Insomnia (42 page)

Rosalie got up, tail between her legs, and began to slink toward the street. She whined as she went, and her fear had worsened her limp to the point where she was barely able to stagger; her hindquarters threatened to slide out from under her at each reluctant, lurching step.

[
‘Hey!’
]

Ralph only realized that he had yelled when he saw the small blue cloud float up in front of his face. It was etched with gossamer silver lines that made it look like a snowflake.

The bald dwarf wheeled toward the sound of Ralph’s shout, instinctively raising the weapon he held as he did. His expression was one of snarling surprise. Rosalie had stopped with her front paws in the gutter and was looking at Ralph with wide, anxious brown eyes.

[
What do
you
want, Shorts?
]

There was fury at being interrupted in that voice, fury at being challenged . . . but Ralph thought there were other emotions underneath. Fear? He wished he could believe it. Perplexity and surprise seemed surer bets. Whatever this creature was, it wasn’t used to being seen by the likes of Ralph, let alone challenged.

[
What’s the matter, Short-Time, cat got your tongue? Or have you already forgotten what you wanted?
]

[
‘I want you to leave that dog alone!’
]

Ralph heard himself in two different ways. He was fairly sure he was speaking aloud, but the sound of his actual voice was distant and tinny, like music drifting up from a pair of Walkman headphones which have been temporarily laid aside. Someone standing right beside him might have heard what he said, but Ralph knew the words would have sounded like a weak, out-of-breath gasp – talk from a man who has just been gutpunched. Inside his head, however, he sounded as he hadn’t in years – young, strong, and confident.

Doc #3 must have heard it that second way, for he recoiled momentarily, again raising his weapon (Ralph was now almost certain it was a scalpel) for a moment, as if in self-defense. Then he seemed to regroup. He left the sidewalk and strode to the edge of Harris Avenue, standing on the leaf-drifted strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street. He hitched at the waistband of his jeans, yanking it through the dirty smock, and stared grimly at Ralph for several moments. Then he raised the rusty scalpel in the air and made an unpleasantly suggestive sawing gesture with it.

[
You can see me – big deal! Don’t poke your nose into what doesn’t concern you, Short-Time! The mutt belongs to me!
]

The bald doc turned back to the cringing dog.

[
I’m done fooling with you, Rover! Get over here! Right now!
]

Rosalie gave Ralph a beseeching, despairing look and then began to cross the street.

I don’t mess in with long-time business,
Old Dor had told him on the day he’d given him the book of Stephen Dobyns poems.
I told
you
not to, either
.

Yes, he had, yes indeed, but Ralph had a feeling it was too late now. Even if it wasn’t, he had no intention of leaving Rosalie to the unpleasant little gnome standing in front of the coin-op laundry across the street. Not if he could help it, that was.

[
‘Rosalie! Over here, girl! Heel!’
]

Rosalie gave a single bark and trotted over to where Ralph stood. She placed herself behind his right leg and then sat down, panting and looking up at him. And here was another expression Ralph found he could read with ease: one part relief, two parts gratitude.

The face of Doc #3 was twisted into a grimace of hate so severe it was almost a cartoon.

[
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?

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.

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.

‘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.’