lied to his wife about it, telling her that a hitchhiker had robbed him. Ralph told jimmy about his realization, at the age of forty-three, that he had become a terpin hydrate junkie, and about his painful, ultimately successful struggle to kick the habit.
He had no more told Carolyn about his bizarre cough-syrup addiction than jimmy V. had told his wife about his last B-girl.
A lot of trips; a lot of changed tires; a lot of jokes about the travelling salesman and the farmer’s beautiful daughter; a lot of late night talks that had gone on till all hours of the morning.
Sometimes it was God they had talked about, sometimes the IRS.
All in all, jimmy Vandermeer had been a damned good pal. Then Ralph had gotten his desk-job with the printing company and fallen out of touch with jimmy. He’d only begun to reconnect out here, and at a few of the other dim landmarks which dotted the Derry of the Old Crocks-the library, the pool-hall, the back room of Dully Sprague’s barber shop, four or five others. When jimmy told him hortly after Carolyn’s death that he had come through a bout with cancer a lung shy but otherwise okay, what Ralph had remembered was the man talking baseball or fishing as he fed smoldering Camel stubs into the slipstream rushing by the wing-window of the car, one after another.
I got lucky was what he had said. Me and the Duke, we both got it neither of them had stayed lucky, it seemed. Not that
“Oh, man,” Ralph said. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“He’s been in Derry Home almost three weeks now,” Faye said.
“Havin those radiation treatments and getting injects of poison that’s supposed to kill the cancer while it’s half-killing you. I’m surprised you didn’t know, Ralph.”
I suppose you are, but I’m not. The insomnia keeps swallowing stuff, you see. One day it’s the last Cup-A-Soup envelope you lose track of,next day it’s your sense of time,-the day after that it’s your old
???? friends.
???? Faye shook his head. 'Fucking cancer. It’s spooky, how it waits.”
???? Ralph nodded, now thinking of Carolyn. 'What room’s Jimmy in, do you
???? know? Maybe I’ll go visit him.”
????
“Just so happens I do. 315. Think you can remember it?” Ralph grinned. “For awhile, anyway.”
“Go see him if you can, sure-they got him pretty doped up, but he still knows who comes in, and I bet he’d love to see you. Him and you had a lot of high old times together, he told me once.”
“Well, you know,” Ralph said. “Couple of guys on the road, that’s all. If we flipped for the check in some diner, jimmy V. always called tails.” Suddenly he felt like crying.
“Lousy, isn’t it?” Faye said quietly. “Yes.”
“Well, you go see him. He’ll be glad, and you’ll feel better. That’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway. And don’t you go and forget the damn chess tournament!” Faye finished, straightening up and making a heroic effort to look and sound cheerful. “If you step out now, you’ll fuck up the seedings.”
“I’ll do my best.”
lucky. Except anyone did, in the end.
“Yeah, I know you will.” He made a fist and punched Ralph’s upper arm lightly. “And thanks again for stopping me before I could do something I’d, you know, feel bad about later.”
“Sure. Peacemaker Number One, that’s me.” Ralph started down the path which led to the Extension, then turned back. “You see that service road over there? The one that goes from General Aviation out to the street?” He pointed. A catering truck was currently driving away from the private terminal, its windshield reflecting bright darts of sunlight into their eyes. The truck stopped just short of the gate, breaking the electric-eye beam. The gate began to trundle open.
“Sure I do,” Faye said.
“Last summer I saw Ed Deepneau using that road, which means he had a key-card to the gate. Any idea how he would have come by a thing like that?”
“You mean The Friends of Life guy? Lab scientist who did a little research in wife-beating last summer?”
Ralph nodded. “But it’s the summer of ’92 I’m talking about. He was driving an old brown Datsun.”
Faye laughed. “I wouldn’t know a Datsun from a Toyota from a Honda, Ralph-I stopped being able to tell cars apart around the time Chevrolet gave up the gullwing tailfins. But I can tell you who mostly uses that road: caterers, mechanics, pilots, crew, and flightcontrollers. Some passengers have key-cards, I think, if they fly private a lot. The only scientists over there are the ones who work at the air-testing station. Is that the kind of scientist he is?”
“Nope, a chemist. He worked at Hawking Labs until just a little while ago.”
“Played with the white rats, did he? Well there aren’t any rats over at the airport-that I know of, anyway-but now that I think of it, there is one other bunch of people who use that gate.”
“Oh? Who?”
Faye pointed at a prefab building with a corrugated-tin roof standing about seventy yards from the General Aviation terminal. “See that building? That’s SoloTech.”
“What’s SoloTech?”
“A school,” Faye said. “They teach people to fly.”
