The Stand, Page 30

  She came to her senses suddenly, and a kind of terror twisted through her. There was a hot smell in the room. Something was burning.

  Frannie jerked her head around, saw a skillet of french fries in oil she had put on the stove and then forgotten. Smoke was billowing up from the pan in a stinking cloud. Grease was flying out of the pan in angry splatters, and the splatters that landed on the burner were flaring alight and then going out, as if an invisible butane lighter was being flicked by an invisible hand. The cooking surface of the pan was black.

  She touched the handle of the pan and drew her fingers back with a little gasp. It was now too hot to touch. She grabbed a dish-towel, wrapped it around the handle, and quickly carried the utensil, sizzling like a dragon, out through the back door. She set it down on the top step of the porch. The smell of honeysuckle and the droning of the bees came to her, but she barely noticed. For a moment the thick, dull blanket which had swaddled all her emotional responses for the last four days was pierced, and she was acutely frightened. Frightened? No--in a state of low terror, only a pace away from panic.

  She could remember peeling the potatoes and putting them into the Wesson Oil to cook. Now she could remember. But for a while there she had just ... whew! She had just forgotten.

  Standing on the porch, dish-towel still clutched in one hand, she tried to remember exactly what her train of thought had been after she had put the french fries on to cook. It seemed very important.

  Well, first she had thought that a meal which consisted of nothing but french fries wasn't very nutritious. Then she'd thought that if the McDonald's down on Route 1 had still been open, she wouldn't have had to cook them herself, and she could have had a burger, too. Just take the car and cruise up to the take-out window. She would get a Quarter Pounder and the large-size fries, the ones that came in the bright red cardboard container. Little grease-spots on the inside. Undoubtedly unhealthy, indubitably comforting. And besides--pregnant women get strange cravings.

  That brought her to the next link in the chain. Thoughts of strange cravings had led to thoughts of the strawberry pie lurking in the fridge. Suddenly it had seemed to her that she wanted a piece of that strawberry pie more than she wanted anything in the world. So she had gotten it, but somewhere along the line her eye had been caught by the knife-rack her father had made for her mother (Mrs. Edmonton, the doctor's wife, had been so envious of that knife-rack that Peter had made one for her two Christmases ago), and her mind had just ... short-circuited. Motes ... beams ... flies ...

  "Oh God," she said to the empty back yard and her father's un-weeded garden. She sat down and put the apron over her face and cried.

  When the tears dried up, she seemed to feel a little better ... but she was still frightened. Am I losing my mind? she asked herself. Is this the way it happens, the way it feels, when you have a nervous breakdown or whatever you want to call it?

  Since her father had died at half past eight the night before, her ability to focus mentally seemed to have gotten fragmented. She would forget things she had been doing, her mind would go off on some dreamy tangent, or she would simply sit, not thinking of anything at all, no more aware of the world than a head of cabbage.

  After her father died she had sat beside his bed for a long time. At last she had gone downstairs and turned on the TV. No particular reason; like the man said, it just seemed like a good idea at the time. The only station broadcasting had been the NBC affiliate in Portland, WCSH, and they seemed to be broadcasting some sort of crazy trial show. A black man, who looked like a Ku Klux Klansman's worst nightmare of headhunting Africans, had been pretending to execute white men with a pistol while other men in the audience applauded. It had to be pretend, of course-- they didn't show things like that on TV if they were real--but it hadn't looked like pretend. It reminded her crazily of Alice in Wonderland, only it wasn't the Red Queen yelling "Off with their heads!" in this case, but ... what? Who? The Black Prince, she had supposed. Not that the beef in the loincloth had looked much like Prince.

  Later in the program (how much later she could not have said), some other men broke into the studio and there was a fire-fight which was even more realistically staged than the executions had been. She saw men, nearly decapitated by heavy-caliber bullets, thrown backward with blood bursting from their shredded necks in gaudy arterial pumps. She remembered thinking in her disorganized way that they should have put one of those signs on the screen from time to time, the ones that warned parents to put the kiddies to bed or change the channel. She also remembered thinking that WCSH might get their license to broadcast lifted all the same; it really was an awfully bloody program.

