His list of sure-fire, never-miss folk remedies continued to grow, and it had occurred to him more than once that he could write an amusing little book on the subject . . . if, that was, he ever got enough sleep to make organized thinking possible again. This late summer he was doing well to slide into matching socks each day, and his mind kept returning to his purgatorial efforts to find a Cup-A-Soup in the kitchen cabinet on the day Helen had been beaten. There had been no return to that level since, because he had managed at least some sleep every night, but Ralph was terribly afraid he would arrive there again - and perhaps places beyond there - if things didn't improve. There were times (usually sitting in the wing-back chair at four-thirty in the morning) when he swore he could actually feel his brains draining.
The remedies ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. The best example of the former was a full-color brochure advertising the wonders of the Minnesota Institute for Sleep Studies in St Paul. A fair example of the latter was the Magic Eye, an all-purpose amulet sold through supermarket tabloids like the National Enquirer and Inside View. Sue, the counter-girl at the Red Apple, bought one of these and presented it to him one afternoon. Ralph looked down at the badly painted blue eye staring up at him from the medallion (which he believed had probably started life as a poker-chip) and felt wild laughter bubbling up inside him. He somehow managed to suppress it until he had regained the safety of his own upstairs apartment across the street, and for that he was very grateful. The gravity with which Sue had given it to him - and the expensive-looking gold chain she had threaded through the eyelet on top - suggested it had cost her a fair amount of money. She had regarded Ralph with something close to awe since the day the two of them had rescued Helen. This made Ralph uncomfortable, but he had no idea what to do about it. In the meantime, he supposed it didn't hurt to wear the medallion so she could see the shape of it under his shirt. It didn't help him sleep, though.
After taking his statement on Ralph's part in the Deepneaus' domestic problems, Detective John Leydecker had pushed back his desk chair, laced his fingers together behind his not inconsiderable breadth of neck, and said that McGovern had told him Ralph suffered from insomnia. Ralph allowed that he did. Leydecker nodded, rolled his chair forward again, clasped his hands atop the litter of paperwork beneath which the surface of his desk was mostly buried, and looked at Ralph seriously.
'Honeycomb,' he said. His tone of voice reminded Ralph of McGovern's tone when he had suggested that whiskey was the answer, and his reply now was exactly the same.
'I beg your pardon?'
'My grandfather swore by it,' Leydecker said. 'Little piece of honeycomb just before bedtime. Suck the honey out of the comb, chew the wax a little - like you would a wad of gum - then spit it out. Bees secrete some sort of natural sedative when they make honey. Put you right out.'
'No kidding,' Ralph said, simultaneously believing it was utter crap and believing every word. 'Where would a person get honeycomb, do you think?'
'Nutra - the health food store out at the mall. Try it. By next week this time your troubles are going to be over.'
Ralph enjoyed the experiment - the comb honey was so sweetly powerful it seemed to suffuse his whole being - but he still woke at 3:10 a.m. after the first dosage, at 3:08 after the second, and at 3:07 after the third. By then the small piece of honeycomb he'd purchased was gone, and he went out to Nutra right away for another one. Its value as a sedative might be nil, but it made a wonderful snack; he only wished he had discovered it earlier.
He tried putting his feet in warm water. Lois bought him something called an All-Purpose Gel Wrap from a catalogue - you put it around your neck and it was supposed to take care of your arthritis as well as help you sleep (it did neither for Ralph, but he had only the mildest case of arthritis to begin with). Following a chance meeting with Trigger Vachon at the counter of Nicky's Lunch, he tried camomile tea. 'That cammy's a beaut,' Trig told him. 'You gonna sleep great, Ralphie.' And Ralph did . . . right up until 2:58 a.m., that was.
Those were the folk cures and homeopathic remedies he tried. Ones he didn't included mega-vitamin packages which cost much more than Ralph could afford to spend on his fixed income, a yoga position called The Dreamer (as described by the postman, The Dreamer sounded to Ralph like a fine way to get a look at your own hemorrhoids), and marijuana. Ralph considered this last one very carefully before deciding it would very likely turn out to be an illegal version of the whiskey and honeycomb and the camomile tea. Besides, if McGovern found out Ralph was smoking pot, he would never hear the end of it.
And through all these experiments a voice in his brain kept asking him if he really was going to have to get down to eye of newt and tongue of toad before he gave up and went to the doctor. That voice was not so much critical as genuinely curious. Ralph had become fairly curious himself.
On September 10th, the day of the first Friends of Life demonstration at WomanCare, Ralph decided that he would try something from the drugstore . . . but not the Rexall downtown where he'd gotten Carolyn's prescriptions filled. They knew him down there, knew him well, and he didn't want Paul Durgin, the Rexall druggist, to see him buying sleeping-pills. It was probably stupid - like going across town to buy rubbers - but that didn't change the way he felt. He had never traded at the Rite Aid across from Strawford Park, so that was where he meant to go. And if the drugstore version of newt's eye and toad's tongue didn't work, he really would go to the doctor.
Is that true, Ralph? Do you really mean it?
'I do,' he said out loud as he walked slowly down Harris Avenue in the bright September sunshine. 'Be damned if I'll put up with this much longer.'
Big talk, Ralph, the voice replied skeptically.
Bill McGovern and Lois Chasse were standing outside the park, having what looked like an animated discussion. Bill looked up, saw him, and motioned for him to come over. Ralph went, not liking the combination of their expressions: bright-eyed interest on McGovern's face, distress and worry on Lois's.
'Have you heard about the thing out at the hospital?' she asked as Ralph joined them.
'It wasn't at the hospital, and it wasn't a "thing",' McGovern said testily. 'It was a demonstration - that's what they called it, anyway - and it was at WomanCare, which is actually behind the hospital. They took a bunch of people to jail - somewhere between six and two dozen, nobody really seems to know yet.'
'One of them was Ed Deepneau!' Lois said breathlessly, and McGovern shot her a disgusted glance. He clearly believed that handling this piece of news had been his job.
'Ed!' Ralph said, startled. 'Ed's in Fresh Harbor!'
'Wrong,' McGovern said. The battered brown fedora he was wearing today gave him a slightly rakish look, like a newspaperman in a forties crime drama. Ralph wondered if the Panama was still lost or had merely been retired for the fall. 'Today he's once more cooling his heels in our picturesque city jail.'
'What exactly happened?'
But neither of them really knew. At that point the story was little more than a rumor which had spread through the park like a contagious headcold, a rumor which was of particular interest in this part of town because Ed Deepneau's name was attached to it. Marie Callan had told Lois that there had been rock-throwing involved, and that was why the demonstrators had been arrested. According to Stan Eberly, who had passed the story on to McGovern shortly before McGovern ran into Lois, someone - it might have been Ed, but it might well have been one of the others - had Maced a couple of doctors as they used the walkway between WomanCare and the back entrance to the hospital. This walkway was technically public property, and had become a favorite haunt of anti-abortion demonstrators during the seven years that WomanCare had been providing abortions on demand.
The two versions of the story were so vague and conflicting that Ralph felt he could reasonably hope neither was true, that perhaps it was just a case of a few overenthusiastic people who'd been arrested for trespassing, or something. In places like Derry, that kind of thin
g happened; stories had a way of inflating like beachballs as they were passed from mouth to mouth.
Yet he couldn't shake the feeling that this time it would turn out to be more serious, mostly because both the Bill version and the Lois version included Ed Deepneau, and Ed was not your average anti-abortion protestor. This was, after all, the guy who had pulled a clump of his wife's hair right out of her scalp, rearranged her dental work, and fractured her cheekbone simply because he had seen her name on a petition which mentioned WomanCare. This was the guy who seemed honestly convinced that someone calling himself the Crimson King - it would be a great name for a pro wrestler, Ralph thought - was running around Derry, and that his minions were hauling their unborn victims out of town on flatbed trucks (plus a few pickups with the fetuses stuffed into barrels marked WEED-GO). No, he had an idea that if Ed had been there, it had probably not been just a case of someone accidentally bonked on the head with a protest sign.
'Let's go up to my house,' Lois proposed suddenly. 'I'll call Simone Castonguay. Her niece is the day receptionist at WomanCare. If anyone knows exactly what happened up there this morning, it'll be Simone - she'll have called Barbara.'
'I was just on my way down to the supermarket,' Ralph said. It was a lie, of course, but surely a very small one; the market stood next to the Rite Aid in the strip-mall half a block down from the park. 'Why don't I stop in on my way back?'
'All right,' Lois said, smiling at him. 'We'll expect you in a few minutes, won't we, Bill?'
'Yes,' McGovern said, and suddenly swept her into his arms. It was a bit of a reach, but he managed. 'In the meantime, I'll have you all to myself. Oh, Lois, how those sweet minutes will fly!'
Just inside the park, a group of young women with babies in strollers (a gossip of mothers, Ralph thought) had been watching them, probably attracted by Lois's gestures, which had a tendency to become grandiose when she was excited. Now, as McGovern bent Lois backward, looking down at her with the counterfeit ardor of a bad actor at the end of a stage tango, one of the mothers spoke to another and both laughed. It was a shrill, unkind sound that made Ralph think of chalk squealing on blackboards and forks dragged across porcelain sinks. Look at the funny old people, the laughter said. Look at the funny old people, pretending to be young again.
'Stop that, Bill!' Lois said. She was blushing, and maybe not just because Bill was up to his usual tricks. She'd also heard the laughter from the park. McGovern undoubtedly had, too, but McGovern would believe they were laughing with him, not at him. Sometimes, Ralph thought wearily, a slightly inflated ego could be a protection.
McGovern let her go, then removed his fedora and swept it across his waist as he made an exaggerated bow. Lois was too busy making sure that her silk blouse was still tucked into the waistband of her skirt all the way around to pay him much notice. Her blush was already fading, and Ralph saw she looked rather pale and not particularly well. He hoped she wasn't coming down with something.
'Come by, if you can,' she told Ralph quietly.
'I will, Lois.'
McGovern slipped an arm around her waist, the gesture of affection both friendly and sincere this time, and they started up the street together. Watching them, Ralph was suddenly gripped by a strong sense of deja vu, as if he had seen them like that in some other place. Or some other life. Then, just as McGovern dropped his arm, breaking the illusion, it came to him: Fred Astaire leading a dark-haired and rather plump Ginger Rogers out onto a small-town movie set, where they would dance together to some tune by Jerome Kern or maybe Irving Berlin.
That's weird, he thought, turning back toward the little strip-mall halfway down Up-Mile Hill. That's very weird, Ralph. Bill McGovern and Lois Chasse are about as far from Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers as you can g--
'Ralph?' Lois called, and he turned back. There was one intersection and about a block's worth of distance between them now. Cars zipped back and forth on Elizabeth Street, turning Ralph's view of them into a moderate stutter.
'What?' he called back.
'You look better! More rested! Are you finally getting some sleep?'
'Yes!' he returned, thinking, Just another small lie, in another good cause.
'Didn't I say you'd feel better once the seasons changed? See you in a little while!'
Lois wiggled her fingers at him, and Ralph was amazed to see bright blue diagonal lines stream back from the short but carefully shaped nails. They looked like contrails.
What the fuck--?
He shut his eyes tight, then popped them open again. Nothing. Only Bill and Lois once again walking up the street toward Lois's house, their backs to him. No bright blue diagonals in the air, nothing like that--
Ralph's eyes dropped to the sidewalk and he saw that Lois and Bill were leaving tracks behind them on the concrete, tracks that looked exactly like the footprints in the old Arthur Murray learn-to-dance instructions you used to be able to get by mail-order. Lois's were gray. McGovern's - larger but still oddly delicate - were a dark shade of olive green. They glowed on the sidewalk, and Ralph, who was standing on the far side of Elizabeth Street with his jaw hanging almost down to his breastbone, suddenly realized he could see little ribbands of colored smoke rising from them. Or perhaps it was steam.
A city bus bound for Old Cape snored by, momentarily blocking his view, and when it passed the tracks were gone. There was nothing on the sidewalk but a message chalked inside a fading pink heart: SAM + DEANIE 4-EVER.
Those tracks are not gone, Ralph; they were never there in the first place. You know that, don't you?
