The Stand

could have to show it. If Joe took his weight off the crowbar the plate would come down with a crash and he’d lose everything on his hands but the thumbs. Nadine had realized this, Larry saw. She had been peering at one of the bikes but now had turned to watch, her body angled into a posture of tension. Her dark eyes went from Larry, down on one knee, to Joe, who was watching Larry as he leaned his weight on the bar. Those seawater eyes were inscrutable. And still Larry couldn’t find purchase.

“Need help?” Nadine asked, her normally calm voice now just a little highpitched.

Sweat ran into one eye and he blinked it away. Still no joy. He could smell gasoline.

“I think we can handle it,” Larry said, looking directly at her.

A moment later his fingers slipped into a short groove on the underside of the plate. He threw his shoulders into it and the plate came up and crashed over on the tarmac with a dull clang. He heard Nadine sigh, and the crowbar fall to the pavement. He wiped his perspiring brow and looked back at the boy.

“That’s good work, Joe,” he said. “If you’d let that thing slip, I would’ve spent the rest of my life zipping my fly with my teeth. Thank you.”

He expected no response (except perhaps an uninterpretable hoot as Joe walked back to inspect the motorcycles again), but Joe said in a rusty, struggling voice: “Weck-come.”

Larry flashed a glance at Nadine, who stared back at him and then at Joe. Her face was surprised and pleased, yet somehow she looked—he couldn’t have said just how—as if she had expected this. It was an expression he had seen before, but not one he could put his finger on right away. “Joe,” he said, “did you say ‘welcome’?”

Joe nodded vigorously. “Weck-come. You weck-come.”

Nadine was holding her arms out, smiling. “That’s good, Joe. Very, very good.” Joe trotted to her and allowed himself to be hugged for a moment or two. Then he began to peer at the bikes again, hooting and chuckling to himself.

“He can talk,” Larry said.

“I knew he wasn’t mute,” Nadine answered. “But it’s wonderful to know he can recover. I think he needed two of us. Two halves. He… oh, I don’t know.”

He saw that she was blushing and thought he knew why. He began to slip the length of rubber hose into the hole in the cement, and suddenly realized that what he was doing could easily be interpreted as a symbolic (and rather crude) bit of dumbshow. He looked up at her, sharply. She turned away quickly, but not before he had seen how intently she was watching what he was doing, and the high color in her cheeks.

The nasty fear rose in his chest and he called: “For Chrissake, Nadine, look out! ” She was concentrating on the hand controls, not looking where she was going, and she was going to drive the Honda directly into a pine tree at a wobbling five miles an hour.

She looked up and he heard her say “Oh! ” in a startled voice. Then she swerved, much too sharply, and fell off the bike. The Honda stalled.

He ran to her, his heart in his throat. “Are you all right? Nadine! Are you—”

Then she was picking herself up shakily, looking at her scraped hands. “Yes, I’m fine. Stupid me, not looking where I was going. Did I hurt the motorcycle?”

“Never mind the goddamn motorcycle, let me take a look at your hands.”

She held them out and he took a plastic bottle of Bactine from his pants pocket and sprayed them.

“You’re shaking,” she said.

“Never mind that either,” Larry answered, more roughly than he had intended. “Listen, maybe we had better just stick to the bicycles. This is dangerous—”

“So is breathing,” she answered calmly. “And I think Joe should ride with you, at least at first.”

“He won’t—”

“I think he will,” Nadine said, looking into his face. “And so do you.”

“Well, let’s stop for tonight. It’s almost too dark to see.”

“Once more. Haven’t I read that if your horse throws you, you should get right back on?”

Joe strolled by, munching blueberries from a motorcycle helmet. He had found a number of wild blueberry bushes behind the dealership and had been picking them while Nadine had her first lesson.

“I guess so,” Larry said, defeated. “But will you please watch where you’re going?”

“Yes, sir. Right, sir.” She saluted and then smiled at him. She had a beautiful slow smile that lit up her whole face. Larry smiled back; there was nothing else to do. When Nadine smiled, even Joe smiled back.

This time she putted around the lot twice and then turned out into the road, swinging over too sharply, bringing Larry’s heart into his mouth again. But she brought her foot down smartly as he had shown her, and went up the hill and out of sight. He saw her switch carefully up to second gear, and heard her switch to third as she dropped behind the first rise. Then the bike’s engine faded to a drone that melted away to nothing. He stood anxiously in the twilight, absently slapping at an occasional mosquito.

Joe strolled by again, his mouth blue. “Weck-come,” he said, and grinned. Larry managed a strained smile in return. If she didn’t come back soon, he would go after her. Visions of finding her lying in a ditch with a broken neck danced blackly in his head.

He was just walking over to the other cycle, debating whether or not to take Joe with him, when the droning hum came to his ears again and swelled to the sound of the Honda’s engine, clocking smoothly along in fourth. He relaxed… a little. Dismally he realized he would never be able to relax completely while she was riding that thing.

She came back into sight, the cycle’s headlamp now on, and pulled up beside him.

“Pretty good, huh?” She switched off.

“I was getting ready to come after you. I thought you’d had an accident.”

“I sort of did.” She saw the way he stiffened and added, “I went too slow turning around and forgot to push the clutch in. I stalled.”

“Oh. Enough for tonight, huh?”

“Yes,” she said. “My tailbone hurts.”

He lay in his blankets that night wondering if she might come to him when Joe was asleep, or if he should go to her. He wanted her and thought, from the way she had looked at the absurd little pantomime with the rubber hose earlier, that she wanted him. At last he fell asleep.

He dreamed he was in a field of corn, lost there. But there was music, guitar music. Joe playing the guitar. If he found Joe he would be all right. So he followed the sound, breaking through one row of corn to the next when he had to, at last coming out in a ragged clearing. There was a small house there, more of a shack really, the porch held up with rusty old jacklifters. It wasn’t Joe playing the guitar, how could it have been? Joe was holding his left hand and Nadine his right. They were with him. An old woman was playing the guitar, a jazzy sort of spiritual that had Joe smiling. The old woman was black, and she was sitting on the porch, and Larry guessed she was just about the oldest woman he had ever seen in his life. But there was something about her that made him feel good… good in the way his mother had once made him feel good when he was very little and she would suddenly hug him and say, Here’s the best boy, here’s Alice Underwood’s all-time best boy.

The old woman stopped playing and looked up at them.

Well say, I got me comp’ny. Step on out where I can see you, my peepers ain’t what they once was.

So they came closer, the three of them hand in hand, and Joe reached out and set a bald old tire swing to slow pendulum movement as they passed it. The tire’s doughnut-shaped shadow slipped back and forth on the weedy ground. They were in a small clearing, an island in a sea of corn. To the north, a dirt road stretched away to a point.

You like to have a swing on this old box o mine? she asked Joe, and Joe came forward eagerly and took the old guitar from her gnarled hands. He began to play the tune they had followed through the corn, but better and faster than the old woman.

Bless im, he plays good. Me, I’m too old. Cain’t make my fingers go that fast now. It’s the rheumatiz. But in 1902 I played at the County Hall. I was the first Negro to ever play there, the very first.

Nadine asked who she was. They were in a kind of forever place where the sun seemed to stand still one hour