The Stand

  It came down to what was important. And what was important wasn't the fact of the disease; it wasn't the fact that Atlanta's integrity had somehow been breached and they were going to have to switch the whole preventative operation to much less satisfactory facilities in Stovington, Vermont; it wasn't the fact that Blue spread in such sneaky common-cold disguise.

  "What is important--"

  "Say again, Blue Base One," the voice said anxiously. "We did not copy."

  What was important was that a regrettable incident had occurred. Starkey flashed back in time twenty-two years to 1968. He had been in the officers' club in San Diego when the news came about Calley and what had happened at Mei Lai Four. Starkey had been playing poker with four other men, two of whom now sat on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The poker game had been forgotten, utterly forgotten, in a discussion of exactly what this was going to do to the military--not any one branch but the entire military--in the witch-hunt atmosphere of Washington's fourth estate. And one of their number, a man who could now dial directly to the miserable worm who had been masquerading as a Chief Executive since January 20, 1989, had laid his cards carefully down on the green felt table and he had said: Gentlemen, a regrettable incident has occurred. And when a regrettable incident occurs which involves any branch of the United States Military, we don't question the roots of that incident but rather how the branches may best be pruned. The service is mother and father to us. And if you find your mother raped or your father beaten and robbed, before you call the police or begin an investigation, you cover their nakedness. Because you love them.

  Starkey had never heard anyone talk so well before or since.

  Now he unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk and fumbled out a thin blue folder bound with red tape. The legend written on the cover read: IF TAPE IS BROKEN NOTIFY ALL SECURITY DIVISIONS AT ONCE. Starkey broke the tape.

  "Are you there, Blue Base One?" the voice was asking. "We do not copy you. Repeat, do not copy."

  "I'm here, Lion," Starkey said. He had flipped to the last page of the book and now ran his finger down a column labeled EXTREME COVERT COUNTERMEASURES.

  "Lion, do you read?"

  "We read five-by, Blue Base One."

  "Troy," Starkey said deliberately. "I repeat, Lion: Troy. Repeat back, please. Over to you."

  Silence. A faraway mumble of static. Starkey was fleetingly reminded of the walkie-talkies they made as kids, two tin Del Monte cans and twenty yards of waxed string.

  "I say again--"

  "Oh Jesus!" a very young voice in Sipe Springs gulped.

  "Repeat back, son," Starkey said.

  "T-Troy," the voice said. Then, more strongly: "Troy."

  "Very good," Starkey said calmly. "God bless you, son. Over and out."

  "And you, sir. Over and out."

  A click, followed by heavy static, followed by another click, silence, and Len Creighton's voice. "Billy?"

  "Yes, Len."

  "I copied the whole thing."

  "That's fine, Len," Starkey said tiredly. "You make your report as you see fit. Of course."

  "You don't understand, Billy," Len said. "You did the right thing. Don't you think I know that?"

  Starkey let his eyes slip closed. For a moment all the sweet downers deserted him. "God bless you, too, Len," he said, and his voice was close to breaking. He switched off and went back to stand in front of monitor 2. He put his hands behind his back like a Black Jack Pershing reviewing troops. He regarded Frank D. Bruce and his final resting place. In a little while he felt calm again.

  Going southeast out of Sipe Springs, if you get on US 36, you are headed in the general direction of Houston, a day's drive away. The car burning up the road was a three-year-old Pontiac Bonneville, doing eighty, and when it came over the rise and saw the nondescript Ford blocking the road, there was nearly an accident.

  The driver, a thirty-six-year-old stringer for a large Houston daily, tromped on the power brake and the tires began to screech, the Pontiac's nose first dipping down toward the road and then beginning to break to the left.

  "Holy Gawd!" the photographer in the shotgun seat cried. He dropped his camera to the floor and began to scramble his seat belt across his middle.

  The driver let up on the brake, skirted the Ford on the shoulder, and then felt his left wheels start to drag in the soft dirt. He matted the gas pedal and the Bonneville responded with more traction, dragging back onto the blacktop. Blue smoke squirted from beneath the tires. The radio blared on and on:

  "Baby, can you dig your man,

  He's a righteous man,

  Baby, can you dig your man?"

