[Better send her across, Shorts! I'm warning you!]
['No.']
[I'll fuck you over, Shorts. I'll fuck you over big-time. And I'll fuck your friends over. Do you get me? Do you--]
Ralph suddenly raised one hand to shoulder height with the palm turned inward toward the side of his head, as if he meant to administer a karate chop. He brought it down and watched, amazed, as a tight blue wedge of light flew off the tips of his fingers and sliced across the street like a thrown spear. Doc #3 ducked just in time, clapping one hand to McGovern's Panama to keep it from flying off. The blue wedge skimmed two or three inches over that small, clutching hand and struck the front window of the Buffy-Buffy. There it spread like some supernatural liquid, and for a moment the dusty glass became the brilliant, perfect blue of today's sky. It faded after only a moment and Ralph could see the women inside the laundromat again, folding their clothes and loading their washers exactly as if nothing had happened.
The bald dwarf straightened, rolled his hands into fists, and shook them at Ralph. Then he snatched McGovern's hat off his head, stuck the brim in his mouth, and tore a bite out of it. As he performed this bizarre equivalent of a child's tantrum, the sun struck splinters of fire from the lobes of his small, neatly made ears. He spat out the chunk of splintery straw and then clapped the hat back on his head.
[That dog was mine, Shorts! I was gonna play with her! I guess maybe I'll have to play with you instead, huh? You and your asshole friends!]
['Get out of here.']
[Cuntlicker! Fucked your mother and licked her cunt! ]
Ralph knew where he had heard that charming sentiment before: Ed Deepneau, out at the airport, in the summer of '92. It wasn't the sort of thing you forgot, and all at once he was terrified. What in God's name had he stumbled into?
5
Ralph lifted his hand to the side of his head again, but something inside had changed. He could bring it down in that chopping gesture again, but he was almost positive that this time no bright blue flying wedge would result.
The doc apparently didn't know he was being threatened with an empty gun, however. He shrank back, raising the hand holding the scalpel in a shielding gesture. The grotesquely bitten hat slipped down over his eyes, and for a moment he looked like a stage-melodrama version of Jack the Ripper . . . one who might have been working out pathologic inadequacies caused by extreme shortness.
[Gonna get you for this, Shorts! You wait! You just wait! No Short-Timer runs the game on me!]
But for the time being, the little bald doctor had had enough. He wheeled around and ran into the weedy lane between the laundromat and the apartment house with his dirty, too-long smock flapping and snapping at the legs of his jeans. The brightness slipped out of the day with him. Ralph marked its passage to a large extent with senses he had never before even suspected. He felt totally awake, totally energized, and almost exploding with delighted excitement.
I drove it off, by God! I drove the little sonofawhore off!
He had no idea what the creature in the white smock really was, but he knew he had saved Rosalie from it, and for now that was enough. Nagging questions about his sanity might creep back tomorrow morning as he sat in the wing-chair looking down at the deserted street below . . . but for the time being, he felt like a million bucks.
'You saw him, didn't you, Rosalie? You saw the nasty little--'
He looked down, saw that Rosalie was no longer sitting by his heel, and looked up in time to see her limping into the park, head down, right leg slueing stiffly off to the side with every pained stride.
'Rosalie!' he shouted. 'Hey, girl!' And, without really knowing why - except that they had just gone through something extraordinary together - Ralph started after her, first just jogging, then running, finally sprinting all out.
He didn't sprint for long. A stitch that felt like a hot chrome needle buried itself in his left side, then spread rapidly across the left half of his chest wall. He stopped just inside the park, standing bent over at the intersection of two paths, hands clamped on his legs just above the knees. Sweat ran into his eyes and stung like tears. He panted harshly, wondering if it was just the ordinary sort of stitch he remembered from the last lap of the mile run in high-school track, or if this was how the onset of a fatal heart attack felt.
After thirty or forty seconds the pain began to abate, so maybe it had just been a stitch, after all. Still, it went a good piece toward supporting McGovern's thesis, didn't it? Let me tell you something, Ralph - at our age, mental illness is common! At our age it's common as hell! Ralph didn't know if that was true or not, but he did know that the year he had made All-State Track was now over half a century in the past, and sprinting after Rosalie the way he'd done was stupid and probably dangerous. If his heart had seized up, he supposed he wouldn't have been the first old guy to be punished with a coronary thrombosis for getting excited and forgetting that when eighteen went, it went forever.
