The Stand, Page 20

  After that there wasn't much for them to do except get on each other's nerves. She marveled how much poorer the TV reception was in the bedroom and he had to bite back an acid comment to the effect that poor reception was better than no reception at all. Finally he said he might go out and see some of the city.

  "That's a good idea," she said with obvious relief. "I'm going to take a nap. You're a good boy, Larry."

  So he had gone down the narrow stairs (the elevator was still broken) and onto the street, feeling guilty relief. The day was his, and he still had some cash in his pocket.

  But now, in Times Square, he didn't feel so cheerful. He wandered along, his wallet long since transferred to a front pocket. He paused in front of a discount record store, transfixed by the sound of his own voice coming from the battered overhead speakers. The bridge verse.

  "I didn't come to ask you to stay all night

  Or to find out if you've seen the light

  I didn't come to make a fuss or pick a fight

  I just want you to tell me if you think you can

  Baby, can you dig your man?

  Dig him, baby--

  Baby, can you dig your man?"

  That's me, he thought, looking vacantly in at the albums, but today the sound depressed him. Worse, it made him homesick. He didn't want to be here under this gray washtub sky, smelling New York exhaust, one hand constantly playing pocket pool with his wallet to make sure it was still there. New York, thy name is paranoia. Suddenly where he wanted to be was in a West Coast recording studio, making a new album.

  Larry quickened his step and turned in at an arcade. Bells and buzzers jangled in his ears; there was the amplified, ripping growl of a Deathrace 2000 game, complete with the unearthly, electronic screams of the dying pedestrians. Neat game, Larry thought, soon to be followed by Dachau 2000. They'll love that one. He went to the change booth and got ten dollars in quarters. There was a working phone kiosk next to the Beef 'n Brew across the street and he direct-dialed Jane's Place from memory. Jane's was a poker parlor where Wayne Stukey sometimes hung out.

  Larry plugged quarters into the slot until his hand ached, and the phone began to ring three thousand miles away.

  A female voice said, "Jane's. We're open."

  "To anything?" he asked, low and sexy.

  "Listen, wise guy, this isn't... hey, is this Larry?"

  "Yeah, it's me. Hi, Arlene."

  "Where are you? Nobody's seen you, Larry."

  "Well, I'm on the East Coast," he said cautiously. "Somebody told me there were bloodsuckers on me and I ought to get out of the pool until they dropped off."

  "Something about a big party?"

  "Yeah."

  "I heard about that, " she said. "Big spender."

  "Is Wayne around, Arlene?"

  "You mean Wayne Stukey?"

  "I don't mean John Wayne--he's dead."

  "You mean you haven't heard?"

  "What would I hear? I'm on the other coast. Hey, he's okay, isn't he?"

  "He's in the hospital with this flu bug. Captain Trips, they're calling it out here. Not that it's any laughing matter. A lot of people have died with it, they say. People are scared, staying in. We've got six empty tables, and you know Jane's never has empty tables."

  "How is he?"

  "Who knows? They've got wards and wards of people and none of them can have visitors. It's spooky, Larry. And there are a lot of soldiers around."

  "On leave?"

  "Soldiers on leave don't carry guns or ride around in convoy trucks. A lot of people are really scared. You're well off out where you are."

  "Hasn't been anything on the news."

  "Out here there's been a few things in the papers about getting flu boosters, that's all. But some people are saying the army got careless with one of those little plague jars. Isn't that creepy?"

  "It's just scare talk."

  "There's nothing like it where you are?"

  "No," he said, and then thought of his mother's cold. And hadn't there been a lot of sneezing and hacking going on in the subway? He remembered thinking it sounded like a TB ward. But there were plenty of sneezes and runny noses to go around in any city. Cold germs are gregarious, he thought. They like to share the wealth.

  "Janey herself isn't in," Arlene was saying. "She's got a fever and swollen glands, she said. I thought that old whore was too tough to get sick."

  "Three minutes are up, signal when through," the operator broke in.

  Larry said: "Well, I'll be coming back in a week or so, Arlene. We'll get together."

