The Stand (Original Edition) (112 page)

By 2
p.m.
on the afternoon of September 21, they were past Sego. The next large town, according to Stu’s pocket map, was Green River. There were no more towns after that for a long, long time.

“Actually,” Larry said to Glen, “I’m not as worried about food as I am water. Most everyone who’s on a trip keeps a few munchies in their car, Oreos or Fig Newtons or something like that.”

Glen smiled. “Maybe the Lord will send us showers of blessing.” Larry looked up at the cloudless blue sky and grimaced at the idea. “I sometimes think she was right off her block at the end of it.” “Maybe she was,” Glen said mildly. “If you read your theology, you’ll find that God often chooses to speak through the dying and the insane. It even seems to me—here’s the closet Jesuit coming out —that there are good psychological reasons for it. A madman or a person on her deathbed is a human being with a drastically changed psyche. A healthy person might be apt to filter the divine message, to alter it with his or her own personality. In other words, a healthy person might make a shitty prophet.”

“The ways of God,” Larry said. “I know. We see through a glass darkly. It’s a pretty dark glass to me, all right. Why we’re walking all this way when we could have driven it in a week—”

“I see some perfectly sound psychological and sociological reasons for this walk,” Glen said. “I don’t know if they’re God’s reasons or not, but they make good sense to me.”

“Such as what?” Stu and Ralph had walked over to hear this, too. “There were several American Indian tribes that used to make ‘having a vision’ an integral part of their manhood rite. When it was your time to become a man, you were supposed to go out into the wilderness unarmed. You were supposed to make a kill, and two songs—one about the Great Spirit and one about your own prowess as a hunter and a rider and a warrior and a fucker—and have that vision. You weren’t supposed to eat. You were supposed to get up high and wait for that vision to come. And eventually, of course, it would.” He chuckled. “Starvation is a great hallucinogenic.”

“You think Mother sent us out here to have visions?” Ralph asked.

“Maybe to gain strength and holiness by a purging process,” Glen said. “The casting away of
things
is symbolic, you know. Talismanic. When you cast away
things,
you’re also casting away the self-related others that are symbolically related to those things. You start a cleaning-out process. You begin to empty the vessel.”

Larry shook his head slowly. “I don’t follow that.”

“Well, take an intelligent pre-plague man. Break his TV, and what does he do at night?”

“Reads a book,” Ralph said.

“Goes to see his friends,” Stu said.

“Plays the stereo,” Larry said, grinning.

“Sure, all those things,” Glen said. “But he’s also missing that TV. There’s a hole in his life where that TV used to be. In the back of his mind he’s still thinking
At nine o’clock I’m going to pull a few beers and watch the Sox on the tube.
And when he goes in there and sees that empty cabinet, he feels as disappointed as hell. A part of his accustomed life has been poured out, is it not so?”

“Yeah,” Ralph said. “Our TV went on the fritz once for two weeks and I didn’t feel right until it was back.”

“It makes a bigger hole in his life if he watched a lot of TV, a smaller hole if he only used it a little bit. But something is gone. Now take away all his books, all his friends, and his stereo. Also remove all sustenance except what he can glean along the way. It’s an emptying-out process and also a diminishing of the ego. Your
selves,
gentlemen—they are turning into window-glass. Or better yet, empty tumblers.”

“But what’s the point?” Ralph asked. “Why go through all the rigamarole?”

Glen said, “If you read your Bible, you’ll see that it was pretty traditional for these prophets to go out into the wilderness from time to time—Old Testament Magical Mystery Tours. The timespan given for these jaunts was usually forty days and forty nights, a Hebraic idiom that really means ‘no one knows exactly how long he was gone, but it was quite a while.’ Does that remind you of anyone?” “Sure. Mother,” Ralph said.

“Now think of yourself as a battery. You really are, you know.

Your brain runs on chemically converted electrical current. For that matter, your muscles run on tiny charges, too—a chemical called acetylcholine allows the charge to pass when you need to move, and when you want to stop, another chemical, cholinesterase, is manufactured. Cholinesterase destroys acetylcholine, so your nerves become poor conductors again. Good thing, too. Otherwise, once you started scratching your nose, you’d never be able to stop. Okay, the point is this: Everything you think, everything you do, it all has to run off the battery. Like the accessories in a car.”

