The Stand

And what he said was: “Holy Christ on a carousel, am I glad to see you boys? I guess I am. Climb on up here and let’s see where we’re going.”

That was how Nick and Tom met Ralph Brentner.

Chapter 44

He was cracking up—baby, don’t you just know it?

That was a line from Huey “Piano” Smith, now that he thought of it. Went way back. A blast from the past. Huey “Piano” Smith, remember how that one went? Ah-ah-ah-ah, daaaay-o… gooba-gooba-gooba-gooba… ah-ah-ah-ah. Et cetera. The wit, wisdom, and social commentary of Huey “Piano” Smith.

“Fuck the social commentary,” he said. “Huey Piano Smith was before my time.”

Years later Joh

“Fuck it,” Larry opined once again. He looked terrible—a pale, frail phantom stumbling up a New England highway. “Gimme the sixties.”

Sure, the sixties, those were the days. Mid-sixties, late sixties. Flower Power. Getting clean for Gene. Andy Warhol with his pink-rimmed glasses and his fucking Brillo boxes. Velvet Underground. The Return of the Creature from Yorba Linda. Norman Spinrad, Norman Mailer, Norman Thomas, Norman Rockwell, and good old Norman Bates of the Bates Motel, heh-heh-heh. Dylan broke his neck. Barry McGuire croaked “The Eve of Destruction.” Diana Ross raised the consciousness of every white kid in America. All those wonderful groups, Larry thought dazedly, give me the sixties and cram the eighties up your ass. When it came to rock and roll, the sixties had been the Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde. Cream. Rascals. Spoonful. Airplane with Grace Slick on vocals, Norman Mailer on lead guitar, and good old Norman Bates on drums. Beatles. Who. Dead—

He fell over and hit his head.

The world swam away blackly and then came back in bright fragments. He wiped his hand across his temple and it came away with a thin foam of blood on it. Didn’t even matter. Whafuck, as they used to say back in the bright and glorious mid-sixties. What was falling down and hitting your head when he had spent the last week unable to sleep without waking up from nightmares, and the good nights were the nights when the scream got no farther than the middle of his throat? If you screamed out loud and woke up to that, you scared yourself even worse.

Dreams of being back in the Lincoln Tu

He would feel the black man’s breath on his very shoulder and that was when he would struggle up from sleep, escaping sleep, and the scream would be stuck in his throat like a hot bone or actually escaping his lips, loud enough to wake the dead.

Daytimes, the vision of the dark man would recede. The dark man strictly worked the night shift. Daytimes, it was the Big Alone that went to work on him, gnawing its way into his brain with the sharp teeth of some tireless rodent—a rat, or a weasel, maybe. During the days, his thoughts would dwell on Rita. Lovely Rita, meter-maid. Over and over in his mind he would turn her over and over, seeing those slitted eyes, like the eyes of an animal which has died in surprise and pain, that mouth he had kissed now filled with stale green puke. She had died so easy, in the night, in the same fucking sleeping bag, and now he was…

Well, cracking up. That was it, wasn’t it? That was what was happening to him. He was cracking up.

“Cracking,” he moaned. “Oh Jeez, I’m going out of my mind.”

A part of him that still retained a measure of rationality asserted that that might be true, but what he was suffering from right this minute was heat prostration. After what had happened to Rita, he hadn’t been able to ride the motorcycle anymore. He just hadn’t been able to; it was like a mental block. He kept seeing himself smeared all over the highway. So finally he had ditched it. Since then he had been walking—how many days? four? eight? nine? He didn’t know. It had been in the nineties since ten this morning, it was now nearly four, the sun was right behind him, and he wasn’t wearing a hat.

He couldn’t remember how many days ago he had ditched the motorcycle. Not yesterday, and probably not the day before (maybe, but probably not), and what did it matter? He had gotten off it, snapped it into gear, twisted the throttle, and let go of the clutch. It had torn itself out of his trembling, sick hands like a dervish and had gone plunging and rearing over the embankment of US 9 somewhere just east of Concord. He thought the name of the town in which he had murdered his motorcycle might have been Gossville, although that didn’t matter much, either. The fact was, the bike had been no more good to him. He hadn’t dared drive it over fifteen miles an hour, and even at fifteen he would have nightmare visions of being thrown over the handlebars and fracturing his skull or going around a blind corner and slamming into an overturned truck and going up in a fireball. And after a while the motherfucking overheat light had come on, of course it had, and it seemed he could almost read the word COWARD printed in small no-nonsense letters on the plastic housing over the little red bulb. Had there been a time when he had not only taken the cycle for granted but had actually enjoyed it, the sensation of speed as the wind rushed by on both sides of his face, the pavement blurring by six cold inches below the footposts? Yes. When Rita had been with him, before Rita had turned into nothing but a mouthful of green puke and a pair of slitted eyes, he had enjoyed it.

So he’d sent the motorcycle crashing over the embankment and into a weed-choked gully and then he had peered at it with a kind of cautious terror, as if it could somehow rise up and smite him. Come on, he had thought, come on and stall out, ya sucker. But for a long time, the motorcycle wouldn’t. For a long time it raved and bellowed down there in that gully, the rear wheel spi