The Stand

Dinny smacked him with noisy kisses.

“I got something for you,” Lloyd said, and took a handful of foil-wrapped Hershey’s Kisses from his breast pocket.

Dinny crowed with delight and clutched them. “Yoyd?”

“What, Dinny?”

“Why do you smell like a gasoline pile?”

Lloyd smiled. “I was burning some trash, honey. You go on and play. Who’s your mom now?”

“Angelina.” He pronounced it Angeyeena. “Then Bonnie again. I like Bonnie. But I like Angelina, too.”

“Don’t tell her Lloyd gave you candy. Angelina would spank Lloyd.”

Dinny promised not to tell and ran off giggling at the image of Angelina spanking Lloyd. In a minute or two he was back on the DON’T COME line of the crap table, generating his army with his mouth crammed full of chocolate. Whitney came over, wearing his white apron. He had two sandwiches for Lloyd and a cold bottle of Hamm’s.

“Thanks,” Lloyd said. “Looks great.”

“That’s homemade Syrian bread,” Whitney said proudly.

Lloyd munched for a while. “Has anybody seen him?” he asked at last.

Ken shook his head. “I think he’s gone again.”

Lloyd thought it over. Outside, a stronger-than-average gust of wind shrieked by, sounding lonely and lost in the desert. Dinny raised his head uneasily for a moment and then bent back to play.

“I think he’s around somewhere,” Lloyd said finally. “I don’t know why, but I do. I think he’s around waiting for something to happen. I dunno what.”

Whitney said in a low voice, “You think he got it out of her?”

“No,” Lloyd said, watching Dinny. “I don’t think he did. It went wrong for him somehow. She… she got lucky or she outthought him. And that doesn’t happen often.”

“It won’t matter in the long run,” Ken said, but he looked troubled just the same.

“No, it won’t.” Lloyd listened to the wind for a while. “Maybe he’s gone back to L.A.” But he didn’t really think so, and his face showed it.

Whitney went back to the kitchen and produced another round of beer. They drank in silence, thinking disquieting thoughts. First the Judge, now the woman. Both dead. And neither had talked. Neither had been unmarked as he had ordered. It was as if the old Yankees of Mantle and Maris and Ford had lost the opening two games of the World Series; it was hard for them to believe, and frightening.

The wind blew hard all night.

Chapter 63

On the late afternoon of September 10, Dinny was playing in the small city park that lies just north of the city’s hotel and casino district. His “mother” that week, Angelina Hirschfield, was sitting on a park bench and talking with a young girl who had drifted into Las Vegas about five weeks before, ten days or so after Angie herself had come in.

Angie Hirschfield was twenty-seven. The girl was ten years younger, now clad in tight bluejeans shorts and a brief middy blouse which left absolutely nothing to the imagination. There was something obscene about the contrast between the tight allure of her young body and the childish, pouty, and rather vacuous expression on her face. Her conversation was monotonous and seemingly without end: rock stars, sex, her lousy job cleaning Cosmoline preservative off armaments at Indian Springs, sex, her diamond ring, sex, the TV programs that she missed so much, and sex.

Angie wished she would go have sex with someone and leave her alone. And she hoped Dinny would be at least thirty before he ever worked around to having this girl for a mother.

At that moment Dinny looked up, smiled, and yelled: “Tom! Hey, Tom!”

On the other side of the park, a big man with straw-blond hair was shambling along with a big workman’s lunch bucket slamming against his leg.

“Say, that guy looks drunk,” the girl said to Angie.

Angie smiled. “No, that’s Tom. He’s just—”

But Dinny was off and running, hollering “Tom! Wait up, Tom!” at the top of his lungs.

Tom turned, grinning. “Dinny! Hey-hey!”

Dinny leaped at Tom. Tom dropped his lunch bucket and grabbed him. Swung him around.

“Airplane me, Tom! Airplane me!”

Tom grabbed Dinny’s wrists and began to spin him around, faster and faster. Centrifugal force pulled the boy’s body out until his whizzing legs were parallel to the ground. He shrieked with laughter. After two or three spins, Tom set him gently on his feet.

Dinny wobbled around, laughing and trying to get his balance back.

“Do it again, Tom! Do it again some more!”

“No, you’ll puke if I do. And Tom’s got to get to his home. Laws, yes.”

“Kay, Tom. ‘Bye!”

Angie said, “I think Dinny loves Lloyd Henreid and Tom Cullen more than anyone else in town. Tom Cullen is simple, but—” She looked at the girl and broke off. She was watching Tom, her eyes narrowed and thoughtful.

“Did he come in with another man?” she asked.

“Who? Tom? No—as far as I know, he came in all by himself about a week and a half ago. He was with those other people in their Zone, but they drove him out. Their loss is our gain, that’s what I say.”

“And he didn’t come in with a dummy? A deaf-and-dummy?”

“A deaf-mute? No, I’m pretty sure he came in alone. Dinny just loves him.”

The girl watched Tom out of sight. She thought of Pepto-Bismol in a bottle. She thought of a scrawled note that said: We don’t need you. That had been back in Kansas, a thousand years ago. She had shot at them. She wished she had killed them, particularly the dummy.

“Julie? Are you all right?”

Julie Lawry didn’t answer. She stared after Tom Cullen. In a little while, she began to smile.

Chapter 64

The dying man opened the Permacover notebook, uncapped his pen, paused a moment, and then began to write.

It was strange; where once the pen had flown over the paper, seeming to cover each sheet from top to bottom by a process of benign magic, the words now straggled and draggled, the letters large and tottery, as if he was regressing back to early grammar school days in his own private time machine.

In those days, his mother and father had still had some love left over for him. Amy had not yet blossomed, and his own future as The Amazing Ogunquit Fat Boy and Possible Hommasexshul was not yet decided. He could remember sitting at the sun-washed kitchen table, slowly copying one of the Tom Swift books word for word in a Blue Horse tablet—pulp stock, blue lines—with a glass of Coke beside him. He could hear his mother’s words drifting out of the living room. Sometimes she was talking on the phone, sometimes to a neighbor.

It’s just baby fat, the doctor says so. There’s nothing wrong with his glands, thank God. And he’s so bright!

Watching the words grow, letter by letter. Watching the sentences grow, word by word. Watching the paragraphs grow, each one a brick in the great walled bulwark that was language.

“It’s to be my greatest invention,” Tom said forcefully. “Watch what happens when I pull out the plate, but for gosh sakes, don’t forget to shield your eyes! ”

The bricks of language. A stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Words. Worlds. Magic. Life and immortality. Power.

I don’t know where he gets it, Rita. Maybe from his grandfather. He was an ordained minister and they say he gave the most wonderful sermons…

Watching the letters improve as time passed. Watching them connect with each other, printing left behind, writing now. Assembling thoughts and plots. That was the whole world, after all, nothing but thoughts and plots. He had gotten a typewriter finally (and by then there wasn’t much else left over for him;