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The Stand, Page 48

Stephen King


  "Don't you take on so," the corpse said, and Nick saw he wasn't a corpse at all but a young man who was looking happily at him. He had most of a bottle of whiskey in one hand, and now Nick understood. Not a corpse but a man who had gotten drunk and had passed out in the middle of the road.

  Nick nodded at him and made a circle with his thumb and forefinger. Just then a drop of blood oozed warmly into the eye that Ray Booth had worked over, making it smart. He raised the eyepatch and swiped his forearm across it. He had a little more vision on that side today, but when he closed his good eye, the world still retreated to something which was little more than a colorful blur. He replaced the patch and then walked slowly to the curb and sat beside a Plymouth with Kansas plates which was slowly settling on its tires. He could see the gash on his forehead reflected in the Plymouth's bumper. It looked ugly but not deep. He would find the local drugstore, disinfect it, and slap a Band-Aid over it. He thought he still must have enough penicillin in his system to fight off almost anything, but his close call from the bullet-scrape on his leg had given him a horror of infection. He picked scraps of gravel out of his palms, wincing.

  The man with the bottle of whiskey had been watching all of this with no expression at all. If Nick had looked up, it would have struck him as queer immediately. When he had turned away to examine his wound in the bumper's reflection, the animation had leaked out of the man's face. It became empty and clean and unlined. He was wearing bib-alls that were clean but faded and heavy workshoes. He stood about five-nine, and his hair was so blond it was nearly white. His eyes were a bright, empty blue, and with the cornsilk hair, his Swedish or Norwegian descent was unmistakable. He looked no more than twenty-three, but Nick found out later he had to be forty-five or close to it because he could remember the end of the Korean War, and how his daddy had come home in uniform a month later. There was no question that he might have made that up. Invention was not Tom Cullen's long suit.

  He stood there, empty of face, like a robot whose plug has been pulled. Then, little by little, animation seeped back into his face. His whiskey-reddened eyes began to twinkle. He smiled. He had remembered again what this situation called for.

  "Holy gee, mister, but you took a tumble. Didn't you just? My laws!" He blinked at the amount of blood on Nick's forehead.

  Nick had a pad of paper and a Bic in his shirt pocket; neither had been jarred loose by the fall. He wrote: "You just scared me. Thought you were dead until you sat up. I'm okay. Is there a drugstore in town?"

  He showed the pad to the man in the bib-alls. The man took it. Looked at what was written there. Handed it back. Smiling, he said, "I'm Tom Cullen. But I can't read. I only got to third grade but then I was sixteen and my daddy made me quit. He said I was too big."

  Retarded, Nick thought. I can't talk and he can't read. For a moment he was utterly nonplussed.

  "Holy gee, mister, but you took a tumble!" Tom Cullen exclaimed. In a way, it was the first time for both of them. "My laws, didn't you just!"

  Nick nodded. Replaced the pad and pen. Put a hand over his mouth again and shook his head. Cupped his hands over his ears and shook his head. Placed his left hand against his throat and shook his head.

  Cullen grinned, puzzled. "Got a toothache? I had one once. Gee, it hurt. Didn't it just? My laws!"

  Nick shook his head and went through his dumbshow again. Cullen guessed earache this time. Nick threw his hands up and went over to his bike. The paint was scraped, but it didn't seem hurt. He got on and pedaled a little way up the street. Yes, it was all right. Cullen jogged alongside, smiling happily. His eyes never left Nick. He hadn't seen anyone for most of a week.

  "Don't you feel like talkin?" he asked, but Nick didn't look around or appear to have heard. Tom tugged at his sleeve and repeated his question.

  The man on the bike put his hand over his mouth and shook his head. Tom frowned. Now the man had put his bike on its kickstand and was looking at the storefronts. He seemed to see what he wanted, because he went over to the sidewalk and then to Mr. Norton's drugstore. If he wanted to go in there it was just too bad, because the drug was locked up. Mr. Norton had left town. Just about everybody had locked up and left town, it seemed like, except for Mom and her friend Mrs. Blakely, and they were both dead.

