The Stand

scratches over her right eye. “I’m not such a bad guy,” he added quietly.

“Just don’t leave me.”

He helped her to her feet and slipped an arm around her waist. Then they walked slowly toward the tollbooths and slipped through them, New York behind them and across the river.

Chapter 36

There was a small park in the center of Ogunquit, complete with a Civil War cannon and a War Memorial, and after Gus Dinsmore died, Frannie Goldsmith went there and sat beside the duck pond, idly throwing stones in and watching the ripples spread in the calm water until they reached the lily pads around the edges and broke up in confusion.

She had taken Gus to the Hanson house down on the beach the day before yesterday, afraid that if she waited any longer Gus wouldn’t be able to walk and would have to spend his “final confinement,” as her ancestors would have termed it with such grisly yet apt euphemism, in his hot little cubicle near the public beach parking lot.

She had thought Gus would die that night. His fever had been high and he had been crazily delirious, falling out of bed twice and even staggering around old Mr. Hanson’s bedroom, knocking things over, falling to his knees, getting up again. He cried out to people who were not there, answered them, and watched them with emotions varying from hilarity to dismay until Frannie began to feel that Gus’s invisible companions were the real ones and she was the phantom. She had begged Gus to get back into bed, but for Gus she wasn’t there. She had to keep stepping out of his way; if she hadn’t, he would have knocked her over and walked over her.

At last he had fallen onto the bed and had passed from energetic delirium to a gasping, heavy-breathing unconsciousness that Fran supposed was the final coma. But the next morning when she looked in on him, Gus had been sitting up in bed and reading a paperback Western he had found on one of the shelves. He thanked her for taking care of him and told her earnestly that he hoped he hadn’t said or done anything embarrassing the night before.

When she said he hadn’t, Gus had looked doubtfully around the wreckage of the bedroom and told her she was good to say so, anyway. She made some soup, which he ate with gusto, and when he complained of how hard it was to read without his spectacles, which had been broken while he had been taking his turn on the barricade at the south end of town the week before, she had taken the paperback (over his weak protests) and had read him four chapters in a Western by that woman who lived up north in Haven. Rimfire Christmas, it was called. Sheriff John Stoner was having problems with the rowdier element in the town of Roaring Rock, Wyoming, it seemed—and, worse, he just couldn’t find anything to give his lovely young wife for Christmas.

Fran had gone away more optimistic, thinking that Gus might be recovering. But last night he had been worse again, and he had died at quarter to eight this morning, only an hour and a half ago. He had been rational at the end, but unaware of just how serious his condition was. He had told her longingly that he’d like to have an ice cream soda, the kind his daddy had treated Gus and his brothers to every Fourth of July and again at Labor Day when the fair came to Bangor. But the power was off in Ogunquit by then—it had gone at exactly 9:17 P.M. on the evening of June 28 by the electric clocks—and there was no ice cream to be had in town. She had wondered if someone in town might not have a gasoline generator with a freezer hooked up to it on an emergency circuit, and even thought of hunting up Harold Lauder to ask him, but then Gus began to breathe his final whooping, hopeless breaths. That went on for five minutes while she held his head up with one hand and a cloth under his mouth with the other to catch the thick expectorations of mucus. Then it was over.

Frannie covered him with a clean sheet and had left him on old Jack Hanson’s bed, which overlooked the ocean. Then she had come here and since then had been skipping rocks across the pond, not thinking about much of anything. But she unconsciously realized that it was a good kind of not thinking; it wasn’t like that strange apathy that had shrouded her on the day after her father had died. Since then, she had been more and more herself. She had gotten a rosebush down at Nathan’s House of Flowers and had carefully planted it at the foot of Peter’s grave. She thought it would take hold real well, as her father would have said. Her lack of thought now was a kind of rest, after seeing Gus through the last of it. It was nothing like the prelude to madness she had gone through before. That had been like passing through some gray, foul tunnel full of shapes more sensed than seen; it was a tunnel she never wanted to travel again.

But she would have to think soon about what to do next, and she supposed that thinking would have to include Harold Lauder. Not just because she and Harold were now the last two people in the area, but because she had no idea what would become of Harold without someone to watch out for him. She didn’t suppose that she was the world’s most practical person, but since she was here she would have to do. She still didn’t particularly like him, but at least he had tried to be tactful and had turned out to have some decency. Quite a bit, even, in his own queer way.

Harold had left her alone since their meeting four days ago, probably respecting her wish to grieve for her parents. But she had seen him from time to time in Roy Brannigan’s Cadillac, cruising aimlessly from place to place. And twice, when the wind was right, she had been able to hear the clacking of his typewriter from her bedroom window—the fact that it was quiet enough to hear that sound, although the Lauder house was nearly a mile and a half away, seemed to underline the reality of what had happened. She was a little amused that although Harold had latched on to the Cadillac, he hadn’t thought of replacing his manual typewriter with one of those quiet humming electric torpedoes.

Not that he could have it now, she thought as she stood up and brushed off the seat of her shorts. Ice cream and electric typewriters were things of the past. It made her feel sadly nostalgic, and she found herself wondering again with a sense of deep bewilderment how such a cataclysm could have taken place in only a couple of weeks.

There would be other people, no matter what Harold said. If the system of authority had temporarily broken down, they would just have to find the scattered others and re-form it. It didn’t occur to her to wonder why “authority” seemed to be such a necessary thing to have, any more than it occurred to her to wonder why she had automatically felt responsible for Harold. It just was. Structure was a necessary thing.

She left the park and walked slowly down Main Street toward the Lauder house. The day was warm already, but the air was freshened by a sea breeze. She suddenly wanted to go down to the beach, find a nice piece of kelp, and nibble on it.

“God, you’re disgusting,” she said aloud. Of course she wasn’t disgusting; she was just pregnant. That was it. Next week it would be Bermuda onion sandwiches. With creamy horseradish on top.

She stopped on the corner, still a block from Harold’s, surprised at how long it had been since she had thought of her “delicate condition.” Before, she had always been discovering that I’m-pregnant thought around odd corners, like some unpleasant mess she kept forgetting to clean up: I ought to be sure and get that blue dress to the cleaners before Friday (a few more months and I can hang it in the closet because I’m-pregnant); I guess I’ll take my shower now (in a few months it’ll look like there’s a whale in the shower stall because I’m-pregnant). I ought to get the oil changed in the car before the pistons fall right out of their sockets or whatever (and I wonder what Johnny down at the Citgo would say if he knew I’m-pregnant). But maybe now she had become accustomed to the thought. After all, she was nearly three months along, nearly a third of the way there.

For the first time she wondered with some unease who would help her have her baby.

From behind the Lauder house there came a steady ratcheting clickclickclick of a hand mower, and when Fran came around the corner, what she saw was so strange that only her complete surprise kept her from laughing out loud.

Harold, clad only in a tight and skimpy blue bathing suit, was mowing the lawn. His white skin was sheened with sweat; his long hair flopped against his neck (although to do Harold credit it did appear to have been washed in the not-too-distant past). The rolls of fat above the waistband of his trunks and below the legbands jounced up and down wildly. His feet were green with cut grass to above the ankle. His back had gone reddish, although with exertion or incipient sunburn she couldn’t tell.

But Harold wasn’t just mowing; he was running. The Lauders’ back lawn sloped down to a picturesque, rambling stone wall, and in the middle of it was an octagonal summerhouse. She and Amy used to hold their “teas” there when they were little girls, Frannie remembered with a sudden stab of nostalgia that was unexpectedly painful, back in the days when they could still cry over the ending of Charlotte’s Web and moan happily over Chuckie Mayo, the cutest boy in school. The