Insomnia (16 page)

Sometimes I get these scary pictures in my head when I try to think of the future. I see us standing in line at Manna for a free meal, or me walking into the Third Street homeless shelter with Nat in my arms, wrapped in a blanket. When I think of that stuff I start to shake, and sometimes I cry. I know it’s stupid; I’ve got a graduate degree in Library Science, for God’s sake, but I can’t help it. And do you know what I hold onto when those bad pictures come? What you said after you took me behind the counter in the Red Apple and sat me down. You told me that I had a lot of friends in the neighborhood, and I was going to get through this. I know I have one friend, at least. One very
true
friend
.

The letter was signed
Love, Helen
.

Ralph wiped tears from the corners of his eyes – he cried at the drop of a hat just lately, it seemed; it probably came from being so goddam tired – and read the PS she had crammed in at the bottom of the sheet and up the right-hand margin:

Ralph sat for a minute or two with Helen’s letter in his lap, looking out over Harris Avenue. It was the tag end of August now, still summer but the leaves of the poplars had begun to gleam silver when the wind stroked them and there was the first touch of coolness in the air. The sign in the window of the Red Apple said
SCHOOL SUPPLIES OF ALL TYPES
!
CHECK HERE FIRST
! And, out by the Newport town line, in some big old farmhouse where battered women went to try and start putting their lives back together, Helen Deepneau was washing storm windows, getting them ready for another long winter.

He slid the letter carefully back into its envelope, trying to remember how long Ed and Helen had been married. Six or seven years, he thought. Carolyn would have known for sure.
How much courage does it take to fire up your tractor and plow under a crop you spent six or seven years growing?
he asked himself.
How much courage to go on and do that after you’ve spent all that time finding out how to prepare the soil and when to plant and how much to water and when to reap? How much to just say, ‘I have to quit these peas, peas are no good for me, I better try corn or beans
.’

‘A lot,’ he said, wiping at the corners of his eyes again. ‘A damn lot, that’s what I think.’

Suddenly he wanted very badly to see Helen, to repeat what she so well remembered hearing and what he could barely remember saying:
You’ll be okay, you’ll get through this, you have a lot of friends in the neighborhood
.

‘Take it to the bank,’ Ralph said. Hearing from Helen seemed to have taken a great weight off his shoulders. He got up, put her letter in his back pocket, and started up Harris Avenue toward the picnic area on the Extension. If he was lucky, he could find Faye Chapin or Don Veazie and play a little chess.

His relief at hearing from Helen did nothing to alleviate Ralph’s insomnia; the premature waking continued, and by Labor Day he was opening his eyes around 2:45 a.m. By the tenth of September – the day when Ed Deepneau was arrested again, this time along with fifteen others – Ralph’s average night’s sleep had shrunk to roughly three hours and he had begun to feel quite a little bit like something on a slide under a microscope.
Just a lonely l’il protozoa, that’s me,
he thought as he sat in the wing-back chair, staring out at Harris Avenue, and wished he could laugh.

His list of sure-fire, never-miss folk remedies continued to grow, and it had occurred to him more than once that he could write an amusing little book on the subject . . . if, that was, he ever got enough sleep to make organized thinking possible again. This late summer he was doing well to slide into matching socks each day, and his mind kept returning to his purgatorial efforts to find a Cup-A-Soup in the kitchen cabinet on the day Helen had been beaten. There had been no return to that level since, because he had managed at least
some
sleep every night, but Ralph was terribly afraid he would arrive there again – and perhaps places beyond there – if things didn’t improve. There were times (usually sitting in the wing-back chair at four-thirty in the morning) when he swore he could actually feel his brains draining.

The remedies ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. The best example of the former was a full-color brochure advertising the wonders of the Minnesota Institute for Sleep Studies in St Paul. A fair example of the latter was the Magic Eye, an all-purpose amulet sold through supermarket tabloids like the
National Enquirer
and
Inside View
. Sue, the counter-girl at the Red Apple, bought one of these and presented it to him one afternoon. Ralph looked down at the badly painted blue eye staring up at him from the medallion (which he believed had probably started life as a poker-chip) and felt wild laughter bubbling up inside him. He somehow managed to suppress it until he had regained the safety of his own upstairs apartment across the street, and for that he was very grateful. The gravity with which Sue had given it to him – and the expensive-looking gold chain she had threaded through the eyelet on top – suggested it had cost her a fair amount of money. She had regarded Ralph with something close to awe since the day the two of them had rescued Helen. This made Ralph uncomfortable, but he had no idea what to do about it. In the meantime, he supposed it didn’t hurt to wear the medallion so she could see the shape of it under his shirt. It didn’t help him sleep, though.

