The Stand

“Really?”

“I heard it today. I didn’t know who they were talking about until I asked.” She mused for a moment, then laughed.

“What’s funny?” Stu asked.

She stuck out her feet, which were clad in low-topped sneakers. On the soles were patterns of circles and lines. “He complimented me on my sneakers,” she said. “Isn’t that dippy?”

“You’re dippy,” Stu said, grinning.

Harold woke up just before dawn with a dull but not entirely unpleasant ache in his groin. He shivered a little as he got up. It was getting noticeably colder in the early mornings, although it was only August 22 and fall was still a calendar month away.

But there was heat below his waist, oh yes. Just looking at the delectable curve of her buttocks in those tiny see-through underpants as she slept was warming him up considerably. She wouldn’t mind if he woke her up… well, maybe she would mind, but she wouldn’t object. He still had no real idea of what might lie behind those dark eyes, and he was a little afraid of her.

Instead of waking her up, he dressed quietly. He didn’t want to mess around with Nadine, as much as he would have liked to.

What he needed to do was go someplace alone and think.

He paused at the door, fully dressed, carrying his boots in his left hand. Between the slight chilliness of the room and the prosy act of getting dressed, his desire had left him. He could smell the room now, and the smell was not terribly appealing.

It was just a little thing, she had said, a thing they could do without. Perhaps it was true. She could do things with her mouth and hands that were nearly beyond belief. But if it was such a small thing, why did this room have that stale and slightly sour odor that he associated with the solitary pleasure of all his bad years?

Maybe you want it to be bad.

Disturbing thought. He went out, closing the door softly behind him.

Nadine’s eyes opened the moment the door was closed. She sat up, looked thoughtfully at the door, and then lay down again. Her body ached in a slow and unrelieved cycle of desire. It felt almost like menstrual cramps. If it was such a small thing, she thought (with no idea of how close to Harold’s her own thoughts were), why did she feel this way? At one point last night she’d had to bite her lips together to stifle the cries: Stop that fooling around and STICK me with that thing! Do you hear me? STICK me with it, cram me FULL of it! Do you think what you’re doing is doing anything for me? Stick me with it and let’s for Christ’s sake—or mine, at least—end this crazy game!

He had been lying with his head between her legs, making strange noises of lust, noises that might have been comic had they not been so honestly urgent, so nearly savage. And she had looked up, those words trembling behind her lips, and had seen (or only thought she had?) a face at the window. In an instant the fire of her own lust had been damped down to cold ash.

It had been his face, grinning savagely in at her.

A scream had risen in her throat… and then the face was gone, the face was nothing but a moving pattern of shadows on the darkened glass mingled with smudges of dust. No more than the boogeyman a child imagines he sees in the closet, or curled up slyly behind the chest of toys in the corner.

No more than that.

Except it was more, and not even now, in the first cold rational light of dawn, could she pretend otherwise. It would be dangerous to pretend otherwise. It had been him, and he had been warning her. The husband-to-be was watching over his intended. And the bride defiled would be the bride unaccepted.

Staring at the ceiling, she thought: I suck his cock, but that’s not defilement. I let him stick himself up my ass, but that isn’t defilement, either. I dress for him like a cheap streetwalking slut, but that’s perfectly okay.

It was enough to make you wonder what sort of man your fiance really was.

Nadine stared up at the ceiling for a long, long time.

Harold made instant coffee, drank it with a grimace, and then took a couple of cold Pop-Tarts out onto the front step. He sat down and ate them while dawn crept across the land.

In retrospect, the last couple of days seemed like a mad carnival ride to him. It was a blur of orange trucks, of Weizak clapping him on the shoulder and calling him Hawk (they all called him that now), of dead bodies, a never-ending moldy stream of them, and then coming home from all that death to a never-ending flow of kinky sex. Enough to blur your head.

But now, sitting here on a front step as cold as a marble headstone, a horrible cup of instant coffee sloshing in his guts, he could munch these sawdust-tasting cold Pop-Tarts and think. He felt clear-headed, sane after a season of insanity. It occurred to him that, for a person who had always considered himself to be a Cro-Magnon man amid a herd of thundering Neanderthals, he had been doing precious little thinking lately. He had been led, not by the nose, but by the penis.

He turned his mind to Frannie Goldsmith even as he turned his gaze out to the Flatirons. It was Frannie who had been at his house that day, he knew it for sure now. He had gone over to the place where she lived with Redman on a pretext, really hoping to get a look at her footgear. As it turned out, she had been wearing the sneakers that matched the print he had found on his cellar floor. Circles and lines instead of the usual waffle or zigzag tread. No question, baby.

He thought he could put it together without too much trouble. Somehow she had found out he had read her diary. He must have left a smudge or mark on one of the pages… maybe more than one. So she had come to his house looking for some indication of how he felt about what he had read. Something written down.

There was, of course, his ledger. But she hadn’t found it, he could feel positive of that. His ledger said flat-out that he planned to kill Stuart Redman. If she had found something like that, she would have told Stu. Even if she hadn’t, he didn’t believe she could have been as easy and as natural with him as she had been yesterday.

He finished his last Pop-Tart, grimacing at the taste of its cold frosting and colder jelly center. He decided he would walk to the bus station instead of taking his cycle; Teddy Weizak or Norris could drop him off on the way home. He set off, zipping his light jacket all the way to his chin against the chill that would be gone in an hour or so. He walked past the empty houses with their shades drawn, and about six blocks down Arapahoe, he began to see an x -mark chalked boldly on door after door. Again, his idea. The Burial Committee had checked all those houses where the mark appeared, and had hauled away whatever bodies there were to be hauled away. x, a crossing-out. The people who had lived in those houses where the mark appeared were gone for all time. In another month that x -mark would be all over Boulder, signifying the end of an age.

It was time to think, and to think carefully. It seemed that, since he had met Nadine, he really had stopped thinking… but maybe he had really stopped even before that.

I read her diary because I was hurt and jealous, he thought. Then she broke into my house, probably looking for my own diary, but she didn’t find it. But just the shock of someone breaking in had maybe been revenge enough. It had certainly bent him out of shape. Maybe they were even and it could be quits.

He didn’t really want Frannie anymore, did he?… Did he?

He felt the sullen coal of resentment glow in his chest. Maybe not. But that didn’t change the fact that they had excluded him. Although Nadine had said little about her reasons for coming to him, Harold had an idea that she had been excluded in some way too, rebuffed, turned back. They were a couple of outsiders, and outsiders hatch plots. It’s perhaps the only thing that keeps them sane. (Remember to put that in the ledger, Harold thought… he was almost downtown now.)

There was a whole company of outsiders on the other side of the mountains. And when there are enough outsiders together in one place, a mystic osmosis takes place and you’re inside. Inside where it’s warm. Just a little thing, being inside where it’s warm, but really such a big thing. About the most important thing in the world.

Maybe he didn’t want to be quits and even. Maybe he didn’t want to settle for a draw, for a career of riding in a twentieth-century deadcart and getting meaningless letters of thanks for his ideas, and waiting five years for Bateman to retire from their precious committee so he could be on it… and what if they decided to pass over him