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INSOMNIA

БЕССОННИЦА / ИНСОМНИЯ

1994

Prologue

Winding the Deathwatch

(1)

Old age is an island, surrounded by death. -Juan Mentalvo “On Beauty” Ne one-least of all Dr. Litchfield-came right out and told Ralph Roberts that his wife was going to die, but there came a time when Ralph understood without needing to be told. The months between March and June were a jangling, screaming time inside his head-a time of conferences with doctors, of evening runs to the hospital with Carolyn, of trips to other hospitals in other states for special tests (Ralph spent much of his travel time an these trips thanking God for Carolyn’s Blue Cross/Major Medical cocoverage), of personal research in the Derry Public Library, at first Imaking for answers the specialists might have overlooked, later on just looking for hope and grasping at straws.

Those four months were like being dragged drunk through some malign carnival where the people on the rides were really screaming, the people lost in the mirror maze were really lost, and the denizens of Freak Alley looked at you with false smiles on their lips and terror in their eyes. Ralph began to see these things by the middle of May, and as June set in, he began to understand that the pitchmen along the medical midway had only quack remedies to sell, and the cheery quickstep of the calliope could no longer quite hide the fact that the tune spilling out of the loudspeakers was “The Funeral March.” It was a carnival, all right; the carnival of lost souls..Ralph continued to deny these terrible images-and the even more terrible idea lurking behind them-all through the early summer of 1992, but as June gave way to July, this finally became impossible. The worst midsummer heatwave since 1971 rolled over central Maine, and Derry simmered in a bath of hazy sun, humidity, and daily temperatures in the mid-nineties. The city-hardly a bustling metropolis at the best of times-fell into a complete Stupor, and it was in this hot silence that Ralph Roberts first heard the ticking of the deathwatch and understood that in the passage from June’s cool damp greens to the baked stillness of July, Carolyn’s slim chances had become no - chances at all. She was going to die. Not this summer, probably-the doctors claimed to have quite a few tricks up their sleeves yet, and Ralph was sure they did-but this fall or this winter. His longtime companion, the only woman he had ever loved, was going to die. He tried to deny the idea, scolding himself for being a morbid old fool, but in the gasping silences of those long hot days, Ralph heard that ticking everywhere-it even seemed to be in the walls.

Yet it was loudest from within Carolyn herself, and when she turned her calm white face toward him-perhaps to ask him to turn on the radio so she could listen while she shelled some beans for their supper, or to ask him if he would go across to the Red Apple and get her an ice cream on a stick-he would see that she heard it, too. He would see it in her dark eyes, at first only when she was straight, but later even when her eyes were hazed by the pain medication she took. By then the ticking had grown very loud, and when Ralph lay in bed beside her on those hot summer nights when even a single sheet seemed to weigh ten pounds and he believed every dog in Derry was barking at the moon, he listened to it, to the deathwatch ticking inside Carolyn, and it seemed to him that his heart would break with sorrow and terror. How much would she be required to suffer before the end came? How much would he be required to suffer? And how could he possibly live without her-?

It was during this strange, fraught period that Ralph began to go for increasingly long walks through the hot summer afternoons and slow, twilit evenings, returning on many occasions too exhausted to eat. He kept expecting Carolyn to scold him for these outings, to say Why don’t you stop it, You stupid old man? You’ll kill yourself if you keep walking in this heat! But she never did, and he gradually realized she didn’t even know. That he went out, yes-she knew that. But not all the miles he went, or that when he came home he was often trembling with exhaustion and near sunstroke. Once upon a time it had seemed to Ralph she saw everything, even a change of half an inch in where he parted his hair. Ne more; the tumor in her brain had stolen her powers of observation, as it would soon steal her life.

So he walked, relishing the heat in spite of the way it sometimes made his head swim and his ears ring, relishing it mostly because of the way it made his ears ring; sometimes there were whole hours when they rang so loudly and his head pounded so fiercely that he couldn’t hear the tick of Carolyn’s deathwatch.

He walked over much of Derry that hot July, a narrow-shouldered old man

with thinning white hair and big hands that still looked capable of hard.work. He walked from Witcham Street to the Barrens, from Kansas Street

to Neibolt Street, from Main Street to the Kissing Bridge, but his feet took him most frequently west along Harris Avenue, where the still beautiful and much beloved Carolvil Roberts was now spending her last year in a haze of headaches.

