The Stand (Original Edition) (38 page)

Sitting on the porch was the oldest woman in America, a black woman with fluffy white thin hair—she is thin herself, wearing a housedress and specs. She looks thin enough for a high afternoon wind to just blow her away, tumble her into the high blue sky and carry her perhaps all the w
^r
ay to Julesburg, Colorado. And the instrument she is playing (perhaps that’s what is holding her down, keeping her on the earth) is a “guitar.” It sounds nice. He feels he could just stand where he is for the rest of the day, watching the old black woman sitting on her porch held up by jacklifters in the middle of all this Nebraska corn, stand here west of Omaha and a little north of Osceloa in the county of Polk, listening. Her face is seamed with a million wrinkles like the map of a state where the geography hasn’t settled down—rivers and canyons along her brown leather cheeks, ridges below the knob of her chin, the sinuous raised drumhn of bone at the base of her forehead, the caves of her eyes.

She has begun to sing again, accompanying herself on the old guitar.

"
Jee-sus, won’t you kum-bah-yere Oh Jee-sus, won’t you kum-bah-yere,

Jesus won’t you come by here?

Cause now .. .is the needy time Oh now . . . is the needy time Now is the
—”

Say, boy, who nailed you to that spot?

She puts the guitar across her lap like a baby and gestures him forward. Nick comes. He says he just wanted to listen to her sing, the singing was beautiful.

Well, singing’s God’s foolishness, I do it most the day now
. . .
how you making out with that black man?

He scares me. I’m afraid
—

Boy, you got to be afraid. Even a tree at dusk, if you see it the right way, you got to be afraid. We’re all mortal, praise God.

But how do I tell him no? How do I
—

How do you breathe? How do you dream? No one knows. But you come see me. Anytime. Mother Abagail is what they call me. I’m the oldest woman in these parts, I guess, and I still make m’own biscuit. You come see me anytime, boy, and bring your friends.

But how do 1 get out of this?

God bless you, boy, no one ever does. You just look up to the best and come see Mother Abagail anytime you take a mind to. I be right here, I guess; don’t move around much anymore. So you come see me. I be right
—

—
here, right here
—

He came awake bit by bit until Nebraska was gone, and the smell of the corn, and Mother Abagail’s seamed, dark face. The real world filtered in, not so much replacing that dream world as overlaying it until it was out of sight.

He was in Shoyo, Arkansas, his name was Nick Andros, he had never spoken nor heard the sound of a “guitar” . . . but he was still alive.

He sat up on the cot, swung his legs over, and looked at the scrape. The swelling had gone down some. The ache was only a throb. I’m healing, he thought with great relief. I think I’m going to be okay.

He got up from the cot and limped over to the window in his shorts. The leg was stiff, but it was the kind of stiffness you know will work out with a little exercise. He looked out at the silent town, not Shoyo anymore but the corpse of Shoyo, and knew he would have to leave today. He wouldn’t be able to get far, but he would make a start.

Where to go? Well, he supposed he knew that. Dreams were just dreams, but for a start he supposed he could go northwest. Toward Nebraska.

Nick pedaled out of town at about quarter past one on the afternoon of July 3. He packed a knapsack in the morning, putting in some more of the penicillin pills in case he needed them, and some canned goods. He went heavy on the Campbell’s tomato soup and the Chef Boy-ar-dee ravioli, two of his favorites. He put in several boxes of bullets for the pistol and took a canteen.

He walked up the street, looking in garages until he found what he wanted: a ten-speed bike that was just about right for his height. He pedaled carefully down Main Street, in a low gear, his hurt leg slowly warming to the work. He was moving west and his shadow followed him, riding its own black bike. He went past the gracious, cool-looking houses on the outskirts of town, standing in the shade with their curtains drawn for all time.

On the outskirts of town he saw a pair of taillights sticking up out of the ditch and dismounted the bike to take a look. It was Dr. Soames’s car. Soames was lying over the steering wheel with his eyes closed. On the floor beside
him
was his black bag, overturned, its bottles and vials spilling out. Nick looked for a long time and then rode on.

