The Stand Read online

  She had asked him in a casual manner what he did for a living ... the casual manner, he reflected with some resentment, of a person for whom anything so simple as "a living" had never been a problem. I was a rock and roll singer, he told her, slightly amazed at how painless that past tense was. Sing with this band for a while, then that one. Sometimes a studio gig. She had nodded and that was the end of it. He had no urge to tell her about "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?"--that was the past now. The gap between that life and this was so large he hadn't really comprehended it yet. In that life he had been running away from a cocaine dealer; in this one he could bury a man in Central Park and accept that (more or less) as a matter of course.

  He put the eggs on a plate, added a cup of instant coffee with a lot of cream and sugar, the way she liked it (Larry himself subscribed to the trucker's credo of "if you wanted a cup of cream and sugar, whydja ask for coffee?"), and brought it to the table. She was sitting on a hassock, holding her elbows and facing the stereo. Debussy strained out of the speakers like melted butter.

  "Soup's on," he called.

  She came to the table with a wan smile, looked at the eggs the way a track and field runner might look at a series of hurdles, and began to eat.

  "Good," she said. "You were right. Thank you."

  "You're more than welcome," he said. "Now look. What I'm going to suggest is this. We go down Fifth to Thirty-ninth and turn west. Cross to New Jersey by the Lincoln Tunnel. We can follow 495 northwest to Passaic and ... those eggs okay? They're not spoiled?"

  She smiled. "They're fine." She forked more into her mouth, followed it with a sip of coffee. "Just what I needed. Go ahead, I'm listening. "

  "From Passaic we just ankle it west until the roads are clear enough for us to drive. Then I thought we could turn northeast and head up to New England. Make kind of a buttonhook, do you see what I mean? It looks longer, but I think it'll end up saving us a lot of hassles. Maybe take a house on the ocean in Maine. Kittery, York, Wells, Ogunquit, maybe Scarborough or Boothbay Harbor. How does that sound?"

  He had been looking out the window, thinking as he spoke, and now he turned back to her. What he saw frightened him badly for a moment --it was as if she'd gone insane. She was smiling, but it was a rictus of pain and horror. Sweat stood out on her face in big round droplets.

  "Rita? Jesus, Rita, what--"

  "--sorry--" She scrambled up, knocking her chair over, and fled across the living room. One foot hooked the hassock she had been sitting on and it rolled on its side like an oversized checker. She almost fell herself.

  "Rita?"

  Then she was in the bathroom and he could hear the industrial grinding sound of her breakfast coming up. He slammed his hand flat on the table in irritation, then got up and went in after her. God, he hated it when people puked. It always made you feel like puking yourself. The smell of slightly used American cheese in the bathroom made him want to gag. Rita was sitting on the robin's-egg-blue tile of the floor, her legs folded under her, her head still hanging weakly over the bowl.

  She wiped her mouth with a swatch of toilet paper and then looked up at him supplicatingly, her face as pale as paper.

  "I'm sorry, I just couldn't eat it, Larry. Really. I'm so sorry."

  "Well Jesus, if you knew it was going to make you do that, why did you try?"

  "Because you wanted me to. And I didn't want you to be angry with me. But you are, aren't you? You are angry with me."

  His mind went back to last night. She had made love to him with such frantic energy that for the first time he had found himself thinking of her age and had been a little disgusted. It had been like being caught in one of those exercise machines. He had come quickly, almost in self-defense it seemed, and a long while later she had fallen back, panting and unfulfilled. Later, while he was on the borderline of sleep, she had drawn close to him and once again he had been able to smell her sachet, a more expensive version of scent his mother had always worn when they went out to the movies, and she had murmured the thing that had jerked him back from sleep and had kept him awake for another two hours: You won't leave me, will you? You won't leave me alone?

  Before that she had been good in bed, so good that he was stunned. She had taken him back to this place after their lunch on the day they had met, and what had happened had happened quite naturally. He remembered an instant of disgust when he saw how her breasts sagged, and how the blue veins were prominent (it made him think of his mother's varicose veins), but he had forgotten all about that when her legs came up and her thighs pressed against his hips with amazing strength.

