CHAPTER 36 There was a small park in the center of Ogunquit, complete with a Civil War cannon and a War

CHAPTER 36

There was a small park in the center of Ogunquit, complete with a Civil War cannon and a War Memorial, and after Gus Dinsmore died, Frannie Goldsmith went there and sat beside the duck pond, idly throwing stones in and watching the ripples spread in the calm water until they reached the lily pads around the edges and broke up in confusion. She had taken Gus to the Hanson house down on the beach the day before yesterday, afraid that if she waited any longer Gus wouldn't be able to walk and would have to spend his "final confinement," as her ancestors would have termed it with such grisly yet apt euphemism, in his hot little cubicle near the public beach parking lot. She had thought Gus would die that night. His fever had been high and he had been crazily delirious, falling out of bed twice and even staggering around old Mr. Hanson's bedroom, knocking things over, falling to his knees, getting up again. He cried out to people who were not there, answered them, and watched them with emotions varying from hilarity to dismay until Frannie began to feel that Gus's invisible companions were the real ones and she was the phantom. She had begged Gus to get back into bed, but for Gus she wasn't there. She had to keep stepping out of his way; if she hadn't, he would have knocked her over and walked over her. At last he had fallen onto the bed and had passed from energetic delirium to a gasping, heavy- breathing unconsciousness that Fran supposed was the final coma. But the next morning when she looked in on him, Gus had been sitting up in bed and reading a paperback Western he had found on

153 one of the shelves. He thanked her for taking care of him and told her earnestly that he hoped he hadn't said or done anything embarrassing the night before. When she said he hadn't, Gus had looked doubtfully around the wreckage of the bedroom and told her she was good to say so, anyway. She made some soup, which he ate with gusto, and when he complained of how hard it was to read without his spectacles, which had been broken while he had been taking his turn on the barricade at the south end of town the week before, she had taken the paperback (over his weak protests) and had read him four chapters in a Western by that woman who lived up north in Haven. Rimfire Christmas, it was called. Sheriff John Stoner was having problems with the rowdier element in the town of Roaring Rock, Wyoming, it seemed-and, worse, he just couldn't find anything to give his lovely young wife for Christmas. Fran had gone away more optimistic, thinking that Gus might be recovering. But last night he had been worse again, and he had died at quarter to eight this morning, only an hour and a half ago. He had been rational at the end, but unaware of just how serious his condition was. He had told her longingly that he'd like to have an ice cream soda, the kind his daddy had treated Gus and his brothers to every Fourth of July and again at Labor Day when the fair came to Bangor. But the power was off in Ogunquit by then-it had gone at exactly 9:17 P. m. on the evening of June 28 by the electric clocks-and there was no ice cream to be had in town. She had wondered if someone in town might not have a gasoline generator with a freezer hooked up to it on an emergency circuit, and even thought of hunting up Harold Lauder to ask him, but then Gus began to breathe his final whooping, hopeless breaths. That went on for five minutes while she held his head up with one hand and a cloth under his mouth with the other to catch the thick expectorations of mucus. Then it was over. Frannie covered him with a clean sheet and had left him on old Jack Hanson's bed, which overlooked the ocean. Then she had come here and since then had been skipping rocks across the pond, not thinking about much of anything. But she unconsciously realized that it was a good kind of not thinking; it wasn't like that strange apathy that had shrouded her on the day after her father had died. Since then, she had been more and more herself. She had gotten a rosebush down at Nathan's House of Flowers and had carefully planted it at the foot of Peter's grave. She thought it would take hold real well, as her father would have said. Her lack of thought now was a kind of rest, after seeing Gus through the last of it. It was nothing like the prelude to madness she had gone through before. That had been like passing through some gray, foul tunnel full of shapes more sensed than seen; it was a tunnel she never wanted to travel again. But she would have to think soon about what to do next, and she supposed that thinking would have to include Harold Lauder. Not just because she and Harold were now the last two people in the area, but because she had no idea what would become of Harold without someone to watch out for him. She didn't suppose that she was the world's most practical person, but since she was here she would have to do. She still didn't particularly like him, but at least he had tried to be tactful and had turned out to have some decency. Quite a bit, even, in his own queer way. Harold had left her alone since their meeting four days ago, probably respecting her wish to grieve for her parents. But she had seen him from time to time in Roy Brannigan's Cadillac, cruising aimlessly from place to place. And twice, when the wind was right, she had been able to hear the clacking of his typewriter from her bedroom window-the fact that it was quiet enough to hear that sound, although the Lauder house was nearly a mile and a half away, seemed to underline the reality of what had happened. She was a little amused that although Harold had latched on to the Cadillac, he hadn't thought of replacing his manual typewriter with one of those quiet humming electric torpedoes. Not that he could have it now, she thought as she stood up and brushed off the seat of her shorts. Ice cream and electric typewriters were things of the past. It made her feel sadly nostalgic, and she found herself wondering again with a sense of deep bewilderment how such a cataclysm could have taken place in only a couple of weeks. There would be other people, no matter what Harold said. If the system of authority had temporarily broken down, they would just have to find the scattered others and re-form it. It didn't occur to her to wonder why "authority" seemed to be such a necessary thing to have, any more than it occurred to her to wonder why she had automatically felt responsible for Harold. It just was. Structure was a necessary thing. She left the park and walked slowly down Main Street toward the Lauder house. The day was warm already, but the air was freshened by a sea breeze. She suddenly wanted to go down to the beach, find a nice piece of kelp, and nibble on it. "God, you're disgusting," she said aloud. Of course she wasn't disgusting; she was just pregnant. That was it. Next week it would be Bermuda onion sandwiches. With creamy horseradish on top. She stopped on the corner, still a block from Harold's, surprised at how long it had been since she had thought of her "delicate condition." Before, she had always been discovering that I'm pregnant thought around odd corners, like some unpleasant mess she kept forgetting to clean up: I ought to

