The Stand Page 7

"Is that on my tab, too?" Larry asked hoarsely.

  "No. The Deck doesn't mess with heroin. That's an Organization item and the Deck doesn't like the idea of cement cowboy boots. But if the cops land, you can bet the bust will go on your tab."

  "But I didn't know--"

  "Just a babe in the woods, yeah."

  "But--"

  "Your total tab for this little shindy so far comes to over twelve thousand dollars," Wayne said. "You went out and picked that Z off the lot ... how much did you put down?"

  "Twenty-five," Larry said numbly. He felt like crying.

  "So what have you got until the next royalty check? Couple thousand? "

  "That's about right," Larry said, unable to tell Wayne he had less than that: about eight hundred, split evenly between cash and checking.

  "Larry, you listen to me because you're not worth telling twice. There's always a party waiting to happen. Out here the only two constants are the constant bullshitting and the constant party. They come running like dickey birds looking for bugs on a hippo's back. Now they're here. Pick them off your carcass and send them on their way."

  Larry thought of the dozens of people in the house. He knew maybe one person in three at this point. The thought of telling all those unknown people to leave made his throat want to close up. He would lose their good opinion. Opposing this thought came an image of Dewey Deck refilling the hospitality bowls, taking a notebook from his back pocket, and writing it all down at the bottom of his tab. Him and his whiffle haircut and his trendy T-shirt.

  Wayne watched him calmly as he squirmed between these two pictures.

  "Man, I'm gonna look like the asshole of the world," Larry said finally, hating the weak and petulant words as they fell from his mouth.

  "Yeah, they'll call you a lot of names. They'll say you're going Hollywood. Getting a big head. Forgetting your old friends. Except none of them are your friends, Larry. Your friends saw what was happening three days ago and split the scene. It's no fun to watch a friend who's, like, pissed his pants and doesn't even know it."

  "So why tell me?" Larry asked, suddenly angry. The anger was prodded out of him by the realization that all his really good friends had taken off, and in retrospect all their excuses seemed lame. Barry Grieg had taken him aside, had tried to talk to him, but Larry had been really flying, and he had just nodded and smiled indulgently at Barry. Now he wondered if Barry had been trying to lay this same rap on him. It made him embarrassed and angry to think so.

  "Why tell me?" he repeated. "I get the feeling you don't like me so very goddam much."

  "No ... but I really don't dislike you, either. Beyond that, man, I couldn't say. I could have let you get your nose punched on this. Once would have been enough for you."

  "What do you mean?"

  "You'll tell them. Because there's a hard streak in you. There's something in you that's like biting on tinfoil. Whatever it takes to make success, you've got it. You'll have a nice little career. Middle-of-the-road pop no one will remember in five years. The junior high boppers will collect your records. You'll make money."

  Larry balled his fists on his legs. He wanted to punch that calm face. Wayne was saying things that made him feel like a small pile of dogshit beside a stop sign.

  "Go on back and pull the plug," Wayne said softly. "Then you get in that car and go. Just go, man. Stay away until you know that next royalty check is waiting for you."

  "But Dewey--"

  "I'll find a man to talk to Dewey. My pleasure, man. The guy will tell Dewey to wait for his money like a good little boy, and Dewey will be happy to oblige." He paused, watching two small children in bright bathing suits run up the beach. A dog ran beside them, rowfing loudly and cheerily at the blue sky.

  Larry stood up and forced himself to say thanks. The sea breeze slipped in and out of his aging shorts. The word came out of his mouth like a brick.

  "You just go away somewhere and get your shit together," Wayne said, standing up beside him, still watching the children. "You've got a lot of shit to get together. What kind of manager you want, what kind of tour you want, what kind of contract you want after Pocket Savior hits. I think it will; it's got that neat little beat. If you give yourself some room, you'll figure it all out. Guys like you always do."

  Guys like you always do.

  Guys like me always do.

  Guys like--

  Somebody was tapping a finger on the window.

  Larry jerked, then sat up. A bolt of pain went through his neck and he winced at the dead, cramped feel of the flesh there. He had been asleep, not just dozing. Reliving California. But here and now it was gray New York daylight, and the finger tapped again.

  He turned his head cautiously and painfully and saw his mother, wearing a black net scarf over her hair, peering in.

  For a moment they just stared at each other through the glass and Larry felt curiously naked, like an animal being looked at in the zoo. Then his mouth took over, smiling, and he cranked the window down.

  "Mom?"

  "I knew it was you," she said in a queerly flat tone. "Come on out of there and let me see what you look like standing up."

  Both legs had gone to sleep; pins and needles tingled up from the balls of his feet as he opened the door and got out. He had never expected to meet her this way, unprepared and exposed. He felt like a sentry who had fallen asleep at his post suddenly called to attention. He had somehow expected his mother to look smaller, less sure of herself, a trick of the years that had matured him and left her just the same.

  But it was almost uncanny, the way she had caught him. When he was ten, she used to wake him up on Saturday mornings after she thought he had slept long enough by tapping one finger on his closed bedroom door. She had wakened him this same way fourteen years later, sleeping in his new car like a tired kid who had tried to stay up all night and got caught by the sandman in an undignified position.

  Now he stood before her, his hair corkscrewed, a faint and rather foolish grin on his face. Pins and needles still coursed up his legs, making him shift from foot to foot. He remembered that she always asked him if he had to go to the bathroom when he did that and now he stopped the movement and let the needles prick him at will.

  "Hi, Mom," he said.

  She looked at him without saying anything, and a dread suddenly roosted in his heart like an evil bird coming back to an old nest. It was a fear that she might turn away from him, deny him, show him the back of her cheap coat, and simply go off to the subway around the corner, leaving him.

  Then she sighed, the way a man will sigh before picking up a heavy bundle. And when she spoke, her voice was so natural and so mildly-- rightly--pleased that he forgot his first impression.

  "Hi, Larry," she said. "Come on upstairs. I knew it was you when I looked out the window. I already called in sick at my building. I got sick time coming."

  She turned to lead him back up the steps, between the vanished stone dogs. He came three steps behind her, catching up, wincing at the pins and needles. "Mom?"

  She turned back to him and he hugged her. For a moment an expression of fright crossed her features, as if she expected to be mugged rather than hugged. Then it passed and she accepted his embrace and gave back her own. The smell of her sachet slipped up his nose, evoking unexpected nostalgia, fierce, sweet, and bitter. For a moment he thought he was going to cry, and was smugly sure that she would; it was A Touching Moment. Over her sloped right shoulder he could see the dead cat, lying half in and half out of the garbage can. When she pulled away, her eyes were dry.

  "Come on, I'll make you some breakfast. Have you been driving all night?"

  "Yes," he said, his voice slightly hoarse with emotion.

  "Well, come on. Elevator's broken, but it's only two floors. It's worse for Mrs. Halsey with her arthritis. She's on five. Don't forget to wipe your feet. If you track in, Mr. Freeman will be on me like a shot. I swear Goshen he can smell dirt. Dirt's his enemy, all right." They were on the stairs now. "
Can you eat three eggs? I'll make toast, too, if you don't mind pumpernickel. Come on."

  He followed her past the vanished stone dogs and looked a little wildly at where they had been, just to reassure himself that they were really gone, that he had not shrunk two feet, that the whole decade of the 1980s had not vanished back into time. She pushed the doors open and they went in. Even the dark brown shadows and the smells of cooking were the same.

  Alice Underwood fixed him three eggs, bacon, toast, juice, coffee. When he had finished all but the coffee, he lit a cigarette and pushed back from the table. She flashed the cigarette a disapproving look but said nothing. That restored some of his confidence--some, but not much. She had always been good at biding her time.

  She dropped the iron spider skillet into the gray dishwater and it hissed a little. She hadn't changed much, Larry was thinking. A little older--she would be fifty-one now--a little grayer, but there was still plenty of black left in that sensibly netted head of hair. She was wearing a plain gray dress, probably the one she worked in. Her bosom was still the same large comber blooming out of the bodice of the dress--a little larger, if anything. Mom, tell me the truth, has your bosom gotten bigger? Is that the fundamental change?

  He started to tap cigarette ashes into his coffee saucer; she jerked it away and replaced it with the ashtray she always kept in the cupboard. The saucer had been sloppy with coffee and it had seemed okay to tap in it. The ashtray was clean, reproachfully spotless, and he tapped into it with a slight pang. She could bide her time and she could keep springing small traps on you until your ankles were all bloody and you were ready to start gibbering.

