The Stand

byebye.

Tom became very still. Nick waited. Tom said hesitantly: “You movin on, mister?”

Nick nodded.

“I don’t want you to!” Tom burst out. His eyes were wide and very blue, sparkling with tears. “I like you! I don’t want you to go to Kansas City, too!”

Nick pulled Tom next to him and put an arm around him. Pointed to himself. To Tom. To the bike. Out of town.

“I don’t getcha,” Tom said.

Patiently, Nick went through it again. This time he added the byebye wave, and in a burst of inspiration he lifted Tom’s hand and made it wave byebye, too.

“Want me to go with you?” Tom asked. A smile of disbelieving delight lit up his face.

Relieved, Nick nodded.

“Sure!” Tom shouted. “Tom Cullen’s gonna go! Tom’s—” He halted, some of the happiness dying out of his face, and looked at Nick cautiously. “Can I take my garage?”

Nick thought about it a moment and then nodded his head yes.

“Okay!” Tom’s grin reappeared like the sun from behind a cloud. “Tom Cullen’s going!”

Nick led him to the bike. He pointed at Tom, then at the bike.

“I never rode one like that,” Tom said doubtfully, eyeing the bike’s gearshift and the high, narrow seat. “I guess I better not. Tom Cullen would fall off a fancy bike like that.”

But Nick was provisionally encouraged. I never rode one like that meant that he had ridden some sort of bike. It was only a question of finding a nice simple one. Tom was going to slow him down, that was inevitable, but perhaps not too much after all. And what was the hurry, anyway? Dreams were only dreams. But he did feel an inner urge to hurry, something so strong yet indefinable that it amounted to a subconscious command.

He led Tom back to his filling station. He pointed at it, then smiled and nodded at Tom. Tom squatted down eagerly, and then his hands paused in the act of reaching for a couple of cars. He looked up at Nick, his face troubled and transparently suspicious. “You ain’t gonna go without Tom Cullen, are you?”

Nick shook his head firmly.

“Okay,” Tom said, and turned confidently to his toys. Before he could stop himself, Nick had ruffled the man’s hair. Tom looked up and smiles shyly at him. Nick smiled back. No, he couldn’t just leave him. That was sure.

It was almost noon before he found a bike which he thought would suit Tom. He hadn’t expected it to take anywhere near as long as it did, but a surprising majority of people had locked their houses, garages, and outbuildings. In most cases he was reduced to peering into shadowy garages through dirty, cobwebby windows, hoping to spot the right bike. He spent a good three hours trudging from street to street with the sweat pouring off him and the sun pounding steadily against the back of his neck. At one point he had gone back to recheck the Western Auto, but that was no good; the two bikes in the show window were his-and-hers three-speeds and everything else was unassembled.

In the end he found what he was looking for in a small detached garage at the southern end of town. The garage was locked, but—it had one window big enough to crawl through. Nick broke the glass with a rock and carefully picked the remaining slivers out of the old, crumbling putty. Inside, the garage was explosively hot and furry with a thick oil-and-dust smell. The bike, an old-fashioned boy’s Schwinn, stood next to a ten-year-old Merc station wagon with balding tires and flaking rocker panels.

The way my luck’s running the damn bike’ll be busted, Nick thought. No chain, flat tires, something. But this time his luck was in. The bike rolled easily. The tires were up and had good tread; all the bolts and sprockets seemed tight. There was no bike basket, he would have to remedy that, but there was a chainguard and hung neatly on the wall between a rake and a snowshovel was an unexpected bonus: a nearly new Briggs hand- pump.

He hunted further and found a can of 3-in-One Oil on a shelf. Nick sat down on the cracked cement floor, now unmindful of the heat, and carefully oiled the chain and both sprockets. That done, he recapped the 3-in-One and carefully put it in his pants pocket.

He tied the bike-pump to the package carrier on the Schwinn’s back fender with a hank of hayrope, then unlocked the garage door and ran it up. Fresh air had never smelled so sweet. He closed his eyes, inhaled it deeply, wheeled the bike out to the road, got on, and pedaled slowly down Main Street. The bike rode fine. It would be just the ticket for Tom… assuming he really could ride it.

He parked it beside his Raleigh and went into the five-and-dime. He found a good-sized wire bike basket in a jumble of sporting goods near the back of the store and was turning to leave with it under his arm when something else caught his eye: a Klaxon horn with a chrome bell and a large red rubber bulb. Grinning, Nick put the horn in the basket and then went over to the hardware section for a screwdriver and an adjustable wrench. He went back outside. Tom was sprawled peacefully in the shade of the old World War II Marine in the town square, napping.

Nick put the basket on the Schwinn’s handlebars and attached the Klaxon horn beside it. He went back into the five-and-dime and came out with a good-sized tote-bag.

He took it up to the A&P and filled it with canned meat, fruit, and vegetables. He was pausing over some canned chili beans when he saw a shadow flit by on the aisle facing him. If he had been able to hear, he would already have been aware that Tom had discovered his bike. The Klaxon’s hoarse and drawn-out cry of Howww-OOO-Gah! floated up and down the street, punctuated by Tom Cullen’s giggles.

Nick pushed out through the supermarket’s doors and saw Tom speeding grandly down Main, his blond hair and his shirttail whipping out behind him, squeezing the bulb of the Klaxon horn for all it was worth. At the Arco station that marked the end of the business section he whirled around and pedaled back. There was a huge and triumphant grin on his face. The Fisher-Price garage sat in the bikes basket. His pants pockets and the flap pockets of his khaki shirt bulged with scale-model Corgi cars. The sun flashed bright, revolving circles in the wheelspokes. A little wistfully Nick wished he could hear the sound of the horn, just to see if it pleased him as much as it was pleasing to Tom.

Tom waved to him and continued on up the street. At the far end of the business section he swerved around again and rode back, still squeezing the horn. Nick held his hand out, a policeman’s order to stop. Tom brought the bike to a skidding halt in front of him. Sweat stood out on his face in great beads. The bike-pump’s rubber hose flopped. Tom was panting and grinning.

Nick pointed out of town and waved byebye.

“Can I still take my garage?”

Nick nodded and slipped the strap of the tote bag over Tom’s bull neck.

“We going right now?”

Nick nodded again. Made a circle with his thumb and forefinger.

“To Kansas City?”

Nick shook his head.

“To anywhere we want?”

Nick nodded. Yes. Anywhere they wanted, he thought, but anywhere would most likely turn out to be somewhere in Nebraska.

“Wow!” Tom said happily. “Okay! Yeah! Wow!”

They got on Route 283 going north and had ridden only two and a half hours when thunderheads began to build up in the west. The storm came at them quickly, riding on a gauzy caul of rain. Nick couldn’t hear the thunderclaps, but he could see forks of lightning stabbing down from the clouds. They were bright enough to dazzle the eyes with bluish-purple afterimages. As they approached the outskirts of Rosston, where Nick meant to turn east on Route 64, the veil of rain under the clouds disappeared and the sky turned a still and queerly ominous shade of yellow. The wind, which had been freshening against his left cheek, died away altogether. He began to feel extremely nervous without knowing why, and oddly clumsy. No one had ever told him that one of the few instincts man still shares with the lower animals is exactly that response to a sudden and radical drop in the air pressure.

Then Tom was tugging at his sleeve, tugging him frantically. Nick looked over at him. He was startled to see