The Stand (Original Edition) (40 page)

“Because there happens to be an installation there for the studying of communicable diseases,” Harold said loftily. “It was my thought that, if there is any order left in this country, or any persons in authority who escaped the late scourge, they would likely be at Stovington or in Atlanta, where there is another such center.”

“That’s right,” Frannie said.

Stu said: “You’re wasting your time.”

Frannie looked stunned. Harold looked indignant; the red began to creep out of his collar again. “I hardly think you’re the best judge of that, my man.”

“I guess I am. I came from there.”

Now they both looked stunned. Stunned and astonished.

“You knew about it? Frannie asked, shaken. “You checked it out?”

“No, it wasn’t like that. It—”

“You’re a liar!” Harold’s voice had gone high and squeaky.

Fran saw an alarming cold flash of anger in Redman’s eyes, then they were brown and mild again. “No. I ain’t.”

“I say you are! I say you’re nothing but a—”

“
Harold, you shut up!”

“But Frannie, how can you believe—”

“How can you be so rude and antagonistic?” she asked hotly. “Will you at least listen to what he has to say, Harold?”

“I don’t trust him.”

Fair enough, Stu thought, that makes us even.

“How can you not trust a man you just met? Really, Harold, you’re being disgusting!”

“Let me tell you how I know,” Stu said quietly. He told an abridged version of the story that began when Campion had crashed into Hap’s gas pumps. He sketched his escape from Stovington a week ago. Harold glared dully down at his hands, which were plucking up bits of moss and shredding them. But the girl’s face was like an unfolding map of a tragic country, and Stu felt bad for her. She had set off with this boy (who, to give him credit due, had had a pretty good idea) hoping against hope that there was something of the old ways left. Well, she had been disappointed. Bitterly so, from her look.

“Atlanta too? The plague got both of them?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, and she burst into tears.

He wanted to comfort her, but the boy would not take to that. Harold glanced uncomfortably at Fran, then down at the litter of moss on his cuffs. Stu gave her his handkerchief. She thanked him distractedly, without looking up. Harold glared sullenly at him again, the eyes those of a piggy little boy who wants the whole cookie jar to himself. Ain’t he going to be surprised, Stu thought, when he finds out a girl isn’t a jar of cookies.

When her tears had tapered down to sniffles, she said, “I guess Harold and I owe you our thanks. At least you saved us a long trip with disappointment at the end.”

“You mean you believe him? Just like that? He tells you a big story and you just. . . you buy it?”

“Harold, why would he lie? For what gain?”

“Well, how do I know what he’s got on his mind?” Harold asked truculently. “Murder, could be. Or rape.”

“I don’t believe in rape myself,” Stu said mildly. “Maybe you know something about it I don’t.”

“Stop
it,” Fran said. “Harold, won’t you try not to be so awful?”
“Awful?"
Harold shouted. “I’m trying to watch out for you—us— and that’s so bloodydamn
awful?"

“Look,” Stu said, and brushed his sleeve up. On the inside of his elbow were several healing needle marks and the last remains of a discolored bruise. “They injected me with all kinds of stuff.”

“Maybe you’re a junkie,” Harold said.

Stu rolled his sleeve back down without replying. It was the girl, of course. He had gotten used to the idea of owning her. Well, some girls could be owned and some could not. This one looked like the latter type. She was tall and pretty and very fresh-looking. Her dark eyes and hair accentuated a look that could be taken for dewy helplessness. It would be easy to miss that faint line (the
1-want
line, Stu’s mother had called it) between her eyebrows that became so pronounced when she was put out, the swift capability of her hands, even the forthright way she tossed her hair from her forehead.

“So now what do we do?” she asked, ignoring Harold’s last contribution to the discussion entirely.

“Go on anyway,” Harold said, and when she looked over at him with that line furrowing her brow, he added hastily: “Well, we have to go
somewhere
. Sure, he’s probably telling the truth, but we could double-check. Then decide what’s next.”

Fran glanced at Stu. Stu shrugged.

“Okay?” Harold pressed.

“I suppose it doesn’t matter,” Frannie said. She picked up a gone-to-seed dandelion and blew away the fluff.

“You haven’t seen anyone at all?” Stu asked.

“No one.”

