Insomnia

  'Think I'm going to pass,' Ralph said. He was looking around for Dorrance, and at last spotted him. He had gone back through the hole in the fence. He was standing in knee-high grass at the edge of the service road over there, bending his book back and forth in his hands as he watched the Piper Cub taxi toward the General Aviation terminal. Ralph found himself remembering how Ed had come tearing along that service road in his old brown Datsun, and how he had sworn (Hurry up! Hurry up and lick shit! ) at the slowness of the gate. For the first time in over a year he found himself wondering what Ed had been doing in there to begin with.

  '- than you did.'

  'Huh?' He made an effort and focused on Faye again.

  'I said you must be sleepin again, because you look a hell of a lot better than you did. But now your hearin's goin to hell, I guess.'

  'I guess so,' Ralph said, and tried a little smile. 'Think I'll go grab myself a little lunch. You want to come, Faye? My treat.'

  'Nah, I already had a Coffee Pot,' Faye said. 'It's sittin in my gut like a piece of lead right now, to tell you the truth. Cheez, Ralph, the old fart was crying, did you see that?'

  'Yes, but I wouldn't make it into a big deal if I were you,' Ralph said. He started walking toward the Extension, and Faye ambled along beside him. With his broad shoulders slumped and his head lowered, Faye looked quite a lot like a trained bear in a man-suit. 'Guys our age cry over just about anything. You know that.'

  'I spose.' He gave Ralph a grateful smile. 'Anyway, thanks for stoppin me before I could make it worse. You know how I am, sometimes.'

  I only wish someone had been there when Bill and I got into it, Ralph thought. Out loud he said, 'No problem. It's me that should be thanking you, actually. It's something else to put on my resume when I apply for that high-paying job at the UN.'

  Faye laughed, delighted, and clapped Ralph on the shoulder. 'Yeah, Secretary-General! Peacemaker Number One! You could do it, Ralph, no shit!'

  'No question about it. Take care of yourself, Faye.'

  He started to turn away and Faye touched his arm. 'You're still up for the tournament next week, aren't you? The Runway 3 Classic?'

  It took a moment for Ralph to figure out what he was talking about, although it had been the retired carpenter's main topic of conversation ever since the leaves had begun to show color. Faye had been putting on the chess tournament he called The Runway 3 Classic ever since the end of his 'real life' in 1984. The trophy was an oversized chrome hubcap with a fancy crown and scepter engraved on it. Faye, easily the best player among the Old Crocks (on the west side of town, at least), had awarded the trophy to himself on six of the nine occasions it had been given out, and Ralph had a suspicion that he had gone in the tank the other three times, just to keep the rest of the tourney participants interested. Ralph hadn't thought much about chess this fall; he'd had other things on his mind.

  'Sure,' he said, 'I guess I'll be playing.'

  Faye grinned. 'Good. We should have had it last weekend - that was the schedule - but I was hopin that if I put it off, Jimmy V would be able to play. He's still in the hospital, though, and if I put it off much longer it'll be too cold to play outdoor and we'll end up in the back of Duffy Sprague's barber shop, like we did in '90.'

  'What's wrong with Jimmy V?'

  'Cancer come back on him again,' Faye said, then added in a lower tone: 'I don't think he's got a snowball's chance in hell of beatin it this time.'

  Ralph felt a sudden and surprisingly sharp pang of sorrow at this news. He and Jimmy Vandermeer had known each other well during their own 'real lives'. Both had been on the road back then, Jimmy in candy and greeting cards, Ralph in printing supplies and paper products, and the two of them had gotten on well enough to team up on several New England tours, splitting the driving and sharing rather more luxurious accommodations than either could have afforded alone.

  They had also shared the lonely, unremarkable secrets of travelling men. Jimmy told Ralph about the whore who'd stolen his wallet in 1958, and how he'd 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 which had gone on until the small 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 Duffy Sprague's barber shop, four or five others. When Jimmy told him shortly 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 lucky. Except neither of them had stayed lucky, it seemed. Not that anyone did, in the end.

  '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 gettin 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.'

  '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 bein 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 flight controllers. 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 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.'

  4

  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, CPA, 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 Buffy-Buffy 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 & Revered Baby, snatching at the gray-blue 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 see--

  See what?

  Well, the auras. Them, of course. And maybe whatever Rosalie (three-six-nine hon) 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 men, 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 begin 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 blue jeans. 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.

  Doc #3 slipped the first two fingers of his right hand into the corners of his mouth and blew a piercing whistle that went through Ralph's head like a drillbit. Down the sidewalk, Rosalie flinched backward and then voiced a brief howl.

  [Get your fucking ass over, Rover! Do it now!]

  Rosalie got up, tail between her legs, and began to slink toward the street. She whined as she went, and her fear had worsened her limp to the point where she was barely able to stagger; her hindquarters threatened to slide out from under her at each reluctant, lurching step.

  ['Hey!']

  Ralph only realized that he had yelled when he saw the small blue cloud float up in front of his face. It was etched with gossamer silver lines that made it look like a snowflake.

  The bald dwarf wheeled toward the sound of Ralph's shout, instinctively raising the weapon he held as he did. His expression was one of snarling surprise. Rosalie had stopped with her front paws in the gutter and was looking at Ralph with wide, anxious brown eyes.

  [What do you want, Shorts?]

  There was fury at being interrupted in that voice, fury at being challenged . . . but Ralph thought there were other emotions underneath. Fear? He wished he could believe it. Perplexity and surprise seemed surer bets. Whatever this creature was, it wasn't used to being seen by the likes of Ralph, let alone challenged.

  [What's the matter, Short-Time, cat got your tongue? Or have you already forgotten what you wanted
?]

  ['I want you to leave that dog alone!']

  Ralph heard himself in two different ways. He was fairly sure he was speaking aloud, but the sound of his actual voice was distant and tinny, like music drifting up from a pair of Walkman headphones which have been temporarily laid aside. Someone standing right beside him might have heard what he said, but Ralph knew the words would have sounded like a weak, out-of-breath gasp - talk from a man who has just been gutpunched. Inside his head, however, he sounded as he hadn't in years - young, strong, and confident.

  Doc #3 must have heard it that second way, for he recoiled momentarily, again raising his weapon (Ralph was now almost certain it was a scalpel) for a moment, as if in self-defense. Then he seemed to regroup. He left the sidewalk and strode to the edge of Harris Avenue, standing on the leaf-drifted strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street. He hitched at the waistband of his jeans, yanking it through the dirty smock, and stared grimly at Ralph for several moments. Then he raised the rusty scalpel in the air and made an unpleasantly suggestive sawing gesture with it.

  [You can see me - big deal! Don't poke your nose into what doesn't concern you, Short-Time! The mutt belongs to me!]

  The bald doc turned back to the cringing dog.

  [I'm done fooling with you, Rover! Get over here! Right now! ]

  Rosalie gave Ralph a beseeching, despairing look and then began to cross the street.

  I don't mess in with long-time business, Old Dor had told him on the day he'd given him the book of Stephen Dobyns poems. I told you not to, either.

  Yes, he had, yes indeed, but Ralph had a feeling it was too late now. Even if it wasn't, he had no intention of leaving Rosalie to the unpleasant little gnome standing in front of the coin-op laundry across the street. Not if he could help it, that was.

  ['Rosalie! Over here, girl! Heel!']

  Rosalie gave a single bark and trotted over to where Ralph stood. She placed herself behind his right leg and then sat down, panting and looking up at him. And here was another expression Ralph found he could read with ease: one part relief, two parts gratitude.

  The face of Doc #3 was twisted into a grimace of hate so severe it was almost a cartoon.