The Stand:BOOK I(75)

"Harold, don't. I know how you feel."

He stared at her, dumbstruck. "You know …  ?" He shook his head. "No. You couldn't."

"Remember when you came to the house? And I was digging the grave? I was half out of my mind. Half the time I couldn't even remember what I was doing. I tried to cook some french fries and almost burned the house down. So if it makes you feel better to mow the grass, fine. You'll get a sunburn if you do it in your bathing trunks, though. You're already getting one," she added critically, looking at his shoulders. To be polite, she sipped a little more of the dreadful Kool-Aid.

He wiped his hands across his mouth. "I never even liked them that well," he said, "but I thought grief was something you felt anyway. Like your bladder's full, you have to urinate. And if close relatives die, you have to be grief-stricken."

She nodded, thinking that was strange but not inapt.

"My mother was always taken with Amy. She was Amy's friend," he amplified with unconscious and nearly pitiful childishness. "And I horrified my father."

Fran saw how that could be. Brad Lauder had been a huge, brawny man, a foreman at the woolen mill in Kennebunk. He would have had very little idea of what to make of the fat, peculiar son that his loins had produced.

"He took me aside once," Harold resumed, "and asked me if I was a queerboy. That's just how he said it. I got so scared I cried, and he slapped my face and told me if I was going to be such a goddamned baby all the time, I'd best ride right out of town. And Amy …  I think it would be safe to say that Amy just didn't give a shit. I was just an embarrassment when she brought her friends home. She treated me like I was a messy room."

With an effort, Fran finished her Kool-Aid.

"So when they were gone and I didn't feel too much one way or the other, I just thought I was wrong. ‘Grief is not a knee-jerk reaction,' I said to myself. But I got fooled. I missed them more and more every day. Mostly my mother. If I could just see her …  a lot of times she wasn't around when I wanted her …  needed her …  she was too busy doing things for Amy, or with Amy, but she was never mean to me. So this morning when I got thinking about it, I said to myself, ‘I'll mow the grass. Then I won't think about it.' But I did. And I started to mow faster and faster …  as if I could outrun it …  and I guess that's when you came in. Did I look as crazy as I felt, Fran?"

She reached across the table and touched his hand. "There's nothing wrong with the way you feel, Harold."

"Are you sure?" He was looking at her again in that wide-eyed, childish stare.

"Yes."

"Will you be my friend?"

"Yes."

"Thank God," Harold said. "Thank God for that." His hand was sweaty in hers, and as she thought it, he seemed to sense it, and pulled his hand reluctantly away. "Would you like some more Kool-Aid?" he asked her humbly.

She smiled her best diplomatic smile. "Maybe later," she said.

They had a picnic lunch in the park: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, Hostess Twinkies, and a large bottle of Coke each. The Cokes were fine after they had been cooled in the duck pond.

"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."