I need to clear my head.” He could feel dull hot blood pounding away in his cheeks and brow. He tried to throw his brain into some forward gear that would allow it to leave this senseless, impotent rage behind, and couldn’t do it. He felt a lot as he had when he had awakened from the dream of Carolyn; his thoughts roared with terror and confusion, and as he started his legs moving, the sense he got was not one of walking but of falling, as he had fallen out of bed yesterday morning.
Still, he kept going. Sometimes that was all you could do.
“Ralph, you need to see a doctor!” McGovern called after him, and Ralph could no longer tell himself that he didn’t hear a weird, shrewish pleasure in McGovern’s voice. The concern which overlaid it was probably genuine enough but it was like sweet icing on a sour cake.
“Not a pharmacist, not a hypnotist, not an acupuncturist! You need to see your own family doctor!”
Yeah, the guy who buried my wife below the high-tide line he thought in a kind of mental scream. The guy who stuck her in sand up to her neck and then told her she didn’t have to worry about drowning as long as she kept taking her Valium and Tylenol-3.
Aloud he said, “I need to take a walk! That’s what I need and that’s all I need.” His heartbeat was now slamming into his temples like the short, hard blows of a sledgehammer, and it occurred to him that this was how strokes must happen; if he didn’t control himself soon, he was apt to fall down with what his father had called a bad-temper apoplexy.”
He could hear McGovern coming down the walk after him. Don’t touch me, Bill, Ralph thought. Don’t even put your hand on my shoulder, because I’m probably going to turn around and slug you if you do.
“I’m trying to help you, don’t you see that?” McGovern shouted.
The mailman on the other side of the street had stopped again to watch them, and outside the Red Apple, Karl, the guy who worked mornings, and Sue, the young woman who worked afternoons, were gawking frankly across the street at them. Karl, he saw, had a bag of hamburger buns in one hand. It was really sort of amazing, the things you saw at a time like this… although not as amazing as some of the things he had already seen that morning.
The things -you thought you saw, Ralph, a traitor voice whispered softly from deep inside his head.
“Walk,” Ralph muttered desperately. “Just a damn alkA mind-movie had begun to play in his head. It was an unpleasant one, the sort of film he rarely went to see even if he had seen everything else that was playing at the Cinema Center. The soundtrack to this mental horror flick seemed to be “Pop Goes the Weasel,” of all things.
“Let me tell you something, Ralph-at our age, mental illness is common! At our age it’s common as hell, So GO SEE YOUR DOCTOR.I” Mrs. Bennigan was now standing on her stoop, her walker abandoned at the foot of the front steps. She was still wearing her bright red fall coat, and her mouth appeared to be hanging open as she stared down the street at them.
“Do you hear me, Ralph? I hope you do l just hope you do.” Ralph walked faster, hunching his shoulders as if against a cold wind.
Suppose he just keeps on yelling, louder and louder? Suppose he follows me right up the street?
if he does that, people will think he’s the one who’s gone crazy, he told himself, but this idea had no power to soothe him. In his mind he continued to hear a piano playing a children’s tune-no, not really playiing,-picking it out in nursery-school punks and plonks: All around the mulberry bush The monkey chased the weasel, The monkey thought ’twas all in fun, POP. Goes the weasel!
And now Ralph began to see the old people of Harris Avenue, the ones who bought their insurance from companies that advertised on cable TV, the ones with the gallstones and the skin tumors, the ones whose memories were diminishing even as their prostates enlarged, the ones who were living on Social Security and peering at the world through thickening cataracts instead of rose-colored glasses. These were the people who now read all the mail which came addressed to Occupant and scanned the supermarket advertising circulars for specials on canned goods and generic frozen dinners. He saw them dressed in grotesque short pants and fluffy short skirts, saw them wearing beanies and tee-shirts which showcased such characters as Beavis and Butt-head and Rude Dog. He saw them, in short, as the world’s oldest pre-schoolers.
They were marching around a double row of chairs as a small bald man in a white smock played “Pop Goes the Weasel” on the piano.
Another baldy filched the chairs one by one, and when the music stopped and everyone sat down, one person-this time it had been May Locher, next time it would probably be McGovern’s old department headwas left standing.
That person would have to leave the room, of course. And Ralph heard McGovern laughing. Laughing because he’d found a seat again.
Maybe May Locher was dead, Bob Polhurst dying, Ralph Roberts losing his marbles, but he was still all right, William D.
McGovern, Esq was still fine, still dandy, still vertical and taking nourishment, still able to find a chair when the music stopped.
Ralph walked faster still, shoulders hunched even higher, anticipating another fusillade of advice and admonition. He thought it unlikely that McGovern would actually follow him up the street, but not entirely out of the question. If McGovern was angry enough he might do just that-remonstrating, telling Ralph to stop fooling around and go to the doctor, reminding him that the piano could stop anytime, any old time at all, and if he didn’t find a chair while the finding was good, he might be out of luck forever.
