The Stand (Original Edition) (33 page)

She left the park and walked slowly down Main Street toward the Lauder house. The day was warm already, but the air was freshened by a sea breeze. She suddenly wanted to go down to the beach, find a nice piece of kelp, and nibble on it.

“God, you’re disgusting,” she said aloud. Of course she was pregnant. That was part of it. Next week it would be Bermuda onion sandwiches. With creamy horseradish on top.

She stopped on the comer still a block from Harold’s, surprised at how long it had been since she had thought of her “delicate condition.” Before, she had always been discovering that
l’m-pregnant
thought around odd comers, like some unpleasant mess she kept forgetting to clean up: I ought to be sure and get that blue dress to the cleaners before Friday (a few more months and I can hang it in the closet because
I’m-pregnant).
 I guess I’ll take my shower now (in a few months it’ll probably look like there’s a whale in the shower stall because
I'm-pregnant).
 I ought to get the oil changed in the car before the pistons fall right out of their sockets or whatever (and I wonder what Johnny would say if he knew
I'
m-pregnant')
. But maybe now she had become accustomed to the thought. After all, she was nearly three months along, nearly a third of the way there.

For the first time she wondered with some unease who would help her have her baby.

From behind the Lauder house there came a steady ratcheting
clickclickclick
of a hand mower, and when Fran came around the comer, what she saw was so strange that only her complete surprise kept her from laughing out loud.

Harold, clad only in a tight and skimpy blue bathing suit, was mowing the lawn. His white skin was sheened with sweat; his long hair flopped against his neck (although to do Harold credit it did appear to have been washed in the not-too-distant past). The rolls of fat above the waistband of his trunks and below the legbands jounced up and down wildly. His feet were green with cut grass to above the ankle. His back had gone reddish, although with exertion or incipient sunburn she couldn’t tell.

But Harold wasn’t just
mowing;
he was
running.
The Lauders’ back lawn sloped down to a picturesque, rambling stone wall, and in the middle of it was an octagonal summerhouse. She and Andy used to hold their “teas” there when they were little girls, Frannie remembered with a sudden stab of nostalgia that was unexpectedly painful, back in the days when they could still cry over the ending of
Charlotte’s Web
and moan happily over Chuckie Mayo, who was the cutest boy in school. The Lauders’ lawn was somehow English in its greenness and its peace, but now a dervish in a blue bathing suit had invaded this pastoral scene. She could hear Harold panting in a way that was alarming to listen to as he turned the northeast corner where the Lauders’ back lawn was divided from the Wilsons’ by a row of mulberry bushes. He roared down the slope of the lawn, bent over the mower’s T-handle. The blades whirred. Grass flew in a green jet, coating Harold’s lower legs. He had mowed perhaps half of the lawn; what was left was a diminishing square with the summerhouse in the middle. He turned the corner at the bottom of the hill and then roared back, for a moment obscured from view by the summerhouse, and then reappearing, bent over his machine like a race driver. About halfway up, he saw her. At exactly the same instant Frannie said timidly: “Harold?” And she saw that he was in tears.

“Huh!” Harold said. She had startled him out of some private world, and for a moment she feared that the startle on top of his exertion would give him a heart attack.

Then he ran for the house, his feet kicking through drifts of mown grass, and she was peripherally aware of the sweet smell it made on the hot summer air.

She took a step after him. “Harold, what’s wrong?”

Then he was bounding up the porch steps. The back door opened, Harold ran inside, and it slammed behind him with a jarring crash. In the silence that descended afterward, a jay called stridently and some small animal made rattling noises in the bushes behind the stone wall. The mower, abandoned, stood with cut grass behind it and high grass before it a little way from the summerhouse where she and Amy had once drunk their Kool-Aid in Barbie’s Kitchen cups with their little fingers sticking elegantly off into the air.

Frannie stood indecisive for a while and at last walked up to the door and knocked. There was no answer, but she could hear Harold crying somewhere inside.

“Harold?”

No answer. The weeping went on.

She let herself into the Lauders’ back hall, which was dark, cool, and fragrant—Mrs. Lauder’s coldpantry opened off the hall to the left, and for as long as Frannie could remember there had been the good smell of dried apples and cinnamon back here, like pies dreaming of creation.

