The Stand

“Ma, you can’t play gin,” he said, smiling a little.

“For a pe

“Maybe if I gave you four hundred points—”

“Listen to the kid,” she jeered softly. “Maybe if I gave you four hundred. Stick around, Larry. What do you say?”

“All right,” he said. For the first time that day he felt good, really good. A small voice inside whispered he was taking again, same old Larry, riding for free, but he refused to listen. This was his mother, after all, and she had asked him. It was true that she had said some pretty hard things on the way to asking, but asking was asking, true or false? “Tell you what. I’ll pay for our tickets to the game on July fourth. I’ll just peel it off the top of whatever I skin you out of tonight.”

“You couldn’t skin a tomato,” she said amiably, then turned back to the shelves. “There’s a men’s down the hall. Why don’t you go wash the blood off your forehead? Then take ten dollars out of my purse and go to a movie. There’s some good movie-houses over on Third Avenue, still. Just stay out of those scum-pits around Forty-ninth and Broadway.”

“I’ll be giving money to you before long,” Larry said. “Record’s number eighteen on the Billboard chart this week. I checked it in Sam Goody’s coming over here.”

“That’s wonderful. If you’re so loaded, why didn’t you buy a copy, instead of just looking?”

Suddenly there was some kind of a blockage in his throat. He harrumphed, but it didn’t go away.

“Well, never mind,” she said. “My tongue’s like a horse with a bad temper. Once it starts ru

“You will,” he said. He came over to her and tugged at the hem of her dress like a little boy. She looked down. He stood on tiptoe and kissed her cheek. “I love you, Ma.”

She looked startled, not at the kiss but either at what he had said or the tone in which he had said it. “Why, I know that, Larry,” she said.

“About what you said. About being in trouble. I am, a little, but it’s not—”

Her voice was cold and stern at once. So cold, in fact, that it frightened him a little. “I don’t want to hear about that.”

“Okay,” he said. “Listen, Ma—what’s the best theater around here?”

“The Lux Twin,” she said, “but I don’t know what’s playing there.”

“It doesn’t matter. You know what I think? There’s three things you can get everyplace in America, but you can only get them good in New York City.”

“Yeah, Mr. New York Times critic? What are those?”

“Movies, baseball, and hotdogs from Nedick’s.”

She laughed. “You ain’t stupid, Larry—you never were.”

So he went down to the men’s room. And washed the blood off his forehead. And went back and kissed his mother again. And got fifteen dollars from her scuffed black purse. And went to the movies at the Lux. And watched an insane, malignant revenant named Freddy Krueger suck a number of teenagers into the quicksand of their own dreams, where all but one of them—the heroine—died. Freddy Krueger also appeared to die at the end, but it was hard to tell, and since this movie had a Roman numeral after its name and seemed to be well attended, Larry thought the man with the razors on the tips of his fingers would be back, without knowing that the persistent sound in the row behind him signaled the end to all that: there would be no more sequels, and in a very short time, there would be no more movies at all.

In the row behind Larry, a man was coughing.

Chapter 12

There was a grandfather clock standing in the far corner of the parlor. Fra

Her favorite room in the place was her father’s workshop. It was in the shed that co

Well, that cozy tu

“Hand me that wrench, Fra