The Stand (Original Edition) (19 page)

He rocked along, his feet easy in the boots, which were comfortably sprung in all the right places. His feet and these boots were old lovers. Christopher Bradenton in Mountain City knew him as Richard Fry. Bradenton was a conductor on one of the underground railway systems by which fugitives moved. Half a dozen different organizations, from the Weathermen to the Guevara Brigade, saw that Bradenton had money. He was a poet who sometimes taught Free University classes or traveled in the western states of Utah, Nevada, and Arizona, speaking to high school English classes, stunning middle-class boys and girls (he hoped) with the news that poetry was an unquiet corpse. He was in his mid-forties now, but Bradenton had been dismissed from one California college fifteen years ago for getting too chummy with the SDS. He had been busted in The Great Chicago Pig Convention of 1968, formed his ties to one radical group after another, first embracing the craziness of these groups, then being swallowed whole.

The dark man walked and smiled. Bradenton represented just one end of one conduit, and there were thousands of them—the pipes the crazies moved through, carrying their books and bombs. The pipes were interconnected, the signposts disguised but readable to the initiate. In New York he was known as Robert Franq, and his claim that he was a black man had never been disputed, although his skin was very light. He and a black veteran of Nam—the black vet had more than enough hate to make up for his missing left leg—had offed six cops in New York and New Jersey. In Georgia he was Ramsey Forrest, a distant descendant of Nathan Bedford Forrest, and in his white sheet he had participated in two rapes, a castration, and the burning of a nigger shanty town. But that had been long ago, in the early sixties, during the first civil rights surge. He sometimes thought that he might have been born in that strife. He certainly could not remember much that had happened to him before that, except that he came originally from Nebraska and that he had once attended high school classes with a red-haired, bandy-legged boy named Charles Starkweather. He remembered the civil rights marches of 1960 and 1961 better—the beatings, the night rides, the churches that had exploded as if some miracle inside them had grown too big to be contained. He remembered drifting down to New Orleans in 1962, and meeting a demented young man who was handing out tracts urging America to leave Cuba alone. That man had been a certain Mr. Oswald, and he had taken some of Oswald’s tracts and he still had a couple, very old and crumpled, in one of his many pockets. He had sat on a hundred different Committees of Responsibility. He had walked in demonstrations against the same dozen companies on a hundred different college campuses. He wrote the questions that most discomfited those in power when they came to lecture, but he never asked the questions himself, because they might have seen his grinning, burning face as some cause for alarm and fled from the podium. Likewise he never spoke at rallies because the microphones would scream with hysterical feedback and circuits would blow. But he had written speeches for those who did speak, and on several occasions those speeches had ended in riots, overturned cars, student strike votes, and violent demonstrations. For a while in the early seventies he had been acquainted with a man named Donald DeFreeze, and had suggested that DeFreeze take the name Cinque. He had helped lay plans that resulted in the kidnaping of an heiress, and it had been he who suggested that the heiress be made crazy instead of ransomed. He had left the small Los Angeles house where DeFreeze and the others had fried not twenty minutes before the police had arrived; he slunk away up the street, his bulging and dusty boots clocking on the pavement, a fiery grin on his face that made mothers grab up their children and pull them into the house. And later, when a few tattered remnants of the group were swept up, all they knew was that there had been someone else associated with the group, maybe someone important, maybe just a hanger-on, a man of no age, a man who was sometimes called the Walkin Dude.

He strode on at a steady, ground-eating pace. Two days ago he had been in Laramie, Wyoming, part of an ecotage group that had blown a power station. Today he was on US 51, between Grasmere and Riddle, on his way to Mountain City. Tomorrow he would be somewhere else. And he was happier than he had ever been, because—

He stopped.

Because something was coming.
He could feel it, almost taste it on the night air. He
could
taste it, a sooty hot taste that came from everywhere, as if God was planning a cookout and all of civilization was going to be the barbecue.

His time of transfiguration was at hand. He was going to be born for the second time, he was going to be squeezed out of the laboring cunt of some great sand-colored beast that even now lay in the throes of its contractions, its legs moving slowly as the birthblood gushed, its sun-hot eyes glaring into the emptiness.