154 be sure and get that blue dress to the cleaners before Friday (a few more months and I can hang it in the closet because I'm-pregnant); I guess I'll take my shower now (in a few months it'll look like there's a whale in the shower stall because I'm-pregnant) . I ought to get the oil changed in the car before the pistons fall right out of their sockets or whatever (and I wonder what Johnny down at the Citgo would say if he knew I'm pregnant). But maybe now she had become accustomed to the thought. After all, she was nearly three months along, nearly a third of the way there. For the first time she wondered with some unease who would help her have her baby.

From behind the Lauder house there came a steady ratcheting clickclickclick of a hand mower, and when Fran came around the corner, what she saw was so strange that only her complete surprise kept her from laughing out loud. Harold, clad only in a tight and skimpy blue bathing suit, was mowing the lawn. His white skin was sheened with sweat; his long hair flopped against his neck (although to do Harold credit it did appear to have been washed in the nottoo-distant past). The rolls of fat above the waistband of his trunks and below the legbands jounced up and down wildly. His feet were green with cut grass to above the ankle. His back had gone reddish, although with exertion or incipient sunburn she couldn't tell. But Harold wasn't just mowing; he was running. The Lauders' back lawnsloped down to a picturesque, rambling stone wall, and in the middle of it was an octagonal summerhouse. She and Amy used to hold their "teas" there when they were little girls, Frannie remembered with a sudden stab of nostalgia that was unexpectedly painful, back in the days when they could still cry over the ending of Charlotte's Web and moan happily over Chuckie Mayo, the cutest boy in school. The Lauders' lawn was somehow English in its greenness and peace, but now a dervish in a blue bathing suit had invaded this pastoral scene. She could hear Harold panting in a way that was alarming to listen to as he turned the northeast corner where the Lauders' back lawn was divided from the Wilsons' by a row of mulberry bushes. He roared down the slope of the lawn, bent over the mower's T-handle. The blades whirred. Grass flew in a green jet, coating Harold's lower legs. He had mowed perhaps half of the lawn; what was left was a diminishing square with the summerhouse in the middle. He turned the corner at the bottom of the hill and then roared back, for a moment obscured from view by the summerhouse, and then reappearing, bent over his machine like a Formula One race driver. About halfway up, he saw her. At exactly the same instant Frannie said timidly: "Harold?" And she saw that he was in tears. "Huh!" Harold said-squeaked, actually. She had startled him out of some private world, and for a moment she feared that the startle on top of his exertion would give him a heart attack. Then he ran for the house, his feet kicking through drifts of mown grass, and she was peripherally aware of the sweet smell it made on the hot summer air. She took a step after him. "Harold, what's wrong?" Then he was bounding up the porch steps. The back door opened, Harold ran inside, and it slammed behind him with a jarring crash. In the silence that descended afterward, a jay called stridently and some small animal made rattling noises in the bushes behind the stone wall. The mower, abandoned, stood with cut grass behind it and high grass before it a little way from the summerhouse where she and Amy had once drunk their Kool-Aid in Barbie's kitchen cups with their little fingers sticking elegantly off into the air. Frannie stood indecisive for a while and at last walked up to the door and knocked. There was no answer, but she could hear Harold crying somewhere inside. "Harold?" No answer. The weeping went on. She let herself into the Lauders' back hall, which was dark, cool, and fragrant-Mrs. Lauder's cold- pantry opened off the hall to the left, and for as long as Frannie could remember there had been the good smell of dried apples and cinnamon back here, like pies dreaming of creation. "Harold?" She walked up the hall to the kitchen and Harold was there, sitting at the table. His hands were clutched in his hair, and his green feet rested on the faded linoleum that Mrs. Lauder had kept so spotless. "Harold, what's wrong?" "Go away!" he yelled tearfully. "Go away, you don't like me!" "Yes I do. You're okay, Harold. Maybe not great, but okay." She paused. "In fact, considering the circumstances and all, I'd have to say that right now you're one of my favorite people in the whole world." This seemed to make Harold cry harder. "Do you have anything to drink?" "Kool-Aid," he said. He sniffed, wiped his nose, and still looking at the table, added: "It's warm."