  "So you came back," Alice said, taking a used Brillo from a Table Talk pie dish and putting it to work on the skillet. "What brought you?"

  Well, Ma, this friend of mine clued me in to the facts of life--the assholes travel in packs and this time they were after me. I don't know if friend is the right word for him. He respects me musically about as much as I respect The 1910 Fruitgum Company. But he got me to put on my traveling shoes and wasn't it Robert Frost who said home is a place that when you go there they have to take you in?

  Aloud he said, "I guess I got to missing you, Mom."

  She snorted. "That's why you wrote me often?"

  "I'm not much of a letter-writer." He pumped his cigarette slowly up and down. Smoke rings formed from the tip and drifted off.

  "You can say that again."

  Smiling, he said: "I'm not much of a letter-writer."

  "But you're still smart to your mother. That hasn't changed."

  "I'm sorry," he said. "How have you been, Mom?"

  She put the skillet in the drainer, pulled the sink stopper, and wiped the lace of soapsuds from her reddened hands. "Not so bad," she said, coming over to the table and sitting down. "My back pains me some, but I got my pills. I make out all right."

  "You haven't thrown it out of whack since I left?"

  "Oh, once. But Dr. Holmes took care of it."

  "Mom, those chiropractors are--" just frauds. He bit his tongue.

  "Are what?"

  He shrugged uncomfortably in the face of her hooked smile. "You're free, white, and twenty-one. If he helps you, fine."

  She sighed and took a roll of wintergreen Life Savers from her dress pocket. "I'm a lot more than twenty-one. And I feel it. Want one?" He shook his head at the Life Saver she had thumbed up. She popped it into her own mouth instead.

  "You're just a girl yet," he said with a touch of his old bantering flattery. She had always liked it, but now it brought only a ghost of a smile to her lips. "Any new men in your life?"

  "Several," she said. "How bout you?"

  "No," he said seriously. "No new men. Some girls, but no new men."

  He had hoped for laughter, but got only the ghost smile again. I'm troubling her, he thought. That's what it is. She doesn't know what I want here. She hasn't been waiting for three years for me to show up after all. She only wanted me to stay lost.

  "Same old Larry," she said. "Never serious. You're not engaged? Seeing anyone steadily?"

  "I play the field, Mom."

  "You always did. At least you never came home to tell me you'd got some nice Catholic girl in a family way. I'll give you that. You were either very careful, very lucky, or very polite."

  He strove to keep a poker face. It was the first time in his life that she had ever mentioned sex to him, directly or obliquely.

  "Anyway, you're gonna learn," Alice said. "They say bachelors have all the fun. Not so. You just get old and full of sand, nasty, the way that Mr. Freeman is. He's got that sidewalk-level apartment and he's always standing there in the window, hoping for a strong breeze."

  Larry grunted.

  "I hear that song you got on the radio. I tell people, that's my son. That's Larry. Most of them don't believe it."

  "You've heard it?" He wondered why she hadn't mentioned that first, instead of going into all this piddling shit.

  "Sure, all the time on that rock and roll station the young girls listen to. WROK."

  "Do you like it?"

  "As well as I like any of that music." She looked at him firmly. "I think some of it sounds suggestive. Lewd."

  He found himself shuffling his feet and forced himself to stop. "It's just supposed to sound ... passionate, Mom. That's all." His face suffused with blood. He had never expected to be sitting in his mother's kitchen, discussing passion.

  "The place for passion's the bedroom," she said curtly, closing off any aesthetic discussion of his hit record. "Also, you did something to your voice. You sound like a nigger."

  "Now?" he asked, amused.

  "No, on the radio."

  "That brown soun, she sho do get aroun," Larry said, deepening his voice to Bill Withers level and smiling.

  "Just like that," she nodded. "When I was a girl, we thought Frank Sinatra was daring. Now they have this rap. Rap, they call it. Screaming, I call it." She looked at him grudgingly. "At least there's no screaming on your record."

