The Stand

  Nick nodded and wrote, "I can take care of myself."

  "Yeah, I believe you can. Still, I'd get someone from town if I thought any of them would--" He broke off as Jane came in.

  "You still jawing this poor boy? You let him go on, now, before my stupid brother comes along and breaks them all out."

  Baker laughed sourly. "He'll be in Tennessee by now, I guess." He whistled out a long sigh that broke up into a series of phlegmy, booming coughs. "I b'lieve I'll go upstairs and lie down, Janey."

  "I'll bring you some aspirin to cut that fever," she said.

  She looked back over her shoulder at Nick as she went to the stairs with her husband. "It was a pleasure meeting you, Nick. Whatever the circumstances. You be just as careful as he says."

  Nick bowed to her, and she dropped half a curtsy in return. He thought he saw a gleam of tears in her eyes.

  A pimply, curious boy in a dirty busboy's jacket brought three dinner trays about half an hour after Nick had gotten down to the jail. Nick motioned for the busboy to put the trays on the cot, and while he did, Nick scribbled: "Is this paid for?"

  The busboy read this with all the concentration of a college freshman tackling Moby-Dick. "Sure," he said. "Sheriff's office runs a tab. Say, can't you talk?"

  Nick shook his head.

  "That's a bitch," the busboy said, and left in a hurry, as if the condition might be catching.

  Nick took the trays in one at a time and pushed each one through the slot in the bottom of the cell door with a broomhandle.

  He looked up in time to catch "--chickshit bastard, ain't he?" from Mike Childress. Smiling, Nick showed him his middle finger.

  "I'll give you the finger, you dummy," Childress said, grinning unpleasantly. "When I get out of here I'll--" Nick turned away, missing the rest.

  Back in the office, sitting in Baker's chair, he drew the memo pad into the center of the blotter, sat thinking for a moment, and then jotted at the top:

  Life History

  By Nick Andros

  He stopped, smiling a little. He had been in some funny places, but never in his wildest dreams had he expected to be sitting in a sheriff's office, deputized, in charge of three men who had beaten him up, and writing his life story. After a moment he began to write again:

  I was born in Caslin, Nebraska, on November 14, 1968. My daddy was an independent farmer. He and my mom were always on the edge of getting squeezed out. They owed three different banks. My mother was six months pregnant with me and my dad was taking her to see the doctor in town when a tie rod on his truck let go and they went into the ditch. My daddy had a heart attack and died.

  Anyway, three months after, my mom had me and I was born the way I am. Sure was a tough break on top of losing her husband that way.

  She carried on with the farm until 1973 and then lost it to the "big operators," as she always called them. She had no family but wrote to some friends in Big Springs, Iowa, and one of them got her a job in a bakery. We lived here until 1977 when she was killed in an accident. A man on a motorcycle hit her while she was crossing the street on her way home from work. It wasn't even his fault but only bad luck as his brakes failed. He wasn't even speeding or anything. The Baptist Church gave my mamma a charity funeral. This same church, the Grace Baptist, sent me to the Children of Jesus Christ orphanage in Des Moines. This is a place that all sorts of churches chip together to support. That was where I learned to read and write...

  He stopped there. His hand was aching from writing so much, but that wasn't why. He felt uneasy, hot and uncomfortable at having to relive all that again. He went back to the jail quarters and looked in. Childress and Warner were asleep. Vince Hogan was standing by the bars, smoking a cigarette and looking across the corridor at the empty cell where Ray Booth would have been tonight if he hadn't run so quick. Hogan looked as if he might have been crying, and that led him back in time to that small mute scrap of humanity, Nick Andros. There was a word he had learned at the movies as a kid. That word was INCOMMUNICADO. It was a word that had always had fantastic, Lovecraftian overtones to Nick, a fearful word that echoed and clanged in the brain, a word that inscribed all the nuances of fear that live only outside the sane universe and inside the human soul. He had been INCOMMUNICADO all his life.

