Ralph stood looking up at McGovern with his hands jammed deep into his pockets and clenched into fists so hard and tight they felt like rocks. He could feel the muscles in his arms thrumming.
McGovern came down the porch steps and took him by the arm, gently, just above the elbow. 'I only think--'
Ralph pulled his arm away so sharply that McGovern grunted with surprise and stumbled a little on his feet. 'I know what you think.'
'You're not hearing what I--'
'Oh, I've heard plenty. More than enough. Believe me. And excuse me - I think I'm going for another walk. I need to clear my head.' He could feel dull hot blood pounding away in his cheeks and brow. He tried to throw his brain into some forward gear that would allow it to leave this senseless, impotent rage behind and couldn't do it. He felt a lot as he had when he had awakened from the dream of Carolyn; his thoughts roared with terror and confusion, and as he started his legs moving the sense he got was not one of walking but of falling, as he had fallen out of bed yesterday morning. Still, he kept going. Sometimes that was all you could do.
'Ralph, you need to see a doctor!' McGovern called after him, and Ralph could no longer tell himself that he didn't hear a weird, shrewish pleasure in McGovern's voice. The concern which overlaid it was probably genuine enough but it was like sweet icing on a sour cake.
'Not a pharmacist, not a hypnotist, not an acupuncturist! You need to see your own family doctor!'
Yeah, the guy who buried my wife below the high-tide line! he thought in a kind of mental scream. The guy who stuck her in sand up to her neck and then told her she didn't have to worry about drowning as long as she kept taking her Valium and Tylenol-3!
Aloud he said, 'I need to take a walk! That's what I need and that's all I need.' His heartbeat was now slamming into his temples like the short, hard blows of a sledgehammer, and it occurred to him that this was how strokes must happen; if he didn't control himself soon, he was apt to fall down with what his father had called 'a bad-temper apoplexy'.
He could hear McGovern coming down the walk after him. Don't touch me, Bill, Ralph thought. Don't even put your hand on my shoulder, because I'm probably going to turn around and slug you if you do.
'I'm trying to help you, don't you see that?' McGovern shouted. The mailman on the other side of the street had stopped again to watch them, and outside the Red Apple, Karl, the guy who worked mornings, and Sue, the young woman who worked afternoons, were gawking frankly across the street at them. Karl, he saw, had a bag of hamburger buns in one hand. It was really sort of amazing, the things you saw at a time like this . . . although not as amazing as some of the things he had already seen that morning.
The things you thought you saw, Ralph, a traitor voice whispered softly from deep inside his head.
'Walk,' Ralph muttered desperately. 'Just a damn walk.' A mind-movie had begun to play in his head. It was an unpleasant one, the sort of film he rarely went to see even if he had seen everything else that was playing at the cinema center. The soundtrack to this mental horror flick seemed to be 'Pop Goes the Weasel', of all things.
'Let me tell you something, Ralph - at our age, mental illness is common! At our age it's common as hell, so GO SEE YOUR DOCTOR!'
Mrs Bennigan was now standing on her stoop, her walker abandoned at the foot of the front steps. She was still wearing her bright red fall coat, and her mouth appeared to be hanging open as she stared down the street at them.
'Do you hear me, Ralph? I hope you do! I just hope you do!'
Ralph walked faster, hunching his shoulders as if against a cold wind. Suppose he just keeps on yelling, louder and louder? Suppose he follows me right up the street?
If he does that, people will think he's the one who's gone crazy, he told himself, but this idea had no power to soothe him. In his mind he continued to hear a piano playing a children's tune - no, not really playing; picking it out in nursery-school plinks and plonks: All around the mulberry bush The monkey chased the weasel, The monkey thought 'twas all in fun, Pop! Goes the weasel!
