The Stand, Page 55

  The boy held out his own hands.

  Larry paused for a moment, then shrugged inside. He handed the guitar to the boy neck first. "It takes a lot of practice," he said.

  But what followed was the most amazing thing he had ever heard in his life. The boy struck up "Jim Dandy" almost flawlessly, hooting at the words rather than singing them, as if his tongue was plastered to the roof of his mouth. At the same time it was perfectly obvious that he had never played a guitar in his life before; he couldn't bear down hard enough on the strings to make them ring out properly and his chord changes were slurred and sloppy. The sound that came out was muted and ghostly--as if Joe was playing a guitar stuffed full of cotton--but otherwise it was a perfect carbon copy of the way Larry had played the tune.

  When he had finished, Joe looked curiously down at his own fingers, as if trying to understand why they could make the substance of the music Larry had played but not the sharp sounds themselves.

  Numbly, as if from a distance, Larry heard himself say: "You're not bearing down hard enough, that's all. You have to build up calluses-- hard spots--on the ends of your fingers. And the muscles in your left hand, too."

  Joe looked at him closely as he spoke, but Larry didn't know if the boy really understood or not. He turned to Nadine. "Did you know he could do that?"

  "No. I'm as surprised as you are. It's as if he is a prodigy or something, isn't it?"

  Larry nodded. The boy ran through "That's All Right, Mamma," again getting almost every nuance of the way Larry had played it. But the strings sometimes thudded like wood as Joe's fingers blocked the vibration of the strings rather than making it come true.

  "Let me show you," Larry said, and held out his hands for the guitar. Joe's eyes immediately slanted down with distrust. Larry thought he was remembering the knife going down into the sea. He backed away, holding the guitar tightly. "All right," Larry said. "All yours. When you want a lesson, come see me."

  The boy made a hooting sound and ran off along the beach, holding the guitar high over his head like a sacrificial offering.

  "He's going to smash it to hell," Larry said.

  "No," Nadine answered, "I don't think he is."

  Larry woke up sometime in the night and propped himself up on one elbow. Nadine was only a vaguely female shape wrapped up in three blankets a quarter of the way around the dead fire. Directly across from Larry was Joe. He was also under several blankets, but his head stuck out. His thumb was corked securely in his mouth. His legs were drawn up and between them was the body of the Gibson twelve-string. His free hand was wrapped loosely around the guitar's neck. Larry stared at him, fascinated. He had taken the boy's knife and thrown it away; the boy had adopted the guitar. Fine. Let him have it. You couldn't stab anybody to death with a guitar, although, Larry supposed, it would make a pretty fair blunt instrument. He dropped off to sleep again.

  When he woke up the next morning, Joe was sitting on a rock with the guitar on his lap and his bare feet in the run of the surf, playing "Sally's Fresno Blues." He had gotten better. Nadine woke up twenty minutes later, and smiled at him radiantly. It occurred to Larry that she was a lovely woman, and a snatch of song occurred to him, something by Chuck Berry: Nadine, honey is that you?

  Aloud, he said: "Let's see what we've got for breakfast."

  He built up the fire and the three of them sat close to it, working the nightchill out of their bones. Nadine made oatmeal with powdered milk and they drank strong tea brewed in a can, hobo fashion. Joe ate with the Gibson across his lap. And twice Larry found himself smiling at the boy and thinking you couldn't not like someone who liked the guitar.

  They cycled south on US 1. Joe rode his bike straight down the white line, sometimes ranging as far as a mile ahead. Once they caught up to him placidly walking his bike along the verge of the road and eating blackberries in an amusing way--he would toss each berry into the air, unerringly catching them in his mouth as they came down. An hour after that, they found him seated on a historic Revolutionary War marker and playing "Jim Dandy" on the guitar.

  Just before eleven o'clock they came to a bizarre roadblock at the town line of a place called Ogunquit. Three bright orange town dump trucks were driven across the road, blocking it from shoulder to shoulder. Sprawled in the back of one of the dump-bins was the crow-picked body of what had once been a man. The last ten days of solid heat had done their work. Where the body was not clothed, a fever of maggots boiled.

  Nadine turned away. "Where's Joe?" she asked.

  "I don't know. Somewhere up ahead."

  "I wish he hadn't seen that. Do you think he did?"

  "Probably," Larry said. He had been thinking that, for a main artery, Route 1 had been awfully deserted ever since they left Wells, with no more than two dozen stalled cars along the way. Now he understood why. They had blocked the road. There would probably be hundreds, maybe thousands, of cars stacked up on the far side of this town. He knew how she felt about Joe. It would have been good to spare the boy this.

  "Why did they block the road?" she asked him. "Why would they do that?"

  "They must have tried to quarantine their town. I imagine we'll find another roadblock on the other end."

  "Are there other bodies?"

  Larry put his bike on its stand and looked. "Three," he said.

  "All right. I'm not going to look at them."

  He nodded. They wheeled their bikes past the trucks and then rode on. The highway had turned close to the sea again and it was cooler. Summer cottages were jammed together in long and sordid rows. People took their vacations in those tenements? Larry wondered. Why not just go to Harlem and let your kids play under the hydrant spray?

  "Not very pretty, are they?" Nadine asked. On either side of them the essence of honky-tonk beach resort had now enclosed them: gas stations, fried clam stands, Dairy Treets, motels painted in feverish pastel colors, mini-golf.

  Larry was drawn two painful ways by these things. Part of him clamored at their sad and blatant ugliness and at the ugliness of the minds that had turned this section of a magnificent, savage coastline into one long highway amusement park for families in station wagons. But there was a more subtle, deeper part of him that whispered of the people who had filled these places and this road during other summers. Ladies in sunhats and shorts too tight for their large behinds. College boys in red-and -black-striped rugby shirts. Girls in beach shifts and thong sandals. Small screaming children with ice cream spread over their faces. They were American people and there was a kind of dirty, compelling romance about them whenever they were in groups--never mind if the group was in an Aspen ski lodge or performing their prosaic-arcane rites of summer along US 1 in Maine. And now all those Americans were gone. A thunderstorm had ripped a branch from a tree and it had knocked the gigantic plastic Dairy Treet sign into the ice cream stand's parking lot, where it lay on its side like a pallid duncecap. The grass was starting to get long on the mini-golf course. This stretch of highway between Portland and Portsmouth had once been a seventy-mile amusement park and now it was only a haunted funhouse where all the clockwork had run down.

  "Not very pretty, no," he said, "but once it was ours, Nadine. Once it was ours, even though we were never here before. Now it's gone."

  "But not forever," she said calmly, and he looked at her, her clean and shining face. Her forehead, from which her amazing white-streaked hair was drawn back, glowed like a lamp. "I am not a religious person, but if I was I would call what has happened a judgment of God. In a hundred years, maybe two hundred, it will be ours again."

  "Those trucks won't be gone in two hundred years."

  "No, but the road will be. The trucks will be standing in the middle of a field or a forest, and there will be lousewort and ladies' slipper growing where their tires used to be. They won't really be trucks anymore. They will be artifacts."

  "I think you're wrong."

  "How can I be wrong?"

  "Because we're looking for other people," Larry sa
id. "Now why do you think we're doing that?"

  She gazed at him, troubled. "Well ... because it's the right thing to do," she said. "People need other people. Didn't you feel that? When you were alone?"

  "Yes," Larry said. "If we don't have each other, we go crazy with loneliness. When we do, we go crazy with togetherness. When we get together we build miles of summer cottages and kill each other in the bars on Saturday night." He laughed. It was a cold and unhappy sound with no humor in it at all. It hung on the deserted air for a long time. "There's no answer. It's like being stuck inside an egg. Come on--Joe'll be way ahead of us."

  She stood astride her bike a moment longer, her troubled gaze on Larry's back as it pulled away. Then she rode after him. He couldn't be right. Couldn't be. If such a monstrous thing as this had happened for no good reason at all, what sense did anything make? Why were they even still alive?

  Joe wasn't so far ahead after all. They came upon him sitting on the back bumper of a blue Ford parked in a driveway. He was looking at a girlie magazine he had found somewhere, and Larry observed uncomfortably that the boy had an erection. He shot a glance at Nadine, but she was looking elsewhere--perhaps on purpose.

  When they reached the driveway Larry asked, "Coming?"

  Joe put the magazine aside and instead of standing up made a guttural interrogative sound and pointed up in the air. Larry glanced up wildly, for a moment thinking the boy had seen an airplane. Then Nadine cried: "Not the sky, the barn!" Her voice was close and tight with excitement. "On the barn! Thank God for you, Joe! We never would have seen it!"

  She went to Joe, put her arms around him, and hugged him. Larry turned to the barn, where white letters stood out clearly on the faded shingle roof:

  HAVE GONE TO STOVINGTON, VT. PLAGUE CENTER

  Below that were a series of road directions. And at the bottom:

  LEAVING OGUNQUIT JULY 2, 1990

  HAROLD EMERY LAUDER

  FRANCES GOLDSMITH

  "Jesus Christ, his ass must have been out to the wind when he put that last line on," Larry said.

  "The plague center!" Nadine said, ignoring him. "Why didn't I think of it? I read an article about it in the Sunday supplement magazine not three months ago! They've gone there!"

  "If they're still alive."

  "Still alive? Of course they are. The plague was over by July second. And if they could climb up on that barn roof, they surely weren't feeling sick."

  "One of them was surely feeling pretty frisky," Larry agreed, feeling a half-reluctant excitement building in his own stomach. "And to think I came right across Vermont."

  "Stovington is north of Highway 9 by quite a ways," Nadine said absently, still looking up at the barn. "Still, they must be there by now. July second was two weeks ago today." Her eyes were alight. "Do you think there might be others at that plague center, Larry? There might be, don't you think? Since they know all about quarantines and sterile clothing? They would have been working on a cure, wouldn't they?"

  "I don't know," Larry said cautiously.

  "Of course they would," she said impatiently and a trifle wildly. Larry had never seen her so excited, not even when Joe performed his amazing feat of mimicry on the guitar. "I'll bet Harold and Frances have found dozens of people, maybe hundreds. We'll go right away. The quickest route--"

  "Wait a minute," Larry said, taking her by the shoulder.

  "What do you mean, wait? Do you realize--"

  "I realize that sign's waited two weeks for us to come by, and this can wait a little longer. In the meantime, let's have some lunch. And ole Joe the Guitar-Picking Fool is falling asleep on his feet."

  She glanced around. Joe was looking at the girlie magazine again, but he had started to nod and blink over it in a glassy way. There were circles under his eyes.

  "You said he just got over an infection," Larry said. "And you've done a lot of hard traveling, too ... not to mention Stalking the Blue-Eyed Guitar-Player."

  "You're right ... I never thought."

  "All he needs is a good meal and a good nap."

  "Of course. Joe, I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking."

  Joe made a sleepy and mostly disinterested grunt.

  Larry felt a lump of residual fear rise up in him at what he had to say next, but it ought to be said. If he didn't, Nadine would as soon as she had a chance to think ... and besides, it was time, maybe, to find out if he had changed as much as he thought.

  "Nadine, can you drive?"

  "Drive? Do you mean do I have a license? Yes, but a car really isn't that practical with all the stalls in the road, is it? I mean--"

  "I wasn't thinking about a car," he said, and the image of Rita riding pillion behind the mysterious black man (his mind's symbolic representation of death, he supposed) suddenly rose up behind his eyes, the two of them dark and pale, bearing down on him astride a monstrous Harley hog like weird horsemen of the apocalypse. The thought dried out the moisture in his mouth and made his temples pound, but when he went on, his voice was steady. If there was a break in it, Nadine did not seem to notice. Oddly, it was Joe who looked up at him out of his half-doze, seeming to notice some change.

  "I was thinking about motorbikes of some kind. We could make better time with less effort and walk them around any ... well, any messes in the road. Like we walked our bikes around those town trucks back there."

  Dawning excitement in her eyes. "Yes, we could do that. I've never driven one, but you could show me what to do, couldn't you?"

  At the words I've never driven one, Larry's dread intensified. "Yes," he said. "But most of what I'd teach you would be to drive slowly until you get the hang of it. Very slowly. A motorcycle--even a little motorbike--doesn't forgive human error, and I can't take you to a doctor if you get wrecked up on the highway."

