny Juniper was dead, and I ..... . suppose that there were few in the world who would say he had not de duh. -. dee..." Oh, shit, I don't know.'
'"Few in the world who would say he had not deserved his death,"' Johnny Smith said. 'Only a slightly fancier way of saying that most would agree that Danny's death was a good thing.'
Chuck was looking at him, and the familiar mix of emotions was crossing his usually pleasant face: amusement, resentment, embarrassment, and a trace of sullenness. Then he sighed and looked down at the Max Brand Western again.
'"Deserved his death. But it was my great trah ... truhjud..."'
'Tragedy,' Johnny supplied.
'"But it was my great tragedy that he had died just as he was about to redeem some of his e-e-evil work by one great service to the world.
"Of course that . .. ..... . that ..... . sih
Chuck closed the book, looked up at Johnny, and smiled brilliantly.
'Let's quit for the day, Johnny, what do you say?' Chuck's smile was his most winning, the one that had probably tumbled cheerleaders into bed all over New Hampshire. 'Doesn't that pool look good? You bet it does. The sweat is running right off your skinny, malnourished little bod.'
Johnny had to admit - at least to himself - that the pool did look good. The first couple of weeks of the Bicentennial Summer of '76 had been uncommonly hot and sticky'. From behind them, around on the other side of the big, gracious white house, came the soporific drone of the riding lawnmower as Ngo Phat, the Vietnamese groundsman, mowed what Chuck called the front forty. It was a sound that made you want to drink two glasses of cold lemonade and then nod off to sleep.
'No derogatory comments about my skinny bod,' he said. 'Besides, we just started the chapter.'
'Sure, but we read two before it.' Wheedling.
Johnny sighed. Usually he could keep Chuck at it, but not this afternoon. And today the kid had fought his way gamely through the way John Sherburne had set up his net of guards around the Amity jail and the way the evil Red Hawk had broken through and killed Danny Juniper.
'Yeah, well, just finish this page, then,' he said. 'That word you're stuck on's "sickened". No teeth in that one, Chuck.'
'Good man!' The grin widened. 'And no questions, right?'
'Well... maybe just a few.'
Chuck scowled, but it was a puton; he was getting off easy and knew it. He opened the paperback with the picture of the gunslinger shouldering his way through a set of saloon batwings again and began to read in his slow, halting voice ... a voice so different from his normal speaking voice that it could have belonged to a different young man altogether.
'"Of course that suh . . sickened me at' once. But it was... was nothing to what waited for me at the bedside of poor Tom Keyn.. . Kenyon.
"'He had been shot through the body and he was fast drying when I..."'
'Dying,' Johnny said quietly. 'Context, Chuck. Read for context.
'Fast drying,' Chuck said, and giggled. Then he resumed '" ... and he was fast dying when I ar-ar when I arrived."'
Johnny felt a sadness for Chuck steal over him as he watched the boy, hunched over the paperback copy of Fire' Brain, a good oat opera that should have read like the wind - and instead, here was Chuck, following Max Brand's simple point-to-point prose with a laboriously moving finger. His father, Roger Chatsworth, owned Chatsworth Mills and Weaving, a very big deal indeed in southern New Hampshire. He owned this sixteen-room house in Durham, and there were five people on the staff, including Ngo Phat, who went down to Portsmouth once a week to take United States citizenship classes. Chatsworth drove a restored 1957 Cadillac convertible. His wife, a sweet, clear-eyed woman of forty-two, drove a Mercedes. Chuck had a Corvette. The family fortune was in the neighborhood of five million dollars.
And Chuck, at seventeen, was what God had really meant when he breathed life into the clay, Johnny often thought. He was a physically lovely human being. He stood six-two and weighed a good muscular one hundred and ninety pounds. His face was perhaps not quite interesting enough to be truly handsome, but it was acne- and pimple-free and set off by a pair of striking green eyes which had caused Johnny to think that the only other person he knew with really green eyes was Sarah Hazlett. At his high school, Chuck was the apotheosis of the BMOC, almost ridiculously so. He was captain of the baseball and football teams, president of the junior class during the school year just ended, and president-elect of the student council this coming fall. And most amazing of all, none of it had gone to his head. In the words of Herb Smith, who had been down once to check out Johnny's new digs, Chuck was 'a regular guy'. Herb had no higher accolade in his vocabulary. In addition, he was someday going to be an exceedingly rich regular guy.