  She switched it off when the camera swung up, showing only the studio-lights hanging down from the ceiling, and lay back on the couch, looking at her own ceiling. She had fallen asleep there, and this morning she was more than half convinced that she had dreamed the entire program. And that was the nub, really: everything had come to seem like a nightmare filled with free-floating anxieties. It had begun with the death of her mother; the death of her father had only intensified what had already been there. As in Alice, things just got curiouser and curiouser.

  There had been a special town meeting which her father had attended even though he had been getting sick by then himself. Frannie, feeling drugged and unreal--but physically no different than ever--had gone with him.

  The town hall had been crowded, much more crowded than it was for town meetings in late February or early March. There was a lot of sniffling and coughing and ker-chooing. The attendees were frightened and ready to be angry at the least excuse. They spoke in loud, hoarse voices. They stood up. They shook their fingers. They pontificated. Many of them--not just the women, either--had been in tears.

  The upshot had been a decision to close off the town entirely. No one would be allowed in. If people wanted to leave, that was fine, as long as they understood that they couldn't come in again. The roads leading in and out of town--most notably US 1--were to be barricaded with cars (after a shouting match that lasted half an hour, that was amended to town-owned Public Works trucks), and volunteers would stand watches at these roadblocks with shotguns. Those trying to use US 1 to go north or south would be directed up north to Wells or down south to York, where they could get on Interstate 95 and thus detour around Ogunquit. Anyone who still tried to get through would be shot. Dead? Someone asked. You bet, several others answered.

  There was a small contingent of about twenty which maintained that those already sick should be put out of town at once. They were overwhelmingly voted down because by the evening of the twenty-fourth, when the meeting was held, almost everyone in town who was not sick had close relatives or friends who were. Many of them believed the newscasts, which said that a vaccine would be available soon. How, they argued, would they ever be able to look each other in the face again if it all turned out to be just a scary close call, and they had overreacted to it by putting their own out like pariah dogs?

  It was suggested that all the sick summer people be put out, then.

  The summer people, a large contingent of them, pointed out grimly that they had supported the town's schools, roads, indigent, and public beaches for years with the taxes they paid on their cottages. Businesses that couldn't break even from mid-September to mid-June stayed afloat because of their summer dollars. If they were to be treated in such a cavalier fashion, the people of Ogunquit could be sure that they would never come back. They could go back to lobstering and clamming and grubbing quahogs out of the dirt for a living. The motion to escort sick summer people out of town was defeated by a comfortable margin.

  By midnight the barriers were set up, and by dawn the next morning, the morning of the twenty-fifth, several people had been shot at the barriers, most just wounded, but three or four killed. Almost all of them were people coming north, streaming out of Boston, stricken with fear, panic-stupid. Some of them went back to York to get on the turnpike willingly enough, but others were too cra
zy to understand and tried to either ram the barriers or swing around them on the soft shoulders of the road. They were dealt with.

  But by that evening, most of the men manning the barricades were sick themselves, glowing bright with fever, constantly propping their shotguns between their feet so they could blow their noses. Some, like Freddy Delancey and Curtis Beauchamp, simply fell down unconscious and were later driven back to the jackleg infirmary that had been set up over the town hall, and there they died.

  By yesterday morning Frannie's father, who had opposed the whole idea of the barricades, had taken to his bed and Frannie was staying in to nurse him. He wouldn't allow her to take him to the infirmary. If he was going to die, he told Frannie, he wanted to do it here at home, decently, in private.

  By afternoon, the flow of traffic had mostly dried up. Gus Dinsmore, the public beach parking lot attendent, said he guessed that so many cars must be just stopped dead along the road that even those manned (or womaned) by able drivers would be unable to move. It was just as well, because by the afternoon of the twenty-fifth there had been less than three dozen men capable of standing watch. Gus, who felt perfectly fine until yesterday, had come down with a runny nose himself. In fact, the only person in town besides herself who seemed all right was Amy Lauder's sixteen-year-old brother Harold. Amy herself had died just before that first town meeting, her wedding dress still hung in the closet, unworn.