  Slow, she had laughed. The last shall be first and the first last.

  He had been on the verge when she had pushed him off and gotten cigarettes.

  What the hell are you doing? he asked, amazed, while old John Thomas waved indignantly in the air, visibly throbbing.

  She had smiled. You've got a free hand, don't you? So do I.

  So they had done that while they smoked, and she chatted lightly about all manner of things--although the color had come up in her cheeks and after a while her breath had shortened and what she was saying began to drift off, forgotten.

  Now, she said, taking his cigarette and her own and crushing them both out. Let's see if you can finish what you started. If you can't, I'll likely tear you apart.

  He finished it, quite satisfactorily for both of them, and they had slipped off to sleep. He woke up sometime after four and watched her sleeping, thinking that there was something to be said for experience after all. He had done a lot of screwing in the last ten years or so, but what had happened earlier hadn't been screwing. It had been something much better than that, if a little decadent.

  Well, she's had lovers, of course.

  This had excited him again, and he woke her up.

  And so it had been until they had found the monster-shouter, and last night. There had been other things before then, things that troubled him, but which he had accepted. Something like this, he had rationalized it, if it only makes you a little bit psycho, you're way ahead.

  Two nights ago he had awakened sometime after two and had heard her running a glass of water in the bathroom. He knew she was probably taking another sleeping pill. She had the big red-and-yellow gelatine capsules that were known as "yellowjackets" on the West Coast. Big downers. He told himself she'd probably been taking them long before the superflu had happened.

  And there was the way she followed him from place to place in the apartment, too, even standing in the bathroom door and talking to him while he was showering or relieving himself. He was a private bathroom person, but he told himself that some weren't. A lot of it depended on your upbringing. He would have a talk with her ... sometime.

  But now ...

  Was he going to have to carry her on his back? Christ, he hoped not. She had seemed stronger than that, at least she had at first. It was one of the reasons she had appealed to him so strongly that day in the park ... the main reason, really. There's no more truth in advertising, he thought bitterly. How the hell was he qualified to take care of her when he couldn't even watch out for himself? He'd shown that pretty conclusively after the record had broken out. Wayne Stukey hadn't been shy about pointing it out, either.

  "No," he told her, "I'm not angry. It's just that ... you know, I'm not your boss. If you don't feel like eating, just say so."

  "I told you ... I said I didn't think I could--"

  "The fuck you did," he snapped, startled and angry.

  She bent her head and looked at her hands and he knew she was struggling to keep from sobbing because he wouldn't like that. For a moment it made him angrier than ever and he almost shouted: I'm not your father or your fat-cat husband! I'm not going to take care of you! You've got thirty years on me, for Christ's sake! Then he felt the familiar surge of self-contempt and wondered what the hell could be the matter with him.

  "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm an insensitive bastard."

  "No you're not," she sai
d, and sniffled. "It's just that ... all of this is starting to catch up with me. It ... yesterday, that poor man in the park ... I thought: no one is ever going to catch the people who did that to him, and put them in jail. They'll just go on and do it again and again. Like animals in the jungle. And it all began to seem very real. Do you understand, Larry? Can you see what I mean?" She turned her tear-wet eyes up to him.

  "Yes," he said, but he was still impatient with her, and just a trifle contemptuous. It was a real situation, how could it not be? They were in the middle of it and had watched it develop this far. His own mother was dead; he had watched her die, and was she trying to say that she was somehow more sensitive to all this than he was? He had lost his mother and she had lost the man who brought her Mercedes around, but somehow her loss was supposed to be the greater. Well, that was bullshit. Just bullshit.

  "Try not to be angry with me," she said. "I'll do better."

  I hope so. I sure do hope so.

  "You're fine," he said, and helped her to her feet. "Come on, now. What do you say? We've got a lot to do. Feel up to it?"

  "Yes," she said, but her expression was the same as it had been when he offered her the eggs.