He had been born when times changed, and the times were going to change again. It was in the wind, in the wind of this soft Idaho evening.

It was almost time to be reborn. He knew. Why else could he suddenly do magic?

Lloyd Henreid, who had been tagged “the baby-faced, unrepentant killer” by the Phoenix papers, was led down the hallway of the Phoenix municipal jail’s maximum security wing by two guards. One of them had a runny nose, and they both looked sour. The wing’s other occupants were giving Lloyd their version of a tickertape parade. In Max, he was a celebrity.

“Heyyy, Henreid!”

“Go to, boy!”

“Tell the DA if he lets me walk I won’t letya hurt im!”

“Rock steady, Henreid!”

“Right on, brother! Rightonrightonrighton!”

Lloyd grinned happily. He was dazzled by his new fame. It sure wasn’t much like Brownsville had been. When you got to be a heavy hitter, you got some respect.

They went through a doorway and a double-barred electric gate. He was frisked again, the guard with the cold breathing heavily through his mouth as if he had just run up a flight of stairs. Then they walked him through a metal detector for good measure, probably to make sure he didn’t have something crammed up his ass.

“Okay,” the guard with the runny nose said, and another guard waved them on. They walked down another hall, this one painted an industrial green. At the far end, another guard was standing in front of a closed door. The door had one small window, hardly more than a loophole, with wire embedded in the glass.

“Why do jails always smell so pissy?” Lloyd asked, just to make conversation. “I mean, even the places where no guys are locked up, it smells pissy. Do you guys maybe do it in the corners?” He snickered at the thought, which was really pretty comical.

“Shut up, killer,” the guard with the cold said.

“You don’t look so good,” Lloyd said. “You ought to be home in bed.”

“Shut up,” the other said.

Lloyd shut up. That’s what happened when you tried to talk to these guys. It was his experience that the class of prison corrections officers had no class.

“Hi, scumbag,” the door-guard said.

“How ya doin, fuckface?” Lloyd responded smartly. There was nothing like a little friendly repartee to freshen you right up.

“You’re gonna lose a tooth for that,” the door-guard said.

“Hey, now, listen, you can’t—”

“Would you care to try for two teeth, barfbag?”

Lloyd was silent.

“That’s okay then,” the door-guard said. “Just one tooth. You fellas can take him in.”

Smiling a little, the guard with the cold opened the door and the other led Lloyd inside, where his court-appointed lawyer was sitting at a metal table, looking at papers from his briefcase.

“Here’s your man, counselor.”

The lawyer looked up. He was hardly old enough to be shaving yet, Lloyd judged, but what the hell? Beggars couldn’t be choosers. They had him cold-cocked anyway, and Lloyd figured to get twenty years or so.

“Thank you very—”

“That guy,” Lloyd said, pointing to the door-guard. “He called me a scumbag. And when I said something back to him, he said he was gonna have some guy knock out one of my teeth. How’s that for police brutality?”

The lawyer passed a hand over his face. “Any truth to that?” he asked the door-guard.

The door-guard rolled his eyes in a burlesque
my God, can you believe it?
gesture. “These guys, counselor,” he said, “they should write for TV. I said hi, he said hi, that was it.”

“That’s a fuckin lie!” Lloyd said dramatically.

“I keep my opinions to myself,” the guard said stonily.

“I’m sure you do,” the lawyer said, “but I believe I’ll count Mr. Henreid’s teeth before I leave.”

A slight, angry discomfiture passed over the guard’s face, and he exchanged a glance with the two that had brought Lloyd in. Lloyd smiled. Maybe the kid was okay at that. The last two CAs he’d had were old hacks; one of them had come into court lugging a colostomy bag, could you believe that, a fucking
colostomy
bag? The old hacks didn’t give a shit for you. Plead and leave, that was their motto. But maybe this guy could get him a straight ten, armed robbery. Maybe even time served.

It was with such pleasant thoughts dancing through his head like sugarplums that Lloyd sat down to conference with his lawyer.

He was in the exercise yard later that morning, watching a softball game and mulling over everything his lawyer had told him, when a large inmate named Mathers came over and yanked him to his feet. Mathers’s head was shaved bald, a la Telly Savalas, and it gleamed benignly in the hot desert air.

