The Stand

bottom, something else caught his eye, something carved into one of the support beams, startlingly white and fresh and in direct contrast to all the rest of the barn’s old dusty darkness. He went over to the beam and peered at the carving, then ran the ball of his thumb over it, part in amusement, part in wonder that another human being had done it on the day he and Rita had been trekking north. He ran his nail along the carved letters again.

In a heart. With an arrow.

I believe, Sergeant, that the bloke must have been in love.

“Good for you, Harold,” Larry said, and left the barn.

The cycle shop in Wells was a Honda dealership, and from the way the showroom bikes were lined up, Larry deduced that two of them were missing. He was more proud of a second find—a crumpled candy wrapper near one of the wastebaskets. A chocolate Payday. It looked as if someone—lovesick Harold Lauder probably—had finished his candy bar while deciding which bikes he and his inamorata would be happiest with. He had balled up his wrapper and shot it at the wastebasket. And missed.

Nadine thought his deductions were good, but she was not as fetched by them as Larry was. She was eyeing the remaining bikes, in a fever to be off. Joe sat on the showroom’s front step, playing the Gibson twelve-string and hooting contentedly.

“Listen,” Larry said, “it’s five o’clock now, Nadine. There’s absolutely no way to get going until tomorrow.”

“But there’s three hours of daylight left! We can’t just sit around! We might miss them!”

“If we miss them, that’s that,” he said. “Harold Lauder left instructions once, right down to the roads they were going to take. If they move on, he’ll probably do it again.”

“But—”

“I know you’re anxious,” he said, and put his hands on her shoulders. He could feel the old impatience building up and forced himself to control it. “But you’ve never been on a motorcycle before.”

“I can ride a bike, though. And I know how to use a clutch, I told you that. Please, Larry. If we don’t waste time we can camp in New Hampshire tonight and be halfway there by tomorrow night. We—”

“It’s not like a bike, goddammit!” he burst out, and the guitar came to a jangling stop behind him. He could see Joe looking back at them over his shoulder, his eyes narrowed and instantly distrustful. Gee, I sure do have a way with people, Larry thought. That made him even angrier.

Nadine said mildly: “You’re hurting me.”

He looked and saw that his fingers were buried in the soft flesh of her shoulders, and his anger collapsed into dull shame. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Joe was still looking at him, and Larry recognized that he had just lost half the ground he had gained with the boy. Maybe more. Nadine had said something.

“What?”

“I said, tell me why it’s not like a bike.”

His first impulse was to shout at her, If you know so much, go on and try it. See how you like looking at the world with your head on backward. He controlled that, thinking it wasn’t only the boy he had lost ground with. He’d lost some with himself. Maybe he had come out the other side, but some of the old childish Larry had come out with him, tagging along at his heels like a shadow which has shrunk in the noonday sun but has not entirely disappeared.

“They’re heavier,” he said. “If you overbalance, you can’t get rebalanced as easily as you can with a bicycle. One of these 360s goes three hundred and fifty pounds. You get used to controlling that extra weight very quickly, but it does take some getting used to. In a standard shift car, you operate the gearshift with your hand and the throttle with your foot. On a cycle it’s reversed: the gearshift is foot-operated, the throttle hand-operated, and that takes a lot of getting used to. There are two brakes instead of one. Your right foot brakes the rear wheel, your right hand brakes the front wheel. If you forget and just use the hand-brake, you’re apt to fly right over the handlebars. And you’re going to have to get used to your passenger.”

“Joe? But I thought he’d ride with you!”

“I’d be glad to take him,” Larry said. “But right now I don’t think he’d have me. Do you?”

Nadine looked at Joe for a long, troubled time. “No,” she said, and then sighed. “He may not even want to ride with me. It may scare him.”

“If he does, you’re going to be responsible for him. And I’m responsible for both of you. I don’t want to see you spill.”

“Did that happen to you, Larry? Were you with someone?”

“I was,” Larry said, “and I took a spill. But by then the lady I was with was already dead.”

“She crashed her motorcycle?” Nadine’s face was very still.

“No. What happened, I’d say it was seventy percent accident and thirty percent suicide. Whatever she needed from me… friendship, understanding, help, I don’t know… she wasn’t getting enough.” He was upset now, his temples pounding thickly, his throat tight, the tears close. “Her name was Rita. Rita Blakemoor. I’d like to do better by you that’s all. You and Joe.”

“Larry, why didn’t you tell me before?”

“Because it hurts to talk about it,” he said simply. “It hurts a lot.” That was the truth, but not the whole truth. There were the dreams. He found himself wondering if Nadine had bad dreams—last night he had awakened briefly and she had been tossing restlessly and muttering. But she had said nothing today. And Joe. Did Joe have bad dreams? Well, he didn’t know about them, but fearless Inspector Underwood of Scotland Yard was afraid of the dreams… and if Nadine took a spill on the motorcycle, they might come back.

“We’ll go tomorrow, then,” she said. “Teach me how tonight.”

But first there was the matter of getting the two small bikes Larry had picked out gassed up. The dealership had a pump, but without electricity it wouldn’t run. He found another candy wrapper by the plate covering the underground tank and deduced that it had recently been pried up by the ever-resourceful Harold Lauder. Lovesick or no, Payday freak or not, Larry had gained a lot of respect for Harold, almost a liking in advance. He had already developed his own mental picture of Harold. Probably in his mid-thirties, a farmer maybe, tall and suntanned, skinny, not too bright in the book sense, maybe, but plenty canny. He grinned. Building up a mental picture of someone you had never seen was a fool’s game, because they were never the way you had imagined. Everybody knows the one about the three-hundred-pound disc jockey with the whipcord-thin voice.

While Nadine got a cold supper together, Larry prowled around the side of the dealership. There he found a large steel wastecan. Leaning against it was a crowbar and curling over the top was a piece of rubber tubing.

I’ve found you again, Harold! Take a look at this, Sergeant Briggs. Our man siphoned some gas from the underground tank to get going. I’m surprised he didn’t take his hose with him.

Perhaps he cut off a piece and that’s what’s left, Inspector Underwood—begging your pardon, but it is in the wastecan.

By jove, Sergeant, you’re right. I’m going to write you up for a promotion.

He took the crowbar and rubber hose back around to the plate covering the tank.

“Joe, can you come here for a minute and help me?”

The boy looked up from the cheese and crackers he was eating and gazed distrustfully at Larry.

“Go on, now, that’s all right,” Nadine said quietly.

Joe came over, his feet dragging a little.

Larry slipped the crowbar into the plate’s slot. “Throw your weight on that and let’s see if we can get it up,” he said.

For a moment he thought the boy either didn’t understand him or didn’t want to do it. Then he grasped the far end of the crowbar and pushed on it. His arms were thin but belted with a scrawny sort of muscle, the kind of muscle that working men from poor families always seem to have. The plate tilted a little but didn’t come up enough for Larry to get his fingers under.

“Lay over it,” he said.

Those half-savage, uptilted eyes studied him coolly for a moment and then Joe balanced on the crowbar, his feet coming off the ground as his whole weight was thrown onto the lever.

The plate came up a little farther than before, enough so that Larry could squirm his fingers under it. While he was struggling for purchase he happened to think that if the boy still didn’t like him, this was the best chance he