The Stand

She showed him her tongue, which came to an interesting point, but he could tell her heart wasn’t in the banter, and he dropped it. She looked pale and rather listless, a startling contrast to the Frannie who had sung the National Anthem with such heart a few hours earlier.

“Something giving you the blues, honey?”

She shook her head no, but he thought he saw tears in her eyes.

“What is it? Tell me.”

“It’s nothing. That’s what’s the matter. Nothing is what’s bothering me. It’s over, and I finally realized it, that’s all. Less than six hundred people singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ It just kind of hit me all at once. No hotdog stands. The Ferris wheel isn’t going around and around at Coney Island tonight. No one’s having a nightcap at the Space Needle in Seattle. Someone finally found a way to clean up the dope in Boston’s Combat Zone and the chicken-ranch business in Times Square. Those were terrible things, but I think the cure was a lot worse than the disease. Know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“In my diary I had a little section called ‘Things to Remember.’ So the baby would know… oh, all the things he never will. And it gives me the blues, thinking of that. I should have called it ‘Things That Are Gone.’” She did sob a little, stopping her bike so she could put the back of her hand to her mouth and try to keep it in.

“It got everybody the same way,” Stu said, putting an arm around her. “Lot of people are going to cry themselves to sleep tonight. You better believe it.”

“I don’t see how you can grieve for a whole country,” she said, crying harder, “but I guess you can. These… these little things keep shooting through my mind. Car salesmen. Frank Sinatra. Old Orchard Beach in July, all crowded with people, most of them from Quebec. That stupid guy on MTV—Randy, I think his name was. The times… oh God, I sound like a fuh-fuh-frigging Rod Muh-McKuen poem!”

He held her, patting her back, remembering one time when his Aunt Betty had gotten a crying fit over some bread that didn’t rise—she was big with his little cousin Laddie then, seven months or so—and Stu could remember her wiping her eyes with the corner of a dishtowel and telling him to never mind, any pregnant woman was just two doors down from the mental ward because the juices their glands put out were always scrambled up into a stew.

After a while Frannie said, “Okay. Okay. Better. Let’s go.”

“Frannie, I love you,” he said. They resumed pushing their bikes.

She asked him, “What do you remember best? What’s the one thing?”

“Well, you know—” he said, and then stopped with a little laugh.

“No, I don’t know, Stuart.”

“It’s crazy.”

“Tell me.”

“I don’t know if I want to. You’ll start looking for the guys with the butterfly nets.”

“Tell me!” She had seen Stu in many moods, but this curious, embarrassed uneasiness was new to her.

“I never told anybody,” he said, “but I have been thinking on it the last couple of weeks. Something happened to me back in 1982, I was pumping gas at Bill Hapscomb’s gas station then. He used to hire me on, if he could, when I was laid off at the calculator plant in town. He had me on part-time, eleven P.M. to closing, which was three in the morning back in those days. There wasn’t much business after the people getting off the three-to-eleven shift at the Dixie Paper factory stopped to get their gas… lots of nights there wasn’t a single car stopped between twelve and three. I’d sit there and read a book or a magazine, and lots of night I’d doze off. You know?”

“Yes.” She did know. In her mind’s eye she could see him, the man who would become her man in the fullness of time and the peculiarity of events, a broad-shouldered man sleeping in a plastic Woolco chair with a book open and facedown on his lap. She saw him sleeping in an island of white light, an island surrounded by a great inland sea of Texas night. She loved him in this picture, as she loved him in all the pictures her mind drew.

“Well, this one night it was about quarter past two, and I was sitting behind Hap’s desk with my feet up, reading some Western—Louis L’Amour, Elmore Leonard, someone like that, and in pulls this big old Pontiac with all the windows rolled down and the tape-player going like mad, playing Hank Williams. I even remember the song—it was ‘Movin’ On.’ This guy, not young and not old, is all by himself. He was a good-lookin man, but in a way that was a little scary—I mean, he looked like he might do scary things without thinkin very hard about em. He had bushy, curly dark hair. There was a bottle of wine snugged down between his legs and a pair of Styrofoam dice hanging from the rearview mirror. He says, ‘High test,’ and I said okay, but for a minute I just stood there and looked at him. Because he looked familiar. I was playin place the face.”

They were on the corner now; their apartment building was across the street. They paused there. Frannie was looking at him closely.

“So I said, ‘Don’t I know you? Ain’t you from up around Corbett or Maxin?’ But it didn’t really seem like I knew him from those two towns. And he says, ‘No, but I passed through Corbett once with my family, when I was just a kid. It seems like I passed through just about everyplace in America when I was a kid. My dad was in the Air Force.’

“So I went back and filled up his car, and all the time I’m thinkin about him, playing place the face, and all at once it came to me. All at once I knew. And I damned near pissed myself, because the man behind the wheel of that Pontiac was supposed to be dead.”

“Who was he, Stuart? Who was he?”

“No, you let me tell it my way, Frannie. Not that it isn’t a crazy story no matter what way you tell it. I went back to the window and I says, ‘That’ll be six dollars and thirty cents.’ He gave me two five-dollar bills and told me I could keep the change. And I says, ‘I think I might have you placed now.’ And he says, ‘Well, maybe you do,’ and he gives me this weird, chilly smile, and all the time Hank Williams is singin about goin to town. I says, ‘If you are who I think you are, you’re supposed to be dead.’ He says, ‘You don’t want to believe everything you read, man.’ I says, ‘You like Hank Williams all right?’ It was all I could think of to say. Because I saw, Frannie, if I didn’t say something, he was just going to roll up that power window and go tooling on down the road… and I wanted him to go, but I also didn’t want him to go. Not yet. Not until I was sure. I didn’t know then that a person is never sure about a lot of things, no matter how much he wants to be.

“He says, ‘Hank Williams is one of the best. I like roadhouse music.’ Then he says, ‘I’m going to New Orleans, going to drive all night, sleep all day tomorrow, then barrelhouse all night long. Is it the same? New Orleans?’ And I say, ‘As what?’ And he says, ‘Well, you know.’ And I say, ‘Well, it’s all the South, you know, although there are considerable more trees down that way.’ And that makes him laugh. He says, ‘Maybe I’ll see you again.’ But I didn’t want to see him again, Frannie. Because he had the eyes of a man who has been trying to look into the dark for a long time and has maybe begun to see what is there. I think, if I ever see that man Flagg, his eyes might look a little like that.”

Stu shook his head as they pushed their bikes across the road and parked them. “I’ve been thinking of that. I thought about getting some of his records after that, but I didn’t want them. His voice… it’s a good voice, but it gives me the creeps.”

“Stuart, who are you talking about?”

“You remember a rock and roll group called The Doors? The man that stopped that night for gas in Arnette was Jim Morrison. I’m sure of it.”

Her mouth dropped open. “But he died! He died in France! He—” And then she stopped. Because there had been something funny about Morrison’s death, hadn’t there? Something secret.

“Did he?” Stu asked. “I wonder. Maybe he did, and the fellow I saw was just a guy who looked like him, but —”

“Do you really think it was?” she asked.

They were sitting on the steps of their building now, shoulders touching, like small children waiting for their mother to call them in to supper.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I do. And until this summer, I thought that would always be the strangest thing that ever happened to me. Boy, was I wrong.”

“And you never told anyone,” she marveled. “You saw Jim Morrison years after he supposedly died and you