The Stand (Original Edition) (43 page)

He looked back at Tom and swigged from the Pepto-Bismol bottle himself. He could feel the dull pressure of anger at his temples. He held the bottle out to Tom, but Tom was not convinced.

“No, uh-uh, Tom Cullen doesn’t drink poison,” he said, and with rising fury at the girl Nick saw that Tom was terrified. “Daddy said don’t. Daddy said if it’ll kill the rats in the barn, it’ll kill Tom! No poison!”

Nick suddenly half-turned to Julie, unable to bear her smug grin. He hit her open-handed, hit her hard. Tom stared, eyes wide and scared.

“You . . .” she began, and for a moment she couldn’t find the words. Her face flushed thinly, and she suddenly looked scrawny and spoiled and vicious. "
You dummy freak bastard! It was just a joke, you shithead! You can’t hit me! You can’t hit me, goddam you!”

She lunged at him and he pushed her backward. She fell on the seat of her denim shorts and stared up at him, lips pulled back in a snarl. Hands trembling, head pounding now, Nick took his pad and pen out and scrawled a note out in large, jagged letters. He tore it off and held it out to her. Eyes glaring and furious, she batted it aside. He picked it up, grabbed the back of her neck, and shoved the note into her face. Tom had withdrawn, whimpering.

She screamed: “All right! I’ll read it! I’ll read your crappy note!”

It was four words: “We don’t need you.”

“Fuck
you!”
she cried, tearing herself out of his grasp. She backed several steps down the sidewalk. Her eyes were as wide and blue as they had been in the drugstore when he almost literally stumbled over her, but now they were spitting with hate. Nick felt tired. Of all the possible people, why her?

“I’m not staying here,” Julie Lawry said. “I’m coming. And you can’t stop me.”

But he could. Didn’t she realize that yet? No, Nick thought, she didn’t. To her all of this was some sort of Hollywood scenario, a living disaster movie in which she had the starring part.

He drew the revolver from its holster and pointed it at her feet. She became very still, and the flush evaporated from her face. Her eyes changed, and she looked very different, somehow real for the first time. Something had entered her world that she could not, at least in her own mind, manipulate to her advantage. A gun. Nick suddenly felt sick as well as tired.

“I didn’t mean it,” she said rapidly. “I’ll do anything you want, honest to God.”

He motioned her away with the gun.

She turned and began to walk, looking back over her shoulder. She walked faster and faster, then broke into a run. She turned the comer a block up and was gone. Nick holstered the gun. He was trembling. He felt soiled and depressed, as if Julie Lawry had been something inhuman, more kin to the trundling and coldblooded beetles you find under dead trees than to other human beings.

He turned around, looking for Tom, but Tom wasn’t in sight.

It took him almost twenty minutes to find him. He was crouched on a back porch two streets down from the business section. He was sitting on a rusty porch glider, his Fisher-Price garage cradled to his chest. When he saw Nick he began to cry.

“Please don’t make me drink it, please don’t make Tom Cullen drink poison, laws no, Daddy said if it would kill the rats it would kill me . . .
pleeease!”

Nick saw that he was still holding the bottle of Pepto-Bismol. He threw it away and spread his empty hands in front of Tom. His diarrhea would just have to run its course.

Tom came down the porch steps, blubbering. ‘‘I’m sorry,” he said over and over. “I’m sorry, Tom Cullen’s sorry.”

They walked back to Main Street together . . . and came to a halt, staring. Both bikes were overturned. The tires had been slashed. The contents of their packs had been strewn from one side of the street to the other.

Just then something passed at high speed close to Nick’s face—he felt it—and Tom shrieked and began to run. Nick stood puzzled for a moment, looking around, and happened to be looking in the right direction to see the muzzleflash of the second shot. It came from a second-story window of the Pratt Hotel. Something like a high-speed darning needle tugged at the fabric of his shirt collar.

He turned and ran after Tom.

He had no way of knowing if Julie fired again; all he knew for sure when he caught up to Tom was that neither of them had been shot. At least we’re shut of that hellion, he thought, but that turned out to be only half-true.

They slept in a barn three miles north of Pratt that evening, and Tom kept waking up with nightmares and then waking Nick to be reassured. They reached Iuka the next morning around eleven, and found two good bicycles in a shop called Sport and Cycle World. Nick, who was beginning to recover at last from the encounter with Julie, thought they could finish re-outfitting themselves in Great Bend, which they should reach by the fourteenth at the latest.

But at just about quarter to three on the afternoon of July 12, he saw a twinkle in the rearview mirror mounted near his left handgrip. He stopped (Tom, who was riding behind him and woolgathering, ran over his foot but Nick barely noticed) and looked back over his shoulder. The twinkle that had risen over the hill directly behind them like a daystar pleased and dazzled his eye—he could hardly believe it. It was a Chevy pickup of an ancient vintage, picking its way slowly, slaloming from one lane of US 281 to the other, avoiding a scatter of stalled vehicles.

The face that appeared belonged to a fortyish man wearing a straw hat with a feather cocked into the blue velvet band at a rakish angle, and when he grinned, his face became a dry-wash of agreeable sunwrinkles.

And what he said was: “Holy Christ on a carousel, am I glad to see you boys? I guess I am. Climb on up here and let’s see where we’re going.”

That was how Nick and Tom met Ralph Brentner.

He was cracking up—baby, don’t you just know it?

That was a line from Huey “Piano” Smith, now that he thought of it. Went way back. A blast from the past. Huey “Piano” Smith, remember how that one went?
Ah-ah-ah-ah, daaaay-o . . . gooba-gooba-gooba-gooba
. . .
ah-ah-ah-ah.
Et cetera. The wit, wisdom, and social commentary of Huey “Piano” Smith. Years later Johnny Rivers had recorded one of Huey’s songs, “Rockin Pneumonia and the Boogie-Woogie Flu.” Very appropriate to the situation. Good old Johnny Rivers. Good old Huey “Piano” Smith.

“Fuck it,” Larry Underwood croaked. He looked terrible—a pale, frail phantom stumbling up a New England highway. “Huey Smith was before my time, gimme the sixties.”

Sure, the sixties, those were the days. Mid-sixties, late sixties. Flower Power. Getting clean for Gene. Andy Warhol with his pink-rimmed glasses and his fucking Brillo boxes. Velvet Underground. The Return of the Creature from Yorba Linda. Norman Spinrad, Norman Mailer, Norman Thomas, Norman Rockwell, and good old Norman Bates of the Bates Motel, heh-heh-heh. Dylan broke his neck. Barry McGuire croaked “The Eve of Destruction.” Diana Ross raised the consciousness of every white kid in America. All those wonderful groups, Larry thought dazedly, give me the sixties and cram 1980 up your ass. Creem. Rascals. Spoonful. Airplane with Grace Slick on vocals, Norman Mailer on lead guitar, and good old Norman Bates on drums. Beatles. Who. Dead—

He fell over and hit his head.

The world swam away blackly and then came back in bright fragments. He wiped his hand across his temple and it came away with a thin foam of blood on it. Didn’t even matter. Whafuck, as they used to say back in the bright and glorious mid-sixties. What was falling down and hitting your head when he had spent the last week unable to sleep without waking up from nightmares, and the good nights were the nights when the scream got no further than the middle of his throat? If you screamed out loud and woke up to
that,
you scared yourself even worse.

Dreams of being back in the Lincoln Tunnel. There was somebody behind him, only in the dreams it wasn’t Rita. It was the devil, and he was stalking Larry with a lightless grin frozen on his face. The black man wasn’t the walking dead; he was
worse
than the walking dead. Larry ran with the slow sludgy panic of bad dreams, tripping over unseen corpses, knowing they were staring at him with the glassy eyes of stuffed trophies from the crypts of their cars, which had stalled inside the frozen traffic even though they had some other place to be, he ran, but what good was running when the black devil man, the black magic man, could see in the dark with eyes like snooperscopes? And after a while the dark man would begin to croon to him:
Come on, Larry, come on, we’ll get it togeeeether Laaary
—

He would feel the black man’s breath on his shoulder and that was when he would struggle up from sleep, escaping sleep, and the scream would be stuck in his throat like a hot bone or actually escaping his lips, loud enough to wake the dead.

He was cracking up.

“Cracking,” he moaned. “Oh Jeez I’m going out of my mind.”

A part of him that still retained a measure of rationality asserted that that might be true, but what he was suffering from right this minute was heat prostration. After what had happened to Rita, he hadn’t been able to ride the motorcycle anymore. He just hadn’t been able to; it was like a mental block. He kept seeing himself smeared all over the highway. So finally he had ditched it. Since then he had been walking—how many days? four? eight? nine? He didn’t know. It had been in the nineties since ten this morning, it was now nearly four, the sun was right behind him, and he wasn’t wearing a hat.

Across the road on a hill two hundred yards away, glimmering like a beautiful mirage, was a white and rambling New England farmhouse. It had green siding, green trim, and a green shingled roof. Rolling down from it was a green lawn just beginning to look shaggy. At the foot of the lawn, a small rill of brook ran; he could hear it gurgling and chuckling, an entrancing sound. A rock wall meandered along beside it, probably marking the edge of the property, and leaning over the wall at spaced intervals were big, shady elms. He would sit in the shade for a while, that’s what he would do. And when he felt a little better about. . . about things in general ... he would go down to the brook and have a drink and a wash-up. Probably he smelled bad. Who cared, though? Who was there to smell him now that Rita was dead?

It was at least fifteen degrees cooler in the shade, and Larry let out his breath in a long sigh of pleasure and relief. He put a hand to the back of his neck where the sun had been beating most of the day and pulled it back with a little hiss of pain. Sunburn pain? Get Xylocaine. And all that good shit. Get these men out of the hot sun. Bum, baby, bum. Watts. Remember Watts? Another blast from the past. The whole human race, just one big heavy blast from the past, a great big golden gasser.

“Man, you’re sick,” he said, and leaned his head against the rough trunk of the elm tree and closed his eyes. Sun-dappled shade made moving patterns of red and black on the insides of his eyelids. The sound of water, chuckling and gurgling, was sweet and soothing. In a minute he would go down there and get a drink of water and wash up. In just a minute.

He dozed.

When he woke up, the first thing Larry was aware of was that he felt good. The second thing was that he felt hungry. The third thing was that the sun was wrong—it seemed to have traveled backward across the sky. The fourth thing was that he had to, you should pardon the expression, piss like a racehorse.

Standing and listening to the delicious crackle of his tendons as he stretched, he realized that he had not just napped; he had slept all night. He looked down at his watch and saw why the sun was wrong. It was 9:20 in the morning. Hungry. There would be food in the big white house. Canned soup, maybe corned beef. His stomach rumbled.

Before going up he knelt by the stream with his clothes off and splashed water all over himself. He noticed how scrawny he was getting—that was no way to run a railroad. He stood up, dried himself with his shirt, and pulled his trousers back on. A couple of stones poked their wet black backs out of the stream and he used them to cross. On the far side he suddenly froze and gazed toward the thick stand of bushes. The fear, which had been dormant in him ever since waking up, suddenly blazed up like an exploding pine knot and then subsided just as quickly. It had been a squirrel or a woodchuck that he had heard, possibly a fox. Nothing else. He turned away indifferently and began to walk up the lawn toward the big white house.

Halfway there a thought rose to the surface of his mind like a bubble and popped. It happened casually, with no fanfare, but the implications brought him to a dead halt.

The thought was:
Why haven’t you been riding a bicycle?

He stood in the middle of the lawn, equidistant from the stream and the house, flabbergasted by the simplicity of it. He had been walking ever since he had ditched the Harley. Walking, wearing himself out, finally collapsing with sunstroke or something so close to it that it made no difference. And he could have been pedaling along, doing no more than a fast run if that’s what he felt like, and he would probably be on the coast now, picking out his summer house and stocking it.

He began to laugh, gently at first, a little bit spooked by the sound of it in all the quiet. Laughing when there was no one else around to laugh with was just another sign that you were taking a one-way trip to that fabled land of bananas. But the laughter sounded so real and hearty, so goddamned
healthy,
and so much like the old Larry Underwood that he just let it come. He stood with his hands on his hips and cocked his head back to the sky and just bellowed with laughter at his own amazing foolishness.

Behind him, where the screening bushes by the creek were thickest, greenish-blue eyes watched all of this, and they watched as Larry at last continued up the lawn to the house, still laughing a little and shaking his head. They watched as he climbed the porch and tried the front door, and found it open. They watched as he disappeared inside. Then the bushes began to shake and make the rattling sound that Larry had heard and dismissed. The boy forced his way through, naked except for his shorts, brandishing the butcher knife.