Lois raised her hand just before he could close his fingers on the bill. “Just mind you get something to eat as well as something to drink. And you might ask yourself if you’re happy with the way you’re living.”
“You’re absolutely right!” the wino cried enthusiastically. His eyes never left the bill between Lois’s fingers. “Absolutely, ma’am!
They got a program other side of the river, detox and rehab, you know.
I’m thinking about it. I really am. I think about it every damn day.”
But his eyes were still tacked to the twenty, and he was almost drooling. Lois gave Ralph a brief, doubtful look, then shrugged and let the bill pass from her fingers to his. “Thanks! Thanks, lady!”
His eyes shifted to Ralph. “Dis lady a real princess! I jus hope you know dat!”
“As a matter of fact, I do,”
Ralph favored Lois with a fond glance. he said.
Half an hour later, the two of them were walking between the rusty steel rails as they curved gently past the Municipal Golf Course… except they had drifted up a little higher above the Short-Time world after their meeting with the wino (perhaps because he had been a little high himself), and walking was not exactly what they were doing.
There was little or no effort involved, for one thing, and although their feet were moving, to Ralph it felt more like gliding than walking. Nor was he entirely sure they were visible to the Short-Time world; squirrels hopped unconcernedly about their feet, busy gathering supplies for the winter ahead, and once he saw Lois duck sharply as a wren almost parted her hair. The bird veered to the left and upward, as if realizing only at the last moment that there was a human in its flight-pattern. The golfers didn’t pay them any mind, either. Ralph’s opinion of golfers was that they were self-absorbed to the point of obsession, but he thought this lack of interest extreme, even SO. If he had seen a couple of neatly dressed adults strolling along a defunct GS amp;WM spur-line in the middle of the day, he thought he might have taken a brief time-out to try and think guess what they were up to and where they might be going.
I’d be especially curious about why the lady kept on muttering “Stay where you are, you darned old thing” and hitching at her skirt, Ralph thought, and grinned. But the golfers didn’t even spare them a glance, although a foursome bound for the ninth hole passed close enough so that Ralph could hear them worrying over a developing softness in the bond market. The idea that he and Lois had become invisible again-or at least very dim-began to seem more and more plausible to Ralph. Plausible… and worrisome. Time goes faster when you’re high, Old Dor had said.
The trail became fresher as they went west, and Ralph liked the drips and splashes which made it up less and less. Where the goop had fallen on the steel rails, it had eaten away the rust like corrosive acid. The weeds it had fallen on were black and dead-even the hardiest of them had died. As Ralph and Lois passed Derry Mum’s third green and entered a tangle of scrawny trees and undergrowth, Lois tugged at his sleeve. She pointed ahead. Large splotches of Atropos’s spoor gleamed like sick paint on the trunks of the trees now pressing in close to the tracks, and there were pools of it in some of the sunken dips between the old rads-places where crossties had once been, Ralph supposed.
[“We’re getting close to where he lives, Ralph.”] [“Yes. “I [“If he comes back and finds us in his place, what will we do?”] Ralph shrugged. He didn’t know, and wasn’t sure he cared. Let the forces that were moving them around like pawns on a chessboard-the ones Mr. C. and Mr.
L. had called the Higher Purpose-worry about that. If Atropos showed up, Ralph would try to yank out the little bald bugger’s tongue and strangle him with it.
And if that upset somebody’s applecart, too goddam bad. He couldn’t take responsibility for grand plans and Long-Time business; his job now was to watch out for Lois, who was at risk, and try to stop the carnage that was going to occur not far from here in just a few hours. And who knew? He might even find a little extra time along the way which he could use to try and protect his own partially rejuvenated hide. This was the stuff he had to do, and if the nasty little fuck got in Ralph’s way, one of them was going down. If that didn’t fit in with the big boys’ plans, tough titty.
Lois was picking most of this up from his aura-he could read that in her own when she touched his arm and he turned to look at her.
[“What does that mean, Ralph? That you’ll try to kill him if he gets in our way?”] He considered this, then nodded.
[“Yeah-that’s exactly what it means.”] She thought about it, then nodded.
[“Ralph?” He looked at her, eyebrows raised.
[“If it needs to be done, I’ll help you do it.”] He was absurdly touched by this… and at pains to hide the rest of his thinking from her: that the only reason she was still with him at all was so that he could keep a protective eye on her. That thought led him back toward her earrings, but he pushed the image of them away, not wanting her to see-or even suspect-them in his aura.
Lois’s thoughts, meanwhile, had gone on in a different, marginally safer, direction. without meeting him, he’ll know some[“Even if we get in and out one was there, won’t he? He’ll probably know who it was, too.”] Ralph couldn’t deny it, but didn’t see that it mattered much; their options had been narrowed to just this one, at least temporarily.
They would take it a step at a time and just keep hoping that when the sun came up tomorrow morning, they would be around to see it.
Although, given a choice, I’d probably opt to sleep in, Ralph thought, and a small, wistful grin touched the corners of his mouth.
God, it feels like years since I slept in. His mind flashed from there to Carolyn’s favorite saying, the one about how it was a long walk back to Eden. It seemed to him right now that Eden might simply be sleeping until noon… or maybe a little past.
He took Lois’s hand and they started forward along Atropos’s trail again.
Forty feet east of the Cyclone fence marking the edge of the airport, the rusty tracks petered out. Atropos’s trail pushed on, however, although not for long; Ralph was quite sure he could see the spot where it ended, and the image of the two of them roped to the spokes of a big wheel recurred. If he was right, Atropos’s den was only a stone’s throw from where Ed had run into the fat man with the barrels of fertilizer in the back of his pickup truck.
The wind gusted, bringing them a sick, rotten smell from close by, and, from a little farther away, the voice of Faye Chapin, haranguing someone on his favorite subject: “… what I always say!
Mali-jongg is like chess, chess is like life, so if you can play either of those games-” The wind dropped again. Ralph could still hear Faye’s voice if he strained his ears, but he had lost the individual words. That was all right, though; he had heard the lecture often enough to know pretty much how it went.
[“Ralph, that stink is awful! It’s him, isn’t it?”] He nodded, but didn’t think Lois saw him. She held his hand tightly in hers, looking straight ahead with wide eyes. The splotchy track which had begun at the doors of the Civic Center ended at the base of a drunkenly leaning dead oak tree two hundred feet away. The cause of both the tree’s death and its final leaning position was clear: one side of the venerable relic had been peeled like a banana by a glancing stroke of lightning. The cracks and crenellations and bulges of its gray bark seemed to make the shapes of halfburied, silently screaming faces, and the tree spread its nude branches against the sky like grim ideograms… ones which boreat least in Ralph’s imagination-an uncomfortable resemblance to the Japanese ideograms which meant kamikaze. The bolt which had killed the tree hadn’t succeeded in knocking it over, but it had certainly done its best. The part of its extensive root-system which faced the airport had been yanked right out of the ground. These roots had extended beneath the chainlink fence and pulled a section of it upward and outward in a bell shape that made Ralph think, for the first time in years, of a childhood acquaintance named Charles Engstrom"Don’t you play with Chuckle,” Ralph’s mother used to tell him.