The Stand (Original Edition) (67 page)

Larry thought of Fran saying:
He’s changed ... I don’t know how or why or even if it’s for the best. . . and sometimes I’m afraid.

Then he stepped forward, saying it just the way he had planned on his long days crossing the country: “Harold Lauder, I presume.”

Harold jerked with surprise, then turned with a brick in one hand and his mortar-dripping trowel in the other, half-raised, like a weapon. Out of the corner of his eye, Larry thought he saw Leo flinch backward. His first thought was, sure enough, Harold didn’t look at all as he had imagined. His second thought had to do with the trowel:
My God, is he going to let me have it with that thing?
Harold’s face was grimly set, his eyes narrow and dark. His hair fell in a lank wave across his sweaty forehead. His lips were pressed together and almost white.

And then there was a transformation so sudden and complete that Larry was never quite able to believe afterward that he had seen that tense, unsmiling Harold, the face of a man more apt to use a trowel to wall someone up in a basement niche than to construct a garden wall.

He smiled, a broad and harmless grin that made deep dimples at the corners of his mouth. His eyes lost their menacing cast. He stuck the trowel blade-down into the mortar—
chunk!
—wiped his hands on the hips of his jeans, and advanced with his hand out. Larry thought:
My God, he’s just a kid, younger than I am. If he’s eighteen yet I’ll eat the candles on his last birthday cake.

“Don’t think I know you,” Harold said, grinning, as they shook. He had a firm grip, and Larry’s hand was pumped up and down exactly three times and let go. It reminded Larry of the time he had shaken hands with Henry “Scoop” Jackson back when Jackson had been running for President. It had been at a political rally, which he had attended on the advice of his mother, given many years ago: If you can’t afford a movie, go to the zoo. If you can’t afford the zoo, go see a politician.

But Harold’s grin was contagious, and Larry grinned back. Kid or not, politician’s handshake or not, the grin impressed him as completely genuine, and after all this time, after all those candy wrappers, here was Harold Lauder, in the flesh.

“No, you don’t,” Larry said. “But I’m acquainted with you.”

“Is that so!” Harold exclaimed, and his grin escalated. If it got any broader, Larry thought with amusement, the ends would meet around at the back of his skull and the top two thirds of his head would just topple off.

“I followed you across the country from Maine,” Larry said.

“No fooling! You did, really?”

“Really did.” He unslung his packsack. “Here, I’ve got some stuff for you.” He took out the bottle of Bordeaux and put it in Harold’s hand.

“Say, you shouldn’t have,” Harold said, looking at the bottle with some astonishment. “1947?”

“A good year,” Larry said. “And these.”

He put nearly half a dozen Paydays in Harold’s other hand. One of them slipped through his fingers and onto the grass. Harold bent to pick it up and as he did, Larry caught a glimpse of that earlier expression.

Then Harold bobbed back up, smiling. “How did you know?”

“I followed your signs . . . and your candy wrappers.”

“Well I be go to hell. Come on in the house. We ought to have a jaw, as my dad was fond of saying. Would your boy drink a Coke?” “Sure. Wouldn’t you, L—”

He looked around, but Leo was no longer beside him. He was all the way back on the sidewalk and looking down at some cracks in the pavement as if they were of great interest to him.

“Hey Leo! Want a Coke?”

Leo muttered something Larry couldn’t hear.

“Talk up!” he said, irritated. “What did God give you a voice for? I asked you if you wanted a Coke.”

Barely audible, Leo said: “I think I’ll go see if Nadine-mom’s back.”

“What the hell? We just got here!”

“I want to go back!” Leo said, looking up from the cement. The sun flashed too strongly back from his eyes and Larry thought,
What in God’s name is this? He’s almost crying.

“Just a sec,” he said to Harold.

“Sure,” Harold said, grinning. “Sometimes kids’re shy. I was.” Larry walked over to Leo and hunkered down, so they would be at eye-level. “What’s the matter, kiddo?”

“I just want to go back,” Leo said, not meeting his gaze. “I want Nadine-mom.”

“Well, you . . .” He paused helplessly.

“Want to go back.” He looked up briefly at Larry. His eyes flickered over Larry’s shoulder toward where Harold stood in the middle of his lawn. Then down at the cement again. “Please.”

“You don’t like Harold?”

“I don’t know . . . he’s all right... I just want to go back.”

Larry sighed. “Can you find your way?”

“Sure.”

