The Stand (Original Edition) (17 page)

Still, it was much the same, and this made him sad. In a way the only real difference made things seem worse: He felt like a tourist here now. But maybe even native New Yorkers felt like tourists in the Square, dwarfed, wanting to look up and read the electronic headlines as they marched around and around up there. He couldn’t tell; he had forgotten what it was like to be a part of New York. And he didn’t want to relearn.

His mother hadn’t gone to work that morning. She’d been fighting a cold for the last couple of days and had gotten up early this morning with a fever. He had heard her from the narrow, safe bed in his old room, banging around out in the kitchen, Sneezing and saying shit under her breath, getting ready for breakfast. The sound of the TV being turned on, then the news on the “Today” program. An attempted coup in India. A power station blown up in Wyoming. The Supreme Court was expected to hand down a landmark decision having to do with gay rights.

By the time Larry came out into the kitchen, buttoning his shirt, the news was over and Gene Shalitt was interviewing a man with a bald head. The man with the bald head was showing a number of small animals he had hand-blown. Glassblowing, he said, had been his hobby for forty years, and his book would be published by Random House. Then he sneezed. “Excuse you,” Gene Shalitt said, and chuckled.

“You want em fried or scrambled?” Alice Underwood asked. She was in her bathrobe.

“Scrambled,” Larry said, knowing it would do no good to protest the eggs. In Alice’s view, it wasn’t breakfast without eggs (which she called “cackleberries” when her humor was good). They had protein and nutrition. Her idea of nutrition was vague but all-encompassing. She kept a list of nutritious items in her head, Larry knew, as well as their opposite numbers—Jujubes, pickles, Slim Jims, the slice of pink bubble gum that came with baseball cards.

He sat down and watched her make the eggs, pouring them into the same old black skillet, stirring them with the same wire whisk that she had used to stir his eggs when he had been going to the first grade at P.S. 162.

She pulled her hankie out of her bathrobe pocket, coughed into it, sneezed into it, and muttered “Shit!” indistinctly into it before putting it back.

“Day off, Mom?”

“I called in sick. This cold wants to break me. I hate to call in sick on Fridays, so many do, but I’ve got to get off my feet. I’m running a fever. Swollen glands, too.”

“Did you call the doctor?”

“When I was a charming maid, doctors made housecalls,” she said. “Now if you’re sick, you have to go to the hospital emergency room. Unless you know you’re going to be sick a week ahead of time, of course, and then you can make an appointment in advance.” She smiled mordantly. “That hospital emergency room, I went there a year ago when I had my inner ear infection. It was worse than the Green Stamp Redemption Center a week before Christmas. And full of Puerto Ricans. I’ll stay home and drink juice and take aspirin. I’ll feel okay tomorrow.”

He stayed most of the morning, trying to help out. He lugged the TV in by her bed, the cords standing out heroically on his arms (“You’re going to give yourself a hernia so I can watch ‘Let’s Make a Deal,’” she sniffed), brought her juice and an old bottle of Nyquil for her stuffiness, and ran down to the market to get her a couple of paperbacks.

After that there wasn’t much for them to do except get on each other’s nerves. She marveled over how much poorer the TV reception was in the bedroom and he had to bite back an acid comment to the effect that it was better than none at all. Finally he said he might go out and see some of the city.

“That’s a good idea,” she said with obvious relief. “I’m going to take a nap. You’re a good boy, Larry.”

So he had gone down the narrow stairs (the elevator was still broken) and onto the street, feeling guilty relief. The day was his, and he still had two hundred dollars in cash.

But now, in Times Square, he didn’t feel so good. He wandered along, his wallet long since transferred to a front pocket. He paused in front of a discount record store, transfixed by the sound of his own voice coming from the battered overhead speakers. The bridge verse.

‘
I
 
didn’t come to ask you to stay all night Or to find out if you've seen the light I didn’t come to make a fuss or pick a fight I just want you to tell me if you think you can Baby, can you dig your man?”

Dig him, baby
—

Baby, can you dig your man?”

That’s me, he thought, looking vacantly in at the albums, but today the sound depressed him. Worse, it made him homesick. He didn’t want to be here under this dirty gray washtub sky, smelling New York exhaust, one hand constantly playing pocket pool with his wallet to make sure it was still there. New York, thy name is paranoia. Suddenly where he wanted to be was in a West Coast recording studio, making a new album.

Larry quickened his step and turned in at an arcade. Bells and buzzers jangled in his ears, and there was the amplified, ripping growl of a Deathrace 2000 game, complete with the unearthly, electronic screams of the dying pedestrians. Neat game, Larry thought, soon to be followed by Dachau 2000. They’ll love that one. He went to the change booth and got ten dollars in quarters. There was a working phone booth next to the Beef ’n Brew across the street and he direct dialed Jane’s Place from memory. Jane’s was a poker parlor where Wayne Stukey sometimes hung out.

Larry plugged quarters into the slot until his hand ached, and then the phone began to ring three thousand miles away.

A female voice said, “Jane’s. We’re open.”

“To anything?” he asked, low and sexy.

“Listen, wise guy, this isn’t. . . hey, is this Larry?”

“Yeah, it’s me. Hi, Arlene.”

“Where are you? Nobody’s seen you, Larry.”

“Well, I’m on the East Coast,” he said cautiously. “Somebody told me there were bloodsuckers on me and I ought to get out of the pool until they dropped off.”

“Something about a big party?”

“Yeah.”

“I
heard
about
that,”
she said. “Biiig spender.”

“Is Wayne around, Arlene?”

“You mean Wayne Stukey? Haven’t you heard?”

“What would I hear? I’m on the other coast. Hey, he’s okay, isn’t he?”

“He’s in the hospital with this flu bug. Captain Trips, they’re calling it out here. Not that it’s any laughing matter. A lot of people have died with it, they say. People are scared, staying in. We’ve got six empty tables, and you know Jane
never
has empty tables.”

“How is he?”

“Who knows? They’ve got wards and wards of people and none of them can have visitors. It’s spooky, Larry. And there are a lot of soldiers around.”

“On leave?”

“Soldiers on leave don’t carry guns or ride around in convoy trucks. A lot of people are really scared. You’re well off out where you are.”

“Hasn’t been anything on the news.”

“Out here there’s been a few things in the papers about getting flu shot boosters, that’s all. But some people are saying the army got careless with one of those little plague jars. Isn’t that
creepy?”

“It’s just scare talk,” he said.

“There’s nothing like it where you are?”

“No,” he said, and then thought of his mother’s cold. And hadn’t there been a lot of sneezing and hacking going on in the subway—he remembered thinking it sounded like a TB ward. But there were plenty of sneezes and runny noses to go around in any city.

“Janey herself isn’t in,” Arlene was saying. “She’s got a fever and swollen glands, she said. I thought that old whore was too tough to get sick.”

“Three minutes are up, signal when through,” the operator broke in.

Larry said: “Well, I’ll be coming back in a week or so, Arlene. .We’ll get together.”

“Fine by me. I always wanted to go out with a famous recording star.”

“Arlene? You don’t know a guy named Dewey the Deck, do you?” “Oh!” she said in a very startled way. “Oh wow! Larry!”

“What?”

“Thank God you didn’t hang up! I did see Wayne, just about two days before he went into the hospital. I forgot all about it! Oh, gee!” “Well, what is it?”

“It’s an envelope. He said it was for you, but he asked me to keep it in my cash drawer for a week or so, or give it to you if I saw you. He said something like ‘He’s goddam lucky Dewey doesn’t own it instead of him.’ ”

“What’s in it?” He switched the phone from one hand to the other. “Just a minute. I’ll see.” There was a moment of silence, then ripping paper. Arlene said, “It’s a savings account book. First of California. There’s a balance of . . . wow! Just over thirteen thousand dollars. If you ask me to go somewhere dutch, I’ll brain you.”

“You won’t have to,” he said, grinning. “Thanks, Arlene.”

“Sure. I’ll put it in an envelope with your name on it. Then you can’t duck me when you come in.”

“I wouldn’t, sugar.”

They hung up and then the operator was there, demanding three dollars for Ma Bell. Larry, still feeling the wide and foolish grin on his face, plugged it willingly into the slot.