“Harold?”

She walked up the hall to the kitchen and Harold was there, sitting at the table. His hands were clutched in his hair, and his green feet rested on the faded linoleum that Mrs. Lauder had kept so spotless.

“Harold, what’s wrong?”

“Go away!” he yelled tearfully. “Go away, you don’t like me!”

“Yes I do. You’re okay, Harold. Maybe not great, but okay.”

This seemed to make Harold cry harder.

“Do you have anything to drink?”

“Kool-Aid,” he said. He sniffed, wiped his nose, and still looking at the table, added: “It’s warm.”

“Of course it is. Did you get the water at the town pump?” Like many small towns, Ogunquit still had a common pump in back of the town hall, although for the last forty years it had been more of an antiquity than a practical source of water. Tourists sometimes took pictures of it. This is the town pump in the little seaside town where we spent our vacation. Oh, isn’t that quaint.

“Yeah, that’s where I got it.”

She poured them each a glass and sat down.
We should be having it in the summerhouse,
she thought. “Harold, what’s wrong?”

Harold uttered a strange, hysterical laugh and fumbled his Kool-Aid to his mouth. He drained the glass and set it down. “Wrong? Now what could be wrong?”

“I mean, is it something specific?” She tasted her Kool-Aid and fought down a grimace. It wasn’t that warm, Harold must have drawn the water only a short time ago, but he had forgotten the sugar.

He looked up at her finally, his face tear-streaked and still wanting to blubber. “I want my mother,” he said simply.

“Oh, Harold—”

“I thought when it happened, when she died, ‘now that wasn’t so bad.’ ” He was gripping his glass, staring at her in an intense, haggard way that was a little frightening. “I know how terrible that must sound to you. But I never knew
how
I would take it when they passed away. I’m a very sensitive person. That’s why I was so persecuted by the cretins at that house of horrors the town fathers saw fit to call a high school. I thought it might drive me mad with grief, their passing, or at least prostrate me for a year ... my interior sun, so to speak, would . . . would . . . and when it happened, my mother . . . Amy ... my father ... I said to myself, ‘Now that wasn’t so bad.' I . . . they . . .” He brought his fist down on the table, making her flinch. “Why can’t I say what I mean?” he cried. “I’ve
always
been able to say what I meant! It’s a writer’s job to carve with language, to hew close to the bone,
so why can’t 1 say what it feels like?”

“Harold, don’t. I know how you feel.”

He stared at her, dumbstruck. “You know . . . ?” He shook his head. “No. You couldn’t.”

“Remember when you came to the house? And I was digging the grave? I was half out of my mind. Half the time I couldn’t even remember what I was doing. I tried to cook some french fries and almost burned the house down. So if it makes you feel better to mow the grass, fine. You’ll get a sunburn if you do it in your bathing trunks, though. You’re already getting one,” she added critically, looking at his shoulders. To be polite, she sipped a little more of the dreadful Kool-Aid.

He wiped his hand across his mouth. “I never even liked them that well,” he said, “but I thought grief was something you felt anyway. Like your bladder’s full, you have to urinate. And if close relatives die, you have to be grief-stricken.”

She nodded, thinking that was strange but rather apt.

“My mother was always taken with Amy. She was Amy’s friend,” he amplified with unconscious and nearly pitiful childishness. “And 1 horrified my father.”

Fran saw how that could be. Brad Lauder had been a huge, brawny man, a foreman at the woolen mill in Kennebunk. He would have had very little idea of what to make of the fat, peculiar son that his loins had produced.

“He took me aside once,” Harold resumed, “and asked me if I was a queerboy. That’s just how he said it. I got so scared I cried, and he slapped my face and told me if I was going to be such a goddamned baby all the time, I’d best ride right out of town. And Amy ... I think it would be safe to say that Amy just didn’t give a shit. I was just an embarrassment when she brought her friends home. She treated me like I was a messy room.”

With an effort, Fran finished her Kool-Aid.

