The Stand (Original Edition) (80 page)

Harold climbed into the back of one of the trucks, his mind churning helplessly. All of a sudden the old grudges, the old hurts, and the unpaid debts seemed as worthless as the paper money choking all the cash registers of America.

Could that be true? Could it possibly be true? He felt panicked, alone, scared. No, he decided at last. It couldn’t possibly be true. Because, consider: If you were strong-willed enough to be able to resist the low opinions of others, when they thought you were a queer, or an embarrassment, or just a plain old bag of shit, then you had to be strong-willed enough to resist. . .

Resist what?

Their
good
opinion of you? That was . . . well, lunacy, wasn’t it?

An old quote surfaced in his troubled mind, some general’s defense of interning Japanese-Americans during World War II. It had been pointed out to this general that no acts of sabotage had occurred on the West Coast, where the naturalized Japanese were most heavily concentrated. The general’s reply had been: “The very fact that no sabotage has taken place is an ominous development.”

Their truck pulled into the bus station parking lot. Harold jumped over the side, reflecting that even his co-ordination had improved a thousand per cent, either from the weight he had lost, his almost constant exercise, or both.

The thought came to him again, stubborn, refusing to be buried: /
could be an asset to this community.

But they had shut him out.

That doesn’t matter. I’ve got the brains to pick the lock on the door they slammed in my face. And I believe I’ve found enough guts to open it once it's unlocked.

But—

Stop it! Stop it! You might as well be wearing handcuffs and legchains with that one word stamped all over them. But, but, but!

“Hey, man, you okay?”

Harold jumped. It was Norris, coming out of the dispatcher’s office, which he had taken over. He looked tired.

“Me? I’m fine. I was just thinking.”

“Well, you go right along. Seems like every time you do that you coin money for this joint.”

Harold shook his head. “Not true.”

“No?” Chad let it go. “Can I drop you somewhere?”

“Huh-uh. I’ve got my chopper.”

“You wanna know something, Hawk? I think most of these guys are really going to come back tomorrow.”

“Yes, so do I.” Harold walked over to his motorcycle and climbed on, savoring his new nickname, rather against his will.

Norris shook his head. “I never would have believed it. I’ll see you tomorrow, man.”

“Eight,” Harold confirmed, and drove out Arapahoe to Broadway. To his right a crew comprised mostly of women was at work with a wrecker and a derrick righting a tractor-trailer truck that had jack-knifed, partially blocking the street. They had drawn a respectable little crowd. This place is building up, Harold thought. I don’t recognize half of those people. He went on out toward his house, his mind worrying and gnawing at the problem he thought he had solved long ago. When he got home, there was a small white Vespa parked at the curb. And a woman sitting on his front step.

She stood up as Harold came up the walk, and put her hand out. She was one of the most striking women Harold had ever seen—he had seen her before, of course, but rarely this close up.

“I’m Nadine Cross,” she said. Her voice was low, close to being husky. Her grip was firm and cool. Harold’s eyes dropped involuntarily to her body for a moment, a habit he knew girls hated, but one he seemed powerless to stop. This one did not seem to mind. She was wearing a pair of light cotton twill slacks that clung to her long legs and a sleeveless blouse of some light blue silky material. No bra, he guessed. How old was she? Thirty? Thirty-five? Younger, maybe. She was going prematurely gray.

All over?
the endlessly homy (and endlessly virginal, seemingly) part of his mind inquired, and his heart beat a little faster.

“Harold Lauder,” he said, smiling. “You came in with Larry Underwood’s party, didn’t you?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Larry came to see me last week, brought me a bottle of wine and some candybars.” His words had a tinkling, false sound to them, and he was suddenly sure that she knew he had been cataloguing her, undressing her in his mind. He fought an urge to lick his lips and won ... at least temporarily. “He’s a helluva nice guy.”

“Larry?” She laughed a little, a strange and somehow cryptic sound. “Yes, he’s very nice. Larry’s a prince.”

They gazed at each other for a moment, and Harold had never been looked at by a woman whose eyes were so frank and speculative. He was again aware of his excitement, and a warm nervousness in his belly.

