The Stand Read online

  Joe had fallen flat on his back. He was splayed out like an x, his arms making a v, his open legs making a second, inverted v. Larry took a step forward and tromped on his right wrist, pinning the hand holding the knife to the muddy ground.

  "Let go of the sticker, kid."

  The boy hissed and then made a grunting, gobbling sound like a turkey. His upper lip drew back from his teeth. His Chinese eyes glared into Larry's. Keeping his foot on the boy's wrist was like standing on a wounded but still vicious snake. He could feel the boy trying to yank his hand free, and never mind if it was at the expense of skin, flesh, or even a broken bone. He jerked into a half-sitting position and tried to bite Larry's leg through the heavy wet denim of his jeans. Larry stepped down even harder on the thin wrist and Joe uttered a cry--not of pain but defiance.

  "Let it go, kid."

  Joe continued to struggle.

  The stalemate would have continued until Joe got the knife free or until Larry broke his wrist if Nadine had not finally arrived, muddy, breathless, and staggering with weariness.

  Without looking at Larry she dropped to her knees. "Let it go!" she said quietly but with great firmness. Her face was sweaty but calm. She held it only inches above Joe's contorted, twisting features. He snapped at her like a dog and continued to struggle. Grimly, Larry strove to keep his balance. If the boy got free now, he would probably strike at the woman first.

  "Let . . . it ... go!" Nadine said.

  The boy growled. Spit leaked between his clenched teeth. There was a smear of mud in the shape of a question mark on his right cheek.

  "We'll leave you, Joe. I'll leave you. I'll go with him. Unless you're good."

  Larry felt a further tensing of the arm under his foot, then a loosening. But the boy was looking at her grievingly, accusingly, reproachfully. When he shifted his gaze slightly to look at Larry, Larry could read the hot jealousy in those eyes. Even with the sweat running off him in buckets, Larry felt cold under that stare.

  She continued to speak calmly. No one would hurt him. No one would leave him. If he let go of the knife, everyone could be friends.

  Gradually Larry became aware that the hand under his shoe had relaxed and let go. The boy lay dormant, staring up at the sky. He had opted out. Larry took his foot off Joe's wrist, bent quickly, and picked up the knife. He turned and scaled it up and out toward the headland. The blade whirled and whirled, throwing off spears of sunlight. Joe's strange eyes followed its course and he gave one long, hooting wail of pain. The knife bounced on the rocks with a thin clatter and skittered over the edge.

  Larry turned back and regarded them. The woman was looking at Joe's right forearm where the waffled shape of Larry's boot was deeply embedded and turning an angry, exclamatory red. Her dark eyes looked up from that to Larry's face. They were full of sorrow.

  Larry felt the old defensive and self-serving words rise--I had to do it, it wasn't my fault, listen lady, he wanted to kill me--because he thought he could read the judgment in those sorrowing eyes: You ain't no nice guy.

  But in the end he said nothing. The situation was what the situation was, and his actions had been forced by the kid's. Looking at the boy, who had now curled himself up desolately over his own knees and put a thumb in his mouth, he doubted if the boy himself had initiated the situation. And it could have ended in a worse way, with one of them cut or even killed.

  So he said nothing, and he met the woman's soft gaze and thought: I think I've changed. Somehow. I don't know how much. He found himself thinking of something Barry Grieg had once said to him about a rhythm guitar player from L.A., a guy named Jory Baker who was always on time, never missed a practice session, or fucked up an audition. Not the kind of guitar player that caught your eye, no showboat like Angus Young or Eddie Van Halen, but competent. Once, Barry had said, Jory Baker had been the driving wheel of a group called Sparx, a group everybody seemed to think that year's Most Likely to Succeed. They had a sound something like early Creedence: hard solid guitar rock and roll. Jory Baker had done most of the writing and all of the vocals. Then a car accident, broken bones, lots of dope in the hospital. He had come out, as the John Prine song says, with a steel plate in his head and a monkey on his back. He progressed from Demerol to heroin. Got busted a couple of times. After a while he was just another street-druggie with fumble fingers, spare-changing down at the Greyhound station and hanging out on the strip. Then, somehow, over a period of eighteen months, he had gotten clean, and stayed clean. A lot of him was gone. He was no longer the driving wheel of any group, Most Likely to Succeed or otherwise, but he was always on time, never missed a practice session, or fucked up an audition. He didn't talk much, but the needle highway on his left arm had disappeared. And Barry Grieg had said: He's come out the other side. That was all. No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just ... come out the other side.

  Or you don't.

  I've changed somehow, Larry thought dimly. I've come out the other side, too.

  She said: "I'm Nadine Cross. This is Joe. I'm happy to meet you."

  "Larry Underwood."

  They shook hands, both smiling faintly at the absurdity.

  "Let's walk back to the road," Nadine said.

  They started off side by side, and after a few steps Larry looked back over his shoulder at Joe, who was still sitting over his knees and sucking his thumb, apparently unaware they were gone.

  "He'll come," she said quietly.

  "Are you sure?"

  "Quite sure."

  As they came to the highway's gravel shoulder she stumbled and Larry took her arm. She looked at him gratefully.

  "Can we sit down?" she asked.

  "Sure."

  So they sat down on the pavement, facing each other. After a little bit Joe got up and plodded toward them, looking down at his bare feet. He sat a little way apart from them. Larry looked at him warily, then back at Nadine Cross.

  "You were the two following me."

  "You knew? Yes. I thought you did."

  "How long?"

  "Two days now," Nadine said. "We were staying in the big house at Epsom." Seeing his puzzled expression she added: "By the creek. You fell asleep by the rock wall."

  He nodded. "And last night the two of you came to peek at me while I was sleeping on that porch. Maybe to see if I had horns or a long red tail."

  "That was Joe," she said quietly. "I came after him when I found he was gone. How did you know?"

  "You left tracks in the dew."

  "Oh." She looked at him closely, examining him, and although he wanted to, Larry didn't drop his eyes. "I don't want you to be angry with us. I suppose that sounds ridiculous after Joe just tried to kill you, but Joe isn't responsible."

  "Is that his real name?"

  "No, just what I call him."

  "He's like a savage in a National Geographic TV show."

  "Yes, just like that. I found him on the lawn of a house--his house, maybe, the name was Rockway--sick from a bite. A rat bite, maybe. He doesn't talk. He growls and grunts. Until this morning I've been able to control him. But I ... I'm tired, you see ... and ..." She shrugged. Marsh-mud was drying on her blouse in what could have been a series of Chinese ideograms. "I dressed him at first. He took everything off but his underpants. Eventually I got tired of trying. The minges and mosquitoes don't seem to bother him." She paused. "I want us to come with you. I guess there is no way to be coy about it, under the circumstances. "

  Larry wondered what she would think if he told her about the last woman who had wanted to come with him. Not that he ever would; that episode was deeply buried, even if the woman in question was not. He was no more anxious to bring up Rita than a murderer would be to drag his victim's name into parlor conversation.

  "I don't know where I'm going," he said. "I came up from New York City, the long way around, I guess. The plan was to find a nice
house on the coast and just lie up there until October or so. But the longer I go, the more I want other people. The longer I go, the more all of this seems to hit me."

  He was expressing himself badly and didn't seem to be able to do better without bringing up Rita or his bad dreams about the dark man.

  "I've been scared a lot of the time," he said carefully, "because I'm on my own. Pretty paranoid. It's like I expected Indians to just swoop down and scalp me."

  "In other words, you've stopped looking for houses and started looking for people."

  "Yes, maybe."

  "You've found us. That's a start."

  "I do believe you found me. And that boy worries me, Nadine. I have to be up front about that. His knife's gone, but the world is full of knives just lying around waiting to be picked up."

  "Yes."

  "I don't want to sound brutal ..." He trailed off, hoping she would say it for him, but she said nothing at all, only looked at him with those dark eyes.

