The Stand (Original Edition) (45 page)

So he said nothing, and he met the woman’s soft gaze and thought:
I think I’ve changed. Somehow. I don’t know how much.

She said: “I’m Nadine Cross. This is Joe. I’m happy to meet you.”

“Larry Underwood.”

They shook hands, both smiling faintly at the absurdity.

“Let’s walk back to the road,” Nadine said.

They started off side by side, and after a few steps Larry looked back over his shoulder at Joe, who was still sitting over his knees and sucking his thumb, apparently unaware they were gone.

“He’ll come.”

“Are you sure?”

“Quite sure.”

As they came to the highway’s gravel shoulder she stumbled and Larry took her arm. She looked at him gratefully.

“Can we sit down?” she asked.

“Sure.”

So they sat down on the pavement, facing each other. After a little bit Joe got up and plodded toward them, looking down at his bare feet. He sat a little way apart from them. Larry looked at him warily, then back at Nadine Cross.

“You were the two following me.”

“You knew? Yes. I thought you did.”

“How long?”

“Two days now,” Nadine said. “We were staying in the big house at Epsom.” Seeing his puzzled expression she added: “By the creek. You fell asleep by the rock wall.”

He nodded. “And last night the two of you came to peek at me while I was sleeping on that porch. Maybe to see if I had horns or a long red tail.”

“That was Joe,” she said quietly. “I came after him when I found he was gone. How did you know?”

“You left tracks in the dew.”

“Oh.” She looked at him closely, examining him, and although he wanted to, Larry didn’t drop his eyes. “I don’t want you to be angry with us. I suppose that sounds ridiculous after Joe just tried to kill you, but Joe isn’t responsible.”

“Is that his real name?”

“No, just what I call him.”

“He’s like a savage in a National Geographic TV show.”

“Yes, just like that. I found him on the lawn of a house—his house, maybe, the name was Rockway—sick from a bite. A rat bite, maybe. He doesn’t talk. He growls and grunts. Until this morning I’ve been able to control him. But I . . . I’m tired, you see . . . and . . She shrugged. Marsh-mud was drying on her blouse in what could have been a series of Chinese ideograms. “I dressed him at first. He took everything off but his underpants. Eventually I got tired of trying. I was a schoolteacher, not a missionary. The minges and mosquitoes don’t seem to bother him.” She paused. “I want us to come with you. I guess there is no way to be coy about it, under the circumstances.”

Larry wondered what she would think if he told her about the last woman who had wanted to come with him. Not that he ever would; that episode was deeply buried, even if the woman in question was not. He was no more anxious to bring up Rita than a murderer would be to drag his victim’s name into parlor conversation.

“I don’t know where I’m going,” he said. “I came up from New York City, the long way around, I guess. The plan was to find a nice house on the coast and just lie up there until October or so. But the longer I go, the more I want other people. The longer I go, the more all of this seems to hit me.”

He was expressing himself badly and didn’t seem to be able to do better without bringing up Rita or his bad dreams about the black man.

“I’ve been scared a lot of the time,” he said carefully, “because I’m on my own. Pretty paranoid. It’s like I expected Indians to just swoop down and scalp me.”

“In other words, you’ve stopped looking for houses and started looking for people.”

“Yes, maybe.”

“You’ve found us. That’s a start.”

“I do believe you found me. And that boy worries me, Nadine. I have to be up front about that. His knife’s gone, but the world is full of knives just lying around waiting to be picked up.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want to sound brutal . . He trailed off, hoping she would say it for him, but she said nothing at all, only looked at him with those dark eyes.

“Would you consider leaving him?” There it was, spit out like a lump of rock, and he still didn’t sound like much of a nice guy . . . but was it right, was it fair to either of them, to make a bad situation worse by burdening themselves with a ten-year-old psychopath?

“I couldn’t do that,” Nadine said calmly. “I understand the danger, and I understand that the danger would be primarily to you. He’s jealous. He’s afraid that you might become more important to me than he is. He might very well try to ... try to get at you again unless you can make friends with him or at least convince him you don’t mean to . . She trailed off, leaving that part vague. “But if I left him, that would be the same as murder. And I won’t be a party to that.”