“Well,” he said. “What can I do for you this afternoon, Miss Cross?”

“You could call me Nadine, for a start. And you could invite me to stay for supper. That would get us a little further along.”

That sense of nervous excitement began to spread. “Nadine, would you like to stay for supper?”

“Very much,” she said, and smiled. When she laid her hand on his forearm, he felt a tingle like a low-grade electric shock. Her eyes never left his. “Thank you.”

He fumbled his latchkey into its slot, thinking:
Now she’ll ask me why I lock my door and I’ll mumble and stumble around, looking for an answer, and seem like a fool.

But Nadine never asked.

He didn’t cook dinner; she did.

Harold had gotten to the point where he considered it impossible to get even a half-decent meal out of cans, but Nadine managed nicely. Suddenly aware of and appalled by what he had spent his day doing, he asked if she could entertain herself for twenty minutes (and she was probably here on some very mundane piece of business, he cautioned himself desperately) while he cleaned up.

When he came back—having splurged and taken a two-bucket shower—she was bustling around in the kitchen. Water was boiling merrily away on the bottled gas stove. As he came into the kitchen, she dumped half a cup of elbow macaroni into the pot. Something mellow was being simmered in a skillet on the other burner; he got a combined aroma of French onion soup, red wine, and mushrooms. His stomach rumbled. The day’s work just past all of a sudden had lost its power over his appetite.

“It smells fantastic,” he said. “You shouldn’t have, but I’m not complaining.”

“It’s a stroganoff casserole,” she said, turning to smile at him. “Tinned beef, I’m afraid, not one of the recommended ingredients, but—” She shrugged to indicate the limitations they all labored under.

“It’s nice of you to do it.”

“Not at all.” She gave him that speculative glance again, and turned halfway toward him, the silky material of her blouse pulled taut against her left breast, molding it sweetly. He felt a hot flush creeping up his neck and willed himself not to have an erection. “We’re going to be very good friends,” she said.

“We . . . are?”

“Yes.” She turned back to the stove, seeming to close the subject, leaving Harold in a thicket of possibilities.

Once, halfway through the meal, he tried again to ask her what had brought her here, but she only smiled and shook her head. “I like to see a man eat.”

For a moment Harold thought she must be talking about someone else and then realized she meant
him.
And he did eat; he had three helpings of the stroganoff, and the tinned meat did not detract from the recipe at all, in Harold’s opinion. The conversation seemed to make itself, leaving him free to quiet the lion in his belly, and to look at her.

Striking, had he thought? She was beautiful. Her hair, which she had pulled back into a casual horsetail in order to cook more easily, was twisted with strands of pure white, not gray as he had first thought. Her eyes were grave and dark, and when they focused unhesitatingly on his, Harold felt giddy. Her voice was low and confidential. The sound of it began to affect him in a way that was both uncomfortable and almost excruciatingly pleasant.

When the meal was done, he started to get up but she beat him to it. “Coffee or tea?”

“Really, I could—”

“You could, but you won’t. Coffee, tea . . . or me?” She smiled then, not the smile of someone who has offered a remark of minor risqueness (“risky talk,” as his dear old mum would have said, her mouth set in a disapproving line), but a slow little smile, rich as the dollop of cream on top of a gooey dessert. And again the speculative look.

His brain spinning, Harold replied with insane casualness: “The latter two,” and was only able to contain a burst of adolescent giggles with a mighty effort.

“Well, we’ll start with tea for two,” Nadine said, and went to the stove.

She looked at him over the rim of her teacup with those disconcertingly frank eyes and smiled again, and his equanimity vanished.

“Can I help you with something?” he asked. It sounded like some lumbering double-entendre, but he
had
to say something, because she must have come here for something. He felt his own protective smile faltering on his lips in his confusion.

“Yes,” she said, and put her teacup down decisively. “Yes, you can. Maybe we can help each other. Could you come into the living room?”

“Sure.” His hand was shaking; when he set his cup down and rose, some of it spilled. As he followed her into the living room, he noticed how smoothly her slacks (which aren’t very slack at all, his mind gibbered) clung to her buttocks. It was the panty line that broke up the smooth look of most womens’ slacks, he had read that somewhere, maybe in one of the magazines he had kept in the back of his bedroom closet behind the shoeboxes, and the magazine had gone on to say that if a woman really wanted that smooth and seamless look
_;
she should wear a g-string or no panties at all.

He swallowed; tried to, at least. There seemed to be a huge blockage of some kind in his throat.

The living room was dim, lit only by the glow that filtered through the drawn shades. Outside, the evening was drawing toward dusk. Harold went to one of the windows to run the shade up and let more light in, when she put her hand on his arm. He turned toward her, his mouth dry.

“No. I like them down. It gives us privacy.”

“Privacy,” Harold croaked, like a trained raven learning a new word.

“So I can do this,” she said, and stepped lightly into his arms.

Her body was pressed frankly and completely against him, the first time in his life anything of the sort had happened, and his amazement was total. He could feel the soft and individual press of each breast through his white cotton shirt and her silky blue one. Her belly, firm but vulnerable, against his, not shying away from the feel of his erection. There was a sweet smell to her, perfume maybe, or maybe just
her own smell,
that seemed like a told secret that bursts, revelative, on the listener. His hands found her hair and plunged into it.

At last the kiss broke but she didn’t move away. Her body remained against his like soft fire. She was perhaps three inches shorter, and her face was turned up to his. It occurred to him in a dim sort of way that it was one of the most amusing ironies of his life: When love—or a reasonable facsimile—had finally found him, it was as if he had slipped sideways into the pages of a love story in a glossy women’s magazine. The authors of such stories, he had once claimed in an unacknowledged letter to
Redbook,
were one of the few convincing arguments in favor of enforced eugenics.

But now her face was turned up to his, her lips were moist and half-parted, her eyes were bright and almost . . . almost . . . yes, almost starry. The only detail not strictly compatible with a
Red-book’s-Eye
view of life was his hardon, which was truly amazing.

“On the couch,” she said.

Somehow they got there, and then they were tangled up there, and her hair had come loose and flowed over her shoulders; her perfume seemed everywhere. His hands were on her breasts and she was
not minding;
in fact she was twisting and squirming around to allow his hands freer access, and he plundered her.

“You’re a virgin,” Nadine said. No question there . . . and it was easier not to have to lie. He nodded.

“Then we do this first. Next time it will be slower. Better.” She unbuttoned his jeans and they snapped open to the zipper-tab of his fly. She traced a light forefinger across his belly just below the navel. Harold’s flesh jumped at her touch.

“Nadine
—”

“Shhh!” Her face was hidden by the fall of her hair, making it impossible to read her expression. “My blouse—”

“Can I—?”

“Yes, that’s what I want. And then I’ll take care of you . . .” She drew in breath. “Harold, that’s lovely.”

Take care of you,
the words echoed down and down. Her hands slipped inside the waistband of his underpants and his jeans slid down to his ankles in a meaningless jingle of keys.

“Raise up,” she whispered, and he did.

It took less than a minute. He cried aloud with the strength of his climax, unable to help himself. He could understand why so many of the writers made that connection between orgasm and death.

Then he lay back in the dimness, his head against the sofa, his chest heaving, his mouth open. He looked at her shamefacedly, embarrassed at the hair-trigger way he had gone off. But she was only smiling at him with those calm, dark eyes that seemed to know everything, the eyes of a very young girl in a Victorian painting. A girl who knows too much, perhaps, about her father.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered.

“Why? For what?” Her eyes never left his face.

“You didn’t get much out of that.”

“Au contraire,
I got a great deal of satisfaction.” She paused. “You’re young. We can go as many times as you want to.”

He looked at her without speaking, unable to speak.

“But you must know one thing.” She put a hand lightly on him. “What you told me about being a virgin? Well, I am, too.”

“You—?” His expression of astonishment must have been comical, because she threw back her head and laughed.

“Is there no room for virginity in your philosophy, Horatio?”