After taking his statement on Ralph’s part in the Deepneaus’ domestic problems, Detective John Leydecker had pushed back his desk chair, laced his fingers together behind his not inconsiderable breadth of neck, and said that McGovern had told him Ralph suffered from insomnia. Ralph allowed that he did. Leydecker nodded, rolled his chair forward again, clasped his hands atop the litter of paperwork beneath which the surface of his desk was mostly buried, and looked at Ralph seriously.

‘Honeycomb,’ he said. His tone of voice reminded Ralph of McGovern’s tone when he had suggested that whiskey was the answer, and his reply now was exactly the same.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘My grandfather swore by it,’ Leydecker said. ‘Little piece of honeycomb just before bedtime. Suck the honey out of the comb, chew the wax a little – like you would a wad of gum – then spit it out. Bees secrete some sort of natural sedative when they make honey. Put you right out.’

‘No kidding,’ Ralph said, simultaneously believing it was utter crap and believing every word. ‘Where would a person get honeycomb, do you think?’

‘Nutra – the health food store out at the mall. Try it. By next week this time your troubles are going to be over.’

Ralph enjoyed the experiment – the comb honey was so sweetly powerful it seemed to suffuse his whole being – but he still woke at 3:10 a.m. after the first dosage, at 3:08 after the second, and at 3:07 after the third. By then the small piece of honeycomb he’d purchased was gone, and he went out to Nutra right away for another one. Its value as a sedative might be nil, but it made a wonderful snack; he only wished he had discovered it earlier.

He tried putting his feet in warm water. Lois bought him something called an All-Purpose Gel Wrap from a catalogue – you put it around your neck and it was supposed to take care of your arthritis as well as help you sleep (it did neither for Ralph, but he had only the mildest case of arthritis to begin with). Following a chance meeting with Trigger Vachon at the counter of Nicky’s Lunch, he tried camomile tea. ‘That cammy’s a beaut,’ Trig told him. ‘You gonna sleep great, Ralphie.’ And Ralph did . . . right up until 2:58 a.m., that was.

Those were the folk cures and homeopathic remedies he tried. Ones he didn’t included mega-vitamin packages which cost much more than Ralph could afford to spend on his fixed income, a yoga position called The Dreamer (as described by the postman, The Dreamer sounded to Ralph like a fine way to get a look at your own hemorrhoids), and marijuana. Ralph considered this last one very carefully before deciding it would very likely turn out to be an illegal version of the whiskey and honeycomb and the camomile tea. Besides, if McGovern found out Ralph was smoking pot, he would never hear the end of it.

And through all these experiments a voice in his brain kept asking him if he really
was
going to have to get down to eye of newt and tongue of toad before he gave up and went to the doctor. That voice was not so much critical as genuinely curious. Ralph had become fairly curious himself.

On September 10th, the day of the first Friends of Life demonstration at WomanCare, Ralph decided that he would try something from the drugstore . . . but not the Rexall downtown where he’d gotten Carolyn’s prescriptions filled. They knew him down there, knew him well, and he didn’t want Paul Durgin, the Rexall druggist, to see him buying sleeping-pills. It was probably stupid – like going across town to buy rubbers – but that didn’t change the way he felt. He had never traded at the Rite Aid across from Strawford Park, so that was where he meant to go. And if the drugstore version of newt’s eye and toad’s tongue didn’t work, he really
would
go to the doctor.

‘I do,’ he said out loud as he walked slowly down Harris Avenue in the bright September sunshine. ‘Be damned if I’ll put up with this much longer.’

Big talk, Ralph,
the voice replied skeptically.

