The Stand Read online

  He turned his head to the left (another bolt of pain, this one not so killing) and saw a rough concrete wall. Cracks ran through it. It had been extensively written on. Some of the writing was new, some old, most illiterate. THIS PLACE HAS BUGS. LOUIS DRAGONSKY, 1987. I LIKE IT IN MY ASSHOLE. DTS CAN BE FUN. GEORGE RAMPLING IS A JERK-OFF. I STILL LOVE YOU SUZANNE. THIS PLACE SUX, JERRY. CLYDE D. FRED 1981. There were pictures of large dangling penises, gigantic breasts, crudely drawn vaginas. It all gave Nick a sense of place. He was in a jail cell.

  Carefully, he propped himself on his elbows, let his feet (clad in paper slippers) drop over the edge of the cot, and then swung up to a sitting position. The large economy-size pain rocked his head again and his backbone gave out an alarming creak. His stomach rolled alarmingly in his gut, and a fainting kind of nausea seized him, the most dismaying and unmanning kind, the kind that makes you feel like crying out to God to make it stop.

  Instead of crying out--he couldn't have done that--Nick leaned over his knees, one hand on each cheek, and waited for it to pass. After a while, it did. He could feel the Band-Aids that had been placed over the furrow on his cheek, and by wrinkling that side of his face a couple of times he decided that some sawbones had sunk a couple of stitches in there for good measure.

  He looked around. He was in a small cell shaped like a Saltine box stood on end. Beyond the end of the cot was a barred door. At the head of the cot was a lidless, ringless toilet. Behind and above him--he saw this by craning his stiff neck very, very carefully--was a small barred window.

  After he had sat on the edge of the cot long enough to feel sure he wasn't going to pass out, he hooked the shapeless gray pajama pants he was wearing down around his knees, squatted on the can, and urinated for what seemed at least an hour. When he was finished he stood up, holding on to the edge of the cot like an old man. He looked apprehensively into the bowl for signs of blood, but his urine had been clear. He flushed it away.

  He walked carefully over to the barred door and looked out into a short corridor. To his left was the drunk tank. An old man was lying on one of its five bunks, a hand like driftwood dangling on the floor. To the right the corridor ended in a door that was chocked open. In the center of the corridor was a dangling green-shaded light like the kind he had seen in pool-halls.

  A shadow rose, danced on the propped-open door, and then a large man in khaki suntans walked into the corridor. He was wearing a Sam Browne belt and a big pistol. He hooked his thumbs into his pants pockets and looked at Nick for almost a full minute without speaking. Then he said, "When I was a boy we caught ourselves a mountain lion up in the hills and shot it and then drug it twenty mile back to town over dirt hardpan. What was left of that creature when we got home was the sorriest-lookin sight I ever saw. You the second-sorriest, boy."

  Nick thought it had the feel of a prepared speech, carefully honed and treasured, saved for out-of-towners and vags that occupied the barred Saltine boxes from time to time.

  "You got a name, Babalugah?"

  Nick put a finger to his swelled and lacerated lips and shook his head. He put a hand over his mouth, then cut the air with it in a soft diagonal hashmark and shook his head again.

  "What? Cain't talk? What's this happy horseshit?" The words were amiable enough, but Nick couldn't follow tones or inflections. He plucked an invisible pen from the air and wrote with it.

  "You want a pencil?"

  Nick nodded.

  "If you're mute, how come you don't have none of those cards?"

  Nick shrugged. He turned out his empty pockets. He balled his fists and shadowboxed the air, which sent another bolt of pain through his head and another wave of nausea through his stomach. He finished by tapping his own temples lightly with his fists, rolling his eyes up, and sagging on the bars. Then he pointed to his empty pockets.

  "You were robbed."

  Nick nodded.

  The man in khaki turned away and went back into his office. A moment later he returned with a dull pencil and a notepad. He thrust them through the bars. Written across the top of each notesheet was MEMO and From The Desk Of Sheriff John Baker.

  Nick turned the pad around and tapped the pencil eraser at the name. He raised questioning eyebrows.

  "Yeah, that's me. Who are you?"

  "Nick Andros," he wrote. He put his hand through the bars.

  Baker shook his head. "I ain't gonna shake with you. You deaf, too?"

  Nick nodded.

  "What happened to you tonight? Doc Soames and his wife almost ran you down like a woodchuck, boy."

  "Beat up & robbed. A mile or so from a roadhouse on Main St. Zack's Place."

  "That hangout's no place for a kid like you, Babalugah. You surely aren't old enough to drink."

  Nick shook his head indignantly. "I'm twenty-two," he wrote. "I can have a couple of beers without getting beaten up & robbed for them, can't I?"

  Baker read this with a sourly amused look on his face. "It don't appear you can in Shoyo. What you doing here, kid?"

  Nick tore the first sheet off the memo pad, crumpled it in a ball, dropped it on the floor. Before he could begin to write his reply, an arm shot through the bars and a steel hand clutched his shoulder. Nick's head jerked up.

  "My wife neatens these cells," Baker said, "and I don't see any need for you to litter yours up. Go throw that in the john."

  Nick bent over, wincing at the pain in his back, and fished the ball of paper off the floor. He took it over to the toilet, tossed it in, and then looked up at Baker with his eyebrows raised. Baker nodded.

  Nick came back. This time he wrote longer, pencil flying over the paper. Baker reflected that teaching a deaf-mute kid to read and write was probably quite a trick, and this Nick Andros must have some pretty good equipment upstairs to have caught the hang of it. There were fellows here in Shoyo, Arkansas, who had never properly caught the hang of it, and more than a few of them hung out in Zack's. But he supposed you couldn't expect a kid who just blew into town to know that.

  Nick handed the pad through the bars.

  "I've been traveling around but I'm not a vag. Spent today working for a man named Rich Ellerton about 6 miles west of here. I cleaned his barn & put up a load of hay in his loft. Last week I was in Watts, Okla., running fence. The men who beat me up got my week's pay."

  "You sure it was Rich Ellerton you was working for? I can check that, you know." Baker had torn off Nick's explanation, folded it to wallet-photo size, and tucked it into his shirt pocket.

  Nick nodded.

  "You see his dog?"

  Nick nodded.

  "What kind was it?"

  Nick gestured for the pad. "Big Doberman," he wrote. "But nice. Not mean."

  Baker nodded, turned away, and went back into his office. Nick stood at the bars, watching anxiously. A moment later, Baker returned with a big keyring, unlocked the holding cell, and pushed it back on its track.

  "Come on in the office," Baker said. "You want some breakfast?"

  Nick shook his head, then made pouring and drinking motions.

  "Coffee? Got that. You take cream and sugar?"

  Nick shook his head.

  "Take it like a man, huh?" Baker laughed. "Come on."

  Baker started up the hallway, and although he was speaking, Nick was unable to hear what he was saying with his back turned and his lips hidden. "I don't mind the company. I got insomnia. It's got so I can't sleep more'n three or four hours most nights. M'wife wants me to go see some big-shot doctor up in Pine Bluff. If it keeps on, I just might do it. I mean, looka this--here I am, five in the morning, not even light out, and there I sit eatin' aigs and greazy home fries from the truck stop up the road."

  He turned on the last phrase and Nick caught "... truck stop up the road." He raised his eyebrows and shrugged his shoulders to indicate his puzzlement.

  "Don't matter," Baker said. "Not to a young kid like you, anyway."

  In the outer office, Baker poured him a cup of black coffee out of a h
uge thermos. The sheriff's half-finished breakfast plate stood on his desk blotter, and he pulled it back to himself. Nick sipped the coffee. It hurt his mouth, but it was good.

  He tapped Baker on the shoulder, and when he looked up, Nick pointed to the coffee, rubbed his stomach, and winked soberly.

  Baker smiled. "You better say it's good. My wife Jane puts it up." He tucked half a hard-fried egg into his mouth, chewed, and then pointed at Nick with his fork. "You're pretty good. Just like one of those pantomimers. Bet you don't have much trouble makin yourself understood, huh?"

  Nick made a seesawing gesture with his hand in midair. Comme ci, comme ca.

  "I ain't gonna hold you," Baker said, mopping up grease with a slice of toasted Wonder Bread, "but I tell you what. If you stick around, maybe we can get the guys who did this to you. You game?"

  Nick nodded and wrote: "You think I can get my week's pay back?"

  "Not a chance," Baker said flatly. "I'm just a hick sheriff, boy. For somethin like that, you'd be wantin Oral Roberts."

  Nick nodded and shrugged. Putting his hands together, he made a bird flying away.

  "Yeah, like that. How many were there?"

  Nick held up four fingers, shrugged, then held up five.

  "Think you could identify any of them?"

  Nick held up one finger and wrote: "Big & blond. Your size, maybe a little heavier. Gray shirt & pants. He was wearing a big ring. 3rd finger right hand. Purple stone. That's what cut me."

  As Baker read this, a change came over his face. First concern, then anger. Nick, thinking the anger was directed against him, became frightened again.

  "Oh Jesus Christ," Baker said. "This here's a full commode slopping over for sure. You sure?"

  Nick nodded reluctantly.

  "Anything else? You see anything else?"

  Nick thought hard, then wrote: "Small scar. On his forehead."

  Baker looked at the words. "That's Ray Booth," he said. "My brother-in-law. Thanks, kid. Five in the morning and my day's wrecked already."

  Nick's eyes opened a little wider, and he made a cautious gesture of commiseration.

  "Well, all right," Baker said, more to himself than to Nick. "He's a bad actor. Janey knows it. He beat her up enough times when they was kids together. Still, they're brother 'n sister and I guess I can forget my lovin for this week."

  Nick looked down, embarrassed. After a moment Baker shook his shoulder so that Nick would see him speaking.

  "It probably won't do any good anyway," he said. "Ray 'n his jerk-off buddies'll just swear each other up. Your word against theirs. Did you get any licks in?"

  "Kicked this Ray in the guts," Nick wrote. "Got another one in the nose. Might have broken it."

  "Ray chums around with Vince Hogan, Billy Warner, and Mike Childress, mostly," Baker said. "I might be able to get Vince alone and break him down. He's got all the spine of a dyin jellyfish. If I could get him I could go after Mike and Billy. Ray got that ring in a fraternity at LSU. He flunked out his sophomore year." He paused, drumming his fingers against the rim of his breakfast plate. "I guess we could give it a go, kid, if you wanted to. But I'll warn you in advance, we probably won't get them. They're as vicious and cowardly as a dogpack, but they're town boys and you're just a deaf-mute drifter. And if they got off, they'd come after you."

  Nick thought about it. In his mind he kept coming back to the image of himself, being shoved from one of them to the next like a bleeding scarecrow, and to Ray's lips forming the words: I'm gonna mess im up. Sucker kicked me. To the feel of his knapsack, that old friend of the last two wandering years, being ripped from his back.

  On the memo pad he wrote and underlined two words: "Let's try."

  Baker sighed and nodded. "Okay. Vince Hogan works down to the sawmill ... well, that ain't just true. What he does mostly is fucks off down to the sawmill. We'll take a ride down there about nine, if that's fine with you. Maybe we can get him scared enough to spill the beans."

  Nick nodded.

  "How's your mouth? Doc Soames left some pills. He said it would probably be a misery to you."

  Nick nodded ruefully.

  "I'll get em. It ..." He broke off, and in Nick's silent movie world, he watched the sheriff explode several sneezes into his handkerchief. "That's another thing," he went on, but he had turned away now and Nick caught only the first word. "I'm comin down with a real good cold. Jesus Christ, ain't life grand? Welcome to Arkansas, boy."

  He got the pills and came back to where Nick sat. After he passed them and a glass of water to Nick, Baker rubbed gently under the angle of his jaw. There was a definite painful swelling there. Swollen glands, coughing, sneezing, a low fever, felt like. Yeah, it was shaping up to be a wonderful day.

  CHAPTER 10

  Larry woke up with a hangover that was not too bad, a mouth that tasted as if a baby dragon had used it for a potty chair, and a feeling that he was somewhere he shouldn't be.

  The bed was a single, but there were two pillows on it. He could smell frying bacon. He sat up, looked out the windows at another gray New York day, and his first thought was that they had done something horrible to Berkeley overnight: turned it dirty and sooty, had aged it. Then last night began coming back and he realized he was looking at Fordham, not Berkeley. He was in a second-floor flat on Tremont Avenue, not far from the Concourse, and his mother was going to wonder where he had been last night. Had he called her, given her any kind of excuse, no matter how thin?

