The Stand

She gave a high laugh that was mostly frustration. “You mean somebody finally showed up and it’s a mute guy?”

Nick shrugged and gave a slanting smile.

“Well,” she said, coming down the aisle to him, “you ain’t bad-looking. That’s something.” She put a hand on his arm, and the swell of her breasts almost touched his arm. He could smell at least three different kinds of perfume, and under all of them the unlovely aroma of her sweat.

“My name’s Julie,” she said. “Julie Lawry. What’s yours?” She giggled a little. “You can’t tell me, can you? Poor you.” She leaned a little closer, and her breasts brushed him. He began to feel very warm. What the hell, he thought uneasily, she’s only a kid.

He broke away from her, took the pad from his pocket, and began to write. A line or so into his message she leaned over his shoulder to see what he was writing. No bra. Jesus. She had sure gotten over her scare quick. His writing became a little uneven.

“Oh, wow,” she said as he wrote—it was as if he was a monkey capable of doing a particularly sophisticated trick. Nick was looking down at his pad and didn’t “read” her words, but he could feel the tickling warmth of her breath.

“I’m Nick Andros. I’m a deaf-mute. I’m traveling with a man named Tom Cullen, who is lightly retarded. He can’t read or understand many of the things I can act out unless they’re very simple. We’re on our way to Nebraska because I think there might be people there. Come with us, if you want.”

“Sure,” she said immediately, and then, remembering that he was deaf and shaping her words very carefully, she asked, “Can you read lips?”

Nick nodded.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m so glad to see someone, who cares if it’s a deaf-mute and a retard. Spooky here. I can hardly sleep nights since the power went off.” Her face set in martyred lines of grief more appropriate to a soap opera heroine than a real person. “My mom and dad died two weeks ago, you know. Everybody died but me. I’ve been so lonely.” With a sob she threw herself into Nick’s arms and began to undulate against him in an obscene parody of grief.

When she drew back from him, her eyes were dry and shiny.

“Hey, let’s make it,” she said. “You’re sort of cute.”

Nick gawped at her. I can’t believe this, he thought.

But it was real enough. She was tugging at his belt. “Come on. I’m on the pill. It’s safe.” She paused for a moment. “You can, can’t you? I mean, just because you can’t talk, that doesn’t mean you can’t—”

He put his hands out, perhaps meaning to take her by the shoulders, but he found her breasts instead. That was the end of any resistance he might have had. Coherent thought left his mind as well. He lowered her to the floor and had her.

Afterwards he went to the door and looked out as he buckled his belt again, checking on Tom. He was still on the park bench, dead to the world. Julie joined him, fiddling with a fresh bottle of perfume.

“That the retard?” she asked.

Nick nodded, not liking the word. It seemed like a cruel word.

She began to talk about herself, and Nick discovered to his relief that she was seventeen, not much younger than he was. Her mamma and her friends had always called her Angel-Face or just Angel for short, she said, because she looked so young. She told him a great deal more in the following hour, and Nick found it next to impossible to separate the truth from the lies… or the wish-fulfillment, if you preferred. She might have been waiting for someone like him, who could never interrupt the endless flow of her monologue, all her life. Nick’s eyes got tired just watching her pink lips push out the shapes of words. But if his eyes wandered for more than just a moment, to check on Tom or to consider the crashed-out plate-glass window of the dress shop across the street, her hand would touch his cheek, bringing his eyes back to her mouth. She wanted him to “hear” everything, ignore nothing. He was annoyed with her at first, then bored with her. In the space of an hour, incredibly, he found himself wishing he hadn’t found her in the first place, or that she would change her mind about coming with them.