Stu told them about Bateman and Kojak. When he had finished he said, “I was going toward the coast, but you saying there aren’t any people back that way kind of takes the wind out of my sails.”

“Sorry,” Harold said, sounding anything but. He stood up. “Ready, Fran?”

She looked at Stu, hesitated, then stood up. “Back to the wonderful diet machine. Thank you for telling us what you know, Mr. Redman, even if the news wasn’t so hot.”

“Just a second,” Stu said, also standing up. He hesitated, wondering again if they were right. The girl was, but the boy surely was seventeen and afflicted with a bad case of the I-hate-most-everybodies. But were there enough people left to pick and choose? Stu thought not.

“I guess we’re both looking for people,” he said. “I’d like to tag along with you, if you’d have me.”

“No,” Harold said instantly.

Fran looked at Harold. “Maybe we—”

“You never mind. I say no.”

“Don’t I get a vote?”

“What’s the matter with you? Can’t you see he only wants one thing? Christ, Fran!”

“Three’s better than two if there’s trouble,” Stu said.

“No,” Harold repeated. His hand dropped to the butt of his gun. “Yes,” Fran said. “We’d be glad to have you, Mr. Redman.” Harold rounded on her, his face angry and hurt. “That’s the way you feel, is it? You were just waiting for some excuse to get rid of me, I get it.” He was so angry that tears had sprung to his eyes, and that made him angrier still. “If that’s the way you want it, okay. You go on with him. I’m done with you.” He stamped off toward where the Hondas were parked.

Frannie looked at Stu with stricken eyes, then turned toward Harold.

“Just a minute,” Stu said. “Stay here, please.” He trotted toward Harold, who was astride his Honda and trying to start it up. In his anger he had twisted the throttle all the way over and it was a good thing for him it was flooded, Stu thought; if it actually started up with that much throttle, it would rare back on its rear wheel like a unicycle and pile old Harold into the first tree and land on top of him.

“You stay away!” Harold screamed angrily at him, and his hand fell onto the butt of the gun again. Stu put his hand on top of Harold’s, as if they were playing slapjack. He put his other hand on Harold’s arm. Harold’s eyes were very wide, and Stu believed he was only an inch or so from becoming dangerous. He wasn’t just jealous of the girl, that had been a bad oversimplification on his part. His personal dignity was wrapped up in it, and his new image of himself as the girl’s protector. God knew what kind of a fuckup he had been before all of this, with his wad of belly and his pointy-toed boots and his stuck-up way of talking. But underneath the new image was the belief that he was still a fuckup and always would be. He would have reacted the same way to Bateman, or to a twelve-year-old kid. In any triangle situation he was going to see himself as the lowest point.

“Harold,” he said, almost into Harold’s ear.

“Let me
go.”
His heavy body seemed light in its tension; he was thrumming like a live wire.

“Harold, are you sleeping with her?”

Harold’s body gave a shivering jerk and Stu knew he was not.

“None of your business!”

“No. Except to get things out where we can see them. She’s not mine, Harold. She’s her own. I’m not going to try to take her away from you. I’m sorry to have to speak so blunt, but it’s best for us to know where we stand. We’re two and one now and if you go off, we’re two and one again. No gain.”

Harold said nothing, but his trembling had subsided.

“I’ll be just as plain as I have to. You know and I know that there’s no need for a man to be rapin women. Not if he knows what to do with his hand.”

“That’s—” Harold licked his lips and then looked over at the side of the road where Fran was still standing, hands cupping elbows, arms crossed just below her breasts, watching them anxiously. “That’s pretty disgusting.”

“Well maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, but when a man’s around a woman who doesn’t want him in bed, that man’s got his choice. I pick the hand every time. I guess you do too since she’s still with you of her own free will. I just want to speak plain, between you and me. I’m not here to squeeze you out like some bully at a county fair dance.”

Harold’s hand relaxed on the gun and he looked at Stu. “You mean that? I. . . you promise you won’t tell?”

Stu nodded.

“I love her,” Harold said hoarsely. “She doesn’t love me, I know that, but I’m speaking plainly, like you said.”

“That’s best. I don’t want to cut in. I just want to come along.” Compulsively, Harold repeated: “You promise?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“All right.”

