The Stand

“I’ve been thinking about what I’m going to do,” Harold said. “Don’t you want the rest of that Twinkle?”

“No, I’m full.”

Her Twinkie disappeared into Harold’s mouth in a single bite. His belated grief hadn’t affected his appetite, Frannie observed, and then decided that was a rather mean way to think.

“What?” she said.

“I was thinking of going to Vermont,” he said diffidently. “Would you like to come?”

“Why Vermont?”

“There’s a government plague and communicable diseases center there, in a town called Stovington. It’s not as big as the one in Atlanta, but it’s sure a lot closer. I was thinking that if there were still people alive and working on this flu, a lot of them would be there.”

“Why wouldn’t they be dead, too?”

“Well, they might be, they might be,” Harold said rather prissily. “But in places like Stovington, where they’re used to dealing with communicable diseases, they’re also used to taking precautions. And if they are still in operation, I would imagine they are looking for people like us. People who are immune.”

“How do you know all that, Harold?” She was looking at him with open admiration, and Harold blushed happily.

“I read a lot. Neither of those places are secret. So what do you think, Fran?”

She thought it was a wonderful idea. It appealed to that uncoalesced need for structure and authority. She immediately dismissed Harold’s disclaimer that the people running such an institution might all be dead. They would get to Stovington, they would be taken in, tested, and out of all the tests would come some discrepancy, some difference between them and all the people who had gotten sick and died. It didn’t occur to her just then to wonder what earthly good a vaccine could do at this point.

“I think we ought to find a road atlas and see how to get there yesterday,” she said.

His face lit up. For a moment she thought he was going to kiss her, and in that single shining moment she probably would have allowed it, but then the moment passed. In retrospect she was glad.

By the road atlas, where all distance was reduced to finger-lengths, it looked simple enough. Number 1 to I- 95, I-95 to US 302, and then northwest on 302 through the lake country towns of western Maine, across the chimney of New Hampshire on the same road, and then into Vermont. Stovington was only thirty miles west of Barre, accessible either by Vermont Route 61 or I-89.

“How far is that, altogether?” Fran asked.

Harold got a ruler, measured, and then consulted the mileage scale.

“You won’t believe this,” he said glumly.

“What is it? A hundred miles?”

“Over three hundred.”

“Oh God,” Frannie said. “That kills my idea. I read somewhere that you could walk through most of the New England states in a single day.”

“It’s a gimmick,” Harold said in his most scholarly voice. “It is possible to walk in four states—Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and just across the Vermont state line—in twenty-four hours, if you do it in just the right way, but it’s like solving that puzzle where you have two interlocked nails—it’s easy if you know how, impossible if you don’t.”

“Where in the world did you get that?” she asked, amused.

“Guinness Book of World Records,” he said disdainfully. “Otherwise known as the Ogunquit High School Study Hall Bible. Actually, I was thinking of bikes. Or… I don’t know… maybe motor scooters.”

“Harold,” she said solemnly, “you’re a genius.”

Harold coughed, blushing and pleased again. “We could bike as far as Wells, tomorrow morning. There’s a Honda dealership there… can you drive a Honda, Fran?”

“I can learn, if we can go slow for a while.”

“Oh, I think it would be very unwise to speed,” Harold said seriously. “One would never know when one might come around a blind curve and find a three-car smashup blocking the road.”

“No, one never would, would one? But why wait until tomorrow? Why don’t we go today?”

“Well, it’s past two now,” he said. “We couldn’t get much farther than Wells, and we’d need to outfit ourselves. That would be easier to do here in Ogunquit, because we know where everything is. And we’ll need guns, of course.”

It was queer, really. As soon as he mentioned that word, she had thought of the baby. “Why do we need guns?”

He looked at her for a moment, then dropped his eyes. A red blush was creeping up his neck.

“Because the police and courts are gone and you’re a woman and you’re pretty and some people… some men… might not be… be gentlemen. That’s why.”

His blush was so red now it was almost purple.

He’s talking about rape, she thought. Rape. But how could anybody want to rape me, I’m-pregnant. But no one knew that, not even Harold. And even if you spoke up, said to the intended rapist: Will you please not do that because I’m-pregnant, could you reasonably expect the rapist to reply, Jeez, lady, I’m sorry, I’ll go rape some other goil?

“All right,” she said. “Guns. But we could still get as far as Wells today.”

“There’s something else I want to do here,” Harold said.

The cupola atop Moses Richardson’s barn was explosively hot. Sweat had been trickling down her body by the time they got to the hayloft, but by the time they reached the top of the rickety flight of stairs leading from the loft to the cupola, it was coursing down her body in rivers, darkening her blouse and molding it to her breasts.

“Do you really think this is necessary, Harold?”

“I don’t know.” He was carrying a bucket of white paint and a wide brush with the protective cellophane still on it. “But the barn overlooks US 1, and that’s the way most people would come, I think. Anyway, it can’t hurt.”

“It will hurt if you fall off and break your bones.” The heat was making her head ache, and her lunchtime Coke was sloshing around her stomach in a way that was extremely nauseating. “In fact, it would be the end of you.”

“I won’t fall,” Harold said nervously. He glanced at her. “Fran, you look sick.”

“It’s the heat,” she said faintly.

“Then go downstairs, for goodness’ sake. Lie under a tree. Watch the human fly as he does his death-defying act on the precipitous ten-degree slope of Moses Richardson’s barn roof.”

“Don’t joke. I still think it’s silly. And dangerous.”

“Yes, but I’ll feel better if I go through with it. Go on, Fran.”

She thought: Why, he’s doing it for me.

He stood there, sweaty and scared, old cobwebs clinging to his naked, blubbery shoulders, his belly cascading over the waistband of his tight bluejeans, determined to not miss a bet, to do all the right things.

She stood on tiptoe and kissed his mouth lightly. “You be careful,” she said, and then went quickly down the stairs with the Coke sloshing in her belly, up-down-all-around, yeeeeccchh; she went quickly, but not so quickly that she didn’t see the stunned happiness come up in his eyes. She went down the nailed rungs from the hayloft to the straw-littered barn floor even faster because she knew she was going to puke now, and while she knew that it was the heat and the Coke and the baby, what might Harold think if he heard? So she wanted to get outside where he couldn’t hear. And she made it. Just.

Harold came down at a quarter to four, his sunburn now flaming red, his arms splattered with white paint. Fran had napped uneasily under an elm in Richardson’s dooryard while he worked, never quite going under completely, listening for the rattle of shingles giving way and poor fat Harold’s despairing scream as he fell the ninety feet from the barn’s roof to the hard ground below. But it never came—thank God—and now he stood proudly before her—lawn-green feet, white arms, red shoulders.

“Why did you bother to bring the paint back down?” she asked him curiously.

“I wouldn’t want to leave it up there. It might lead to spontaneous combustion and we’d lose our sign.” And she thought again how determined he was not to miss a single bet. It was just a little bit scary.

They both gazed up at the barn roof. The fresh paint gleamed out in sharp contrast to the faded green