“Okay. But I sure wish you’d come in and have a Coke with us. I’ve been waiting to meet Harold a long time. You know that, don’t you?”

“Ye-es . . .”

“And we could walk back together.”

“I’m not going in that house,” Leo hissed, and for a moment he was Joe again, the eyes going blank and savage.

“Okay,” Larry said hastily. He stood up. “Go straight home. I’ll check to see if you did. And stay out of the street.”

“I will.” And suddenly Leo blurted in that small, hissing whisper: “Why don’t you come back with me? Right now? We’ll go together. Please, Larry? Okay?”

“Jeez, Leo, what—”

“Never mind,” Leo said. And before Larry could say anything more, Leo was hurrying away. Larry stood watching him until he was out of sight. Then he turned back to Harold with a troubled frown.

“Say, that’s all right,” Harold said. “Kids are funny.”

“I guess he’s got a right. He’s been through a lot.”

“I’ll bet he has,” Harold replied, and for just an instant Larry felt distrust, felt that Harold’s quick sympathy for a boy he had never met was as ersatz as powdered eggs.

“Well, come in,” Harold said. “You know, you’re just about my first company. Frannie and Stu have been out a few times, but they hardly count.” His grin became a smile, a slightly sad smile, and Larry felt sudden pity for this boy—because a boy was all he was, really. He was lonely and here stood Larry, same old Larry, never a good word for anyone.

“Glad to,” he answered.

The living room was small but comfortable. “I’m going to put in some new furniture when I get around to it,” Harold said. “Modern. Chrome and leather. As the commercial says, ‘Fuck the budget. I’ve got Master Charge.’ ”

Larry laughed heartily.

“There are some good glasses in the basement, I’ll just get them. Try that green chair. It’s the best of a bad lot.”

Harold left, and Larry sat down in the green chair. He heard a door open and then Harold’s heavy tread descending a flight of stairs. He looked around. Nope, not one of the world’s great living rooms, but with a shag rug and some nice modern furniture, it could be fine. The best feature of this room was the stone fireplace and chimney. Lovely work, carefully done by hand. But there was one loose stone on the hearth. It looked to Larry as if it had come out and had been put back a little carelessly. Leaving it like that would be like leaving one piece out of the jigsaw puzzle or a picture hanging crooked on the wall.

He got up and picked the stone out of the hearth. Harold was still rummaging around downstairs. Larry was about to put it back in when he saw there was a book down in the hole, its front now lightly powdered with rockdust, not enough to obscure the single word stamped there in gold leaf: LEDGER.

Feeling slightly ashamed, as if he had been prying intentionally, he put the rock back in just as Harold’s footfalls began to ascend the stairs again. This time the fit was perfect, and when Harold came back into the living room with a balloon glass in each hand, Larry was seated in the green chair again.

“I took a minute to rinse them out in the downstairs sink,” Harold said. “They were a bit dusty.”

“They look fine,” Larry said. “Look, I can’t swear that Bordeaux hasn’t gone over. We might be helping ourselves to vinegar.”

“Nothing ventured,” Harold said, grinning, “nothing gained.”

That grin made him feel uncomfortable, and Larry suddenly found himself thinking about the ledger—was it Harold’s, or had it belonged to the house’s previous owner? And if it was Harold’s, what in the world might be written in there?

They cracked the bottle of Bordeaux and found, to their mutual pleasure, that it was just fine. Half an hour later they were both pleasantly squiffed, Harold a little more so than Larry. Even so, Harold’s grin remained; broadened, in fact.

His tongue loosened a bit by wine, Larry said: “Those posters The big meeting on the eighteenth. How come you didn’t get on that committee, Harold? I would have thought a guy like you would have been a natural.”

Harold’s smile became large, beatific. “Well, I’m awfully young. I suppose they thought I didn’t have experience enough.”

“I think it’s a goddam shame.” But did he? The grin. The dark, barely glimpsed expression of suspicion. Did he? He didn’t know.

“Well, who knows what lies in the future?” Harold said, grinning broadly. “Every dog has its day.”

Larry left around five o’clock. His parting from Harold was friendly; Harold shook his hand, grinned, told him to come back often. But Larry had somehow gotten the feeling that Harold could give a shit if he never came back.

