by Stephen King
In the playpen which Stu had brought up and covered with a blanket, Peter began to cry lustily. Fran moved toward him, but Lucy, mountainous and eight months pregnant, was there first.
“I warn you,” Fran said. “It’s his diapers. I can tell just by the way he sounds.”
“Looking at a little poo isn’t going to cross my eyes.” Lucy lifted an indignantly crying Peter from the playpen and shook him gently back and forth in the sunlight. “Hi, baby. What you doing? Not too much?”
Peter blatted.
Lucy set him down on another blanket they had brought up for a changing table. Peter began to crawl away, still blatting. Lucy turned him over and began to unsnap his blue corduroy pants. Peter’s legs waved in the air.
“Why don’t you two go for a walk?” Lucy said. She smiled at Fran, but Stu thought the smile was sad.
“Why don’t we just do that?” Fran agreed, and took Stu’s arm.
Stu allowed himself to be walked away. They crossed the road and entered a mild green pasture that climbed upward at a steep angle under the moving white clouds and bright blue sky.
“What was that about?” Stu asked.
“Pardon me?” But Fran looked just a trifle too innocent.
“That look.”
“What look?”
“I know a look when I see one,” Stu said. “I may not know what it means, but I know it when I see it.”
“Sit down with me, Stu.”
“Like that, is it?”
They sat down and looked east where the land fell away in a series of swoops to flatlands that faded into a blue haze. Nebraska was out there in that haze somewhere.
“It’s serious. And I don’t know how to talk to you about it, Stuart.”
“Well, you just go on the best you can,” he said, and took her hand.
Instead of speaking, Fran’s face began to work. A tear spilled down her cheek and her mouth drew down, trembling.
“Fran—”
“No, I won't cry!” she said angrily, and then there were more tears, and she cried hard in spite of herself. Bewildered, Stu put an arm around her and waited.
When the worst of it seemed to be over, he said: “Now tell me. What’s this about?”
“I’m homesick, Stu. I want to go back to Maine.”
Behind them, the children whooped and yelled. Stu looked at her, utterly flabbergasted. Then he grinned a little uncertainly. “That’s it? I thought you must have decided to divorce me, at the very least. Not that we’ve ever actually had the benefit of the clergy, as they say.”
“I won’t go anyplace without you,” she said. She had taken a Kleenex from her breast pocket and was wiping her eyes with it. “Don’t you know that?”
“I guess I do.”
“But I want to go back to Maine. I dream about it. Don’t you ever dream about East Texas, Stu? Arnette?”
“No,” he said truthfully. “I could live just as long and die just as happy if I never saw Amette again. Did you want to go to Ogunquit, Frannie?”
“Eventually, maybe. But not right away. I’d want to go to western Maine, what they called the Lakes Region. You were almost there when Harold and I met you in New Hampshire. There are some beautiful places, Stu. Bridgton . . . Sweden . . . Lovell. The lakes would be jumping with fish, I’d imagine. In time, the coast, I suppose. But I couldn’t face that the first year. Too many memories. It would be too big at first. The sea would be too big.” She looked down at her nervously plucking hands. “If you want to stay here . . . help them get it going ... I’ll understand. The mountains are beautiful, too, but... it just doesn’t seem like home.”
He looked east and discovered he could at last name something he had felt stirring around in himself since the snow had begun to melt: an urge to move on. There were too many people here; they were beginning to make him feel nervous. There were people here who could cope with that sort of thing, who actually seemed to relish it. Jack Jackson, who headed the new Free Zone Committee (now expanded to nine members), was one. Brad Kitchner was another—Brad had a hundred projects going, and all the warm bodies he could use to help with each of them. It had been his idea to get one of the Denver TV stations going. It showed old movies every night from 6 to 1 A.M.
And the man who had taken over the marshaling chore in Stu’s absence, Hugh Petrella, was not the sort of man Stu much cottoned to. The very fact that Petrella had campaigned for the job made Stu feel uneasy. He was a hard, puritanical man with a face that looked as if it had been carved by licks of a hatchet. He had seventeen deputies and was pushing for more at each Free Zone Committee meeting—if Glen had been here, Stu thought he would have said that the endless American struggle between the law and freedom of the individual had begun again. Petrella was not a bad man, but he was a hard man . . . and Stu supposed he made a better marshal in his sure belief that the law was the final answer to every problem than Stu himself ever would have been.
“I know you’ve been offered a spot on the committee,” Fran was saying hesitantly.
“I got the feeling that was an honorary thing, didn’t you?”
Fran looked relieved. “Well . . .”
