The Stand, Page 63

  He wrote a note and handed it to June.

  "One of the things Dick and Ralph are supposed to get in Columbus is a CB radio. Someone will have to monitor Channel 14 all the time."

  "Oh," Olivia said. "Smart."

  Nick tapped his forehead gravely, then smiled.

  The two women went back to hang their clothes. Gina returned to the toy cars, hopping nimbly on one leg. Nick walked across the yard, mounted the porch steps, and sat down next to the dozing old woman. He looked out over the corn and wondered what was going to become of them.

  If that's the way you say it is, Nick, okay.

  They had turned him into a leader. They had done that and he couldn't even begin to understand why. You couldn't take orders from a deaf-mute; it was like a bad joke. Dick should have been their leader. His own place was as spear-carrier, third from the left, no lines, recognized only by his mother. But from the time they had met Ralph Brentner pottering up the road in his truck, not really going anywhere, that business of saying something and then glancing quickly at Nick, as if for confirmation, had begun. A fog of nostalgia had already begun to creep over those few days between Shoyo and May, before Tom and responsibility. It was easy to forget how lonely he had been, the fear that the constant bad dreams might mean he was going crazy. Easy to remember how there had been only yourself to look out for, a spear-carrier, third from the left, a bit player in this terrible play.

  I knew when I saw you. It's you, Nick. God has put His finger on your heart...

  No, I don't accept that. I don't accept God either, for that matter. Let the old woman have her God, God was as necessary for old women as enemas and Lipton tea bags. He would concentrate on one thing at a time, planting one foot ahead of the other. Get them to Boulder, then see what came next. The old woman said the dark man was a real man, not just a psychological symbol, and he didn't want to believe that, either ... but in his heart he did. In his heart he believed everything she had said, and it scared him. He didn't want to be their leader.

  It's you, Nick.

  A hand squeezed his shoulder and he jumped with surprise, then turned around. If she had been dozing, she wasn't anymore. She was smiling down at him from her armless rocker.

  "I was just sittin here and thinkin on the Great Depression," she said. "Do you know my daddy once owned all this land for miles around? It's true. No small trick for a black man. And I played my guitar and sang down at the Grange Hall in nineteen and oh-two. Long ago, Nick. Long, long ago."

  Nick nodded.

  "Those were good days, Nick--most of em were, anyway. But nothin lasts, I guess. Only the love of the Lord. My daddy died, and the land was split between his sons with a piece for my first husband, sixty acres, not much. This house stands on part o that sixty, you know. Four acres, that's all that's left. Oh, I guess now I could lay claim to all of it again, but t'wouldn't be the same, somehow."

  Nick patted her scrawny hand and she sighed deeply.

  "Brothers don't always work so well together; they almost always fall to squabblin. Look at Cain n Abel! Everyone wanted to be a foreman and nobody wanted to be a fielhand! Comes 1931, and the bank called its paper home. Then they all pulled together, but by then it was most too late. By 1945 everything was gone but my sixty and forty or fifty more where the Goodell place is now."

  She fumbled her handkerchief from her dress pocket and wiped her eyes with it, slowly and thoughtfully.

  "Finally there was only me left, with no money nor nothing. And each year when tax-time came round, they'd take a little more to pay it off, and I'd come out here to look at the part that wasn't my own anymore, and I'd cry over it like I'm crying now. A little more each year for taxes, that's how it happened. A whack here, a whack there. I rented out what was left, but it was never enough to cover what they had to have for their cussed taxes. Then, when I got to be a hundred years old, they remanded the taxes in perpetuity. Yes, they give it over after they'd taken everything but this little piece o scratch that's here. Big o them, wa'n't it?"

  He squeezed her hand lightly and looked at her.

  "Oh, Nick," Mother Abagail said, "I have harbored hate of the Lord in my heart. Every man or woman who loves Him, they hate Him too, because He's a hard God, a jealous God, He Is, what He Is, and in this world He's apt to repay service with pain while those who do evil ride over the roads in Cadillac cars. Even the joy of serving Him is a bitter joy. I do His will, but the human part o me has cursed Him in my heart. 'Abby,' the Lord says to me, 'there's work for you far up ahead. So I'll let you live an live, until your flesh is bitter on your bones. I'll let you see all your children die ahead of you and still you'll walk the earth. I'll let you see your daddy's lan taken away piece by piece. And in the end, your reward will be to go away with strangers from all the things you love best and you'll die in a strange land with the work not yet finished. That's My will, Abby,' says He, and 'Yes, Lord,' says I. 'Thy will be done,' and in my heart I curse Him and ask, 'Why, why, why?' and the only answer I get is 'Where were you when I made the world?' "

  Now her tears came in a bitter flood, running down her cheeks and wetting the bodice of her dress, and Nick marveled that there could be so many tears in such an old woman, who seemed as dry and thin as a dead twig.

  "Help me along, Nick," she said. "I only want to do what's right."

  He held her hands tightly. Behind them Gina giggled and held one of the toy cars up to the sky for the sun to shine and sparkle on.

  Dick and Ralph came back at noon, Dick behind the wheel of a new Dodge van and Ralph driving a red wrecker truck with a pushboard on the front and the crane and hook dangling from the back. Tom stood in the rear, waving grandly. They pulled up by the porch and Dick got out of the van.

  "There's a helluva nice CB in that wrecker," he told Nick. "Forty-channel job. I think Ralph's in love with it."

  Nick grinned. The women had come over and were looking at the trucks. Abagail's eyes noted the way Ralph squired June over to the wrecker so she could look at the radio equipment, and approved. The woman had a good set of hips on her, there would be a fine porch door down there between them. She could have just about as many little ones as she wanted.

  "So when do we go?" Ralph asked.

  Nick scribbled, "Soon as we eat. Did you try the CB?"

  "Yeah," Ralph said. "I had it on all the way back. Horrible static; there's a squelch button, but it doesn't seem to work very well. But you know, I swear I did hear something, static or no static. Far off. Might not have been voices at all. But I'll say the truth, Nicky, I didn't care for it much. Like those dreams."

  A silence fell among them.

  "Well," Olivia said, breaking it. "I'll get something cooking. Hope nobody minds pork two days in a row."

  No one did. And by one o'clock the camping things--and Abagail's rocker and guitar--had been stowed in the van and they were off, the wrecker now lumbering ahead to move anything blocking the road. Abagail sat up front in the van as they drove westbound on Route 30. She did not cry. Her cane was planted between her legs. Crying was done. She was set in the center of the Lord's will and His will would be done. The Lord's will would be done, but she thought of that red Eye opening in the dark heart of the night and she was afraid.

  CHAPTER 46

  It was late evening, July 27. They were camped on what the sign, now half-demolished by summer storms, proclaimed to be the Kunkle Fairgrounds. Kunkle itself, Kunkle, Ohio, was south of them. There had been some sort of fire there, and most of Kunkle was gone. Stu said it had probably been lightning. Harold had of course disputed that. These days if Stu Redman said a firetruck was red, Harold Lauder would produce facts and figures proving that most of them these days were green.

  She sighed and rolled over. Couldn't sleep. She was afraid of the dream.

  To her left the five motorcycles stood in a row, heeled over on their kickstands, moonlight twinkling along their chromed exhaust pipes and fittings. As if a band of Hell's Angels had picked this particular s
pot to crash for the night. Not that the Angels ever would have ridden such a pussycat bunch of bikes as these Hondas and Yamahas, she supposed. They had driven "hogs" ... or was that just something she had picked up from the old American-International bike epics she'd seen on TV? The Wild Angels. The Devil's Angels. Hell's Angels on Wheels. The bike pictures had been very big at the drive-ins when she had been in high school, Wells Drive-In, Sanford Drive-In, South Portland Twin, you pays your money and you takes your choice. Now kaput, all the drive-ins were kaput, not to mention the Hell's Angels and good old American-International Pictures.

  Put it in your diary, Frannie, she told herself, and rolled over on her other side. Not tonight. Tonight she was going to sleep, dreams or no dreams.

  Twenty paces from where she was lying, she could see the others, zonked out in their sleeping bags like Hell's Angels after a big beer party, the one where everybody in the picture got laid except for Peter Fonda and Nancy Sinatra. Harold, Stu, Glen Bateman, Mark Braddock, Perion McCarthy. Take Sominex tonight and sleep ...

  It wasn't Sominex they were on but half a grain of Veronal apiece. It had been Stu's idea when the dreams got really bad and they all began to get flaky and hard to live with. He had taken Harold aside before mentioning it to the rest of them because the way to flatter Harold was to soberly ask his opinion and also because Harold knew things. It was good that he did, but it was also rather spooky, as if they had a fifth-rate god traveling with them--more or less omniscient, but emotionally unstable and likely to fragment at any time. Harold had picked up a second gun in Albany, where they had met Mark and Perion, and now he wore the two pistols crisscrossed low on his hips like a latterday Johnny Ringo. She felt badly for Harold, but Harold had also begun to frighten her. She had begun to wonder if Harold might not just go crackers some night and start blazing away with his two pistols. She often found herself remembering the day she had come upon Harold in his back yard, all his emotional defenses demolished, mowing the lawn in his bathing suit and crying.

  She knew just how Stu would have put it to him, very quietly, almost conspiratorially: Harold, these dreams are a problem. I've got an idea, but I don't know exactly how to carry it out ... a mild sedative ... but it would have to be just the right dose. Too much and nobody would wake up if there was trouble. What do you suggest?

  Harold had suggested they try a whole grain of Veronal, available at any drugstore, and if that interrupted the dream-cycle, that they cut back to three quarters of a grain, and if that worked to half. Stu had gone privately to Glen, had gotten a concurring opinion, and the experiment had been tried. At a quarter grain the dreams had begun to creep back in, so they held the dosage at a half.

  At least for the others.

  Frannie accepted her drug each night, but palmed it. She didn't know if Veronal would hurt the baby or not, but she was taking no chances. They said that even aspirin could break the chromosome chain. So she suffered the dreams--suffered, that was the right word. One of them predominated; if the others were different, they would sooner or later blend into this one. She was in her Ogunquit house, and the dark man was chasing her. Up and down shadowy corridors, through her mother's parlor where the clock continued to tick off seasons in a dry age ... she could get away from him, she knew, if she didn't have to carry the body. It was her father's body, wrapped in a bedsheet, and if she dropped it the dark man would do something to it, perform some awful desecration on it. So she ran, knowing that he was getting closer and closer, and at last his hand would fall on her shoulder, his hot and sickening hand. She would go boneless and weak, her father's shrouded corpse would slither out of her arms, she would turn, ready to say: Take him, do anything, I don't care, just don't chase me anymore.

  And there he would be, dressed in some dark stuff like a hooded monk's robe, nothing visible of his features save his huge and happy grin. And in one hand he held the bent and twisted coathanger. That was when the horror struck her like a padded fist and she struggled up from sleep, her skin clammy with sweat, her heart thudding, wanting never to sleep again.

  Because it wasn't the dead body of her father he wanted; it was the living child in her womb.

  She rolled over again. If she didn't go to sleep soon she really would take her diary out and write in it. She had been keeping the journal since July 5. In a way she was keeping it for the baby. It was an act of faithfaith that the baby would live. She wanted it to know what it had been like. How the plague had come to a place called Ogunquit, how she and Harold had escaped, what became of them. She wanted the child to know how things had been.

  The moonlight was strong enough to write by, and two or three pages of diary were always enough to make her feel snoozy. Didn't say much for her literary talents, she supposed. She would give sleep one more fair chance first, though.

  She closed her eyes.

  And went on thinking of Harold.

  The situation might have eased with the coming of Mark and Perion if the two of them hadn't already been committed to each other. Perion was thirty-three, eleven years older than Mark, but in this world such things made little difference. They had found each other, they had been looking out for each other, and they were content to stick together. Perion had confided to Frannie that they were trying to make a baby. Thank God I was on the pill and didn't have a loop, Peri said. How in God's name would I ever have gotten it out?

  Frannie had almost told her about the baby she was carrying (she was over a third of the way along now) but something held her back. She was afraid it might make a bad situation even worse.

  So now there were six of them instead of four (Glen refused utterly to try driving a motorcycle and always rode pillion behind Stu or Harold) , but the situation hadn't changed with the addition of another woman.

  What about you, Frannie? What do you want?

  If she had to exist in a world like this, she thought, with a biological clock inside her set to go off in six months, she wanted someone like Stu Redman to be her man--no, not someone like. She wanted him. There it was, stated with complete baldness.

  With civilization gone, all the chrome and geegaws had been stripped from the engine of human society. Glen Bateman held forth on this theme often, and it always seemed to please Harold inordinately.

  Women's lib, Frannie had decided (thinking that if she was going to be bald, she might as well go totally bald), was nothing more nor less than an outgrowth of the technological society. Women were at the mercy of their bodies. They were smaller. They tended to be weaker. A man couldn't get with child, but a woman could--every four-year-old knows it. And a pregnant woman is a vulnerable human being. Civilization had provided an umbrella of sanity that both sexes could stand beneath. Liberation--that one word said it all. Before civilization, with its careful and merciful system of protections, women had been slaves. Let us not gild the lily; slaves was what we were, Fran thought. Then the evil days ended. And the Women's Credo, which should have been hung in the offices of Ms. magazine, preferably in needlepoint, was just this: Thank you, Men, for the railroads. Thank you, Men, for inventing the automobile and killing the red Indians who thought it might be nice to hold on to America for a while longer, since they were here first. Thank you, Men, for the hospitals, the police, the schools. Now I'd like to vote, please, and have the right to set my own course and make my own destiny. Once I was chattel, but now that is obsolete. My days of slavery must be over; I need to be a slave no more than I need to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a tiny boat with sails. Jet planes are safer and quicker than little boats with sails and freedom makes more sense than slavery. I am not afraid of flying. Thank you, Men.

  And what was there to say? Nothing. The rednecks could grunt about burning bras, the reactionaries could play intellectual little games, but the truth only smiles. Now all that had changed, in a matter of weeks it had changed--how much only time would tell. But lying here in the night, she knew that she needed a man. Oh God, she badly needed a man.

  Nor was it all a matter
of preserving herself and her baby, of looking out for number one (and, she supposed, number two). Stu attracted her, especially after Jess Rider. Stu was calm, capable, and most of all he was not what her father would have called "twenty pounds of bullshit in a ten-pound bag."

  He was attracted to her as well. She knew that perfectly well, had known it since that first lunch together on the Fourth of July in that deserted restaurant. For a moment--just one moment--their eyes had met and there had been that instant of heat, like a power surge when all the needles swing over to overload. She guessed Stu knew how things were, too, but he was waiting on her, letting her make her decision in her own time. She had been with Harold first, therefore she was Harold's chattel. A stinking macho idea, but she was afraid this was going to be a stinking macho world again, at least for a while.

  If only there was someone else, someone for Harold, but there wasn't, and she was afraid she could not wait long. She thought of the day Harold, in his clumsy way, had tried to make love to her, to make his claim of ownership irrevocable. How long ago? Two weeks? It seemed longer. All the past seemed longer now. It had pulled out like warm Bonomo's Turkish taffy. Between her worry of what to do about Harold --and her fears of what he might do if she did go to Stuart--and her fears of the dreams, she would never get to sleep.

  So thinking, she drifted off.

  When she woke up, it was still dark. Someone was shaking her.

  She muttered some protest--her sleep had been restful and without dreams for the first time in a week--and then came reluctantly out of it, thinking that it must be morning, and time to get going. But why would they want to get going in the dark? As she sat up, she saw that even the moon was down.

  It was Harold shaking her, and Harold looked scared.

  "Harold? Is something wrong?"

  Stu was also up, she saw. And Glen Bateman. Perion was kneeling on the far side of the place where their small fire had been.