“That doesn’t sound very scientific, Ralph.”
“I suppose not.”
She squeezed his arm and grinned up at him. “It does sound about right, though.”
He grinned back at her, “You need to take some more, too,” she told him. “it still feels wrong to me-like stealing-but if you don’t, I think you’re going to pass right out on your feet.”
“As soon as I can. Right now all I want to do is get out to High Ridge.” Yet once he got behind the wheel, his hand faltered away from the ignition key almost as soon as he touched it.
“Ralph? What is it?”
“Nothing… everything. I can’t drive like this. I’ll wrap us around a telephone pole or drive us into somebody’s living room,” He looked up at the sky and saw one of those huge birds, this one transparent, roosting atop a satellite dish on the roof of an apartment house across the way. A thin, lemon-colored haze drifted up from its folded prehistoric wings.
Are you seeing a. t? a part of his mind asked doubtfully.
Are you sure of that, Ralph? Are you really, really sure?
I’m seeing it, all right. Fortunately or unfortunately I’m seeing it all… but if there was ever a right time to see such things, this isn’t it.
He concentrated, and felt that interior blink happen deep within his mind. The bird faded away like a ghost-image on a TV screen.
The warmly glowing palette of colors spread out across the morning lost their vibrancy. He went on perceiving that other part of the world long enough to see the colors run into one another, creating the bright gray-blue haze which he’d begun seeing on the day he’d gone into Day Break, Sun Down for coffee and pie with Joe Wyzer, and then that was gone, too. Ralph felt an almost crushing need to curl up, pillow his head on his arm, and go to sleep. He began taking long, slow breaths instead, pulling each one a little deeper into his lungs, and then turned the ignition key. The engine roared into life, accompanied by that clacking sound. It was much louder now.
“What’s that?” Lois asked.
“I don’t know,” Ralph said, but he thought he did-either a tierod or a piston. In either case they would be in trouble if it let go.
At last the sound began to diminish, and Ralph dropped the transmission into Drive. “Just poke me hard if you see me starting to nod off, Lois.”
“You can count on it,” she said. “Now let’s go.”
CHAPTER 21
The Dunkin’ Donuts on Newport Avenue was a jolly pink sugarchurch in a drab neighborhood of tract houses. Most had been built in a single year, 1946, and were now crumbling. This was Derry’s Old Cape, where elderly cars with wired-up mufflers and cracked windshields wore bumper-stickers saying things like DON’T BLAME ME I VOTED FOR PEROT and ALL TIIL, WAY with THE N.R.A where no house was complete without at least one Fisher-Price Big Wheel trike standing on the listless lawn, where girls were stepping dynamite at sixteen and all too often dull-eyed, fat-bottomed mothers of three at twenty-four.
Two boys on fluorescent bikes with extravagant ape-hanger handlebars were doing wheelies in the parking lot, weaving in and out of each other’s path with a dexterity that suggested a solid background in video gaming and possible high-paying futures as airtraffic controllers… if they managed to stay away from coke ajicl car accidents, that was. Both wore their hats backward. Ralph wondered briefly why they weren’t in school on a Friday morning, or at least on the way, and decided he didn’t care.
Probably they didn’t, either.
Suddenly the two bikes, which had been avoiding each other easily up until then, crashed together. Both boys fell to the pavement, then got to their feet almost immediately. Ralph was relieved to see neither was hurt; their auras did not even flicker.
“Goddam wet end!” the one in the Nirvana tee-shirt yelled indignantly at his friend. He was perhaps eleven. “What the hell’s the matter with you? You ride a bike like old people fuck!”
“I heard something,” the other said, resetting his hat carefully on his dirty-blonde hair. “Great big bang. You tellin me you didn’t hear it? Boo-ya!”
“I didn’t hear jack shit,” Nirvana Boy said. He held out his palms, which were now dirty (or perhaps just dirtier) and oozing blood from two or three minor scratches. “Look at this-fuckin road-rash!”
“You’ll live,” his friend said.
“Yeah, but-” Nirvana Boy noticed Ralph, leaning against his rusty whale of an Oldsmobile with his hands in his pockets, watching them.
“The fuck you looking at?”
“You and your friend,” Ralph said. “That’s all.”
“That’s all, huh?”
“Yep-the whole story.”
Nirvana Boy glanced at his friend, then back at Ralph. His eyes glowered with a purity of suspicion which, in Ralph’s experience, could be found only here in the Old Cape. “You got a problem?”