“I got the idea they’d be just as happy if I turned it down. I’m the last holdover from the old committee. And we were a crisis committee. Now there’s no crisis. What about Peter, Frannie?”
“I think he’ll be old enough to travel by June,” she said. “And I’d like to wait until Lucy has her baby.”
There had been eighteen births in the Zone since Peter had come into the world on January 4. Four had died; the rest were just fine. The babies born of plague-immune parents would begin to arrive very soon, and it was entirely possible that Lucy’s would be the first. She was due on June 14.
“What would you think about leaving on July first?” He asked.
Fran’s face lit up. “You will? You want to?”
“Sure.”
“You’re not just saying that to please me?”
“No,” he said. “Other people will be leaving too. Not many, not for a while. But some.”
She flung her arms around his neck and hugged him. “Maybe it will just be a vacation,” she said. “Or maybe . . . maybe we’ll really like it.” She looked at him timidly. “Maybe we’ll want to stay.”
He nodded. “Maybe so.” But he wondered if either of them would be content to stay in one place for any run of years.
He looked over at Lucy and Peter. Lucy was sitting on the blanket and bouncing Peter up and down. He was giggling and trying to catch Lucy’s nose.
“Have you thought that he might get sick? And you. What if you catch again?”
She smiled. “There are books. We can both read them. We can’t live our lives afraid, can we?”
“No, I suppose not.”
“Books and good drugs. We can learn to use them, and as for the drugs that have gone over ... we can learn to make them again. As for getting sick and dying . . .” She looked back toward the large meadow where the last of the children were walking toward the picnic area, sweaty and winded. “That’s going to happen here, too. Remember Rich Moffat?” He nodded. “And Shirley Hammet?” “Yes.” Shirley had died of a stroke in February.
Frannie took his hands. Her eyes were bright and shining with determination. “I say we take our chances and live our lives the way we want.”
“All right. That sounds good to me. That sounds right.”
“I love you, East Texas.”
“That goes back to you, ma’am.”
Peter had begun to cry again.
“Let’s go see what’s wrong with the emperor,” she said, getting up and brushing grass from her slacks.
“He tried to crawl and bumped his nose,” Lucy said, handing Peter to Fran. “Poor baby.”
“Poor baby,” Fran agreed, and put Peter on her shoulder. He laid his head familiarly against her neck, looked at Stu, and smiled. Stu smiled back.
Lucy looked from Fran to Stu and back to Fran again.
“You’re going, aren’t you? You talked him into it.” “I guess she did,” Stu said. “We’ll stick around long enough to see which flavor you get, though.”
“I’m glad.” Lucy said.
From far off, a bell began to clang.
“Lunch,” Lucy said, getting up. She patted her gigantic belly. “Hear that, junior? We’re going to eat. Ow, don’t kick, I’m going.”
Stu and Fran got up, too. “Here, you take the boy,” Fran said.
Peter had gone to sleep. The three of them walked up the hill to Sunrise Amphitheater together.
Dusk, of a Summer Evening
They sat on the porch as the sun went down and watched Peter as he crawled enthusiastically through the dust of the yard. Stu was in a chair with a caned seat; the caning had been belled downward by years of use. Sitting at his left was Fran, in the rocker. In the yard, to Peter’s left, the doughnut-shaped shadow of the tire swing printed its depthless image on the ground in the day’s kind last light.
“She lived here a long time, didn’t she?” Fran asked softly.
“Long and long,” Stu agreed, and pointed at Peter. “He’s gettin all dirty.”
“There’s water. She had a hand-pump. All it takes is priming. All the conveniences, Stuart.”
He nodded and said no more. He lit his pipe, taking long puffs. Peter turned around to make sure they were still there.
“Hi, baby,” Stu said, and waved.
Peter fell over. He got back up on his hands and knees and began to creep around in a large circle again. Standing at the end of the dirt road that cut through the wild corn was a small Winnebago camper with a winch attachment on the front. They were sticking to secondary roads, but the winch had still come in handy again and again.
“Are you lonely?” Fran asked.
“No. I may be, in time.”
“Scared about the baby?” she patted her stomach, which was still perfectly flat.
“Nope.”
“It’s going to put a scab on Pete’s nose.”
“It’ll fall off. And Lucy had twins ” He smiled at the sky. “Can you imagine it?”
“I saw them. Seeing’s believing, they say. When do you think we’ll be in Maine, Stu?”
