But it didn’t end there. By the first week of May, Ralph was waking up to birdsong at 5:15 a.m. He tried earplugs for a few nights, although he doubted from the outset that they would work. It wasn’t the newly returned birds that were waking him up, nor the occasional delivery-truck backfire out on Harris Avenue. He had always been the sort of guy who could sleep in the middle of a brass marching band, and he didn’t think that had changed. What had changed was inside his head. There was a switch in there, something was turning it on a little earlier every day, and Ralph hadn’t the slightest idea of how to keep it from happening.
By June he was popping out of sleep like jack out of his box at 4:30 a.m. 4:45 at the latest. And by the middle of July-not quite as hot as July of ’92, but bad enough, thanks very much-he was snapping to at around four o’clock. It was during those long hot nights, taking up too little of the bed where he and Carolyn had made love on so many hot nights (and cold ones), that he began to consider what a hell his life would become if sleep departed entirely.
In daylight he was still able to scoff at the notion, but he was discovering certain dismal truths about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dark night of the soul, and the grand-prize winner was this: at 4:15 a.m anything seems possible. Anything.
During the days he was able to go on telling himself that he was simply experiencing a readjustment of his sleep-cycle, that his body was responding in perfectly normal fashion to a number of big changes in his life, retirement and the loss of his wife being the two biggest.
He sometimes used the word loneliness when he thought about his new life, but he shied away from The Dreaded D-Word, stuffing it back into the deep closet of his subconscious whenever it happened to glimmer for a moment in his thoughts. Loneliness was okay. Depression most certainly was not.
Maybe you need to get more exercise, he thought. Do some walking’ like you used to last summer. After all, you’ve been leading a pretty sedentary life-get up, eat a toast, read a book, watch some TV, get a sandwich across the street in the Red Apple for lunch, potter around in the garden a little, maybe go to the library or visit with Helen and the hah f hey happen to be sitting out, eat upper, maybe sit on the porch and visit with McGovern or Lois Chasse for awhile. Then what?
Read a little more, watch a little more TV, wash up, go to bed.
Sedentary.
Boring. No wonder you wake up early.
Except that was crap. His life sounded sedentary, yes, no doubt, but it really wasn’t. The garden was a good example. What he did out there was never going to win him any prizes, but it was a hell of a long way from “pottering around.” Most afternoons he weeded until sweat made a dark tree-shape down the back of his shirt and spread damp circles at his armpits, and he was often trembling with exhaustion by the time he let himself go back inside. “Punishment” probably would have been closer to the mark than “pottering,” but punishment for what?
Waking up before dawn?
Ralph didn’t know and didn’t care. Working in the garden filled up a large piece of the afternoon, it took his mind off things he didn’t really care to think of, and that was enough to justify the aching muscles and the occasional lights of black spots in front of his eyes.
He began his extended visits to the garden shortly after the Fourth of July and continued all through August, long after the early crops had been harvested and the later ones had been hopelessly stunted by the lack of rain.
“You ought to quit that,” Bill McGovern told him one night as they sat on the porch, drinking lemonade. This was in mid-August, and Ralph had begun to wake up around three-thirty each morning.
It’s got to be hazardous to your health. Worse, you look like a lunatic.”
“Maybe I am a lunatic,” Ralph responded shortly, and either his tone or the look in his eyes must have been convincing, because McGovern changed the subject.
He did begin walking again-nothing like the Marathons of ’92, but he managed two miles a day if it wasn’t raining. His usual route took him down the perversely named Up-Mile Hill, to the Derry Public Library, and then on to Back Pages, a used-book store and newsstand on the corner of Witcham and Main.
Back Pages stood next to a jumbled junkatorium called Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes, and as he passed this store one day during the August of his discontent, Ralph saw a new poster among the announcements of outdated bean suppers and ancient church socials, placed so it covered roughly half of a yellowing PAT BUCHANAN FOR PRESIDENT placard.
The woman in the two photographs at the top of the poster was a pretty blonde in her late thirties or early forties, but the style of the photos-unsmiling full face on the left, unsmiling profile on the right, plain white background in both-was unsettling enough to stop Ralph in his tracks. The photos made the woman look as if she belonged on a Post office wall or in a TV docudrama… and that, the poster’s printed matter made clear, was no accident.
The photos were what stopped him, but it was the woman’s name that held him.
WANTED FOR MURDER SUSAN EDWINA DAY was printed across the top in big black letters. And below the simulated mug-shots, in red: STAY OUT OF OUR CITY!
There was a small line of print at the very bottom of the poster.
Ralph’s close vision had deteriorated quite a bit since Carolyn’s death-gone to hell in a handbasket might actually have been a more accurate way of putting it-and he had to lean forward until his brow was pressed against the dirty show window of Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes before he could decipher it: Paid for by the Mane LifeWatch Committee Far down in his mind a voice whispered: Hey, hey, Susan Day.
Hou, many kids did you kill today?