Yes, he knew. The idea that Bill and Lois looked like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers had gotten into his head; progressing from that idea to a hallucination of phantom footprints leading up the sidewalk like tracks in an Arthur Murray dance-diagram had a certain bizarre logic. Still, it was scary. His heart was beating too fast, and when he closed his eyes for a moment to try and calm down, he saw those marks trailing up from Lois's waving fingers like bright blue jet contrails.
I've got to get more sleep, Ralph thought. I've got to. If I don't, I'm apt to start seeing anything.
'That's right,' he muttered under his breath as he turned toward the drugstore again. 'Anything at all.'
3
Ten minutes later, Ralph was standing at the front of the Rite Aid Pharmacy and looking at a sign which hung on chains from the ceiling. FEEL BETTER AT RITE AID! it said, seeming to suggest that feeling better was a goal attainable by any reasonable, hard-working consumer. Ralph had his doubts about that.
This, Ralph decided, was retail drug-dealing on a grand scale - it made the Rexall where he usually traded look like a tenement apartment by comparison. The fluorescent-lit aisles seemed as long as bowling alleys and displayed everything from toaster ovens to jigsaw puzzles. After a little study, Ralph decided Aisle 3 contained most of the patent medicines and was probably his best bet. He made his way slowly through the area marked STOMACH REMEDIES, sojourned briefly in the kingdom of ANALGESICS, and quickly crossed the land of LAXATIVES. And there, between LAXATIVES and DECONGESTANTS, he stopped.
This is it, folks - my last shot. After this there's only Dr Litchfield, and if he suggests chewing honeycomb or drinking camomile tea, I'll probably snap and it'll take both nurses and the receptionist to pull me off him.
SLEEPING AIDS, the sign over this section of Aisle 3 read.
Ralph, never much of a patent medicine user (he would otherwise have arrived here much sooner, no doubt), didn't know exactly what he'd expected, but it surely had not been this wild, almost indecent profusion of products. His eye slipped across the boxes (the majority were a soothing blue), reading the names. Most seemed strange and slightly ominous: Compoz, Nytol, Sleepinal, Z-Power, Sominex, Sleepinex, Drow-Zee. There was even a generic brand.
You have to be kidding, he thought. None of these things are going to work for you. It's time to quit fucking around, don't you know that? When you start to see colored footprints on the sidewalk, it's time to q
uit fucking around and go to the doctor.
But on the heels of this he heard Dr Litchfield, heard him so clearly it was as if a tape recorder had turned on in the middle of his head: Your wife is suffering from tension headaches, Ralph - unpleasant and painful, but not life-threatening. I think we can take care of the problem.
Unpleasant and painful, but not life-threatening - yes, right, that was what the man had said. And then he had reached for his prescription pad and written out the order for the first bunch of useless pills while the tiny clump of alien cells in Carolyn's head continued to send out its microbursts of destruction, and maybe Dr Jamal had been right, maybe it was too late even then, but maybe Jamal was full of shit, maybe Jamal was just a stranger in a strange land, trying to get along, trying not to make waves. Maybe this and maybe that; Ralph didn't know for sure and never would. All he really knew was that Litchfield hadn't been around when the final two tasks of their marriage had been set before them: her job to die, his job to watch her do it.
Is that what I want to do? Go to Litchfield and watch him reach for his prescription pad again?
Maybe this time it would work, he argued to - with - himself. At the same time his hand stole out, seemingly of its own volition, and took a box of Sleepinex from the shelf. He turned it over, held it slightly away from his eyes so he could read the small print on the side panel, and ran his eye slowly down the list of active ingredients. He had no idea of how to pronounce most of the jawbreaking words, and even less of what they were or how they were supposed to help you sleep.
Yes, he answered the voice. Maybe this time it would work. But maybe the real answer would be just to find another doc--
'Help you?' a voice asked from directly behind Ralph's shoulder.
He was in the act of returning the box of Sleepinex to its place, meaning to take something that sounded a little less like a sinister drug in a Robin Cook novel, when the voice spoke. Ralph jumped and knocked a dozen assorted boxes of synthetic sleep onto the floor.
'Oh, sorry - clumsy!' Ralph said, and looked over his shoulder.