They were all still listening closely.

“Watching TV, reading books, talking with friends, eating a big dinner ... all of it runs off the battery. A normal life—at least in what used to be Western civilization—was like running a car with power windows, power brakes, power seats, all the goodies. But the more goodies you have, the less the battery can charge. True?” “Yeah,” Ralph said. “Even a big Delco won’t ever overcharge when it’s sitting in a Cadillac.”

“Well, what we’ve done is to strip off the accessories. We’re on charge.”

Ralph said uneasily: “If you put a car battery on charge for too long, she’ll explode.”

“Yes,” Glen agreed. “Same with people. You can clean yourself out so much there’s nothing left. The Bible tells us about Isaiah and Job and the others, but it doesn’t say how many prophets came back from the wilderness with visions that had crisped their brains. I imagine there were some. But I have a healthy respect for human intelligence and the human psyche, in spite of an occasional throwback like East Texas here—”

“Off my case, baldy,” Stu growled.

“Anyhow, the capacity of the human mind is a lot bigger than the biggest Delco battery. I think it can take a charge almost to infinity. In certain cases, perhaps beyond infinity.”

They walked in silence for a while, thinking this over.

“Are we changing?” Stu asked quietly.

“Yes,” Glen answered. “Yes, I think we are.”

“We’ve dropped some weight,” Ralph said. “I know that just looking at you guys. And me, I used to have a helluva beergut. Now 1 can look down and see my toes again.”

“It’s a state of mind,” Larry said suddenly. When they looked at him he seemed a trifle embarrassed but went on: “I’ve had this feeling for the last week or so, and I couldn’t understand it. Maybe now

I can. I’ve been feeling high. Like I’d done half a joint of really dynamite grass or snorted just a touch of coke. But there’s none of the disorienting feeling that goes with dope. You do some dope and you feel like normal thinking is just a little bit out of your grasp. I feel like I’m thinking just fine, better than ever, in fact. But I still feel high.” Larry laughed. “Maybe it’s just hunger.”

“Hunger’s part of it,” Glen agreed, “but not all of it.”

“Me, I’m hungry all the time,” Ralph said, “but it doesn’t seem too important. I feel good.”

“I do too,” Stu said. “Physically, I haven’t felt this good in years.” “When you empty out the vessel, you also empty out all the crap floating around in there,” Glen said. “The additives. The impurities. Sure it feels good. It’s a whole-body, whole-mind enema.”

“You got such a fancy way of puttin things, baldy.”

“It may be inelegant, but it’s accurate.”

Ralph asked, “Will it help us with
him?”

“Well,” Glen said, “that’s what it’s for. I don’t have much doubt about that. But we’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?”

They came to the washout a little past noon on the twenty-third. The sky had been overcast all day, and it was cold—cold enough to snow, almost, Stu thought.

The four of them stood on the edge, Kojak at Glen’s heel, looking down and across. Somewhere north of here a dam might have given way, or there might have been a succession of hard summer rainstorms. Whatever, there had been a flash flood along the San Rafael, which was only a dry wash in some years. It had swept away a great thirty-foot slab of 1-70. The gully was about fifty feet deep, the banks crumbly, rubbly soil and sedimentary rock. At the bottom was a sullen trickle of water.

“Holy crow,” Ralph said. “Somebody oughtta call the Utah State Highway Department about this.”

Larry pointed. “Look over there,” he said. They looked out into the monolith-strewn wilderness, and about one hundred yards down the course of the San Rafael they saw a tangle of guardrails and cable, and large slabs of asphalt-composition paving. One chunk stuck up toward the cloudy, racing sky like an apocalyptic finger, complete with white broken passing line.

Glen was looking down into the rubble-strewn cut, hands stuffed into his pockets, an absent, dreaming look on his face. In a low voice, Stu said: “Can you make it, Glen?”

“Sure, I think so.”

“How’s that arthritis?”

“It’s been worse.” He cracked a smile. “But in all honesty, it’s been better, too.”

They had no rope with which to anchor each other. Stu went down first, moving carefully. He didn’t like the way the ground sometimes shifted under his feet, starting little slides of rock and dirt. Once he thought his footing was going to go out from under him completely, sending him sliding all the way to the bottom on his can. One groping hand caught a solid rock outcropping and he hung on for dear life, finding more solid ground for his feet. Then Kojak was bounding blithely past him, kicking up little puffs of dirt and sending down only small runnels of earth. A moment later he was standing on the bottom, wagging his tail and barking amiably up at Stu.