“Now wait,” Lloyd said. “My lawyer counted every one of my teeth. So if you—”

“Yeah, that’s what Shockley told me,” said Mathers. “So he told me to—”

His knee came up squarely in Lloyd’s crotch, and the sudden pain was so excruciating he couldn’t even scream. He collapsed in a hunching, writhing pile, clutching his testicles. After a while, who knew how long, he was able to look up. Mathers was still looking at him, bald head gleaming. The guards were looking elsewhere. Lloyd moaned and writhed, a redhot ball of lead in his belly.

“Nothing personal,” Mathers said sincerely. “Myself, I hope you make out. The law’s a bitch.”

He strode away and Lloyd saw the door-guard standing atop a ramp in the truck-loading bay on the other side of the yard. His thumbs were hooked in his belt and he was grinning at Lloyd. When he saw that he had Lloyd’s complete, undivided attention, the door-guard gave him the finger. Mathers strolled over and the door-guard tossed him a package of Pall Malls. Mathers sketched a salute and walked away. Lloyd Henreid lay on the ground, knees drawn up to his chest, hands clutching his cramping belly, and the lawyer’s words echoed in his brain:
It’s a tough old world, Lloyd, a tough old world.

Right.

Nick Andros pushed aside one of the curtains and looked out into the street. From here, on the second story of the late John Baker’s house, you could see all of downtown Shoyo by looking left and by looking right you could see Route 63 going out of town. Main Street was utterly deserted. The shades of the business establishments were drawn. A sick-looking dog sat in the middle of the road, head down, sides bellowsing, white foam dripping from its muzzle to the heat-shimmering pavement. In the gutter half a block down, another dog lay dead.

The woman behind him moaned in a low, guttural way, but Nick did not hear her. He closed the curtain, rubbed his eyes for a moment, and then went to the woman, who had awakened. Jane Baker was bundled up with blankets because she had been cold a couple of hours ago. Now sweat was streaming from her face and she had kicked off the blankets—he saw with embarrassment that she had sweated her thin nightgown into transparency in some places. But she was not seeing him, and at this point he doubted if her seminakedness mattered. She was dying.

“Johnny, bring the basin, I think I’m going to throw up!” she cried.

He brought the basin out from under the bed and put it beside her, but she thrashed and knocked it onto the floor with a hollow bonging sound which he also couldn’t hear. He picked it up and just held it, watching her.

“Johnny!” she screamed. “I can’t find my sewing box! It isn’t in the closet!”

He poured her a glass of water from the pitcher on the nightstand and held it to her lips but she thrashed again and almost knocked it from his grasp. He set it back down where it would be in reach if she quieted.

He had never been so bitterly aware of his muteness as the last two days had made him. The Methodist minister, Braceman, had been with her on the twenty-third when Nick came over. He was Bible-reading with her in the living room, but he looked nervous and anxious to get away. Nick could guess why. Her fever had given her a rosy, girlish glow that went jarringly with her bereavement. Perhaps the minister had been anxious to gather up his family and melt away over the fields. News travels fast in a small town, and others had already decided to get out of Shoyo.

Since the time Braceman had left the Baker living room some forty-eight hours ago, everything had turned into a waking nightmare. Mrs. Baker had gotten worse, so much worse that Nick had feared she would die before the sun went down.

Worse, he couldn’t sit with her constantly. He had gone down to the truck stop to get his three prisoners lunch, but Vince Hogan hadn’t been able to eat. He was delirious. Mike Childress and Billy Warner wanted out, but Nick couldn’t bring himself to let them out. It wasn’t fear; he didn’t believe they would waste any time working him over to settle their grievance; they would want to make fast tracks away from Shoyo, like the others. But he had a responsibility. He had made a promise to a man who was now dead. Surely, sooner or later the state patrol would get things in hand and come to take them away.

He found a .45 rolled up in its holster in the bottom drawer of Baker’s desk, and after a few moments of debate he put it on. Looking down and seeing the woodgrip butt of the gun lying against his skinny hip had made him feel ridiculous—but its weight was comforting.