  He sat down and re-read the last line he'd written. That was where I learned to read and write. But it hadn't been as simple as that. He lived in a silent world. Writing was code. Speech was the moving of lips, the rise and fall of teeth, the dance of a tongue. His mother had taught him to read lips, and had taught him how to write his name in struggling, sprawling letters. That's your name, she had said. That's you, Nicky. But of course she had said it silently, meaninglessly. The prime connection had come when she tapped the paper, then tapped his chest. The worst part about being deaf-mute was not living in the silent movie world; the worst part was not knowing the names of things. He had not really begun to understand the concept of naming until he was four. He had not known that you called the tall green things trees until he was six. He had wanted to know, but no one had thought to tell him and he had no way to ask: he was INCOMMUNICADO.

  When she died he had retreated almost all the way. The orphanage was a place of roaring silence where grim-faced thin boys made fun of his silence; two boys would run up to him, one boy with his hands plastered over his mouth, one boy with his hands plastered over his ears. If none of the staff happened to be near, they would punch him out. Why? No reason. Except that maybe in the vast white class of victims there is a subclass: the victims of victims.

  He stopped wanting to communicate, and when that happened the thinking process itself began to rust and disintegrate. He began to wander from place to place vacantly, looking at the nameless things that filled the world. He watched groups of children in the play yard move their lips, raise and lower their teeth like white drawbridges, dance their tongues in the ritual mating of speech. He sometimes found himself looking at a single cloud for as long as an hour at a time.

  Then Rudy had come. A big man with scars on his face and a bald head. Six feet, five inches tall, might as well have been twenty to runty Nick Andros. They met for the first time in a basement room where there was a table, six or seven chairs, and a TV that only worked when it felt like it. Rudy squatted, putting his eyes on approximately the same level as Nick's. Then he took his huge, scarred hands and put them over his mouth, his ears.

  I am a deaf-mute.

  Nick turned his face sullenly away: Who gives a fuck?

  Rudy slapped him.

  Nick fell down. His mouth opened and silent tears began to leak from his eyes. He didn't want to be here with this scarred troll, this bald boogey. He was no deaf-mute, it was a cruel joke.

  Rudy pulled him gently to his feet and led him to the table. A blank sheet of paper was there. Rudy pointed at it, then at Nick. Nick stared sullenly at the paper and then at the bald man. He shook his head. Rudy nodded and pointed at the empty paper again. He produced a pencil and handed it to Nick. Nick put it down as if it were hot. He shook his head. Rudy pointed at the pencil, then at Nick, then at the paper. Nick shook his head. Rudy slapped him again.

  More silent tears. The scarred face looking at him with nothing but deadly patience. Rudy pointed at the paper again. At the pencil. At Nick.

  Nick grasped the pencil in his fist. He wrote the four words that he knew, calling them forth from the cobwebby, rusting mechanism that was in his thinking brain. He wrote:

  Then he broke the pencil in half and looked sullenly and defiantly at Rudy. But Rudy was smiling. Suddenly he reached across the table and held Nick's head steady between his hard, callused palms. His hands were warm, gentle. Nick could not remember the last time he had been touched with such love. His mother had touched him like that.

  Rudy removed his hands from Nick's face. He picked up the half of the pencil with the point on it. He turned the paper over to the blank side. He tapped the empty white space with the tip of the pencil, and then tap
ped Nick. He did it again. And again. And again. And finally Nick understood.

  You are this blank page.

  Nick began to cry.

  Rudy came for the next six years.

  ... where I learned to read and write. A man named Rudy Sparkman came to help me. I was very lucky to have him. In 1984 the orphanage went broke. They placed as many kids that they could, but I was not one of them. They said I would get in with a family after a while and the state would pay them for keeping me. I wanted to go with Rudy but Rudy was in Africa working for the Peace Corps.

  So I ran away. Being sixteen, I don't think they looked for me too hard. I figured if I could stay out of trouble I would be all right, and so far so good. I have been taking the high school correspondence courses one at a time, because Rudy always said education is the most important. When I settle down for a while I'm going to take that high-school equivalency test. I will be able to pass it soon. I like school. Maybe I will go to college someday. I know that sounds crazy, a deaf-mute bum like me, but I don't think it's impossible. Anyway, that's my story.

  Yesterday morning Baker had come in around seven-thirty while Nick was emptying wastebaskets. The sheriff looked better.