He walked slowly down the cement path to the sidewalk and turned to wave, but Harold had already gone back inside. The door was shut. It had been very cool in the house because the Venetian blinds were drawn, and inside that had seemed all right, but standing outside it occurred to him suddenly that it was the only house he’d been inside in Boulder where the blinds and curtains were drawn. But of course he thought there were still plenty of houses in Boulder where the shades were drawn. They were the houses of the dead. When they got sick, they had drawn their curtains against the world. They had drawn them and died in privacy, like any animal in its last extremity prefers to do. The living—maybe in subconscious acknowledgment of that fact of death—threw their curtains wide.

Thank God for tunnel vision,
he thought.
Thank God for selective perception. Because without it, we might as well all be in a Lovecraft story.

His thoughts became confused. He became suddenly convinced that Harold was peering at him from between the slats of his blinds, his hands opening and closing in a strangler’s grip, his grin turned into a leer of hatred . . .
every dog has its day.

Stop it. Stop freaking yourself out.

Boot Hill,
his mind free-associated.
Chrissake, just stop it, wish I’d never thought about the dead people, the dead people behind all those closed blinds and pulled drapes and shut curtains, in the dark, like in the tunnel, the Lincoln Tunnel, Christ, what if they all started to move, to stir around, Holy God, cut it out
—

“Larry? Are you okay?”

He was so startled that a little noise—
"Yike!”
—squeaked out of his throat and he jumped. It was Leo, sitting on the curb about three blocks down from Harold’s. He had a Ping-Pong ball and was bouncing it up and down on the pavement.

“What are you doing here?” Larry asked.

“I wanted to walk home with you,” Leo said diffidently, “but I didn’t want to go into that guy’s house.”

“Why not?” Larry asked. He sat down on the curb beside Leo.

Leo shrugged and turned his eyes back to the Ping-Pong ball. It made a small
whock! whock!
sound as it struck the pavement and bounced back up to his hand.

“I don’t know.”

“Leo?”

“What.”

“This is very important to me. Because I like Harold . . . and don’t like him. I feel two ways about him. Have you ever felt two ways about a person?”

“I only feel one way about him.”
Whock! Whock!

“How?”

“Scared,” Leo said simply. “Can we go home and see my Nadine-mom and my Lucy-mom?”

“Sure.”

They continued down Arapahoe for a while without speaking, Leo still bouncing the Ping-Pong ball and catching it deftly.

“Sorry you had to wait so long,” Larry said.

“Aw, that’s okay.”

“No, really, if I’d known I would have hurried up.”

“I had something to do. I found this on a guy’s lawn. It’s a Pong-Ping ball.”

“Ping-Pong,” Larry corrected absently. “Why do you think Harold would keep his shades down?”

“So nobody can see in, I guess,” Leo said. “So he can do secret things. It’s like the dead people, isn’t it?”
Whock! Whock!

They walked on, reached the comer of Broadway, and turned south. They saw other people on the streets now; women looking in windows at dresses, a man with a pickaxe returning from somewhere, another man casually sorting through fishing tackle in the broken display window of a sporting goods store.

“Secret things,” Larry mused aloud, not really trying to draw the boy out anymore.

“Maybe he’s praying to the dark man,” Leo said casually, and Larry jerked as if brushed by a live wire. Leo didn’t notice. He was double-bouncing his Ping-Pong ball, first off the sidewalk and then catching it on the rebound from the brick wall they were passing . . .
whock-whap!

“Do you really think so?” Larry asked, making an effort to sound casual.

“I don’t know. But he’s not like us. He smiles a lot. But I think there might be worms inside him, making him smile. Big white worms eating up his brain. Like maggots.”

“Joe . . . Leo, I mean—”

Leo’s eyes, dark, remote, and Chinese, suddenly cleared. He smiled. “Look, there’s Dayna. I like her. Hey, Dayna!” he yelled, waving. “Got any gum?”

Dayna, who had been oiling the sprocket of a spidery-thin ten-speed bike, turned and smiled. She reached into her shirt pocket and spread out five sticks of Juicy Fruit like a poker hand. With a happy laugh, Leo ran toward her, his long hair flying, Ping-Pong ball clutched in one hand, leaving Larry to stare after him. That idea of white worms behind Harold’s smile . . . where had Joe
(no, Leo, he’s Leo, at least I think he is)
gotten an idea as sophisticated—and as horrible—as that? The boy had been in a semitrance. And he wasn’t the only one; how many times in the few days he had been here had Larry seen someone just stop dead on the street, looking blankly at nothing for a moment, and then going on? Things had changed. The whole range of human perception seemed to have stepped up a notch.