“You will be if he cuts my throat in the middle of the night.”

She bowed her head.

Speaking so quietly that only she could hear (he didn’t know if Joe, who was watching them, understood what they were talking about or not), Larry said, “He probably would have done it last night if you hadn’t come after him. Isn’t that the truth?”

Softly she replied: “Those are things that might be.”

Larry laughed. “The Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come?”

She looked up. “I want to come with you, Larry, but I can’t leave Joe. You will have to decide.”

“You don’t make it easy.”

“It’s no easy life anymore.”

He thought about it. Joe sat on the soft shoulder of the road, watching them with his seawater eyes. Behind them, the real sea moved restlessly against the rocks, booming in its secret channels where it had infiltrated the land.

“All right,” he said. “I think you’re being dangerously softhearted, but. . . all right.”

“Thank you,” Nadine said. “I will be responsible for his actions.” “That will be a great comfort if he kills me.”

“That would be on my heart for the rest of my life,” Nadine said, and a sudden certainty that all her words about the sanctity of life would someday not too distant rise up to mock her swept her like a cold wind, and she shuddered. No, she told herself. I’ll not kill. Not that. Never that.

They camped that night on the soft white sand of the Wells public beach. Larry built a large fire above the strand of kelp that marked the last high tide and Joe sat on the other side, away from him and Nadine, feeding small sticks into the blaze. Occasionally he would hold a bigger stick into the flames until it caught like a torch and then tear away down the sand, holding it aloft like a single flaming birthday candle. They were able to see him until he was beyond the thirty-foot glow of the fire and then only his moving torch, drawn back in the wind manufactured by his wild sprinting. The seabreeze had come up a little, and it was cooler than it had been for days. The breeze danced the flames up toward the black starshot sky. Embers cycloned up even higher and flickered out. He thought of fall, still distant but not so far as it had been on that day in June when he had discovered his mother lying on the floor, delirious. He shivered a little. North, far down the beach, Joe’s torch bobbed up and down. It made him feel lonely and all the colder—that single light flickering in the large and silent darkness. The surf rolled and boomed.

“Do you play?”

He jumped a little at her voice and looked at the guitar case lying beside them on the sand. It had been leaning against a Steinway piano in the music room of the big house they had broken into to get their supper. He had loaded his pack with enough cans to replace what they had eaten this day, and had taken the guitar on impulse, not even looking inside the case to see what it was—coming from a house like that, it was probably a good ’un. He hadn’t played since that crazy Malibu party, and that had been six weeks ago. In another life.

“Yeah, I do,” he said, and discovered that he
wanted
to play, not for her but because sometimes it felt good to play, it eased your mind. And when you had a bonfire on the beach, someone was supposed to play the guitar. That was practically graven in stone.

“Let’s see what we got here,” he said, and unsnapped the catches.

He had expected something good, but what lay inside the case was still a happy surprise. It was a Gibson twelve-string, a beautiful instrument, perhaps even custom-made. Larry wasn’t enough of a judge of guitars to be sure. He did know that the fretboard inlays were real mother-of-pearl, catching reddish-orange glints from the fire and waxing them into prisms of light.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

“It sure is.”

He strummed it and liked the sound it made, even open and not quite in tune. The sound was fuller and richer than the sound you got from a six-string. A harmonic sound, but tough. That was the good thing about a steel-string guitar, you got a nice tough sound. And the strings were Black Diamonds, wrapped and a little hokey, but you got an honest sound, a trifle rough when you changed chords —
zing!
He smiled a little, remembering Barry Greig’s contempt for the smooth flat guitar strings. He had always called them “dollar slicks.” Good old Barry, who wanted to be Steve Miller when he grew up.

“What are you smiling about?” Nadine asked.

“Old times,” he said, and felt a little sad.

He tuned by ear, getting it just right, still thinking about Barry and Johnny McCall and Wayne Stukey. As he was finishing she tapped him lightly on the shoulder and he looked up.