She was “into” rock music and marijuana and had a taste for what she called “Colombian short rounds” and “fry-daddies.” She’d had a boyfriend, but he’d gotten so pissed off at the “establishment system” running the local high school that he had quit to join the Marines last April. She hadn’t seen him since then, but still wrote him every week. She and her two girlfriends, Ruth Honinger and Mary Beth Gooch, went to all the rock concerts in Wichita and had hitched all the way to Kansas City last September to see Van Halen and the Monsters of Heavy Metal in concert. She claimed to have “made it” with the Dokken bassist, and said it had been “the most bitchin-groovy experience of my life”; she had just “cried and cried” after the deaths of her mother and father within twenty-four hours of each other, even though her mother was a “bitchy prude” and her father “had a stick up his ass” about Ronnie, her boyfriend who had left town to join the Marines; she had plans to become either a beautician in Wichita when she graduated high school, or to “truck on out to Hollywood and get a job with one of those companies that do the homes of the stars, I’m bitchin-groovy at interior decoration, and Mary Beth said she’d come with me.”

At this point she suddenly remembered Mary Beth Gooch was dead, and that her opportunity to become a beautician or an interior decorator to the stars had passed with her… and everyone and everything else. This seemed to strike her with a more genuine sort of grief. It was not a storm, however, but only a brief squall.

When the flow of words had begun to dry up a little—at least for the time being—she wanted to “do it” (as she so coyly put it) again. Nick shook his head and she pouted briefly. “Maybe I don’t want to go with you after all,” she said.

Nick shrugged.

“Dummy-dummy-dummy,” she said with sudden sharp viciousness. Her eyes shone with spite. Then she smiled. “I didn’t mean that. I was just kidding.”

Nick looked at her, expressionless. He had been called worse names, but there was something in her that he very much did not like. Some restless instability. If she got angry with you, she wouldn’t yell or slap your face; not this one. This one would claw you. It came to him with sudden surety that she had lied about her age. She wasn’t seventeen, or fourteen, or twenty-one. She was any age you wanted her to be… as long as you wanted her more than she wanted you, needed her more than she needed you. She came across as a sexual creature, but Nick thought that her sexuality was only a manifestation of something else in her personality… a symptom. Symptom was a word you used for someone who was sick, though, wasn’t it? Did he think she was sick? In a way he did, and he was suddenly afraid of the effect she might have on Tom.

“Hey, your friend’s waking up!” Julie said.

Nick looked around. Yes—Tom was now sitting on the park bench, scratching his crow’s-nest hair and goggling around pallidly. Nick suddenly remembered the Pepto-Bismol.

“Hi, y’all!” Julie trilled, and ran down the street toward Tom, her breasts bouncing sweetly under her tight middy top. Tom’s goggle had been big to begin with; now it grew bigger still.

“Hi?” he said-asked slowly, and looked at Nick for confirmation and/or explanation.

Masking his own unease, Nick shrugged and nodded.

“I’m Julie,” she said. “How you doin, cutie-pie?”

Deep in thought—and unease—Nick went back into the drugstore to get what Tom needed.

“Uh-uh,” Tom said, shaking his head and backing away. “Uh-uh, I ain’t gonna. Tom Cullen doesn’t like medicine, laws no, tastes bad.”

Nick looked at him with frustration and disgust, holding the three-sided bottle of Pepto-Bismol in one hand. He looked to Julie and she caught his gaze, but in it he saw that same teasing light as when she had called him dummy—it was not a twinkle but a hard mirthless shine. It is the look that a person with no essential sense of humor gets in his or her eye when he or she is getting ready to tease.

“That’s right, Tom,” she said. “Don’t drink it, it’s poison.”

Nick gaped at her. She grinned back, hands on hips, challenging him to convince Tom otherwise. This was her petty revenge, perhaps; for having her second offer of sex turned down.

He looked back at Tom and swigged from the Pepto-Bismol bottle himself. He could feel the dull pressure of anger at his temples. He held the bottle out to Tom, but Tom was not convinced.

“No, uh-uh, Tom Cullen doesn’t drink poison,” he said, and with rising fury at the girl Nick saw that Tom was