The pain was almost gone and he was getting his wind back, but his legs still felt untrustworthy, as if they might unlock at the knees and spill him onto the gravel path without the slightest warning. Ralph lifted his head, looking for the nearest park bench, and saw something that made him forget stray dogs, shaky legs, even possible heart attacks. The nearest bench was forty feet farther along the left-hand path, at the top of a gentle, sloping hill. Lois Chasse was sitting on that bench in her good blue fall coat. Her gloved hands were folded together in her lap, and she was sobbing as if her heart would break.
CHAPTER TWELVE
* * *
1
'What's wrong, Lois?'
She looked up at him, and the first thought to cross Ralph's mind was actually a memory: a play he had taken Carolyn to see at the Penobscot Theater in Bangor eight or nine years ago. Some of the characters in it had supposedly been dead, and their makeup had consisted of clown-white greasepaint with dark circles around the eyes to give the impression of huge empty sockets.
His second thought was much simpler: Raccoon.
She either saw some of his thoughts on his face or simply realized how she must look, because she turned away, fumbled briefly at the clasp of her purse, then simply raised her hands and used them to shield her face from his view.
'Go away, Ralph, would you?' she asked in a thick, choked voice. 'I don't feel very well today.'
Under ordinary circumstances, Ralph would have done as she asked, hurrying away without looking back, feeling nothing but a vague shame at having come across her with her mascara smeared and her defenses down. But these weren't ordinary circumstances, and Ralph decided he wasn't leaving - not yet, anyway. He still retained some of that strange lightness, and still felt that other world, that other Derry, was very close. And there was something else, something perfectly simple and straightforward. He hated to see Lois, whose happy nature he had never even questioned, sitting here by herself and bawling her eyes out.
'What's the matter, Lois?'
'I just don't feel well!' she cried. 'Can't you leave me alone?'
Lois buried her face in her gloved hands. Her back shook, the sleeves of her blue coat trembled, and Ralph thought of how Rosalie had looked when the bald doctor had been yelling at her to get her ass across the street: miserable, scared to death.
Ralph sat down next to Lois on the bench, slipped an arm around her, and pulled her to him. She came, but stiffly . . . as if her body were full of wires.
'Don't you look at me!' she cried in that same wild voice. 'Don't you dare! My makeup's a mess! I put it on special for my son and daughter-in-law . . . they came for breakfast . . . we were going to spend the morning . . . "We'll have a nice time, Ma," Harold said . . . but the reason they came . . . you see, the real reason . . .'
Communication broke down in a fresh spate of weeping. Ralph groped in his back pocket, came up with a handkerchief which was wrinkled but clean, and put it in one of Lois's hands. She took it without looking at him.
'Go on,'he said.
'Scrub up a little if you want, although you don't look bad, Lois; honest you don't.'
A little raccoony is all, he thought. He began to smile, and then the smile died. He remembered the day in September when he had set off for the Rite Aid to check out the over-the-counter sleep aids and had encountered Bill and Lois standing outside the park, talking about the doll-throwing demonstration which Ed had orchestrated at WomanCare. She had been clearly distressed that day - Ralph remembered thinking that she looked tired in spite of her excitement and concern - but she had also been close to beautiful: her considerable bosom heaving, her eyes flashing, her cheeks flushed with a maid's high color. That all but irresistible beauty was hardly more than a memory today; in her melting mascara Lois Chasse looked like a sad and elderly clown, and Ralph felt a quick hot spark of fury for whatever or whoever had wrought the change.
'I look horrible!' Lois said, applying Ralph's handkerchief vigorously. 'I'm a fright!'
'No, ma'am. Just a little smeary.'
Lois at last turned to face him. It clearly took a lot of effort with her rouge and eye makeup now mostly on Ralph's handkerchief. 'How bad am I?' she breathed. 'Tell the truth, Ralph Roberts, or your eyes'll cross.'
