The Stand (Original Edition) (47 page)

H.L.

L

F.G.

In a heart. With an arrow.

“Good for you, Harold,” Larry said, and left the barn.

The shop in Wells was a Honda dealership, and from the way the showroom bikes were lined up, Larry deduced that two of them were missing. He was more proud of a second find—a crumpled Payday wrapper near one of the wastebaskets. It looked as if someone— lovesick Harold Lauder, probably—had finished his nutroll while deciding which bikes he and his amorata would be happiest with. He had balled up his wrapper and shot it at the wastebasket. And missed.

Nadine thought his deductions were good, but she was not as fetched by them as Larry was. She was eying the remaining bikes, in a fever to be off. Joe sat on the showroom’s front step, playing the Gibson twelve-string and hooting contentedly.

“Listen,” Larry said, “it’s five o’clock now, Nadine. There’s absolutely no way we can get going until tomorrow.”

“But there’s three hours of daylight left!”

“That’s not enough.”

“But—”

“I know you’re anxious,” he said, and put his hands on her shoulders. He could feel the old impatience building up and forced himself to control it. “But you’ve never been on a motorcycle before.”

“But I can ride a bike. And I know how to use a clutch, I told you that.
Please,
Larry. If we don’t waste time we can camp in New Hampshire tonight and be halfway there by tomorrow night. We—”

“It’s not
like
a bike, goddammit!” he burst out, and the guitar came to a jangling stop behind him. He could see Joe looking back at them over his shoulder, his eyes narrowed and instantly distrustful. Gee, I sure do have a way with people, Larry thought. That made him even angrier.

Nadine said mildly: “You’re hurting me.”

He looked and saw that his fingers were buried in the soft flesh of her shoulders, and his anger collapsed into dull shame.

“Sorry,” he said.

Joe was still looking at him, and Larry recognized that he had just lost half the ground he had gained with the boy. Maybe more. Nadine had said something.

“What?”

“I said, tell me why it’s not like a bike.”

His first impulse was to shout at her,
If you know so much, go on and try it. See how you like looking at the world with your head on backward.
He controlled that, thinking it wasn’t only the boy he had lost ground with; he’d lost some with himself.

“They’re heavier,” he said. “One of these 360s goes three hundred and fifty pounds. You get used to controlling that extra weight very quickly, but it
does
take some getting used to. In a standard shift car, you operate the gearshift with your hand and the throttle with your foot. On a cycle it’s reversed: The gearshift is foot-operated, the throttle hand-operated, and that takes a
lot
of getting used to. There are two brakes instead of one. Your right foot brakes the rear wheel, your right hand brakes the front wheel. If you forget and just use the hand-brake, you’re apt to fly right over the handlebars. And you re going to have to get used to your passenger.”

“Joe? But I thought he’d ride with you!”

“I’d be glad to take him,” Larry said. “But right now I don’t think he’d have me. Do you?”

Nadine looked at Joe for a long, troubled time. “No,” she said, and then sighed. “He may not even want to ride on one. It may scare him.”

“If he does, you’re going to be responsible for him. And I’m responsible for both of you. I don’t want to see you spill.”

“Did that happen to you, Larry? Were you with someone?”

“I was,” Larry said, “and I took a spill. But by then the lady I was with was already dead.”

“She crashed her motorcycle?” Nadine’s face was very still.

“No. What happened, I’d say it was seventy percent accident and thirty percent suicide. Whatever she needed from me . . . friendship, understanding, help, I don’t know ... she wasn’t getting enough.” He was upset now, his temples pounding thickly, his throat tight, the tears close. “I’d like to do better by you, that’s all. You and Joe. Her name w'as Rita.”

“Larry, why didn’t you tell me before?”

“Because it hurts,” he said simply. “It hurts a lot.” That was the truth, but not the whole truth. There were the dreams. He found himself wondering if Nadine had bad dreams—last night he had awakened briefly and she had been tossing restlessly and muttering. But she had said nothing today. And Joe. Did Joe have bad dreams? Well, he didn’t know about them, but fearless Inspector Underwood of Scotland Yard w
^?
as afraid of the dreams . . . and if Nadine took a spill on the motorcycle, they might come back.

“We’ll go tomorrow, then,” she said. “Teach me how tonight.”

But first there was the matter of getting gassed up. The dealership had a pump, but without electricity it wouldn’t run. He discovered that the plate covering the underground tank had recently been pried up, almost surely by the ever-resourceful Harold Lauder. Lovesick or not, Payday freak or not, Larry had gained a lot of respect for Harold, almost a liking in advance. He had already developed his own mental picture of Harold. Probably in his mid-thirties, a farmer maybe, tall and suntanned, skinny, not too bright in the book sense, maybe, but plenty canny. He grinned. Building up a mental picture of someone you had never seen was a fool’s game, because they were never the way you had imagined. Everybody knows the one about the three-hundred-pound disc jockey with the whipcord-thin voice.

While Nadine got a cold supper together, Larry prowled around the rear of the dealership. Leaning against a big steel wastecan was a crowbar. Curling over the rim of the wastecan was a piece of rubber tubing.

Found you again, Harold you old devil.

He took the crowbar and the rubber hose back around to the plate covering the tank.

“Joe, can you come here a minute and help me?”

The boy looked up from his cheese and crackers and gazed distrustfully at Larry.

“Go on now, that’s all right,” Nadine said quietly.

Joe came over, dragging his feet a little. Larry slipped the crowbar into the plate’s slot and said, “Throw your weight on the bar and let’s see if we can get it up.”

For a moment he thought Joe either didn’t understand or didn’t want to help. Then he grasped the far end of the crowbar and pushed. His arms were thin but belted with scrawny muscle. The plate tilted a little but didn’t come up enough for Larry to get his fingers underneath.

“Lean on it,” he said.

Those half-savage, uptilted eyes studied him coolly for a moment and then Joe balanced on the crowbar, his feet coming off the ground. The plate came up a little more, and Larry squirmed his fingers under it. While he was still struggling for purchase, he happened to think that this was Joe’s golden opportunity to do a number on him. If the boy took his weight off the crowbar the plate would come down and crush or actually sever everything on his hands but his thumbs. Nadine had realized it too. She had been looking at one of the cycles but now turned to watch, her body angled into a posture of tension. Her eyes went from Larry, down on one knee, to Joe, who was watching Larry as he leaned his weight on the crowbar. Those seawater eyes were inscrutable. And still Larry couldn’t get hold of the plate.

“Need help?” Nadine asked. Her voice was a little unsteady.

Sweat ran into his eyes and he blinked it away. Still he couldn’t get a hold on the bitchy thing. He could smell gasoline.

“I think we can handle it,” Larry said, looking directly at her.

A moment later his fingers slipped into a short groove on the underside of the plate. He threw his shoulders into the work and the plate tilted up and over, hitting the concrete with a dull clang. He heard Nadine sigh as the crowbar fell to the pavement. He wiped his forehead, which was slimy-slick with perspiration, and looked at the boy.

“That was a good piece of work you did. If you’d let that thing slip, I’d’ve spent the rest of my life zipping my fly with my teeth. Thanks.”

He expected no response (except maybe an uninterpretable hoot), but Joe said in a rusty, struggling voice: “Weck-come.”

Larry glanced at Nadine, who stared back at him and then at Joe. Her expression was one of surprised pleasure, and yet she looked as if she had expected this. It was an expression he had seen before, but he could not put his finger on exactly where.

“Joe” he said, “did you say welcome?”

Joe nodded. “Weck-come. You weck-come.”

Nadine was holding her arms out, smiling. “That’s good, Joe. Very, very good.” Joe trotted to her and allowed himself to be hugged for a moment or two. Then he went to the bikes and began to look them over again, hooting and chuckling to himself.

“Well, he can talk,” Larry said.

She nodded. “I knew that, but it’s very good to know he can recover. I think he needed two of us. Two halves. He . . . oh, I don’t know.”

She walked away to join the boy, but not before he had seen the flush rising in her cheeks. He began to slip the rubber hose into the hole in the cement, but he saw that she had turned back to watch what he was doing, still blushing. Yes, he thought he knew why well enough.

The nasty fear rose in his chest and he called:
"For Chrissake Nadine look out where you’re going!”

