The Stand

County, Nebraska, altho they couldn’t get together on the actual name of the town—Stu says Hollingford Home, Glen says Hemingway Home. Close either way. They both seemed to feel they could find it. (Note Well, diary: My guess is “Hemingford Home.”)

Glen said, “This is really remarkable. We all seem to be sharing an authentic psychic experience.” Harold pooh-poohed, of course, but he looked like he’d been given lots of food for thought. He would only agree to go on the basis of “we have to go somewhere.” We leave in the morning. I’m scared, excited, and mostly happy to be leaving Stovington, which is a death-place. And I’ll take that old woman over the dark man anytime.

Things to Remember: “Hang loose” meant don’t get upset. “Rad” and “gnarly” were ways of saying a thing was good. “No sweat” meant you weren’t worried. To “boogie down” was to have a good time, and lots of people wore T-shirts which said SHIT HAPPENS, which it certainly did… and still does. “I got grease” was a pretty current expression (I first heard it just this year) that meant everything was going well. “Digs,” an old British expression, was just replacing “pad” or “crashpad” as an expression for the place you were living in before the superflu hit. It was very cool to say “I dig your digs.” Stupid, huh? But that was life.

It was just after twelve noon.

Perion had fallen into an exhausted sleep beside Mark, who they had moved carefully into the shade two hours earlier. He was in and out of consciousness, and it was easier on all of them when he was out. He had held against the pain for the remainder of the night, but after daybreak he had finally given in to it and when he was conscious, his screams curdled their blood. They stood looking at each other, helpless. No one had wanted any lunch.

“It’s his appendix,” Glen said. “I don’t think there’s any doubt about it.”

“Maybe we ought to try… well, operating on him,” Harold said. He was looking at Glen. “I don’t suppose you…”

“We’d kill him,” Glen said flatly. “You know that, Harold. If we could open him up without having him bleed to death, which we couldn’t, we wouldn’t know his appendix from his pancreas. The stuff in there isn’t labeled, you know.”

“We’ll kill him if we don’t,” Harold said.

“Do you want to try?” Glen asked waspishly. “Sometimes I wonder about you, Harold.”

“I don’t see that you’re being much help in our current situation, either,” Harold said, flushing.

“No, stop, come on,” Stu said. “What good are either of you doing? Unless one of you plans to saw him open with a jackknife, it’s out of the question, anyway.”

“Stu! ” Frannie almost gasped.

“Well?” he asked, and shrugged. “The nearest hospital would be back in Maumee. We could never get him there. I don’t even think we could get him back to the turnpike.”

“You’re right, of course,” Glen muttered, and ran a hand over his sandpapery cheek. “Harold, I apologize. I’m very upset. I knew this sort of thing could happen—pardon me, would happen—but I guess I only knew it in an academic way. This is a lot different than sitting in the old study, blue-skying things.”

Harold muttered an ungrateful acknowledgment and walked off with his hands stuffed deep into his pockets. He looked like a sulky, overgrown ten-year-old.

“Why can’t we move him?” Fran asked desperately, looking from Stu to Glen.

“Because of how much his appendix must have swelled by now,” Glen said. “If it bursts, it’s going to dump enough poison into his system to kill ten men.”

Stu nodded. “Peritonitis.”

Frannie’s head whirled. Appendicitis? That was nothing these days. Nothing. Why sometimes, if you were in the hospital for gallstones or something, they would just lift out your appendix on general principles while they still had you open. She remembered that one of her grammar school friends, a boy named Charley Biggers whom everyone had called Biggy, had had his appendix out during the summer between fifth and sixth grades. He was only in the hospital for two or three days. Having your appendix out was just nothing, medically speaking.

Just like having a baby was nothing, medically speaking.

“But if you leave him alone,” she asked, “won’t it burst anyway?”

Stu and Glen looked at each other uncomfortably and said nothing.

“Then you’re just as bad as Harold says!” she burst out wildly. “You’ve got to do something, even if it is with a jackknife! You’ve got to!”

“Why us?” Glen asked angrily. “Why not you? We don’t even have a medical book, for Christ’s sweet sake!”

“But you… he… it can’t happen this way! Having your appendix out is supposed to be nothing! ”

“Well, maybe not in the old days, but it’s sure something now,” Glen said, but by then she had blundered off, crying.

She came back around three o’clock, ashamed of herself and ready to apologize. But neither Glen nor Stu was in camp. Harold was sitting dejectedly on the trunk of a fallen tree. Perion was sitting crosslegged by Mark, sponging his face with a cloth. She looked pale but composed.

“Frannie!” Harold said, looking up and brightening visibly.

“Hi, Harold.” She went on to Peri. “How is he?”

“Sleeping,” Perion said, but he wasn’t sleeping; even Fran could see that. He was unconscious.

“Where have the others gone, Peri? Do you know?”

It was Harold who answered her. He had come up behind her, and Fran could feel him wanting to touch her hair or put a hand on her shoulder. She didn’t want him to. Harold had begun to make her acutely uncomfortable almost all of the time.

“They’ve gone to Kunkle. To look for a doctor’s office.”

“They thought they could get some books,” Peri said. “And some… some instruments.” She swallowed and her throat made an audible click. She went on cooling Mark’s face, occasionally dipping her cloth into one of the canteens and wringing it out.

“We’re really sorry,” Harold said uncomfortably. “I guess that doesn’t sound like jack-shit, but we really are.”

Peri looked up and offered Harold a strained, sweet smile. “I know that,” she said. “Thank you. This is no one’s fault. Unless there’s a God, of course. If there’s a God, then it’s His fault. And when I see Him, I intend to kick Him in the balls.”

She had a horsey sort of face and a thick peasant’s body. Fran, who saw everyone’s best features long before she saw the less fortunate ones (Harold, for instance, had a lovely pair of hands for a boy), noticed that Peri’s hair, a soft auburn shade, was almost gorgeous, and that her dark indigo eyes were fine and intelligent. She had taught anthropology at NYU, she had told them, and she had also been active in a number of political causes, including women’s rights and equal treatment under the law for AIDS victims. She had never been married. Mark, she told Frannie once, had been better to her than she had ever expected a man to be. The others she had known had either ignored her or lumped her in with other girls as a “pig” or a “scag.” She admitted Mark might have been in the group which had always just ignored her if conditions had been normal, but they hadn’t been. They had met each other in Albany, where Perion had been summering with her parents, on the last day of June, and after some talk they had decided to get out of the city before all the germs incubating in all the decomposing bodies could do to them what the superflu hadn’t been able to do.

So they had left, and the next night they had become lovers, more out of desperate loneliness than any real attraction (this was girl-talk, and Frannie hadn’t even written it down in her diary). He was good to her, Peri had told Fran in the soft and slightly amazed way of all plain women who have discovered a nice man in a hard world. She began to love him, a little more each day she had begun to love him.

And now this.

“It’s funny,” she said. “Everybody here but Stu and Harold are college graduates, and you certainly would have