The eyes widened behind the dirty hornrims-not just in surprise but in shock-and the man with the zany hair recoiled a little. For a moment the terrible pressure high on Ralph’s left side eased. It was his chance, the only one he was apt to have, and he took it, throwing himself to the right, falling off his chair and tumbling to the floor.
The back of his head smacked the tiles, but the pain seemed distant and unimportant compared to the relief at the removal of the knife-point.
The man with the zany hair squawked-a sound of mingled rage and resignation, as if he had become used to such setbacks over his long and difficult life. He leaned over Ralph’s now-empty chair, his twitching face thrust forward, his eyes looking like the sort of fantastic, glowing creatures which live in the ocean’s deepest trenches.
Ralph raised the spray-can and had just a moment to realize he hadn’t had time to check which direction the pinhole in the nozzle was pointing-he might very well succeed only in giving himself a faceful of Bodyguard.
No time to worry about that now.
He pressed the nozzle as the man with the zany hair thrust his knife forward. The man’s face was enveloped in a thin haze of droplets that looked like the stuff that came out of the pine-scented airfreshener Ralph kept on the bathroom toilet tank. The lenses of his glasses fogged over.
The result was immediate and all Ralph could have wished for.
The man with the zany hair screamed in pain, dropped his knife (it landed on Ralph’s left knee and came to rest between his legs), and clutched at his face, pulling his glasses off. They landed on the table.
At the same time the thin, somehow greasy aura around him flashed a brilliant red and then winked out-out of Ralph’s view, at least.
“I’m blind!” the man with the zany hair cried in a high, shrieky voice. “I’m blind, I’m blind!”
“No, you’re not,” Ralph said, getting shakily to his feet.
“You’re just-” The man with the zany hair screamed again and fell to the floor.
He rolled back and forth on the black and white tiles with his hands over his face, howling like a child who has gotten his hand caught in a door. Ralph could see little pie-wedges of cheeks between his splayed fingers. The skin there was turning an alarming shade of red.
Ralph told himself to leave the guy alone, that he was crazy as a loon and dangerous as a rattlesnake, but he found himself too horrified and ashamed of what he had done to take this no doubt excellent advice.
The idea that it had been a matter of survival, of disabling his assailant or dying, had already begun to seem unreal.
He bent down and put a tentative hand on the man’s arm. The nut rolled away from him and began to drum his dirty lowtop sneakers on the floor like a child having a tantrum. “oh you son of a bitch” he was screaming. “You shot me with something!” And then, incredibly: “I’ll sue the pants off you.”
“You’ll have to explain about the knife before you’re able to progress much with your lawsuit, I think,” Ralph said.
He saw the knife lying on the floor, reached for it, then thought again. It would be better if his fingerprints weren’t on it. As he straightened, a wave of dizziness rushed through his head and for a moment the rain beating against the window sounded hollow and distant.
He kicked the knife away, then tottered on his feet and had to grab the back of the chair he’d been sitting in to keep from falling over.
Things steadied again.
He heard approaching footsteps from the main lobby and murmuring, questioning voices.
Now you come, Ralph thought wearily. Where were you three minutes ago, when this guy was on the verge of popping my left lung like a balloon?
Mike Hanlon, looking slim and no more than thirty despite his tight cap of gray hair, appeared in the doorway. Behind him was the teenage boy Ralph recognized as the weekend desk assistant, and behind the teenager were four or five gawkers, probably from the periodicals room.
“Mr. Roberts!” Mike exclaimed. “Christ, how bad are you hurt?”
“I’m fine, it’s him that’s hurt,” Ralph said. But he happened to look down at himself as he pointed at the man on the floor and saw he wasn’t fine. His coat had pulled up when he pointed, and the left side of the plaid shirt beneath had gone a deep, sodden red in a teardrop shape that started just below the armpit and spread out from there.
“Shit,” he said faintly, and sat down in his chair again.
He bumped the hornrimmed glasses with his elbow and they skittered almost all the way across the table. The mist of droplets on their lenses made them look like eyes which had been blinded by cataracts.
“He shot me with acid!” the man on the floor screamed. “I can’t see and my skin is melting. I can feel it melting.l” To Ralph -, he sounded like an almost conscious parody of the Wicked Witch of the West.
Mike tossed a quick glance at the man on the floor, then sat down in the chair next to to Ralph. “What happened?”
“Well, it sure wasn’t acid,” Ralph said, and held up the can of Bodyguard. He set it on the table beside Patterns of Dreaming. “The lady who gave it to me said it’s not as strong as Mace, it Just irritates your eyes and makes you sick to your-”
“It’s not what’s wrong with him that I’m worried about,” Mike said impatiently.
“Anyone who can yell that loud probably isn’t going to die in the next three minutes, It’s you I’m worried about, Mr. Roberts-any idea how bad he stabbed you?”
“He didn’t actually stab me at all,” Ralph said. “He… sort of poked me. With that.” He pointed at the knife lying on the tile floor.
At the sight of the red tip, he felt another wave of faintness track through his head. It felt like an express train made of feather-pillows.
That was stupid, of course, made no sense at all, but he wasn’t in a very sensible frame of mind.