Avenue Extension and Derry County A’ morphine, to the airport. He would walk out the Extension-which was treeless and completely exposed to the pitiless sun-until he felt his legs threatening to cave in beneath him, and then double back.

He often paused to catch his second wind in a shady picnic area close to the airport’s service entrance. At night this place was a teenage drinking and makeout spot, alive with the sounds of rap coming from boombox radios, but during the days it was the more-or-less exclusive domain of a group Ralph’s friend Bill McGovern called the Harris Avenue Old Crocks. The Old Crocks gathered to play chess, to play gin, or just to shoot the shit. Ralph had known many of them for years (had, in fact, gone to grammar school with Stan Eberty), and was comfortable with them . . . as long as they didn’t get too nosy. Most didn’t. They were old-school Yankees, for the most part, raised to believe that what a man doesn’t choose to talk about is no,one’s business but his own. it was on one of these walks that he first became aware that something had gone very wrong with Ed Deepneau, his neighbor from up the street. Ralph had walked much farther from the Harris Avenue Extension than usual that day, possibly because thunderheads had blotted out the sun and a cool, if still spmradic, breeze had begun to blow. He had fallen into a kind of trance, not thinking of anything, not watching anything but the dusty toes of his sneakers, when the four-forty-five United Airlines flight from Boston swooped low overhead, startling him back to) where he was with the teeth-rattling whine of its jet engines. He watched it cross above the old GS&WM railroad tracks and the Cyclone fence that marked the edge of the airport, watched it settle toward the runway, marked the blue puffs of smoke as its wheels touched down. Then he glanced at his watch, saw how late it was getting, and looked up with wide eyes at the orange roof of the Howard Johnson’s just up the road. He had been in a trance, all right; he had walked more than five miles without the slightest sense of time passing.

Carolyn’s time, a voice deep inside his head muttered. Yes, yes; Carolyn’s time. She would be back in the apartment, counting the minutes until she could have another Darvon Complex, and he was out on the far side of the airport ... halfway to Newport, in fact, Ralph looked up at the sky and for the first time really saw the bruise-purple thunderheads which were stacking up over the airport. They did not mean rain, not for sure, not yet, but if it did rain, he was almost surely going to be caught in it; there was nowhere to shelter between here and the little picnic area back by Runway 3, and there was nothing there but a ratty little gazebo that always smelled faintly of beer.

He took another look at the orange roof, then reached into his right.hand pocket and felt the little sheaf of bills held by the sliver

money-clip Carolyn had given him for his sixty-fifth. There was nothing to prevent him walking up to Hojo’s and calling a cab ... except maybe for the thought of how the driver might look at him. Stupid old man, the eyes in the rear-view mirror might say. Stupid old man, walked a lot further than you shoulda on a hot day. If you’d been swimming, you woulda drownded.

Paranoid, Ralph, the voice in his head told him, and now its clucky, slightly Patronizing tone reminded him of Bill McGovern. Well, maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t. Either way, he thought he would chance the rain and walk back.

What if it doesn’t just rain ? Last summer it hailed so hard that one time in August it broke windows all over the east side. “Let it hail, then,” he said. “I don’t bruise that easy.” Ralph began to walk slowly back toward town along the shoulder of the Extension, his old high-tops raising small, parched puffs of dust as he went. He could hear the first rumbles of thunder in the west, where the clouds were stacking up. The sun, although blotted out, was refusing to quit without a fight; it edged the thunderheads with bands of brilliant gold and shone through occasional rifts in the clouds like the fragmented beam of some huge movie-projector. Ralph found himself feeling glad he had decided to walk , in spite of the ache in his legs and the steady nagging pain in the small of his back. One thing, at least, he thought. I’ll sleep tonight. I’ll sleep like a damn rock.

The verge of the airport-acres of dead brown grass with the rusty railroad tracks sunk in them like the remains of some old wreckwas now on his left. Far in the distance beyond the Cyclone fence he could see the United 747, now the size of a child’s toy plane, taxiing toward the small terminal which United and Delta shared.