And now Ralph began to see the old people of Harris Avenue, the ones who bought their insurance from companies that advertised on cable TV, the ones with the gallstones and the skin tumors, the ones whose memories were diminishing even as their prostates enlarged, the ones who were living on Social Security and peering at the world through thickening cataracts instead of rose-colored glasses. These were the people who now read all the mail which came addressed to Occupant and scanned the supermarket advertising circulars for specials on canned goods and generic frozen dinners. He saw them dressed in grotesque short pants and fluffy short skirts, saw them wearing beanies and tee-shirts which showcased such characters as Beavis and Butt-Head and Rude Dog. He saw them, in short, as the world's oldest pre-schoolers. They were marching around a double row of chairs as a small bald man in a white smock played 'Pop Goes the Weasel' on the piano. Another baldy filched the chairs one by one, and when the music stopped and everyone sat down, one person - this time it had been May Locher, next time it would probably be McGovern's old department head - was left standing. That person would have to leave the room, of course. And Ralph heard McGovern laughing. Laughing because he'd found a seat again. Maybe May Locher was dead, Bob Polhurst dying, Ralph Roberts losing his marbles, but he was still all right, William D. McGovern, Esq was still fine, still dandy, still vertical and taking nourishment, still able to find a chair when the music stopped.
Ralph walked faster still, shoulders hunched even higher, anticipating another fusillade of advice and admonition. He thought it unlikely that McGovern would actually follow him up the street, but not entirely out of the question. If McGovern was angry enough he might do just that - remonstrating, telling Ralph to stop fooling around and go to the doctor, reminding him that the piano could stop anytime, any old time at all, and if he didn't find a chair while the finding was good, he might be out of luck forever.
No more shouts came, however. He thought of looking back to see where McGovern was, then thought better of it. If he saw Ralph looking back, it might set him off all over again. Best to just keep going. So Ralph lengthened his stride, heading back in the direction of the airport again without even thinking about it, walking with his head down, trying not to hear the relentless piano, trying not to see the old children marching around the chairs, trying not to see the terrified eyes above their make-believe smiles.
It came to him as he walked that his hopes had been denied. He had been pushed into the tunnel after all, and the dark was all around him.
PART 2
THE SECRET CITY
Old men ought to be explorers.
T.S. Eliot
Four Quartets
CHAPTER ELEVEN
* * *
1
The Derry of the Old Crocks was not the only secret city existing quietly within the place Ralph Roberts had always thought of as home; as a boy growing up in Mary Mead, where the various Old Cape housing developments stood today, Ralph had discovered there was, in addition to the Derry that belonged to the grownups, one that belonged strictly to the children. There were the abandoned hobo jungles near the railroad depot on Neibolt Street, where one could sometimes find tomato soup cans half-full of mulligatawny stew and bottles with a swallow or two of beer left in them; there was the alley behind the Aladdin Theater, where Bull Durham cigarettes were smoked and Black Cat firecrackers sometimes set off; there was the big old elm which overhung the river, where scores of boys and girls had learned to dive; there were the hundred (or perhaps it was closer to two hundred) tangled trails winding through the Barrens, an overgrown valley which slashed through the center of town like a badly healed scar.
These secret streets and highways in hiding were all below the adult plane of vision and were consequently overlooked by them . . . although there had been exceptions. One of them had been a cop named Aloysius Nell - Mr Nell to generations of Derry children - and it was only now, as he walked up toward the picnic area near the pla
ce where Harris Avenue became the Harris Avenue Extension, that it occurred to Ralph that Chris Nell was probably old Mr Nell's son . . . except that couldn't be quite right, because the cop Ralph had first seen in the company of John Leydecker wasn't old enough to be old Mr Nell's son. Grandson, more like it.
Ralph had become aware of a second secret city - one that belonged to the old folks - around the time he retired, but he hadn't fully realized that he himself was a citizen of it until after Carol's death. What he had discovered then was a submerged geography eerily similar to the one he had known as a child, a place largely ignored by the hurry-to-work, hurry-to-play world which thumped and hustled all around it. The Derry of the Old Crocks overlapped yet a third secret city: the Derry of the Damned, a terrible place inhabited mostly by winos, runaways, and lunatics who could not be kept locked up.
It was in the picnic area that Lafayette Chapin had introduced Ralph to one of life's most important considerations . . . once you'd become a bona fide Old Crock, that was. This consideration had to do with one's 'real life'. The subject had come up while the two men were just getting to know one another. Ralph had asked Faye what he had done before he started coming out to the picnic area.