  Fran hadn't been out today, hadn't seen anyone since Gus had come by yesterday afternoon to check on her. She had heard engines a few times this morning, and once the close-together double explosions of a shotgun, but that was all. The steady, unbroken silence added to her sense of unreality.

  And now there were these questions to consider. Flies ... eyes ... pies. Frannie found herself listening to the refrigerator. It had an automatic ice-maker attachment, and every twenty seconds or so there would be a cold thump somewhere inside as it made another cube.

  She sat there for almost an hour, her plate before her, the dull, half-questioning expression on her face. Little by little another thought began to surface in her mind--two thoughts, actually, that seemed at once connected and totally unrelated. Were they maybe interlocking parts of a bigger thought? Keeping an ear open for the sound of dropping icecubes inside the refrigerator's ice-making gadget, she examined them. The first thought was that her father was dead; he had died at home, and he might have liked that.

  The second thought had to do with the day. It was a beautiful summer's day, flawless, the kind that the tourists came to the Maine seacoast for. You don't come to swim because the water's never really warm enough for that; you come to be knocked out by the day.

  The sun was bright and Frannie could read the thermometer outside the back kitchen window. The mercury stood just under 80. It was a beautiful day and her father was dead. Was there any connection, other than the obvious tear-jerky one?

  She frowned over it, her eyes confused and apathetic. Her mind circled the problem, then drifted away to think of other things. But it always drifted back.

  It was a beautiful warm day and her father was dead.

  That brought it home to her all at once and her eyes squeezed shut, as if from a blow.

  At the same time her hands jerked involuntarily on the tablecloth, yanking her plate off onto the floor. It shattered like a bomb and Frannie screamed, her hands going to her cheeks, digging furrows there. The wandering, apathetic vagueness disappeared from her eyes, which were suddenly sharp and direct. It was as if she had been slapped hard or had an open bottle of ammonia waved under her nose.

  You can't keep a corpse in the house. Not in high summer.

  The apathy began to creep back in, blurring the outlines of the thought. The full horror of it began to be obscured, cushioned. She began to listen for the clunk and drop of the icecubes again--

  She fought it off. She got up, went to the sink, ran the cold water on full, and then splatted cupped handfuls against her cheeks, shocking her lightly perspiring skin.

  She could drift away all she wanted, but first this thing had to be solved. It had to be. She couldn't just let him lie in bed up there as June melted into July. It was too much like that Faulkner story that was in all the college anthologies. "A Rose for Emily." The town fathers hadn't known what that terrible smell was, but after a while it had gone away. It ... it ...

  "No!" she cried out loud to the sunny kitchen. She began to pace, thinking about it. Her first thought was the local funeral home. But who would ... would ...

  "Stop backing away from it!" she shouted furiously into the empty kitchen. "Who's going to bury him?"

  And at the sound of her own voice, the answer came. It was perfectly clear. She was, of course. Who else? She was.

  It was two-thirty in the afternoon when she heard the car turn into the driveway, its heavy motor purring complacently, low with power. Frannie put the spade down on the edge of the hole--she was digging in the garden, between the tomatoes and the lettuce--and turned around, a little afraid.

  The car was a brand-new Cadillac Coupe de Ville, bottle green, and stepping out of it was fat sixteen-year-old Harold Lauder. Frannie felt an instant surge of distaste. She didn't like Harold and didn't know anyone who did, including his late sister Amy. Probably his mother had. But it struck Fran with a tired sort of irony that the only person left in Ogunquit besides herself should be one of the very few people in town she honestly didn't like.

  Harold edited the Ogunquit High School literary magazine and wrote strange short stories that were told in the present tense or with the point of view in the second person, or both. You come down the delirious corridor and shoulder your way through the splintered door and look at the racetrack stars--that was Harold's style.