He bent forward and kissed one moist cheek. 'Only lovely, Lois. You'll have to save ethereal for another day, I guess.'
She gave him an uncertain smile, and the upward movement of her face caused two fresh tears to spill from her eyes. Ralph took the crumpled handkerchief from her and gently wiped them away.
'I'm so glad it was you who came along and not Bill,' she told him. 'I would have died of shame if Bill had seen me crying in public.'
Ralph looked around. He saw Rosalie, safe and sound at the bottom of the hill - she was lying between the two Portosans that stood down there, her muzzle resting on one paw - but otherwise this part of the park was empty. 'I think we've got the place pretty much to ourselves, at least for now,' he said.
'Thank God for small favors.' Lois took the handkerchief back and went to work on her makeup again, this time in a rather more businesslike manner. 'Speaking of Bill, I stopped into the Red Apple on my way down here - that was before I got feeling sorry for myself and started to bawl my silly head off - and Sue said you two had a big argument just a little while ago. Yelling and everything, right out in your front yard.'
'Nah, not that big,' Ralph said, smiling uneasily.
'Can I be nosy and ask what it was about?'
'Chess,' Ralph said. It was the first thing to pop into his mind. 'The Runway 3 Tournament Faye Chapin has every year. Only it really wasn't about anything. You know how it is - sometimes people get out of bed on the wrong side and just grab the first excuse.'
'I wish that was all it was with me,' Lois said. She opened her purse, managing the clasp effortlessly this time, and took out her compact. Then she sighed and stuffed it back into the bag again without opening it. 'I can't. I know I'm being a baby, but I just can't.'
Ralph darted his hand into her purse before she could close it, removed the compact, opened it, and held the mirror up in front of her. 'See? That's not so bad, is it?'
She averted her face like a vampire turning away from a crucifix. 'Ugh,' she said. 'Put it away.'
'If you promise to tell me what happened.'
'Anything, just put it away.'
He did. For a little while Lois said nothing but only sat and watched her hands fiddle restlessly with the clasp of her purse. He was about to prod her when she looked up at him with a pitiful expression of defiance.
'It just so happens you're not the only one who can't get a decent night's sleep, Ralph.'
'What are you talking ab--'
'Insomnia!' she snapped. 'I go to sleep at about the same time I always did, but I don't sleep through anymore. And it's worse than that. I wake up earlier every morning, it seems.'
Ralph tried to remember if he had told Lois about that aspect of his own problem. He didn't think he had.
'Why are you looking so surprised?' Lois asked. 'You didn't really think you were the only person in the world to ever have a sleepless night, did you?'
'Of course not!' Ralph responded with some indignation . . . but hadn't it often felt as if he were the only person in the world to have that particular kind of sleepless night? Standing helplessly by as his good sleep-time was eroded minute by minute and quarter hour by quarter hour? It was like a weird variant of the Chinese water-torture.
'When did yours start?' he asked.
'A month or two before Carol died.'
'How much sleep are you getting?'
'Barely an hour a night since the start of October.' Her voice was calm, but Ralph heard a tremor which might have been panic just below the surface. 'The way things are going, I'll have entirely quit sleeping by Christmas, and if that really happens, I don't know how I'll survive it. I'm barely surviving now.'
Ralph struggled for speech and asked the first question to come into his mind: 'How come I've never seen your light?'
'For the same reason I hardly ever see yours, I imagine,' she said. 'I've been living in the same place for almost thirty-five years, and I don't need to turn on the lights to find my way around. Also, I like to keep my troubles to myself. You keep turning on the lights at two in the morning and sooner or later someone sees them. It gets around, and then the nosybirds start asking questions. I don't like nosybird questions, and I'm not one of those people who feel like they have to take an ad out in the paper every time they have a little constipation.'
Ralph burst out laughing. Lois looked at him in round-eyed perplexity for a moment, then joined in. His arm was still around her (or had it crept back on its own after he had taken it away? Ralph didn't know and didn't really care), and he hugged her tightly. This time she pressed against him easily; those stiff little wires had gone out of her body. Ralph was glad.
'You're not laughing at me, are you, Ralph?'
'Nope. Absolutely not.'
