The Stand, Page 56

  In a heart. With an arrow.

  I believe, Sergeant, that the bloke must have been in love.

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

  The cycle 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 candy wrapper near one of the wastebaskets. A chocolate Payday. It looked as if someone--lovesick Harold Lauder probably--had finished his candy bar while deciding which bikes he and his inamorata 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 eyeing 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 to get going until tomorrow."

  "But there's three hours of daylight left! We can't just sit around! We might miss them!"

  "If we miss them, that's that," he said. "Harold Lauder left instructions once, right down to the roads they were going to take. If they move on, he'll probably do it again."

  "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."

  "I can ride a bike, though. 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.

  "I'm 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. Maybe he had come out the other side, but some of the old childish Larry had come out with him, tagging along at his heels like a shadow which has shrunk in the noonday sun but has not entirely disappeared.

  "They're heavier," he said. "If you overbalance, you can't get rebalanced as easily as you can with a bicycle. 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 handbrake, 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 with me. 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. "Her name was Rita. Rita Blakemoor. I'd like to do better by you, that's all. You and Joe."

  "Larry, why didn't you tell me before?"

  "Because it hurts to talk about it," 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 was 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 the two small bikes Larry had picked out gassed up. The dealership had a pump, but without electricity it wouldn't run. He found another candy wrapper by the plate covering the underground tank and deduced that it had recently been pried up by the ever-resourceful Harold Lauder. Lovesick or no, 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 side of the dealership. There he found a large steel wastecan. Leaning against it was a crowbar and curling over the top was a piece of rubber tubing.

  I've found you again, Harold! Take a look at this, Sergeant Briggs. Our man siphoned some gas from the underground tank to get going. I'm surprised he didn't take his hose with him.

  Perhaps he cut off a piece and that's what's left, Inspector Underwood --begging your pardon, but it is in the wastecan.

  By jove, Sergeant, you're right. I'm going to write you up for a promotion.

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

  "Joe, can you come here for a minute and help me?"

  The boy looked up from the cheese and crackers he was eating and gazed distrustfully at Larry.

  "Go on, now, that's all right," Nadine said quietly.

  Joe came over, his feet dragging a little.

  Larry slipped the crowbar into the plate's slot. "Throw your weight on that and let's see if we can get it up," he said.

  For a moment he thought the boy either didn't understand him or didn't want to do it. Then he grasped the far end of the crowbar and pushed on it. His arms were thin but belted with a scrawny sort of muscle, the kind of muscle that working men from poor families always seem to have. The plate tilted a little but didn't come up enough for Larry to get his fingers under.

  "Lay over 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 as his whole weight was thrown onto the lever.

  The plate came up a little farther than before, enough so that Larry could squirm his fingers under it. While he was struggling for purchase he happened to think that if the boy still didn't like him, this was the best chance he could have to show it. If Joe took his weight off the crowbar the plate would come down with a crash and he'd lose everything on his hands but the thumbs. Nadine had realized this, Larry saw. She had been peering at one of the bikes but now had turned to watch, her body angled into
a posture of tension. Her dark eyes went from Larry, down on one knee, to Joe, who was watching Larry as he leaned his weight on the bar. Those seawater eyes were inscrutable. And still Larry couldn't find purchase.

  "Need help?" Nadine asked, her normally calm voice now just a little highpitched.

  Sweat ran into one eye and he blinked it away. Still no joy. 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 it and the plate came up and crashed over on the tarmac with a dull clang. He heard Nadine sigh, and the crowbar fall to the pavement. He wiped his perspiring brow and looked back at the boy.

  "That's good work, Joe," he said. "If you'd let that thing slip, I would've spent the rest of my life zipping my fly with my teeth. Thank you."

  He expected no response (except perhaps an uninterpretable hoot as Joe walked back to inspect the motorcycles again), but Joe said in a rusty, struggling voice: "Week-come."

  Larry flashed a glance at Nadine, who stared back at him and then at Joe. Her face was surprised and pleased, yet somehow she looked--he couldn't have said just how--as if she had expected this. It was an expression he had seen before, but not one he could put his finger on right away.

  "Joe," he said, "did you say 'welcome'?"

  Joe nodded vigorously. "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 began to peer at the bikes again, hooting and chuckling to himself.

  "He can talk," Larry said.

  "I knew he wasn't mute," Nadine answered. "But it's wonderful to know he can recover. I think he needed two of us. Two halves. He ... oh, I don't know."

  He saw that she was blushing and thought he knew why. He began to slip the length of rubber hose into the hole in the cement, and suddenly realized that what he was doing could easily be interpreted as a symbolic (and rather crude) bit of dumbshow. He looked up at her, sharply. She turned away quickly, but not before he had seen how intently she was watching what he was doing, and the high color in her cheeks.

  The nasty fear rose in his chest and he called: "For Chrissake, Nadine, look out!" She was concentrating on the hand controls, not looking where she was going, and she was going to drive the Honda 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. Then she swerved, much too sharply, and fell off the bike. The Honda stalled.

  He ran to her, his heart in his throat. "Are you all right? Nadine? Are you--"

  Then she was picking herself up shakily, looking at her scraped hands. "Yes, I'm fine. Stupid me, not looking where I was going. Did I hurt the motorcycle?"

