The Stand

“Your name wouldn’t happen to be Fran Goldsmith, would it?”

“It so happens. But I don’t know you.”

“Larry Underwood. We just came in today. Actually, I was looking for a fellow named Harold Lauder. They said he was living at 261 Pearl along with Stu Redman and Frannie Goldsmith and some other people.”

That dried her giggles up. “Harold was in the building when we first got to Boulder, but he split quite a while ago. He’s on Arapahoe now, on the west side of town. I can give you his address if you want it, and directions.”

“I’d appreciate that. But I’ll wait until tomorrow to go over, I guess. I’m not risking this action again.”

“Do you know Harold?”

“I do and I don’t—the same way I do and don’t know you. Although I have to be honest and say you don’t look the way I pictured you. In my mind I saw you as a Valkyrie-type blonde right out of a Frank Frazetta painting, probably with a .45 on each hip. But I’m pleased to meet you any way.” He stuck out his hand and Frannie shook it with a bewildered little smile.

“I’m afraid I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

“Sit down on the curb a minute and I’ll tell you.”

She sat. A ghost of a breeze riffled up the street, shuffling scraps of paper and making the old elms move on the courthouse lawn three blocks farther down.

“I’ve got some stuff for Harold Lauder,” Larry said. “But it’s supposed to be a surprise, so if you see him before I do, mum’s the word and all that.”

“Okay, sure,” Frannie said. She was more mystified than ever.

He held up the long-barreled gun and it wasn’t a gun at all; it was a wine bottle with a long neck. She tilted the label to the starlight and could just barely read the large print—BORDEAUX at the top, and at the bottom, the date: 1947.

“The best vintage Bordeaux in this century,” he said. “At least that’s what an old friend of mine used to say. His name was Rudy. God love and rest his soul.”

“But 1947… that’s forty-three years ago. Won’t it be… well, gone over?”

“Rudy used to say a good Bordeaux never went over. Anyway, I’ve carried it all the way from Ohio. If it’s bad wine, it’ll be well-traveled bad wine.”

“And that’s for Harold?”

“That and a bunch of these.” He took something out of his jacket pocket and handed it to her. She didn’t have to turn this up to the starlight to read the print. She burst out laughing. “A Payday candy bar!” she exclaimed. “Harold’s favorite… but how could you know that?”

“That’s the story.”

“Then tell me!”

“Well, then. Once upon a time there was a fellow named Larry Underwood who came from California to New York to see his dear old mother. That wasn’t the only reason he came, and the other reasons were a little less pleasant, but let’s stick to the nice-guy reason, shall we?”

“Why not?” Fran agreed.

“And behold, the Wicked Witch of the West, or some Pentagon assholes, visited the country with a great plague, and before you could say, ‘Here comes Captain Trips,’ just about everyone in New York was dead. Including Larry’s mother.”

“I’m sorry. My mom and dad, too.”

“Yeah—everybody’s mom and dad. If we all sent each other sympathy cards, there wouldn’t be any left. But Larry was one of the lucky ones. He made it out of the city with a lady named Rita who wasn’t very well equipped to deal with what had happened. And unfortunately, Larry wasn’t very well equipped to help her deal with it.”

“No one had the equipment.”

“But some developed it quicker than others. Anyhow, Larry and Rita headed for the coast of Maine. They made it as far as Vermont, and there the lady OD’d on sleeping pills.”

“Oh, Larry, that is too bad.”

“Larry took it very hard. In fact, he took it as a more or less divine judgment on his strength of character. In further fact, he had been told by one or two people who should have known that his most incorruptible character trait was a splendid streak of self-interest, which came shining through like a Day-Glo madonna sitting on the dashboard of a ‘59 Cadillac.”

Frannie shifted a bit on the curb.

“I hope I’m not making you uncomfortable, but all of this has been sloshing around inside for a long time, and it does have some bearing on the Harold part of the story. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Thanks. I think that ever since we stopped by and met that old woman today I’ve been looking for a friendly face so I could spill this. I just thought it would be Harold’s. Anyway—Larry continued on to Maine because there didn’t seem to be anyplace else to go. He was having very bad dreams by then, but since he was alone he had no way of knowing that other people were having them, too. He simply assumed it was another symptom of his continuing mental breakdown. But eventually he made it to a small coastal town named Wells, where he met a woman named Nadine Cross and a strange little boy whose name turns out to be Leo Rockway.”

“Wells,” she marveled softly.

“Anyway, the three travelers sort of flipped a coin to see which way they should head on US 1, and since it came up tails, they headed down south where they eventually came to—”

“Ogunquit!” Frannie said, delighted.

“Just so. And there, on a barn, in huge letters, I made my first acquaintance with Harold Lauder and Frances Goldsmith.”

“Harold’s sign! Oh, Larry, he will be pleased!”

“We followed the directions on the barn to Stovington, and the directions at Stovington to Nebraska and the directions at Mother Abagail’s house to Boulder. We met people along the way. One of them was a girl named Lucy Swann, who’s my woman. I’d like you to meet her sometime. I think you’d like her.”

“By then something had happened that Larry didn’t really want. His little party of four grew to six. The six met four more in upstate New York, and our party absorbed theirs. By the time we made it to Harold’s sign in Mother Abagail’s dooryard there were sixteen of us, and we picked up another three just as we were leaving. Larry was in charge of this brave band. There was no vote or anything like that. It just was. And he really didn’t want the responsibility. It was a drag. It was keeping him awake nights. He started popping Tums and Rolaids. But it’s funny the way your mind boxes your mind. I couldn’t let it go. It got to be a self-respect thing. And I—he —was always afraid he was going to fuck it up righteously, that he’d get up some morning and someone would be dead in their sleeping bag the way Rita was that time in Vermont and everyone would be standing around pointing their fingers and saying, ‘It’s your fault. You didn’t know any better and it’s your fault.’ And that was something I couldn’t talk about, not even to the Judge—”

“Who’s the Judge?”

“Judge Farris. An old guy from Peoria. I guess he really was a judge at one time back in the early fifties, circuit judge or something, but he’d been retired a long time when the flu hit. He’s plenty sharp, though. When he looks at you, you’d swear he has X-ray eyes. Anyhow, Harold was important to me. He got to be more important as there got to be more people. In direct ratio, you might say.” He chuckled a little. “That barn. Man! The last line of that sign, the one with your name, was so low I figured he really must have been hanging ass out to the wind when he painted it on.”

“Yes. I was sleeping when he did that. I would have made him stop.”

“I started to get a sense of him,” Larry said. “I found a Payday wrapper in the cupola of that barn in Ogunquit, and then the carving on the beam—”

“What carving?”

She felt that Larry was studying her in the dark, and she pulled her robe a little closer around her… not a gesture of modesty, because she felt no threat from this man, but one of nervousness.

“Just his initials,” Larry said casually. “H.E.L. If that had been the end of it, I wouldn’t be here now. But then at the motorcycle dealership in Wells—”

“We were there!”