“Why not?” Fran agreed.

“And behold, the Wicked Witch of the West, or some Pentagon assholes, visited the country with a great plague, and before you could say, ‘Here comes Captain Trips,’ just about everyone in New York was dead. Including Larry’s mother.”

“I’m sorry. My mom and dad, too.”

“Yeah—everybody’s mom and dad. If we all sent each other sympathy cards, there wouldn’t be any left. But Larry was one of the lucky ones. He made it out of the city with a lady named Rita who wasn’t very well equipped to deal with what had happened. And unfortunately, Larry wasn’t very well equipped to help her deal with it.”

“No one had the equipment.”

“But some developed it quicker than others. Anyhow, Larry and Rita headed for the coast of Maine. They made it as far as Vermont, and there the lady OD’d on sleeping pills.”

“Oh, Larry, that is too bad.”

“Larry took it very hard. In fact, he took it as a more or less divine judgment on his strength of character. In further fact, he had been told by one or two people who should have known that his most incorruptible character trait was a splendid streak of self-interest, which came shining through like a Day-Glo madonna sitting on the dashboard of a ‘59 Cadillac.”

Frannie shifted a bit on the curb.

“I hope I’m not making you uncomfortable, but all of this has been sloshing around inside for a long time, and it does have some bearing on the Harold part of the story. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Thanks. I think that ever since we stopped by and met that old woman today I’ve been looking for a friendly face so I could spill this. I just thought it would be Harold’s. Anyway—Larry continued on to Maine because there didn’t seem to be anyplace else to go. He was having very bad dreams by then, but since he was alone he had no way of knowing that other people were having them, too. He simply assumed it was another symptom of his continuing mental breakdown. But eventually he made it to a small coastal town named Wells, where he met a woman named Nadine Cross and a strange little boy whose name turns out to be Leo Rockway.”

“Wells,” she marveled softly.

“Anyway, the three travelers sort of flipped a coin to see which way they should head on US 1, and since it came up tails, they headed down south where they eventually came to—”

“Ogunquit!” Frannie said, delighted.

“Just so. And there, on a barn, in huge letters, I made my first acquaintance with Harold Lauder and Frances Goldsmith.”

“Harold’s sign! Oh, Larry, he will be pleased!”

“We followed the directions on the barn to Stovington, and the directions at Stovington to Nebraska and the directions at Mother Abagail’s house to Boulder. We met people along the way. One of them was a girl named Lucy Swann, who’s my woman. I’d like you to meet her sometime. I think you’d like her.”

“By then something had happened that Larry didn’t really want. His little party of four grew to six. The six met four more in upstate New York, and our party absorbed theirs. By the time we made it to Harold’s sign in Mother Abagail’s dooryard there were sixteen of us, and we picked up another three just as we were leaving. Larry was in charge of this brave band. There was no vote or anything like that. It just was. And he really didn’t want the responsibility. It was a drag. It was keeping him awake nights. He started popping Tums and Rolaids. But it’s funny the way your mind boxes your mind. I couldn’t let it go. It got to be a self-respect thing. And I—he —was always afraid he was going to fuck it up righteously, that he’d get up some morning and someone would be dead in their sleeping bag the way Rita was that time in Vermont and everyone would be standing around pointing their fingers and saying, ‘It’s your fault. You didn’t know any better and it’s your fault.’ And that was something I couldn’t talk about, not even to the Judge—”

“Who’s the Judge?”

“Judge Farris. An old guy from Peoria. I guess he really was a judge at one time back in the early fifties, circuit judge or something, but he’d been retired a long time when the flu hit. He’s plenty sharp, though. When he looks at you, you’d swear he has X-ray eyes. Anyhow, Harold was important to me. He got to be more important as there got to be more people. In direct ratio, you might say.” He chuckled a little. “That barn. Man! The last line of that sign, the one with your name, was so low I figured he really must have been hanging ass out to the wind when he painted it on.”

“Yes. I was sleeping when he did that. I would have made him stop.”

“I started to get a sense of him,” Larry said. “I found a Payday wrapper in the cupola of that barn in Ogunquit, and then the carving on the beam—”

“What carving?”

She felt that Larry was studying her in the dark, and she pulled her robe a little closer around her… not a gesture of modesty, because she felt no threat from this man, but one of nervousness.

“Just his initials,” Larry said casually. “H.E.L. If that had been the end of it, I wouldn’t be here now. But then at the motorcycle dealership in Wells—”

“We were there!”

“I know you were. I saw a couple of bikes gone. What made an even bigger impression was that Harold had siphoned some gas from the underground tank. You must have helped him, Fran. I damn near lost my fingers.”

“No, I didn’t have to. Harold hunted around until he found something he called a plug-vent—”

Larry groaned and slapped his forehead. “Plug-vent! Jesus! I never even looked for where they were venting the tank! You mean he just hunted around… pulled a plug… and put his hose in?”

“Well… yes.”

“Oh, Harold,” Larry said in a tone of admiration that she had never heard before, at least not in connection with Harold Lauder’s name. “Well, that’s one of his tricks I missed. Anyway, we got to Stovington. And Nadine was so upset she fainted.”

“I cried,” Fran said. “I bawled until it seemed I’d never stop. I just had my mind made up that when we got there, someone would welcome us in and say, ‘Hi! Step inside, delousing on the right, cafeteria’s on your left.’” She shook her head. “That seems so silly now.”

“I was not dismayed. Dauntless Harold had been there before me, left his sign, and gone on. I felt like a tenderfoot Easterner following that Indian from The Pathfinder.”

His view of Harold both fascinated and amazed her. Hadn’t Stu really been leading the party by the time they left Vermont and struck out for Nebraska? She couldn’t honestly remember. By then they had all been preoccupied with the dreams. Larry was reminding her of things she had forgotten… or worse, taken for granted. Harold risking his life to put that sign on the barn—it had seemed like a foolish risk to her, but it had done some good after all. And getting gas from that underground tank… it had apparently been a major operation for Larry, but Harold had seemed to take it purely as a matter of course. It made her feel small and made her feel guilty. They all more or less assumed that Harold was nothing but a grinning supernumerary. But Harold had turned quite a few tricks in the last six weeks. Had she been so much in love with Stu that it took this total stranger to point out some home truths about Harold? What made the feeling even more uncomfortable was the fact that, once he had gotten his feet under him, Harold had been completely adult about herself and Stuart.

Larry said, “So here’s another neat sign, complete with route numbers, at Stovington, right? And fluttering in the grass next to it, another Payday candy wrapper. I felt like instead of following broken sticks and bent grasses, I was following Harold’s trail of chocolate Paydays. Well, we didn’t follow your route the whole way. We bent north near Gary, Indiana, because there was one hell of a fire, still burning in places. It looked like every damn oiltank in the city went up. Anyhow, we picked up the Judge on the detour, stopped by Hemingford Home—we knew she was gone by then, the dreams you know, but we all wanted to see that place just the same. The corn… the tire-swing… you know what I mean?”