And here he sat, bent grimly over his book like a machine gunner at a lonely outpost, shooting the words down one by one as they came at him. He had taken Max Brand's exciting, fast-moving story of drifting John 'Fire Brain' Sherburne and his confrontation with the outlaw Comanche Red Hawk and had turned it into something that sounded every bit as exciting as a trade advertisement for semiconductors or radio components.
But Chuck wasn't stupid. His math grades were good, his retentive memory was excellent, and he was manually adept. His problem was that he had great difficulty storing printed words. His oral vocabulary was fine, and he could grasp the theory of phonics but apparently not it - practice; and he would sometimes reel a sentence off flawlessly and then come up totally blank when you asked him to rephrase it. His father had been afraid that Chuck was dyslexic, but Johnny didn't think so - he had never met a dyslexic child that he was aware of, although many parents seized on the words to explain or excuse the reading problems of their children. Chuck's problem seemed more general - a loose, across-the-board reading phobia.
It was a problem that had become more and more apparent over the last five years of Chuck's schooling, but his parents had only begun to take it seriously - as Chuck had - when his sports eligibility became endangered. And that was not the worst of it. This winter would be Chuck's last good chance to take the Scholastic Achievement Tests, if he expected to start college in the fall of 1977. The maths were not much of a problem, but the rest of the exam... well... if he could have the questions read aloud to him, he would do an average-to-good job. Five hundreds, no sweat. But they don't let you bring a reader with you when you take the SATs, not even if your dad is a biggie in the world of New Hampshire business.
'"But I found him a ch ... changed man. He knew what lay before him and his courage was ....... supper superb. He asked for nothing; he regretted nothing. All the terror and the nerv ... nervousness which had puss ... possett... possessed him so long as he was cuh cuh ... culafronted ... confronted by an unknown fate..."'
Johnny had seen the ad for a tutor in the Maine' Time's and had applied without too much hope. He had moved down to Kittery in mid-February, needing more than anything else to get away from Pownal, from the boxful of mail each day, the reporters who had begun to find their way to the house in ever-increasing numbers, the nervous women with the wounded eyes who had just 'dropped by' because 'they just happened to be in the neighborhood' (one of those who had just dropped by because she just happened to be in the neighborhood had a Maryland license plate; another was driving a tired old Ford with Arizona tags). Their hands, stretching out to touch him...
In Kittery he had discovered for the first time that an anonymous name like John-no-middle-initial-Smith had its advantages. His third day in town he had applied for a job as a shortorder cook, putting down his experience in the UMO commons and one summer cooking at a boys' camp in the Rangely Lakes as experience. The diner's owner, a tough-as-nails widow named Ruby Pelletier, had looked over his application and said, 'You're a teensy bit overeducated for slinging hash. You know that, don't you, slugger?'
'That's right,' Johnny said. 'I went and educated my-self right out of the job market.'
Ruby Pelletier put her hands on her scrawny hips, threw her head back, and bellowed laughter. 'You think you can keep your shit together at two in the morning when twelve CB cowboys pull in all at once and order scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, french toast, and flap-jacks?'
'I guess maybe,' Johnny said.
'I guess maybe you don't know what the eff I'm talking about just yet,' Ruby said, 'but I'll give you a go, college boy. Go get yourself a physical so we're square with the board of health and bring me back a clean bill. I'll put you right on.'
He had done that, and after a harum-scarum first two weeks (which included a painful rash of blisters on his right hand from dropping a french-fry basket into a well of boiling fat a little too fast), he had been riding the job instead of the other way around. When he saw Chatsworth's ad, he had sent his resume to the box number. In the course of the resume he had listed his special ed credentials, which included a one-semester seminar in learning disabilities and reading problems.
