The Stand (Original Edition) (12 page)

Kippers and bacon? His stomach began to fold in on itself with horror.

“No, honey, I’ve got to run. Someone I’ve got to see.”

“Oh hey, you can’t just run out on me like that—”

“Really, it’s important.”

“Well, I’m impawtant, too!” She was starting to be strident, and that hurt Larry’s head.

“Your Bronx is showing, luv,” he said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” She planted her hands on her hips and her breasts jiggled fetchingly . . . but Larry wasn’t fetched. He stepped into his pants and buttoned them. “So I’m from the Bronx, does that make me black? What have you got against the Bronx?”

“Nothing,” he said, and walked over to her in his bare feet. “Listen, the somebody I have to meet is my mother. I just got into town two days ago and I didn’t call her last night or anything ... did I?” he added hopefully.

“You didn’t call anybody,” she said sullenly. “I just bet it’s your mother.”

He walked back to the bed and stuck his feet in his loafers. “It is. Really. She works in the Chemical Bank Building as floor supervisor.”

“I bet you aren’t the Larry Underwood that has that record, either.”

“You believe what you want. I have to run.”

“You cheap prick!” she flashed at him. “What am I supposed to do with all the stuff I cooked?”

“Throw it out the window.”

She uttered a high squawk of anger and hurled the spatula at him. On any other day of his life, it would have missed him. One of the first laws of physics was, to wit, a spatula will not fly a straight trajectory if hurled by an angry oral hygienist. Only this was the exception that proved the rule, flip-flop, up and over, smash, right into Larry’s forehead. It didn’t hurt much. Then he saw two drops of blood fall on the throw-rug as he bent over to pick the spatula up.

He advanced two steps with the spatula in his hand. “I ought to paddle you with this!” he shouted at her.

“Sure,” she said, cringing back and starting to cry. “Why not? Big star. Fuck and run. I thought you were a nice guy. You ain’t no nice guy.” Several tears ran down her cheeks, dropped from her jaw, and plopped onto her upper chest. Fascinated, he watched one of them roll down the slope of her right breast and perch on the nipple. It had a magnifying effect. He could see pores, and one black hair sprouting from the inner edge of the aureole. Jesus Christ, I’m going crazy, he thought wonderingly.

“I have to go,” he said. His white cloth jacket was on the foot of the bed. He picked it up and slung it over his shoulder.

“You ain’t no nice guy!” she cried at him as he went into the living room. “I only went with you because I thought you were a nice guy!”

The sight of the living room made him groan inwardly. On the couch where he dimly remembered being gobbled were at least two dozen copies of “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?” Three more were on the turntable of the dusty portable stereo. On the far wall was a huge poster of Ryan O’Neal and Ali McGraw. Being gobbled means never having to say you’re sorry, ha-ha. Jesus, I
am
going crazy.

She stood in the bedroom doorway, still crying, pathetic in her halfslip. He could see a nick on one of her shins where she had cut herself shaving.

“Listen, give me a call,” she said. “I ain’t mad.”

He should have said, “Sure,” and that would have been the end of it. Instead he heard his mouth utter a crazy laugh and then, “Your kippers are burning.”

Larry got out quickly and pounded down the stairs. As he went down the last six steps to the front door he heard her in the upstairs hall, yelling down:
“You ain't no nice guy! You ain’t no
—”

He slammed the door behind him and misty, humid warmth washed over him, with it the smell of spring trees and automobile exhaust. It was perfume after the smell of frying grease and stale cigarette smoke. He still had the crazy cigarette, now burned down to the filter, and he threw it into the gutter and took a deep breath of the fresh air. Wonderful to be out of that craziness. Return with us not to those wonderful days of normalcy as we—

Above and behind him a window went up with a rattling bang and he knew what was coming next.

“I hope you rot!”
she screamed down at him.
"I hope you fall in front of some fuckin subway train! You ain’t no singer! You’re shitty in bed! You louse! Take this to ya mother, you louse!”

A milk bottle came zipping down from her second-floor bedroom window. Larry ducked. It went off in the gutter like a bomb, spraying the street with glass fragments. A scotch bottle came next, twirling end over end, to crash nearly at his feet. Whatever else she was, her aim was terrifying. He broke into a run, holding one arm over his head. This madness was never going to end.

From behind him came a final long braying cry, triumphant with juicy Bronx intonation:
“KISS MY ASS, YOU CHEAP BAAAAS-TARD!”
Then he was around the corner and on the expressway overpass, leaning over, laughing with a shaky intensity that was nearly hysteria, watching the cars pass below.

“Couldn’t you have handled that better?” he said, totally unaware he was speaking out loud. “Oh man, you coulda done better than that. That was a bad scene. Crap on that, man.” He realized he was speaking aloud, and another burst of laughter escaped him. He suddenly felt a dizzy, spinning nausea in his stomach and squeezed his eyes tightly closed. A memory circuit clicked open and he heard Wayne Stukey saying,
There’s something in you that’s like biting on tinfoil.

He had treated the girl like an old whore on the morning after the frathouse gangbang.

You ain’t no nice guy.

I am. I am.

But when the people at the big party had protested his decision to cut them off, he had threatened to call the police, and he had meant it. Most of them were strangers, true, he could care if they crapped on a landmine, but four or five of the protestors had gone back a ways. And Wayne Stukey, that bastard, standing in the doorway with his arms folded like a judge or something.

Sal Doria going out, saying:
If this is what it does to guys like you, Larry, I wish you were still playing sessions.

He opened his eyes and turned away from the overpass, looking for a cab. Oh sure. The outraged friend bit. If Sal was such a big friend, what was he doing there sucking the cream in the first place? I was stupid, and nobody likes to see a stupid guy wise up. That’s the real story.

You ain’t no nice guy.

“I am a nice guy,” he said sulkily. “And whose business is it, anyway?”

A cab was coming and Larry flagged it.

“The Chemical Bank Building on Park,” he said, climbing in.

“You got a cut on your forehead, guy,” the cabbie said.

“A girl threw a spatula at me,” Larry said absently.

The cabbie offered him a strange false smile of commiseration and drove on, leaving Larry to settle back and try to imagine how he was going to explain his night out to his mother.

The red light went on. The pump hissed. The door opened. The man who stepped through was not wearing one of the white all-over suits, but a small shiny nose-filter that looked a little bit like a two-pronged silver fork, the kind the hostess leaves on the canape table to get the olives out of the bottle.

“Hi, Mr. Redman,” he said, strolling across the room. He stuck out his hand, clad in a thin transparent rubber glove, and Stu, surprised into the defensive, shook it. “I’m Dick Deitz. Denninger said you wouldn’t play ball anymore unless somebody told you what the score was.”

Stu nodded.

“Good,” Deitz said, and sat on the edge of the bed. He was a small brown man, and sitting there with his elbows cocked just above his knees, he looked like a gnome in a Disney picture. “So what do you want to know?”

“First, I guess I want to know why you’re not wearing one of those space-suits.”

“Because Geraldo there says you’re not catching.” Deitz pointed to a guinea pig behind the two-panel glass window. The guinea pig was in a cage, and standing behind the cage was Denninger himself, his face expressionless.

“Geraldo, huh?”

“Geraldo’s been breathing your air for the last three days, via convector. This disease that your friends have passes easily from humans to guinea pigs and vice versa. If you were catching, we figure Geraldo would be dead by now.”

“But you’re not taking any chances,” Stu said dryly, and cocked a thumb at the nose-filter.

“That,” Deitz said with a cynical smile, “is not in my contract.” “What have the others got?”

“I’m sorry, that’s classified.”

“How did that fellow Campion get it?”

“That’s classified, too.”

“My guess is that he was in the army. And there was an accident someplace. Like what happened to those sheep in Utah, only a lot worse.”

“Mr. Redman, I could go to jail just for telling you you were hot or cold.”

Stu rubbed a hand thoughtfully over his new scrub of beard.

“You should be glad we’re not telling you more than we are,” Deitz said. “You know that, don’t you?”

“So I can serve my country better,” Stu said dryly.

“No, that’s strictly Denninger’s stick,” Deitz said. “In the scheme of things both Denninger and I are little men, but Denninger is even littler than I am. He’s a servomotor, nothing more. There’s a more pragmatic reason for you to be glad. You’re classified, too, you know. You’ve disappeared from the face of the earth. If you knew enough, the big guys might decide that the safest thing would be for you to disappear forever.”