He camped that night in a farmhouse ten miles west of Shoyo. By nightfall on July 4 he was nearly to Oklahoma. That evening before he went to sleep he stood in another farmyard, his face turned up to the sky, watching a meteor shower scratch the night with cold white fire. He thought he had never seen anything so beautiful. Whatever lay ahead, he was glad to be alive.

Larry woke up at half past eight to sunlight and the sound of birds. They both freaked him out. Every morning since they had left New York City, sunlight and the sound of birds. And as an extra added attraction, a Bonus Free Gift, if you like, the air smelled clean and fresh. Even Rita had noticed it. He kept thinking: Well, that’s as good as it’s going to get. But it kept getting better. It got better until you wondered what they had been doing to the planet. And it made you wonder if this was the way the air had
always
smelled in places like upstate Minnesota and in Oregon and on the western slope of the Rockies.

And this morning, in Bennington, Vermont, now headed due east along Highway 9, this morning was something special. It was the byGod Fourth of July, Independence Day.

He sat up in the sleeping bag and looked over at Rita, but she was still out like a light, nothing showing but the lines of her body under the bag’s quilted fabric and a fluff of her hair. Well, he would wake her up in style this morning.

Larry unzipped his side of the bag and got out, buck naked. For a moment his flesh marbled into goosebumps and then the air felt naturally warm, probably seventy already. It was going to be another peach of a day. He crawled out of the little two-man tent and stood up.

Parked beside the tent was a 1200-cc Harley cycle, black and chrome. Like the sleeping bag and the tent, it had been acquired in Passaic. By that time they had already gone through three cars, two blocked by terrible traffic jams, the third stuck in the mud outside of Nutley when he had tried to swing around a two-truck smashup. The bike was the answer. It could be trundled around accidents, pulling itself along in low gear. When the traffic was seriously piled up, it

could be ridden along the breakdown lane or the sidewalk, if there was one. Rita didn’t like it—riding pillion made her nervous and she clung to Larry desperately—but she had agreed it was the only practical solution. Mankind’s final traffic jam had been a dilly. And since they had left Passaic and gotten into the country, they had made great time. By the evening of July 2 they had recrossed into New York State and had pitched their tent on the outskirts of Quarry ville, with the hazed and mystic Catskills to the west. They turned east on the afternoon of the third crossing into Vermont just as dusk fell. And here they were in Bennington.

They had camped on a rise outside of town, and now as Larry stood naked beside the cycle, urinating, he could look down and marvel at the picture postcard New England town below him. Two clean white churches, their steeples rising as if to poke through the blue morning sky; a private school, gray fieldstone buildings shackled with ivy; a mill; a couple of red brick school buildings; plenty of trees dressed in summer greengowns. The only thing that made the picture subtly wrong was the lack of smoke from the mill and the number of twinkling toy cars parked at weird angles on the main street, which was also the highway they were following. But it’s the Fourth, he thought. The mill would have been shut down anyway.

He cleared his throat, spat, and hummed a little to find his pitch. He drew breath, very much aware of the light morning breeze on his naked chest and buttocks, and burst into song.

"Oh say can you see,

By the dawn’s early light

What so proudly we hailed

At the twilight’s last gleaming
. . .”

He sang it all the way through, facing Bennington, doing a little burlesque bump and grind at the end, because by now Rita would be standing at the flap of the tent, smiling at him.

He finished with a snappy salute at the building he thought might be the Bennington courthouse, then turned around, thinking the best way to start another year of independence in the good old US of A would be with a good old all-American fuck.

“Larry Underwood, Boy Patriot, wishes you a very good m—”

But the tentflap was still closed, and he felt a momentary irritation with her again. He squashed it resolutely. She couldn’t be on his wavelength all the time. That’s all. When you could recognize that and deal with it, you were on your way to an adult relationship. He had been trying very hard with Rita since that harrowing experience in the tunnel, and he thought he’d been doing pretty well.