Bill McGovern and Lois Chasse were standing outside the park, having what looked like an animated discussion. Bill looked up, saw him, and motioned for him to come over. Ralph went, not liking the combination of their expressions: bright-eyed interest on McGovern’s face, distress and worry on Lois’s.

‘Have you heard about the thing out at the hospital?’ she asked as Ralph joined them.

‘It wasn’t at the hospital, and it wasn’t a “thing”,’ McGovern said testily. ‘It was a demonstration – that’s what they called it, anyway – and it was at WomanCare, which is actually
behind
the hospital. They took a bunch of people to jail – somewhere between six and two dozen, nobody really seems to know yet.’

‘One of them was Ed Deepneau!’ Lois said breathlessly, and McGovern shot her a disgusted glance. He clearly believed that handling this piece of news had been his job.

‘Ed!’ Ralph said, startled. ‘Ed’s in Fresh Harbor!’

‘Wrong,’ McGovern said. The battered brown fedora he was wearing today gave him a slightly rakish look, like a newspaperman in a forties crime drama. Ralph wondered if the Panama was still lost or had merely been retired for the fall. ‘Today he’s once more cooling his heels in our picturesque city jail.’

‘What exactly happened?’

But neither of them really knew. At that point the story was little more than a rumor which had spread through the park like a contagious headcold, a rumor which was of particular interest in this part of town because Ed Deepneau’s name was attached to it. Marie Callan had told Lois that there had been rock-throwing involved, and that was why the demonstrators had been arrested. According to Stan Eberly, who had passed the story on to McGovern shortly before McGovern ran into Lois, someone – it might have been Ed, but it might well have been one of the others – had Maced a couple of doctors as they used the walkway between WomanCare and the back entrance to the hospital. This walkway was technically public property, and had become a favorite haunt of anti-abortion demonstrators during the seven years that WomanCare had been providing abortions on demand.

The two versions of the story were so vague and conflicting that Ralph felt he could reasonably hope neither was true, that perhaps it was just a case of a few overenthusiastic people who’d been arrested for trespassing, or something. In places like Derry, that kind of thing happened; stories had a way of inflating like beachballs as they were passed from mouth to mouth.

Yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that this time it would turn out to be more serious, mostly because both the Bill version and the Lois version included Ed Deepneau, and Ed was not your average anti-abortion protestor. This was, after all, the guy who had pulled a clump of his wife’s hair right out of her scalp, rearranged her dental work, and fractured her cheekbone simply because he had seen her name on a petition which mentioned WomanCare. This was the guy who seemed honestly convinced that someone calling himself the Crimson King –
it would be a great name for a pro wrestler,
Ralph thought – was running around Derry, and that his minions were hauling their unborn victims out of town on flatbed trucks (plus a few pickups with the fetuses stuffed into barrels marked
WEED-GO
). No, he had an idea that if Ed had been there, it had probably not been just a case of someone accidentally bonked on the head with a protest sign.

‘Let’s go up to my house,’ Lois proposed suddenly. ‘I’ll call Simone Castonguay. Her niece is the day receptionist at WomanCare. If anyone knows exactly what happened up there this morning, it’ll be Simone – she’ll have called Barbara.’

‘I was just on my way down to the supermarket,’ Ralph said. It was a lie, of course, but surely a very small one; the market stood next to the Rite Aid in the strip-mall half a block down from the park. ‘Why don’t I stop in on my way back?’

‘All right,’ Lois said, smiling at him. ‘We’ll expect you in a few minutes, won’t we, Bill?’

‘Yes,’ McGovern said, and suddenly swept her into his arms. It was a bit of a reach, but he managed. ‘In the meantime, I’ll have you all to myself. Oh, Lois, how those sweet minutes will fly!’

Just inside the park, a group of young women with babies in strollers (
a gossip of mothers,
Ralph thought) had been watching them, probably attracted by Lois’s gestures, which had a tendency to become grandiose when she was excited. Now, as McGovern bent Lois backward, looking down at her with the counterfeit ardor of a bad actor at the end of a stage tango, one of the mothers spoke to another and both laughed. It was a shrill, unkind sound that made Ralph think of chalk squealing on blackboards and forks dragged across porcelain sinks.
Look at the funny old people,
the laughter said.
Look at the funny old people, pretending to be young again
.