In late April, as he was finishing his second month at the diner, he had gotten a letter from Roger Chatsworth, asking him to appear for an interview on May 5. He made the necessary arrangements to take the day off, and at 2: loon a lovely midspring afternoon he had been sitting in Chatsworth's study, a tall, ice-choked glass of Pepsi-Cola in one hand, listening to Stuart talk about his son's reading problems.
'That sound like dyslexia to you?' Stuart asked.
'No. It sounds like a general reading phobia.'
Chatsworth had winced a little. 'Jackson's Syndrome?' Johnny had been impressed - as he was no doubt supposed to be. Michael Carey Jackson was a reading-and-grammar specialist from the University of Southern California who had caused something of a stir nine years ago with a book called The Unlearning Reader. The book described a loose basket of reading problems that had since become known as Jackson's Syndrome. The book was a good one if you could get past the dense academic jargon. The fact that Chatsworth apparently had done so told Johnny a good deal about the man's commitment to solving his son's problem.
'Something like it,' Johnny agreed. 'But you understand I haven't even met your son yet, or listened to him read.'
'He's got course work to make up from last year. American Writers, a nine-week history block, and civics, of all things. He flunked his final exam there because he couldn't read the beastly thing. Have you got a New Hampshire teacher's certificate?'
'No,' Johnny said, 'but getting one is no problem'
'And how would you handle the situation?'
Johnny outlined the way he would deal with it. A lot of oral reading on Chuck's part, leaning heavily on high-impact materials such as fantasy, science fiction, Westerns, and boy-meets-car juvenile novels. Constant questioning on what had just been read. And a relaxation technique described in Jackson's book. 'High achievers often suffer the most,' Johnny said. 'They try too hard and reinforce the block. It's a kind of mental stutter that ...
'Jackson says that?'. Chatsworth interposed sharply.
Johnny smiled. 'No, I say that,' he said
'Okay. Go on.'
'Sometimes, if the student can totally blank his mind right after reading and not feel the pressure to recite back right away, the circuits seem to dear themselves. When that begins to happen, the student begins to rethink his line of attack. It's a positive thinking kind of thing...'
Chatsworth's eyes had gleamed. Johnny had just touched on the linchpin of his own personal philosophy -probably the linchpin for the beliefs of most self-made men. 'Nothing succeeds like success,' he said.
'Well, yes. Something like that.'
'How long would it take you to get a New Hampshire certificate?'
'No longer than it takes them to process my application. Two weeks, maybe.'
'Then you could start on the twentieth?'
Johnny blinked. 'You mean I'm hired?'
'If you want the job, you're hired. You can stay in the guest house, it'll keep the goddam relatives at bay this summer, not to mention Chuck's friends - and I want him to really buckle down. I'll pay you six hundred dollars a month, not a king's ransom, but if Chuck gets along, I'll pay you a substantial bonus. Substantial.'
Chatsworth removed his glasses and rubbed a hand across his face. 'I love my boy, Mr. Smith. I only want the best for him. Help us out a little if you can.'
'I'll try.'
Chatsworth put his glasses back on and picked up Johnny's resume again. 'You haven't taught for a helluva long time. Didn't agree with you?'
Here' it comes, Johnny thought.
'It agreed,' he said, 'but I was in an accident.'
Chatsworth's eyes had gone to the scars on Johnny's neck where the atrophied tendons had been partially repaired. 'Car crash?'
'Yes.'
'Bad one?'
'Yes.'
'You seem fine now,' Chatsworth said. He picked up the resume, slammed it into a drawer and, amazingly, that had been the end of the questions. So after five years Johnny was teaching again, although his student load was only one.
2.
'"As for me, who had i ... indirectly br . .~. brog ... brought his death upon him, he took my hand with a weak grip and smiled his for... forgiveness up to me. It was a hard moment, and I went away feeling that I had done more harm in the world than I could ever ma make up to it.",
Chuck snapped the book closed. 'There. Last one. in the pool's a green banana.'
'Hold it a minute, Chuck.'
'Ahhhhhhh.. .' Chuck sat down again, heavily, his face composing itself into what Johnny already thought of as his now the questions expression. Long-suffering good humor predominated, but beneath it he could sometimes see another Chuck: sullen, worried, and scared. Plenty scared. Because it was a reader's world, the unlettered of America were dinosaurs lumbering down a blind alley, and Chuck was smart enough to know it. And he was plenty afraid of what might happen to him when he got back to school this fall.
