The telephone lines on Derry’s west side were still above ground, and Ralph stared fixedly at them, vaguely aware that he had stopped breathing and should probably start again soon if he didn’t want to pass out. jagged yellow spirals were running briskly up and down the black wires, reminding Ralph of how barber-poles had looked when he was a kid. Every now and then this bumblebee pattern was broken by a spiky red vertical stroke or a green flash that seemed to spread both ways at once, obliterating the yellow rings for a moment before fading out.
You’re watching people talk, he thought numbly. Do you know, that, Ralph? Aunt Sadie in Dallas is chatting with her favorite nephew who lives in Derry,-a farmer in Haven is jawing with the dealer he buys his tractor parts from,-a minister is trying to help a troubled parishioner. Those are voices, and I think the bright strokes and flashes are coming from people in the grip of some strong emotion-love or hate, happiness orjealousy.
And Ralph sensed that all he was seeing and all he was feeling was not all; that there was a whole world still waiting just beyond the current reach of his senses. Enough, perhaps, to make even what he was seeing now seem faint and faded. And if there was more, how could he possibly bear it without going mad? Not even putting his eyes out would help; he understood somehow that his sense of ’ “these things came mostly from his lifelong acceptance of seeing sight as his primary sense. But there was, in fact, a lot more than seeing going on here.
In order to prove this to himself he closed his eyes… and went right on seeing Harris Avenue. It was as if his eyelids had turned to glass. The only difference was that all the usual colors had reversed themselves, creating a world that looked like the negative of a color photograph. The trees were no longer orange and yellow but the bright, unnatural green of lime Gatorade. The surface of Harris Avenue, repaved with fresh asphalt in June, had become a great white way, and the sky was an amazing red lake. He opened his eyes again, almost positive that the auras would be gone, but they weren’t; the world still boomed and rolled with color and movement and deep, resonating sound.
When do I start seeing them? Ralph wondered as he began to walk slowly down the hill again. When do the little bald doctors start coming out of the woodwork?
There were no doctors in evidence, however, bald or otherwise; no angels in the architecture; no devils peering up from the sewer gratings. There was only"Look out, Roberts, watch where you’re going, can’t you?”
The words, harsh and a little alarmed, seemed to have actual physical texture; it was like running a hand over oak panelling in some ancient abbey or ancestral hall. Ralph stopped short and saw Mrs. Perrine from down the street. She had stepped off the sidewalk into the gutter to keep from being bowled over like a tenpin, and now she stood ankle-deep in fallen leaves, holding her net shopping bag in one hand and glaring at Ralph from beneath her thick salt-andpepper eyebrows. The aura which surrounded her was the firm, nononsense gray of a West Point uniform.
“Are you drunk, Roberts?” she asked in a clipped voice, and suddenly the riot of color and sensation fell out of the world and it was just Harris Avenue again, drowsing its way through a lovely weekday morning in mid-autumn.
“Drunk? Me? Not at all. Sober as a judge, honest.”
He held out his hand to her. Mrs. Perrine, over eighty but not giving in to it so much as a single inch, looked at it as if she believed Ralph might have a joy-buzzer hidden in his palm. Wouldn’t put it past you, Roberts, her cool gray eyes said. Wouldn’t put it past you at all. She stepped back onto the sidewalk without Ralph’s aid.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Perrine. I wasn’t watching where I was going.”
“No, you certainly weren’t. Loflygagging along with your mouth hanging open is what you were doing. You looked like the village idiot.”
“Sorry,” he repeated, and then had to bite his tongue to stifle a bray of laughter.
“Hmmp.” Mrs. Perrine looked him slowly up and down, like a Marine drill-sergeant inspecting a raw recruit. “There’s a rip under the arm of that shirt, Roberts.”
Ralph raised his left arm and looked. There was indeed a large rip in his favorite plaid shirt. He could look through it and see the bandage with its dried spot of blood; also an unsightly tangle of oldman armpit hair. He lowered his arm hurriedly, feeling a blush rising in his cheeks.
“Hmmp,” Mrs. Perrine said again, expressing everything she needed to express on the subject of Ralph Roberts without recourse to a single vowel. “Drop it off at the house, if you like. Any other mending you might have, as well. I can still run a needle, you know.”
“Oh yes, I’ll bet you can, Mrs. Perrine.”
Mrs. Perrine now gave him a look which said You’re a dried-up old asskisser, Ralph Roberts, but I suppose you can’t help it.
“Not in the afternoon,” she said. “I help make dinner at the homeless shelter in the afternoons, and help serve it out at five.
It’s God’s work.”
“Yes, I’m sure it-”
“There’ll be no homeless in heaven, Roberts.
You can count on that. No ripped shirts, either, I’m sure. But while we’re here, we have to get along and make do. It’s our job.”
And I, for one, am doing spectacularly well at it, Mrs. Perrine’s face proclaimed. “Bring your mending in the morning or in the evening, Roberts. Don’t stand on ceremony, but don’t you show up on my doorstep after eightthirty. I go to bed at nine.”
“That’s very kind of you, Mrs. Perrine,” Ralph said, and had to bite his tongue again. He was aware that very soon this trick would cease to work; soon it was going to be a case of laugh or die, “Not at all. Christian duty. Also, Carolyn was a friend of mine.”
“Thank you,” Ralph said. “Terrible about May Locher, wasn’t it?”
“No,” Mrs. Perrine said. “God’s mercy.” And she glided upon her way before Ralph could say another word. Her spine was so excruciatingly straight that it hurt him to look at it.
He walked on a dozen steps, then could hold it no longer. He leaned a forearm against a telephone pole, pressed his mouth to his arm, and laughed as quietly as he could-laughed until tears poured down his cheeks. When the fit (and that was what it really felt like; a kind of hysterical seizure) had passed, Ralph raised his head and looked around with attentive, curious, slightly teary eyes. He saw nothing that anyone else couldn’t see as well, and that was a relief.
But it will come back, Ralph. You know it will. All of it.
Yes, he supposed he did know it, but that was for later. Right now he had some talking to do.
When Ralph finally arrived back from his amazing journey up the street, McGovern was sitting in his chair on the porch and idling through the morning paper. As Ralph turned up the walk, he came to a sudden decision. He would tell Bill a lot, but not everything.
One of the things he would definitely leave out was how much the two guys he’d seen coming out of Mrs. Locher’s house had looked like the aliens in the tabloids for sale at the Red Apple.
McGovern looked up as he climbed the steps. “Hello, Ralph.”
“Hi, Bill. Can I talk to you about something?”
“Of course.” He closed the paper and folded it carefully. “They finally took my old friend Bob Polhurst to the hospital yesterday.”
“Oh? I thought you expected that to happen sooner.”
“I did. Everybody did. He fooled us. In fact, he seemed to be getting better-of the pneumonia, at least-and then he relapsed, He had a breathing arrest yesterday around noon, and his niece thought he was going to die before the ambulance got there. He didn’t, though, and now he seems to have stabilized again.” McGovern looked up the street and sighed. “May Locher pops off in the middle of the night and Bob keeps chugging along. What a world, huh?”