The Stand (Original Edition) Read online

“How you feeling?” Nick wrote.

  “Pretty good. I was burnin up until midnight. Worst fever I’ve had since I was a kid. Aspirin didn’t seem to help it. Janey wanted to call the doc, but around twelve-thirty the fever just broke. I slept like a log after that. How are you doing?”

  Nick made a thumb-and-forefinger circle.

  “How’s our guests?”

  Nick opened and closed his mouth several times in a mime jabbering. Looked furious. Made banging gestures on invisible bars.

  Baker threw back his head and laughed, then sneezed several times.

  “You ought to be on TV,” he said. “Did you write your life story down like you said you was gonna?”

  Nick nodded and handed the two sheets of longhand over. The sheriff sat down at his desk and read them carefully. When he was done he looked at Nick so long and so piercingly that Nick stared down at his feet for a moment, embarrassed and confused.

  When he looked up again Baker said: “You’ve been on your own since you were sixteen? For six years?”

  Nick nodded.

  “And you’ve really taken all these high school courses?”

  Nick wrote for some time on one of the memo sheets. “I was way behind because I started to read & write so late. When the orphanage closed I was just starting to catch up. I got six h.s. credits from there and another six since then from La Salle in Chicago. I need four more credits.”

  “What courses do you still need?” Baker asked.

  Nick wrote: “Geometry. Advanced math. Two years of a language. Those are the college requirements.”

  “A language. You mean like French? German? Spanish?”

  Nick nodded.

  Baker laughed and shook his head. “Don’t that beat all. A deafmute learning to talk a foreign language. Nothing against you, boy. You understand that.”

  Nick smiled and nodded.

  “So why you been driftin around so much?”

  “While I was still a minor I didn’t dare stay in one place for too long,” Nick wrote. “Afraid they’d try to stick me in another orphanage or something. When I got old enough to look for a steady job, times got worse.”

  “Most places would have just let you ramble on,” Baker said. “In hard times the milk of human kindness don’t flow so free, Nick. I might be able to put you onto something around here, unless those boys soured you on Shoyo and Arkansas for good. But... we ain’t all like that.”

  Nick nodded to show he understood that.

  “How’s youi teeth?”

  Nick shrugged.

  “Take any of those pain pills?”

  Nick held up two fingers.

  “Well, look, I got some paperwork to do on those boys. You go on with what you were doing. We’ll talk more later.”

  Dr. Soames, the man who had almost hit Nick with his car, came by around 9:30 A.M. that same morning. He was a man of about sixty with shaggy white hair and a scrawny chicken neck and very sharp blue eyes.

  “Big John tells me you read lips,” he said. “He also says he wants to see you gainfully employed, so I guess I better make sure you’re not going to die on his hands. Take off your shirt.”

  Nick unbuttoned his blue workshirt and took it off.

  “Holy Jesus, look at him,” Baker said.

  “They worked him over pretty good, all right.” Soames looked at Nick and said dryly, “Boy, you almost lost your left tit.” He pointed to a crescent-shaped scab just above the nipple. Nick’s belly and rib-cage looked like a Canadian sunrise. Soames poked and prodded him and looked carefully into the pupils of his eyes. At last he examined the shattered remains of Nick’s front teeth, the only part of him that really hurt now, in spite of the spectacular bruises.

  “That must hurt like a sonofabitch,” he said, and Nick nodded ruefully. “You’re gonna lose them,” Soames went on. “You—” He sneezed three times in quick succession. “Excuse me.”

  He began to put his tools back into his black bag. “The prognosis is favorable, young man, barring strokes of lightning or further trips to Zack’s ginmill. Is your speaking problem physical, or does it come from being deaf?”

  Nick wrote: “No vocal cords. No eardrums.”

  Soames nodded. “Classic birth defects. It’s a shame. Thank God that He didn’t decide to give your brains a stir while He was at it. Put your shirt on.”

  Nick did. He liked Soames; in his way, he was very much like Rudy Sparkman, who told him once that God had given all deafmute males an extra two inches below the waist to make up for what He had taken away above the collarbones.

  Soames said, “I’ll tell em to give you a refill on that pain medication down at the drugstore. Tell moneybags here to pay for it.”

  “Ho-ho,” John Baker said.

  “He’s got more dough stashed away in fruit jars than a hog has warts,” Soames went on. He sneezed again, wiped his nose, rummaged around in his bag and brought out a stethoscope.

  “You want to look out, gramps, I’ll lock you up for drunk and disorderly,” Baker said with a smile.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Soames said. “You’ll open your mouth too wide one day and fall right in. Take off y’shirt, John, and let’s see if your boobs are as big as they used to be.”

  “Take off my shirt? Why?”

  “Because your wife wants me to look at you, that’s why. She thinks you’re a sick man and she doesn’t want you to get any sicker, God knows why. Ain’t I told her enough times that she and I wouldn’t have to sneak around anymore if you were underground? Come on, Johnny. Strip it off.”

  “It was just a cold,” Baker said, reluctantly unbuttoning his shirt. “I feel fine this morning. Honest to God, Ambrose, you sound worse than I do.”

  “You don’t tell the doctor, the doctor tells you,” Soames said. As Baker pulled his shirt off, Soames turned to Nick and said, “But you know it’s funny how a cold will just start making the rounds. Mrs. Lathrop is down sick, and the whole Richie family, and most of those no-accounts out on the Barker Road are coughing their brains out. Even that Billy Warner in there.”

  Baker had wormed out of his undershirt.

  “There, what’d I tell you?” Soames said conversationally. “Hasn’t he got a set? Even an old shit like me could get horny looking at that.”

  Baker gasped as the stethoscope touched his chest. “Jesus, that’s cold! What do you, keep it in a deep freeze?”

  “Breathe in,” Soames said, frowning. “Let it out.”

  Baker let it out, and his exhale turned into a weak cough.

  Soames kept at the sheriff for a long time. Front and back both. At last he put away his stethoscope and used a tongue depressor to look down Baker’s throat. Finished, he broke it in two and tossed it into the wastebasket.

  “Well?” Baker said.

  Soames pressed the fingers of his right hand into the flesh of Baker’s neck under the jaw. Baker winced away from it.

  “I don’t have to ask if that hurt,” Soames said. “John, go home and go to bed.”

  Baker blinked. “Am,” he said quietly, “you know I can’t do that. I’ve got three prisoners who have to go up to Camden this afternoon. I left this kid with them last night, but I won’t do it again. He’s mute. I wouldn’t have agreed to it last night if I had been thinking right.” “You’ve got some kind of respiratory infection, a damn good one by the sound, and a fever. Your pipes are sick, Johnny, and to be perfectly frank, that’s no joke for a man who’s carrying around the extra meat you are. Go to bed. If you still feel okay tomorrow morning, get rid of them then. Better still, call the state patrol to come down and get them.”

  Baker looked apologetically at Nick. “You know,” he said, “I do feel kind of dragged out. Maybe some rest—”

  “Go home and lie down,” Nick wrote. “I’ll be careful. Besides, I have to earn enough to pay for those pills.”

  “Nobody works so hard for you as a junkie,” Soames said, and burst out laughing.

  Baker picked up the two sheets of p
aper with Nick’s background on them. “Could I take these home for Janey to read? She took a real shine to you, Nick.”

  Nick scrawled on the pad, “Sure can. She’s very nice.”

  “One of a kind,” Baker said, and sighed as he buttoned his shirt back up. “This fever’s comin on strong again. Thought I had it licked.”

  “Take aspirin,” Soames said, latching his bag. “It’s that glandular infection I don’t like.”

  “There’s a cigar box in the bottom desk drawer,” Baker said. “It’s petty cash. You can go out for lunch, and get your medication on the way. Those boys aren’t what I’d call desperadoes. Just leave a voucher for how much you take. I’ll get in touch with the state police and you’ll be shut of them by late this afternoon.”

  Nick made a thumb-and-forefinger circle.

  “I’ve been trusting you a lot on short notice,” Baker said soberly, “but Janey says it’s all right. You have a care.”

  Nick nodded.

  Jane Baker had come in around six yesterday evening with a covered dish supper and a carton of milk.

  Nick wrote, “Thanks very much. How’s your husband?”

  She laughed, a small woman with chestnut brown hair, dressed prettily in a checked shirt and faded jeans. “He wanted to come down himself, but I talked him out of it. His fever was up so high this afternoon that it scared me, but it’s almost down to normal tonight. I think it’s because of the state patrol. Johnny’s never really happy unless he can be mad at the state patrol.”

  Nick looked at her quizzically.

  “They told him they couldn’t send anybody down for his prisoners until nine tomorrow morning. They’ve had a bad sick-day, twenty or more troopers out. And a lot of the people who are on have been fetching people to the hospital up at Camden or even Pine Bluff. There’s a lot of this sickness around. I think Am Soames is a lot more worried than he’s letting on.”

  She looked worried herself. Then she took the two folded sheets of memo paper from her breast pocket.

  “This is quite a story,” she said quietly, handing the papers back to him. “You’ve had just about the worst luck of anyone I ever heard of. I think the way you’ve risen above your handicaps is admirable. And I have to apologize again for my brother.”

  Nick, embarrassed, could only shrug.

  “I hope you’ll stay on in Shoyo,” she said, standing. “My husband likes you, and I do, too. Be careful of those men in there.”

  “I will,” Nick wrote. “Tell the sheriff I hope he feels better.” “I’ll take him your good wishes.”

  She left then, and Nick passed a night of broken rest, getting up occasionally to check on his three wards. He dreamed oddly, and all he could remember upon waking was that he seemed to have been walking through endless rows of green corn, looking for something and terribly afraid of something else that seemed to be behind him.

  Chapter 14

  It had been so long since Larry had been in Times Square that he had expected it to look different somehow, magical. Things would look smaller and yet better there, and he would not feel intimidated by the rank, smelly, and sometimes dangerous vitality of the place the way he had as a child, when he and Buddy Marx or just he alone would scutter down here to see the 990 double features or to stare at the glittering junk in the windows of the arcades and shops and pinball hangouts.

  But it all looked just the same—more than it should have because some things really had changed. When you came up the stairs from the subway, the newsstand that had been on the corner as you came out was gone. Half a block down, where there had been a penny arcade full of flashing lights and bells and dangerous-looking young men with cigarettes dangling from the corners of their mouths as they played the Gottlieb Desert Isle or Space Race, where that had been there was now an Orange Julius with a flock of young blacks standing in front of it, their lower bodies moving gently as if somewhere jive played on and on, jive that only black ears could hear. There were more massage parlors and X-rated movies.

  Still, it was much the same, and this made him sad. In a way the only real difference made things seem worse: He felt like a tourist here now. But maybe even native New Yorkers felt like tourists in the Square, dwarfed, wanting to look up and read the electronic headlines as they marched around and around up there. He couldn’t tell; he had forgotten what it was like to be a part of New York. And he didn’t want to relearn.

  His mother hadn’t gone to work that morning. She’d been fighting a cold for the last couple of days and had gotten up early this morning with a fever. He had heard her from the narrow, safe bed in his old room, banging around out in the kitchen, Sneezing and saying shit under her breath, getting ready for breakfast. The sound of the TV being turned on, then the news on the “Today” program. An attempted coup in India. A power station blown up in Wyoming. The Supreme Court was expected to hand down a landmark decision having to do with gay rights.

  By the time Larry came out into the kitchen, buttoning his shirt, the news was over and Gene Shalitt was interviewing a man with a bald head. The man with the bald head was showing a number of small animals he had hand-blown. Glassblowing, he said, had been his hobby for forty years, and his book would be published by Random House. Then he sneezed. “Excuse you,” Gene Shalitt said, and chuckled.

  “You want em fried or scrambled?” Alice Underwood asked. She was in her bathrobe.

  “Scrambled,” Larry said, knowing it would do no good to protest the eggs. In Alice’s view, it wasn’t breakfast without eggs (which she called “cackleberries” when her humor was good). They had protein and nutrition. Her idea of nutrition was vague but all-encompassing. She kept a list of nutritious items in her head, Larry knew, as well as their opposite numbers—Jujubes, pickles, Slim Jims, the slice of pink bubble gum that came with baseball cards.

