The Stand

that, despite their white beauty, gulls were carrion eaters. The thought that followed was nearly unspeakable, but it had formed fully in his mind before he could push it away: The pickings must be real good just lately.

He began to walk again, his shoes now clicking and scraping on sun-dried rock which would always be wet in its many seams from the spray. There were barnacles growing in those cracks, and scattered here and there like shrapnel bursts of bone were the shells the gulls had dropped to get at the soft meat inside.

A moment later he stood upon the naked headland. The seawind struck him full force, lifting his heavy growth of hair back from his forehead. He lifted his face into it, into the harsh-clean salt-smell of the blue animal. The combers, glassy blue-green, moved slowly in, their slopes becoming more pronounced as the bottom shallowed up beneath them, their peaks gaining first a curl of foam, then a curdly topping. Then they crashed suicidally against the rocks as they had since the beginning of time, destroying themselves, destroying an infinitesimal bit of the land at the same time. There was a ramming, coughing boom as water was forced deep into some half-submerged channel of rock that had been carved out over the millennia.

He turned first left, then right, and saw the same thing happening in each direction, as far as he could see… combers, waves, spray, most of all an endless glut of color that took his breath away.

He was at land’s end.

He sat down with his feet dangling over the edge, feeling a little overcome. He sat there for half an hour or better. The seabreeze honed his appetite and he rummaged in his pack for lunch. He ate heartily. Thrown spray had turned the legs of his bluejeans black. He felt cleaned out, fresh.

He walked back across the marsh, still so full of his own thoughts that he first supposed the rising scream to be the gulls again. He had even started to look up at the sky before he realized with a nasty jolt of fear that it was a human scream. A warcry.

His eyes jerked downward again and he saw a young boy running across the road toward him, muscular legs pumping. In one hand he held a long butcher knife. He was naked except for underpants and his legs were crisscrossed with bramble welts. Behind him, just coming out of the brush and nettles on the far side of the highway, was a woman. She looked pale, and there were circles of weariness under her eyes.

“Joe! ” she called, and then began to run as if it hurt her to do so.

Joe came on, never heeding, his bare feet splashing up thin sheets of marsh water. His entire face was drawn back in a tight and murderous grin. The butcher knife was high over his head, catching the sun.

He’s coming to kill me, Larry thought, entirely poleaxed by the idea. This boy… what did I ever do to him?

“Joe! ” the woman screamed, this time in a high, weary, despairing voice. Joe ran on, closing the distance.

Larry had time to realize he had left his rifle with his bike, and then the screaming boy was upon him.

As he brought the butcher knife down in a long, sweeping arc, Larry’s paralysis broke. He stepped aside and, not even thinking, brought his right foot up and sent the wet yellow workboot it was wearing into the boy’s midriff. And what he felt was pity: there was nothing to the kid—he went over like a candlepin. He looked fierce but was no heavyweight.

“Joe!” Nadine called. She tripped over a hummock and fell to her knees, splashing her white blouse with brown mud. “Don’t hurt him! He’s only a little boy! Please, don’t hurt him!” She got to her feet and struggled on.

Joe had fallen flat on his back. He was splayed out like an x, his arms making a v, his open legs making a second, inverted v. Larry took a step forward and tromped on his right wrist, pinning the hand holding the knife to the muddy ground.

“Let go of the sticker, kid.”

The boy hissed and then made a grunting, gobbling sound like a turkey. His upper lip drew back from his teeth. His Chinese eyes glared into Larry’s. Keeping his foot on the boy’s wrist was like standing on a wounded but still vicious snake. He could feel the boy trying to yank his hand free, and never mind if it was at the expense of skin, flesh, or even a broken bone. He jerked into a half-sitting position and tried to bite Larry’s leg through the heavy wet denim of his jeans. Larry stepped down even harder on the thin wrist and Joe uttered a cry—not of pain but defiance.

“Let it go, kid.”

Joe continued to struggle.

The stalemate would have continued until Joe got the knife free or until Larry broke his wrist if Nadine had not finally arrived, muddy, breathless, and staggering with weariness.

Without looking at Larry she dropped to her knees. “Let it go!” she said quietly but with great firmness. Her face was sweaty but calm. She held it only inches above Joe’s contorted, twisting features. He snapped at her like a dog and continued to struggle. Grimly, Larry strove to keep his balance. If the boy got free now, he would probably strike at the woman first.

“Let… it… go!” Nadine said.

The boy growled. Spit leaked between his clenched teeth. There was a smear of mud in the shape of a question mark on his right cheek.

“We’ll leave you, Joe. I’ll leave you. I’ll go with him. Unless you’re good.”

Larry felt a further tensing of the arm under his foot, then a loosening. But the boy was looking at her grievingly, accusingly, reproachfully. When he shifted his gaze slightly to look at Larry, Larry could read the hot jealousy in those eyes. Even with the sweat running off him in buckets, Larry felt cold under that stare.

She continued to speak calmly. No one would hurt him. No one would leave him. If he let go of the knife, everyone could be friends.

Gradually Larry became aware that the hand under his shoe had relaxed and let go. The boy lay dormant, staring up at the sky. He had opted out. Larry took his foot off Joe’s wrist, bent quickly, and picked up the knife. He turned and scaled it up and out toward the headland. The blade whirled and whirled, throwing off spears of sunlight. Joe’s strange eyes followed its course and he gave one long, hooting wail of pain. The knife bounced on the rocks with a thin clatter and skittered over the edge.

Larry turned back and regarded them. The woman was looking at Joe’s right forearm where the waffled shape of Larry’s boot was deeply embedded and turning an angry, exclamatory red. Her dark eyes looked up from that to Larry’s face. They were full of sorrow.

Larry felt the old defensive and self-serving words rise—I had to do it, it wasn’t my fault, listen lady, he wanted to kill me —because he thought he could read the judgment in those sorrowing eyes: You ain’t no nice guy.

But in the end he said nothing. The situation was what the situation was, and his actions had been forced by the kid’s. Looking at the boy, who had now curled himself up desolately over his own knees and put a thumb in his mouth, he doubted if the boy himself had initiated the situation. And it could have ended in a worse way, with one of them cut or even killed.

So he said nothing, and he met the woman’s soft gaze and thought: I think I’ve changed. Somehow. I don’t know how much. He found himself thinking of something Barry Grieg had once said to him about a rhythm guitar player from L.A., a guy named Jory Baker who was always on time, never missed a practice session, or fucked up an audition. Not the kind of guitar player that caught your eye, no showboat like Angus Young or Eddie Van Halen, but competent. Once, Barry had said, Jory Baker had been the driving wheel of a group called Sparx, a group everybody seemed to think that year’s Most Likely to Succeed. They had a sound something like early Creedence: hard solid guitar rock and roll. Jory Baker had done most of the writing and all of the vocals. Then a car accident, broken bones, lots of dope in the hospital. He had come out, as the John Prine song says, with a steel plate in his head and a monkey on his back. He progressed from Demerol to heroin. Got busted a couple of times. After a while he was just another street-druggie with fumble fingers, spare-changing down at the Greyhound station and hanging out on the strip. Then, somehow, over a period of eighteen months, he had gotten clean, and stayed clean. A lot of him was gone. He was no longer the driving wheel of any group, Most Likely to Succeed or otherwise, but he was always on time, never missed a practice session, or fucked up an audition. He didn’t talk much, but the needle highway on his left arm had disappeared. And Barry Grieg had said: He’s come out the other side. That was all. No one can tell what goes on in between the