She nodded, still smiling. 'That's all right, then. You never even saw me moving around in my living room, did you?'
'No.'
'That's because there's no streetlamp in front of my house. But there's one in front of yours. I've seen you in that ratty old wing-chair of yours many times, sitting and looking out and drinking tea.'
I always assumed I was the only one, he thought, and suddenly a question - both comic and embarrassing - popped into his head. How many times had she seen him sitting there and picking his nose? Or picking at his crotch?
Either reading his mind or the color in his cheeks, Lois said,'I really couldn't make out much more than your shape, you know, and you were always wearing your robe, perfectly decent. So you don't have to worry about that. Also, I hope you know that if you'd ever started doing anything you wouldn't want people to see you doing, I wouldn't have looked. I wasn't exactly raised in a barn, you know.'
He smiled and patted her hand. 'I do know that, Lois. It's just . . . you know, a surprise. To find out that while I was sitting there and watching the street, somebody was watching me.'
She fixed him with an enigmatic smile that might have said, Don't worry, Ralph - you were just another part of the scenery to me.
He considered this smile for a moment, then groped his way back to the main point. 'So what happened, Lois? Why were you sitting here and crying? Just sleeplessness? If that's what it was, I certainly sympathize. There's really no just about it, is there?'
Her smile slipped away. Her gloved hands folded together again in her lap and she looked somberly down at them. 'There are worse things than insomnia. Betrayal, for instance. Especially when the people doing the betraying are the people you love.'
2
She fell quiet. Ralph didn't prompt her. He was looking down the hill at Rosalie, who appeared to be looking up at him. At both of them, maybe.
'Did you know we share the same doctor as well as the same problem, Ralph?'
'You go to Litchfield, too?'
'Used to go to Litchfi
eld. He was Carolyn's recommendation. I'll never go to him again, though. He and I are quits.' Her upper lip drew back. 'Double-crossing son of a bitch!'
'What happened?'
'I went along for the best part of a year, waiting for things to get better by themselves - for nature to take her course, as they say. Not that I didn't try to help nature along every now and then. We probably tried a lot of the same things.'
'Honeycomb?' Ralph asked, smiling again. He couldn't help it. What an amazing day this has been, he thought. What a perfectly amazing day . . . and it's not even one in the afternoon yet.
'Honeycomb? What about it? Does that help?'
'No,' Ralph said, grinning more widely than ever, 'doesn't help a bit, but it tastes wonderful.'
She laughed and squeezed his bare left hand in both of her gloved ones. Ralph squeezed back.
'You never went to see Dr Litchfield about it, did you, Ralph?'
'Nope. Made an appointment once, but cancelled it.'
'Did you put it off because you didn't trust him? Because you felt he missed the boat on Carolyn?'
Ralph looked at her, surprised.
'Never mind,' Lois said. 'I had no right to ask that.'
'No, it's okay. I guess I'm just surprised to hear the idea from someone else. That he . . . you know . . . that he might have misdiagnosed her.'
'Huh!' Lois's pretty eyes flashed. 'It crossed all our minds! Bill used to say he couldn't believe you didn't have that fumble-fingered bastard in district court the day after Carolyn's funeral. Of course back then I was on the other side of the fence, defending Litchfield like mad. Did you ever think of suing him?'
'No. I'm seventy, and I don't want to spend whatever time I have left flogging a malpractice suit. Besides - would it bring Carol back?'
She shook her head.
Ralph said,'What happened to Carolyn was the reason I didn't go see him, though. I guess it was, at least. I just couldn't seem to trust him, or maybe . . . I don't know . . .'
No, he didn't really know, that was the devil of it. All he knew for sure was that he had cancelled the appointment with Dr Litchfield, as he had cancelled his appointment with James Roy Hong, known in some quarters as the pinsticker man. That latter appointment had been scratched on the advice of a ninety-two- or -three-year-old man who could probably no longer remember his own middle name. His mind slipped to the book Old Dor had given him, and to the poem Old Dor had quoted from - 'Pursuit', it had been called, and Ralph couldn't seem to get it out of his head . . . especially the part where the poet talked about all the things he saw falling away behind him: the unread books, the untold jokes, the trips that would never be taken.