Joe was standing by the fire, a burned-out stick held forgotten in one hand. Those strange eyes were staring at him with frank fascination, and his mouth was open.

Very quietly, so quietly that it might have been a thought in his own head, Nadine said: “Music hath charms . . .”

Larry began to pick out a rough melody on the guitar, an old blues he had picked up off an Elektra folk album as a teenager. Something originally done by Koemer, Ray, and Glover, he thought. When he thought he had the melody right, he let it walk off down the beach and then sang ... his singing was always going to be better than his playing.

"Well you see me comin baby from a long ways away

I will turn the night mamma right into day

Cause I'm here

A long ways from my home

But you can hear me comin baby

By the slappin on my black cat bone.”

The boy was grinning now, grinning in the amazed way of someone who has discovered a glad secret. Larry scruffed through long-unused archives of memory, hunting a second verse, and found one.

"I
can do some things mamma that other men can’t do

They can’t find the numbers baby, can’t work the

Conqueror root

But I can, cause I’m a long way from my home

And you know you’ll hear me comin

By the whackin on my black cat bone."

The boy’s open, delighted grin lit those eyes up, made them into something, Larry realized, that would be apt to make the muscles in any young girl’s thighs loosen a little. He reached for an instrumental bridge and fumbled through it, not too badly, either. His fingers wrung the right sounds out of the guitar: hard, flashy, a little bit tawdry, like a display of junk jewelry, probably stolen, sold out of a paper bag on a streetcorner. He made it swagger a little and then retreated quickly to good old three-finger E before he could fuck it all up. He couldn’t remember all of the last verse, something about a railroad track, so he repeated the first verse again and quit.

When the silence hit again, Nadine laughed and clapped her hands. Joe threw his stick away and jumped up and down on the sand, making fierce hooting sounds of joy. Larry couldn’t believe the change in the kid, and had to caution himself not to make too much of it. To do so would be to risk disappointment.

Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast.

He found himself wondering with unwilling distrust if it could be something as simple as that. Joe was gesturing at him and Nadine said: “He wants you to play something else. Would you? That was wonderful. It makes me feel better. So much better.”

So he played Geoff Maladur’s “Goin Downtown” and his own “Sally’s Fresno Blues”; he played “The Springhill Mine Disaster” and Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right, Mamma.” He switched to primitive rock and roll—“Milk Cow Blues,” “Jim Dandy,” and finally a song he had always liked, “Endless Sleep,” originally done by Jody Reynolds.

“I can’t play anymore,” he said to Joe, who had stood without moving through this entire recital. “My fingers.” He held them out, showing the deep grooves the strings had made in his fingers, and the chips in his nails.

The boy held out his own hands.

Larry paused for a moment, then shrugged inside. He handed the guitar to the boy neck first. “It takes a lot of practice,” he said.

But what followed was the most amazing thing he had ever heard in his life. The boy struck up “Jim Dandy” almost flawlessly, hooting at the words rather than singing them, as if his tongue was plastered to the roof of his mouth. At the same time it was perfectly obvious that he had never played a guitar in his life before; he couldn’t bear down hard enough on the strings to make them ring out properly and his chord changes were slurred and sloppy. The sound that came out was muted and ghostly—as if Joe was playing a guitar stuffed full of cotton—but otherwise it was a perfect carbon copy of the way Larry had played the tune.

When he had finished, Joe looked curiously down at his own fingers, as if trying to understand why they could make the substance of the music Larry had played but not the sharp sounds themselves.

Numbly, as if from a distance, Larry heard himself say: “You’re not bearing down hard enough, that’s all. You have to build up calluses—hard spots—on the ends of your fingers. And the muscles in your left hand, too.”

Joe looked at him closely as he spoke, but Larry didn’t know if the boy really understood or not He turned to Nadine. “Did you know he could do that?”

“No. I’m as surprised as you are. It’s as if he is a prodigy or something isn’t it?”

Larry nodded. The boy ran through “That’s All Right, Mamma,” again getting almost every nuance of the way Larry had played it. But the strings sometimes thudded like wood as Joe’s fingers blocked the vibration of the strings rather than making it come true.