  "Fine by me. I always wanted to go out with a famous recording star."

  "Arlene? You don't by any chance know a guy named Dewey the Deck, do you?"

  "Oh!" she said in a very startled way. "Oh wow! Larry!"

  "What?"

  "Thank God you didn't hang up! I did see Wayne, just about two days before he went into the hospital. I forgot all about it! Oh, gee!"

  "Well, what is it?"

  "It's an envelope. He said it was for you, but he asked me to keep it in my cash drawer for a week or so, or give it to you if I saw you. He said something like 'He's goddam lucky Dewey the Deck isn't collecting it instead of him.' "

  "What's in it?" He switched the phone from one hand to the other.

  "Just a minute. I'll see." There was a moment of silence, then ripping paper. Arlene said, "It's a savings account book. First Commercial Bank of California. There's a balance of ... wow! Just over thirteen thousand dollars. If you ask me to go somewhere dutch, I'll brain you."

  "You won't have to," he said, grinning. "Thanks, Arlene. Hang on to that for me, now."

  "No, I'll throw it down a storm-drain. Asshole."

  "It's so good to be loved."

  She sighed. "You're too much, Larry. I'll put it in an envelope with both our names on it. Then you can't duck me when you come in."

  "I wouldn't do that, sugar."

  They hung up and then the operator was there, demanding three more dollars for Ma Bell. Larry, still feeling the wide and foolish grin on his face, plugged it willingly into the slot.

  He looked at the change still scattered on the phone booth's shelf, picked out a quarter, and dropped it into the slot. A moment later his mother's phone was ringing. Your first impulse is to share good news, your second is to club someone with it. He thought--no, he believed--that this was entirely the former. He wanted to relieve both of them with the news that he was solvent again.

  The smile faded off his lips little by little. The phone was only ringing. Maybe she had decided to go in to work after all. He thought of her flushed, feverish face, and of her coughing and sneezing and saying "Shit!" impatiently into her handkerchief. He didn't think she would have gone in. The truth was, he didn't think she was strong enough to go in.

  He hung up and absently removed his quarter from the slot when it clicked back. He went out, jingling the change in his hand. When he saw a cab he hailed it, and as the cab pulled back into the flow of traffic it began to spatter rain.

  The door was locked and after knocking two or three times he was sure the apartment was empty. He had rapped loud enough to make someone on the floor above rap back, like an exasperated ghost. But he would have to go in and make sure, and he didn't have a key. He turned to go down the stairs to Mr. Freeman's apartment, and that was when he heard the low groan from behind the door.

  There were three different locks on his mother's door, but she was indifferent about using them all in spite of her obsession with the Puerto Ricans. Larry hit the door with his shoulder and it rattled loudly in its frame. He hit it again and the lock gave. The door swung back and banged off the wall.

  "Mom?"

  That groan again.

  The apartment was dim; the day had grown dark very suddenly, and now there was thick thunder and the sound of rain had swelled. The living room window was half open, the white curtains bellying out over the table, then being sucked back through the opening and into the airshaft
beyond. There was a glistening wet patch on the floor where the rain had come in.

  "Mom, where are you?"

  A louder groan. He went through into the kitchen, and thunder rumbled again. He almost tripped over her. She was lying on the floor, half in and half out of her bedroom.

  "Mom! Jesus, Mom!"

  She tried to roll over at the sound of his voice, but only her head would move, pivoting on the chin, coming to rest on the left cheek. Her breathing was stertorous and clogged with phlegm. But the worst thing, the thing he never forgot, was the way her visible eye rolled up to look at him, like the eye of a hog in a slaughtering pen. Her face was bright with fever.

  "Larry?"

  "Going to put you on your bed, Mom."

  He bent, locking his knees fiercely against the trembling that wanted to start up in them, and got her in his arms. Her housecoat fell open, revealing a wash-faded nightgown and fishbelly-white legs sewn with puffy varicose veins. Her heat was immense. That terrified him. No one could remain so hot and live. Her brains must be frying in her head.

  As if to prove this, she said querulously: "Larry, go get your father. He's in the bar."