Stu said nothing. He was stunned.

“But I didn’t come here to threaten you. We want your co-operation very badly, Mr. Redman. We need it.”

“Where are the other people I came in here with?”

Deitz brought a paper out of an inside pocket. “Victor Palfrey, deceased. Norman Bruett, Robert Bruett, deceased. Thomas Wannamaker, deceased. Ralph Hodges, Bert Hodges, Cheryl Hodges, deceased. Christian Ortega, deceased. Anthony Leominster, deceased.” The names reeled in Stu’s head. Chris the bartender. He’d always kept a sawed-off, lead-loaded Louisville Slugger under the bar, and the trucker who thought Chris was kidding about using it was apt to get a big surprise. Tony Leominster, who drove that big International with the Cobra CB under the dash. Sometimes hung around Hap’s station, but hadn’t been there the night Campion took out the pumps. Vic Palfrey . . . Christ, he had known Vic his whole life. How could Vic be dead? But the thing that hit him the hardest was the Hodges family.

“All of them?” he heard himself ask. “Ralph’s whole
family?”

Deitz turned the paper over. “No, there’s a little girl. Eva. Four years old. She’s alive.”

“Well, how is she?”

“I’m sorry, that’s classified.”

Rage struck him with all the unexpectedness of a sweet surprise. He was up, and then he had hold of Deitz’s lapels, and he was shaking him back and forth. From the comer of his eye he saw startled movement behind the double-paned glass. Dimly, muffled by distance and soundproofed walls, he heard a hooter go off.

“What did you people do?” he shouted. “What did you do? What in Christ’s name did you do?”

“Mr. Redman—”

“Huh? What the fuck did you people do?”

The door hissed open. Three large men in olive-drab uniforms stepped in. They were all wearing nose-filters.

Deitz looked over at them and snapped, “Get the hell out of here.”

The three men looked uncertain.

“Our orders—”

“Get out of here and
that's
an order!”

They retreated. Deitz sat calmly on the bed. His lapels were rumpled and his hair had tumbled over his forehead. That was all. He was looking at Stu calmly, even compassionately. For a wild moment Stu considered ripping his nose-filter out, and then he remembered Geraldo, what a stupid name for a guinea pig. Dull despair struck him like cold water. He sat down.

“Christ in a sidecar,” he muttered.

“Listen to me,” Deitz said. “I’m not responsible for you being here. Neither is Denninger, or the nurses who come in to take your blood pressure. If there was a responsible party it was Campion, but you can’t lay it all on him, either. He ran, but it was a technical slipup that allowed him to run. The situation exists. We are trying to cope with it, all of us. But that doesn’t make us responsible.”

“Then who is?”

“Nobody,” Deitz said, and smiled. “On this one the responsibility spreads in so many directions that it’s invisible. It was an accident. It could have happened in any number of other ways.”

“Some accident,” Stu said, his voice nearly a whisper. “What about the others? Hap and Hank Carmichael and Lila Bruett? Their boy Luke? Monty Sullivan—”

“Classified,” Deitz said. “Going to shake me some more? If it will make you feel better, shake away.”

Stu said nothing, but the way he was looking at Deitz made Deitz suddenly look down and begin to fiddle with the creases of his pants.

“They’re alive,” he said, “and you may see them in time.” “What about Amette?”

“Quarantined.”

“Who’s dead there?”

“Nobody.”

“You’re lying.”

“Sorry you think so.”

“When do I get out of here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Classified?” Stu asked bitterly.

“No, just unknown. You don’t seem to have this disease. We want to know why you don’t have it. Then we’re home free.”

“Can I get a shave? I itch.”

Deitz smiled. “If you’ll allow Denninger to start running his tests again, I’ll get an orderly in to shave you right now.”

“I can handle it. I’ve been doing it since I was fifteen.”

Deitz shook his head firmly. “I think not.”

Stu smiled dryly at him. “Afraid I might cut my own throat?”

“Let’s just say—”

Stu interrupted him with a series of harsh, dry coughs. He bent over with the force of them.

The effect on Deitz was galvanic. He was up off the bed like a shot and across to the airlock with his feet seeming not to touch the floor at all. Then he was fumbling in his pocket for the square key and ramming it into the slot.

“Don’t bother,” Stu said, smiling. “I was faking.”