You come down the delirious corridor and shoulder your way through the splintered door and look at the racetrack stars —that was Harold’s style.
“He whacks off in his pants,” Amy had once confided to Fran. “How’s that for nasty? Whacks off in his pants and wears the same pair of undershorts until they’ll just about stand up by themselves.”
Harold’s hair was black and greasy. He was fairly tall, about six-one, but he was carrying nearly two hundred and forty pounds. He favored cowboy boots with pointed toes, wide leather garrison belts that he was constantly hitching up because his belly was considerably bigger than his butt, and flowered shirts that billowed on him like staysails. Frannie didn’t care how much he whacked off, how much weight he carried, or if he was imitating Wright Morris this week or Hubert Selby, Jr. But looking at him—she always felt uncomfortable and a little disgusted, as if she sensed by low-grade telepathy that almost every thought Harold had was coated lightly with slime. She didn’t think, even in a situation like this, that Harold could be dangerous, but he would probably be as unpleasant as always, perhaps more so.
He hadn’t seen her. He was looking up at the house. “Anybody home?” he shouted, then reached through the Cadillac’s window and honked the horn. The sound jagged on Frannie’s nerves. She would have kept silent, except that when Harold turned around to get back into the car, he would see the excavation, and her sitting on the end of it. For a moment she was tempted to crawl deeper into the garden and just lie low among the peas and beans until he got tired and went away.
Stop it, she told herself, just stop it. He’s another living human being, anyway.
“Over here, Harold,” she called.
Harold jumped, his large buttocks joggling inside his tight pants. Obviously he had just been going through the motions, not really expecting to find anyone. He turned around and Fran walked to the edge of the garden, brushing at her legs, resigned to being stared at in her white gym shorts and halter. Harold’s eyes crawled over her with great avidity as he came to meet her.
“Say, Fran,” he said happily.
“Hi, Harold.”
“I’d heard that you were having some success in resisting the dread disease, so I made this my first stop. I’m canvassing the township.” He smiled at her, revealing teeth that had, at best, a nodding acquaintance with his toothbrush.
“I was awfully sorry to hear about Amy, Harold. Are your mother and father—?”
“I’m afraid so,” Harold said. He bowed his head for a moment, then jerked it up, making his clotted hair fly. “But life goes on, does it not?”
“I guess it does,” Fran said wanly. His eyes were on her beasts again, dancing across them, and she wished for a sweater.
“How do you like my car?”
“It’s Mr. Brannigan’s, isn’t it?” Roy Brannigan was a local realtor.
“It was,” Harold said indifferently. “I used to believe that, in these days of shortages, anyone who drove such a thyroidal monster ought to be hung from the nearest Sunoco sign, but all of that has changed. Less people means more petrol.”Petrol , Fran thought dazedly, he actually saidpetrol . “More everything,” Harold finished. His eyes took on a fugitive gleam as they dropped to the cup of her navel, rebounded to her face, dropped to her shorts, and bounced to her face again. His smile was both jolly and uneasy.
“Harold, if you’ll excuse me—”
“But whatever can you be doing, my child?”
The unreality was trying to creep back in again, and she found herself wondering just how much the human brain could be expected to stand before snapping like an overtaxed rubber band. My parents are dead, but I can take it. Some weird disease seems to have spread across the entire country, maybe the entireworld , mowing down the righteous and the unrighteous alike—I can take it. I’m digging a hole in the garden my father was weeding only last week, and when it’s deep enough I guess I’m going to put him in it—IthinkI can take it. But Harold Lauder in Roy Brannigan’s Cadillac, feeling me up with his eyes and calling me “my child”? I don’t know, my Lord. I just don’t know.
“Harold,” she said patiently. “I am not your child. I am five years older than you. It is physicallyimpossiblefor me to be your child.”
“Just a figure of speech,” he said, blinking a little at her controlled ferocity. “Anyway, what is it? That hole?”
“A grave. For my father.”
“Oh,” Harold Lauder said in a small, uneasy voice.
“I’m going in to get a drink of water before I finish up. To be blunt, Harold, I’d just as soon you went away. I’m upset.”
“I can understand that,” he said stiffly. “But Fran… in the garden?”
She had started toward the house, but now she rounded on him, furious. “Well, what would you suggest? That I put him in a coffin and drag him out to the cemetery? What in the name of God for? Helovedhis garden! And what’s it to you, anyway? What business is it of yours?”
She was starting to cry. She turned and ran for the kitchen, almost running into the Cadillac’s front bumper. She knew Harold would be watching her jiggling buttocks, storing up the footage for whatever X-rated movie played constantly in his head, and that made her angrier, sadder, and more weepy than ever.
The screen door whacked flatly shut behind her. She went to the sink and drank three cold glasses of water, too quickly, and a silver spike of pain sank deeply into her forehead. Her surprised belly cramped and she hung over the porcelain sink for a moment, eyes slitted closed, waiting to see if she was going to throw up. After a moment her stomach told her it would take the cold water, at least on a trial basis.
“Fran?” The voice was low and hesitant.
She turned and saw Harold standing outside the screen, his hands dangling limply at his sides. He looked concerned and unhappy, and Fran suddenly felt badly for him. Harold Lauder tooling around this sad, ruined town in Roy Brannigan’s Cadillac, Harold Lauder who had probably never had a date in his life and so affected what he probably thought of as worldly disdain. For dates, girls, friends, everything. Including himself, most likely.
“Harold, I’m sorry.”
“No, I didn’t have the right to say anything. Look, if you want me to, I can help.”
“Thank you, but I’d rather do it alone. It’s…”
“It’s personal. Of course, I understand.
”
She could have gotten a sweater from the kitchen closet, but of course he would have known why and she didn’t want to embarrass him again. Harold was trying hard to be a good guy—something which must have been a little like speaking a foreign language. She went back out on the porch and for a moment they stood there looking at the garden, at the hole with the dirt thrown up around it. And the afternoon buzzed somnolently around them as if nothing had changed.
“What are you going to do?” she asked Harold.
“I don’t know,” he said. “You know…” He trailed off.
“What?”
“Well, it’s hard for me to say. I am not one of the most loved persons in this little patch of New England. I doubt if a statue would ever have been erected in my memory on the local common, even if I had become a famous writer, as I had once hoped. Parenthetically speaking, I believe I may be an old man with a beard down to my beltbuckle before there is another famous writer.”
She said nothing; only went on looking at him.
“So!” Harold exclaimed, and his body jerked as if the word had exploded out. “So I am forced to wonder at the unfairness of it. The unfairness seems, to me at least, so monstrous that it is easier to believe that the louts who attend our local citadel of learning have finally succeeded in driving me mad.”
He pushed his glasses up on his nose, and she noticed with sympathy how really horrible his acne problem was. Had anyone ever told him, she wondered, that soap and water would take care of some of that? Or had they all been too busy watching pretty, petite Amy as she zoomed through the University of Maine with a 3.8 average, graduating twenty-third in a class of over a thousand? Pretty Amy, who was so bright and vivacious where Harold was just abrasive.
“Mad,” Harold repeated softly. “I’ve been driving around town in a Cadillac on my learner’s permit. And look at these boots.” He pulled up the legs of his jeans a little, disclosing a gleaming pair of cowboy boots, complexly stitched. “Eighty-six dollars. I just went into the Shoe Boat and picked out my size. I feel like an imposter. An actor in a play. There have been moments today when I’ve beensureI was mad.”
“No,” Frannie said. He smelled like he hadn’t had a bath in three or four days, but this no longer disgusted her. “What’s that line? I’ll be in your dream if you’ll be in mine? We’re not crazy, Harold.”
“Maybe it would be better if we were.”
“Someone will come,” Frannie said. “After a while. After this disease, whatever it is, burns itself out.”
“Who?”
“Somebody in authority,” she said uncertainly. “Somebody who will… well… put things back in order.”
He laughed bitterly. “My dear child… sorry, Fran. Fran, it was the people in authority whodidthis. They’re good at putting things back in order. They’ve solved the depressed economy, pollution, the oil shortage, and the cold war, all at a stroke. Yeah, they put things in order, all right. They solved everything the same way Alexander solved the Gordian knot—by cutting it in two with his sword.”
“But it’s just a funny strain of theflu , Harold. I heard it on the radio—”
“Mother Nature just doesn’t work that way, Fran. Your somebody in authority got a bunch of bacteriologists, virologists, and epidemiologists together in some government installation to see how many funny bugs they could dream up. Bacteria. Viruses. Germ plasm, for all I know. And one day some well-paid toady said, ‘Look whatImade. It kills almosteverybody . Isn’t it great?’ And they gave him a medal, and a pay-raise, and a time-sharing condo, and then somebody spilled it.
“What are you going to do, Fran?”
“Bury my father,” she said softly.
“Oh… of course.” He looked at her for a moment and then said, very swiftly, “Look, I’m going to get out of here. Out of Ogunquit. If I stay much longer, I really will go crazy. Fran, why don’t you come with me?”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Not yet.”
“Well, if you think of a place, come ask me again.”
Harold brightened. “All right, I will. It… you see, it’s a matter of…” He trailed off and began to walk down the porch steps in a kind of daze. His new cowboy boots gleamed in the sun. Fran watched him with sad amusement.
He waved just before climbing behind the wheel of the Caddy. Fran lifted a hand in return. The car jerked unprofessionally when he put it in reverse, and then he was backing down the driveway in fits and starts. He wandered to the left, crushing some of Carla’s flowers under the offside wheels, and nearly thumped into the culvert ditch as he turned out onto the road. Then he honked twice and was gone. Fran watched until he was out of sight, and then went back to her father’s garden.
Sometime after four o’clock she went back upstairs with dragging footsteps, forcing herself along. There was a dull headache in her temples and forehead, caused by heat and exertion and tension. She had told herself to wait another day, but that would only make it worse. Under her arm she carried her mother’s best damask tablecloth, the one kept strictly for company.
It did not go as well as she had hoped, but it was also nowhere near as bad as she had feared. There were flies on his face, lighting, rubbing their hairy little forelegs together and then taking off again, and his skin had gone a dusky dark shade, but he was so tanned from working in the garden that it was hardly noticeable… if you made your mind up not to notice it, that was. There was no smell, and that was what she had been most afraid of.
The bed he had died in was the double he had shared for years with Carla. She laid the tablecloth out on her mother’s half, so that its hem touched her father’s arm, hip, and leg. Then, swallowing hard (her head was pounding worse than ever), she prepared to roll her father onto his shroud.
Peter Goldsmith was wearing his striped pajamas, and that struck her as jarringly frivolous, but they would have to do. She could not even entertain the thought of first undressing and then dressing him again.
Steeling herself, she grasped his left arm—it was as hard and unyielding as a piece of furniture—and pushed, rolling him over. As she did so, a hideous long burping sound escaped him, a belch that seemed to go on and on, rasping in his throat as if a locust had crawled down there and had now come to life in the dark channel, calling and calling.
She screeched, stumbling away and knocking over the bedtable. His combs, his brushes, the alarm clock, a little pile of change and some tieclips and cufflinks all jingled and fell to the floor.