The assistant was looking cautiously down at the man on the floor.
“Uh-oh,” he said. “We know this guy, Mike-it’s Charlie Pickering.”
“Goodness-gracious, great balls of fire,” Mike said. “Now why aren’t I surprised?” He looked at the teenage assistant and sighed.
“Better call the cops, Justin. It looks like we’ve got us a situation here.”
“Am I in trouble for using that?” Ralph asked an hour later, and pointed to one of the two sealed plastic bags sitting on the cluttered surface of the desk in Mike Hanlin’s office. A strip of yellow tape, marked EVIDENCE amp;/ DATE 101,31 and SITE r of the DERRY PUBLIC LIBRARY ran across the front.
“Not as much as our old pal Charlie’s going to be in for using this,” John Leydecker said, and pointed to the other sealed bag, The hunting knife was inside, the blood on the tip now dried to a tacky maroon. Leydecker was wearing a University of Maine football sweater today. It made him look approximately the size of a dairy barn. “We still pretty much believe in the concept of self-defense out here in the sticks. We don’t talk it up much, though-it’s sort of like admitting you believe the world is flat.”
Mike Hanlon, who was leaning in the doorway, laughed.
Ralph hoped his face didn’t show how deeply relieved he felt. As a paramedic (one of the guys who had run Helen Deepneau to the hospital back in August, for all he knew) worked on him-first photographing, then disinfecting, finally butterfly-clamping and bandaging-he had sat with his teeth gritted, imagining a judge sentencing him to six months in the county clink for assault with a semideadly weapon. Hopefully, Mr. Roberts, this will serve as an example and a warning to any other old farts in this vicinity who may feel justified in carrying around spray-cans of disabling nerve-gas…
Leydecker looked once more at the six Polaroid photographs lined up along the side of Hanlon’s computer terminal. The fresh-faced emergency medical technician had taken the first three before patching Ralph up. These showed a small dark circle-it looked like the sort of oversized period made by children just learning to print low down on Ralph’s side. The E.M.T had taken the second set of three after applying the butterfly clamp and getting Ralph’s signature on a form attesting to the fact that he had been offered hospital service and had refused it. In this latter group of photographs, the beginnings of what was going to be an absolutely spectacular bruise could be seen.
“God bless Edwin Land and Richard Polaroid, Leydecker said, putting the photographs into another EVIDENCE Baggie.
“I don’t think there ever was a Richard Polaroid,” Mike Hanlon said from his spot in the doorway.
“Probably not, but God bless him just the same. No jury who got a look at these photos would do anything but give you a medal, Ralph, and not even Clarence Darrow could keep em out of evidence.” He looked back at Mike, “Charlie Pickering.”
Mike nodded. “Charlie Pickering.”
“Fuckhead.”
Mike nodded again. “Fuckhead deluxe.”
The two of them looked at each other solemnly, then burst into gales of laughter at the same moment. Ralph understood exactly how they felt-it was funny because it was awful and awful because it was funny-and he had to bite his lips savagely to keep from joining them.
The last thing in the world he wanted to do right now was get laughing; it would hurt like a bastard.
Leydecker took a handkerchief out of his back pocket, mopped his streaming eyes with it, and began to get himself under control.
“Pickering’s one of the right-to-lifers, isn’t he?” Ralph asked.
He was remembering how Pickering had looked when Hanlon’s teenage assistant had helped him sit up. Without his glasses, the man had looked about as dangerous as a bunny in a petshop window.
“You could say that,” Mike agreed dryly. “He’s the one they caught last year in the parking garage that services the hospital and WomanCare. He had a can of gasoline in his hand and a knapsack filled with empty bottles on his back.”
“Also strips of sheeting, don’t forget these,” Leydecker said.
“These were going to be his fuses. That was back when Charlie was a member in good standing of Daily Bread.”
“How close did he come to lighting the place up?” Ralph asked curiously.
Leydecker shrugged. “Not very. Someone in the group apparently decided firebombing the local women’s clinic might be a little closer to terrorism than politics and made an anonymous phone-call to Your local police authority,”
“Good deal,” Mike said. He snorted another little chuckle, then crossed his arms as if to hold any further outburst inside.
“Yeah,” Leydecker said. He laced his fingers together, stretched out his arms, and popped his knuckles. “Instead of prison, a thoughtful, caring ’judge sent Charlie to juniper Hill for six months’ worth of treatment and therapy, and they must have decided he was okay, because he’s been back in town since July or so.”
“Yep,” Mike agreed. “He’s down here just about every day. Kind of improving the tone of the place. Buttonholes everyone who comes in, practically, and gives them his little peptalk on how any woman who has an abortion is going to perish in brimstone, and how the real baddies like Susan Day are going to burn forever in a lake of fire. But I can’t figure out why he’d take after you, Mr. Roberts.”
“Just lucky, I guess.”
“Are you okay, Ralph?” Leydecker asked. “You look pale.”
“I’m fine,” Ralph said, although he did not feel fine; in fact, he had begun to feel very queasy.
“I don’t know about fine, but you’re sure lucky. Lucky those women gave you that can of pepper-gas, lucky you had it with you, and luckiest of all that