155 "Of course it is. Did you get the water at the town pump?" Like many small towns, Ogunquit still had a common pump in back of the town hall, although for the last forty years it had been more of an antiquity than a practical source of water. Tourists sometimes took pictures of it. This is the town pump in the little seaside town where we spent our vacation. Oh, isn't that quaint. "Yeah, that's where I got it." She poured them each a glass and sat down. We should be having it in the summerhouse, she thought. We could drink it with our little fingers sticking off into the air. "Harold, what's wrong?" Harold uttered a strange, hysterical laugh and fumbled his Kool-Aid to his mouth. He drained the glass and set it down. "Wrong? Now what could be wrong?" "I mean, is it something specific?" She tasted her KoolAid and fought down a grimace. It wasn't that warm, Harold must have drawn the water only a short time ago, but he had forgotten the sugar. He looked up at her finally, his face tear-streaked and still wanting to blubber. "I want my mother," he said simply. "Oh, Harold—" "I thought when it happened, when she died, `Now that wasn't so bad. ' " He was gripping his glass, staring at her in an intense, haggard way that was a little frightening. "I know how terrible that must sound to you. But I never knew how I would take it when they passed away. I'm a very sensitive person. That's why I was so persecuted by the cretins at that house of horrors the town fathers saw fit to call a high school. I thought it might drive me mad with grief, their passing, or at least prostrate me for a year... my interior sun, so to speak, would... would... and when it happened, my mother... Amy... my father... I said to myself, `Now that wasn't so bad. ' I... they..." He brought his fist down on the table, making her flinch. "Why can't I say what I mean?" he screamed. "I've always been able to say what I meant! It's a writer's job to carve with language, to hew close to the bone, so why can't I say what it feels like?" "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 griefstricken." 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."

156 "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 smash-up blocking the road." "No, one never would, would one? But why wait until tomorrow? Why don't we go today?"

157 "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'mpregnant, 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." "It's the heat," she said faintly. "Then go downstairs, for goodness' sake. Lie under a tree. Watch the human fly as he does his death-defying act on the precipitous ten-degree slope of Moses Richardson's barn roof." "Don't joke. I still think it's silly. And dangerous." "Yes, but I'll feel better if I go through with it. Go on, Fran." She thought: Why, he's doing it for me. He stood there, sweaty and scared, old cobwebs clinging to his naked, blubbery shoulders, his belly cascading over the waistband of his tight bluejeans, determined to not miss a bet, to do all the right things. She stood on tiptoe and kissed his mouth lightly. "You be careful," she said, and then went quickly down the stairs with the Coke sloshing in her belly, updown-all-around, yeeeeccchh; she went quickly, but not so quickly that she didn't see the stunned happiness come up in his eyes. She went down the nailed rungs from the hayloft to the strawlittered barn floor even faster because she knew she was going to puke now, and while she knew that it was the heat and the Coke and the baby, what might Harold think if he heard? So she wanted to get outside where he couldn't hear. And she made it. Just.

Harold came down at a quarter to four, his sunburn now flaming red, his arms splattered with white paint. Fran had napped uneasily under an elm in Richardson's dooryard while he worked, never quite going under completely, listening for the rattle of shingles giving way and poor fat Harold's despairing scream as he fell the ninety feet from the barn's roof to the hard ground below. But it never came-thank God-and now he stood proudly before her-lawn-green feet, white arms, red shoulders. "Why did you bother to bring the paint back down?" she asked him curiously. "I wouldn't want to leave it up there. It might lead to spontaneous combustion and we'd lose our sign." And she thought again how determined he was not to miss a single bet. It was just a little bit scary. They both gazed up at the barn roof. The fresh paint gleamed out in sharp contrast to the faded green shingles, and the words painted there reminded Fran of the signs you sometimes came upon down South, painted across barn roofs— JESUS SAVES or CHEW RED INDIAN. Harold's read:

HAVE GONE TO STOVINGTON, VT. PLAGUE CENTER US 1 TO WELLS INTERSTATE 95 TO PORTLAND US 302 TO BARRE

158 INTERSTATE 89 TO STOVINGTON LEAVING OGUNQUIT JULY 2, 1990 HAROLD EMERY LAUDER FRANCES GOLDSMITH