The Stand

She shrugged, and the movement made her br**sts sway prettily. "Life will go on, won't it, Harold? I'll try to find some way of doing the thing I have to do. You'll go on. Sooner or later you'll find a girl who will do that... one little thing for you. But that one little thing is very tiresome after a while. Very tiresome."

"How would you know?" he asked, and grinned crookedly at her.

"I know because sex is life in small, and life is tiresome - time spent in a variety of waiting rooms. You might have your little glories here, Harold, but to what end? On the whole it will be a humdrum, slipping-down life, and you'll always remember me with my shirt off, and you'll always wonder what I would have looked like with everything off. You'll wonder what it would have been like to hear me talking dirty to you... or to have me spill honey all over your... body... and then lick it off... and you'll wonder - "

"Stop it," he said. He was trembling all over.

But she wouldn't.

"I think you'll also wonder what it would have been like on his side of the world," she said. "That more than anything and everything else, maybe."

"I - "

"Decide, Harold. Do I put my shirt back on or take everything else off?"

How long did he think? He didn't know. Later, he wasn't even sure he had struggled with the question. But when he spoke, the words tasted like death in his mouth: "In the bedroom. Let's go in the bedroom."

She smiled at him, such a smile of triumph and sensual promise that he shuddered from it, and his own eager response to it.

She took his hand.

And Harold Lauder succumbed to his destiny.

BOOK II ON THE BOARDER Chapter 55

The Judge's house overlooked a cemetery.

He and Larry sat on the back porch after dinner, smoking Roi-Tan cigars and watching sunset fade to pale orange around the mountains.

"When I was a boy," the Judge said, "we lived within walking distance of the finest cemetery in Illinois. Its name was Mount Hope. Every night after supper, my father, who was then in his early sixties, would take a walk. Sometimes I would walk with him. And if the walk took us past this perfectly maintained necropolis, he would say, 'What do you think, Teddy? Is there any hope?' And I would answer, 'There's Mount Hope,' and each time he'd roar with laughter as if it had been the first time. I sometimes think we walked past that boneyard just so he could share that joke with me. He was a wealthy man, but it was the funniest joke he seemed to know."

The Judge smoked, his chin low, his shoulders hunched high.

"He died in 1937, when I was still in my teens," he said. "I have missed him ever since. A boy does not need a father unless he is a good father, but a good father is indispensable. No hope but Mount Hope. How he enjoyed that! He was seventy-eight years old when he passed on. He died like a king, Larry. He was seated upon the throne in our home's smallest room, with the newspaper in his lap."

Larry, not sure how to respond to this rather bizarre bit of nostalgia, said nothing.

The Judge sighed. "This is going to be quite a little operation here before long," he said. "If you can get the power on again, that is. If you can't, people are going to get nervous and start heading south before the bad weather can come and hem them in."

"Ralph and Brad say it's going to happen. I trust them."

"Then we'll hope that your trust is well founded, won't we? Maybe it is a good thing that the old woman is gone. Perhaps she knew it would be better that way. Maybe people should be free to judge for themselves what the lights in the sky are, and if one tree has a face or if the face was only a trick of the light and shadow. Do you understand me, Larry?"

"No, sir," Larry said truthfully. "I'm not sure I do."

"I wonder if we need to reinvent that whole tiresome business of gods and saviors and ever-afters before we reinvent the flushing toilet. That's what I'm saying. I wonder if this is the right time for gods."

"Do you think she's dead?"