'Well, in my real life I was a carpenter n fancy cabinetmaker,' Chapin had replied, exposing his remaining teeth in a wide grin, 'but all that ended almost ten year ago.' As if, Ralph remembered thinking, retirement was something like a vampire's kiss, pulling those who survived it into the world of the undead. And when you got right down to cases, was that really so far off the mark?
2
Now, with McGovern safely behind him (at least he hoped so), Ralph stepped through the screen of mixed oak and maple which shielded the picnic area from the Extension. He saw that eight or nine people had drifted in since his earlier walk, most with bag lunches or Coffee Pot sand-wiches. The Eberlys and Zells were playing hearts with the greasy deck of Top Hole cards which was kept stashed in a knothole of a nearby oak; Faye and Doc Mulhare, a retired vet, were playing chess; a couple of kibbitzers wandered back and forth between the two games.
Games were what the picnic area was about - what most of the places in the Derry of the Old Crocks were about - but Ralph thought the games were really just framework. What people actually came here for was to touch base, to report in, to confirm (if only to themselves) that they were still living some kind of life, real or otherwise.
Ralph sat on an empty bench near the Cyclone fence and traced one finger absently over the engraved carvings - names, initials, lots of FUCKS YOUS - as he watched planes land at orderly two-minute intervals: a Cessna, a Piper, an Apache, a Twin Bonanza, the eleven forty-five Air Express out of Boston. He kept one ear cocked to the ebb and flow of conversation behind him. May Locher's name was mentioned more than once. She had been known by several of these people, and the general opinion seemed to be Mrs Perrine's - that God had finally shown mercy and ended her suffering. Most of the talk today, however, concerned the impending visit of Susan Day. As a rule, politics wasn't much of a conversational draw with the Old Crocks, who preferred a good bowel cancer or stroke any day, but even out here the abortion issue exercised its singular ability to engage, inflame, and divide.
'She picked a bad town to come to, and the hell of it is, I doubt she knows it,' Doc Mulhare said, watching the chessboard with glum concentration as Faye Chapin blitzkrieged his king's remaining defenders. 'Things have a way of happening here. Remember the fire at the Black Spot, Faye?'
Faye grunted and captured the doc's remaining bishop.
'What I don't understand is these cootie-bugs,' Lisa Zell said, picking up the front section of the News from the picnic table and slapping the photograph of the hooded figures marching in front of WomanCare. 'It's like they want to go back to the days when women gave themselves abortions with coathangers.'
'That's what they do want,' Georgina Eberly said. 'They figure if a woman's scared enough of dying, she'll have the baby. It never seems to cross their minds that a woman can be more scared of having a kid than using a coathanger to get rid of it.'
'What does bein afraid have to do with it?' one of the kibbitzers - a shovel-faced oldster named Pedersen - asked truculently. 'Murder is murder whether the baby's inside or outside, that's the way I look at it. Even when they're so small you need a microscope to see em, it's still murder. Because they'd be kids if you let em alone.'
'I guess that just about makes you Adolf Eichmann every time you jerk off,' Faye said, and moved his queen. 'Check.'
'La-fay-ette Cha-pin!' Lisa Zell cried.
'Playin with yourself ain't the same at all,' Pedersen said, glowering.
'Oh no? Wasn't there some guy in the Bible got cursed by God for hammerin the old haddock?' the other kibbitzer asked.
'You're probably thinking of Onan,' said a voice from behind Ralph. He turned, startled, and saw Old Dor standing there. In one hand he held a paperback with a large number 5 on the cover. Where the hell did you come from? Ralph wondered. He could almost have sworn there had been no one standing behind him a minute or so before.
'Onan, Shmonan,' Pedersen said. 'Those sperms aren't the same as a baby--'
'No?' Faye asked. 'Then why ain't the Catholic Church sellin rubbers at Bingo games? Tell me that.'
'That's just ignorant,' Pedersen said. 'And if you don't see--'
'But it wasn't masturbation Onan was punished for,' Dorrance said in his high, penetrating old man's voice. 'He was punished for refusing to impregnate his brother's widow, so his brother's line could continue. There's a poem, by Allen Ginsberg, I think--'
'Shut up, you old fool!' Pedersen yelled, and then glowered at Faye Chapin. 'And if you don't see that there's a big difference between a man beating his meat and a woman flushing the baby God put in her belly down the toilet, you're as big a fool as he is.'