He looked at the change still scattered on the phone booth’s shelf, picked out a dime, and dropped it into the slot. A moment later his mother’s phone was ringing. Your first impulse is to share good news, your second is to club someone with it. He thought—no, he believed—that this was entirely the former. He wanted to relieve both of them with the news that he was solvent again.

The smile faded off his lips little by little. The phone was only ringing. Maybe she had decided to go in after all. He thought of her flushed, feverish face, and of her coughing and sneezing and saying “shit!” impatiently into her handkerchief. He didn’t think she would have gone in.

He hung up and absently removed his dime from the slot when it clicked back. He went out, jingling the change in his hand. When he saw a cab he hailed it, and as the cab pulled back into the flow of traffic it began to spatter rain.

The door was locked and after knocking two or three times he was sure the apartment was empty. He had rapped loud enough to make someone on the floor above rap back, like an exasperated ghost. But he would have to go in and make sure, and he didn’t have a key. He turned to go down the stairs to Mr. Freeman’s apartment and that was when he heard the low groan from behind the door.

There were three different locks on his mother’s door, but she was indifferent about using them all in spite of her obsession with the Puerto Ricans. Larry hit the door with his shoulder and it rattled loudly in its frame. He hit it again and the lock gave. The door swung back and banged off the wall.

“Mom?”

That groan again.

The apartment was dim; the day had grown dark very suddenly, and now there was thick thunder and the sound of rain had swelled. The living room window was half open, the white curtains bellying out over the table, then being sucked back through the opening and into the airshaft beyond. There was a glistening wet patch on the floor where the rain had come in.

“Mom, where are you?”

A louder groan. He went through into the kitchen, and thunder rumbled again. He almost tripped over her because she was lying on the floor, half in and half out of her bedroom.

“Mom! Jesus, Mom!”

She tried to roll over at the sound of his voice, but only her head would move, pivoting on the chin, coming to rest on the left cheek. Her breathing was stentorious and clogged with phlegm. But the worst thing, the thing he never forgot, was the way her visible eye rolled up to see him, like the eye of a hog in a slaughtering pen. Her face was bright with fever.

“Larry?”

“Going to put you on your bed, Mom.”

He bent, locking his knees fiercely against the trembling that wanted to start up in them, and got her in his arms. Her housecoat fell open revealing a wash-faded nightgown and fishbelly-white legs sewn with puffy blue varicose veins. Her heat was immense. That terrified him. No one could remain so hot and live. Her brains must be frying in her head.

As if to prove this, she said querulously: “Larry, go get your father. He’s in the bar.”

“Be quiet,” he said, distraught. “Just be quiet and go to sleep, Mom.”

“He’s in the bar with that photographer!” she said shrilly into the palpable afternoon darkness, and thunder cracked viciously outside. Larry’s body felt as if it was coated with slowly running cold slime. A cool breeze was moving through the apartment, coming from the half-open window in the living room. As if in response to it, Alice began to shiver and the flesh of her arms humped up in gooseflesh. Her teeth clicked. Her face was a full moon in the bedroom’s semidarkness. Larry scrambled the covers down, put her legs in, and pulled the blankets up to her chin. Still she shivered helplessly, making the top blanket quiver and shake. Her face was dry and sweat-less.

“You go tell him I said come outta there!” she cried, and then was silent, except for the heavy bronchial sound of her breathing.

He went back into the living room, approached the telephone, then detoured around it. He shut the window with a bang and then went back to the phone.

The books were on a shelf underneath the little table it sat on. He looked up the number of Mercy Hospital and dialed it while more thunder cracked outside. A stroke of lightning turned the window he’d just closed into a blue and white X-ray plate. In the bedroom his mother screamed breathlessly, chilling his blood.

The phone rang once, there was a buzzing sound, then a click. A mechanically bright voice said: “This is a recording made at Mercy General Hospital. At the time of your call, all circuits are busy. If you will hold, your call will be taken as soon as possible. Thank you. This is a recording made at Mercy General Hospital. At the time of your call—”

“We put the mopheads downstairs!” his mother cried out. Thunder rolled. “Those Puerto Rickies don’t know nothing!”

“—call will be taken as soon as—”

He thumped the phone down and stood over it, sweating. What kind of goddam hospital was that, where you got a fucking recorded announcement? What was going on there?