The Stand

to look down. He felt that quarts of semen must have splattered all over everything.

Young feller, we’ve struck oil!

He looked at her shamefacedly, embarrassed at the hair-trigger way he had gone off. But she was only smiling at him with those calm, dark eyes that seemed to know everything, the eyes of a very young girl in a Victorian painting. A girl who knows too much, perhaps, about her father.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered.

“Why? For what?” Her eyes never left his face.

“You didn’t get much out of that.”

“Au contraire, I got a great deal of satisfaction.” But he didn’t think that was exactly what he had meant. Before he had a chance to consider this, she went on: “You’re young. We can go as many times as you want to.”

He looked at her without speaking, unable to speak.

“But you must know one thing.” She put a hand lightly on him. “What you told me about being a virgin? Well, I am, too.”

“You—” His expression of astonishment must have been comical, because she threw back her head and laughed.

“Is there no room for virginity in your philosophy, Horatio?”

“No… yes… but—”

“I’m a virgin. And I’m going to stay that way. Because it’s for someone else to… to make me not a virgin anymore.”

“Who?”

“You know who.”

He stared at her, suddenly cold all over. She looked back calmly.

“Him? ”

She half turned away and nodded.

“But I can show you things,” she said, still not looking at him. “We can do things. Things you’ve never even… no, I take that back. Maybe you have dreamed of them, but you never dreamed you’d do them. We can play. We can make ourselves drunk with it. We can wallow in it. We can…” She trailed off, and then did look at him, a look so sly and sensual that he felt himself stirring again. “We can do anything— everything —but that one little thing. And that one thing really isn’t so important, is it?”

Images whirled giddily in his mind. Silk scarves… boots… leather… rubber. Oh Jesus. Fantasies of a Schoolboy. A weird kind of sexual solitaire. But it was all a kind of dream, wasn’t it? A fantasy begotten of fantasy, child of a dark dream. He wanted all those things, wanted her, but he also wanted more.

The question was, how much would he settle for?

“You can tell me everything,” she said. “I’ll be your mother, or your sister, or your whore, or your slave. All you have to do is tell me, Harold.”

How that echoed in his mind! How that intoxicated him!

He opened his mouth, and the voice that emerged was as tuneless as the chiming of a cracked bell. “But for a price. Isn’t that right? For a price. Because nothing is for free. Not even now, when everything is lying around, waiting to be picked up.”

“I want what you want,” she said. “I know what’s in your heart.”

“No one knows that.”

“What’s in your heart is in your ledger. I could read it there—I know where it is—but I don’t need to.”

He started and looked at her with a wild guilt.

“It used to be under that loose stone there,” she said, pointing to the hearth, “but you moved it. Now it’s behind the insulation in the attic.”

“How do you know that? How do you know? ”

“I know because he told me. He… you could say that he wrote me a letter. And what’s more important, he told me about you, Harold. How the cowboy took your woman and then kept you off the Free Zone Committee. He wants us to be together, Harold. And he’s generous. From now until when we leave here, it’s recess for you and me.”

She touched him and smiled.

“From now until then it’s playtime. Do you understand?”

“I—”

“No,” she answered, “you don’t. Not yet. But you will, Harold. You will.”

Insanely, it came to his mind to tell her to call him Hawk.

“And later, Nadine? What does he want later?”

“What you want. And what I want. What you almost did to Redman on the first night you went out hunting for the old woman… but on a much larger scale. And when that’s done, we can go to him, Harold. We can be with him. We can stay with him.” Her eyes slipped half-closed in a kind of rapture. Perhaps paradoxically, the fact that she loved the other but would give herself to him—might actually enjoy it—brought his desire up again, hot and close.

“What if I say no?” His lips felt cold, ashy.

She shrugged, and the movement made her breasts sway prettily. “Life will go on, won’t it, Harold? I’ll try to find some way of doing the thing I have to do. You’ll go on. Sooner or later you’ll find a girl who will do that… one little thing for you. But that one little thing is very tiresome after a while. Very tiresome.”

“How would you know?” he asked, and grinned crookedly at her.

“I know because sex is life in small, and life is tiresome—time spent in a variety of waiting rooms. You might have your little glories here, Harold, but to what end? On the whole it will be a humdrum, slipping-down life, and you’ll always remember me with my shirt off, and you’ll always wonder what I would have looked like with everything off. You’ll wonder what it would have been like to hear me talking dirty to you… or to have me spill honey all over your… body… and then lick it off… and you’ll wonder—”

“Stop it,” he said. He was trembling all over.

But she wouldn’t.

“I think you’ll also wonder what it would have been like on his side of the world,” she said. “That more than anything and everything else, maybe.”

“I—”

“Decide, Harold. Do I put my shirt back on or take everything else off?”

How long did he think? He didn’t know. Later, he wasn’t even sure he had struggled with the question. But when he spoke, the words tasted like death in his mouth: “In the bedroom. Let’s go in the bedroom.”

She smiled at him, such a smile of triumph and sensual promise that he shuddered from it, and his own eager response to it.

She took his hand.

And Harold Lauder succumbed to his destiny.

Chapter 55

The Judge’s house overlooked a cemetery.

He and Larry sat on the back porch after dinner, smoking Roi-Tan cigars and watching sunset fade to pale orange around the mountains.

“When I was a boy,” the Judge said, “we lived within walking distance of the finest cemetery in Illinois. Its name was Mount Hope. Every night after supper, my father, who was then in his early sixties, would take a walk. Sometimes I would walk with him. And if the walk took us past this perfectly maintained necropolis, he would say, ‘What do you think, Teddy? Is there any hope?’ And I would answer, ‘There’s Mount Hope,’ and each time he’d roar with laughter as if it had been the first time. I sometimes think we walked past that boneyard just so he could share that joke with me. He was a wealthy man, but it was the funniest joke he seemed to know.”

The Judge smoked, his chin low, his shoulders hunched high.

“He died in 1937, when I was still in my teens,” he said. “I have missed him ever since. A boy does not need a father unless he is a good father, but a good father is indispensable. No hope but Mount Hope. How he enjoyed