  "Then that's what we'll do. We'll ... Larry, were you riding a cycle before we came across you? You must have been, to make it up here from New York City so quickly."

  "I ditched it," he said steadily. "I got nervous about riding alone."

  "Well, you won't be alone anymore," Nadine said, almost gaily. She whirled to Joe. "We're going to Vermont, Joe! We're going to see some other people! Isn't it nice? Isn't it just great?"

  Joe yawned.

  Nadine said she was too excited to sleep but she would lie down with Joe until he was under. Larry rode into Ogunquit to look for a motorcycle dealership. There was none, but he thought that he had seen a cycle shop on their way out of Wells. He went back to tell Nadine and found them both asleep in the shade of the blue Ford where Joe had been perusing Gallery.

  He lay down a little way from them but couldn't sleep. At last he crossed the highway and made his way through the knee-high timothy grass to the barn where the sign was painted. Thousands of grasshoppers jumped wildly to get out of his way as he walked toward them, and Larry thought: I'm their plague. I'm their dark man.

  Near the barn's wide double doors he spotted two empty Pepsi cans and a crust of sandwich. In more normal times the gulls would have had the remains of sandwich long ago, but times had changed and the gulls were no doubt used to richer food. He toed the crust, then one of the cans.

  Get these right down to the crime lab, Sergeant Briggs. I think our killer has finally made a mistake.

  Right-o, Inspector Underwood. The day Scotland Yard decided to send you was a lucky day for Squinchly-on-the-Green.

  Don't mention it, Sergeant. All part of the job.

  Larry went inside--it was dark, hot, and alive with the softly whirring wings of the barnswallows. The smell of hay was sweet. There were no animals in the stalls; the owner must have let them out to live or die with the superflu rather than face certain starvation.

  Mark that down for the coroner's inquest, Sergeant.

  I will indeed, Inspector Underwood.

  He glanced down at the floor and saw a candy wrapper. He picked it up. A chocolate Payday candy bar had once been stowed inside it. The signpainter had had guts, maybe. Good taste, no. Anyone w
ith a taste for chocolate Paydays had been spending too much time in the hot sun.

  Steps leading to the loft were nailed to one of the loft's supporting beams. Greasy with sweat already, not even knowing why he was here, Larry climbed up. In the center of the loft (he was walking slowly and keeping an eye out for rats), a more conventional flight of stairs went up to the cupola, and these stairs were splattered with drips of white paint.

  We've stumbled on another find, I believe, Sergeant.

  Inspector, I stand amazed--your deductive acumen is exceeded only by your good looks and the extraordinary length of your reproductive organ.

  Don't mention it, Sergeant.

  He went up to the cupola. It was even hotter up here, explosively so, and Larry reflected that if Frances and Harold had left their paint up here when the job was done, the barn would have burned merrily to the ground a week ago. The windows were dusty and festooned with decaying cobwebs which had no doubt been freshly spun when Gerald Ford was President. One of these windows had been forced up, and when Larry leaned out, he had a breathtaking view of the country for miles around.

  This side of the barn faced east, and he was high enough for the roadside concessions, which seemed so monstrously ugly when seen at ground level, to look as inconsequential as a little strewing of roadside litter. Beyond the highway, magnificent, was the ocean, with the incoming waves neatly broken in two by the breakwater stretching out from the northern side of the harbor. The land was an oil painting depicting high summer, all green and gold, wrapped in a still haze of afternoon. He could smell salt and brine. And looking down along the slope of the roof, he could read Harold's sign, upside down.

  Just the thought of crawling around on that roof, so high above the ground, made Larry's guts feel dauncy. And he really must have hung his legs right over the raingutter to get the girl's name on.

  Why did he go to the trouble, Sergeant? That, I think, is one of the questions to which we must address ourselves.

  If you say so, Inspector Underwood.

  He went back down the stairs, going slowly and watching his footing. This was no time for a broken leg. At the bottom, something else caught his eye, something carved into one of the support beams, startlingly white and fresh and in direct contrast to all the rest of the barn's old dusty darkness. He went over to the beam and peered at the carving, then ran the ball of his thumb over it, part in amusement, part in wonder that another human being had done it on the day he and Rita had been trekking north. He ran his nail along the carved letters again.