  Now the no-talking-man was trying the door. Tom could have told him it was no use even though the OPEN sign was on the door. The OPEN sign was a liar. Too bad, because Tom would dearly have loved an ice cream soda. It was a lot better than the whiskey, which had made him feel good at first and then made him sleepy and then had made his head ache fit to split. He had gone to sleep to get away from the headache but he had had a lot of crazy dreams about a man in a black suit like the one that Revrunt Deiffenbaker always wore. The man in the black suit chased him through the dreams. He seemed like a very bad man to Tom. The only reason he had gone to drinking in the first place was because he wasn't supposed to, his daddy had told him that, and Mom too, but now everyone was gone, so what? He would if he wanted to.

  But what was the no-talking-man doing now? Picked up the litter basket from the sidewalk and he was going to ... what? Break Mr. Norton's window? CRASH! By God and by damn if he didn't! And now he was reaching through, unlocking the door ...

  "Hey, mister, you can't do that!" Tom cried, his voice throbbing with outrage and excitement. "That's illegal! M-O-O-N and that spells il-legal. Don't you know--"

  But the man was already inside and he never turned around.

  "What are you, anyway, deaf?" Tom called indignantly. "My laws! Are you ..."

  He trailed off. The animation and excitement left his face. He was the robot with the pulled plug again. In May it had not been an uncommon sight to see Feeble Tom like this. He would be walking along the street, looking into shop windows with that eternally happy expression on his slightly rounded Scandahoovian face, and all of a sudden he would stop dead and go blank. Someone might shout, "There goes Tom!" and there would be laughter. If Tom's daddy was with him he would scowl and elbow Tom, perhaps even sock him repeatedly on the shoulder or the back until Tom came to life. But Tom's daddy had been around less and less over the first half of 1988 because he was stepping out with a redheaded waitress who worked at Boomer's Bar & Grille. Her name was DeeDee Packalotte (and weren't there some jokes about that name), and about a year ago she and Don Cullen run off together. They had been seen just once, in a cheap fleabag motel not far away, in Slapout, Oklahoma, and that had been the last of them.

  Most folks took Tom's sudden blankouts as a further sign of retardation, but they were actually instances of nearly normal thinking. The human thinking process is based (or so the psychologists tell us) on deduction and induction, and the retarded person is incapable of making these deductive and inductive leaps. There are lines down somewhere inside, circuits shorted out, fouled switches. Tom Cullen was not severely retarded, and he was capable of making simple connections. Every now and then--during his blankouts--he would be capable of making a more sophisticated inductive or deductive connection. He would feel the possibility of making such a connection the way a normal person will sometimes feel a name dancing "right on the tip of his tongue." When it happened, Tom would dismiss his real world, which was nothing more or less than an instant-by-instant flow of sensory input, and go into his mind. He would be like a man in a darkened unfamiliar room who holds the plug-end of a lampcord in one hand and who goes crawling around on the floor, bumping into things and feeling with his free hand for the electrical socket. And if he found it--he didn't always--there would be a burst of illumination and he would see the room (or the idea) plain. Tom was a sensory creature. A list of his favorite things would have included the taste of an ice cream soda at Mr. Norton's fountain, watching a pretty girl in a short dress waiting on the comer to cross the street, the smell of lilac, the feel of silk. But more than any of these things he loved the intangible, he loved that moment when the connection would be made, the switch cleared (at least momentarily), the lig
ht would go on in the dark room. It didn't always happen; often the connection eluded him. This time it didn't.

  He had said, What are you, anyway, deaf?

  The man hadn't acted like he heard what Tom was saying except for those times he had been looking right at him. And the man hadn't said anything to him, not even hi. Sometimes people didn't answer Tom when he asked questions because something in his face told them he was soft upstairs. But when that happened, the person who wouldn't answer looked mad or sad or kind of blushy. This man didn't act like that--he had given Tom a circle made of his thumb and forefinger and Tom knew that meant Okey Dokey ... but still he didn't talk.

  Hands over his ears and a shake of his head.

  Hands over his mouth and the same.

  Hands over his neck and the same again.

  The room lit up: connection made.

  "My laws!" Tom said, and the animation came back into his face. His bloodshot eyes glowed. He rushed into Norton's Drugstore, forgetting that it was illegal to do so. The no-talking-man was squirting something that smelled like Bactine onto cotton and was then wiping the cotton on his forehead.

  "Hey mister!" Tom said, rushing up. The no-talking-man didn't turn around. Tom was momentarily puzzled, and then he remembered. He tapped Nick on the shoulder and Nick turned. "You're deaf n dumb, right? Can't hear! Can't talk! Right?"

