Orange Boy dismounted reluctantly. The combatants rose to their feet, looking at each other warily. Then Green Boy, trying to appear nonchalant, turned and went into the store. Only his quick glance back over his shoulder to make sure his opponent was not pursuing spoiled the effect.
The spectators were either following Green Boy into the store for their post-practice supplies or clustered around Orange Boy, congratulating him. Above them, unseen, that virulent red-purple toadstool was breaking up like a cloudbank before a strong wind.
Pieces of it tattered, unravelled, and disappeared.
The street is a carnival of energy, Ralph thought. The,juice thrown off by those two guys during the ninety seconds they were mixing it up looked like enough to light Derry for a week, and if a person could tap the energy the watchers generated-the energy inside that mushroom cloud-one could probably light the whole state of Maine for a month. Can you imagine what it would be like to enter the world of auras in Times Square at two minutes to midnight on New Year’s Eve?
He couldn’t and didn’t want to. He suspected he had glimpsed the leading edge of a force so huge and so vital that it made all the nuclear weapons created since 1945 seem about as powerful as a child’s cap-pistol fired into an empty peach can.
Enough force to destroy the universe, perhaps… or to create a new one.
Ralph went upstairs, dumped a can of beans into one pot and a couple of hotdogs into another, and walked impatiently back and forth through the flat, snapping his fingers and occasionally running his fingers through his hair, as he waited for this impromptu bachelor’s supper to cook. The bone-deep weariness which had hung on him like invisible weights ever since midsummer was, for the time being, at least, entirely gone; he felt filled with manic, antic energy, absolutely stuffed with it. He supposed this was why people liked Benzedrine and cocaine, only he had an idea that this was a much better high, that when it departed it would not leave him feeling plundered and mistreated, more used than user.
Ralph Roberts, unaware that the hair his fingers were combing through had grown thicker, and that threads of black were visible in it for the first time in five years, jive-toured his apartment, walking on the balls of his feet, first humming and then singing an old rockand-roll tune from the early sixties: “Hey, pretty bay-bee, you can’t sit down… you gotta slop, bop, slip, slop, flip top alll about…
The beans were bubbling in their pot, the hotdogs boiling in theirs-only it looked to Ralph almost as if they were dancing in there, doing the Bristol Stomp to the old Dovells tune. Still singing at the top of his lungs (“When you hear the hippie with the backbeat, you can’t sit down”), Ralph cut the hotdogs into the beans, dumped in half a pint of ketchup, added some chili sauce, then stirred everything vigorously together and headed for the door. He carried his supper, still in the pot, in one hand. He ran down the stairs as nimbly as a kid who’s running late on the first day of school.
He hooked a baggy old cardigan sweater-McGovern’s, but what the hell-out of the front hall closet, and then went back out on the porch.
The auras were gone, but Ralph wasn’t dismayed; for the time being he was more interested in the smell of food. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt as flat-out hungry as he did at that moment. He sat on the top step with his long thighs and bony knees sticking out on either side of him, looking decidedly Ichabod Craneish, and began to eat. The first few bites burned his lips and tongue, but instead of being deterred, Ralph ate faster, almost gobbling.
He paused with half the pot of beans and franks consumed. The animal in his stomach hadn’t gone back to sleep-not yet-but it had been pacified a bit. Ralph belched unselfconsciously and looked out at Harris Avenue with a feeling of contentment he hadn’t known in years.
Under the current circumstances, that feeling made no sense at all, but that didn’t change it in the slightest. When was the last time he had felt this good? Maybe not since the morning he’d awakened in that barn somewhere between Derry, Maine, and Poughkeepsie, New York, amazed by the conflicting rays of light-thousands of them, it had seemed-which crisscrossed the warm, sweet-smelling place where he lay.
Or maybe never.
Yes, or maybe never.
He spied Mrs. Perrine coming up the street, probably returning from A Safe Place, the combination soup-kitchen and homeless shelter down by the Canal. Ralph once again found himself fascinated by her strange, gliding walk, which she achieved without the aid of a cane and seemingly without any side-to-side movement of her hips.
Her hair, still more black than gray, was now held-or perhaps subdued was the word-by the hairnet she wore on the serving line.
Thick support hose the color of cotton candy rose from her spotless white nurse’s shoes… not that Ralph could see much of either them or the legs they covered; this evening Mrs. Perrine wore a man’s wool overcoat, and the hem came almost to her ankles. She seemed to depend almost entirely on her upper legs to move her along-a sign of some chronic back problem, Ralph guessed-and this mode of locomotion, coupled with the overcoat, gave Esther Perrine a somewhat surreal aspect as she approached. She looked like the black queen on a chessboard, a piece that was either being guided by an invisible hand or moving all by itself.
As she neared the place where Ralph sat-still wearing the ripped shirt and now eating his supper directly from the pot in the bargain-the auras began to steal back into the world again. The streetlights had already come on, and now Ralph saw delicate lavender arcs hung over each. He could also see a red haze hovering above some roofs, a yellow haze above others, a pale cerise abox,e still others. in the east, where night was now gathering itself, the horizon flocked with dim green speckles.
Closer to hand, he watched as Mrs. Perrine’s aura sprang to life around her-that firm gray that reminded him of a West Point cadet’s uniform. A few darker spots, like phantom buttons, shimmered above her bosom (Ralph assumed there was a bosom hidden somewhere beneath the overcoat). He was not sure, but thought these might be signs of impending ill health.
“Good evening, Mrs. Perrine,” he said politely, and watched(!
LIS the words rose in front of his eyes in snowflake shapes.
She gave him a penetrating glance, flicking her eyes up and down, seeming to simultaneously sum him up and dismiss him in a single look.
“I see you’re still wearing that same shirt, Roberts,” she said.
What she didn’t say-but what Ralph was sure she was thinking was I also see you sitting there an eating beans right out of the tin, like some ragged street-person who never learned any better…
“I have a habit of remembering what I see, Roberts.
“So I am,” Ralph said. “I guess I forgot to change it.”
“Hmmp,” said Mrs. Perrine, and now he thought it was his underwear she was considering. When was the last time it occurred to you to change that? I shudder to think, Roberts.
“Lovely evening, isn’t it, Mrs. Perrine?”
Another of those quick, birdlike glances, this time up at the sky.
Then back to Ralph. “It’s going to turn cold.”
“Do you think so?”
“Oh, yes-Indian summer’s over. My back isn’t good for much besides weather forecasting these days, but at that it does very well.”
She paused. “I believe that’s Bill McGovern’s sweater.”
“I guess it is,” Ralph agreed, wondering if she would ask him next if Bill knew he had it. He wouldn’t have put it past her.
Instead, she told him. to button it up. “You don’t want to be a candidate for pneumonia, do you?” she asked, and the tucked set of her mouth added, As well as for the nuthouse?