He shrugged. “Near the end of July. In plenty of time to start getting ready for winter, anyhow. You worried?'*
“Nope,” she said, mocking him. She stood up. “Look at him, he’s getting filthy”
“Told you.’*
He watched her go down the porch steps and gather up the baby. He sat there, where Mother Abagail had sat often and long, and thought about the life that was ahead of them. He thought it would be all right. In time they would have to go back to Boulder, if only so their children could meet others their own age and court and marry and make more children. Or perhaps part of Boulder would come to them. There had been people who had questioned their plans closely, almost cross-examining them . . . but the look in their eyes had been one of longing rather than contempt or anger. Stu and Fran weren’t the only ones with a touch of the wanderlust, apparently. Harry Dunbarton, the former spectacle salesman, had talked about Minnesota. And Mark Zellman had spoken of Hawaii, of all places. Learning how to fly a plane and going to Hawaii.
“Mark, you’d kill yourself,” Fran had scolded indignantly.
Mark had only smiled slyly and said, “Look who’s talkin, Frannie.”
And Stan Nogotny had begun to talk thoughtfully about going south, perhaps stopping at Acapulco for a few years, then maybe going on down to Peru. “I tell you what, Stu,’* he said, “all these people make me as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room fulla rockers. I don’t know one person in a dozen anymore. People lock their houses at night . . . don’t look at me that way, it’s a fact. Listenin to me, you’d never think I lived in Miami, which I did for sixteen years, and locked the house every night. But, damn! that was one habit I liked losing. Anyway, it’s just getting too crowded. I think about Acapulco a lot. Now if I could just convince Janey—*’
It wouldn’t be such a bad thing, Stu thought, watching Fran pump water, if the Free Zone did fall apart. Glen Bateman would think so, he was quite sure. Its purpose has been served, Glen would say. Best to disband before—
Before what?
Well, at the last Free Zone Committee meeting before he and Fran had left, Hugh Petrella had asked for and had been given authorization to arm his deputies. It had been the cause in Boulder during his and Fran’s last few weeks there—everyone had taken a side. In early June a drunk had manhandled one of the deputies and had thrown him through the plate glass window of The Broken Drum, a bar on Pearl Street. The deputy had needed over thirty stitches and a blood transfusion. Petrella had argued it never would have happened if his man had had a Police Special to point at the drunk. And so the controversy raged. There were plenty of people (and Stu was among them, although he kept his opinions mostly to himself) who believed that, if the deputy had had a gun, the incident might have ended with a dead drunk instead of a wounded deputy.
What happens after you give guns to the deputies? he asked himself. What’s the logical progression? And it seemed that it was the scholarly, slightly dry voice of Glen Bateman that spoke in answer. You give them bigger guns. And police cars. And when you discover a Free Zone community down in Chile or maybe up in Canada, you make Hugh Petrella the Minister of Defense just in case, and maybe you start sending out search parties, because after all—
That stuff is lying around, just waiting to be picked up.
“Let’s put him to bed,” Fran said, coming up the steps.
“Okay.”
“Why are you sitting around in such a blue study, anyhow?”
“Was I?”
“You certainly were.”
He smiled. “Better?”
“Much. Help me put him in.”
“My pleasure.”
As he followed her inside Mother Abagail’s house he thought it would be better, much better, if they did break down and spread. Postpone organization as long as possible. It was organization that always seemed to cause the problem. You didn’t have to give the cops guns until the cops couldn’t remember the names ... the faces . . .
Fran lit a kerosene lamp and it made a soft yellow glow. Peter looked up at them quietly, already sleepy. He had played hard. Fran slipped him into a nightshirt.
All any of us can buy is time, Stu thought. Pete’s lifetime, his children’s lifetimes, maybe the lifetimes of my great-grandchildren. Until the year 2050, maybe, surely no longer than that. Maybe not that long. Time enough for poor old mother Earth to recycle herself a little. A season of rest.
“What?” she asked, and he realized he had murmured it aloud.
“A season of rest,” he repeated.
“What does that mean?” “Everything,” he said, and took her hand.
Looking down at Peter he thought: Maybe if we tell him what happened, he’ll tell his own children. Warn them. Dear children, the toys are death—they’re flashburns and radiation sickness and black, choking plague. These toys are dangerous; the devil in men’s brains guided the hands of God when they were made. Don’t play with these toys, dear children, please, not ever. Not ever again. Please . . . please learn the lesson. Let this empty world be your copybook.
“Frannie,” he said, and turned her around so he could look into her eyes.
“What, Stuart?”
“Do you think ... do you think people ever learn anything?”
She opened her mouth to speak, hesitated, fell silent. The kerosene lamp flickered. Her eyes seemed very blue.
“I don’t know,” she said at last. She seemed unpleased with her answer; she struggled to say something more; to illuminate her first response; and could only say it again:
I don’t know.
Archive.