“What do you expect them to try?” Ralph asked. “Armed assault, like in a Chuck Norris movie?”
He smiled, but Gretchen did not answer it. “The thing is, we don’t know what they might try,” she said. “The most likely answer is nothing at all. Then again, Ed or one of the others might take it into his head to try and push you out your own kitchen window. The spray is basically nothing but watered-down teargas. A little insurance policy, that’s all.”
“Insurance,” he said thoughtfully.
“You’re in very select company,” Helen said with a wan smile.
“The only other male Centurion on their list-that we know about, anyway-is Mayor Cohen.”
“Did you give him one of these?” Ralph asked, picking up the aerosol can. It looked no more dangerous than the free samples of shaving cream he got in the mail from time to time.
“We didn’t need to,” Gretchen said. She looked at her watch again. Helen saw the gesture and stood up with the sleeping baby in her armg-.
“He’s got a license to carry a concealed weapon.”
“How would you know a thing like that?” Ralph asked.
“We checked the files at City Hall,” she said, and grinned. “Gun permits are a matter of public record.”
“Oh.” A thought occurred to him. “What about Ed? Did you check on him? Does he have one?”
“Nope,” she said. “But guys like Ed don’t necessarily apply for weapons permits once they get past a certain point… you know that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Ralph replied, also getting up. “I suppose I do. What about you guys? Are you watching out?”
“You bet, Daddy-o. You bet we are.”
He nodded, but wasn’t entirely satisfied. There was a faintly patronizing tone in her voice that he didn’t like, as if the very question were a silly one. But it wasn’t silly, and if she didn’t know that, she and her friends could be in trouble down the line. Bad trouble.
“I hope so,” he said. “I really do. Can I carry Nat downstairs for you, Helen?”
“Better not-you’d wake her.” She looked at him gravely.
“Would you carry that spray for me, Ralph? I can’t stand the thought of you being hurt just because you tried to help me and he’s got some crazy bee in his bonnet.”
“I’ll think about it very seriously. Will that do?”
“I guess it will have to.” She looked at him closely, her eyes searching his face. “You look much better than the last time I saw you-you’re sleeping again, aren’t you?”
He grinned. “Well, to tell you the truth, I’m still having my problems, but I must be getting better, because people keep telling me that.”
She stood on tiptoe and kissed the corner of his mouth. “We’ll be in touch, won’t we? I mean, we’ll stay in touch.”
“I’ll do my part if you’ll do yours, sweetie.”
She smiled. “You can count on that, Ralph-you’re the nicest male
Centurion I know.”
They all laughed at that, so hard that Natalie woke up and looked around at them in sleepy surprise.
After he had seen the women off (I’M PREJUDICED, AND I VOTE!
read the sticker on the rear bumper of Gretchen Tillbury’s Accord fastback), Ralph climbed slowly up to the second floor again.
Weariness dragged at his heels like invisible weights. once in the kitchen he looked first at the vase of flowers, trying to see that strange and gorgeous green mist rising from the stems. Nothing. Then he picked up the aerosol and re-examined the cartoon on the side of the can.
One Menaced Woman, heroically warding off her attacker; one Bad Man, complete with eye-mask and slouch hat. No shades of gray here; just a case of go ahead, punk, make my day.
It occurred to Ralph that Ed’s madness was catching. There were women all over Derry-Gretchen Tillbury and his own sweet Helen among them-walking around with these little spray-cans in their purses, and all the cans really said the same thing: I’m afraid. The bad men in the masks and the slouch hats have arrived in Derry and I’m arra id.
Ralph wanted no part of it. Standing on tiptoe, he put the can of Bodyguard on top of the kitchen cabinet beside the sink, then shrugged into his old gray leather jacket. He would go up to the picnic area near the airport and see if he could find a game of chess.
Lacking that, maybe a few rounds of cribbage.
He paused in the kitchen doorway, looking fixedly at the flowers, trying to make that sizzling green mist come. Nothing happened.
But it was there. You saw it,-Natalie did, too.
But had she? Had she really? Babies were always goggling at stuff, everything amazed them, so how could he know for sure?
“I just do,” he said to the empty apartment. Correct. The green mist rising from the stems of the flowers had been there, all the auras had been there, and…
“And they’re still there,” he said, and did not know if he should be relieved or appalled by the firmness he heard in his own voice, For right now, why don’t you try being neither, sweetheart.p His thought, Carolyn’s voice, good advice.
Ralph locked up his apartment and went out into the Derry of the Old Crocks, looking for a game of chess.
CHAPTER 7
When Ralph came walking up Harris Avenue to his apartment on October 2nd, with a c(puple of recycled Elmer Kelton Westerns from Back Pages in one hand, he saw that someone was sitting on the perch steps with his own book. The visitor wasn’t reading, however; he was watching with dreamy intensity as the warm wind which had been blowing all day harvested the yellow and gold leaves from the oaks and the three surviving elms across the street.
Ralph came closer, observing the thin white hair flying around the skull of the man on the porch, and the way all his bulk seemed to have run into his belly, hips, and bottom. That wide center section, coupled with the scrawny neck, narrow chest, and spindly legs clad in old green flannel pants, gave him the look of a man wearing an inner tube beneath his clothes. Even from a hundred and fifty yards away, there was really no question about who the visitor was: Dorrance Marstellar.
Sighing, Ralph walked the rest of the way up to his building.
Dorrance, seemingly hypnotized by the bright falling leaves, did not look around until Ralph’s shadow dropped across him. Then he turned, craned his neck, and smiled his sweet, strangely vulnerable smile.
Faye Chapin, Don Veazie, and some of the other old-timers who hung out at the picnic area up by Runway 3 (they would retire to the Jackson Street Billiard Emporium once Indian summer broke and the weather turned cold) saw that smile as just another indicator that Old Dor, poetry books or no poetry books, was essentially brainless. Don Veazie, nobody’s idea of Mr. Sensitivity, had fallen into the habit of calling Dorrance Old Chief Dumbhead, and Faye had once told Ralph that he, Faye, wasn’t in the least surprised that Old Dor had lived to the age of half-past ninety. “People who don’t have any furniture on their upper storey always live the longest,” he had explained to Ralph earlier that year. “They don’t have anything to worry about. That keeps their blood-pressure down and they ain’t so likely to blow a valve or throw a rod.”
Ralph, however, was not so sure. The sweetness in Dorrance’s smile did not make the old man look empty-headed to him; it made him look somehow ethereal and knowing at the same time… sort of like a small-town Merlin. Nonetheless, he could have done without a visit from Dor today; this morning he had set a new record, waking at 1:58 a.m and he was exhausted. He only wanted to sit in his own living room, drink coffee, and try to read one of the Westerns he had picked up downtown. Maybe later on he would take another stab at napping.
“Hullo,” Dorrance said. The book he was holding was a paperback-Cemetery Nights, by a man named Stephen Dobyns.
“Hello, Dor,” he said. “Good book?”
Dorrance looked down at the book as if he’d forgotten he had one, then smiled and nodded. “Yes, very good. He writes poems that are like stories. I don’t always like that, but sometimes I do.”