The Stand (Original Edition) (13 page)

Deitz turned to him slowly. Now his face had changed. His lips were thinned with anger, his eyes staring. “You were
what?”
“Faking,” Stu said. His smile broadened.

Deitz took two uncertain steps toward him. His fists closed, opened, then closed again. “But why? Why would you want to do something like that?”

“Sorry,” Stu said, smiling. “That’s classified.”

“You shit son of a bitch,” Deitz said with soft wonder.

“Go on,” Stu said. “Go on out and tell them they can do their tests.”

He slept better that night than he had since they had brought him here. And he had an extremely vivid dream. He had always dreamed a great deal—his wife had complained about him thrashing and muttering in his sleep—but he had never had a dream like this.

He was standing on a country road, at the precise place where the black hottop gave up to bone-white dirt. A blazing summer sun

shone down. On both sides of the road there was green corn, and it stretched away endlessly. There was a sign, but it was dusty and he couldn’t read it. There was the sound of crows, harsh and far away. Closer by, someone was playing an acoustic guitar, fingerpicking it. Vic Palfrey had been a picker, and it was a fine sound.

This is where I ought to get to,
Stu thought dimly.
Yeah, this is the place, all right.

What was that tune? “Beautiful Zion”? “The Fields of My Father’s Home”? “Sweet Bye and Bye”? Some hymn he remembered from his childhood, something he associated with full immersion and picnic lunches. But he couldn’t remember which one.

Then the music stopped. A cloud came over the sun. He began to be afraid. He began to feel that there was something terrible, something worse than plague, fire, or earthquake. Something was in the corn and it was watching him. Something dark was in the corn.

He looked, and saw two burning red eyes far back in the shadows, far back in the corn. Those eyes filled him with the paralyzed, hopeless horror that the hen feels for the weasel.
Him,
he thought.
The man with no face. Oh dear God. Oh dear God no.

Then the dream was fading and he awoke with feelings of disquiet, dislocation, and relief. He went to the bathroom and then to his window. He looked out at the moon. He went back to bed but it was an hour before he got back to sleep. All that corn, he thought sleepily. Must have been Iowa or Nebraska, maybe northern Kansas. But he had never been in any of those places in his life.

It was two minutes to midnight.

Patty Greer, the nurse who had been trying to take Stu’s blood pressure when he went on strike, was leafing through the current issue of
McCall’s
at the nurses’ station and waiting to go in and check Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Hapscomb. Hap would still be awake watching Johnny Carson and would be no problem. He liked to josh her about how hard it would be to pinch her bottom through her white all-over suit. Mr. Hapscomb was scared, but he was being cooperative, not like that dreadful Stuart Redman, who only looked at you and wouldn’t say boo to a goose. Mr. Hapscomb was what Patty Greer thought of as a “good sport.” As far as she was concerned, all patients could be divided into two categories: “good sports” and “old poops.” Patty, who had broken a leg roller skating when she was seven and had never spent a day in bed since, had very little patience with the “old poops.” You were either really sick and being a “good sport” or you were a hypochondriac making trouble for a poor working girl.

Mr. Sullivan would be asleep, and he would wake up ugly. It wasn’t her fault that she had to wake him up, and she would think Mr. Sullivan would understand that. He should just be grateful that he was getting the best care the government could provide, and all free at that. And she would just tell him so if he started being an “old poop” again tonight.

The clock touched midnight; time to get going.

She left the nurses’ station and walked down the hallway toward the white room where she would first be sprayed and then helped into her suit. Halfway there, her nose began to tickle. She got her hankie out of her pocket and sneezed lightly three times. She replaced the handkerchief.

Intent on dealing with cranky Mr. Sullivan, she attached no significance to her sneezes. It was probably a touch of hay fever. The directive in the nurses’ station which said in big red letters, REPORT ANY COLD SYMPTOMS
NO MATTER HOW MINOR
TO YOUR SUPERVISOR
AT ONCE,
never even crossed her mind. They were worried that whatever those poor people from Texas had might spread outside the sealed rooms, but she also knew it was impossible for even a tiny virus to get inside the self-contained environment of the white-suits.

Nevertheless, on her way down to the white room she infected an orderly, a doctor who was just getting ready to leave, and another nurse on her way to do her midnight rounds.

A new day had begun.

A day later, on June 23, a big white Connie was roaring north on US 180, in another part of the country. It was doing somewhere between ninety and one hundred, its Corinthian white paintjob glittering in the sun, the chrome winking. The opera windows in the rear also gave back the sun, heliographing it viciously.

The trail that Connie had left behind was wandering and pretty much senseless. Up 81 to US 80, the turnpike, until Poke and Lloyd began to feel nervous. They had killed six people in the last six days, including the owner of the Continental, his wife, and his daughter. But it was not the six murders that made them feel antsy about being on the interstate. It was the dope and the guns. Five grams of hash, a little tin snuffbox filled with God knew how much coke, and sixteen pounds of marijuana. Also two .38s, three .45s, a .357 Mag that Poke called his Pokerizer, six shotguns—two of them sawed-off pumps—and a Schmeisser submachine gun. Murder was a trifle beyond their intellectual reach, but they both understood the trouble they were going to be in if the Arizona state police picked them up in a stolen car full of blow and shooting irons. On top of everything else, they were interstate fugitives. Had been ever since they crossed the Nevada border.

Interstate fugitives.
Lloyd Henreid liked the sound of that. Gang-busters. Take that, you dirty rats. Have a lead sandwich, ya lousy copper.

So they had turned north at Deming, now on 180; had gone through Hurley and Bayard and the slightly larger town of Silver City, where Lloyd had bought a bag of burgers and eight milkshakes (why in the name of Christ had he bought eight of the motherfuckers? they would «r>on be pissing chocolate), grinning at the waitress in an empty yet hilarious way that made her nervous for hours afterward. I believe that man would just as soon have killed me as looked at me, she told her boss that afternoon.

Past Silver City and roaring through Cliff, the road now bending west again, just the direction they didn’t want to go in. Through Buckhom and then they were back in the country God forgot, two-lane blacktop running through sagebrush and sand, buttes and mesas in the background, made you want to puke.

“We’re gettin low on gas,” Poke said.

“Wouldn’t be if you didn’t drive so fuckin fast,” Lloyd said. He took a sip of his third milkshake, gagged on it, powered down the window, and threw out all the leftover crap, including the three milkshakes neither of them had touched.

“Whoop! Whoop!” Poke cried. He began to goose the gas pedal. The Connie lurched forward, dropped back, lurched forward.

“Ride em cowboy!” Lloyd yelled.

“Whoop! Whoop!”

“You want to smoke?”

“Smoke em if you got em,” Poke said. “Whoop! Whoop!”

There was a large green Hefty bag on the floor between Lloyd’s feet. It was holding the sixteen pounds of marijuana. He reached in, got a handful, and began to roll up a bomber joint.

“Whoop! Whoop!” The Connie cruised back and forth over the white line.

“Cut the shit!” Lloyd shouted. “I’m spillin it everywhere!”

“Plenty more where that came from . . . whoop!”

“Come on, we gotta sell this stuff, man. We gotta deal this stuff or we’re gonna get caught and wind up in somebody’s trunk.”

“Okay, sport.” Poke began to drive smoothly again, but his expression was sulky. “It was your idea, your fuckin idea.”

“You thought it was a good idea.”

“Yeah, and I didn’t know we’d end up drivin all over fuckin Arizona, either. How are we ever gonna get to New York this way?” “We’re throwin off pursuit, man,” Lloyd said. In his mind he saw police garage doors opening and thousands of 1940s radio cars issuing forth into the night. Spotlights crawling over brick walls. Come on out, Canarsie, we know you’re in there.

“Good fuckin luck,” Poke said, still sulking. “We’re doin a helluva job. You know what we got, besides that dope and the guns? We got sixteen bucks and three hundred fuckin credit cards we don’t dare use. What the fuck, we don’t even have enough cash to fill this hog’s gas tank.”

“God will provide,” Lloyd said, and spit-sealed the bomber. He lit it with the Connie’s dashboard lighter. “Happy fuckin days.”

“And if you want to sell it, what are we doing smokin it?” Poke went on, not much mollified by the thought of God providing.

“So we sell a few short ounces. Come on, Poke. Have a smoke.”

This never failed to break Poke up. He brayed laughter and took the joint. Between them, standing on its wire stock, was the Schmeis-ser, fully loaded. The Connie blazed on up the road, its gas gauge standing at an eighth.