No more shouts came, however. He thought of looking back to see where McGovern was, then thought better of it. If he saw Ralph looking back, it might set him off all over again. Best to just keep going, So Ralph lengthened his stride, heading back in the direction of the airport again without even thinking about it, walking with his head down, trying not to hear the relentless piano, trying not to seeing not to see the old children marching around the chars, try’ the terrified eyes above their make-believe smiles.
It came to him as he walked that his hopes had been denied. He had been pushed into the tunnel after all, and the dark was all around him.
Part II
THE SECRET CITY
Old men ought to be explorers.
CHAPTER 11
The Derry of the Old Crocks was not the only secret city existing quietly within the place Ralph Roberts had always thought of as home; as a boy growing up in Mary Mead, where the various Old Cape housing developments stood today, Ralph had discovered there was, in addition to the Derry that belonged to the grownups, one that belonged strictly to the children. There were the abandoned hobo jungles near the railroad depot on Neibolt Street, where one could sometimes find tomato soup cans half-full of mulligatawny stew and bottles with a swallow or two of beer left in them; there was the alley behind the Aladdin Theater, where Bull Durham cigarettes were smoked and Black Cat firecrackers sometimes set off; there was the big old elm which overhung the river, where scores of boys and girls had learned to dive; there were the hundred (or perhaps it was closer to two hundred) tangled trails winding through the Barrens, an overgrown valley which slashed through the center of town like a badly healed scar.
These secret streets and highways in hiding were all below the adults’ plane of vision and were consequently overlooked by them… although there had been exceptions. One of them had been a cop named Aloysius Nell-Mr. Nell to generations of Derry children walked up toward the picnic area near and it was only now, as he the place where Harris Avenue became the Harris Avenue Extension, that it occurred to Ralph that Chris Nell was probably old Mr. Nell’s son… except that couldn’t be quite right, because the cop Ralph had first seen in the company of John Leydecker wasn’t old enough to be old Mr. Nell’s son. Grandson, more like it.
Ralph had become aware of a second secret city-one that belonged to the old folks-around the time he retired, but he hadn’t fully realized that he himself was a citizen of it until after Carol’s death.
What he had discovered then was a submerged geography eerily similar to the one he had known as a child, a place largely ignored by the hurry-to-work, hurry-to-play world which thumped and hustled all around it. The Derry of the Old Crocks overlapped yet a third secret city: the Derry of the Damned, a terrible place inhabited mostly by winos, runaways, and lunatics who could not be keptlocked up.
It was in the picnic area that Lafayette Chapin ha Ralph to one of life’s most important considerations… once you’d become a bona ride Old Crock, that was. This consideration had to do with one’s “real life.” The subject had come up while the two men were just getting to know one another. Ralph had asked Faye what he had done before he started coming out to the picnic area.
“Well, in my real life I was a carpenter n fancy cabinetmaker,” Chapin had replied, exposing his remaining teeth in a wide grin, “but all that ended almost ten year ago.” As if, Ralph remembered thinking, retirement was something like a vampire’s kiss, pulling those ’ who survived it into the world of the undead. And when you got right down to cases, was that really so far off the mark?
Now, with McGovern safely behind him (at least he hoped so), Ralph stepped through the screen of mixed oak and maple which shielded the picnic area from the Extension. He saw that eight or nine people had drifted in since his earlier walk, most with bag lunches or Coffee Pot sandwiches. The Eberlys and Zells were play I ing hearts with the greasy deck of Top Hole cards which was kept stashed in a knothole of a nearby oak; Faye and Doc Mulhare, a retired vet, were playing chess; a couple of kibbitzers wandered back and forth between the two games.
Games were what the picnic area was about-what most of the places in the
Derry of the Old Crocks were about-but Ralph thought the games were really just framework. What people actually came here for was to touch base, to report in, to confirm (if only to themselves) that they were still living some kind of life, real or otherwise.
Ralph sat on an empty bench near the Cyclone fence and traced one finger absently over the engraved carvings-names, initials, lots Of FUCK You’s-as he watched planes land at orderly two-minute intervals: a Cessna, a Piper, an Apache, a Twin Bonanza, the elevenforty-five Air Express out of Boston. He kept one ear cocked to the ebb and flow of conversation behind him. May Locher’s name was mentioned more than once. She had been known by several of these people, and the general opinion seemed to be Mrs. Perrine’s-that God had finally shown mercy and ended her suffering. Most of the talk today, however, concerned the impending visit of Susan Day.
As a rule, Politics wasn’t much of a conversational draw with the Old Crocks, who preferred a good bowel-cancer or stroke any day, but even out here the abortion issue exercised its singular ability to engage, inflame, and divide.