'Just a couple of questions, Chuck.'
'Why bother? You know I won't be able to answer them.'
'Oh yes. This time you'll be able to answer them all.'
'I can never understand what I read, you ought to know that by now.' Chuck looked morose and unhappy. 'I don't even know what you stick around for, unless it's the chow.'
'You'll be able to answer these questions because they're not about the book.'
Chuck glanced up. 'Not about the book? Then why ask em? I thought...'
'Just humour me, okay?'
Johnny's heart was pounding hard, and he was not totally surprised to find that he was scared. He had been planning this for a long time, waiting for just the right confluence of circumstances. This was as close as he was ever going to get. Mrs. Chatsworth was not hovering around anxiously, making Chuck that much more nervous. None of his buddies were splashing around in the pool, making him feel self-conscious about reading aloud like a backward fourth grader. And most important, his father, the man Chuck wanted to please above all others in the world, was not here. He was in Boston at a New England Environmental Commission meeting on water pollution.
From Edward Stanney's An Overview of Learning Disabilities:
'The subject, Rupert J., was sitting in the' third row of a movie theater. He was closest to the screen by more than six rows, and was the only one in a position to observe that a small fire had started in the accumulated litter on the' floor. Ru pert J. stood up and cried "F-F-F-F-F -" while the people' behind him shouted for him to sit down and be quiet
'"How did that make you feel?" l asked Rupert J
'"I could never explain in a thousand years how it made me feel," he answered. "J was scared, but even more than being scared, 7 was frustrated. I felt inadequate, not fit to be a member of the human race'. The stuttering always made me feel that way, but now I felt impotent, too."
"'Was there' anything else?"
'"Yes, I felt jealousy, because' someone' else would see' the' fire and you know -'"Get the glory of reporting it?"
'"Yes, that's right. I saw the fire starting, I was the only one. And all I could say was F-F-F-F like a stupid broken record. Not fit to be a member of the human race' describes it best."
"'And how did you break the block?"
'"The' day before had been my mother's birthday. l got her half a dozen roses at the florist's. And I stood there with all of them yelling at me and l thought: I am going to open my mouth and scream ROSES! lust as loud as I can. I got that word all ready."
"'Then what did you do?"
"'I opened my mouth and screamed FIRE! at the top of my lungs."'
It had been eight years since Johnny had read that case history in the introduction to Stanney's text, but he had never forgotten it. He had always thought that the key word in Rupert J.'s recollection of what had happened was impotent. If you feel that sexual intercourse is the most important thing on earth at this point in time, your risk of corning up with a limp penis increases ten or a hundredfold. And if you feel that reading is the most important thing on earth...
'What's your middle name, Chuck?' he asked casually. 'Murphy,' Chuck said with a little grin. 'How's that for bad? My mother's maiden name. You tell Jack or Al that, and I'll be forced to do gross damage to your skinny body.'
'No-fear,' Johnny said. 'When's your birthday?'
'September 8.'
Johnny began to throw the questions faster, not giving Chuck a chance to think - but they weren't questions you had to think about.
'What's your girl's name?'
'Beth. You know Beth, Johnny...
'What's her middle name?'
Chuck grinned. 'Alma. Pretty horrible, right?'
'What's your paternal grandfather's name?'
'Richard.'
'Who do you like in the American League East this year?'
'Yankees. In a walk.'
'Who do you like for president?'
'I'd like to see Jerry Brown get it.'
'You planning to trade that Vette?'
'Not this year. Maybe next.'
'Your mom's idea?'
'You bet. She says it outraces her peace of mind.'
'How did Red Hawk get past the guards and kill Danny Jupiter?'
'Sherburne didn't pay enough attention to that trapdoor leading into the jail attic,' Chuck said promptly. without thinking, and Johnny felt a sudden burst of triumph that hit him like a knock of straight bourbon. It had worked. He had gotten Chuck talking about roses, and he had responded with a good, healthy yell of fire!
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 fucking 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.