  "Never mind the goddam motorcycle, let me take a look at your hands."

  She held them out and he took a plastic bottle of Bactine from his pants pocket and sprayed them.

  "You're shaking," she said.

  "Never mind that either," Larry answered, more roughly than he had intended. "Listen, maybe we had better just stick to the bicycles. This is dangerous--"

  "So is breathing," she answered calmly. "And I think Joe should ride with you, at least at first."

  "He won't--"

  "I think he will," Nadine said, looking into his face. "And so do you."

  "Well, let's stop for tonight. It's almost too dark to see."

  "Once more. Haven't I read that if your horse throws you, you should get right back on?"

  Joe strolled by, munching blueberries from a motorcycle helmet. He had found a number of wild blueberry bushes behind the dealership and had been picking them while Nadine had her first lesson.

  "I guess so," Larry said, defeated. "But will you please watch where you're going?"

  "Yes, sir. Right, sir." She saluted and then smiled at him. She had a beautiful slow smile that lit up her whole face. Larry smiled back; there was nothing else to do. When Nadine smiled, even Joe smiled back.

  This time she putted around the lot twice and then turned out into the road, swinging over too sharply, bringing Larry's heart into his mouth again. But she brought her foot down smartly as he had shown her, and went up the hill and out of sight. He saw her switch carefully up to second gear, and heard her switch to third as she dropped behind the first rise. Then the bike's engine faded to a drone that melted away to nothing. He stood anxiously in the twilight, absently slapping at an occasional mosquito.

  Joe strolled by again, his mouth blue. "Week-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, debating whether or not to take Joe with him, when the droning hum came to his ears again and swelled to the sound of the Honda's engine, clocking smoothly along in fourth. He relaxed ... a little. Dismally he realized he would never be able to relax completely while she was riding that thing.

  She came back into sight, the cycle's headlamp now on, and pulled up beside him.

  "Pretty good, huh?" She switched off.

  "I was getting ready to come after you. I thought you'd had an accident."

  "I sort of did." She saw the way he stiffened and added, "I went too slow turning around and forgot to push the clutch in. I stalled."

  "Oh. Enough for tonight, huh?"

  "Yes," she said. "My tailbone hurts."

  He lay in his blankets that night wondering if she might come to him when Joe was asleep, or if he should go to her. He wanted her and thought, from the way she had looked at the absurd little pantomime with the rubber hose earlier, that she wanted him. At last he fell asleep.

  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. So 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, a jazzy sort of spiritual that had Joe smiling. The old woman was black, and 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 once made him feel good when he was very little and she would suddenly hug him and say, Here's the best boy, here's Alice Underwood's all-time best boy.

  The old woman stopped playing and looked up at them.

  Well say, I got me comp'ny. Step on out where I can see you, my peepers ain't what they once was.

  So they came closer, the three of them hand in hand, and Joe reached out and set a bald old tire swing to slow pendulum movement as they passed it. The tire's doughnut-shaped shadow slipped back and forth on the weedy ground. 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 gnarled hands. He began to play the tune they had followed through the corn, but better and faster than the old woman.

  Bless im, he plays good. Me, I'm too old. Cain't make my fingers go that fast now. It's the rheumatiz. But in 1902 I played at the County Hall. I was the first Negro to ever play there, the very first.

  Nadine asked who she was. They were in a kind of forever place where the sun seemed to stand still one hour from darkness and the shadow of the swing Joe had set in motion would always travel back and forth across the weedy yard. Larry wished he could stay here forever, he and his family. This was a good place. The man with no face could never
get him here, or Joe, or Nadine.

  Mother Abagail is what they call me. I'm the oldest woman in eastern Nebraska, I guess, and I still make my own biscuits. You come see me as quick as you can. We got to go before he gets wind of us.

  A cloud came over the sun. The swing's arc had decreased to nothing. Joe stopped playing with a jangling rattle of strings, and Larry felt the hackles rise on the back of his neck. The old woman seemed not to notice.

  Before who gets wind of us? Nadine asked, and Larry wished he could speak, cry out for her to take the question back before it could leap free and hurt them.

  That black man. That servant of the devil. We got the Rockies between us n him, praise God, but they won't keep him back. That's why we got to knit together. In Colorado. God come to me in a dream and showed me where. But we got to be quick, quick as we can, anyway. So you come see me. There's others coming, too.

  No, Nadine said in a cold and fearful voice. We're going to Vermont, that's all. Only to Vermont--just a short trip.

  Your trip will be longer than ours, if'n you don't fight off his power, the old woman in Larry's dream replied. She was looking at Nadine with great sadness. This could be a good man you got here, woman. He wants to make something out of himself. Why don't you cleave to him instead of using him?

  No! We're going to Vermont, to VERMONT!

  The old woman looked at Nadine pityingly. You'll go straight to hell if you don't watch close, daughter of Eve. And when you get there, you are gonna find that hell is cold.

  The dream broke up then, splitting into cracks of darkness that swallowed him. But something in that darkness was stalking him. It was cold and merciless, and soon he would see its grinning teeth.

  But before that could happen he was awake. It was half an hour after dawn, and the world was swaddled in a thick white ground fog that would burn off when the sun got up a little more. Now the motorcycle dealership rose out of it like some strange ship's prow constructed of cinderblock instead of wood.