  "Be quiet," he said, distraught. "Just be quiet and go to sleep, Mom."

  "He's in the bar with that photographer!" she said shrilly into the palpable afternoon darkness, and thunder cracked viciously outside. Larry's body felt as if it was coated with slowly running slime. A cool breeze was moving through the apartment, coming from the half-open window in the living room. As if in response to it, Alice began to shiver and the flesh of her arms humped up in gooseflesh. Her teeth clicked. Her face was a full moon in the bedroom's semidarkness. Larry scrambled the covers down, put her legs in, and pulled the blankets up to her chin. Still she shivered helplessly, making the top blanket quiver and quake. Her face was dry and sweatless.

  "You go tell him I said come outta there!" she cried, and then was silent, except for the heavy bronchial sound of her breathing.

  He went back into the living room, approached the telephone, then detoured around it. He shut the window with a bang and then went back to the phone.

  The books were on a shelf underneath the little table it sat on. He looked up the number of Mercy Hospital and dialed it while more thunder cracked outside. A stroke of lightning turned the window he'd just closed into a blue and white X-ray plate. In the bedroom his mother screamed breathlessly, chilling his blood.

  The phone rang once, there was a buzzing sound, then a click. A mechanically bright voice said: "This is a recording made at Mercy General Hospital. Right now all of our circuits are busy. If you will hold, your call will be taken as soon as possible. Thank you. This is a recording made at Mercy General Hospital. At the time of your call--"

  "We put the mopheads downstairs!" his mother cried out. Thunder rolled. "Those Puerto Rickies don't know nothing!"

  "--call will be taken as soon as--"

  He thumped the phone down and stood over it, sweating. What kind of goddam hospital was that, where you got a fucking recorded announcement when your mother was dying? What was going on there?

  Larry decided to go down and see if Mr. Freeman could watch her while he got over to the hospital. Or should he call a private ambulance? Christ, how come nobody knew about these things when they needed to know about them? Why didn't they teach it in school?

  In the bedroom his mother's laborious breathing went on and on.

  "I'll be back," he muttered, and went to the door. He was scared, terrified for her, but underneath another voice was saying things like: These things always happen to me. And: Why did it have to happen after I got the good news? And most despicable of all: How bad is this going to screw up my plans? How many things am I going to have to change around?

  He hated that voice, wished it would die a quick, nasty death, but it just went on and on.

  He ran down the stairs to Mr. Freeman's apartment and thunder boomed through the dark clouds. As he reached the first-floor landing the door blew open and a curtain of rain swept in.

  CHAPTER 20

  The Harborside was the oldest hotel in Ogunquit. The view was not so good since they had built the new yacht club over on the other side, but on an afternoon like this, when the sky had been poxed with intermittent thunderstorms, the view was good enough.

  Frannie had been sitting by the window for almost three hours, trying to write a letter to Grace Duggan, a high school chum who was now going to Smith. It wasn't a confessional letter dealing with her pregnancy or the scene with her mother--writing about those things would do nothing but depress her, and she supposed Grace would hear soon enough from her own sources in town. She had only been trying to write a friendly letter. The bicycle trip Jesse and I took to Rangely in May with Sam Lothrop and Sally Wenscelas. The biology final I lucked out on. Peggy Tate's (another high school friend and mutual aquaintance) new job as a Senate page. The impending marriage of Amy Lauder.

  The letter just wouldn't allow itself to be written. The interesting pyrotechnics of the day had played a part--how could you write while pocket thunderstorms kept coming and going over the water? More to the point, none of the news in the letter seemed precisely honest. It had twisted slightly, like a knife in the hand that gives you a superficial cut instead of peeling the potato as you had expected it to do. The bicycle trip had been jolly, but she and Jess were no longer on such jolly terms. She had indeed lucked out on her BY-7 final, but had not been lucky at all on the biology final that really counted. Neither she nor Grace had ever cared all that much for Peggy Tate, and Amy's forthcoming nuptials, in Fran's present state, seemed more like one of those ghastly sick jokes than an occasion of joy. Amy's getting married but I'm having the baby, hah-hah-hah.

