The Stand:BOOK I(31)

Protesting, Vince was led to the Power Wagon and deposited inside. Protesting, he was taken back to town. Protesting, he was locked up and left to stew for a couple of hours. Baker didn't bother with reading him his rights. "Damn fool'd just get confused," he told Nick. When Baker went back around noon, Vince was too hungry and too scared to do any more protesting. He just spilled everything.

Mike Childress was in the jug by one o'clock, and Baker got Billy Warner at his house just as Billy was packing up his old Chrysler to go someplace-along piece from the look of all the packed liquor-store boxes and strapped-together luggage. But somebody had talked to Ray Booth, and Ray had been just smart enough to move a little quicker.

Baker took Nick home to meet his wife and have some supper. In the car Nick wrote on the memo pad: "I am sure sorry it's her brother. How is she taking it?"

"She's bearing up," Baker said, both his voice and the set of his body almost formal. "I guess she's done some crying over him, but she knew what he was. And she knows you can't pick your relatives like you do your friends."

Jane Baker was a small, pretty woman who had indeed been crying. Looking at her deeply socketed eyes made Nick uncomfortable. But she shook his hand warmly and said; "I'm pleased to know you, Nick. And I apologize deeply for your trouble. I feel responsible, with one of mine being a part of it and all."

Nick shook his head and shuffled his feet awkwardly.

"I offered him a job around the place," Baker said. "Station's gone right to hell since Bradley moved up to Little Rock. Painting and picking up, mostly. He's gonna have to stick around for a while anyway-for the …  you know."

"The trial, yes," she said.

There was a moment then in which the silence was so heavy even Nick found it painful.

Then, with forced gaiety, she said, "I hope you eat redeye ham, Nick. That's what there is, along with some corn and a big bowl of slaw. My slaw's never been up to what his mother used to make. That's what he says, anyway."

Nick rubbed his stomach and smiled.

Over dessert (a strawberry shortcake-Nick, who had been on short rations during the last couple of weeks, had two helpings), Jane Baker said to her husband: "Your cold sounds worse. You've been taking too much on, John Baker. And you didn't eat enough to keep a fly alive."

Baker looked guiltily at his plate for a moment, then shrugged. "I can afford to miss a meal now and then," he said, and palpated his double chin.

Nick, watching them, wondered how two people of such radically different size got along in bed. I guess they manage, he thought with an interior grin. They sure look comfortable enough with each other. And not that it's any of my business anyway.

"You're flushed, too. You carrying a fever?"

Baker shrugged. "Nope …  well. Maybe a touch."

"Well, you're not going out again tonight. That's final."

"My dear, I have prisoners. If they don't specially need to be watched, they do need to be fed and watered."

"Nick can do it," she said with finality. "You're going to bed. And don't go on about your insomnia; it won't do you any good."

"I cant send Nick," he said weakly. "He's a deaf-mute. Besides, he ain't a deputy."

"Well then, you just up and deputize him."

"He ain't a resident!"

"I won't tell if you won't," Jane Baker said inexorably. She stood up and began clearing the table. "Now you just go on and do it, John."

And that was how Nick Andros went from Shoyo prisoner to Shoyo deputy in less than twenty-four hours. As he was preparing to go up to the sheriff's office, Baker came into the downstairs hall, looking large and ghostly in a frayed bathrobe. He seemed embarrassed to be on view in such attire

"I never should have let her talk me into this," he said. "Wouldn't have done, either, if I didn't feel so punk. My chest's all clogged up and I'm as hot as a fire sale two days before Christmas. Weak, too."

Nick nodded sympathetically.

"I'm stuck between deputies. Bradley Caide and his wife went up to Little Rock after their baby passed away. One of those crib deaths. Awful thing. I don't blame them for going."

Nick pointed at his own chest and made a circle with his thumb and forefinger.

"Sure, you'll be okay. You just take normal care, you hear? There's a .45 in the third drawer of my desk, but don't you be takin it back there. Nor the keys either. Understand?"

Nick nodded.

"If you go back there, stay out of their reach. If any of em tries playin sick, don't you fall for it. It's the oldest dodge in the world. If one of em should get sick, Doc Soames can see them just as easy in the morning. I'll be in then."

Nick took his pad from his pocket and wrote: "I appreciate you trusting me. Thanks for locking them up & thanks for the job."

Baker read this carefully. "You're a puredee caution, boy. Where you from? How come you're out on your own like this?"

"That's a long story," Nick jotted. "I'll write some of it down for you tonight, if you want."

"You do that," Baker said. "I guess you know I put your name on the wire."

Nick nodded. It was SOP. But he was clean.

"I'll get Jane to call Ma's Truck Stop out by the highway. Those boys'll be hollering police brutality if they don't get their supper."

Nick wrote: "Have her tell whoever brings it to come right in. I can't hear him if he knocks."

"Okay." Baker hesitated a moment longer. "You got your cot in the corner. It's hard, but it's clean. You just remember to be careful, Nick. You can't call for help if there's trouble."

Nick nodded and wrote, "I can take care of myself."

"Yeah, I believe you can. Still, I'd get someone from town if I thought any of them would-" He broke off as Jane came in.

"You still jawing this poor boy? You let him go on, now, before my stupid brother comes along and breaks them all out."

Baker laughed sourly. "He'll be in Tennessee by now, I guess." He whistled out a long sigh that broke up into a series of phlegmy, booming coughs. "I b'lieve I'll go upstairs and lie down, Janey."

"I'll bring you some aspirin to cut that fever," she said.

She looked back over her shoulder at Nick as she went to the stairs with her husband. "It was a pleasure meeting you, Nick. Whatever the circumstances. You be just as careful as he says."

Nick bowed to her, and she dropped half a curtsy in return. He thought he saw a gleam of tears in her eyes.

A pimply, curious boy in a dirty busboy's jacket brought three dinner trays about half an hour after Nick had gotten down to the jail. Nick motioned for the busboy to put the trays on the cot, and while he did, Nick scribbled: "Is this paid for?"

The busboy read this with all the concentration of a college freshman tackling Moby Dick. "Sure," he said. "Sheriff's office runs a tab. Say, can't you talk?"

Nick shook his head.

"That's a bitch," the busboy said, and left in a hurry, as if the condition might be catching.

Nick took the trays in one at a time and pushed each one through the slot in the bottom of the cell door with a broomhandle.

He looked up in time to catch "-chickshit bastard, ain't he?" from Mike Childress. Smiling, Nick showed him his middle finger.

"I'll give you the finger, you dummy," Childress said, grinning unpleasantly. "When I get out of here I'll-" Nick turned away, missing the rest.

Back in the office, sitting in Baker's chair, he drew the memo pad into the center of the blotter, sat thinking for a moment, and then jotted at the top:

Life History

By Nick Andros

He stopped, smiling a little. He had been in some funny places, but never in his wildest dreams had he expected to be sitting in a sheriff's office, deputized, in charge of three men who had beaten him up, and writing his life story. After a moment he began to write again:

I was born in Caslin, Nebraska, on November 14, 1968. My daddy was an independent farmer. He and my mom were always on the edge of getting squeezed out. They owed three different banks. My mother was six months pregnant with me and my dad was taking her to see the doctor in town when a tie rod on his truck let go and they went into the ditch. My daddy had a heart attack and died.

Anyway, three months after, my mom had me and I was born the way I am. Sure was a tough break on top of losing her husband that way.

She carried on with the farm until 1973 and then lost it to the "big operators," as she always called them. She had no family but wrote to some friends in Big Springs, Iowa, and one of them got her a job in a bakery. We lived here until 1977 when she was killed in an accident. A motorcycle hit her while she was crossing the street on her way home from work. It wasn't even his fault but only bad luck as his brakes failed. He wasn't even speeding or anything. The Baptist Church gave my mamma a charity funeral. This same church, the Grace Baptist, sent me to the Children of Jesus Christ orphanage in Des Moines. This is a place that all sorts of churches chip together to support. That was where I learned to read and write …

He stopped there. His hand was aching from writing so much, but that wasn't why. He felt uneasy, hot and uncomfortable at having to relive all that again. He went back to the jail quarters and looked in. Childress and Warner were asleep. Vince Hogan was standing by the bars, smoking a cigarette and looking across the corridor at the empty cell where Ray Booth would have been tonight if he hadn't run so quick. Hogan looked as if he might have been crying, and that led him back in time to that small mute scrap of humanity, Nick Andros. There was a word he had learned at the movies as a kid. That word was INCOMMUNICADO. It was a word that had always had fantastic, Lovecraftian overtones to Nick, a fearful word that echoed and clanged in the brain, a word that inscribed all the nuances of fear that live only outside the sane universe and inside the human soul. He had been INCOMMUNICADO all his life.