Ralph’s gaze was caught by another vehicle, this one a car, leaving the General Aviation terminal, which stood at this end of the airport. It was heading across the tarmac toward the small service entrance which gave on the Harris Avenue Extension. Ralph had watched a lot of vehicles come and go through that entrance just lately; it was only seventy yards or so from the picnic area where the Harris Avenue Old Crocks gathered. As the car approached the gate, Ralph recognized it as Ed and Helen Deepneau’s Datsun . . . and it was really moving. Ralph stopped on the shoulder, unaware that his hands had curled into anxious fists as the small brown car bore down on the closed gate.

You needed a key-card to open the gate from the outside; from the inside

an electric-eye beam did the ‘Oh. But the beam was set close to the

gate, very close, and at the speed the Datsun was going ....At the last moment (or so it seemed to Ralph), the small brown car

scrunched to a stop, the tires sending up puffs of blue smoke that made Ralph think of the 747 touching down, and the gate began to trundle slowly open on its track. Ralph’s fisted hands relaxed. An arm emerged from the driver’s-side window of the Datsun and began to wave up and down, apparently haranguing the gate, urging it to hurry it up. There was something so absurd about this that Ralph began to smile. The smile died before it had exposed even a gleam of teeth, however. The wind was still freshening from the west, where the thunderheads were, and it carried the screaming voice of the Datsun’s driver: “You son of a bitch fucker.t You bastard Eat my cock Bur up HurrY up and lick shit, you fucking asshole cuntlapper. Fuckling booger! Ratdick riingmeat Suckhole.”’ “That can’t be Ed Deepneau,” Ralph murmured. He began to walk again without realizing it. “Can’t be.”

Ed was a research chemist at the Hawking Laboratories research facility in Fresh Harbor, one of the kindest, most civil young men galph had ever met. Both he and Carolyn were very fond of Ed’s wife, Helen, and their new baby, Natalie, as well, A visit from Natalie was one of the few things with the power to lift Carolyn out of her own life these days, and, sensing this, Helen brought her over frequently. Ed never complained. There were men, he knew, who wouldn’t have cared to have the missus running to the old folks down the street every time the baby did some new and entrancing thing, especially when the granny-figure in the picture was ill. Ralph had an idea that Ed wouldn’t be able to tell someone to go to hell without suffering a sleepless night in consequence, but”You fuckting whoremaster! Move your sour shit-caked ass, you hear me? Butt-fucker. Cunt-rammer. But it sure sounded like Ed. Even from two or three hundred yards away, it certainly sounded like him.

Now the driver of the Datsun was revving his engine like a kid in a muscle-car waiting for the light to turn green. Clouds of exhaust smoke farted up from the tailpipe. As soon as the gate had retracted enough to allow the Datsun passage, the . car leaped forward, squirting through the gap with its engine roaring, and when it did, Ralph got a clear look at the driver. He was close enough now for there to be no doubt: it was Ed, all right. The Datsun bounced along the short unpaved stretch of lane between the gate and the Harris Street Extension. A horn blared suddenly, and Ralph saw a blue Ford Ranger, heading west on the Extension, swerve to avoid the oncoming Datsun. The driver of the pickup saw the danger too late, and Ed apparently never saw it at all (it was only later that Ralph came to consider Ed might have rammed the Ranger on purpose).

There was a brief scream of tires followed by the hollow bang of the

Datsun’s fender driving into the Ford’s sidewall. The pickup was driven

halfway across the yellow line. The Datsun’s hood crumpled, came

unlatched, and popped up a little; headlight glass tinkled into the

street. A moment later both vehicles were dead in the middle of the

road, tangled together like some weird sculpture..Ralph stood where he was for the time being, watching as oil spread

beneath the Datsun’s front end. He had seen several roadaccidents in his almost-seventy years, most of them minor, one or two serious, and he was always stunned by how quickly they happened and how little drama there was. It wasn’t like in the movies, where the camera could slow things down, or on a video tape, where you could watch the car go off the cliff again and again if you so chose; there was usually just a series of converging blurs, followed by that quick and toneless combination of sounds: the cry of the tires, the hollow bang of metal crimping metal, the tinkle (of glass.

There was even a kind of protocol for this sort of thing: How Should Behave When Involved in a Low-Speed Collision. Of course there was, Ralph mused. There were probably a dozen two-bit collisions in Derry every day, and maybe twice that number in the wintertime, when there was snow and the roads got slippery. You got out, you met your opposite number at the point where the two vehicles had come together (and where, quite often, they were still entwined), you looked, you shook your heads. Sometimes-often, actually-this phase of the encounter was marked with angry words: fault was assigned (often rashly), driving skills impugned, legal action threatened. Ralph supposed what the drivers were really trying to say without coming right out and saying it was Listen, fool, you scared the living hell out of me!

The final step in this unhappy little dance was The Exchange of the Sacred Insurance Screeds, and it was at this point that the drivers usually began to get control of their galloping emotions . . . always assuming that no one had been hurt, as appeared to be the case here. Sometimes the drivers involved even finished up by shaking hands. Ralph prepared to watch all this from his vantage point less than a hundred and fifty yards away, but as seen as the driver’s door of the Datsun opened he understood that things were going to go differently here-that the accident was maybe not over but still happening. It certainly did not seem that anyone was going to shake at the end of these festivities.

The door did not swing open; it flew open. Ed Deepneau leaped out, then simply stood stock-still beside his car, his slim shoulders squared against a background of deepening clouds, He was wearing faded jeans and a tee-shirt, and Ralph realized that before today he had never seen Ed in a shirt that didn’t button up the front. And there was something around his neck: a long white something. A scarf? It looked like a scarf, but why would anyone be wearing a scarf on a day as hot as this one had been?

Ed stood beside his wounded car for a moment, seeming to look in every direction but the right one. The fierce little pokes of his narrow head reminded Ralph of the way roosters studied their barnyard turf, looking for invaders and interlopers. Something about that similarity made Ralph feel uneasy.

He had never seen Ed look like that before, and he supposed that was

part of it, but it wasn’t all of way it. The truth of the matter was

simply this: he had never seen anyone look exactly like that..Thunder rumbled in the west, louder now. And closer.

The man getting out of the Ranger would have made two of Ed Deepneau, possibly three. His vast, deep belly hung over the rolled waistband of his green chino workpants; there were sweatstains the size of dinner-plates under the arms of his open-throated white shirt. He tipped back the bill of the West Side Gardeners gimme-cap he was wearing to get a better look at the man who had broadsided him. His heavy-jowled face was dead pale except for bright patches of color like rouge high on his cheekbones, and Ralph thought: There’s a man who’s a prime candidate for a heart-attack. If I was closer I bet I’d be able to see the creases in his earlobes.

“Hey!” the heavyset guy yelled at Ed. The voice coming out of that broad chest and deep gut was absurdly thin, almost reedy. “Where’d you get your license? Fuckin Sears n Roebuck?” Ed’s wandering, jabbing head swung immediately toward the sound of the big man’s voice-seemed almost to home in, like a jet guided by radar-and Ralph got his first good look at Ed’s eyes. He felt a bolt of alarm light up in his chest and suddenly began to run toward the accident. Ed, meanwhile, had started toward the man in the sweat-soaked white shirt and gimme-cap. He was walking in a stiff-legged, high-shouldered strut that was nothing at all like his usual easygoing amble. “Ed!” ‘Ralph shouted, but the freshening breeze-cold now with the promise of rain-seemed to snatch the words away before they could even get out of his mouth. Certainly Ed never turned. Ralph made himself run faster, the ache in his legs and the throbbing in the small of his back forgotten. It was murder he had seen in Ed Deepneau’s wide, unblinking eyes. He had absolutely no previous experience upon which to base such an assessment, but he didn’t think you could mistake such a naked glare; it was the look fighting cocks must wear when they launch themselves at each other, spurs up and slashing. “Ed! Hey, Ed, hold up! it’s Ralph!”

Not so much as a glance around, although Ralph was now so close that Ed must have heard, wind or no wind. Certainly the heavyset man glanced around, and Ralph could see both fear and uncertainty in his look. Then Heavyset turned back to Ed and raised his hands placatingly.

“Look,” he said. “We can talk-“

That was as far as he got. Ed took another quick step forward, reached up with one slim hand-it was very white in the rapidly darkening day-and slapped Heavyset across his far from inconsiderable jowls. The sound was like the report of a kid’s air rifle.

“How many have you killed?” Ed asked.

Heavyset pressed back against the side of his pickup, his mouth open,

his eyes wide. Ed’s queer, stif strut never la tered. He walked into.the other man and stood belly to belly with him, seemingly oblivious of

the fact that the pickup’s driver was four inches taller and outweighed him by a hundred pounds or more. Ed reached up and slapped him again. “Come on! Fess up, brave boy-how many have you killed?” His voice rose to a shriek that was lost in the coming storm’s first really authoritative clap of thunder.

Heavyset pushed him away-a gesture not of aggression but of simple fright-and Ed went reeling backward against the crumpled nose of his Datsun. He bounced back at once, fists clenched, gathering himself to leap at Heavyset, who was cringing against the side of his truck with his gimme-cap now askew and his shirt untucked in the back and at the sides. A memory flashed across Ralph’s mind-a Three Stooges short he’d seen years ago, Larry, Curly, and Moe playing painters without a clue-and he felt a sudden surge of sympathy for Heavyset, who looked absurd as well as scared to death.

Ed Deepneau did not look absurd. With his yanked-back lips and wide, unblinking eyes, Ed looked more like a fighting cock than ever. “I know what you’ve been doing,” he whispered to Heavyset “What kind of comedy did you think this was? Did you think you and your butcher friends could get away with it fores-“ At that moment Ralph arrived, puffing and gasping like an old carthorse, and put an arm around Ed’s shoulders. The heat beneath the thin tee-shirt was unnerving; it was like putting an arm around an oven, and when Ed turned to look at him, Ralph had the momentary (but unforgettable) impression that that was exactly what he was looking into. He had never seen such utter, unreasoning fury in a pair of human eyes; had never even suspected such fury might exist.

Ralph’s immediate impulse was to recoil, but he suppressed it and stood firm. He had an idea that if he pulled back, Ed would fall on him like a rogue dog, biting and clawing. It was absurd, of course; Ed was a research chemist, Ed was a member of the Book-of-theMonth Club (the kind who took the twenty-pound histories of the Crimean War they always seemed to offer as alternates to the main selection), Ed was Helen’s husband and Natalie’s Dad. Hell, Ed was a friend. ... except this wasn’t that Ed, and Ralph knew it. Instead of pulling back, Ralph leaned forward, grasped Ed’s shoulders (so hot under the tee-shirt, so incredibly, throbbingly hot), and moved his face until it blocked Heavyset from Ed’s creepy fixed gaze. “Ed, quit it!” Ralph said. He used the loud but steadily firm voice he assumed one used with people who were having hysterics. “You’re all right! just quit it!”

For a moment Ed’s fixed gaze didn’t waver, and then his eyes moved over Ralph’s face. It wasn’t much, but Ralph felt a small surge of relief just the same.

“What’s the matter with him?” Heavyset asked from behind Ralph.

“He crazy, do you think?”.”He’s fine, I’m sure,” Ralph said, although he was sure of no such

thing. He spoke out of the corner of his mouth, and didn’t take his eyes from Ed. He didn’t dare take his eyes from Ed-that contact felt like the only hold he had over the man, and a tenuous one at best. “Just shaken up from the crash. He needs a few seconds to calm d-“ “Ask him what he’s got under that tarp! “ Ed yelled suddenly, and pointed over Ralph’s shoulder. Lightning flashed, and for a moment the pitted scars of Ed’s adolescent acne were thrown into sharp relief, like some strange organic treasure map- Thunder rolled. “Hey, hey, Susan Day!” he chanted in a high, childlike voice that made Ralph’s forearms break out in goosebumps. “How many kids did you kill today.” “He ain’t shook up,” Heavyset said. “He’s crazy. And when the cops get here, I’m gonna see he gets tooken in.”

Ralph glanced around and saw a blue tarpaulin stretched across the bed of the pickup. It had been tied down with bright yellow hanks of rope. Round shapes bulked beneath it, “Ralph?” a timid voice asked. He glanced to his left and saw Dorrance Marstellar-at ninety something easily the oldest of the Harris Avenue Old Crocks standing just beyond Heavyset’s pickup truck, There was a paperback book in his waxy, liverspotted hands, and Dorrance was bending it anxiously back and forth, giving the spine a real workout.

Ralph supposed it was a book of poetry, which was all he had ever seen old Dorrance read. Or maybe he didn’t really read at all; maybe he just liked to hold the books and look at the artfully stacked words. “Ralph, what’s wrong? What’s happening?”

More lightning flashed overhead, a purple-white snarl of electricity. Dorrance looked up at it as if unsure of where he was, who he was or what he was seeing. Ralph groaned inside.

“Dorrance-“ he began, and then Ed lunged beneath him, like some wild animal which has lain quiet only to regain its strength. Ralph staggered, then pushed Ed back against the crumpled hood of his Datsun. He felt panicky-unsure of what to do next or how to do it. There were too many things going on at once. He could feel the muscles in Ed’s arms humming fiercely just below his grip; it was almost as if the man had somehow swallowed a bolt of the lightning now loose in the sky.

“Ralph?” Dorrance asked in that same calm but worried voice. are you. I can’t see your hands.”

Oh, good. Another lunatic to deal with. just what he needed.

Ralph glanced down at his hands, then looked at the old man..”What are you talking about, Dorrance?”

“Your hands,” Dorrance said patiently. “I can’t see your-“ “This is no place for you, Dor-why don’t you get lost?” The old man brightened a little at that. “Yes!” he said in the tone of one who has just stumbled over a great truth. “That’s just what I oughtta do!” He began to back up, and when the thunder cracked again, he cringed and put his book on top of his head. Ralph was able to read the bright red letters of the title: Buckdancer’s Choice. “It’s what you ought to do, too, Ralph. You don’t want to mess in with long-time business. It’s a good way to get hurt.” “What are you-“ But before Ralph could finish, Dorrance turned his back and went lumbering off in the direction of the picnic area with his fringe of white hair-as gossamer as the hair on a new baby’s head-rippling ing in the breeze of the oncoming storm. One problem solved, but Ralph’s relief was short-lived. Ed had been temporarily distracted by Dorrance, but now he was looking daggers at Heavyset again. “Cuntlicker!” he spat. “Fucked your mother and licked her cunt!”

Heavyset’s enormous brow drew down. “What”

Ed’s eyes shifted back to Ralph, whom he now seemed to recognize. “Ask him what’s under that tarp!” he cried. “Better yet, get the murdering cocksucker to show you!”

Ralph looked at the heavyset man. “What have you got under there?”

“What’s it to you?” Heavyset asked, perhaps trying to sound truculent. He sampled the look in Ed Deepneau’s eyes and took two more sidling steps away.

“Nothing to me, something to him,” Ralph said, lifting his chin in Ed’s direction. “Just help me cool him out, okay?”

“You know him?”

“Murderer!” Ed repeated, and this time he lunged hard enough under Ralph’s hands to drive him back a step. Yet something was happening, wasn’t it? Ralph thought the scary, vacant look was seeping out of Ed’s eyes. There seemed to be a little more Ed in there than there had been before . . . or perhaps that was only wishful thinking. “Murderer, baby murderer!”

“Jesus, what a looney tune,” Heavyset said, but he went to the rear of

the truckbed, yanked one of the ropes free, and peeled back a corner of

the tarpaulin. Beneath it were four pressboard barrels, each marked

WEED-GO. “Organic fertilizer,” Heavyset said, his eyes flicking from Ed

to Ralph and then back to Ed again. He touched the bill of his West.Side Gardeners cap. “I spent the day working on a set of new

flower-beds outside the Derry Psych Wing . . . where you could stand a short vacation, friend.”

“Fertilizer?” Ed asked. It was himself he seemed to be speaking to.

His left hand rose slowly to his temple and began to rub there. “Fertilizer?” He sounded like a man questioning some simple yet staggering scientific development.

“Fertilizer,” Heavyset agreed. He glanced back at Ralph and said, “This guy is sick in the head. You know it?”

“He’s confused, that’s all,” Ralph answered uneasily. He leaned over the side of the truck and rapped a barrel-top. Then he turned back to Ed. “Barrels of fertilizer,” he said. “Okay?”

No response. Ed’s right hand rose and began to rub at his other temple.

He looked like a man sinking into a terrible migraine.

“Okay?” Ralph repeated gently.

Ed closed his eyes for a moment, and when they opened again, Ralph observed a sheen in them he thought was probably tears. Ed’s tongue slipped out and dabbed delicately first at one corner of his mouth and then the other. He took the end of his silk scarf and wiped his forehead, and as he did, Ralph saw there were Chinese figures embroidered on it in red, just above the fringe. “I guess maybe-“ he began, and then broke off. His eyes widened again in that look Ralph didn’t like. “Babies!” he rasped. “You hear me? Babies.”’ Ralph shoved him back against his car for the third or fourth time-he’d lost count. “What are you talking about, Ed?” An idea suddenly occurred to him. “Is it Natalie? Are you worried about Natalie?”

A small, crafty smile touched Ed’s lips. He looked past Ralph at the heavyset man. “Fertilizer, huh? Well, if that’s all it is, you won’t mind opening one of them, will you?”

Heavyset looked at Ralph uneasily. “Man needs a doctor,” he said. “Maybe he does. But he was calming down, I thought ... Could you open one of those barrels? It might make him feel better.” “Yeah, sure, what the heck. In for a penny, in for a pound,” he said, There was another flash of lightning, another heavy blast of thunder-one that seemed to go rolling all the way across the sky this time-and a cold spackle of rain struck the back of Ralph’s sweaty neck. He glanced to his left and saw Dorrance Marstellar standing at the entrance to the picnic area, book in hand, watching the three of them anxiously.

“It’s gonna rain a pretty bitch, looks like,” Heavyset said, “and I can’t let this stuff get wet. It starts a chemical reaction. So look.fast.” He felt around between one of the barrels and the sidewall of his truck for a moment, then came up with a crowbar. must be as nutty as he is, doing this,” he said to Ralph. “I mean, I was just going along home, mindin my business. He hit me.”

“Go on,” Ralph said. “It’ll only take a second.” “Yeah,” Heavyset replied sourly, turning and setting the flat end of the crowbar under the lid of the nearest barrel, “but the memories will last a lifetime.”

Another thunderclap rocked the day just then, and Heavyset did not hear what Ed Deepneau said next. Ralph did, however, and it chilled the pit of his stomach.

“Those barrels are full of dead babies,” Ed said. “You’ll see.” Heavyset popped the I’d on the end barre , and such was the conviction in Ed’s voice that Ralph almost expected to see tangles of arms and legs and bundles of small hairless heads. Instead, he saw a mixture of fine blue crystals and brown stuff. The smell which rose from the barrel was rich and peaty, with a thin chemical undertone. “See? Satisfied?” Heavyset asked, speaking directly to Ed again. “I ain’t Ray joubert or that guy Dahmer after all. How ‘bout that!” The look of confusion was back on Ed’s face, and when the thunder cracked overhead again, he cringed a little. He leaned over, reached a hand toward the barrel, then looked a question at Heavyset. The big man nodded to him, almost sympathetically, Ralph thought. “Sure, touch it, fine by me. But if it rains while you’re holdin a fistful, you’ll dance like John Travolta. It burns.” Ed reached into the barrel, grabbed some of the mix, and let it run through his fingers. He shot Ralph a perplexed look (there was an element of embarrassment in that look as well, Ralph thought), and then sank his arm into the barrel all the way to the elbow. “Hey!” Heavyset cried, startled. “That ain’t a box of Cracker Jack! “ For a moment the crafty grin resurfaced on Ed’s face-a look that said I know a trick worth two of that-and then it subsided into puzzlement again as he found nothing farther down but more fertilizer. When he drew his arm out of the barrel, it was dusty and aromatic with the mix. Another flash of lightning exploded above the airport. The thunder which followed was almost deafening.

“Get that off your skin before it rains, I’m warning you,” Heavyset

said. He reached through the Ranger’s open passenger window and

produced a McDonald’s take-out sack. He rummaged in it, came out with a

couple of napkins, and handed them to Ed, who began to wipe the.fertilizer dust from his forearm like a man in a dream.

While he did this, Heavyset replaced the lid on the barrel, tamping it into place with one large, freckled fist and taking quick glances up at the darkening sky. When Ed touched the shoulder of his white shirt, the man stiffened and pulled away, looking at Ed warily. “I think I owe you an apology,” Ed said, and to Ralph his voice sounded completely clear and sane for the first time.

“You’re damn tooting,” Heavyset said, but he sounded relieved. He stretched the plastic-coated tarpaulin back into place and tied it in a series of quick, efficient gestures. Watching him, Ralph was struck by what a sly thief time was. Once he could have tied that same sheetbend with that same dextrous ease. Today he could still tie it, but it would take him at least two minutes and maybe three of his best curse-words.

Heavyset patted the tarp and then turned to them, folding his arms across the substantial expanse of his chest. “Did you see the accident?” he asked Ralph.

“No,” Ralph said at once. He had no idea why he was lying, but the decision to do it was instantaneous. “I was watching the plane land. The United.”

...

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