  Feeling that the letter had to be finished if only so she wouldn't have to wrestle with it anymore, she wrote:

  I've got problems of my own, boy do I have problems, but I just don't have the heart to write them all down. Bad enough just having to think about them! But I expect to see you by the Fourth, unless your plans have changed since your last letter. (One letter in six weeks? I was beginning to think someone had chopped your typing fingers off, kid!). When I see you I'll tell you all. I could sure use your advice.

  Believe in me and I'll believe in you,

  Fran

  She signed her name with her customary flamboyant/comic scrawl, so it took up half of the remaining white space on the notesheet. Just doing that made her feel more like an imposter than ever. She folded it into the envelope and addressed it and put it against the mirror standing up. Finished business.

  There. Now what?

  The day was darkening again. She got up and walked restlessly around the room, thinking she ought to go out before it started to rain again, but where was there to go? A movie? She'd seen the only one in town. With Jesse. To Portland to look at clothes? No fun. The only clothes she could look at realistically these days were the ones with the elastic waistbands. Room for two.

  She'd had three calls today, the first one good news, the second indifferent, the third bad. She wished they'd come in reverse order. Outside the rain had begun to fall, darkening the marina's pier again. She decided she'd go out and walk and to hell with the impending rain. The fresh air, the summer damp, might make her feel better. She might even stop somewhere and have a glass of beer. Happiness in a bottle. Equilibrium, anyway.

  The first call had been from Debbie Smith, in Somersworth. Fran was more than welcome, Debbie said warmly. In fact, she was needed. One of the three girls who had been sharing the apartment had moved out in May, had gotten a job in a warehousing firm as a secretary. She and Rhoda couldn't swing the rent much longer without a third. "And we both come from big families," Debbie said. "Crying babies don't bother us."

  Fran said she'd be ready to move in by the first of July, and when she hung up she found warm tears coursing down her cheeks. Relief tears. If she could get away from this town where she had grown up, she thought she would be all right. Away
from her mother, away from her father, even. The fact of the baby and her singleness would then assume some sort of sane proportion in her life. A large factor, surely, but not the only one. There was some sort of animal, a bug or a frog, she thought, that swelled up to twice its normal size when it felt threatened. The predator, in theory at least, saw this, got scared, and slunk off. She felt a little like that bug, and it was this whole town, the total environment (gestalt was maybe an even better word), that made her feel that way. She knew that nobody was going to make her wear a scarlet letter, but she also knew that for her mind to finish convincing her nerves of that fact, a break with Ogunquit was necessary. When she went out on the street she could feel people, not looking at her, but getting ready to look at her. The year-round residents, of course, not the summer people. The year-round residents always had to have someone to look at--a tosspot, a welfare slacker, The Kid from a Good Family who had been picked up shoplifting in Portland or Old Orchard Beach... or the girl with the levitating belly.

  The second call, the so-so one, had been from Jess Rider. He had called from Portland and he had tried the house first. Luckily, he had gotten Peter, who gave him Fran's telephone number at the Harborside with no editorial comment.

  Still, almost the first thing he'd said was: "You got a lot of static at home, huh?"

  "Well, I got some," she said cautiously, not wanting to go into it. That would make them conspirators of a kind.

  "Your mother?"

  "Why do you say that?"

  "She looks like the type that might freak out. It's something in the eyes, Frannie. It says if you shoot my sacred cows, I'll shoot yours."

  She was silent.

  "I'm sorry. I don't want to offend you."

  "You didn't," she said. His description was actually quite apt--surface-apt anyway--but she was still trying to get over the surprise of that verb, offend. It was a strange word to hear from him. Maybe there's a postulate here, she thought. When your lover begins to talk about "offending" you, he's not your lover anymore.

  "Frannie, the offer still stands. If you say yes, I can get a couple of rings and be there this afternoon."

  On your bike, she thought, and almost giggled. A giggle would be a horrible, unnecessary thing to do to him, and she covered the phone for a second just to be sure it wasn't going to escape. She had done more weeping and giggling in the last six days than she had done since she was fifteen and starting to date.