  "Would you consider leaving him?" There it was, spat out like a lump of rock, and he still didn't sound like much of a nice guy ... but was it right, was it fair to either of them, to make a bad situation worse by burdening themselves with a ten-year-old psychopath? He had told her he was going to sound brutal, and he supposed he had. But they were in a brutal world now.

  Meanwhile, Joe's odd seawater-colored eyes bored into him.

  "I couldn't do that," Nadine said calmly. "I understand the danger, and I understand that the danger would be primarily to you. He's jealous. He's afraid that you might become more important to me than he is. He might very well try to ... try to get at you again unless you can make friends with him or at least convince him you don't mean to ..." She trailed off, leaving that part vague. "But if I left him, that would be the same as murder. And I won't be a party to that. Too many have died to kill more."

  "If he cuts my throat in the middle of the night, you'll be a party to that. "

  She bowed her head.

  Speaking so quietly that only she could hear (he didn't know if Joe, who was watching them, understood what they were talking about or not), Larry said, "He probably would have done it last night if you hadn't come after him. Isn't that the truth?"

  Softly she replied: "Those are things that might be."

  Larry laughed. "The Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come?"

  She looked up. "I want to come with you, Larry, but I can't leave Joe. You will have to decide."

  "You don't make it easy."

  "These days it's no easy life."

  He thought about it. Joe sat on the soft shoulder of the road, watching them with his seawater eyes. Behind them, the real sea moved restlessly against the rocks, booming in its secret channels where it had infiltrated the land.

  "All right," he said. "I think you're being dangerously softhearted, but ... all right."

  "Thank you," Nadine said. "I will be responsible for his actions."

  "That will be a great comfort if he kills me."

  "That would be on my heart for the rest of my life," Nadine said, and a sudden certainty that all her words about the sanctity of life would someday not too distant rise up to mock her swept her like a cold wind, and she shuddered. No, she told herself. I'll not kill. Not that. Never that.

  They camped that night on the soft white sand of the Wells public beach. Larry built a large fire above the strand of kelp that marked the last high tide and Joe sat on the other side, away from him and Nadine, feeding small sticks into the blaze. Occasionally he would hold a bigger stick into the flames until it caught like a torch and then tear away down the sand, holding it aloft like a single flaming birthday candle. They were able to see him until he was beyond the thirty-foot glow of the fire and then only his moving torch, drawn back in the wind manufactured by his wild sprinting. The seabreeze had come up a little, and it was cooler than it had been for days. Vaguely, Larry remembered the spell of rain that had occurred the afternoon he had found his mother dying, just before the superflu had hit New York like a highballing freight train. Remembered the thunderstorm and the white curtains blowing wildly into the apartment. He shivered a little, and the wind danced a spiral of fire out of the fire and up toward the black starshot sky. Embers cycloned up even higher and flickered out. He thought of fall, still distant but not so far as it had been on that day in June when he had discovered his mother lying on the floor, delirious. He shivered a little. North, far down on the beach, Joe's torch bobbed up and down. It made him feel lonely and all the colder--that single light flickering in the large and silent darkness. The surf rolled and boomed.

  "Do you play?"

  He jumped a little at her voice and looked at the guitar case lying beside them on the sand. It had been leaning against a Steinway piano in the music room of the big house they had broken into to get their supper. He had loaded his pack with enough cans to replace what they had eaten this day, and had taken the guitar on impulse, not even looking inside the case to see what it was--coming from a house like that, it was probably a good un. He hadn't played since that crazy Malibu party, and that had been six weeks ago. In another life.

  "Yeah, I do," he said, and discovered that he wanted to play, not for her but because sometimes it felt good to play, it eased your mind. And when you had a bonfire on the beach, someone was supposed to play the guitar. That was practically graven in stone.

  "Let's see what we got here," he said, and unsnapped the catches.

