The Stand Read online

  "Huh!" Harold said--squeaked, actually. She had startled him out of some private world, and for a moment she feared that the startle on top of his exertion would give him a heart attack.

  Then he ran for the house, his feet kicking through drifts of mown grass, and she was peripherally aware of the sweet smell it made on the hot summer air.

  She took a step after him. "Harold, what's wrong?"

  Then he was bounding up the porch steps. The back door opened, Harold ran inside, and it slammed behind him with a jarring crash. In the silence that descended afterward, a jay called stridently and some small animal made rattling noises in the bushes behind the stone wall. The mower, abandoned, stood with cut grass behind it and high grass before it a little way from the summerhouse where she and Amy had once drunk their Kool-Aid in Barbie's kitchen cups with their little fingers sticking elegantly off into the air.

  Frannie stood indecisive for a while and at last walked up to the door and knocked. There was no answer, but she could hear Harold crying somewhere inside.

  "Harold?"

  No answer. The weeping went on.

  She let herself into the Lauders' back hall, which was dark, cool, and fragrant--Mrs. Lauder's cold-pantry opened off the hall to the left, and for as long as Frannie could remember there had been the good smell of dried apples and cinnamon back here, like pies dreaming of creation.

  "Harold?"

  She walked up the hall to the kitchen and Harold was there, sitting at the table. His hands were clutched in his hair, and his green feet rested on the faded linoleum that Mrs. Lauder had kept so spotless.

  "Harold, what's wrong?"

  "Go away!" he yelled tearfully. "Go away, you don't like me!"

  "Yes I do. You're okay, Harold. Maybe not great, but okay." She paused. "In fact, considering the circumstances and all, I'd have to say that right now you're one of my favorite people in the whole world."

  This seemed to make Harold cry harder.

  "Do you have anything to drink?"

  "Kool-Aid," he said. He sniffed, wiped his nose, and still looking at the table, added: "It's warm."

  "Of course it is. Did you get the water at the town pump?" Like many small towns, Ogunquit still had a common pump in back of the town hall, although for the last forty years it had been more of an antiquity than a practical source of water. Tourists sometimes took pictures of it. This is the town pump in the little seaside town where we spent our vacation. Oh, isn't that quaint.

  "Yeah, that's where I got it."

  She poured them each a glass and sat down. We should be having it in the summerhouse, she thought. We could drink it with our little fingers sticking off into the air. "Harold, what's wrong?"

  Harold uttered a strange, hysterical laugh and fumbled his Kool-Aid to his mouth. He drained the glass and set it down. "Wrong? Now what could be wrong?"

  "I mean, is it something specific?" She tasted her Kool-Aid and fought down a grimace. It wasn't that warm, Harold must have drawn the water only a short time ago, but he had forgotten the sugar.

  He looked up at her finally, his face tear-streaked and still wanting to blubber. "I want my mother," he said simply.

  "Oh, Harold--"

  "I thought when it happened, when she died, 'Now that wasn't so bad.' " He was gripping his glass, staring at her in an intense, haggard way that was a little frightening. "I know how terrible that must sound to you. But I never knew how I would take it when they passed away. I'm a very sensitive person. That's why I was so persecuted by the cretins at that house of horrors the town fathers saw fit to call a high school. I thought it might drive me mad with grief, their passing, or at least prostrate me for a year... my interior sun, so to speak, would... would... and when it happened, my mother... Amy... my father... I said to myself, 'Now that wasn't so bad.' I ... they..." He brought his fist down on the table, making her flinch. "Why can't I say what I mean?" he screamed. "I've always been able to say what I meant! It's a writer's job to carve with language, to hew close to the bone, so why can't I say what it feels like?"

  "Harold, don't. I know how you feel."

  He stared at her, dumbstruck. "You know... ?" He shook his head. "No. You couldn't."

