The Stand

They crossed into Kansas just before it got too dark to ride any farther. Tom had turned sulky and tired after supper; he wanted to play with his garage. He wanted to watch TV. He didn’t want to ride anymore because his bum hurt from the seat. He had no conception of state lines and felt none of the lift Nick did when they passed another sign, this one saying YOU ARE NOW ENTERING KANSAS. By then the dusk was so thick that the white letters seemed to float inches above the brown sign, like spirits.

They camped a quarter of a mile over the line, beneath a water tower standing on tall steel legs like an H.G. Wells Martian. Tom was asleep as soon as he crawled into his sleeping bag. Nick sat awhile, watching the stars come out. The land was utterly dark, and for him, utterly still. Shortly before crawling in himself, a crow fluttered down to a fencepost nearby and seemed to be watching him. Its small black eyes were rimmed with half-circles of blood—reflection from a bloated orange summer moon that had risen silently. There was something about the crow Nick didn’t like; it made him uneasy. He found a big dirt-clod and pegged it at the crow. It fluttered its wings, seemed to fix him with a baleful glare, and was gone into the night.

That night he dreamed of the man with no face standing on the high roof, his hands stretched out to the east, and then of the corn—corn higher than his head—and the sound of the music. Only this time he knew it was music and this time he knew it was a guitar. He awoke near dawn with a painfully full bladder and her words ringing in his ears: Mother Abagail is what they call me… you come see me anytime.

Late that afternoon, moving east through Comanche County on Highway 160, they sat astride their bikes in amazement, watching a small herd of buffalo—a dozen in all, perhaps—walking calmly back and forth across the road in search of good graze. There had been a barbed wire fence on the north side of the road, but it appeared the buffalo had butted it down.

“What are they?” Tom asked fearfully. “Those ain’t cows!”

And because Nick couldn’t talk and Tom couldn’t read, Nick couldn’t tell him. That day was July 8, 1990, and they slept that night in flat open farm country forty miles west of Deerhead.

It was July 9, and they were eating their lunch in the shade of an old, graceful elm in the front yard of a farmhouse which had partially burned down. Tom was eating sausages from a tin with one hand and driving a car in and out of his service station with the other. And singing the refrain of a popular song over and over again. Nick knew the shape it made on Tom’s lips by heart: “Baby, can you dig your man—he’s a raht-eous ma-yun—baby, can you dig your man?”

Nick was depressed and slightly overawed by the size of the country; never before had he realized how easy it was to stick out your thumb, knowing that sooner or later the law of averages was going to favor you. A car was going to stop, usually with a man driving, and with a can of beer resting comfortably in the fork of his crotch more often than not. He would want to know how far you were going and you would hand him a slip of paper which you’d kept handy in your breast pocket, a slip of paper which read: “Hello, my name is Nick Andros. I’m a deaf- mute. Sorry about that. I’m going to—. Thanks very much for the ride. I can read lips.” And that would be that. Unless the guy had a thing about deaf-mutes (and some people did, although they were a minority), you hopped in and the car took you where you wanted to go, or a good piece in that direction. The car ate road and blew miles out its tailpipe. The car was a form of teleportation. The car defeated the map. But now there was no car, although on many of these roads a car would have been a practical mode of transportation for seventy or eighty miles at a stretch, if you were careful. And when you were finally blocked, you would only have to abandon your vehicle, walk for a while, and then take another. With no car, they were like ants crawling across the chest of a fallen giant, ants trundling endlessly from one nipple to the other. And so Nick half wished, half daydreamed, that when they finally did meet someone else (always assuming that would happen), it would be as it had been in those mostly carefree days of hitchhiking: there would be that familiar twinkle of chrome rising over the top of the next hill, that sunflare which simultaneously dazzled and pleased the eye. It would be some perfectly ordinary American car, a Chevy Biscayne or a Pontiac Tempest, sweet old Detroit rolling iron. In his dreams it was never a Honda or Mazda or Yugo. That American beauty would pull over and he would see a man behind the wheel, a man with a sunburned elbow cocked cockily out the window. This man would be smiling and he would say, “Holy Joe, boys! Ain’t I some glad sumbitch to see you guys! Hop in here! Hop in and let’s us see where we’re goin!”