“Fucking showoff dog,” Stu growled, and carefully made his way to the bottom.

“I’m coming next,” Glen called. “I heard what you said about my dog!”

“Be careful, baldy! Be damn careful! It’s really loose underfoot.”

Glen came down slowly, moving with great deliberation from one hold to the next. Stu tensed every time he saw loose dirt start to slide out from underneath Glen’s battered Georgia Giants. His hair blew like fine silver around his ears in the light breeze that had sprung up. It occurred to him that when he had first met Glen, painting a mediocre picture beside the road in New Hampshire, Glen’s hair had still been mostly dark.

Until the moment Glen finally planted his feet on the level ground of the mudflat at the bottom of the gully, Stu was sure he was going to fall and break himself in two. Stu sighed with relief and clapped him on the shoulder.

“No sweat, East Texas,” Glen said, and bent to ruffle Kojak’s fur.

“Plenty here,” Stu told him.

Ralph came next, jumping the last eight feet or so. “Boy,” he said. “That shit’s just as loose as a goose. Be funny if we couldn’t get up that other bank and had to walk four or five miles upstream to find shallower bank, wouldn’t it?”

“Be a lot funnier if another flash flood came along while we were looking,” Stu said.

Larry came down agilely and well, joining them less than three minutes after they had started down. “Who goes up first?” He asked.

“Why don’t you, since you’re so perky?” Glen said.

“Sure”

It took him considerably longer to get up, and twice the treacherous footing ran out beneath him and he nearly fell. But finally he gained the top and waved down at them.

“I’m next,” Glen said, and walked across to the other bank.

Stu caught his arm. “Listen,” he said. “We can walk upstream and find a shallower bank, like Ralph said.”

“And lose the rest of the day? When I was a kid, I could have gone up there in forty seconds and registered a pulse-rate under seventy at the top.”

“You’re no kid now, Glen.”

“No. But I think there’s still some of him left.”

Before Stu could say more, Glen had started up. He paused to rest about a third of the way up and then pressed on. Near the halfway point he grabbed an outcrop of shale that crumbled away under his hands and Stu was sure he was going to tumble all the way to the bottom, end over arthritic end.

“Ah, shit—” Ralph breathed.

Glen flailed his arms and somehow kept his balance. He jigged to his right and went up another twenty feet, rested, then went up again. Near the top a spur of rock that he had been standing on tore loose and he would have fallen, but Larry was there. He grabbed Glen’s arm and hauled him up.

“Nothing to it,” Glen called down.

Stu grinned with relief. “How’s your pulse-rate, baldy?”

“Plus ninety, I think,” Glen admitted.

Ralph went up like a stolid mountain goat, checking each hold, shifting his hands and feet with great deliberation. When he reached the top, Stu started up.

Right up until the moment he fell, Stu was thinking that actually this slope was a little easier than the one they had descended. The holds were better, the gradient a tiny bit shallower. But the surface was a mixture of chalky soil and rock fragments that had been badly loosened by the wet weather. Stu sensed that it wanted to be evil, and he went up carefully.

His chest was over the edge when the knob of outcropping his left foot was on suddenly disappeared. He felt himself begin to slide. Larry grabbed for his hand, but this time he missed his grip. Stu grabbed the outjutting edge of the turnpike, and it came off in his hands. He stared at it stupidly for a moment as the speed of his descent began to increase. He discarded it, feeling insanely like the coyote in a Roadrunner cartoon.

His knee struck something, and there was a sudden bolt of pain. He grabbed at the gluey surface of the slope, which was now speeding past him at an alarming rate, and kept coming away with nothing but handfuls of dirt.

He slammed into a boulder and cartwheeled, the breath slapped from his body. He fell free for about ten feet, and came down on his lower leg at an angle. He heard it snap. The pain was instantaneous and huge. He yelled. He did a backward somersault. He was eating dirt now. Sharp pebbles scrawled bloody scratches across his face and arms. He came down on the hurt leg again, and felt it snap somewhere else. This time he didn’t yell. This time he screamed.