  "Remember when you came to the house? And I was digging the grave? I was half out of my mind. Half the time I couldn't even remember what I was doing. I tried to cook some french fries and almost burned the house down. So if it makes you feel better to mow the grass, fine. You'll get a sunburn if you do it in your bathing trunks, though. You're already getting one," she added critically, looking at his shoulders. To be polite, she sipped a little more of the dreadful Kool-Aid.

  He wiped his hands across his mouth. "I never even liked them that well," he said, "but I thought grief was something you felt anyway. Like your bladder's full, you have to urinate. And if close relatives die, you have to be grief-stricken."

  She nodded, thinking that was strange but not inapt.

  "My mother was always taken with Amy. She was Amy's friend," he amplified with unconscious and nearly pitiful childishness. "And I horrified my father."

  Fran saw how that could be. Brad Lauder had been a huge, brawny man, a foreman at the woolen mill in Kennebunk. He would have had very little idea of what to make of the fat, peculiar son that his loins had produced.

  "He took me aside once," Harold resumed, "and asked me if I was a queerboy. That's just how he said it. I got so scared I cried, and he slapped my face and told me if I was going to be such a goddamned baby all the time, I'd best ride right out of town. And Amy... I think it would be safe to say that Amy just didn't give a shit. I was just an embarrassment when she brought her friends home. She treated me like I was a messy room."

  With an effort, Fran finished her Kool-Aid.

  "So when they were gone and I didn't feel too much one way or the other, I just thought I was wrong. 'Grief is not a knee-jerk reaction,' I said to myself. But I got fooled. I missed them more and more every day. Mostly my mother. If I could just see her... a lot of times she wasn't around when I wanted her... needed her... she was too busy doing things for Amy, or with Amy, but she was never mean to me. So this morning when I got thinking about it, I said to myself, 'I'll mow the grass. Then I won't think about it.' But I did. And I started to mow faster and faster... as if I could outrun it ... and I guess that's when you came in. Did I look as crazy as I felt, Fran?"

  She reached across the table and touched his hand. "There's nothing wrong with the way you feel, Harold."

  "Are you sure?" He was looking at her again in that wide-eyed, childish stare.

  "Yes."

  "Will you be my friend?"

  "Yes."

  "Thank God," Harold said. "Thank God for that." His hand was sweaty in hers, and as she thought it, he seemed to sense it, and pulled his hand reluctantly away. "Would you like some more Kool-Aid?" he asked her humbly.

  She smiled her best diplomatic smile. "Maybe later," she said.

  They had a picnic lunch in the park: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, Hostess Twinkies, and a large bottle of Coke each. The Cokes were fine after they had been cooled in the duck pond.

  "I've been thinking about what I'm going to do," Harold said. "Don't you want the rest of that Twinkie?"

  "No, I'm full."

  Her Twinkie disappeared into Harold's mouth in a single bite. His belated grief hadn't affected his appetite, Frannie observed, and then decided that was a rather mean way to think.

  "What?" she said.

  "I was thinking of going to Vermont," he said diffidently. "Would you like to come?"

  "Why Vermont?"

  "There's a government plague and communicable diseases center there, in a town called Stovington. It's not as big as the one in Atlanta, but it's sure a lot closer. I was thinking that if there were still people alive and working on this flu, a lot of them would be there."

  "Why wouldn't they be dead, too?"

  "Well, they might be, they might be," Harold said rather prissily. "B
ut in places like Stovington, where they're used to dealing with communicable diseases, they're also used to taking precautions. And if they are still in operation, I would imagine they are looking for people like us. People who are immune."

  "How do you know all that, Harold?" She was looking at him with open admiration, and Harold blushed happily.

  "I read a lot. Neither of those places are secret. So what do you think, Fran?"

  She thought it was a wonderful idea. It appealed to that uncoalesced need for structure and authority. She immediately dismissed Harold's disclaimer that the people running such an institution might all be dead. They would get to Stovington, they would be taken in, tested, and out of all the tests would come some discrepancy, some difference between them and all the people who had gotten sick and died. It didn't occur to her just then to wonder what earthly good a vaccine could do at this point.

