The Stand (Original Edition) (77 page)

“It’s hard,” Nadine said, her voice still low. “She made it hard because she’s right. I want you now. And I’m afraid I’m too late. I want to stay here.”

“Nadine—”

"No!”
she said fiercely. “Let me finish. /
want to stay here,
can’t you understand that? And if we’re with each other, I’ll be able to. You’re my last chance,” she said, her voice breaking. “Joe’s gone now.”

“No, he hasn’t,” Larry said, feeling slow and stupid and bewildered. “We dropped him off at your place on the way home. Isn’t he there?”

“No. There’s a boy named Leo Rockway asleep in his bed.”

“What are you—”

“Listen,” she said. “Listen to me, can’t you
listen?
As long as I had Joe, I was all right. I could ... be as strong as I had to be. But he doesn’t need me anymore. And I need to be needed.”

“He does need you!”

“Of course he does,” Nadine said, and Larry felt afraid again. She wasn’t talking about Leo anymore; he didn’t know
who
she was talking about. “He needs me. That’s what I’m afraid of. That’s why I came to you.” She stepped in front of him and looked up, her chin tilted. He could smell her secret clean scent, and he wanted her. But part of him turned back toward Lucy. That was the part of him he needed if he was going to make it here in Boulder. If he let it go and went with Nadine, they might as well slink out of Boulder tonight. It would be finished with him. The old Larry triumphant.

“I have to go home,” he said. “I’m sorry. You’ll have to work it out on your own, Nadine.”
Work it out on your own,
weren’t they the words he had been using to people in one form or another all his life? Why did they have to rise up this way when he knew he was right and still catch him, and twist in him, and make him doubt himself?

“Make love to me,” she said, and put her arms around his neck. She pressed her body against his and he knew by its looseness, its warmth and springiness, that he had been right, she was wearing the dress and that was all. Buckytail naked underneath, he thought, and thinking it excited him blackly.

“That’s all right, I can feel you,” she said, and began to wriggle against him—sideways, up and down, creating a delicious friction. “Make love to me and that will be the end of it. I’ll be safe. Safe. I’ll be safe.”

He reached up, and later he never knew how he was able to do that when he could have been inside her warmth in only three quick movements and one thrust, the way she wanted it, but somehow he reached up and unlocked her hands and pushed her away with such force that she stumbled and almost fell. A low moan came from her.

“Larry, if you knew—”

“Well, I don’t. Why don’t you try telling me instead of . . .of raping me?”

“Rape!” she repeated, and laughed shrilly. “Oh, that’s funny! Oh, what you said! Me! Rape
you!
Oh, Larry!”

“Whatever you want from me, you could have had. You could have had it last week, or the week before. The week before that I asked you to take it. I wanted you to have it.”

“That was too soon,” she whispered.

“And now it’s too late,” he said, hating the brutal sound of his voice but unable to control it. He was still shaking all over from wanting her, how was he supposed to sound? “What are you gonna do, huh?”

“All right. Goodbye, Larry.”

She was turning away. In that instant she was more than Nadine, turning her back on him forever. She was the oral hygienist. She was Yvonne, with whom he had shared an apartment in L.A.—she had pissed him off and so he had just slipped into his boogie shoes, leaving her holding the lease. She was Rita Blakemoor.

Worst of all, she was his mother.

“Nadine?”

She didn’t turn around. She was a black shape distinguishable from other black shapes only when she crossed the street. Then she disappeared altogether against the black background of the mountains. He called her name once again and she didn’t answer. There was something terrifying in the way she had left him, the way she had just melted into that black backdrop.

He stood in front of King Sooper’s, hands clenched, brow covered with pearls of sweat in spite of the evening cool. His ghosts were with him now, and at last he knew how you pay off for not being no nice guy: never clear about your own motivations, never able to weigh hurt against help except by rule of thumb, never able to get rid of the sour taste of doubt in your mouth and—

His head jerked up. His eyes widened until they seemed to bulge from his face. The wind had picked up again, it made a strange hooting sound in some empty doorway, and further away he thought he could hear bootheels pacing off the night, rundown bootheels somewhere in the foothills coming to him on the chilly draft of this early morning breeze.

Lucy heard him let himself in and her heart leaped up fiercely. She told it to stop, that he was probably only coming back for his things, but it would not stop.
He picked me,
was the thought that hammered into her brain, driven there by her heart’s triphammer beat.
He picked me
—

In spite of her excitement and hope, she lay stiffly on her back in the bed, waiting and watching nothing but the ceiling. The door clicked open and she saw him in it, just a silhouette.

“Lucy? You awake?”

“Yes.”

“Can I put on the lamp?”

“If you want.”

She heard the minute hiss of gas and then the light came on, turned down to a thread of flame, revealing him. He looked pale and shaken.

“I have to say something.”

“No you don’t. Just come to bed.”

“I have to say it. I. . .” He pressed his hand against his forehead and ran it through his hair.

“Larry?” She sat up. “Are you all right?”

He spoke as if he hadn’t heard her, and he spoke without looking at her. “I love you. If you want me, you got me. But I don’t know if you’re getting much. I’m never going to be your best bet, Lucy.”

“I’ll take the chance. Come to bed.”

He did. And when the love was over she told him she loved him, it was true, God knew that, but she didn’t think that he slept for a long time. Once in the night she came awake (or dreamed she did) and it seemed to her that Larry was at the window, looking out, his head cocked in a listening posture, the lines of light and shadow giving his face the appearance of a haggard mask. But in the light of day she was more sure that it must have been a dream; in the light of day he seemed to be his old self again.

It was only three days later that they heard from Ralph Brentner that Nadine had moved in with Harold Lauder. At that his face seemed to tighten, but it was only for a moment. And although she disliked herself for it, Ralph’s news made her breathe a little easier. It seemed it must be over.

She went home only briefly after seeing Larry. She let herself in, went to the living room, and lit the lamp. Carrying it high, she went to the back of the house, pausing for just a moment to let the light spill into the boy’s room. Leo lay all sprawling in a tangle of bedclothes, dressed only in his undershorts . . . but the cuts and scratches had faded, disappeared altogether in most cases, and the all-over tan he had gotten from going practically naked had also faded. He was not Joe anymore. This was just a boy sleeping after a busy day.

She thought of the night she had been almost asleep and had come awake to find him gone from her side. That had been in North Berwick, Maine—most of the continent away now. She had followed him and had made him come back. He had been Joe then, and full of mute savagery. Hate pounced on Nadine in a surging flash, striking up brilliant sparks as if from flint and steel. The Coleman lamp trembled in her hand, making wild shadows leap and dance. She should have let him do it! She should have held the door for Joe herself, let him in so he could stab and rip and cut and puncture and gut and destroy. She should have—

But now the boy turned over and moaned in his throat, as if waking. His hands came up and batted the air, as if warding off a black shape in a dream. And Nadine withdrew, a pulse beating thickly at her temples. There was still something strange in the boy, and she didn’t like the way he had moved just now, as if he had picked up her thoughts.

She had to go ahead now. She had to be quick.

She went into her own room, which was small and totally devoid of character. There was a single narrow old maid’s bed. She opened the closet door and reached behind her hanging clothes. She was on her knees now, sweating. She drew out a brightly colored box with a photograph of laughing adults on the front, adults who were playing a party-game. A party-game that was at least three thousand years old.

She had found the planchette in a downtown novelty shop, but she dared not use it in the house, not with the boy here. In fact, she had not dared use it at all . . . until now. Something had impelled her into the shop, and when she had seen the planchette in its gay party box, a terrible struggle had gone on inside her—the sort of struggle psychologists call aversion/compulsion. She had wanted to hurry out of that shop without looking back, but she had also wanted to snatch the box, that dreadful gay box, and carry it home with her. But she shouldn’t. After what had happened that time in college, she . . . she shouldn’t.

But at last, she had taken the box.

That had been four days ago. Each night the compulsion had grown stronger until tonight, half insane with fears she didn’t understand, she had gone to Larry wearing the blue-gray dress with nothing on underneath. She had gone to put an end to the fears for good. Waiting on the porch for them to get back from the meeting, she had been sure she had finally done the right thing. There had been that feeling in her, that lightly drunk, starstruck feeling, that she’d not properly had since she had run across the dewdrenched grass with the boy behind her. Only this time the boy would catch her. She would let him catch her. It would be the end.

