Ralph boosted himself up, swung a leg over the fence, and dropped down on the other side. He liked the way doing it felt-it seemed to wake old, long memories in his bones.

[“We’re going to need to power up again before long, Lois.”] Lois, nodding wearily: [“I know. Come on, let’s go.”

They followed the trail across the racetrack, climbed another board fence on the other side, then descended a brushy, overgrown slope to Neibolt Street. Ralph saw Lois grimly holding her slip up through the skirt of her dress as they struggled down the hill, thought again about asking if she wouldn’t be happier just ditching the damned thing, and decided again to mind his own business. If it became enough of a problem to her, she would do it without any further advice on the subject from him.

Ralph’s greatest worry-that Atropos’s trail would simply peter out on them-initially proved groundless. The dim pink blotches led directly down the crumbling, patched surface of Neibolt Street, between paintless tenements that should have been demolished years ago, Tattered laundry flapped on sagging lines; dirty children with snotty noses watched them pass from dusty front yards. A beautiful tow-headed boy of about three gave Ralph and Lois a deeply suspicious look from his front step, then grabbed his crotch with one hand and used the other to flash them the bird.

Neibolt Street dead-ended at the old trainyards, and here Ralph and Lois momentarily lost the track. They stood by one of the sawhorses blocking off an ancient rectangular cellar-hole-all that remained of the old passenger depot-and looked around at a big semicircle of waste ground. Rusty-red siding tracks glowered from deep within tangles of sunflowers and thorny weeds; shards from a hundred broken bottles twinkled in the afternoon sun. Spray-painted in hot-pink letters across the splintery side of the old diesel shed were the words SUZY SUCKT MY BIG FAT ONE. This sentimental declaration stood within a border of dancing swastikas.

Ralph: [“Where the hell did it go?”] [“Down there, Ralph-see?”] She was pointing along what had been the main line until 1963, the only line until 1983, and was now just another pair of rusty, overgrown steel tracks on the way to nowhere. Even most of the ties were gone, burned as evening campfires either by local winos or by wigs passing through on their way to the potato fields of Aroostook County or the apple orchards and fishing smacks of the maritimes on one of the few remaining crossties, Ralph saw splashes of pink spoor. They looked fresher than the ones they had followed down Neibolt Street. to He stared along the half-hidden course of the tracks, trying recall. If memory served, this line skirted the Municipal Golf Course on its way back to… well, on its way back to the west side. Ralph thought this must be the same set of defunct tracks which ran along the edge of the airport and past the picnic area where Faye Chap’ in might even now be brooding over the seedings in the upcoming Runway 3 Classic.

It’s all been one big loop, he thought. It’s taken us damned near three days, but I think in the end we’re going to be right back where we started… not Eden, but Harris Avenue.

“Say, you guys! How you doon?”

It was a voice Ralph almost thought he recognized, and that feeling was reinforced by his first look at the man it came from. He was standing behind them, at the point where the Neibolt Street sidewalk finally gave up the ghost. He looked fifty or so, but Ralph guessed he might actually be five or even ten years younger than that.

He was wearing a sweatshirt and old ragged jeans. The aura surrounding him was as green as a glass of Saint Patrick’s Day beer.

That was finally what turned the trick for Ralph. It was the wino who had approached him and Bill on the day he had found Bill in Strawford Park, bawling over his old pal Bob Polhurst… who, as it had turned out, had outlived him. Life was funnier than Groucho Marx sometimes.

A queer sense of fatalism was creeping over Ralph, and with it an intuitive understanding of the forces which now surrounded them.

It was one he could have done without. ’It hardly mattered if those forces were beneficent or malign, Random or Purpose; they were gigantic, that was what mattered, and they made the things Clotho and Lachesis had said about choice and free will seem like a joke.

He felt as if he and Lois were roped to the spokes of a gigantic wheel-a wheel which kept rolling them back to where they had come from even as it took them deeper and deeper into this horrible tunnel.

“You got a bitta the old spare change, mister?”

Ralph slid down a little so the wino would be sure to hear him when he talked.

“I’ll bet your uncle called you from Dexter,” Ralph said. “Told you you could have your old job back at the mill…

. but only if you got there today. Is that about right?”

The wino blinked at him in cautious surprise. “Well… yeah.

Sumpin like that.” He felt for the story-one he probably believed in more fully than anyone he told it to these days-and found its tattered thread again. “Dass a good job, you know? And I could have it back. There’s a Bangor n Aroostook bus at two o’clock, but the fare’s five-fifty and so far I got only toon a quarter. -.”

“Seventy-six cents is what you’ve got,” Lois said. “Two quarters, two dimes, one nickel, and a penny. But considering how much you drink, your aura looks extremely healthy, I’ll say that much for you.

You must have the constitution of an ox.”

The wino gave her a puzzled look, then took a step backward and wiped his nose with the palm of one hand.

“Don’t worry,” Ralph reassured him, “my wife sees auras everywhere. She’s a very spiritual person.”

“Izzat so, now?”

,Uh-huh. She’s also very generous, and I think she’ll do quite a bit better by you than a little spare change. Won’t you, Alice?”

“He’ll just drink it up,” she said. “There’s no job in Dexter.”

“No, probably not,” Ralph said, fixing her with his eyes, “but his aura does look extremely healthy. Extremely.”

“You kinda got your own spiritual side, I guess,” the wino said.

His eyes were still shifting cautiously back and forth between Ralph and Lois, but there was a guarded flicker of hope in them.

“You know, that’s true,” Ralph said. “And just lately it’s really come to the fore.” He pursed his lips as if an interesting thought had just occurred to him, and inhaled. A bright green ray shot out of the panhandler’s aura, crossed the ten feet separating him from Ralph and Lois, and entered Ralph’s mouth. The taste was clear and at once identifiable: Boone’s Farm Apple Wine. It was rough and lowdown, but sort of pleasant, just the same-it had a workingman’s sparkle to it.

With the taste came that sense of returning strength, which was good, and a sharp-edged clarity of thought that was even better.

Lois, meanwhile, was holding out a twenty-dollar bill. The wino didn’t immediately see it, however; he was scowling up into the sky.

At that instant, another bright green ray quilled out of his aura.

It shot across the weedy clearing beside the cellar-hole like a brilliant flashlight beam and into Lois’s mouth and nose. The bill in her hand shook briefly.

[“Oh, God, that’s so good."’]

“Goddam jet-jockeys from Charleston Air Force Base!” the wino cried disapprovingly. “They ain’t s’pored to boom the sound-barrier till they get out over the ocean! I damn near wet my-” His eye fell on the bill between Lois’s fingers, and his scowl deepened. “Sa-aay, what kind of joke you think you pullin here? I ain’t stupid, you know.

Maybe I like a drink every now n then, but that don’t make me stupid.”

Give it time, Ralph thought. It will.

“No one thinks you’re stupid,” Lois said, “and it’s no joke.

Take the money, sir.”

The bum tried to hold onto his suspicious glower, but after another close look at Lois (and a quick side-glance at Ralph), it was overwhelmed by a large and winning smile. He stepped toward Lois, putting out his hand to take the money, which he had earned without even knowing it.