  "I get a royalty," he said. "A certain percent of every record sold. It breaks down to--"

  "Oh, go on," she said, and made a shooing gesture with her hand. "I flunked all my maths. Have they paid you yet, or did you get that little car on credit?"

  "They haven't paid me much," he said, skating up to the edge of the lie but not quite over it. "I made a down payment on the car. I'm financing the rest."

  "Easy credit terms," she said balefully. "That's how your father ended up bankrupt. The doctor said he died of a heart attack, but it wasn't that. It was a broken heart. Your dad went to his grave on easy credit terms."

  This was an old rap, and Larry just let it flow over him, nodding at the right places. His father had owned a haberdashery. A Robert Hall had opened not far away, and a year later his business had failed. He had turned to food for solace, putting on 110 pounds in three years. He had dropped dead in the comer luncheonette when Larry was nine, a half-finished meatball sandwich on his plate in front of him. At the wake, when her sister tried to comfort a woman who looked absolutely without need of comfort, Alice Underwood said it could have been worse. It could, she said, looking past her sister's shoulder and directly at her brother-in-law, have been drink.

  Alice brought Larry the rest of the way up on her own, dominating his life with her proverbs and prejudices until he left home. Her last remark to him as he and Rudy Schwartz drove off in Rudy's old Ford was that they had poorhouses in California, too. Yessir, that's my mamma.

  "Do you want to stay here, Larry?" she asked softly.

  Startled, he countered, "Do you mind?"

  "There's room. The rollaway's still in the back bedroom. I've been storing things back there, but you could move some of the boxes around."

  "All right," he said slowly. "If you're sure you don't mind. I'm only in for a couple of weeks. I thought I'd look up some of the old guys. Mark .... Galen ... David ... Chris ... those guys."

  She got up, went to the
window, and tugged it up.

  "You're welcome to stay as long as you like, Larry. I'm not so good at expressing myself, maybe, but I'm glad to see you. We didn't say goodbye very well. There were harsh words." She showed him her face, still harsh, but also full of a terrible, reluctant love. "For my part, I regret them. I only said them because I love you. I never knew how to say that just right, so I said it in other ways."

  "That's all right," he said, looking down at the table. The flush was back. He could feel it. "Listen, I'll chip in for stuff."

  "You can if you want. If you don't want to, you don't have to. I'm working. Thousands aren't. You're still my son."

  He thought of the stiffening cat, half in and half out of the trash can, and of Dewey the Deck, smilingly filling the hospitality bowls, and he suddenly burst into tears. As his hands blurred double in the wash of them, he thought that this should be her bit, not his--nothing had gone the way he thought it would, nothing. She had changed after all. So had he, but not as he had suspected. An unnatural reversal had occurred; she had gotten bigger and he had somehow gotten smaller. He had not come home to her because he had to go somewhere. He had come home because he was afraid and he wanted his mother.

  She stood by the open window, watching him. The white curtains fluttered in on the damp breeze, obscuring her face, not hiding it entirely but making it seem ghostly. Traffic sounds came in through the window. She took the handkerchief from the bodice of her dress and walked over to the table and put it in one of his groping hands. There was something hard in Larry. She could have taxed him with it, but to what end? His father had been a softie, and in her heart of hearts she knew it was that which had really sent him to the grave; Max Underwood had been done in more by lending credit than taking it. So when it came to that hard streak? Who did Larry have to thank? Or blame?

  His tears couldn't change that stony outcropping in his character any more than a single summer cloudburst can change the shape of rock. There were good uses for such hardness--she knew that, had known it as a woman raising a boy on her own in a city that cared little for mothers and less for their children--but Larry hadn't found any yet. He was just what she had said he was: the same old Larry. He would go along, not thinking, getting people--including himself--into jams, and when the jams got bad enough, he would call upon that hard streak to extricate himself. As for the others? He would leave them to sink or swim on their own. Rock was tough, and there was toughness in his character, but he still used it destructively. She could see it in his eyes, read it in every line of his posture ... even in the way he bobbed his cancer-stick to make those little rings in the air. He had never sharpened that hard piece of him into a blade to cut people with, and that was something, but when he needed it, he was still calling on it as a child did--as a bludgeon to beat his way out of traps he had dug for himself. Once, she had told herself Larry would change. She had; he would.