  He tromped the brake again, and the Bonneville slued to a stop in the middle of the hot and deserted afternoon. He drew in a ragged, terrified breath and then coughed it out in a series of bursts. He began to be angry. He threw the Pontiac into reverse and backed toward the Ford and the two men standing behind it.

  "Listen," the photographer said nervously. He was fat and hadn't been in a fight since the ninth grade. "Listen, maybe we just better--"

  He was thrown forward with a grunt as the stringer brought the Pontiac to another screeching halt, threw the transmission lever into park with one hard thrust of his hand, and got out.

  He began to walk toward the two young men behind the Ford, his hands doubled into fists.

  "All right, motherfuckers!" he shouted. "You almost got us fucking killed and I want--"

  He had been in the service, four years in the army. Volunteer. He had just time to identify the rifles as the new M-3A's when they brought them up from below the rear deck of the Ford. He stood shocked in the hot Texas sunshine and made water in his pants.

  He began to scream and in his mind he was turning to run back to the Bonneville but his feet never moved. They opened up on him, and slugs blew out his chest and groin. As he dropped to his knees, holding both hands out mutely for mercy, a slug struck him an inch over his left eye and tore off the top of his head.

  The photographer, who had been twisted over the back seat, found it impossible to comprehend exactly what had happened until the two young men stepped over the stringer's body and began to walk toward him, rifles raised.

  He slid across the Pontiac's seat, warm bubbles of saliva collecting at the corners of his mouth. The keys were still in the ignition. He turned the car on and screamed out just as they began shooting. He felt the car lurch to the right as if a giant had kicked the left rear, and the wheel began to shimmy wildly in his hands. The photographer bounced up and down as the Bonneville pogoed up the road on the flat tire. A second later the giant kicked the other side of the car. The shimmy got worse. Sparks flew off the blacktop. The photographer was whining. The Pontiac's rear tires shimmied and flapped like black rags. The two young men ran back to their Ford, whose serial number was listed among the multitude in the Army Vehicles division at the Pentagon, and one of them drove it around in a tight, swaying circle. The nose bounced wildly as it came off the shoulder and drove over the body of the stringer. The sergeant in the passenger seat sprayed a startled sneeze onto the windshield.

  Ahead of them, the Pontiac washing-machined along on its two flat rear tires, the nose bouncing up and down. Behind the wheel the fat photographer had begun to weep at the sight of the dark Ford growing in the rear-view mirror. He had the accelerator pressed to the floor but the Pontiac would do no more than forty and it was all over the road. On the radio Larry Underwood had been replaced by Madonna. Madonna was asserting that she was a material girl.

  The Ford swung around the Bonneville and for one second of crystal hope the photographer thought it was going to keep right on going, to just disappear over the desolate horizon and let him alone.

  Then it pulled back in, and the Pontiac's wildly jittering nose caught its mudguard. There was a scream of pulling metal. The photographer's head flew forward into the wheel and blood sprayed from his nose.

  Throwing terrified, creaky-necked glances back over his shoulder, he slid acr
oss the warm plastic seat as if it were grease and got out on the passenger's side. He ran down the shoulder. There was a barbed wire fence and he leaped over it, sailing up and up like a blimp, and he thought: I'm going to make it, I can run forever--

  He fell down on the other side with his leg caught in the barbs. Screaming at the sky, he was still trying to free his pants and dimpled white flesh when the two young men came down the shoulder with their guns in their hands.

  Why, he tried to ask them, but all that came out of him was a low and helpless squawk and then his brains exited the back of his head.

  There was no published report of disease or any other trouble in Sipe Springs, Texas, that day.

  CHAPTER 18

  Nick opened the door between Sheriff Baker's office and the jail cells and they started razzing him right off. Vincent Hogan and Billy Warner were in the two Saltine-box cells on Nick's left. Mike Childress was in one of the two on the right. The other was empty and it was empty because Ray Booth, he of the purple LSU fraternity ring, had flown the coop.

