Be careful, young lady, Ralph said You’re standing next to a very dangerous man.
Then the flash was gone and the man in the tweed jacket was once more just an earnest young fellow who had followed his conscience to hell. Once more it was Dalton, now nervously snapping his suspenders like big red rubber bands, who looked a few sandwiches shy of a picnic.
“What we’re doing is what the so-called good Germans failed to do in the thirties,” Ed was saying. He spoke in the patient, lecturely tones of a man who has been forced to point this out over and over…
. mostly to those who should already know it. “They were silent and six million Jews died. In this country a similar holocaust-”
“Over a thousand babies every day,” Dalton said. His former shrillness had departed. He sounded horrified and desperately tired.
“Many of them are ripped from the wombs of their mothers in pieces, with their little arms waving in protest even as they die.”
“Oh good God,” McGovern said. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I have ever-”
“Hush, Bill,” Lois said. -purpose of this protest” Rivers was asking Dalton.
“As you probably know,” Dalton said, “the City Council has agreed to re-examine the zoning regulations that allow WomanCare to operate where it does and how it does. They could vote on the issue as early as November. The abortion rights people are afraid the Council might throw sand in the gears of their death-machine, so they’ve summoned Susan Day, this country’s most notorious proabortion advocate, to try and keep the machine running. We are marshalling our forces-” The pendulum of the microphone swung back to Ed. “Will there be more protests, Mr. Deepneau?” Rivers asked, and Ralph suddenly had an idea she might be interested in him in a way which was not strictly professional. Hey, why not? Ed was a good-looking guy, and His. Rivers could hardly know that he believed the Crimson King and his Centurions were in Derry, joining forces with the baby-killers at WomanCare.
“Until the legal aberration which opened the door to this slaughter has been corrected, the protests will continue,” Ed replied.
“And we’ll go on hoping that the histories of the next century will record that not all Americans were good Nazis during this dark period of our history.”
“Violent protests?”
“It’s violence we oppose.” The two of them were now maintaining strong eye contact, and Ralph thought Anne Rivers had what Carolyn would have called a case of hot thighs. Dan Dalton was standing off to one side of the screen, all but forgotten.
“And when Susan Day comes to Derry next month, can you guarantee her safety?”
Ed smiled, and in his mind’s eye Ralph saw him as he had been on that hot August afternoon less than a month ago-kneeling with one hand planted on either side of Ralph’s shoulders and breathing They burn the fetuses over in Newport into his face. Ralph shivered.
“In a country where thousands of children are sucked from the wombs of their mothers by the medical equivalent of industrial vacuum cleaners, I don’t believe anyone can guarantee anything,” Ed replied.
Anne Rivers looked at him uncertainly for a moment, as if deciding whether or not she wanted to ask another question (maybe for his telephone number), and then turned back to face the camera.
“This is Anne Rivers, at Derry Police Headquarters,” she said.
Lisette Benson reappeared, and something in the bemused cast of her mouth made Ralph think that perhaps he hadn’t been the only one to sense the attraction between interviewer and interviewee.
“We’ll be following this story all day,” she said. “Be sure to tune in at six for further updates. In Augusta, Governor Greta Powers responded to charges that she may have-” Lois got up and pushed the Off button on the TV. She simply stared at the darkening screen for a moment, then sighed heavily and sat down. “I have blueberry compote,” she said, “but after that, do either of you want any?”
Both men shook their heads. McGovern looked at Ralph and said, “That was scary.”
Ralph nodded. He kept thinking of how Ed had gone striding back and forth through the spray thrown by the lawn-sprinkler, breaking the rainbows with his body, pounding his fist into his open palm.
“How could they let him Out On bail and then interview him on the news as if he was a normal human being?” Lois asked indignantly.
“After what he did to poor Helen? My God, that Anne Rivers looked ready to invite him home to dinner!”
“Or to eat crackers in bed with her,” Ralph said dryly.
“The assault charge and this stuff today are entirely different matters,” McGovern said, “and you can bet your boots the lawyer or lawyers these yo-yos have got on retainer will be sure to keep it that way.”
“And even the assault charge was only a misdemeanor,” Ralph reminded her.
“How can assault be a misdemeanor?” Lois asked. “I’m sorry, but I never did understand that part.”
“It’s a misdemeanor when you only do it to your wife,” McGovern said, hoisting his satiric eyebrow. “It’s the American way, Lo.”
She twisted her hands together restlessly, took Mr. Chasse down from the television, looked at him for a moment, then put him back and resumed twisting her hands, “Well, the law’s one thing,” she said, “and I’d be the first to admit that I don’t understand it all. But somebody ought to tell them he’s crazy.
That he’s a wife-beater and he’s crazy.”
“You don’t know how crazy,” Ralph said, and for the first time he told them the story of what had happened the previous summer, out by the airport. It took about ten minutes. When he finished, neither of them said anything-they only looked at him with wide eyes.