You had to put yourself in her place, that was the thing. You had to recognize that she was a lot older, she had been used to having things a certain way for most of her life. It was natural for her to have a harder job adapting to a world that had turned itself upside down. The pills, for instance. He hadn’t been overjoyed to discover that she had brought her whole fucking pharmacy along with her in a jelly jar. Yellowjackets, Quaaludes, Darvon, and some other stuff that she called “my little pick-me-ups.” The little pick-me-ups were reds. Three of those with a shot of tequila and you would jitter and jive all the live-long day. He didn’t like it because too many ups and downs and all-arounds added up to one mean monkey on your back. A monkey roughly the size of King Kong. And he didn’t like it because, when you got right down to where the cheese binds, it was a kind of slap in the face at him, wasn’t it? What did she have to be nervous about? Why should she have trouble dropping off at night? He sure as hell didn’t.

He went back to the tent, then hesitated for a moment. Maybe he ought to let her sleep. Maybe she was worn out. But . . .

He looked down at Old Sparky, and Old Sparky didn’t really want to let her sleep. Singing the old Star-Speckled Banana had turned him right on. So—

“Rita?”

And it hit him right away after the fresh morning cleanness of the air outside; he must have been mostly asleep before to have missed it. The smell was not overpoweringly strong because the tent was fairly well ventilated, but it was strong enough: the sweet-sour smell of vomit and sickness.

“Rita?” He felt mounting alarm at the still way she was lying, just that dry fluff of hair sticking out of the sleeping bag. He crawled toward her on his hands and knees, the smell of vomit stronger now, making his stomach knot. “Rita, you all right? Wake up, Rita!”

No movement.

So he rolled her over and the sleeping bag was halfway unzipped as if she had tried to struggle out of it in the night, maybe realizing what was happening to her, struggling and failing, and he all the time sleeping peacefully beside her, old Mr. Rocky Mountain High himself. He rolled her over and one of her pill bottles fell out of her hand and her eyes were cloudy dull marbles behind half-closed lids and her mouth was filled with the green puke she had strangled on.

He stared into her dead face for what seemed a very long time. They were almost nose to nose, and the tent seemed to be getting hotter and hotter until it was like an attic on a late August afternoon just before the cooling thundershowers hit. His head seemed to be swelling and swelling. Her mouth was full of that shit. He couldn’t take his eyes off that. The question that ran around and around in his brain like a mechanical rabbit on a dogtrack rail was:
How long was I sleeping with her after she died?
Repulsive, man.
Reeee-
pulsive.

The paralysis broke and he scrambled out of the tent, scraping both knees when they came off the groundsheet and onto the naked earth. He thought he was going to puke himself and he struggled with it, willing himself not to, he hated to puke worse than anything, and then he thought
But I was going back in there to FUCK her, man!
and everything came up in a loose rush and he crawled away from the steaming mess crying and hating the cruddy taste in his mouth and nose.

He thought about her most of the morning. He felt a measure of relief that she had died—a great measure, actually. He would never tell anyone that.

“I ain’t no nice guy,” he said aloud, and having said it, he felt better. It became easier to tell the truth, and truth-telling was the most important thing. He had made an agreement with himself, no, he had made a
sacred pact
with himself that he was going to take care of her. Maybe he wasn’t no nice guy, but he was no murderer either and what he had done in the tunnel was pretty damn close to attempted murder. So he was going to take care of her, he wasn’t going to shout at her no matter how pissed he got sometimes—like when she grabbed him with her patented Kansas City Clutch as they mounted the Harley—he wasn’t going to get mad no matter how much she held him back or how stupid she could be about some things. The night before last she had put a can of peas into the coals of their fire without ventilating the top and he had fished it out all charred and swelled, about three seconds before it would have gone off like a bomb, maybe blinding them with flying hooks of tin shrapnel. But had he read her out about it? No. He hadn’t. He had made a light joke and passed it off. Same with the pills. He had figured the pills were her business.

Maybe you should have discussed it with her. Maybe she wanted you to.

“It wasn’t a friggin encounter session,” he said aloud. It was survival. And she hadn’t been able to cut it. Maybe she had known it, too. Maybe—