The Stand (Original Edition) (24 page)

The car was a brand-new Cadillac Coupe de Ville, bottle green, and stepping out of it was fat sixteen-year-old Harold Lauder. Frannie felt an instant surge of distaste. She didn’t like Harold and didn’t know anyone who did, including his late sister Amy. Probably his mother had. But it struck Fran with a tired sort of irony that the only person left in Ogunquit besides herself should be one of the very few people in town that she honestly didn’t like.

Harold edited the Ogunquit High School literary magazine and wrote strange short stories that were told in the present tense or with the point of view in the second person, or both. “He whacks off in his pants,” Amy had once confided to Fran. “How’s that for nasty? Whacks off in his pants and wears the same pair of undershorts until they’ll just about stand up by themselves.”

Harold’s hair was black and greasy. He was fairly tall, about six-one, but he was carrying nearly 240 pounds. He favored cowboy boots with pointed toes, wide leather garrison belts that he was constantly hitching up, and flowered shirts that billowed on him like staysails. Frannie didn’t care how much he whacked off, how much weight he carried, or if he was imitating Wright Morris this week or Hubert Selby, Jr. But looking at him, she always felt uncomfortable and a little disgusted, as if she sensed by low-grade telepathy that almost every thought Harold had was coated lightly with slime. She didn’t think, even in a situation like this, that Harold could be dangerous, but he would probably be as unpleasant as always, perhaps more so.

He hadn’t seen her. He was looking up at the house. “Anybody home?” he shouted, then reached through the Cadillac’s window and honked the horn. The sound jagged on Frannie’s nerves. She would have kept silent, except that when Harold turned around to get back into the car, he would see the excavation, and her sitting on the end of it. For a moment she was tempted to crawl deeper into the garden and just lie low until he got tired and went away.

Stop it, she told herself, just stop it. He’s another living human being, anyway.

“Over here, Harold,” she called.    ,

Harold jumped, his large buttocks joggling inside his tight pants. Obviously he had just been going through the motions, not really expecting to raise anyone. He turned around and Fran walked to the edge of the garden, resigned to being stared at in her white gym * shorts and her halter. Harold’s eyes crawled over her with great avidity.

“Say, Fran,” he said happily.

“Hi, Harold.”

“I’d heard that you were having some success in resisting the dread disease, so I made this my first stop. I’m canvassing the township.” He smiled at her, revealing teeth that had a nodding acquaintance at best with his toothbrush.

“I was awfully sorry to hear about Amy, Harold. Are your mother and father—?”

“I’m afraid so,” Harold said. He bowed his head for a moment, then jerked it up, making his clotted hair fly. “But life goes on, does it not?”

“I guess it does,” Fran said wanly. His eyes were on her breasts again, dancing across them, and she wished for a sweater.

“How do you like my car?”

“It’s Mr. Brannigan’s, isn’t it?” Roy Brannigan was a local realtor.

“It was,” Harold said indifferently. “I used to believe that, in these days of shortages, anyone who drove such a thyroidal monster ought to be hung from the nearest Sunoco sign, but all of that has changed. Less people means more petrol.” Petrol, Fran thought dazedly, he actually said petrol. “More everything,” Harold finished. His eyes took on a fugitive gleam as they dropped to the cup of her navel, rebounded to her face, dropped to her shorts, and bounced to her face again. His smile was both jolly and uneasy.

“Harold, if you’ll excuse me—”

“But whatever can you be doing, my child?”

The unreality was trying to creep back in again, and she found herself wondering just how much the human brain could be expected to stand before snapping like an overtaxed rubber band. My parents are dead, but I can take it. Some weird disease seems to have spread across the entire country, maybe the entire
world,
mowing down the righteous and the unrighteous alike—I can take it. I’m digging a hole in the garden my father was weeding only last week, and when it’s deep enough I guess I’m going to put him in it—I think I can take it. But Harold Lauder in Roy Brannigan’s Cadillac, feeling me up with his eyes and calling me “my child”? I don’t know, Lord. I just don’t know.

“Harold,” she said patiently. “I am not your child. I am five years older than you. It is physically impossible for me to be your child.” “Just a figure of speech,” he said, blinking a little at her controlled ferocity. “Anyway, what is it? That hole?”

“It’s a grave,” she said. “For my father.”

“Oh,” Harold Lauder said in a small, uneasy voice.

“I’m going in to get a drink of water before I finish up. To be blunt, Harold, I’d just as soon you went away. I’m upset.”

“I can understand that,” he said stiffly. “But Fran ... in the garden?”

She had walked past him toward the house, and now she rounded on him, furious. “Well, what would you suggest? That I put him in a coffin and drag him out to the cemetery? What in the name of God for? He loved his garden! And what’s it to you, anyway? What business is it of yours?”

She was starting to cry. She turned and ran for the kitchen, almost running into the Cadillac’s front bumper. She knew Harold would be watching her jiggling buttocks, storing up the footage for whatever X-rated movie played constantly in his head, and that made her angrier, sadder, and more weepy than ever.

The screen door whacked flatly shut behind her. She went to the sink and drank three cold glasses of water, too quickly, and a silver spike of pain sank deeply into her forehead. Her surprised belly cramped and she hung over the porcelain sink for a moment, eyes slitted closed, waiting to see if she was going to throw up. After a moment her stomach told her it would take the cold water, at least on a trial basis.

“Fran?” The voice was low and hesitant.

She turned and saw Harold standing outside the screen, his hands dangling limply at his sides. He looked concerned and unhappy, and Fran suddenly felt badly for him. Harold Lauder tooling around this sad, ruined town in Roy Brannigan’s Cadillac, Harold Lauder who had probably never had a date in his life and so affected what he probably thought of as worldly disdain. For dates, girls, friends, everything.

“Harold, I’m sorry.”

“No, I didn’t have the right to say anything. Look, if you want me to, I can help.”

“Thank you, but I’d rather do it alone. It’s . .

“It’s personal. Of course, I understand.”

She could have gotten a sweater from the kitchen closet, but of course he would have known why, and she didn’t want to embarrass him again. She went back out on the porch and for a moment they stood there looking at the garden, at the hole with the dirt thrown up around it. And the afternoon buzzed somnolently around them as if nothing had changed.

“What are you going to do?” she asked Harold.

“I don’t know,” he said. “You know . . .” He trailed off.

“What?”

“Well, it’s hard for me to say. I am not one of the most loved persons in this little patch of New England. I doubt if a statue would ever be erected in my memory on the local common, even if I had become a famous writer, as I had once hoped. Parenthetically speaking, I believe I may be an old man with a beard down to my belt-buckle before there is another famous writer.”

She said nothing; only went on looking at him.

“So,” Harold said, and his body jerked as if the word had exploded out, “so I am forced to wonder at the unfairness of it. The unfairness seems, to me at least, so monstrous that it is easier to believe that the louts who attend our local citadel of learning have finally succeeded in driving me mad.”

He pushed his glasses up on his nose, and she noticed with sympathy how really horrible his acne problem was. Had anyone told him, she wondered, that soap and water would take care of some of that? Or had they all been too busy watching pretty, petite Amy as she zoomed through the University of Maine with a 3.8 average, graduating twenty-third in a class of over a thousand? Pretty Amy, who was so bright and vivacious where Harold was just abrasive.

“Mad,” Harold repeated softly. “I’ve been driving around town in a Cadillac on my learner’s permit. And look at these boots.” He pulled up the legs of his jeans a little, disclosing a gleaming pair of cowboy boots, complexly stitched. “Twenty-six dollars. I just went into the Shoe Boat and picked out my size. I feel like an impostor. An actor in a play. There have been moments today when I’ve been sure I was mad.”

“No,” Frannie said. He smelled like he hadn’t had a bath in three or four days, but this no longer disgusted her. “What’s that line? I’ll be in your dream if you’ll be in mine? We’re not crazy, Harold.” “Maybe it would be better if we were.”

“Someone will come,” Frannie said. “After a while. After this disease, whatever it is, burns itself out.”

“Who?”

“Somebody in authority,” she said uncertainly. “Somebody who will. . . well. . . put things back in order.”

He laughed bitterly. “My dear child . . . sorry. Fran. Fran, it was the people in authority who
did
this. They’re good at putting things back in order. They’ve solved the depressed economy, pollution, the oil shortage, and the cold war, all at a stroke. Yeah, they put things in order, all right.”

