The Stand (Original Edition) (42 page)

Tom brought the bike to a skidding halt in front of Nick. Sweat stood out on his face in great beads. The bike pump’s rubber hose flopped. Tom was panting and grinning.

Nick pointed out of town and waved byebye.

“Can I still take my garage?”

Nick nodded and slipped the strap of the tote bag over Tom’s bull neck.

“We going right now?”

Nick nodded again. Made a circle with his thumb and forefinger.

“Wow!” Tom said happily. “Okay! Yeah! Wow!”

Nick went back to his own bike, slipped into his pack, and got on. Tom watched him ride up, his face alight with furious anticipation. Nick clapped him on the shoulder. They rode out of town side by side, Tom still squeezing the bulb of his horn.

They camped that night in left field of the Rosston Jaycees’ Little League ballfield. The evening was cloudless and starry. Nick’s sleep came quickly and was dreamless. He woke up at dawn the next morning, thinking how good it was to be with someone again, what a difference it made.

He had a battered Rand-McNally road atlas in his pack, and while he waited for Tom to wake up, he sat crosslegged in a sleeping bag lifted from the Rosston Sporting Goods and tried to plot a course.

There really was a Polk County, Nebraska. At first that had given him a start, but he had traveled all over the last few years. He must have talked to somebody who mentioned Polk County, or who had come from Polk County, and his conscious mind had just forgotten it. There was a Route 30, too. But he couldn’t really believe, at least not in the bright day of this early morning, that they were actually going to find an old Negro woman sitting on her porch in the middle of a field of corn and accompanying herself on a guitar while she sang hymns. He didn’t believe in precognition or in visions. But it seemed important to go somewhere, to look for people. In a way he shared Fran Goldsmith’s and Stu Redman’s urge to regroup. Until that could be done, everything would remain alien and out of joint. There was danger everywhere. You couldn’t see it but you could feel it. Danger, every particle of his being seemed to whisper it. Bridge Out. Forty Miles of Bad Road. We Are Not Responsible for Persons Proceeding Beyond This Point.

Part of it was the tremendous, walloping psychological shock of the empty countryside. He remembered a Walt Disney movie he had seen as a kid, a nature thing. Filling the screen was this tulip, this one tulip, so beautiful it just made you want to hold your breath. Then the camera pulled back with dizzying suddenness and you saw a whole field filled with tulips. It knocked you fiat It produced total sensory overload and some internal circuit breaker fell with a sizzle, cutting off the input. It was too much. And that was how this trip had been. Shoyo was empty and he could adjust to that. But McNab was empty, too, and Texarkana, and Spencerville; Ardmore had burned right to the ground. He had come north on Highway 81 and had only seen two living people—and they had run away from him like deer. Twice he had seen sign: a campfire perhaps two days old, and a deer that had been shot and neatly cleaned out. But no people. It was enough to screw you all up, because the enormity of it was steadily creeping up on you. It wasn’t just Shoyo or McNab or Texarkana; it was
America,
lying here like a huge discarded tin can with a few forgotten peas rolling around in the bottom. And beyond America was the
whole world,
and thinking of that made Nick feel so dizzy and sick that he had to give up.

He bent over the atlas. If they kept rolling, maybe they would be like a snowball going downhill, getting bigger. With any luck they would pick up a few more people between here and Nebraska (or be picked up themselves, if they met a larger group). After Nebraska he supposed they would go somewhere else. It was like a quest with no object in view at the end of it—no grail, no sword plunged into an anvil.

We’ll cut northeast, he thought, up into Kansas. Highway 35 would take them to another version of 81, and 81 would take them all the way to Swedeholm, Nebraska, where it intersected Nebraska Route 92 at a perfect right angle. Another highway, Route 30, connected the two, the hypotenuse of a right triangle. And somewhere in that triangle was the country of his dream.

Thinking about it gave him a queer, anticipatory thrill.

Movement at the top of his vision made him look up. Tom was sitting, both fists screwed into his eyes. A cavernous yawn seemed to make the whole bottom half of his face disappear. Nick grinned at him and Tom grinned back.

“We gonna ride some more today?” Tom asked, and Nick nodded. “Gee, that’s good. I like to ride my bike. Laws, yes! I hope we never stop!”