He got slowly off the Honda. He and Stu walked back to Fran.

“He can come,” Harold said. “And I . . He looked at Stu and said with difficult dignity, “I apologize for being such an asshole.” “Hooray!” Fran said, and clapped her hands. “Now that that’s settled, where are we going?”

In the end they went in the direction Fran and Harold had been headed in, west. Stu said he thought Glen Bateman would be glad to have them overnight, if they could reach Woodsville by dark—and he might agree to tag along with them in the morning (at this Harold began to glower again). Stu drove Fran’s Honda, and she rode pillion behind Harold. They stopped in Twin Mountain for lunch and began the slow, cautious business of getting to know each other. Their accents sounded funny to Stu, the way they broadened their a’s and dropped or modified their r’s. He supposed he sounded just as funny to them, maybe funnier.

They ate in an abandoned lunchroom and Stu found his gaze was drawn again and again to Fran’s face—her lively eyes, the small but determined set of her chin, the way that line formed between her eyes, indexing her emotions. He liked the way she looked and talked; he even liked the way her dark hair was drawn back from her temples. And that was the beginning of his knowing that he did want her, after all.

July 5—September 6, 1980

“We come on the ship they call the Mayflower

We come on the ship that sailed the moon

We come in the age’s most uncertain hour

and sing an American tune

But it’s all right, it’s all right

You can’t be forever blessed . .

—Paul Simon

“Lookin hard for a drive-in

Searching for a parking space

Where hamburgers sizzle on an open grille night and day

Yes! Juke-box is jumpin with records back in the U.S.A.

Well I’m so glad I’m living in the U.S.A.

Anything you want we got it right here in the U.S.A.”

—Chuck Berry

There was a dead man lying in the middle of Main Street in May, Oklahoma.

Nick wasn’t surprised. He had seen a lot of corpses since leaving Shoyo, and he suspected he hadn’t seen a thousandth of all the dead people he must have passed. In places, the rich smell of death on the air was enough to make you feel like swooning. One more dead man, more or less, wasn’t going to make any difference.

But when the dead man sat up, such an explosion of terror rose in him that he again lost control of his bike. It wavered, then wobbled, then crashed, spilling Nick violently onto the pavement of Oklahoma Route 3. He cut his hands and scraped his forehead.

“Holy gee, mister, but you took a tumble,” the corpse said, coming toward Nick at a pace best described as an amiable stagger. “Didn’t you just? My laws!”

Nick got none of this. He was wondering how badly he was hurt from this second spill in less than a week. Blood from his cut forehead splattered on the pavement. When the hand touched him on the shoulder he remembered the corpse and scrambled away on the palms of his hands and the soles of his shoes, his eyes bright with terror.

“Don’t you take on so,” the corpse repeated, and Nick saw he was looking happily at Nick. He had most of a bottle of whiskey in one hand, and now Nick understood. Not a corpse but a man who had gotten drunk and had passed out in the middle of the road.

Nick nodded at him and made a circle with his thumb and forefinger. Just then a drop of blood oozed warmly into the eye that Ray Booth had worked over, making it smart. He swiped his forearm across it, then walked slowly to the curb and sat beside a Plymouth with Kansas plates which was slowly settling on its tires. He could see the gash on his forehead reflected in the Plymouth’s bumper. It looked ugly but not deep. He would find the local drugstore, disinfect it, and slap a Band-Aid over it. He thought he still must have enough penicillin in his system to fight off almost anything, but his close call from the scrape on his leg had given him a horror of infection. He picked scraps of gravel out of his palms, wincing.

The man with the bottle of whiskey had been watching all of this with no expression at all. If Nick had looked up, it would have struck him as queer immediately. When he had turned away to examine his wound in the bumper’s reflection, the animation had leaked out of the man’s face. It became empty and clean and unlined. He was wearing bib-alls that were clean but faded and heavy workshoes. He stood about five-nine, and his hair was so blond it was nearly white. His eyes were a bright, empty blue, and with the cornsilk hair, his Swedish or Norwegian descent was unmistakable. He looked no more than twenty-three, but Nick found out later he had to be forty or close to it because he could remember the end of World War II, and how his daddy had come home in uniform a month later. There was no question that he might have made it all up. Invention was not Tom Cullen’s long suit.