  He sat down and watched her make the eggs, pouring them into the same old black skillet, stirring them with the same wire whisk that she had used to stir his eggs when he had been going to the first grade at P.S. 162.

  She pulled her hankie out of her bathrobe pocket, coughed into it, sneezed into it, and muttered “Shit!” indistinctly into it before putting it back.

  “Day off, Mom?”

  “I called in sick. This cold wants to break me. I hate to call in sick on Fridays, so many do, but I’ve got to get off my feet. I’m running a fever. Swollen glands, too.”

  “Did you call the doctor?”

  “When I was a charming maid, doctors made housecalls,” she said. “Now if you’re sick, you have to go to the hospital emergency room. Unless you know you’re going to be sick a week ahead of time, of course, and then you can make an appointment in advance.” She smiled mordantly. “That hospital emergency room, I went there a year ago when I had my inner ear infection. It was worse than the Green Stamp Redemption Center a week before Christmas. And full of Puerto Ricans. I’ll stay home and drink juice and take aspirin. I’ll feel okay tomorrow.”

  He stayed most of the morning, trying to help out. He lugged the TV in by her bed, the cords standing out heroically on his arms (“You’re going to give yourself a hernia so I can watch ‘Let’s Make a Deal,’” she sniffed), brought her juice and an old bottle of Nyquil for her stuffiness, and ran down to the market to get her a couple of paperbacks.

  After that there wasn’t much for them to do except get on each other’s nerves. She marveled over how much poorer the TV reception was in the bedroom and he had to bite back an acid comment to the effect that it was better than none at all. Finally he said he might go out and see some of the city.

  “That’s a good idea,” she said with obvious relief. “I’m going to take a nap. You’re a good boy, Larry.”

  So he had gone down the narrow stairs (the elevator was still broken) and onto the street, feeling guilty relief. The day was his, and he still had two hundred dollars in cash.

  But now, in Times Square, he didn’t feel so good. He wandered along, his wallet long since transferred to a fron
t pocket. He paused in front of a discount record store, transfixed by the sound of his own voice coming from the battered overhead speakers. The bridge verse.

  ‘I didn’t come to ask you to stay all night Or to find out if you've seen the light I didn’t come to make a fuss or pick a fight I just want you to tell me if you think you can Baby, can you dig your man?”

  Dig him, baby—

  Baby, can you dig your man?”

  That’s me, he thought, looking vacantly in at the albums, but today the sound depressed him. Worse, it made him homesick. He didn’t want to be here under this dirty gray washtub sky, smelling New York exhaust, one hand constantly playing pocket pool with his wallet to make sure it was still there. New York, thy name is paranoia. Suddenly where he wanted to be was in a West Coast recording studio, making a new album.

  Larry quickened his step and turned in at an arcade. Bells and buzzers jangled in his ears, and there was the amplified, ripping growl of a Deathrace 2000 game, complete with the unearthly, electronic screams of the dying pedestrians. Neat game, Larry thought, soon to be followed by Dachau 2000. They’ll love that one. He went to the change booth and got ten dollars in quarters. There was a working phone booth next to the Beef ’n Brew across the street and he direct dialed Jane’s Place from memory. Jane’s was a poker parlor where Wayne Stukey sometimes hung out.

  Larry plugged quarters into the slot until his hand ached, and then the phone began to ring three thousand miles away.

  A female voice said, “Jane’s. We’re open.”

  “To anything?” he asked, low and sexy.

  “Listen, wise guy, this isn’t. . . hey, is this Larry?”

  “Yeah, it’s me. Hi, Arlene.”

  “Where are you? Nobody’s seen you, Larry.”

  “Well, I’m on the East Coast,” he said cautiously. “Somebody told me there were bloodsuckers on me and I ought to get out of the pool until they dropped off.”

  “Something about a big party?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I heard about that,” she said. “Biiig spender.”

  “Is Wayne around, Arlene?”

  “You mean Wayne Stukey? Haven’t you heard?”