  He had expected something good, but what lay inside the case was still a happy surprise. It was a Gibson twelve-string, a beautiful instrument, perhaps even custom-made. Larry wasn't enough of a judge of guitars to be sure. He did know that the fretboard inlays were real mother-of-pearl, catching reddish-orange glints from the fire and waxing them into prisms of light.

  "It's beautiful," she said.

  "It sure is."

  He strummed it and liked the sound it made, even open and not quite in tune. The sound was fuller and richer than the sound you got from a six-string. A harmonic sound, but tough. That was the good thing about a steel-string guitar, you got a nice tough sound. And the strings were Black Diamonds, wrapped and a little hokey, but you got an honest sound, a trifle rough when you changed chords--zing! He smiled a little, remembering Barry Grieg's contempt for the smooth flat guitar strings. He had always called them "dollar slicks." Good old Barry, who wanted to be Steve Miller when he grew up.

  "What are you smiling about?" Nadine asked.

  "Old times," he said, and felt a little sad.

  He tuned by ear, getting it just right, still thinking about Barry and Johnny McCall and Wayne Stukey. As he was finishing she tapped him lightly on the shoulder and he looked up.

  Joe was standing by the fire, a burned-out stick held forgotten in one hand. Those strange eyes were staring at him with frank fascination, and his mouth was open.

  Very quietly, so quietly that it might have been a thought in his own head, Nadine said: "Music hath charms ..."

  Larry began to pick out a rough melody on the guitar, an old blues he had picked up off an Elektra folk album as a teenager. Something originally done by Koerner, Ray, and Glover, he thought. When he thought he had the melody right, he let it walk off down the beach and then sang ... his singing was always going to be better than his playing.

  "Well you see me comin baby from a long ways away

  I will turn the night mamma right into day

  Cause I'm here

  A long ways from my home

  But you can hear me comin baby

  By the slappin on my black cat bone."

  The boy was grinning now, grinning in the amazed way of someone who has discovered a glad secret. Larry thought he looked like someone who had been suffering from an unreachable itch between his shoulder-blades for a long, long time and had finally found someone who knew exactly where to scratch. He scruffed through long-unused archives of memory, hunting a second verse, and found one.

  "I can do some things mamma that
other men can't do

  They can't find the numbers baby, can't work the

  Conqueror root

  But I can, cause I'm a long way from my home

  And you know you'll hear me comin

  By the whackin on my black cat bone."

  The boy's open, delighted grin lit those eyes up, made them into something, Larry realized, that would be apt to make the muscles in any young girl's thighs loosen a little. He reached for an instrumental bridge and fumbled through it, not too badly, either. His fingers wrung the right sounds out of the guitar: hard, flashy, a little bit tawdry, like a display of junk jewelry, probably stolen, sold out of a paper bag on a street corner. He made it swagger a little and then retreated quickly to a good old three-finger E before he could fuck it all up. He couldn't remember all of the last verse, something about a railroad track, so he repeated the first verse again and quit.

  When the silence hit again, Nadine laughed and clapped her hands. Joe threw his stick away and jumped up and down on the sand, making fierce hooting sounds of joy. Larry couldn't believe the change in the kid, and had to caution himself not to make too much of it. To do so would be to risk disappointment.

  Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast.

  He found himself wondering with unwilling distrust if it could be something as simple as that. Joe was gesturing at him and Nadine said: "He wants you to play something else. Would you? That was wonderful. It makes me feel better. So much better."

  So he played Geoff Muldaur's "Goin Downtown" and his own "Sally's Fresno Blues"; he played "The Springhill Mine Disaster" and Arthur Crudup's "That's All Right, Mamma." He switched to primitive rock and roll--"Milk Cow Blues," "Jim Dandy," "Twenty Flight Rock" (doing the boogie-woogie rhythm of the chorus as well as he could, although his fingers were getting slow and numb and painful by now), and finally a song he had always liked, "Endless Sleep," originally done by Jody Reynolds.

  "I can't play anymore," he said to Joe, who had stood without moving through this entire recital. "My fingers." He held them out, showing the deep grooves the strings had made in his fingers, and the chips in his nails.