  He swung his legs out of bed and found a crumpled pack of Winstons with one crazy cigarette left in it. He lit it with a green plastic Bic lighter. It tasted like dead horseshit. Out in the kitchen the sound of frying bacon went on and on, like radio static.

  The girl's name was Maria and she had said she was a ... what? Oral hygienist, was that it? Larry didn't know how much she knew about hygiene, but she was great on oral. He vaguely remembered being gobbled like a Perdue drumstick. Crosby, Stills, and Nash on the crappy little stereo in the living room, singing about how much water had gone underneath the bridge, time we had wasted on the way. If his memory was correct, Maria sure hadn't wasted much time. She had been a little overwhelmed to discover he was that Larry Underwood. At one point in the evening's festivities, hadn't they gone out reeling around looking for an open record store so they could buy a copy of "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?"

  He groaned very softly and tried to retrace yesterday from its innocuous beginnings to its frantic, gobbling finale.

  The Yankees weren't in town, he remembered that. His mother had been gone to work when he woke up, but she had left a Yankees schedule on the kitchen table along with a note: "Larry. As you can see, the Yankees won't be back until Jul 1. They are playing a doubleheader the 4th of July. If you're not doing anything that day, why not take your mom to the ball park. I'll buy the beer and hotdogs. There are eggs and sausage in the fridge or sweetrolls in the breadbox if you like them better. Take care of yourself kiddo." There was a typical Alice Underwood PS: "Most of the kids you hung around with are gone now and good riddance to that bunch of hoods but I think Buddy Marx is working at that print shop on Stricker Avenue."

  Just thinking of that note was enough to make him wince. No "Dear" before his name. No "Love" before her signature. She didn't believe in phony stuff. The real stuff was in the refrigerator. Sometime while he had been sleeping off his drive across America, she had gone out and stocked up on every goddam thing in the world that he liked. Her memory was so perfect it was frightening. A Daisy canned ham. Two pounds of real butter--how the hell could she afford that on her salary? Two six-packs of Coke. Deli sausages. A roast of beef already marinating in Alice's secret sauce, the contents of which she refused to divulge even to her son, and a gallon of Baskin-Robbins Peach Delight ice cream in the freezer. Along with a Sara Lee cheesecake. The kind with strawberries on top.

  On impulse, he had gone into the bathroom, not just to take care of his bladder but to check the medicine cabinet. A brand new Pepsodent t
oothbrush was hanging in the old holder, where all of his childhood toothbrushes had hung, one after another. There was a package of disposable razors in the cabinet, a can of Barbasol shave cream, even a bottle of Old Spice cologne. Not fancy, she would have said -- Larry could actually hear her--but smelly enough, for the money.

  He had stood looking at these things, then had taken the new tube of toothpaste out and held it in his hand. No "Dear," no "Love, Mom." Just a new toothbrush, new tube of toothpaste, new bottle of cologne. Sometimes, he thought, real love is silent as well as blind. He began brushing his teeth, wondering if there might not be a song in that someplace.

  The oral hygienist came in, wearing a pink nylon half-slip and nothing else. "Hi, Larry," she said. She was short, pretty in a vague Sandra Dee sort of way, and her breasts pointed at him perkily without a sign of a sag. What was the old joke? That's right, Loot--she had a pair of 38s and a real gun. Ha-ha, very funny. He had come three thousand miles to spend the night being eaten alive by Sandra Dee.

  "Hi," he said, and got up. He was naked but his clothes were at the foot of the bed. He began to put them on.

  "I've got a robe you can wear if you want to. We're having kippers and bacon."

  Kippers and bacon? His stomach began to shrivel and fold in on itself.

  "No, honey, I've got to run. Someone I've got to see."

  "Oh hey, you can't just run out on me like that--"

  "Really, it's important."

  "Well, I'm impawtant, too!" She was becoming strident. It hurt Larry's head. For no particular reason, he thought of Fred Flintstone bellowing "WIIILMAAA!" at the top of his cartoon lungs.

  "Your Bronx is showing, luv," he said.

  "What's that supposed to mean?" She planted her hands on her hips, the greasy spatula sticking out of one closed fist like a steel flower. Her breasts jiggled fetchingly, but Larry wasn't fetched. He stepped into his pants and buttoned them. "So I'm from the Bronx, does that make me black? What have you got against the Bronx? What are you, some kind of racist?"