But when he had caught her, he hadn’t wanted her.

Nadine stood up, holding the box to her chest, and put out the lamp. He had scorned her, and didn’t they say that hell hath no fury —? A scorned woman might well traffic with the devil ... or his henchman.

She paused only long enough to get the large flashlight from the table in the front hall. From deeper inside the house, the boy cried out in his sleep, freezing her for a moment, making the hair prickle on her scalp.

Then she let herself out.

Her Vespa was at the curb, the Vespa she had used some days ago to motor up to Harold Lauder’s house. Why had she gone there? She hadn’t passed a dozen words with Harold since she’d gotten to Boulder. But in her confusion about the planchette, and in her terror of the dreams that continued to come to her even after everyone else’s had stopped, it had seemed to her that she must talk about it to Harold. She had been afraid of that impulse, too ... it seemed to be an idea that had come to her from outside herself.
His
thought, maybe. But when she had given in and gone to Harold’s, he hadn’t been at home. The house was locked, the only locked house she had come upon in Boulder, and the shades were drawn. She had rather liked that, and she’d had a moment’s bitter disappointment that Harold was not there. If he had been, he could have let her in and then locked the door behind her. They could have gone into the living room and talked, or made love, or have done unspeakable things together, and no one would have known.

Harold’s was a private place.

“What’s happening to me?” she whispered to the dark, but the dark had no answer for her. She started the Vespa, and the steady burping pop of its engine seemed to profane the night. She put it in gear and drove away. To the west.

Moving, the cool night air on her face, she felt better at last. Blow away the cobwebs, night wind. You know, don’t you? When all the choices but one have been taken away, what do you do? You choose what’s left. You choose whatever dark adventure was meant for you. You let Larry have his stupid little twist of tail with her tight pants and her single-syllable vocabulary and her movie-magazine mind. You go beyond them. You risk . . . whatever there is to be risked.

The road unrolled before her in the baby spotlight of the Vespa’s headlamp. She had to switch to second gear as the road began to climb; she was on Baseline Road now, headed up the black mountain. Let them have their meetings. They were concerned with getting the power back on; her lover was concerned with the
world.

The Vespa’s engine lugged and strained and somehow carried on. A horrible yet sexy kind of fear began to grip her, and the vibrating saddle of the motorbike began to heat her up down there
(why, you're horny, Nadine,
she thought with shrill good humor,
naughty, naughty, NAUGHTY
). To her right was a straight dropoff. Nothing but death down there. And up above? Well, she would see. It was too late to turn back, and that thought alone made her feel paradoxically and deliciously free.

An hour later she was in Sunrise Amphitheater—but sunrise was still three or more hours away. The amphitheater was close to the summit of Flagstaff Mountain, and nearly everyone in the Free Zone had made the trip to the camping area at the top before they had been in Boulder very long. On a clear day—which was most days in Boulder, at least during the summer season—you could see Boulder, and 1-25 stretching away south to Denver and then off into the haze toward New Mexico two hundred miles beyond. Due east were the flatlands, stretching away toward Nebraska, and closer at hand was Boulder Canyon, a knife-gash through foothills that were walled in pine and spruce. In summers gone by, gliders had plied the thermals over Sunrise Amphitheater like birds.

Now Nadine saw only what was revealed in the glow of the six-cell flashlight which she put on a picnic table near the dropoff. There was a large artist’s sketchpad turned back to a clean sheet, and squatting on it the three-cornered planchette like a triangular spider. Protruding from its belly, like the spider’s stinger, was a pencil, lightly touching the pad.

Nadine was in a feverish state that was half-euphoria, half-terror. Coming up here on the back of her gamely laboring Vespa, which had most decidedly not been made for mountain climbing, she had felt what Harold had felt in Nederland. She could feel
him.
But while Harold had felt it as a sort of magnetism, a
drawing toward,
Nadine felt it as a kind of mystic event, a border-crossing. It was as if these mountains, of which she was even now only in the foothills, were a no-man’s land between two spheres of influence—Flagg in the west, the old woman in the east. And here the magic flew both ways, mixing, making its own concoction that belonged neither to God nor to Satan but which was totally pagan. She felt she was in a haunted place.