She was concentrating on the Honda’s hand controls, not looking where she was going, and she was going to drive directly into a pine tree at a wobbling five miles an hour. She looked up and he heard her say
"Oh!”
in a startled voice. She swerved the bike, and the Honda did what all Hondas must do when they are swerved sharply at low speed: it fell over. Larry ran to her, his heart in his throat.

“Are you okay, Nadine? Are you—”

Then she was picking herself up, examining her scraped hands. “I’m fine. Stupid me, not looking where I was going. Did I hurt the motorcycle?”

“Never mind that, let me look at your hands.” She held them out. He took a plastic bottle of Bactine from his pocket and sprayed them.

“You’re shaking,” she said.

“Yes. I am. Listen, maybe we had better just stick to the bicycles. This is dangerous.”

“So is breathing. And Joe can ride with you, at least at first.”

“He won’t—”

“I think he will,” Nadine said calmly. “And so do you.”

“Well, let’s stop for tonight. It’s almost too dark to see.”

“Once more. I read someplace that if your horse throws you, you should get right back on.”

Joe strolled by, paying no attention to them. He was munching blueberries that he had gathered in a motorcycle helmet.

“I guess so,” Larry said, defeated. “But will you please watch where you’re going and spare me a heart seizure?”

“Yes, sir. Right, sir.” She made a comic salute and smiled at him. She had a beautiful, slow smile that eventually lit up her whole face. Larry smiled back unwillingly. There was nothing else to do.

This time she putted around the lot twice and then turned out into the road, swinging over too sharply and bringing Larry’s heart into his mouth again. But this time the Honda let her get away with it. She went up the hill and out of sight. He saw her switch up to second gear, and heard her switch to third and fourth before the bike’s engine faded to a meaningless drone melting away to nothing. He stood anxiously in the twilight, waiting for her, slapping at an occasional mosquito.

Joe strolled by again, his mouth blue. “Weck-come,” he said, and grinned. Larry managed a strained smile in return. If she didn’t come back soon he would go after her. Visions of finding her lying in a ditch with a broken neck danced blackly in his head.

He was just walking over to the other cycle they had gassed up when the droning hum came to his ears again, gradually swelling to the sound of the Honda’s engine. He relaxed ... a little. Dismally he realized he would never be able to relax completely while she was on that thing. She came back into sight and pulled up beside him.

“Pretty good, huh?” She raced the throttle and switched off.

“I was getting ready to come after you. I thought you’d had an accident.”

“In a manner of speaking, I did. I forgot to use the clutch when I slowed down and I stalled it.”

“Oh. Enough for tonight, Nadine, okay? Please?”

“Yes,” she said. “My tailbone hurts.”

He lay in his blankets that night wondering if she might come to him when Joe was asleep. Waiting and wondering, Larry fell asleep himself.

He dreamed he was in a field of corn, lost there. But there was music, guitar music. Joe playing the guitar? If he found Joe he would be all right. Except Joe was just what Nadine called him; the boy’s real name was Leo. Leo Rockway.

He followed the sound, breaking through one row of corn to the next when he had to, at last coming out in a ragged clearing. There was a small house there, more of a shack, really, the porch held up with rusty old jacklifters. It wasn’t Joe playing the guitar, how could it have been? Joe was holding his left hand and Nadine his right. They were with him. An old woman was playing the guitar, playing a jazzy sort of spiritual that had Joe smiling. The old woman was black. She was sitting on the porch, and Larry guessed she was just about the oldest woman he had ever seen in his life. But there was something about her that made him feel good . . . good in the way his mother had made him feel good when she would suddenly hug him and say:
Here's the best boy, here's Alice Underwood’s alltime best boy.

The old woman stopped playing and looked at them.
Well say, I got me some comp’ny. Step out where I can see you good and plain!

So they came closer, the three of them hand in hand, and Joe reached out and set the bald old tire swing into slow pendulum movement as they passed it. The tire’s doughnut-shaped shadow slipped back and forth on the earth. They were in a small clearing; an island in a sea of corn. To the north a dirt road stretched away to a point.

You like to have a swing on this old box o mine?
she asked Joe, and Joe came forward eagerly and took the old guitar from her bunched hands. He began to play the tune they had followed through the corn, but better and faster than the old woman had.