  "When we get out of the city, you'll feel better."

  She looked at him nakedly. "Will I?"

  "Sure," Larry said heartily. "Sure you will."

  They went first-cabin.

  Manhattan Sporting Goods was locked, but Larry broke a hole in the show window with a long iron pipe he had found. The burglar alarm brayed senselessly into the deserted street. He selected a large pack for himself and a smaller one for Rita. She had packed two changes of clothes for each of them--it was all he would allow--and he was carrying them in a PanAm flight bag she had found in the closet, along with toothbrushes. The toothbrushes struck him as slightly absurd. Rita was fashionably attired for walking, in white silk deckpants and a shell blouse. Larry wore faded bluejeans and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

  They loaded the packs with freeze-dried foods and nothing else. There was no sense, Larry told her, in weighting themselves down with a lot of other stuff--including more clothes--when they could simply take what they wanted on the other side of the river. She agreed wanly, and her lack of interest nettled him again.

  After a short interior debate with himself, he also added a .30-.30 and two hundred rounds of ammunition. It was a beautiful gun, and the pricetag he pulled from the trigger-guard and dropped indifferently on the floor said four hundred and fifty dollars.

  "Do you really think we'll need that?" she asked apprehensively. She still had the .32 in her purse.

  "I think we'd better have it," he told her, not wanting to say more but thinking about the monster-shouter's ugly end.

  "Oh," she said in a small voice, and he guessed from her eyes that she was thinking about that, too.

  "That pack's not too heavy for you, is it?"

  "Oh, no. It isn't. Really."

  "Well, they have a way of getting heavier as you walk along. You just say the word and I'll carry it for a while."

  "I'll be all right," she said, and smiled. After they were on the sidewalk again, she looked both ways and said, "We're leaving New York."

  "Yes."

  She turned to him. "I'm glad. I feel like ... oh, when I was a little girl. And my father would say, 'We're going on a trip today.' Do you remember how that was?"

  Larry smiled a little in return, remembering the evenings his mother would say, "That Western you wanted to see is down at the Crest, Larry. Clint Eastwood. What do you say?"

  "I guess I do remember," he said.

  She stretched up on her toes, and readjusted the pack a little bit on her shoulders.

  "The beginning of a journey," she said, and then so softly he wasn't sure he'd heard her correctly: "The way leads ever on ..."

  "What?"

  "It's a line from Tolkien," she said. "The Lord of the Rings. I've always thought of it as sort of a gateway to adventure."

  "The less adventure the better," Larry said, but almost unwillingly he knew what she meant.

  Still she was looking at the street. Near this intersection it was a narrow canyon between high stone and stretches of sun-reflecting thermopane, clogged with cars backed up for miles. It was as if everyone in New York had decided at the same time to park in the streets.

  She said: "I've been to Bermuda and England and Jamaica and Montreal and Saigon and to Moscow. But I haven't been on a journey since I was a little girl and my father took my sister Bess and me to the zoo. Let's go, Larry."

  It was a walk that Larry Underwood never forgot. He found himself thinking that she hadn't been so wrong to quote Tolkien at that, Tolkien with his mythic lands seen through the lens of time and half-mad, half-exalted imaginings, peopled with elves and ents and trolls and orcs. There were none of those in New York, but so much had changed, so much was out of joint, that it was impossible not to think of it in terms of fantasy. A man hung from a lamppost at Fifth and East Fifty-fourth, below the park and in a once-congested business district, a placard with the single word LOOTER hung around his neck. A cat lying on top of a hexagonal litter basket (the basket still had fresh-looking advertisements for a Broadway show on its sides) with her kittens, giving them suck and enjoying the midmorning sun. A young man with a big grin and a valise who strolled up to them and told Larry he would give him a million dollars for the use of the woman for fifteen minutes. The million, presumably, was in the valise. Larry unslung the rifle and told him to take his million elsewhere. "Sure, man. Don't hold it against me, you dig it? Can't blame a guy for tryin, can you? Have a nice day. Hang loose."