But they saw no one that day, and on the tenth it was Julie Lawry they ran across.

The day was another scorcher. They had pedaled most of the afternoon with their shirts tied around their waists, and both of them were getting brown as Indians. They hadn’t been making very good time, not today, because of the apples. The green apples.

They had found them growing on an old apple tree in a farmyard, green and small and sour, but they had both been deprived of fresh fruit for a long time, and they tasted ambrosial. Nick made himself stop after two, but Tom ate six, greedily, one after the other, right down to the cores. He had ignored Nick’s motions that he should stop; when he got an idea in his head, Tom Cullen could be every bit as attractive as a wayward child of four.

So, beginning around eleven in the morning and continuing through the rest of the afternoon, Tom had the squats. Sweat ran off him in small creeks. He groaned. He had to get off his bike and walk it up even shallow hills. Despite his irritation at the poor time they were making, Nick couldn’t help a certain rueful amusement.

When they reached the town of Pratt around 4 P.M., Nick decided that was it for the day. Tom collapsed gratefully on a bus-stop bench in the shade and dozed off at once. Nick left him there and went along the deserted business section in search of a drugstore. He would get some Pepto-Bismol and force Tom to drink it when he woke up, whether Tom wanted to or not. If it took a whole bottle to cork Tom up, so be it. Nick wanted to make up some time tomorrow.

He found a Rexall between the Pratt Theater and the local Norge. He slipped in through the open door, and stood for a moment smelling the familiar hot, unaired, stale smell. There were other odors mixed in, strong and cloying. Perfume was the strongest. Perhaps some of the bottles had burst in the heat.

Nick glanced around, looking for the stomach medicines, trying to remember if Pepto-Bismol went over in the heat. Well, the label would say. His eyes slipped past a mannequin and two rows to the right he saw what he wanted. He had taken two steps that way when he realized that he had never before seen a mannequin in a drugstore.

He looked back and what he saw was Julie Lawry.

She was standing perfectly still, a bottle of perfume in one hand, the small glass wand you used to daub the stuff on in the other. Her china-blue eyes were wide in stunned, disbelieving surprise. Her brown hair was drawn back and tied with a brilliant silk scarf that hung halfway down her back. She was wearing a pink middy sweater and bluejeans shorts that were almost abbreviated enough to be mistaken for panties. There was a rash of pimples on her forehead and a hell of a good one right in the middle of her chin.

She and Nick stared at each other across half the length of the deserted drugstore, both frozen now. Then the bottle of perfume dropped from her fingers, shattered like a bomb, and a hothouse reek filled the store, making it smell like a funeral parlor.

“Jesus, are you real?” she asked in a trembling voice.

Nick’s heart had begun to race, and he could feel his blood thudding crazily in his temples. Even his eyesight had begun to wham in and out a little, making dots of light race across his field of vision.

He nodded.

“You ain’t a ghost?”

He shook his head.

“Then say somethin. If you ain’t a ghost, say somethin.”

Nick put a hand across his mouth, then on his throat.

“What’s that s’posed to mean?” Her voice had taken on a slightly hysterical tone. Nick couldn’t hear it… but he could sense it, see it on her face. He was afraid to step toward her, because if he did, she would run. He didn’t think she was afraid of seeing another person; what she was afraid of was that she was seeing a hallucination, and she was cracking up. Again, he felt that wave of frustration. If he could only talk —

Instead, he went through his pantomime again. It was, after all, the only thing he could do. This time understanding dawned.

“You can’t talk? You’re a mute?”

Nick nodded.