Ralph walked back down Harris Avenue With his big hands stuffed into his pockets and his head lowered so he did not see much more than the cracks in the sidewalk passing beneath his sneakers. His mind was fixed on Ed Deepneau again… and on SoloTech. He had no way of knowing if SoloTech was the reason Ed had been out at the airport on the day he had run into Mr. West Side Gardeners, but all of a sudden that was a question to which Ralph very much wanted an answer. He was also curious as to just where Ed was living these days. He wondered if John Leydecker might share his curiosity on these two points, and decided to find out.
He was passing the unpretentious double storefront which housed George Lyford, C.P.A on one side and Maritime jewelry (WE BUY YOUR OLD GOLD AT TOP PRICES on the other, when he was pulled out of his thoughts by a short, strangled bark. He looked up and saw Rosalie sitting on the sidewalk just outside the upper entrance to Strawford Park. The old dog was panting rapidly; saliva drizzled off her lolling tongue, building up a dark puddle on the concrete between her paws.
Her fur was stuck together in dark clumps, as if she had been running, and the faded blue bandanna around her neck seemed to shiver with her rapid respiration. As Ralph looked at her, she gave another bark, this one closer to a yelp.
He glanced across the street to see what she was barking at and saw nothing but the Burry-Burry Laundromat. There were a few women moving around inside, but Ralph found it impossible to believe Rosalie was barking at them. No one at all was currently passing on the sidewalk in front of the coin-op laundry.
Ralph looked back and suddenly realized that Rosalie wasn’t just sitting on the sidewalk but crouching there… cowering there. She looked scared almost to death.
Until that moment, Ralph had never thought much about how eerily human the expressions and body language of dogs were: they grinned when they were happy, hung their heads when they were ashamed registered anxiety in their eyes and tension in the set of their shoulders-all things that people did. And, like people, they registered abject, total fear in every quivering line of the body.
He looked across the street again, at the spot where Rosalie’s attention seemed focused, and once again saw nothing but the laundry and the empty sidewalk in front of it. Then, suddenly, he remembered Natalie, the Exalted amp; Revered Baby, snatching at the grayblue contrails his fingers left behind as he reached out with them to wipe the milk from her chin. To anyone else she would have looked as if she were grabbing at nothing, the way babies always appeared to be grabbing at nothing… but Ralph had known better.
He had seen better.
Rosalie uttered a string of panicky yelps that grated on Ralph’s ear like the sound of unoiled hinges.
So far it’s only happened on its own but maybe I can make it happen. Maybe I can make myself seeSee what?
Well, the auras. Them, of course. And maybe whatever Rosalie (three-six-nine lion) was looking at, as well. Ralph already had a pretty good idea (the goose drank wine) of what it was, but he wanted to be sure. The question was how to do it.
How does a person see in the first place?
By looking, of course.
Ralph looked at Rosalie. Looked at her carefully, trying to see everything there was to see: the faded pattern on the blue bandanna which served as her collar, the dusty clumps and tangles in her uncared-for coat, the sprinkle of gray around her long muzzle, After a few moments of this she seemed to feel his gaze, for she turned, looked at him, and whined uneasily.
As she did, Ralph felt something turn over in his mind-it felt like the starter-motor of a car. There was a brief but very clear sense of being suddenly lighter, and then brightness flooded into the day.
He had found his way back into that more vivid, more deeply textured world. He saw a murky membrane-it made him think of spoiled eggwhite-swim into existence around Rosalie, and saw a dark gray balloon-string rising from her. Its point of origin wasn’t the skull, however, as had been the case in all the people Ralph had seen while in this heightened state of awareness; Rosalie’s balloon string rose from her muzzle.
Now you know the most essential difference between dogs and me, he thought. Their souls reside in different places.
“Doggy. Here, doggy, c’mere.”
Ralph winced and drew back from that voice, which was like chalk squeaking on a blackboard. The heels of his palms rose most of the way to his ears before he realized that wouldn’t help; he wasn’t really hearing it with his ears, and the part that the voice hurt the worst was deep inside his head, where his hands couldn’t reach.
[Hey, you fucking flea suitcase! You think I’ve got all day? Get your raggedy ass over here.”
Rosalie whined and switched her gaze from Ralph back toward whatever she had been looking at before. She started to get up, then shrank back down on her haunches again. The bandanna she wore was shaking harder than ever, and Ralph saw a dark crescent begill to spread around her left flank as her bladder let go.
He looked across the street and there was Doc #3, standing between the laundromat and the elderly apartment house next door, Doc #3 in his white smock (it was badly stained, Ralph noticed, as if he had been wearing it for a long time) and his midget-sized bluejeans.
He still had McGovern’s Panama on his head.
The hat now appeared to balance on the creature’s ears; it was so big for him that the top half of his head seemed submerged in it. He was grinning ferociously at the dog, and Ralph saw a double row of pointed white teeth-the teeth of a cannibal. In his left hand he was holding something which was either an old scalpel or a straight-razor.
Part of Ralph’s mind tried to convince him that it was blood he saw on the blade, but he was pretty sure it was just rust.