“Not me,” Ralph said. He had inhaled a great deal of Nirvana Boy’s russet-colored aura and now felt quite a bit like Superman on a speed trip. He also felt like a child-molester. “I was just thinkingthat we didn’t talk much like you and your friend when I was a kid.”
Nirvana Boy regarded him insolently. “Yeah? What’d you talk like?”
“I can’t quite remember,” Ralph said, “but I don’t think we sounded quite so much like shitheads.” He turned away from them as the screen door slammed. Lois came out of the Dunkin’ Donuts with a large container of coffee in each hand. The boys, meanwhile, jumped on their fluorescent bikes and streaked off, Nirvana Boy giving Ralph one final distrustful look over his shoulder.
“Can you drink this and drive the car at the same time?” Lois asked, handing him a coffee.
“I think so,” Ralph said, “but I don’t really need it anymore.
I’m fine, Lois.”
She glanced after the two boys, then nodded. “Let’s go.”
The world blazed all around them as they drove out Route 33 toward what had once been Barrett’s Orchards, and they didn’t have to slide even a single inch up the ladder of perception to see it. The city fell away and they drove through second-growth woods on fire with autumn. The sky was a blue lane above the road, and the Oldsmobile’s shadow raced beside them, wavering across leaves and branches.
“God, it’s so beautiful,” Lois said. “Isn’t it beautiful, Ralph?”
“Yes. It is.”
“You know what I wish? More than anything?”
He shook his head.
“That we could just pull over to the side of the road-stop the car and get out and walk into the woods a little way, Find a clearing, 541 sit in the sun, and look up at the clouds.
You’d say, ’Look at that one, Lois, it looks like a horse.” And I’d say, ’Look over there, Ralph, it’s a man with a broom.” Wouldn’t that be nice?”
“Yes,” Ralph said. The woods opened in a narrow aisle on their left; power-poles marched down the steep slope like soldiers.
Hightension lines shone silver between them in the morning sunlight, gossamer as spiderwebs. The feet of the poles were buried in brazen drifts of red sumac, and when Ralph looked up above the slash he saw a hawk riding an air-current as invisible as the world of auras.
“Yes,” he said again. “That would be nice. Maybe we’ll even get a chance to do it sometime. But
“But what?”
“’Each thing I do I rush through so I can do something else,” Ralph said.
She looked at him, a little startled. “What a terrible idea!”
“Yeah. I think most true ideas are terrible. It’s from a book of poems called Cemetery Nights. Dorrance Marstellar gave it to me on the same day he slipped upstairs to my apartment and put the spray can of Bodyguard into my jacket pocket.”
He glanced up into his rear-view mirror and saw at least two miles of Route 33 laid out behind them, a strip of black running through the fiery woods. Sunlight twinkled on chrome. A car. Maybe two or three.
And coming fast, from the look.
“Old Dor,” she mused.
“Yes. You know, Lois, I think he’s also a part of this.”
“Maybe he is,” Lois said. “And if Ed’s a special case, maybe Dorrance is, too.”
“Yes, that thought occurred to me. The most interesting thing about him-Old Dor, I mean, not Ed-is that I don’t think Clotho and Lachesis know about him. It’s like he’s from an entirely different neighborhood.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not sure. But Mr. C. and Mr. L. never nentioned him, Lind that… that seems…”
He glanced back at the rear-view. Now there was a fourth car, behind the others but moving up fast, and he could see the blue flashers atop the closer three. Police cars. Headed for Newport? No, probably headed for someplace a little closer than that.
Maybe they’re after us, Ralph thought. Maybe Lois’s suggestio that the Richards woman forget we were there didn’t hold.
But would the police send four cruisers after two golden-agers in a rustbucket Oldsmobile? Ralph didn’t think so. Helen’s face suddenly flashed into his mind. He felt a sinking in the pit of his stomach as he guided the Olds over to the side of the road.
“Ralph? What-” Then she heard the rising howl of the sirens and turned in her seat, alarm widening her eyes. The first three police-cars roared past at better than eighty miles an hour, pelting Ralph’s car with grit and sending crisp fallen leaves into dancing dervishes in their wake.
“Ralph!” she nearly screamed. “What if it’s High Ridge? Helen’s out there! Helen and her baby!”
“I know,” Ralph said, and as the fourth police car slammed by them hard enough to rock the Oldsmobile on its springs, he felt that interior blink happen