  "Hey, dummy!" Childress called. "Hey, you fuckin dummy! What's gonna happen to you when we get outta here? Huh? What the fuck's gonna happen to you?"

  "I'm personally gonna rip your balls off and stuff em down your throat until you strangle on em," Billy Warner told him. "You understand me?"

  Only Vince Hogan didn't participate in the razzing. Mike and Billy didn't have too much use for him on this day, June 23, when they were to be taken up to the Calhoun County seat and jugged pending trial. Sheriff Baker had leaned on Vince and Vince had spilled his yellow guts. Baker had told Nick he could get an indictment against these ole boys, but when it got to a jury trial, it was going to be Nick's word against these three--four, if they picked up Ray Booth.

  Nick had gained a healthy respect for Sheriff John Baker these last couple of days. He was a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound ex-farmer who was predictably called Big Bad John by his constituents. The respect Nick felt for him was not because Baker had given him this job swamping out the holding area to make up for his lost week's pay, but because he had gone after the men who had beaten and robbed Nick. He had done it as if Nick were a member of one of the oldest and most respected families in town instead of just a deaf-mute drifter. There were plenty of sheriffs here in the border South, Nick knew, who would have seen him on a workfarm or roadgang for six months instead.

  They had driven out to the sawmill where Vince Hogan worked, taking Baker's private car, a Power Wagon, instead of the county prowler car. There was a shotgun under the dash ("Always locked up and always loaded," Baker said) and a bubble light Baker put on the dash when he was on police business. He put it up there when they swung into the lumberyard parking area, two days ago now.

  Baker had hawked, spat out the window, blew his nose, and dabbed at his red eyes with a handkerchief. His voice had acquired a nasal foghorn quality. Nick couldn't hear it, of course, but he didn't need to. It was clear enough that the man had a nasty cold.

  "Now, when we see him, I'll grab him by the arm," Baker said. "I'll ask you, 'Is this one of em?' You give me a big nod yes. I don't care if it was or not. You just nod. Get it?"

  Nick nodded. He got it.

  Vince was working the board planer, feeding rough planks into the machine, standing in sawdust almost to the top of his workboots. He gave John Baker a nervous smile, and his eyes flicked uneasily to Nick standing beside the sheriff. Nick's face was thin and battered and still too pale.

  "Hi, Big John, what you doin out with the workin folk?"

  The other men in the crew were watching all this, their eyes shifting gravely from Nick to Vince to Baker and then back the other way like men watching some complicated new version of tennis. One of them spat a stream of Honey Cut into the fresh sawdust and wiped off his chin with the heel of his hand.

  Baker grabbed Vince Hogan by one flabby, sunburned arm and pulled him forward.

  "Hey! What's the idea, Big John?"

  Baker turned his head so Nick could see his lips. "Is this one of em?"

  Nick nodded firmly, and pointed at Vince for good measure.

  "What is this?" Vince protested again. "I don't know this dummy from Adam."

  "Then how come you know he's a dummy? Come on, Vince, you're going to the cooler. Toot-sweet. You can send one of these boys to get your toothbrush."

  Protesting, Vince was led to the Power Wagon and deposited inside. Protesting, he was taken back to town. Protesting, he was locked up and left to stew for a couple of hours. Baker didn't bother with reading him his rights. "Damn fool'd just get confused," he told Nick. When Baker went back around noon, Vince was too hungry and too scared to do any more protesting. He just spilled everything.

  Mike Childress was in the jug by one o'clock, and Baker got Billy Warner at his house just as Billy was packing up his old Chrysler to go someplace--a long piece from the look of all the packed liquor-store boxes and strapped-together luggage. But somebody had talked to Ray Booth, and Ray had been just smart enough to move a little quicker.

  Baker took Nick home to meet his wife and have some supper. In the car Nick wrote on the memo pad: "I am sure sorry it's her brother. How is she taking it?"

  "She's bearing up," Baker said, both his voice and the set of his body almost formal. "I guess she's done some crying over him, but she knew what he was. And she knows you can't pick your relatives like you do your friends."