  "He whacks off in his pants," Amy had once confided to Fran. "How's that for nasty? Whacks off in his pants and wears the same pair of undershorts until they'll just about stand up by themselves."

  Harold's hair was black and greasy. He was fairly tall, about six-one, but he was carrying nearly two hundred and forty pounds. He favored cowboy boots with pointed toes, wide leather garrison belts that he was constantly hitching up because his belly was considerably bigger than his butt, and flowered shirts that billowed on him like staysails. Frannie didn't care how much he whacked off, how much weight he carried, or if he was imitating Wright Morris this week or Hubert Selby, Jr. But looking at him, she always felt uncomfortable and a little disgusted, as if she sensed by low-grade telepathy that almost every thought Harold had was coated lightly with slime. She didn't think, even in a situation like this, that Harold could be dangerous, but he would probably be as unpleasant as always, perhaps more so.

  He hadn't seen her. He was looking up at the house. "Anybody home?" he shouted, then reached through the Cadillac's window and honked the horn. The sound jagged on Frannie's nerves. She would have kept silent, except that when Harold turned around to get back into the car, he would see the excavation, and her sitting on the end of it. For a moment she was tempted to crawl deeper into the garden and just lie low among the peas and beans until he got tired and went away.

  Stop it, she told herself, just stop it. He's another living human being, anyway.

  "Over here, Harold," she called.

  Harold jumped, his large buttocks joggling inside his tight pants. Obviously he had just been going through the motions, not really expecting to find anyone. He turned around and Fran walked to the edge of the garden, brushing at her legs, resigned to being stared at in her white gym shorts and halter. Harold's eyes crawled over her with great avidity as he came to meet her.

  "Say, Fran," he said happily.

  "Hi, Harold."

  "I'd heard that you were having some success in resisting the dread disease, so I made this my first stop. I'm canvassing the township." He smiled at her, revealing teeth that had, at best, a nodding acquaintance with his toothbrush.

  "I was awfully sorry to hear about Amy, Harold. Are your mother and father--?"<
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  "I'm afraid so," Harold said. He bowed his head for a moment, then jerked it up, making his clotted hair fly. "But life goes on, does it not?"

  "I guess it does," Fran said wanly. His eyes were on her breasts again, dancing across them, and she wished for a sweater.

  "How do you like my car?"

  "It's Mr. Brannigan's, isn't it?" Roy Brannigan was a local realtor.

  "It was," Harold said indifferently. "I used to believe that, in these days of shortages, anyone who drove such a thyroidal monster ought to be hung from the nearest Sunoco sign, but all of that has changed. Less people means more petrol." Petrol, Fran thought dazedly, he actually said petrol. "More everything," Harold finished. His eyes took on a fugitive gleam as they dropped to the cup of her navel, rebounded to her face, dropped to her shorts, and bounced to her face again. His smile was both jolly and uneasy.

  "Harold, if you'll excuse me--"

  "But whatever can you be doing, my child?"

  The unreality was trying to creep back in again, and she found herself wondering just how much the human brain could be expected to stand before snapping like an overtaxed rubber band. My parents are dead, but I can take it. Some weird disease seems to have spread across the entire country, maybe the entire world, mowing down the righteous and the unrighteous alike--I can take it. I'm digging a hole in the garden my father was weeding only last week, and when it's deep enough I guess I'm going to put him in it--I think I can take it. But Harold Lauder in Roy Brannigan's Cadillac, feeling me up with his eyes and calling me "my child"? I don't know, my Lord. I just don't know.

  "Harold," she said patiently. "I am not your child. I am five years older than you. It is physically impossible for me to be your child."

  "Just a figure of speech," he said, blinking a little at her controlled ferocity. "Anyway, what is it? That hole?"

  "A grave. For my father."

  "Oh," Harold Lauder said in a small, uneasy voice.

  "I'm going in to get a drink of water before I finish up. To be blunt, Harold, I'd just as soon you went away. I'm upset."