The Stand

“What?” Tom asked.

Nick waved his arm in a large circle at the buildings of the downtown area. He put a burlesque expression of puzzlement on his face, wrinkling his brow, cocking his head, scratching the back of his skull. Then he made walking motions with his fingers on the grass and finished by looking up at Tom questioningly.

What he saw was alarming. Tom might have died sitting up for all the animation on his face. His eyes, which had been sparkling a moment before with all the things he wanted to tell, were now cloudy blue marbles. His mouth hung ajar so Nick could see the soggy potato chip crumbs lying on his tongue. His hands were lax in his lap.

Concerned, Nick reached out to touch him. Before he could, Tom’s body gave a jerk. His eyelids fluttered, and the animation flowed back into his eyes like water filling a pail. He began to grin. If a balloon containing the word EUREKA had appeared over his head, what had happened would not have been more plain.

“You want to know where all the people went!” Tom exclaimed.

Nick nodded his head strongly.

“Well, I guess they went to Kansas City,” Tom said. “My laws, yes. Everybody’s always talkin about what a little town this is. Nothin happens. No fun. Even the roller-skating place went bust. Now there’s nothin but the drive-in, and that doesn’t show anything but those diddly-daddly pitchers. My mom always says people leaves but no people comes back. Just like my dad, he run off with a waitress from Boomer’s Cafe, her name was M-O-O-N, that spells DeeDee Packalotte. So I guess everybody just got fed up and went at the same time. To Kansas City it must have been, my laws, didn’t they just? That’s where they must have gone. Except for Mrs. Blakely and my mom. Jesus is going to take them up to heaven up above and rock them in the everlasting harms.”

Tom’s monologue recommenced.

Gone to Kansas City, Nick thought. For all I know, that could be it, too. Everybody left on the poor sad planet picked up by the Hand of God and either rocked in the everlasting harms of Same or set down again in Kansas City.

He leaned back and his eyelids fluttered so that Tom’s words broke up into the visual equivalent of a modern poem, sans caps, like a work by e.e. cummings:

mother said

ain’t got no

but i said to them i said you better

not mess with

The dreams had been bad the night before, which he had spent in a barn, and now, with his belly full, all he wanted was…

my laws

M-O-O-N that spells

sure do wish

Nick fell asleep.

Waking up, he first wondered in that dazed way you have when you sleep heavily in the middle of the day why he was sweating so much. Sitting up, he understood. It was quarter to five in the afternoon; he had slept over two and a half hours and the sun had moved out from behind the war memorial. But that was not all. Tom Cullen, in a perfect orgy of solicitude, had covered him so he would not take a chill. With two blankets and a quilt.

He threw them aside, stood up, stretched. Tom was not in sight. Nick walked slowly toward the main entrance to the square, wondering what—if anything—he was going to do about Tom… or with him. The retarded fellow had been feeding himself from the A&P on the far side of the town square. He had felt no compunction about going in there and picking out what he wanted to eat by the pictures on the labels of the cans because, Tom said, the supermarket door had been unlocked.

Nick wondered idly what Tom would have done if it hadn’t been. He supposed that, when he’d gotten hungry enough, he would have forgotten his scruples, or laid them aside for the nonce. But what would become of him when the food was gone?

But that wasn’t what really bothered him about Tom. It was the pathetic eagerness with which the man had greeted him. Retarded he might be, Nick thought, but he was not too retarded to feel loneliness. Both his mother and the woman who had served as his commonlaw aunt were dead. His dad had run off long before. His employer, Mr. Norbutt, and everyone else in May had stolen off to Kansas City one night while Tom slept, leaving him behind to wander up and down Main Street like a gently unhinged ghost. And he was getting into things he had no business getting into—like the whiskey. If he got drunk again, he might hurt himself. And if he got hurt with no one to take care of him, it would probably mean the end of him.

But… a deaf-mute and a man who was mentally retarded? Of what possible use could they be to each other? Here you got one guy who can’t talk and another guy who can’t think. Well, that wasn’t fair. Tom could think at least a little, but he couldn’t read, and Nick had no illusions about how long it would take him to get tired of playing charades with Tom Cullen. Not that Tom would get tired of it. Laws, no.

He stopped on the sidewalk just outside the park’s entrance, hands stuffed in his pockets. Well, he decided, I can spend the night here with him. One night won’t matter. I can cook him a decent meal at the very least.

Cheered a little by this, he went to find Tom.

Nick slept in the park that night. He didn’t know where Tom slept, but when he woke up the next morning, slightly dewy but feeling pretty good otherwise, the first thing he saw when he crossed the town square was Tom, crouched over a fleet of toy Corgi cars and a large plastic Texaco station.

Tom must have decided that if it was all right to break into Norton’s Drug Store, it was all right to break into another place. He was sitting on the curb of the five-and-ten, his back to Nick. About forty model cars were lined up along the edge of the sidewalk. Next to them was the screwdriver Tom had used to jimmy the display case open. There were Jaguars, Mercedes-Benzes, Rolls-Royces, a scale-model Bentley with a long, lime-green cowling, a Lamborghini, a Cord, a four-inch-long customized Pontiac Bonneville, a Corvette, a Maserati, and, God watch over us and protect us, a 1933 Moon. Tom was hunched over these studiously, driving them in and out of the garage, gassing them up at the toy pump. One of the lifts in the repair bay worked, Nick saw, and from time to time Tom would raise one of the cars up on it and, pretend to do something underneath. If he had been able to hear, he would have heard, in the nearly perfect silence, the sound of Tom Cullen’s imagination at work—the lip- vibrating brrrrrr as he drove the cars onto the Fisher-Price tarmac, the chk-chk-chk-ding! of the gas-pump at work, the ssshhhhhhh as the lift inside went up and down. As it was, he could catch some of the conversation between the station proprietor and the little people in the little cars: Fill that up, sir? Regular? You bet! Just let me get that windshield, ma’am. I think it’s your carb. Let’s put her up in the air and take a look at the bass-tud. Restrooms? You bet! Right around the side there!

And over this, arching for miles in every direction, the sky God had allocated to this little bit of Oklahoma.

Nick thought: I can’t leave him. I can’t do that. And he was suddenly swept by a bitter and totally unexpected sadness, a feeling so deep he thought for a moment he would weep.

They’ve gone to Kansas City, he thought. That’s what’s happened. They’ve all gone to Kansas City.

Nick walked across the street and tapped Tom on the arm. Tom jumped and looked over his shoulder. A large and guilty smile stretched his lips, and a blush climbed out of his shirt collar.

“I know it’s for little boys and not for grown men,” he said. “I know that, laws yes, Daddy tole me.”

Nick shrugged, smiled, spread his hands. Tom looked relieved.

“It’s mine now. Mine if I want it. If you could go in the drug and get something, I could go into the five-and- dime and get something. My laws, couldn’t I just? I don’t have to put it back, do I?”

Nick shook his head.

“Mine,” Tom said happily, and turned back to the garage. Nick tapped him again and Tom looked back. “What?”

Nick tugged his sleeve and Tom stood up willingly enough. Nick led him down the street to where his bike leaned on its kickstand. He pointed to himself. Then at the bike. Tom nodded.

“Sure. That bike is yours. That Texaco garage is mine. I won’t take your bike and you won’t take my garage. Laws, no!”

Nick shook his head. He pointed at himself. At the bike. Then down Main Street. He waved his fingers: