He nodded at her. 'You're right. We need to talk.'
'Would you like to come back to my house for a little late lunch? I make a pretty mean stir-fry for an old gal who can't keep track of her earrings.'
'I'd love to. I'll tell you what I know, but it's going to take awhile. When I talked to Bill this morning, I gave him the Reader's Digest version.'
'So,' Lois said. 'The fight was about chess, was it?'
'Well, maybe not,' Ralph said, smiling down at his hands. 'Maybe it was actually more like the fight you had with your son and your daughter-in-law. And I didn't even tell him the craziest parts.'
'But you'll tell me?'
'Yes,' he said, and started to get up. 'I'll bet you're a hell of a good cook, too. In fact--' He stopped suddenly and clapped one hand to his chest. He sat back down on the bench, heavily, his eyes wide and his mouth ajar.
'Ralph? Are you all right?'
Her alarmed voice seemed to be coming from a great distance. In his mind's eye he was seeing Baldy #3 again, standing between the Buffy-Buffy and the apartment house next door. Baldy #3 trying to get Rosalie to cross Harris Avenue so he could cut her balloon-string. He'd failed then, but he'd gotten the job done (I was gonna play with her! ) before the morning was out.
Maybe the fact that Bill McGovern isn't the hat-biting type wasn't the only reason Lois didn't notice whose hat Baldy #3 was wearing, Ralph old buddy. Maybe she didn't notice because she didn't want to notice. Maybe there are a couple of pieces here that fit together, and if you're right about that, the implications are wide-ranging. You see that, don't you?
'Ralph? What's wrong?'
He saw the dwarf snatching a bite from the brim of the Panama and then clapping it back on his head. Heard him saying he guessed he would have to play with Ralph instead.
But not just me. Me and my friends, he said. Me and my asshole friends.
Now, thinking back on it, he saw something else, as well. He saw the sun striking splinters of fire from the lobes of Doc #3's ears as he - or it - chomped into the brim of McGovern's hat. The memory was too clear to deny, and so were those implications.
Those wide-ranging implications.
Take it easy - you don't know a thing for sure, and the funny-farm is just over the horizon, my friend. I think you need to remember that, maybe use it as an anchor. I don't care if Lois is also seeing all this stuff or not. The other men in the white coats, not the pint-sized baldies but the muscular guys with the butterfly nets and the Thorazine shots, can show up at any time. Any old time at all.
But still.
Still.
'Ralph! Jesus Christ, talk to me!' Lois was shaking him now and shaking hard, like a wife trying to rouse a husband who is going to be late for work.
He looked around at her and tried to manufacture a smile. It felt false from the inside but must have looked all right to Lois, because she relaxed. A little, anyway. 'Sorry,' he said. 'For a few seconds there it all just sort of . . . you know, ganged up on me.'
'Don't you scare me like that! The way you grabbed your chest, my God!'
'I'm fine,' Ralph said, and forced his false smile even wider. He felt like a kid pulling a wad of Silly Putty, seeing how far he could stretch it before it thinned enough to tear. 'And if you're still cookin, I'm still eatin.'
Three-six-nine, hon, the goose drank wine.
Lois took a close look at him and then relaxed. 'Good. That would be fun. I haven't cooked for anyone but Simone and Mina - they're my girlfriends, you know - in a long time.' Then she laughed. 'Except that isn't what I mean. That isn't why it would be, you know, fun.'
'What do you mean?'
'That I haven't cooked for a man in a long time. I hope I haven't forgotten how.'
'Well, there was the day Bill and I came in to watch the news with you - we had macaroni and cheese. It was good, too.'
She made a dismissive gesture. 'Reheated. Not the same.'
The monkey chewed tobacco on the streetcar line. The line broke--
Smiling wider than ever. Waiting for the rips to start. 'I'm sure you haven't forgotten how, Lois.'
'Mr Chasse had a very hearty appetite. All sorts of hearty appetites, in fact. But then he started having his liver trouble, and . . .' She sighed, then reached for Ralph's arm and took it with a mixture of timidity and resolution he found completely endearing. 'Never mind. I'm tired of snivelling and moaning about the past. I'll leave that to Bill. Let's go.'
He stood up, linked his arm through hers, and walked her down the hill and toward the lower entrance to the park. Lois beamed blindingly at the young mothers in the playground as she and Ralph passed them. Ralph was glad for the distraction. He could tell himself to withhold judgement, he could remind himself over and over again that he didn't know enough about what was happening to him and Lois to even kid himself that he could think logically about it, but he kept jumping at that conclusion anyway. The conclusion felt right to his heart, and he had already come a long way toward believing that, in the world of auras, feeling and knowing were close to identical.
I don't know about the other two, but #3 is one crazy medic . . . and he takes souvenirs. Takes them the way some of the crazies in Vietnam took ears.
That Lois's daughter-in-law had given in to an evil impulse, scooping the diamond earrings from the china dish and putting them in the pocket of her jeans, he had no doubt. But Janet Chasse no longer had them; even now she was no doubt reproaching herself bitterly for having lost them and wondering why she had ever taken them in the first place.
Ralph knew the shrimp with the scalpel had McGovern's hat even if Lois had failed to recognize it, and they had both seen him take Rosalie's bandanna. What Ralph had realized as he started to get up from the bench was that those splinters of light he had seen reflected from the bald creature's earlobes almost certainly meant that Doc #3 had Lois's earrings, as well.
4
The late Mr Chasse's rocking chair stood on faded linoleum by the door to the back porch. Lois led Ralph to it and admonished him to 'stay out from underfoot'. Ralph thought this was an assignment he could handle. Strong light, mid-afternoon light, fell across his lap as he sat and rocked. Ralph wasn't sure how it had gotten so late so fast, but somehow it had. Maybe I fell asleep, he thought. Maybe I'm asleep right now, and dreaming all this. He watched as Lois took down a wok (definitely hobbit-sized) from an overhead cupboard. Five minutes later, savory smells began to fill the kitchen.
'I told you I'd cook for you someday,' Lois said, adding vegetables from the fridge crisper and spices from one of the overhead cabinets. 'That was the same day I gave you and Bill the leftover macaroni and cheese. Do you remember?'
'I believe I do,' Ralph said, smiling.
'There's a jug of fresh cider in the milk-box on the front porch - cider always keeps best outside. Would you get it? You can pour out, too. My good glasses are in the cupboard over the sink, the one I can't reach without dragging over a chair. You're tall enough to do without the chair, I judge. What are you, Ralph, about six-two?'
'Six-three. At least I was; I guess maybe I've lost an inch or two in the last ten years. Your spine settles, or something. And you don't have to go putting on the dog just for me. Honest.'
She looked at him levelly, hands on hips, the spoon with which she had been stirring the contents of the wok jutting from one of them. Her severity was offset by a trace of a smile. 'I said my good glasses, Ralph Roberts, not my best glasses.'
'Yes, ma'am,' he said, grinning, then added: 'From the way that smells, I guess you still remember how to cook for a man.'
'The proof of the pudding is in the eating,' Lois replied, but Ralph thought she looked pleased as she turned back to the wok.
5
The food was good, and they didn't talk about what had happened in the park as they applied themselves to it. Ralph's appetite had become uncertain, out more often than in, since his insomnia had really begun to bite, but today he ate heartily and chased Lois's spicy stir-fr
y with three glasses of apple cider (hoping uneasily as he finished the last one that the rest of the day's activities wouldn't take him too far from a toilet). When they had finished, Lois got up, went to the sink, and began to draw hot water for dishes. As she did, she resumed their earlier conversation as if it were a half-finished piece of knitting which had been temporarily laid aside for some other, more pressing, chore.
'What did you do to me?' she asked him. 'What did you do to make the colors come back?'
'I don't know.'
'It was as if I was on the edge of that world, and when you put your hands over my eyes, you pushed me into it.'
He nodded, remembering how she'd looked in the first few seconds after he'd removed his hands - as if she'd just taken off a pair of goggles which had been dipped in powdered sugar. 'It was pure instinct. And you're right, it is like a world. I keep thinking of it just that way, as the world of auras.'
'It's wonderful, isn't it? I mean, it's scary, and when it first started to happen to me - back in late July or early August, this was - I was sure I was going crazy, but even then I liked it, too. I couldn't help liking it.'
Ralph gazed at her, startled. Had he once upon a time thought of Lois as transparent? Gossipy? Unable to keep a secret?
No, I'm afraid it was a little worse than that, old buddy. You thought she was shallow. You saw her pretty much through Bill's eyes, as a matter of fact: as 'our Lois'. No less . . . but not much more.
'What?' she asked, a little uneasily. 'Why are you looking at me like that?'
'You've been seeing these auras since summer? That long?'
'Yes - brighter and brighter. Also more often. That's why I finally went to see the tattletale. Did I really shoot that thing with my finger, Ralph? The more time goes by, the less I can believe that part of it.'
'You did. I did something like it myself shortly before I ran into you.'
He told her about his earlier confrontation with Doc #3, and about how he had banished the dwarf . . . temporarily, at least. He raised his hand to his shoulder and brought it swiftly down. 'That's all I did - like a kid pretending to be Chuck Norris or Steven Seagal. But it sent this incredible bolt of blue light at him, and he scurried in a hurry. Which was probably for the best, because I couldn't have done it again. I don't know how I did that, either. Could you have shot your finger again?'
Lois giggled, turned toward him, and cocked her finger in his general direction. 'Want to find out? Kapow! Kablam!'
'Don't point dat ding at me, lady,' Ralph told her. He smiled as he said it, but wasn't entirely sure he was joking.
Lois lowered her finger and squirted Joy into the sink. As she began to stir the water around with one hand, puffing up the suds, she asked what Ralph thought of as the Big Questions: 'Where did this power come from, Ralph? And what's it for?'
He shook his head as he got up and walked over to the dish-drainer. 'I don't know and I don't know. How's that for helpful? Where do you keep your dish-wipers, Lois?'
'Never mind where I keep my dish-wipers. Go sit down. Please tell me you're not one of these modern men, Ralph - the ones that are always hugging each other and bawling.'
Ralph laughed and shook his head. 'Nope. I was just well trained, that's all.'
'Okay. As long as you don't start going on about how sensitive you are. There are some things a girl likes to find out for herself.' She opened the cupboard under the sink and tossed him a faded but scrupulously clean dishtowel. 'Just dry them and put them on the counter. I'll put them away myself. While you're working, you can tell me your story. The unabridged version.'
'You got a deal.'
He was still wondering where to begin when his mouth opened, seemingly of its own accord, and began for him. 'When I finally started to get it through my head that Carolyn was going to die, I went for a lot of walks. And one day, while I was out on the Extension . . .'
6
He told her everything, beginning with his intervention between Ed and the fat man wearing the West Side Gardeners gimme-cap and ending with Bill telling him that he'd better go see his doctor, because at their age mental illness was common, at their age it was common as hell. He had to double back several times to pick up dropped stitches - the way Old Dor had showed up in the middle of his efforts to keep Ed from going at the man from West Side Gardeners, for instance - but he didn't mind doing that, and Lois didn't seem to have any trouble keeping his narrative straight, either. The overall feeling Ralph was conscious of as he wound his way through his tale was a relief so deep it was nearly painful. It was as if someone had stacked bricks on his heart and mind and he was now removing them, one by one.
By the time he was finished, the dishes were done and they had left the kitchen in favor of the living room with its dozens of framed photographs, presided over by Mr Chasse from his place on the TV.
'So?' Ralph said. 'How much of it do you believe?'
'All of it, of course,' she said, and either did not notice the expression of relief of Ralph's face or chose to ignore it. 'After what we saw this morning - not to mention what you knew about my wonderful daughter-in-law - I can't very well not believe. That's my advantage over Bill.'
Not your only one, Ralph thought but didn't say.
'None of this stuff is coincidental, is it?' she asked him.
Ralph shook his head. 'No, I don't think so.'
'When I was seventeen,' she said, 'my mother hired this boy from down the road - Richard Henderson, his name was - to do chores around our place. There were a lot of boys she could have hired, but she hired Richie because she liked him . . . and she liked him for me, if you understand what I mean.'
'Of course I do. She was matchmaking.'
'Uh-huh, but at least she wasn't doing it in a big, gruesome, embarrassing way. Thank God, because I didn't care a fig for Richie - at least not like that. Still, Mother gave it her very best. If I was studying my books at the kitchen table, she'd have him loading the woodbox even though it was May and already hot. If I was feeding the chickens, she'd have Richie cutting side-hay next to the dooryard. She wanted me to see him around . . . to get used to him . . . and if we got to like each other's company and he asked me to a dance or the town fair, that would have been just fine with her. It was gentle, but it was there. A push. And that's what this is like.'
'The pushes don't feel all that gentle to me,' Ralph said. His hand went involuntarily to the place where Charlie Pickering had pricked him with the point of his knife.
'No, of course they don't. Having a man stick a knife in your ribs like that must have been horrible. Thank God you had that spray-can. Do you suppose Old Dor sees the auras, too? That something from that world told him to put the can in your pocket?'
Ralph gave a helpless shrug. What she was suggesting had crossed his mind, but once you got beyond it, the ground really started to slope away. Because if Dorrance had done that, it suggested that some ((entity) force or being had known that Ralph would need help. Nor was that all. That force - or being - would also have had to know that (a) Ralph would be going out on Sunday afternoon, that (b) the weather, quite nice up until then, would turn nasty enough to require a jacket, and (c) which jacket he would wear. You were talking, in other words, about something that could foretell the future. The idea that he had been noticed by such a force frankly scared the hell out of him. He recognized that in the case of the aerosol can, at least, the intervention had probably saved his life, but it still scared the hell out of him.
'Maybe,' he said. 'Maybe something did use Dorrance as an errand-boy. But why?'
'And what do we do now?' she added.
Ralph could only shake his head.
She glanced up at the clock squeezed in between the picture of the man in the raccoon coat and the young woman who looked ready to say Twenty-three skidoo any old time, then reached for the phone. 'Almost three-thirty! My goodness!'
Ralph touched her hand. 'Who are you calling?'
'Simone Castonguay. I'd made plans to
go over to Ludlow with her and Mina this afternoon - there's a card-party at the Grange - but I can't go after all this. I'd lose my shirt.' She laughed, then colored prettily. 'Just a figure of speech.'
Ralph put his hand over hers before she could lift the receiver. 'Go on to your card-party, Lois.'
'Really?' She looked both doubtful and a little disappointed.
'Yes.' He was still unclear about what was going on here, but he sensed that was about to change. Lois had spoken of being pushed, but to Ralph it felt more as if he were being carried, the way a river carries a man in a small boat. But he couldn't see where he was going; heavy mist shrouded the banks, and now, as the current began to grow swifter, he could hear the rumble of rapids somewhere up ahead.
Still, there are shapes, Ralph. Shapes in the mist.
Yes. Not very comforting ones, either. They might be trees that only looked like clutching fingers . . . but on the other hand, they might be clutching fingers trying to look like trees. Until Ralph knew which was the case, he liked the idea of Lois being out of town just fine. He had a strong intuition - or perhaps it was only hope masquerading as intuition - that Doc #3 couldn't follow her to Ludlow, that he might not even be able to follow her across the Barrens to the east side.
You can't know any such thing, Ralph.
Maybe not, but it felt right, and he was still convinced that in the world of the auras, feeling and knowing were pretty nearly the same thing. One thing he did know was that Doc #3 hadn't cut Lois's balloon-string yet; that Ralph had seen for himself, along with the joyously healthy gray glow of her aura. Yet Ralph could not escape a growing certainty that Doc #3 - Crazy Doc - intended to cut it, and that, no matter how lively Rosalie had looked when she went trotting away from Strawford Park, the severing of that cord was a mortal, murderous act.
Let's say you're right, Ralph; let's say he can't get at her this afternoon if she's playing nickel-in, dime-or-out in Ludlow. What about tonight? Tomorrow? Next week? What's the solution? Does she call up her son and her bitch of a daughter-in-law, tell them she's changed her mind about Riverview Estates and wants to go there after all?