Susan Day, Ralph recalled, was a Political activist from either New York or Washington, the sort of fast-speaking woman who regularly drove taxi-drivers, barbers, and hardhat construction workers into foaming frenzies. Why that particular little jangle of doggerel had come into his mind, however, he couldn’t say; it was tagged to some memory that wouldn’t quite come. Maybe his tired old brains were just cross-referencing that sixties Vietnam protest chant, the one which had gone “Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?”
No, that’s not it. he thought. Close, but no cigar. It was just before his mind could cough up Ed Deepneau’s name and face, a voice spoke from almost beside him. “Earth to Ralph, earth to Ralph, come in, Ralphie-baby!”
Roused out of his thoughts, Ralph turned toward the voice. He was both shocked and amused to find he had almost been asleep on his feet.
Christ, he thought, you never know how important sleep is until you miss a little. Then all the floors start to tilt and all the corners on things start to round off.
It was Hamilton Davenport, the proprietor of Back Pages, who had spoken to him. He was stocking the library cart he kept in front of his shop with brightly jacketed paperbacks. His old corncob pipe-to Ralph it always looked like the stack of a model steamship-jutted from the corner of his mouth, sending little puffs of blue smoke into the hot, bright air. Winston Smith, his old gray tomcat, sat in the open doorway of the shop with his tail curled around his paws. He looked at Ralph with yellow-eyed indifference, as if to say, You think you know old, my friend? I’m here to testify you don’t know dick about getting old.
“Sheesh, Ralph,” Davenport said. “I must have called your name at least three times.”
“I guess I was woolgathering,” Ralph said. He stepped past the library cart, leaned in the doorway (Winston Smith held his place with regal disinterest), and grabbed the two papers he bought every day: a Boston Globe and a USA Today. The Derry News came right to the house, courtesy of Pete the paperboy. Ralph sometimes told people that he was sure one of the three papers was comic relief, but he had never been able to make up his mind which one it was.
“I haven’t-” He broke off as Ed Deepneau’s face came into his mind. It was out by the airport last summer he’d heard that nasty little chant from, and it really wasn’t any wonder it had taken him a little while to retrieve the memory, Ed Deepneau was the last person in the world from whom you’d expect to hear something like that.
“Ralphie?” Davenport said. “You just shut down on me.”
Ralph blinked. “Oh, sorry. I haven’t been sleeping very well, that’s what I started to say.”
“Bummer… but there are worse problems. just drink a glass of warm milk and listen to some quiet music half an hour before bed.”
Ralph had begun to discover this summer that everyone in America apparently had a pet remedy for insomnia, some bit of bedtime magic that had been handed down through the generations like the family Bible.
“Bach’s good, also Beethoven, and William Ackerman ain’t bad. But the real trick”-Davenport raised one finger impressively to emphasize this-“is not to get up from your chair during that half hour.
Not for anything. Don’t answer the phone, don’t wind up the dog and put out the alarm-clock, don’t decide to brush your teeth… nothing. Then, when you do go to bed… barn! Out like a light!”
“What if you’re sitting there in your favorite easy chair and all at once you realize you have a call of nature?” Ralph asked. “These things can come on pretty suddenly when you get to be my age.”
“Do it in your pants,” Davenport said promptly, and burst out laughing. Ralph smiled, but it had a dutiful feel. His insomnia was rapidly losing whatever marginal humor value it might once have had.
“In your pants.” Ham chortled. He slapped the library cart and wagged his head back and forth.
Ralph happened to glance down at the cat. Winston Smith looked blandly back at him, and to Ralph his calm yellow gaze seemed to say, Yes, that’s right, He’s a fool, but he’s my fool.
“Not bad, huh? Hamilton Davenport, master of the snappy comeback.
Do it in your. He snorted laughter, shook his head, then took the two dollar bills Ralph was holding out. He slipped them into the pocket of his short red apron and came out with some change. “That about right?”
“You bet. Thanks, Ham.”
Uh-huh. And all joking aside, try the music. It really works.
Mellows out your brain-waves, or something.”
“I will.” And the devil of it was, he probably would, as he had already tried Mrs. Rapaport’s lemon-and-hot-water recipe, and Shawna McClure’s advice on how to clear his mind by slowing his respiration and concentrating on the word cool (except when Shawna said it, the word came out cuhhhh-ooooooooooool). When you were trying to deal with a slow but relentless erosion of your good sleeptime, any folk remedy started to look good.
Ralph began to turn away, then turned back. “What’s with that poster next door?”
Ham Davenport wrinkled his nose. “Dan Dalton’s place? I don’t look in there at all, if I can help it. Screws up my appetite. Has he got something new and disgusting in the window?”
“I guess it’s new-it’s not as yellow as the rest of them, and there’s a notable lack of flydirt on it. Looks like a wanted poster, only it’s Susan Day in the photos.”
“Susan Day on a-son of a bitch!” He cast a dark and humorless look at the shop next door.
“What is she, President of the National Organization of Women, or something?”