Poke and Lloyd had met a year before in the Brownsville Minimum Security Station, a Nevada work farm. Brownsville was ninety acres of irrigated farmland and a prison compound of Quonset huts about sixty miles north of Tonopah and about eighty northeast of Gabbs. It was a mean place to do short time. Although Brownsville Station was supposed to be a farm, nothing much grew there. Carrots and lettuce and peas got one taste of that blaring sun, chuckled weakly, and died. Legumes and weeds would grow, and the state legislature was frantically dedicated to the idea that someday soybeans would grow. But the kindest thing that could be said about Brownsville’s ostensible purpose was that the desert was taking a Christless long time to bloom. The warden (who preferred to be called “the boss”) prided himself on being a hardass, and he hired only men he considered to be fellow hardasses. And, as he was fond of telling the new fish, Brownsville was mostly minimum security because there was no place to run to if you went under the wire. Some did, but most were brought back in two or three days, sunburned, glareblind, and eager to sell the boss their shriveled raisin souls for a drink of water. Some of them cackled madly, and one young man who was out for three days claimed he saw a large castle some miles south of Gabbs, a castle with a moat. The moat, he said, was guarded by trolls riding big black horses. Some months later when a Colorado revival preacher did a show at Brownsville, this same young man got Jesus in a big way.

Andrew “Poke” Freeman, in for simple assault, was released in April of 1980. He had occupied a bed next to Lloyd Henreid, and had told him that if Lloyd was interested in a big score, he knew about something interesting in Vegas. Lloyd was willing.

Lloyd was released on June 1. His crime, committed in Reno, had been attempted rape. The lady was a showgirl on her way home, and she had shot a load of teargas into Lloyd’s eyes. He felt lucky to get only two to four, plus time served, plus time off for good behavior. At Brownsville it was just too fuckin hot to misbehave.

He caught a bus to Las Vegas, and Poke met him at the terminal. This is the deal, Poke told him. He knew this fellow, “one-time business associate” might describe him best, and this guy was known in certain circles as Gorgeous George. He did some piecework for a group of people with mostly Italian and Sicilian names. George was strictly part-time help. What he did mostly for these Sicilian-type people was to take things and bring things. Sometimes he took things from Vegas to L.A.; sometimes he brought other things back from L.A. to Vegas. Small-time dope mostly, freebies for big-time customers. Sometimes guns. The guns were always a bring, never a take. As Poke understood it (and Poke’s understanding never got much beyond what the movie people call “soft focus”), these Sicilian-type people sometimes sold iron to independent thieves. Well, Poke said, Gorgeous George was willing to tell them the time and place when a fairly good haul of these items were in stock. George was asking twenty-five per cent of what they realized. Poke and Lloyd would crash in on George, tie him and gag him, take the stuff, and maybe give him a couple of biffs and baffs for good measure. It had to look good, George had cautioned, because these Sicilian-type people were no one to fool around with.

“Yeah,” Lloyd said. “That sounds good.”

The next day Poke and Lloyd went to see Gorgeous George, a mild-mannered six-footer with a small head which sat incongruously above his roofbeam shoulders. He had a full head of waved blond hair, which made him look a bit like the famed wrestler.

He had had second thoughts about the deal, but Poke had changed his mind again. Poke was good at that. George told them to come around to his house the following Friday evening around six. “Wear masks, for God’s sake,” he said. “And you bloody my nose and black my eye, too. Jesus, I wish I’d never gotten into this.”

The big night came. Poke and Lloyd took a bus to the corner of George’s street and put on ski-masks at the foot of his walk. The door was locked, but as George had promised, not too tightly locked. There was a rumpus room downstairs, and there was George, standing in front of a Hefty bag full of pot. The Ping-Pong table was loaded down with guns. George was scared.

“Jesus, oh Jesus, I wish I’d never gotten into this,” he kept saying as Lloyd tied his feet with clothesrope and Poke bound his hands with Scotch brand filament tape.

Then Lloyd biffed George in the nose, bloodying it, and Poke baffed him in the eye, blacking it as per request.

“Jeez!” George cried. “Did you have to do it so hard?”

Poke plastered a piece of adhesive tape across George’s mouth. The two of them had begun to gather up the swag.