Putting the atlas away Nick thought: And who knows? You may get your wish.

They turned east that morning and ate their lunch at a crossroads not far from the Oklahoma-Kansas border. It was July 7, and hot. They crossed into Kansas just before it got too dark to ride any further. Tom had turned sulky and tired after supper; he wanted to play with his garage. He wanted to watch TV. He didn’t want to ride anymore because his bum hurt from the seat. He had no conception of state lines and felt none of the lift Nick did when they passed the sign saying YOU ARE NOW ENTERING KANSAS. By then the dusk was so thick that the white letters seemed to float inches above the brown sign, like spirits.

They camped a quarter of a mile over the line, beneath a water tower standing on tall steel legs like an H. G. Wells Martian. Tom was asleep as soon as he crawled into his sleeping bag. Nick sat awhile, watching the stars come out. The land was utterly dark, and for him, utterly still. Shortly before crawling in himself, a crow fluttered down to a fence-post nearby and seemed to be watching him. Its small black eyes were rimmed with half-circles of blood—reflection from a bloated orange summer moon that had risen silently. There was something about the crow Nick didn’t like; it made him uneasy. He found a big dirt-clod and pegged it at the crow. It fluttered its wings, seemed to fix him with a baleful glare, and was gone into the night.

That night he dreamed of the man with no face standing on the high roof, his hands stretched out to the east, and then of the corn— corn higher than his head—and the sound of the music. Only this time he
knew
it was music and this time he
knew
it was a guitar. He awoke near dawn with a painfully full bladder and her words ringing in his ears:
Mother Abagail is what they call me
. . .
you come see me anytime.

They ran across Julie Lawry on July 10.

The day was another scorcher. They had pedaled most of the afternoon with their shirts tied around their waists, and both of them were getting as brown as Indians. They hadn’t been making very good time, not today, because of the apples. The green apples.

They had found them growing on an old apple tree in a farmyard, green and small and sour, but they had both been deprived of fresh fruit for a long time, and they tasted ambrosial. Nick made himself stop after two, but Tom ate six, greedily, one after the other, right down to the cores. He had ignored Nick’s motions that he should stop; when he got an idea in his head, Tom Cullen could be every bit as attractive as a wayward child of four.

So, beginning around eleven in the morning and continuing through the rest of the afternoon, Tom had the squats. Sweat ran off him in small creeks. He groaned. He had to get off his bike and walk it up even shallow hills. Despite his irritation at the poor time they were making, Nick couldn’t help a certain rueful amusement.

When they reached the town of Pratt around 4
p.m.,
Nick decided that was it for the day. Tom collapsed gratefully on a bus-stop bench that was in the shade and dozed off at once. Nick left him there and went along the deserted business section in search of a drugstore. He would get some Pepto-Bismol and force Tom to drink it when he woke up, whether Tom wanted to or not. If it took a whole bottle to cork Tom up, so be it. Nick wanted to make up some time tomorrow.

He found a Rexall between the Pratt Theater and the local Norge

He slipped in through the open door and stood for a moment smelling the familiar hot, unaired, stale smell. There were other odors mixed in, strong and cloying. Perfume was the strongest. Perhaps some of the bottles had burst in the heat.

Nick glanced around, looking for the stomach medicines, trying to remember if Pepto-Bismol went over in the heat. Well, the label would say. His eyes slipped past a mannequin and two rows to the right he saw what he wanted. He had taken two steps that way when he realized the mannequin wasn’t a mannequin.

She was standing perfectly still, a bottle of perfume in one hand, the small glass wand you used to daub the stuff on in the other. Her china blue eyes were wide in stunned, disbelieving surprise. Her brown hair was drawn back and tied with a brilliant silk scarf that hung halfway down her back. She was wearing a pink middy sweater and blue jeans shorts that were almost abbreviated enough to be mistaken for panties. There was a rash of pimples on her forehead.

She and Nick stared at each other across half the length of the deserted drugstore, both frozen now. Then the bottle of perfume dropped from her fingers, shattered like a bomb, and drowned out the scent of the others at once.

“Jesus, are you real?” she asked in a trembling voice.

Nick nodded.

“You ain’t a ghost?”

He shook his head.

“Then say somethin. If you ain’t a ghost, say somethin.”

Nick put a hand across his mouth, then on his throat. He shook his head. She took two steps toward him, gaping.

“You can’t
talk?
You’re a
mute?”

Nick nodded.

She gave a high laugh that was mostly frustration. “You mean somebody finally showed up and it’s a
mute
guy?”

Nick shrugged and gave a slanting smile.

“Well,” she said, coming down the aisle to him, “you ain’t bad-looking. That’s something.” She put a hand on his arm, and the swell of her breasts almost touched his arm. He could smell at least three different kinds of perfume, and under all of them the unlovely aroma of her sweat.

“My name’s Julie,” she said. “Julie Lawry. What’s yours?” She giggled a little. “You can’t tell me, can you? Poor
you.”
She leaned a little closer, and her breasts brushed him. He began to feel very warm. What the hell, he thought uneasily, she’s only a kid.

He broke away from her, took the pad from his pocket, and began to write. A line or so into his message she leaned over his shoulder to see what he was writing. No bra. Jesus. His writing became a little uneven.

“I’m Nick Andros. I’m a deafmute. I’m traveling with a man named Tom Cullen, who is lightly retarded. He can’t read or understand many of the things I can act out unless they’re very simple. We’re on our way to Nebraska because I think there might be people there. Come with us, if you want.”

“Sure,” she said immediately, and then, remembering that he was deaf and shaping her words very carefully, she asked, “Can you read lips?”

Nick nodded.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m so glad to see someone, who cares if it’s a deafmute and a retard. Spooky here. I can hardly sleep nights since the power went off. My mom and dad died two weeks ago, you know. Everybody died but me. I’ve been so lonely.” With a sob she threw herself into Nick’s arms and began to undulate against him in an obscene parody of grief.

When she drew back from him, her eyes were dry and shiny.

“Hey, let’s make it,” she said. “You’re sort of cute.”

Nick gawped at her. I can’t believe this, he thought.

But it was real enough. She was tugging at his belt. “Come on. I’m on the pill. It’s safe.” She paused for a moment. “You can, can’t you? I mean, just because you can’t talk, that doesn’t mean you can’t—”

He put his hands out, perhaps meaning to take her by the shoulders, but he found her breasts instead. That was the end of any resistance he might have had. Coherent thought left his mind as well. He lowered her to the floor and had her.

After, he went to the door and looked out as he buckled his belt again, checking on Tom. He was still on the park bench, dead to the world. Julie joined him, fiddling with a fresh bottle of perfume.

“That the retard?” she asked.

Nick nodded, not liking the word. It seemed like a cruel word.

She began to talk about herself, and Nick discovered to his relief that she was seventeen, not much younger than he was. She talked a lot, and he found it next to impossible to separate the truth from the lies ... or the wish-fulfillment, if you preferred. She might have been waiting for someone like him, who could never interrupt the endless flow of her monologue, all her life. In the space of an hour, incredibly, he found himself wishing he hadn’t found her in the first place, or that she would change her mind about coming with them.

When the flow of words had begun to dry up a little—at least for the time being—she wanted to “do it” (as she so coyly put it) again. Nick shook his head and she pouted briefly. “Maybe I don’t want to go with you after all,” she said.

Nick shrugged.

“Dummy-dummy-dummy,” she said with sudden sharp viciousness. Her eyes shone with spite. Then she smiled. “I didn’t mean that. I was just kidding.”

Nick wondered.

“Uh-uh,” Tom said, shaking his head and backing away. “Uh-uh, I ain’t gonna. Tom Cullen doesn’t like medicine, laws no, tastes bad.”

Nick looked at him with frustration and disgust, holding the three-sided bottle of Pepto-Bismol in one hand. He looked to Julie and she caught his gaze, but in it he saw that same teasing light as when she had called him dummy—it was not a twinkle but a hard and mirthless shine. It is the look that a person with no essential sense of humor gets in his or her eye when he or she is getting ready to tease.

“That’s right, Tom,” she said. “Don’t drink it, it’s poison.”

Nick gaped at her. She grinned back, hands on hips, challenging him to convince Tom otherwise. This was her petty revenge, perhaps, for having her second offer of sex turned down.