  "I think we ought to find a road atlas and see how to get there yesterday," she said.

  His face lit up. For a moment she thought he was going to kiss her, and in that single shining moment she probably would have allowed it, but then the moment passed. In retrospect she was glad.

  By the road atlas, where all distance was reduced to finger-lengths, it looked simple enough. Number 1 to I-95, I-95 to US 302, and then northwest on 302 through the lake country towns of western Maine, across the chimney of New Hampshire on the same road, and then into Vermont. Stovington was only thirty miles west of Barre, accessible either by Vermont Route 61 or 1-89.

  "How far is that, altogether?" Fran asked.

  Harold got a ruler, measured, and then consulted the mileage scale.

  "You won't believe this," he said glumly.

  "What is it? A hundred miles?"

  "Over three hundred."

  "Oh God," Frannie said. "That kills my idea. I read somewhere that you could walk through most of the New England states in a single day."

  "It's a gimmick," Harold said in his most scholarly voice. "It is possible to walk in four states--Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and just across the Vermont state line--in twenty-four hours, if you do it in just the right way, but it's like solving that puzzle where you have two interlocked nails--it's easy if you know how, impossible if you don't."

  "Where in the world did you get that?" she asked, amused.

  "Guinness Book of World Records," he said disdainfully. "Otherwise known as the Ogunquit High School Study Hall Bible. Actually, I was thinking of bikes. Or ... I don't know... maybe motor scooters."

  "Harold," she said solemnly, "you're a genius."

  Harold coughed, blushing and pleased again. "We could bike as far as Wells, tomorrow morning. There's a Honda dealership there... can you drive a Honda, Fran?"

  "I can learn, if we can go slow for a while."

  "Oh, I think it would be very unwise to speed," Harold said seriously. "One would never know when one might come around a blind curve and find a three-car smash-up blocking the road."

  "No, one never would, would one? But why wait until tomorrow? Why don't we go today?"

  "Well, it's past two now," he said. "We couldn't get much farther than Wells, and we'd need to outfit ourselves. That would be easier to do here in Ogunquit, because we know where everything is. And we'll need guns, of course."

  It was queer, really. As soon as he mentioned that word, she had thought of the baby. "Why do we need guns?"

  He looked at her for a moment, then dropped his eyes. A red blush was creeping up his neck.

  "Because the police and courts are gone and you're a woman and you're pretty and some people... some men... might not be ... be gentlemen. That's why."

  His blush was so red now it was almost purple.

  He's talking about rape, she thought. Rape. But how could anybody want to rape me, I'm-pregnant. But no one knew that, not even Harold. And even if you spoke up, said to the intended rapist: Will you please not do that because I'm-pregnant, could you reasonably expect the rapist to reply, Jeez, lady, I'm sorry, I'll go rape some other goil?

  "All right," she said. "Guns. But we could still get as far as Wells today."

  "There's something else I want to do here," Harold said.

  The cupola atop Moses Richardson's barn was explosively hot. Sweat had been trickling down her body by the time they got to the hayloft, but by the time they reached the top of the rickety flight of stairs leading from the loft to the cupola, it was coursing down her body in rivers, darkening her blouse and molding it to her breasts.

  "Do you really think this is necessary, Harold?"

  "I don't know." He was carrying a bucket of white paint and a wide brush with the protective cellophane still on it. "But the barn overlooks US 1, and that's the way most people would come, I think. Anyway, it can't hurt."

  "It will hurt if you fall off and break your bones." The heat was making her head ache, and her lunchtime Coke was sloshing around her stomach in a way that was extremely nauseating. "In fact, it would be the end of you."

  "I won't fall," Harold said nervously. He glanced at her. "Fran, you look sick."

  "It's the heat," she said faintly.

  "Then go downstairs, for goodness' sake. Lie under a tree. Watch the human fly as he does his death-defying act on the precipitous ten-degree slope of Moses Richardson's barn roof."

  "Don't joke. I still think it's silly. And dangerous."

  "Yes, but I'll feel better if I go through with it. Go on, Fran."

  She thought: Why, he's doing it for me.

  He stood there, sweaty and scared, old cobwebs clinging to his naked, blubbery shoulders, his belly cascading over the waistband of his tight bluejeans, determined to not miss a bet, to do all the right things.

  She stood on tiptoe and kissed his mouth lightly. "You be careful," she said, and then went quickly down the stairs with the Coke sloshing in her belly, up-down-all-around, yeeeeccchh; she went quickly, but not so quickly that she didn't see the stunned happiness come up in his eyes. She went down the nailed rungs from the hayloft to the straw-littered barn floor even faster because she knew she was going to puke now, and while she knew that it was the heat and the Coke and the baby, what might Harold think if he heard? So she wanted to get outside where he couldn't hear. And she made it. Just.

  Harold came down at a quarter to four, his sunburn now flaming red, his arms splattered with white paint. Fran had napped uneasily under an elm in Richardson's dooryard while he worked, never quite going under completely, listening for the rattle of shingles giving way and poor fat Harold's despairing scream as he fell the ninety feet from the barn's roof to the hard ground below. But it never came--thank God--and now he stood proudly before her--lawn-green feet, white arms, red shoulders.

  "Why did you bother to bring the paint back down?" she asked him curiously.

  "I wouldn't want to leave it up there. It might lead to spontaneous combustion and we'd lose our sign." And she thought again how determined he was not to miss a single bet. It was just a little bit scary.

  They both gazed up at the barn roof. The fresh paint gleamed out in sharp contrast to the faded green shingles, and the words painted there reminded Fran of the signs you sometimes came upon down South, painted across barn roofs--JESUS SAVES or CHEW RED INDIAN. Harold's read:

  HAVE GONE TO STOVINGTON, VT. PLAGUE CENTER US 1 TO WELLS

  INTERSTATE 95 TO PORTLAND

  US 302 TO BARRE

  INTERSTATE 89 TO STOVINGTON

  LEAVING OGUNQUIT JULY 2, 1990

  HAROLD EMERY LAUDER

  FRANCES GOLDSMITH

  "I didn't know your middle name," Harold said apologetically.

  "That's fine," Frannie said, still looking up at the sign. The first line had been written just below the cupola window; the last, her name, just above the rain-gutter. "How did you get that last line on?" she asked.

  "It wasn't hard," he said self-consciously. "I had to dangle my feet over a little, that's all."

  "Oh, Harold. Why couldn't you have just signe
d for yourself?"

  "Because we're a team," he said, and then looked at her a little apprehensively. "Aren't we?"

  "I guess we are... as long as you don't kill yourself. Hungry?"

  He beamed. "Hungry as a bear."

  "Then let's go eat. And I'll put some baby oil on your sunburn. You're just going to have to wear your shirt, Harold. You won't be able to sleep on that tonight."

  "I'll sleep fine," he said, and smiled at her. Frannie smiled back. They ate a supper of canned food and Kool-Aid (Frannie made it, and added sugar), and later, when it had begun to get dark, Harold came over to Fran's house with something under his arm.

  "It was Amy's," he said. "I found it in the attic. I think Mom and Dad gave it to her when she graduated from junior high. I don't even know if it still works, but I got some batteries from the hardware store." He patted his pockets, which were bulging with EverReady batteries.

  It was a portable phonograph, the kind with the plastic cover, invented for teenage girls of thirteen or fourteen to take to beach and lawn parties. The kind of phonograph constructed with 45 singles in mind--the ones made by the Osmonds, Leif Garrett, John Travolta, Shaun Cassidy. She looked at it closely, and felt her eyes filling with tears.