The Stand

shadowed hollow of one lacerated and shredded elbow.

“What about you?” he called up. “Aren’t you a betrayer, too?”

Her voice was sad. “I never betrayed him in my heart.”

“I believe that’s exactly where you did betray him,” Harold called up to her. He tried to put a large expression of sincerity on his face, but he was actually calculating the distance. He would have two shots at the most. And a pistol was a notoriously chancy weapon. “I believe he knows it, too.”

“He needs me,” she said, “and I need him. You were never in it, Harold. And if we’d gone on together, I might have… might have let you do something to me. That small thing. And that would have destroyed everything. I couldn’t take the smallest chance that might happen after all the sacrifice and blood and nastiness. We sold our souls together, Harold, but there’s enough of me left to want full value for mine.”

“I’ll give you full value,” Harold said, and managed to get up on his knees. The sun was dazzling. Vertigo seized him in rough hands, whirling the gyroscope balance inside his head. He seemed to hear voices— a voice —roaring in surprised protest. He pulled the trigger. The shot echoed, bounced back, was thrown from cliff-face to cliff-face, cracking and whacking and fading. Comical surprise spread over Nadine’s face.

Harold thought in a drunken kind of triumph: She didn’t think I had it in me! Her mouth hung open in a shocked, round O. Her eyes were wide. The fingers of her hands tensed and flew up, as if she were about to play some abnormal tune on the piano. The moment was so sweet that he lost a second or two savoring it and not realizing that he had missed. When he did realize, he brought the pistol back down, trying to aim it, locking his right wrist with his left hand.

“Harold! No! You can’t! ”

Can’t I? It’s such a little thing, squeezing a trigger. Sure I can.

She seemed too shocked to move, and as the pistol’s front sight came to rest in the hollow of her throat, he felt a sudden cold certainty that this was how it had been meant to end, in a short and meaningless spate of violence.

He had her, dead in his sights.

But as he started to pull the trigger, two things happened. Sweat ran into his eyes, doubling his vision. And he began to slide. He later told himself that the loose gravel had given way, or that his mangled leg had buckled, or both. It might even have been true. But it felt… it felt like a push, and in the long nights between then and now, he had not been able to convince himself otherwise. The daytime Harold was stubbornly rational to the end, but in the night the hideous certainty stole over him that in the end it was the dark man himself who had stepped in to thwart him. The shot he had meant to put smack into the hollow of her throat went wild: high, wide, and handsome into the indifferent blue sky. Harold went rolling and tumbling back down to the dead tree, his right leg twisting and buckling, a huge sheet of agony from ankle to groin.

He had struck the tree and passed out. When he came to again, it was just past dusk and the moon, three quarters full, was riding solemnly over the gorge. Nadine was gone.

He spent the first night in a delirium of terror, sure that he would be unable to crawl back up to the road, sure he would die in the ravine. When morning came he began to crawl upward again nevertheless, sweating and racked with pain.

He began around seven o’clock, just about the time the big orange Burial Committee trucks would be leaving the bus depot back in Boulder. He finally wrapped one raw and blistered hand around the guardrail cable at five o’clock that afternoon. His motorcycle was still there, and he nearly wept with relief. He dug some cans and the opener out of one of the saddlebags with frantic haste, opened one of the cans, and crammed cold corned beef hash into his mouth in double handfuls. But it tasted bad, and after a long struggle he threw it up.

He began to understand the irrefutable fact of his coming death then, and he lay beside the Triumph and wept, his twisted leg under him. After that he was able to sleep a little.

The following day he was drenched by a pounding rainshower that left him soaked and shivering. His leg had begun to smell of gangrene, and he took pains to keep the Cold Woodsman sheltered from the wet with his body. That evening he had begun to write in the Permacover notebook and discovered for the first time that his handwriting was beginning to regress. He found himself thinking of a story by Daniel Keyes—“Flowers for Algernon,” it had been called. In it, a bunch of scientists had somehow turned a mentally retarded janitor into a genius… for a while. And then the poor guy began to lose it. What was the guy’s name? Charley something, right? Sure, because that was the name of the movie they made out of it. Charly. A pretty good movie. Not as good as the story, full of sixties psychedelic shit as he remembered, but still pretty good. Harold had gone to the movies a lot in the old days, and he had watched a lot more on the family VCR. Back in the days when the world had been what the Pentagon would have called a quote viable alternative unquote. He had watched most of them alone.

He wrote in his notebook, the words emerging slowly from the straggling letters:

Are they all dead, I wonder? The committee? If so, I am sorry. I was misled. That is a poor excuse for my actions, but I swear out of all I know that it is the only excuse that ever matters. The dark man is as real as the superflu itself, as real as the atomic bombs that still sit somewhere in their leadlined closets. And when the end comes, and when it is as horrible as good men always knew it would be, there is only one thing to say as all those good men approach the Throne of Judgment: I was misled.

Harold read what he had written and passed a thin and trembling hand over his brow. It wasn’t a good excuse; it was a bad one. Pretty it up however you would, it still smelled. Someone who read that paragraph after reading his ledger would see him as a total hypocrite. He had seen himself as the king of anarchy, but the dark man had seen through him and had reduced him effortlessly to a shivering bag of bones dying badly by the highway. His leg had swelled up like an innertube, it smelled like gassy, overripe bananas, and he sat here with buzzards swooping and diving on the thermals overhead, trying to rationalize the unspeakable. He had fallen victim to his own protracted adolescence, it was as simple as that. He had been poisoned by his own lethal visions.

Dying, he felt as if he had gained a little sanity and maybe even a little dignity. He did not want to demean that with small excuses that would come limping off the page on crutches.

“I could have been something in Boulder,” he said quietly, and the simple, awful truth of that might have brought tears if he hadn’t been so tired and so dehydrated. He looked at the straggling letters on the page, and from there to the Colt. Suddenly he wanted it over, and he tried to think how to put a finish to his life in the truest, simplest way he could. It seemed more necessary than ever to write it and leave it for whoever might find him, in one year or in ten.

He gripped the pen. Thought. Wrote:

I apologize for the destructive things I have done, but do not deny that I did them of my own free will. On my school papers, I always signed my name Harold Emery Lauder. I signed my manuscripts—poor things that they were—the same way. God help me, I once wrote it on the roof of a barn in letters three feet high. I want to sign this by a name given me in Boulder. I could not accept it then, but I take it now freely.

I am going to die in my right mind.

Writing neatly at the bottom, he affixed his signature: Hawk.

He put the Permacover notebook into the Triumph’s saddlebag. He capped the pen and clipped it in his pocket. He put the muzzle of the Colt into his mouth and looked up at the blue sky. He thought of a game they had played when they were children, a game the others had teased him about because he never quite dared to go through with it. There was a gravel pit out on one of the back roads, and you could jump off the edge and fall a heartstopping distance before hitting the sand, rolling over and over, and finally climbing up to do it all over again.

All except Harold. Harold would stand on the lip of the drop and chant, One… Two… Three! just like the others, but the talisman never worked. His legs remained locked. He could not bring himself to jump. And the others sometimes chased him home, shouting at him, calling him Harold the Pansy.

He thought: If I could have brought myself to jump once… just once… I might not be here. Well, last time pays for all.

He thought: One… Two… THREE!

He pulled the trigger.

The gun went off.

Harold jumped.