  "How you feeling?" Nick wrote.

  "Pretty good. I was burnin up until midnight. Worst fever I've had since I was a kid. Aspirin didn't seem to help it. Janey wanted to call the doc, but around twelve-thirty the fever just broke. I slep like a log after that. How are you doing?"

  Nick made a thumb-and-forefinger circle.

  "How's our guests?"

  Nick opened and closed his mouth several times in a mime jabbering. Looked furious. Made banging gestures on invisible bars.

  Baker threw back his head and laughed, then sneezed several times.

  "You ought to be on TV," he said. "Did you write your life story down like you said you was gonna try to do?"

  Nick nodded and handed the two sheets of longhand over. The sheriff sat down and read them carefully. When he was done he looked at Nick so long and so piercingly that Nick stared down at his feet for a moment, embarrassed and confused.

  When he looked up again Baker said: "You've been on your own since you were sixteen? For six years?"

  Nick nodded.

  "And you've really taken all these high school courses?"

  Nick wrote for some time on one of the memo sheets. "I was way behind because I started to read & write so late. When the orphanage closed I was just starting to catch up. I got six h.s. credits from there and another six since then from La Salle in Chicago. I learned about them from a matchbook cover. I need four more credits."

  "What courses do you still need?" Baker asked, then turned his head and shouted: "Shut up in there! You'll get your hotcakes and coffee when I'm damned good and ready and not before!"

  Nick wrote: "Geometry. Advanced math. Two years of a language. Those are the college requirements."

  "A language. You mean like French? German? Spanish?"

  Nick nodded.

  Baker laughed and shook his head. "Don't that beat all. A deaf-mute learning to talk a foreign language. Nothing against you, boy. You understand that."

  Nick smiled and nodded.

  "So why you been driftin around so much?"

  "While I was still a minor I didn't dare stay in one place for too long," Nick wrote. "Afraid they'd try to stick me in another orphanage or something. When I got old enough to look for a steady job, times got worse. They said the stock-market crashed, or something, but since I'm deaf I didn't hear it (ha-ha)."

  "Most places would have just let you ramble on," Baker said. "In hard times the milk of human kindness don't flow so free, Nick. As for a steady job, I might be able to put you onto something around here, unless those boys soured you on Shoyo and Arkansas for good. But... we ain't all like that."

  Nick nodded to show he understood.

  "How's your teeth? That was quite a shot in the mouth you took."

  Nick shrugged.

  "Take any of those pain pills?"

  Nick held up two fingers.

  "Well, look, I got some paperwork to do on those boys. You go on with what you were doing. We'll talk more later."

  Dr. Soames, the man who had almost hit Nick with his car, came by around 9:30 A.M. the same morning. He was a man of about sixty with shaggy white hair, a scrawny chicken neck, and very sharp blue eyes.

  "Big John tells me you read lips," he said. "He also says he wants to see you gainfully employed, so I guess I better make sure you're not going to die on his hands. Take off your shirt."

  Nick unbuttoned his blue workshirt and took it off.

  "Holy Jesus, lookitim," Baker said.

  "They did a job of work, all right." Soames looked at Nick and said dryly, "Boy, you almost lost your left tit." He pointed to a crescent-shaped scab just above the nipple. Nick's belly and ribcage looked like a Canadian sunrise. Soames poked and prodded him and looked carefully into the pupils of his eyes. At last he examined the shattered remains of Nick's front teeth, the only part of him that really hurt now, in spite of the spectacular bruises.

  "That must hurt like a sonofabitch," he said, and Nick nodded ruefully. "You're gonna lose them," Soames went on. "You--" He sneezed three times in quick succession. "Excuse me."

  He began to put his tools back into his black bag. "The prognosis is favorable, young man, barring strokes of lightning or further trips to Zack's ginmill. Is your speaking problem physical, or does it come from being deaf?"

  Nick wrote: "Physical. Birth defect."

  Soames nodded. "Damn shame. Got to think positive, though, and thank God that He didn't decide to give your brains a stir while He was at it. Put your shirt on."

  Nick did. He liked Soames; in his way, he was very much like Rudy Sparkman, who had told him once that God had given all deaf-mute males an extra two inches below the waist to make up for the little bit He had subtracted from above the collarbones.