  Nick nodded. And to him, Tom's reaction was nothing short of amazing. He jumped into the air and clapped his hands wildly.

  "I thought of it! Hooray for me! I thought of it myself! Hooray for Tom Cullen!"

  Nick had to grin. He couldn't remember when his disability had brought someone so much pleasure.

  There was a small town square fronting on the courthouse, and in this square was a statue of a Marine tricked out in World War II kit and weaponry. The plaque beneath announced that this monument was dedicated to the boys from Harper County who had made the ULTIMATE SACRIFICE FOR THEIR COUNTRY. In the shade of this monument Nick Andros and Tom Cullen sat, eating Underwood Deviled Ham and Underwood Deviled Chicken on potato chips. Nick had an x of Band-Aids on his forehead above his left eye. He was reading Tom's lips (which was a little tough, because Tom kept stuffing food through what he was saying) and reflecting to himself that he was getting damned tired of eating stuff which came out of cans. What he would really like was a big steak with all the trimmings.

  Tom hadn't stopped talking since they sat down. It was pretty repetitious stuff, with many ejaculations of My laws! and Wasn't it just? thrown in for seasoning. Nick didn't mind. He hadn't really known how much he missed other people until he met Tom, or how much he had been secretly afraid that he was the only one left, out of all the earth. It had even crossed his mind at one point that maybe the disease had killed everyone in the world but deaf-mutes. Now, he thought with an interior smile, he could speculate on the possibility that it had killed everyone in the world but deaf-mutes and the mentally retarded. That thought, which seemed amusing in the two o'clock light of a summer's afternoon, would come back to haunt him that night and not seem funny at all.

  He wondered where Tom thought all the people had gone. He had already heard about Tom's daddy, who had run off a couple of years before with a waitress, and about Tom's job as a handyman out on the Norbutt farm and how, two years ago, Mr. Norbutt had decided Tom was "getting on well enough" to be trusted handling an axe, and about the "big boys" who had jumped Tom one night and how Tom had "fought em all ofF'til they was just about dead, and I put one of 'em in the hospital with ruptures, M-O-O-N, that spells ruptures, that's what Tom Cullen did," and he had heard about how Tom had found his mother at Mrs. Blakely's house and they were both dead in the living room and so Tom had stolen away. Jesus wouldn't come and take dead people up to heaven if anyone was watching, Tom said (Nick reflected that Tom's Jesus was a kind of Santa Claus in reverse, taking dead people up the chimney instead of bringing presents down). But he had said nothing at all about May's total emptiness, or the road arrowing in and out of town on which nothing moved.

  He put his hands lightly on Tom's chest, stopping the flow of words.

  "What?" Tom asked.

  Nick waved his arm in a large circle at the buildings of the downtown area. He put a burlesque expression of puzzlement on his face, wrinkling his brow, cocking his head, scratching the back of his skull. Then he made walking motions with his fingers on the grass and finished by looking up at Tom questioningly.

  What he saw was alarming. Tom might have died sitting up for all the animation on his face. His eyes, which had been sparkling a moment before with all the things he wanted to tell, were now cloudy blue marbles. His mouth hung ajar so Nick could see the soggy potato chip crumbs lying on his tongue. His hands were lax in his lap.

  Concerned, Nick reached out to touch him. Before he could, Tom's body gave a jerk. His eyelids fluttered, and the animation flowed back into his eyes like water filling a pail. He began to grin. If a balloon containing the word EUREKA had appeared over his head, what had happened would not have been more plain.

  "You want to know where all the people went!" Tom exclaimed.

  Nick nodded his head strongly.

  "Well, I guess they went to Kansas City," Tom said. "My laws, yes. Everybody's always talkin about what a little town this is. Nothin happens. No fun. Even the roller-skating place went bust. Now there's nothin but the drive-in, and that doesn't show anything but those diddly-daddly pitchers. My mom always says people leaves but no people comes back. Just like my dad, he run off with a waitress from Boomer's Cafe, her name was M-O-O-N, that spells DeeDee Packalotte. So I guess everybody just got fed up and went at the same time. To Kansas City it must have been, my laws, didn't they just? That's where they must have gone. Except for Mrs. Blakely and my mom. Jesus is going to take them up to heaven up above and rock them in the everlasting harms."

  Tom's monologue recommenced.

  Gone to Kansas City, Nick thought. For all I know, that could be it, too. Everybody left on the poor sad planet picked up by the Hand of God and either rocked in the everlasting harms of Same or set down again in Kansas City.

  He leaned back and his eyelids fluttered so that Tom's words broke up into the visual equivalent of a modern poem, sans caps, like a work by e.e. cummings:

  mother said

  ain't got no

  but i said to them i said you better

  not mess with

  The dreams had been bad the night before, which he had spent in a barn, and now, with his belly full, all he wanted was ...

  my laws

  M-O-O-N that spells

  sure do wish

  Nick fell asleep.

  Waking up, he first wondered in that dazed way you have when you sleep heavily in the middle of the day why he was sweating so much. Sitting up, he understood. It was quarter to five in the afternoon; he had slept over two and a half hours and the sun had moved out from behind the war memorial. But that was not all. Tom Cullen, in a perfect orgy of solicitude, had covered him so he would not take a chill. With two blankets and a quilt.

  He threw them aside, stood up, stretched. Tom was not in sight. Nick walked slowly toward the main entrance to the square, wondering what --if anything--he was going to do about Tom ... or with him. The retarded fellow had been feeding himself from the A&P on the far side of the town square. He had felt no compunction about going in there and picking out what he wanted to eat by the pictures on the labels of the cans because, Tom said, the supermarket door had been unlocked.

  Nick wondered idly what Tom would have done if it hadn't been. He supposed that, when he'd gotten hungry enough, he would have forgotten his scruples, or laid them aside for the nonce. But what would become of him when the food was gone?

  But that wasn't what really bothered him about Tom. It was the pathetic eagerness with which the man had greeted him. Retarded he might be, Nick thought, but he was not too retarded to feel loneliness. Both his mother and the woman who had served as his commonlaw aunt were dead. His
dad had run off long before. His employer, Mr. Norbutt, and everyone else in May had stolen off to Kansas City one night while Tom slept, leaving him behind to wander up and down Main Street like a gently unhinged ghost. And he was getting into things he had no business getting into--like the whiskey. If he got drunk again, he might hurt himself. And if he got hurt with no one to take care of him, it would probably mean the end of him.

  But ... a deaf-mute and a man who was mentally retarded? Of what possible use could they be to each other? Here you got one guy who can't talk and another guy who can't think. Well, that wasn't fair. Tom could think at least a little, but he couldn't read, and Nick had no illusions about how long it would take him to get tired of playing charades with Tom Cullen. Not that Tom would get tired of it. Laws, no.

  He stopped on the sidewalk just outside the park's entrance, hands stuffed in his pockets. Well, he decided, I can spend the night here with him. One night won't matter. I can cook him a decent meal at the very least.

  Cheered a little by this, he went to find Tom.

  Nick slept in the park that night. He didn't know where Tom slept, but when he woke up the next morning, slightly dewy but feeling pretty good otherwise, the first thing he saw when he crossed the town square was Tom, crouched over a fleet of toy Corgi cars and a large plastic Texaco station.

  Tom must have decided that if it was all right to break into Norton's Drugstore, it was all right to break into another place. He was sitting on the curb of the five-and-ten, his back to Nick. About forty model cars were lined up along the edge of the sidewalk. Next to them was the screwdriver Tom had used to jimmy the display case open. There were Jaguars, Mercedes-Benzes, Rolls-Royces, a scale-model Bentley with a long, lime-green cowling, a Lamborghini, a Cord, a four-inch-long customized Pontiac Bonneville, a Corvette, a Maserati, and, God watch over us and protect us, a 1933 Moon. Tom was hunched over these studiously, driving them in and out of the garage, gassing them up at the toy pump. One of the lifts in the repair bay worked, Nick saw, and from time to time Tom would raise one of the cars up on it and pretend to do something underneath. If he had been able to hear, he would have heard, in the nearly perfect silence, the sound of Tom Cullen's imagination at work-- the lip-vibrating brrrrrr as he drove the cars onto the Fisher-Price tarmac, the chk-chk-chk-ding! of the gas-pump at work, the ssshhhhhhh as the lift inside went up and down. As it was, he could catch some of the conversation between the station proprietor and the little people in the little cars: Fill that up, sir? Regular? You bet! Just let me get that windshield, ma'am. I think it's your carb. Let's put her up in the air and take a look at the bass-tud. Restrooms? You bet! Right around the side there!