“So when they were gone and I didn’t feel too much one way or the other, I just thought I was wrong. Grief is not a knee-jerk reaction, I said to myself. But I got fooled. I missed them more and more every day. Mostly my mother. If I could just see her ... a lot of times she wasn’t around when I wanted her . . . needed her . . . she was too busy doing things for Amy, or with Amy, but she was never mean to me. So this morning when I got thinking about it, I said to myself, ‘I’ll mow the grass. Then I won’t think of it.’ But I did.”

She reached across the table and touched his hand. “There’s nothing wrong with the way you feel, Harold.”

“Are you sure?” He was looking at her again in that wide-eyed, childish stare.

“Yes.”

“Will you be my friend?”

“Yes.”

“Thank God,” Harold said. “Thank God for that.” His hand was sweaty in hers, and as she thought it, he seemed to sense it, and pulled his hand reluctantly away. “Would you like some more Kool-Aid?” he asked her humbly.

She smiled her best diplomatic smile. “Maybe later,” she said.

They had a picnic lunch in the park: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, Hostess Twinkies, and a large bottle of Coke each. The Cokes were fine after they had been cooled in the duck pond.

“I’ve been thinking about what I’m going to do,” Harold said. “Don’t you want the rest of that Twinkie?”

“No, I’m full.”

Her Twinkie disappeared into Harold’s mouth in a single bite. His belated grief hadn’t affected his appetite, Frannie observed, and then decided that was a rather mean thing to think.

“What?” she said.

“I was thinking of going to Vermont,” he said diffidently. “Would you like to come?”

“Why Vermont?”

“There’s a government plague and communicable diseases center there, in a town called Stovington,” Harold said. “It’s not as big as the one in Atlanta, but it’s sure a lot closer. I was thinking that if there are still people alive and working on this flu, a lot of them would be there.”

“Why wouldn’t they be dead, too?”

“Well, they might be, they might be,” Harold said rather prissily.

“But in places like Stovington, where they’re used to dealing with communicable diseases, they’re also used to taking precautions. And if they are still in operation, I would imagine they are looking for people like us. People who are immune.”

“How do you know all that, Harold?” She was looking at him with open admiration, and Harold blushed happily.

“I read a lot. Neither of those places are secret. So what do you think, Fran?”

She thought it was a wonderful idea. It appealed to that uncoalesced need for structure and authority. She immediately dismissed Harold’s disclaimer that they might all be dead. They would get to Stovington, they would be taken in, tested, and out of all the tests would come some discrepancy, some difference between them and all the people who had gotten sick and died. It didn’t occur to her just then to wonder what earthly good a vaccine could do at this point.

“I think we ought to find a road atlas and see how to get there as quick as we can,” she said.

His face lit up. For a moment she thought he was going to kiss her, and in that single shining moment she probably would have allowed it, but then the moment passed. In retrospect she was glad.

By the road atlas, where all distance was reduced to fingerlengths, it looked simple enough. Number 1 to 1-95, 1-95 to US 302, and then northwest on 302 through the lake country towns of western Maine, across the chimney of New Hampshire on the same road, and then into Vermont. Stovington was only thirty miles west of Barre, accessible either by Vermont Route 61 or 1-89.

“How far is that, all together?” Fran asked.

Harold got a ruler, measured, and then consulted the mileage scale.

“You won’t believe this,” he said glumly.

“What is it? A hundred miles?”

“Over three hundred.”

“Oh God,” Frannie said. “That kills my idea. I thought we could hike it.”

“I was thinking of bikes,” Harold said. “Or ... or maybe motor scooters.”

“Harold,” she said solemnly, “you’re a genius.”

Harold coughed, blushing and pleased again. “We could bike as far as Wells, tomorrow morning. There’s a Honda dealership there . . . can you drive a Honda, Fran?”

“I can learn, if we can go slow for a while.”

“Oh, I think it would be very unwise to speed,” Harold said seriously. “One would never know when one would come around a blind curve and find a three-car smashup blocking the road.”

“Why wait until tomorrow? Why don’t we go today?”

“Well, it’s past two now,” he said. “We couldn’t get much further than Wells, and we’d need to outfit ourselves. That would be easier to do here in Ogunquit, because we know where everything is. And we’ll need guns, of course.”

It was queer, really. As soon as he mentioned that word, she had thought of the baby. “Why do we need guns?”