  Soames said, "I'll tell em to give you a refill on that pain medication down at the drugstore. Tell moneybags here to pay for it."

  "Ho-ho," John Baker said.

  "He's got more dough stashed away in fruit jars than a hog has warts," Soames went on. He sneezed again, wiped his nose, rummaged around in his bag, and brought out a stethoscope.

  "You want to look out, Gramps, I'll lock you up for drunk and disorderly," Baker said with a smile.

  "Yeah, yeah, yeah," Soames said. "You'll open your mouth too wide one day and fall right in. Take off y'shirt, John, and let's see if your boobs are as big as they used to be."

  "Take off my shirt? Why?"

  "Because your wife wants me to look at you, that's why. She thinks you're a sick man and she doesn't want you to get any sicker, God knows why. Ain't I told her enough times that she and I wouldn't have to sneak around anymore if you were underground? Come on, Johnny. Show us some skin."

  "It was just a cold," Baker said, reluctantly unbuttoning his shirt. "I feel fine this morning. Honest to God, Ambrose, you sound worse'n I do."

  "You don't tell the doctor, the doctor tells you." As Baker pulled his shirt off, Soames turned to Nick and said, "But you know it's funny how a cold will just start making the rounds. Mrs. Lathrop is down sick, and the whole Richie family, and most of those no-accounts out on the Barker Road are coughing their brains out. Even Billy Warner in there's hacking away."

  Baker had wormed out of his undershirt.

  "There, what'd I tell you?" Soames asked. "Ain't he got a set of knockers on him? Even an old shit like me could get horny looking at that."

  Baker gasped as the stethoscope touched his chest. "Jesus, that's cold! What do you do, keep it in a deep freeze?"

  "Breathe in," Soames said, frowning. "Now let it out."

  Baker's exhale turned into a weak cough.

  Soames kept at the sheriff for a long time. Front and back both. At last he put away his stethoscope and used a tongue depressor to look down Baker's throat. Finished, he broke it in two and tossed i
t into the wastebasket.

  "Well?" Baker said.

  Soames pressed the fingers of his right hand into the flesh of Baker's neck under the jaw. Baker winced away from it.

  "I don't have to ask if that hurt," Soames said. "John, you go home and go to bed and that isn't advice, that's an order."

  The sheriff blinked. "Ambrose," he said quietly, "come on. You know I can't do that. I've got three prisoners who have to go up to Camden this afternoon. I left this kid with them last night, but I had no business doing it, and I won't do it again. He's mute. I wouldn't have agreed to it last night if I had been thinking right."

  "You never mind them, John. You got problems of your own. It's some kind of respiratory infection, a damn good one by the sound, and a fever to go with it. Your pipes are sick, Johnny, and to be perfectly frank, that's no joke for a man who's carrying around the extra meat you are. Go to bed. If you still feel okay tomorrow morning, get rid of them then. Better still, call the State Patrol to come down and get them."

  Baker looked apologetically at Nick. "You know," he said, "I do feel kind of dragged out. Maybe some rest--"

  "Go home and lie down," Nick wrote. "I'll be careful. Besides, I have to earn enough to pay for those pills."

  "Nobody works so hard for you as a junkie," Soames said, and cackled.

  Baker picked up the two sheets of paper with Nick's background on them. "Could I take these home for Janey to read? She took a real shine to you, Nick."

  Nick scrawled on the pad, "Sure can. She's very nice."

  "One of a kind," Baker said, and sighed as he buttoned his shirt back up. "This fever's comin on strong again. Thought I had it licked."

  "Take aspirin," Soames said, latching his bag. "It's that glandular infection I don't like."

  "There's a cigar box in the bottom desk drawer," Baker said. "Petty cash fund. You can go out for lunch and get your medication on the way. Those boys are more dildoes than desperadoes. They'll be okay. Just leave a voucher for how much money you take. I'll get in touch with the State Police and you'll be shut of them by late this afternoon."

  Nick made a thumb-and-forefinger circle.

  "I've been trusting you a lot on short notice," Baker said soberly, "but Janey says it's all right. You have a care."