  Jane Baker was a small, pretty woman who had indeed been crying. Looking at her deeply socketed eyes made Nick uncomfortable. But she shook his hand warmly and said, "I'm pleased to know you, Nick. And I apologize deeply for your trouble. I feel responsible, with one of mine being a part of it and all."

  Nick shook his head and shuffled his feet awkwardly.

  "I offered him a job around the place," Baker said. "Station's gone right to hell since Bradley moved up to Little Rock. Painting and picking up, mostly. He's gonna have to stick around for a while anyway--for the... you know."

  "The trial, yes," she said.

  There was a moment then in which the silence was so heavy even Nick found it painful.

  Then, with forced gaiety, she said, "I hope you eat redeye ham, Nick. That's what there is, along with some corn and a big bowl of slaw. My slaw's never been up to what his mother used to make. That's what he says, anyway."

  Nick rubbed his stomach and smiled.

  Over dessert (a strawberry shortcake--Nick, who had been on short rations during the last couple of weeks, had two helpings), Jane Baker said to her husband: "Your cold sounds worse. You've been taking too much on, John Baker. And you didn't eat enough to keep a fly alive."

  Baker looked guiltily at his plate for a moment, then shrugged. "I can afford to miss a meal now and then," he said, and palpated his double chin.

  Nick, watching them, wondered how two people of such radically different size got along in bed. I guess they manage, he thought with an interior grin. They sure look comfortable enough with each other. And not that it's any of my business anyway.

  "You're flushed, too. You carrying a fever?"

  Baker shrugged. "Nope... well. Maybe a touch."

  "Well, you're not going out again tonight. That's final."

  "My dear, I have prisoners. If they don't specially need to be watched, they do need to be fed and watered."

  "Nick can do it," she said with finality. "You're going to bed. And don't go on about your insomnia; it won't do you any good."

  "I can't send Nick," he said weakly. "He's a deaf-mute. Besides, he ain't a deputy."

  "Well then, you just up and deputize him."

  "He ain't a resident!"

  "I won't tell if you won't," Jane Baker said inexorably. She stood up and began clearing the table. "Now you just go on and do it, John."

  And that was how Nick Andros went from Shoyo prisoner to Shoyo deputy in less than twenty-four hours. As he was preparing to go up to the sheriffs office, Baker came into the downstairs hall, looking large and ghostly i
n a frayed bathrobe. He seemed embarrassed to be on view in such attire.

  "I never should have let her talk me into this," he said. "Wouldn't have done, either, if I didn't feel so punk. My chest's all clogged up and I'm as hot as a fire sale two days before Christmas. Weak, too."

  Nick nodded sympathetically.

  "I'm stuck between deputies. Bradley Caide and his wife went up to Little Rock after their baby passed away. One of those crib deaths. Awful thing. I don't blame them for going."

  Nick pointed at his own chest and made a circle with his thumb and forefinger.

  "Sure, you'll be okay. You just take normal care, you hear? There's a .45 in the third drawer of my desk, but don't you be takin it back there. Nor the keys either. Understand?"

  Nick nodded.

  "If you go back there, stay out of their reach. If any of em tries playin sick, don't you fall for it. It's the oldest dodge in the world. If one of em should get sick, Doc Soames can see them just as easy in the morning. I'll be in then."

  Nick took his pad from his pocket and wrote: "I appreciate you trusting me. Thanks for locking them up & thanks for the job."

  Baker read this carefully. "You're a puredee caution, boy. Where you from? How come you're out on your own like this?"

  "That's a long story," Nick jotted. "I'll write some of it down for you tonight, if you want."

  "You do that," Baker said. "I guess you know I put your name on the wire."

  Nick nodded. It was SOP. But he was clean.

  "I'll get Jane to call Ma's Truck Stop out by the highway. Those boys'll be hollering police brutality if they don't get their supper."

  Nick wrote: "Have her tell whoever brings it to come right in. I can't hear him if he knocks."

  "Okay." Baker hesitated a moment longer. "You got your cot in the corner. It's hard, but it's clean. You just remember to be careful, Nick. You can't call for help if there's trouble."