  They reached the corner of Fifth and East Thirty-ninth shortly after meeting that man (Rita, with a hysterical sort of good humor, insisted on referring to him as John Bearsford Tipton, a name which meant nothing to Larry). It was nearly noon, and Larry suggested lunch. There was a delicatessen on the corner, but when he pushed the door open, the smell of rotted meat that came out made her draw back.

  "I'd better not go in there if I want to save what appetite I have," she said apologetically.

  Larry suspected he could find some cured meat inside--salami, pepperoni, something like that--but after running across "John Bearsford Tipton" four blocks back, he didn't want to leave her alone for even the short time it would take to go in and check. So they found a bench half a block west, and ate dehydrated fruit and dehydrated strips of bacon. They finished with cheese spread on Ritz crackers and passed a thermos of iced coffee back and forth.

  "This time I was really hungry," she said proudly.

  He smiled back, feeling better. Just to be on the move, to be taking some positive action--that was good. He had told her she would feel better when they got out of New York. At the time it had just been something to say. Now, consulting the rise in his own spirits, he guessed it was true. Being in New York was like being in a graveyard where the dead were not yet quiet. The sooner they got out, the better it would be. She would perhaps revert to the way she had been that first day in the park. They would go to Maine on the secondary roads and set up housekeeping in one of those rich-bitch summer houses. North now, and south in September or October. Boothbay Harbor in the summer, Key Biscayne in the winter. It had a nice ring. Occupied with his thoughts, he didn't see her grimace of pain as he stood up and shouldered the rifle he had insisted on bringing.

  They were moving west now, their shadows behind them--at first as squat as frogs, beginning to lengthen out as the afternoon progressed. They passed the Avenue of the Americas, Seventh Avenue, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth. The streets were crammed and silent, frozen rivers of automobiles in every color, predominated by the yellow of the taxicabs. Many of the cars had become hearses, their decaying drivers still leaning behind the wheels, their passengers slumped as if, weary of the traffic jam, they had fallen asleep. Larry started to think that maybe they'd want to pick up a couple of motorcycles once they got out of the city. That would give them both mobili
ty and a fighting chance to skirt the worst of the clots of dead vehicles which must litter the highways everywhere.

  Always assuming she can run a bike, he thought. And the way things were going, it would turn out she couldn't. Life with Rita was turning out to be a real pain in the butt, at least in some of its aspects. But if push came down to shove, he supposed she could ride pillion behind him.

  At the intersection of Thirty-ninth and Seventh, they saw a young man wearing cutoff denim shorts and nothing else lying atop a Ding-Dong Taxi.

  "Is he dead?" Rita asked, and at the sound of her voice the young man sat up, looked around, saw them, and waved. They waved back. The young man lay placidly back down.

  It was just after two o'clock when they crossed Eleventh Avenue. Larry heard a muffled cry of pain behind him and realized Rita was no longer walking on his left.

  She was down on one knee, holding her foot. With something like horror, Larry noticed for the first time that she was wearing expensive open-toed sandals, probably in the eighty-dollar range, just the thing for a four-block stroll along Fifth Avenue while window-shopping, but for a long walk--a hike, really--like the one they had been making ...

  The ankle-straps had chafed through her skin. Blood was trickling down her ankles.

  "Larry, I'm s--"

  He jerked her abruptly to her feet. "What were you thinking about?" he shouted into her face. He felt a moment's shame at the miserable way she recoiled, but also a mean sort of pleasure. "Did you think you could cab back to your apartment if your feet got tired?"

  "I never thought--"

  "Well, Christ!" He ran his hands through his hair. "I guess you didn't. You're bleeding, Rita. How long has it been hurting?"

  Her voice was so low and husky that he had trouble hearing her even in the preternatural silence. "Since ... well, since about Fifth and Forty-ninth, I guess."

  "Your feet have been hurting you for twenty fucking blocks and you didn't say anything?"

  "I thought ... it might ... go away ... not hurt anymore ... I didn't want to ... we were making such good time ... getting out of the city ... I just thought ..."