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 the honeycomb and the chamomile 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 Carol’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 ewt’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 ’all-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 S the pondered if the Panama was still in a forties crime drama. Ralph was lost or had merely been retired for the fall. “Today he’s once more j cooling his heels in our picturesque city all.”

“What exactly happened?” as little But neither of them really knew. At that point the story was more than a rumor which had spread through the park like a cont in this tagious headcold, a rumor which was of particular interest part of town because Ed Deepneau’s name was attached to it. Marie Callan had told Lois that there had been rock-throwing involved, I 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 demrs that WomanCare had been protors during the seven yea onstra ’ding abortions on demand. vi The two versions of the story were so vague and conflicting that Ralph felt he could reasonably hope neither was true, that perhaps just a case of a few overenthusiastic people who’d been ant was In places like Derry, that kind rested for trespassing, or something of thing 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-(;()).

No, he had an idea that if Ed had been there, it had probably not been just a case of someone accidentally honked 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 wearay, 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.