“What?” Ralph asked uneasily. “You don’t believe me? You think I imagined it?”
“Of course I believe it,” Lois said. “I was just… well… stunned.
And frightened.”
“Ralph, I think maybe you ought to pass that story on to John Leydecker,” McGovern said. “I don’t think he can do a goddam thing with it, but considering Ed’s new playmates, I think it’s information he should have.”
Ralph thought it over carefully, then nodded and pushed himself to his feet. “No time like the present,” he said. “Want to come, Lois?
“She thought it over, then shook her head. “I’m tired out,” she said.
“And a little-what do the kids call it these days?-a little freaked.
I think I’ll put my feet up for a bit. Take a nap.”
“You do that,” Ralph said. “You do look a little tuckered. And thanks for feeding us.” Impulsively, he bent over her and kissed the corner of her mouth. Lois looked up at him with startled gratitude.
Ralph turned off his own television a little over six hours later, as Lisette Benson finished the evening news and handed off to the sports guy. The demonstration at WomanCare had been bumped to the number-two slot-the evening’s big story was the continuing a allegation that Governor Greta Powers had used cocaine as a grad student-and there was nothing new, except that Dan Dalton was now being identified as the head of The Friends of Life.
Ralph thought figurehead was probably a better word. Was Ed actually in charge yet? If he wasn’t, Ralph guessed he would be before longChristmas at the latest. A potentially more interesting question was what Ed’s employers thought about Ed’s legal adventures up the road in Derry. Ralph had an idea they would be a lot less comfortable with what had gone on today than with last month’s domesticabuse charge; he had read only recently that Hawking Labs would soon become the fifth such research center in the Northeast to be working with fetal tissue.
They probably wouldn’t applaud the information that one of their research chemists had been arrested for chucking dolls filled with fake blood at the side of a clinic that did abortions. And if they knew how crazy he really wasWho’s going to tell them, Ralph? You?
No. That was a step further than he was willing to go, at least for the time being. Unlike going down to the police station with McGovern to talk to John Leydecker about the incident last summer, it felt like persecution. Like writing KILL THIS CUNT beside a picture of a woman with whose views you didn’t agree.
That’s bullshit, and you know it, “I don’t know anything,” he said, getting up and going to the window. “I’m too tired to know anything.” But as he stood there, looking across the street at two men coming out of the Red Apple with a six-pack apiece, he suddenly did know something, remembered something that drew a cold line up his back.
This morning, when he had come out of the Rite Aid and been overwhelmed by the auras-and a sense of having stepped up to some new level of awareness-he had reminded himself again and again to enjoy but not to believe; that if he failed to make that crucial distinction, he was apt to end up in the same boat as Ed deep Neal!.
That thought had almost opened the door on some associative memory, but the shifting auras in the parking lot had pulled him away from it before it had been able to kick all the way in.
Now it came to him: Ed had said something about seeing auras, hadn’t he?
No-he might have meant auras, but the word he actually used was colors. I’m almost positive of that. It was right after he talked about seeing the corpses of baht’es everyplace, even on the roofs. He saidRalph watched the two men get into a beat-up old van and thought that he would never be able to remember Ed’s words exactly; he was just too tired. Then, as the van drove off trailing a cloud of exhaust that reminded him of the bright maroon stuff he’d seen coming from the tailpipe of the bakery truck that noon, another door opened and the memory did c(gene.
“He said that sometimes the world is full of colors,” Ralph told his empty apartment, “but that at some point they all started turning black. I think that was it.”
It was close, but was it everything? Ralph thought there had been at least a little more to Ed’s spiel, but he couldn’t remember what.
And did it matter, anyway? His nerves suggested strongly that it did-the cold line up his back had both widened and deepened.
Behind him, the telephone rang. Ralph turned and saw it sitting in a bath of baleful red light, dark red, the color of nosebleeds and (cocks fighting cocks)
rooster-combs.
No, part of his mind moaned. Oh no, Ralph, don’t get going on this again-Each time the phone rang, the envelope of light got brighter.
During the intervals of silence, it darkened. It was like looking at a ghostly heart with a telephone inside it.
Ralph closed his eyes tightly, and when he opened them again, the red aura around the telephone was gone.
No, you just can’t see it right now. I’m not sure, but I think -you might have willed it away. Like something in a lucid dream.
As he crossed the room to the telephone, he told himself-and in no uncertain terms-that that idea was as crazy as seeing the auras in the first place. Except it wasn’t, and he knew it wasn’t. Because if it was crazy, how come it had taken only one look at that roosterred halo of light to make him sure that it was Ed Deepneau calling?
. That’s crap, Ralph. You think it’s Ed because Ed’s on your mind… and because you’re so tired your head’s getting funny. Go on, pick it UP, you’ll see. It’s not the tell-tale heart, not even the tell-tale phone.
It’s probably some guy wanting to sell you subscriptions or the lady at the blood-bank, wondering why you haven’t been in lately.
Except he knew better.