“But it’s just a funny strain of the
flu,
Harold. I heard it on the radio—”

“Mother Nature just doesn’t work that way, Fran. Your somebody in authority got a bunch of bacteriologists, virologists, and epidemiologists together in some government installation to see how many funny bugs they could dream up. And they dreamed up a dilly.

“What are you going to do, Fran?”

“Bury my father,” she said softly.

“Oh ... of course.” He looked at her for a moment and then said, very swiftly, “Look, I’m going to get out of here. Out of Ogunquit. If I stay much longer, I really will go crazy. Fran, why don’t you come with me?”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. Not yet.”

“Well, if you think of a place, come ask me again.”

Harold brightened. “All right, I will. It—” He trailed off and began to walk down the porch steps in a kind of daze. His new cowboy boots gleamed in the sun. Fran watched him with sad amusement.

He waved just before climbing behind the wheel of the Caddy. Fran lifted a hand in return. The car jerked unprofessionally when he put it in reverse, and then he was backing down the driveway in fits and starts. He wandered to the left crushing some of Carla’s flowers under the offside wheels, and nearly thumped into the culvert ditch as he turned out onto the road. Then he honked twice and was gone. Fran watched until he was out of sight, and then went back out to her father’s garden.

Sometime after four o’clock she went back upstairs with dragging footsteps, forcing herself along. There was a dull headache in her temples and forehead, caused by heat and exertion and tension. She had told herself to wait another day, but that would only make it worse. Under her arm she carried her mother’s best damask tablecloth, the one kept strictly for company.

“I love you, Daddy,” she said. “I love you, Frannie loves you.” Her tears fell on his face and gleamed there. She removed his pajamas and dressed him in his best suit, hardly noticing the dull throb in her back, the ache in her neck and arms as she lifted each part of his weight, dressed it, dropped it, and went on to the next part. She propped his head up with two volumes of
The Book of Knowledge
to get his tie right. In his bottom drawer, under the socks, she found his army medals—purple heart, good conduct medals, campaign ribbons . . . and the Bronze Star he had won at Anzio. She pinned them to his lapel. In the bathroom she found Johnson’s baby powder and powdered his face and neck and hands. The smell of the powder, sweet and nostalgic, brought the tears on again. Sweat slicked her body. There were pitted dark circles of exhaustion under her eyes.

She folded the tablecloth over him, got her mother’s sewing kit, and closed the seam. Then she doubled the seam and sewed again. With a sobbing, whistling grunt, she managed to get his body to the floor without dropping it. Then she rested, half-swooning. When she felt she could go on, she lifted the top half of the corpse, got it to the head of the stairs and then, as carefully as she could, down to the first floor. She stopped again, her breath coming in quick, whining gasps. Her headache was sharp now, needling into her with quick hard bursts of pain.

She dragged the body down the hall, through the kitchen, and out onto the porch. Down the porch steps. Then she had to rest again. The golden light of early evening was on the land now. She gave way again and sat beside him, her head on her knees, rocking back and forth, weeping. Birds twittered. Eventually she was able to drag him into the garden.

At last it was done. By the time the last sods were back in place (she had fitted them together down on her knees, as if doing a jigsaw puzzle) it was quarter of nine. She was filthy. Only the flesh around her eyes was white; that area had been washed clean by her tears. She was reeling with exhaustion. Her hair hung against her cheeks in matted strings.

“Please be at peace, Daddy,” she muttered. “Please.”

She dragged the spade back to her father’s workshop and slung it inside indifferently. She had to rest twice as she climbed the six steps to the back porch. She crossed the kitchen without turning on the lights and kicked off her low-topped sneakers as she entered the living room. She dropped to the couch and slept immediately.

In the dream she was climbing the stairs again, going to her father, to do her duty and see him decently under the ground. But when she entered the room the tablecloth was already over the body and her sense of grief and loss changed to something else
. . .
something like fear. She crossed the darkened room, not wanting to, suddenly wanting only to flee, but helpless to stop. The tablecloth glimmered in the shadows, ghostly, ghastly, and it came to her: