The Stand, Page 68

  On the twenty-ninth, they had caught sight of Stu and the others for the first time. The zoo had been camped in a picnic area just off the interstate when the four of them passed by.

  "Garvey was very taken with you," Susan said, nodding toward Frannie. Frannie shuddered.

  Dayna leaned closer to them and spoke softly. "And they'd made it pretty clear whose place you were going to take." She nodded her head almost imperceptibly at Shirley Hammet, who was still muttering and eating graham crackers.

  "That poor woman," Frannie said.

  "It was Dayna who decided you guys might be our best chance," Patty said. "Or maybe our last chance. There were three men in your party--both she and Helen Roget had seen that. Three armed men. And Doc had gotten just the teeniest bit overconfident about the trailer-overturned -in-the-road bit. Doc would just act like somebody official, and the men in the parties they met--when there were men--just caved in. And got shot. It had been working like a charm."

  "Dayna asked us to try and palm our pills this morning," Susan went on. "They'd gotten sort of careless about making sure we really took them, too, and we knew that this morning they'd be busy pulling that big trailer out into the road and tipping it over. We didn't tell everyone. The only ones in on it were Dayna and Patty and Helen Roget ... one of the girls Ronnie shot back there. And me, of course. Helen said, 'If they catch us trying to spit the pills into our hands, they're going to kill us.' And Dayna said they would kill us anyway, sooner or later, and only sooner if we were lucky, and of course we knew that was true. So we did it."

  "I had to hold mine in my mouth for quite a while," Patty said. "It was starting to dissolve by the time I got a chance to spit it out." She looked at Dayna. "I think Helen actually had to swallow hers. I think that's why she was so slow."

  Dayna nodded. She was looking at Stu with a clear warmth that made Frannie uneasy. "It still would have worked if you hadn't gotten wise, big fella."

  "I didn't get wise near soon enough, looks like," Stu said. "Next time I will." He stood up, went to the window, and looked out. "You know, that's half of what scares me," he said. "How wise we're all getting."

  Fran cared even less for the sympathetic way Dayna looked after him. She had no right to look sympathetic after all she'd been through. And she's much prettier than I am, in spite of everything, Fran thought. Also, I doubt if she's pregnant.

  "It's a get-wise world, big fella," Dayna said. "Get wise or die."

  Stu turned to look at her, really seeing her for the first time, and Fran felt a stab of pure jealous agony. I waited too long, she thought. Oh my God, I went and did it, I went and waited too long.

  She happened to glance at Harold and saw that Harold was smiling in a guarded way, one hand up to his mouth to conceal it. It looked like a smile of relief. She suddenly felt that she would like to stand up, walk casually over to Harold, and hook his eyes out of his head with her fingernails.

  Never, Harold! she would scream as she did it. Never!

  Never?

  From Fran Goldsmith's Diary

  July 19, 1990

  Oh Lord. The worst has happened. At least in the books when it happens it's over, something at least changes, but in real life it just seems to go on and on, like a soap opera where nothing ever comes to a head. Maybe I should move to clear things up, take a chance, but I'm so afraid something might happen between them and. You can't end a sentence with "and," but I'm afraid to put down what might come after the conjunction.

  Let me tell you everything, dear diary, even though it's no great treat to write it down. I even hate to think about it.

  Glen and Stu went into town (which happens to be Girard, Ohio, tonight) near dusk to look for some food, hopefully concentrates and freeze-dried stuff. They're easy to carry and some of the concentrates are really tasty, but as far as I am concerned all the freeze-dried food has the same flavor, namely dried turkey turds. And when have you ever had dried turkey turds to serve as your basis for a comparison? Never mind, diary, some things will never be told, ha-ha.

  They asked Harold and me if we wanted to come, but I said I'd had enough motorcycling for one day if they could do without me, and Harold said no, he would fetch some water and get it boiled up. Probably already laying his plans. Sorry to make him sound so scheming, but the simple fact is, he is.

  [A note here: We are all fantastically sick of boiled water, which tastes flat and TOTALLY DEVOID of oxygen, but both Mark and Glen say the factories, etc., have not been shut down nearly long enough for the streams & rivers to have purified themselves, especially in the industrial Northeast & what they call the Rust Belt, so we all boil to be safe. We all keep hoping we'll find a large supply of bottled mineral water sooner or later, and should have already--so Harold says--but a lot of it seems to have mysteriously disappeared. Stu thinks that a lot of people must have decided it was the tapwater that was making them sick and used up a lot of mineral water before they died.]

  Well, Mark and Perion were off somewhere, supposedly hunting for wild berries to supplement our diet, probably doing something else--they are quite modest about it & bully for them, say I--and so I was first gathering wood for a fire and then getting one going for Harold's kettle of water ... and pretty soon he came back with one (he'd pretty obviously stayed at the stream long enough to have a bath and wash his hair). He hung it on the whatdoyoucallit that goes over the fire. Then he comes & sits down beside me.

  We were sitting on a log, talking about one thing and another, when he suddenly put his arms around me and tried to kiss me. I say tried but he actually succeeded, at least at first, because I was so surprised. Then I jerked away from him--looking back it seems sorta comic altho I'm still sore--and fell backward right off the log. It rucked up the back of my blouse and scraped about a yard of skin off. I let out a yell. Talk about history repeating, that was too much like the time with Jess out on the breakwater when I bit my tongue ... too much like it for comfort.

  In a second Harold's on one knee beside me, asking if I'm all right, blushing right down to the roots of his clean hair. Harold tries sometimes to be so icy, so sophisticated--he always seems to me like a jaded young writer constantly searching for that special Sad Caf on the West Bank where he can idle the day away talking about Jean-Paul Sartre and drinking cheap plonk--but underneath, well covered, is a teenager with a far less mature set of fantasies. Or so I believe. Saturday matinee fantasies for the most part: Tyrone Power in Captain from Castile, Humphrey Bogart in Dark Passage, Steve McQueen in Bullitt. In times of stress it's always this side of him which seems to come out, maybe because he repressed it so severely as a child, I don't know. Anyway, when he regresses to Bogie, he only succeeds in reminding me of that guy who played Bogie in that Woody Allen movie, Play It Again, Sam.

  So when he knelt beside me and said, "Are you all right, baby?," I started to giggle. Talk about history repeating itself! But it was more than the humor of the situation, you know. If that had been all, I could have held it in. No, it was more in the line of hysterics. The bad dreams, the worrying about the baby, what to do about my feelings for Stu, the traveling every day, the stiffness, the soreness, losing my parents, everything changed for good ... it came out in giggles at first, then in hysterical laughter I just couldn't stop.

  "What's so funny?" Harold asked, getting up. I think it was supposed to come out in this terribly righteous voice, but by then I had stopped thinking about Harold and got this crazy image of Donald Duck in my head. Donald Duck waddling through the ruins of Western civilization quacking angrily: What's so funny, hah? What's so funny? What's so fucking funny? I put my hands over my face & just giggled & sobbed & giggled until Harold must have thought I'd gone absolutely crackers.

  After a little bit I managed to stop. I wiped the tears off my face and wanted to ask Harold to look at my back and see how badly it was scraped. But I didn't because I was afraid he might take it as a LIBERTY. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of Frannie, oh-ho, that's not so funny.

>   "Fran," Harold sez, "I find this very hard to say."

  "Then maybe you better not say it," I said.

  "I have to," he answers, and I began to see he wasn't going to take no for an answer unless it was hollered at him. "Frannie," he says, "I love you."

  I guess I knew all along it was just as bald as that. It would be easier if he only wanted to sleep with me. Love's more dangerous than just balling, and I was in a spot. How to say no to Harold? I guess there's only one way, no matter who you have to say it to.

  "I don't love you, Harold," is what I said.

  His face cracked all to pieces. "It's him, isn't it?" he said, and his face got an ugly grimace on it. "It's Stu Redman, isn't it?"

  "I don't know," I said. Now I have a temper, which I have not always been able to control--a gift from my mother's side, I think. But I have struggled womanfully with it as applies to Harold. I could feel it straining its leash, however.

  "I know." His voice had gotten shrill and self-pitying. "I know, all right. The day we met him, I knew it then. I didn't want him to come with us, because I knew. And he said ..."

  "What did he say?"

  "That he didn't want you! That you could be mine!"

  "Just like giving you a new pair of shoes, right, Harold?"

  He didn't answer, maybe realizing he had gone too far. With a little effort I remembered back to that day in Fabyan. Harold's instant reaction to Stu was the reaction of a dog when a new dog, a strange dog, comes into the first dog's yard. Into his domain. I could almost see the hackles bristling on the back of Harold's neck. I understood that what Stu said, he said it to take us out of the class of dogs and put us back in the class of people. And isn't that what it's really all about? This hellacious struggle we're in now, I mean? If it isn't, why are we even bothering to try and be decent?

  "No one owns me, Harold," I said.

  He muttered something.

  "What?"

  "I said, you may have to change that idea."

  A sharp retort came to mind, but I didn't let it out. Harold's eyes had gone far away, and his face was very still and open. He said: "I've seen that guy before. You better believe it, Frannie. He's the guy that's the quarterback on the football team but who just sits there in class throwing spitballs and flipping people the bird because he knows the teacher's got to pass him with at least a C so he can keep on playing. He's the guy who goes steady with the prettiest cheerleader and she thinks he's Jesus Christ with a bullet. The guy who farts when the English teacher asks you to read your composition because it's the best one in the class.

  "Yeah, I know fuckers like him. Good luck, Fran."

  Then he just walked off. It wasn't the GRAND, TRAMPLING EXIT that he'd meant to make, I feel quite sure. It was more like he'd had some secret dream, and I'd just shot it full of holes--the dream being that things had changed, the reality being that nothing really had. I felt terrible for him, God's truth, because when he walked off he wasn't playing at jaded cynicism but feeling REAL cynicism, not jaded but as sharp & hurtful as a knife-blade. He was whipped. Oh, but what Harold will never see is that his head has got to change a little first, he's got to see that the world is going to stay the same as long as he does. He stores up rebuffs the way pirates were supposed to store up treasure...

  Well. Now everyone is back, supper eaten, smokes smoked, Veronal handed out (mine is in my pocket instead of dissolving in my stomach), people settling down. Harold and I have gone through a painful confrontation which has left me with the feeling that nothing has really been resolved, except that he is watching Stu and me to see what happens next. It makes me feel sick and pointlessly angry to write that. What right does he have to watch us? What right does he have to complicate this miserable situation we are in?

  Things to Remember: I'm sorry, diary. It must be my state of mind. I can't remember a single thing.

  When Frannie came upon him, Stu was sitting on a rock and smoking a cigar. He had scraped a small round circle of bare earth with his boot heel and was using it for an ashtray. He was facing west, where the sun was just going down. The clouds had rifted enough to allow the red sun to poke its head through. Although they had met the four women and taken them into their party only yesterday, it already seemed distant. They had gotten one of the station wagons out of the ditch easily enough and now, with the motorcycles, they made quite a caravan as they moved slowly west on the turnpike.

  The smell of his cigar made her think of her father and her father's pipe. What came with the memory was sorrow that had almost mellowed into nostalgia. I'm getting over losing you, Daddy, she thought. I don't think you'd mind.

  Stu looked around. "Frannie," he said with real pleasure. "How are you?"

  She shrugged. "Up and around."

  "Want to share my rock and watch the sun go down?"

  She joined him, her heartbeat quickening a little. But after all, why else had she come out here? She had known which way he left camp, just as she knew that Harold and Glen and two of the girls had gone into Brighton to look for a CB radio (Glen's idea instead of Harold's for a change). Patty Kroger was back in camp babysitting their two combat-fatigue patients. Shirley Hammet showed some signs of coming out of her daze, but she had awakened them all around one this morning, shrieking in her sleep, her hands clawing at the air in warding-off gestures. The other woman, the one with no name, seemed to be going in the other direction. She sat. She would eat if she was fed. She would perform the functions of elimination. She would not answer questions. She only really came alive in her sleep. Even with a heavy dose of Veronal, she often moaned and sometimes shrieked. Frannie thought she knew what the poor woman was dreaming of.

  "It seems like a long way still to go, doesn't it?" she said.

  He didn't answer for a moment, and then he said: "It's further than we thought. That old woman, she's not in Nebraska anymore."

  "I know--" she began, and then bit down on her words.

  He glanced at her with a faint grin. "You've been skippin your medication, ma'am."

  "My secret's out," she said with a lame smile.

  "We're not the only ones," Stu said. "I was talkin to Dayna this afternoon" (she felt that interior dig of jealousy--and fear--at the familiar way he used her name) "and she said neither she nor Susan wanted to take it."

  Fran nodded. "Why did you stop? Did they drug you... in that place?"

  He tapped ashes into his bare earth ashtray. "Mild sedatives at night, that was all. They didn't need to drug me. I was locked up nice and tight. No, I stopped three nights ago because I felt... out of touch." He meditated for a moment and then expanded. "Glen and Harold going to get that CB radio, that was a real good idea. What's a two-way for? To put you in touch. This buddy of mine back in Arnette, Tony Leominster, he had one in his Scout. Great gadget. You could talk to folks, or you could holler for help if you got in a jam of trouble. These dreams, they're almost like having a CB in your head, except the transmit seems to be broken and we're only receiving."

  "Maybe we are transmitting," Fran said quietly.

  He looked at her, startled.

  They sat quiet for a while. The sun peered through the clouds, as if to say a quick goodbye before sinking below the horizon. Fran could understand why primitive people worshiped it. As the gigantic quiet of the nearly empty country accumulated on her day by day, imprinting its truth on her brain by its very weight, the sun--the moon, too, for that matter--began to seem bigger and more important. More personal. Those bright skyships began to look to you as they had when you were a child.

  "Anyway, I stopped," Stu said. "Last night I dreamed about that black man again. It was the worst yet. He's setting up somewhere out in the desert. Las Vegas, I think. And Frannie... I think he's crucifying people. The ones who give him trouble."

  "He's doing what?"

  "That's what I dreamed. Lines of crosses along Highway 15 made out of barn-beams and telephone poles. People hanging off them."

  "Just a dream," she said uneasily
.

  "Maybe." He smoked and looked west at the red-tinged clouds. "But the other two nights, just before we run on those maniacs holding the women, I dreamed about her--the woman who calls herself Mother Abigail. She was sitting in the cab of an old pickup truck parked on the shoulder of Highway 76. I was standing on the ground with one arm leaning on the window, talking to her just as natural as I'm talking to you. And she says, 'You got to move em along faster still, Stuart; if an old lady like me can do it, a big tough fella from Texas like you should be able to.' " Stu laughed, threw down his cigar, and crushed it under his heel. In kind of an absent way, as if not knowing what he was doing, he put an arm around Frannie's shoulders.

  "They're going to Colorado," she said.

  "Why, yes, I think they are."

  "Has ... has either Dayna or Susan dreamed of her?"

  "Both. And last night Susan dreamed of the crosses. Just like I did."

  "There's a lot of people with that old woman now."

  Stu agreed. "Twenty, maybe more. You know, we're passing people nearly every day. They just hunker down and wait for us to go by. They're scared of us, but her... they'll come to her, I guess. In their own good time."

  "Or to the other one," Frannie said.

  Stu nodded. "Yeah, or to him. Fran, why did you stop taking the Veronal?"

  She uttered a trembling sigh and wondered if she should tell him. She wanted to, but she was afraid of what his reaction might be.

  "There's no counting on what a woman will do," she said at last.

  "No," he agreed. "But there are ways to find out what they're thinking, maybe."

  "What--" she began, and he stopped her mouth with a kiss.

  They lay on the grass in the last of the twilight. Flagrant red had given way to cooler purple as they made love, and now Frannie could see stars shining through the last of the clouds. It would be good riding weather tomorrow. With any luck they would be able to get most of the way across Indiana.

  Stu slapped lazily at a mosquito hovering over his chest. His shirt was hung on a nearby bush. Fran's shirt was on but unbuttoned. Her breasts pushed at the cloth and she thought, I'm getting bigger, just a little right now, but it's noticeable... at least to me.