'This is a disgusting conversation,' Lisa Zell said, sounding more fascinated than disgusted. Ralph looked over her shoulder and saw a section of chainlink fencing had been torn loose from its post and bent backward, probably by the kids who took this place over at night. That solved one mystery, anyway. He hadn't noticed Dorrance because the old man hadn't been in the picnic area at all; he'd been wandering around the airport grounds.
It occurred to Ralph that this was his chance to grab Dorrance and maybe get some answers out of him . . . except that Ralph would likely end up more confused than ever. Old Dor was too much like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland - more smile than substance.
'Big difference, huh?' Faye was asking Pedersen.
'Yeah!' Red patches glowered in Pedersen's chapped cheeks.
Doc Mulhare shifted uneasily on his seat. 'Look, let's just forget it and finish the game, Faye, all right?'
Faye took no notice; his attention was still fixed on Pedersen. 'Maybe you ought to think again about all the little spermies that died in the palm of your hand every time you sat on the toilet seat thinkin about how nice it'd be to have Marilyn Monroe cop your--'
Pedersen reached out and slapped the remaining chess-pieces off the board. Doc Mulhare winced backward, mouth trembling, eyes wide and frightened behind pink-rimmed glasses which had been mended in two places with electrical tape.
'Yeah, good!' Faye shouted. 'That's a very reasonable fuckin argument, you geek!'
Pedersen raised his fists in an exaggerated John L. Sullivan pose. 'Want to do somethin about it?' he asked. 'Come on, let's go!'
Faye got slowly to his feet. He stood easily a foot taller than the shovel-faced Pedersen and outweighed him by at least sixty pounds.
Ralph could hardly believe what he was seeing. And if the poison had seeped this far, what about the rest of the city? It seemed to him that Doc Mulhare was right; Susan Day must not have the slightest idea of how bad an idea bringing her act to Derry really was. In some ways - in a lot of ways, actually - Derry wasn't like other places.
He was moving before he was consciously aware of what he meant to do, and he was relieved to see St
an Eberly doing the same thing. They exchanged a glance as they approached the two men standing nose to nose, and Stan nodded slightly. Ralph slipped an arm around Faye's shoulders a bare second before Stan gripped Pedersen's upper left arm.
'You ain't doing none of that,' Stan said, speaking directly into one of Pedersen's tufted ears. 'We'll end up taking the both of you over to Derry Home with heart attacks, and you don't need another one of those, Harley - you had two already. Or is it three?'
'I ain't letting him make jokes about wimmin murderin babies!' Pedersen said, and Ralph saw there were tears rolling down the man's cheeks. 'My wife died havin our second daughter! Sepsis carried her off back in '46! So I ain't havin that talk about murderin babies!'
'Christ,' Faye said in a different voice. 'I didn't know that, Harley. I'm sorry--'
'Ah, frig your sorry!' Pedersen cried, and ripped his arm out of Stan Eberly's grip. He lunged toward Faye, who raised his fists and then lowered them again as Pedersen went blundering past without looking at him. He took the path through the trees which led back out to the Extension and was gone. What followed his departure was thirty seconds of pure shocked silence, broken only by the wasp-whine of an incoming Piper Cub.
3
'Jesus,' Faye said at last. 'You see a guy every few days over five, ten years, and you start to think you know everything. Christ, Ralphie, I didn't know how his wife died. I feel like a fool.'
'Don't let it get you down,' Stan said. 'He's prob'ly just havin his monthlies.'
'Shut up,' Georgina said. 'We've had enough dirty talk for one morning.'
'I'll be glad when that Day woman comes n goes n things can get back to normal,' Fred Zell said.
Doc Mulhare was down on his hands and knees, collecting chess-pieces. 'Do you want to finish, Faye?' he asked. 'I think I remember where they all were.'
'No,' Faye said. His voice, which had remained steady during the confrontation with Pedersen, now sounded trembly. 'Think I've had enough for awhile. Maybe Ralph'll give you a little tourney prelim.'