by Stephen King
She finished her own coffee, set the cup carefully back down in its saucer, studied her fingertips for a moment, then looked up at him. Again he was forcibly struck by her beauty - almost levelled by it.
'They were good,' she said. 'They are good. I felt that very strongly. Didn't you?'
'Yes,' he said, almost reluctantly. Of course he had felt it. They were everything Atropos was not.
'And you're going to try to stop Ed regardless - you said you could no more not try than you could not try to duck a baseball someone chucked at your head. Isn't that so?'
'Yes,' he said, more reluctantly still.
'Then you should let the rest of it go,' she said calmly, meeting his blue eyes with her dark ones. 'It's just taking up space inside your head, Ralph. Making clutter.'
He saw the truth of what she said, but still doubted if he could simply open his hand and let that part of it fly free. Maybe you had to live to be seventy before you could fully appreciate how hard it was to escape your upbringing. He was a man whose education on how to be a man had begun before Adolf Hitler's rise to power, and he was still a prisoner of a generation that had listened to H.V. Kaltenborn and the Andrews Sisters on the radio - a generation of men that believed in moonlight cocktails and walking a mile for a Camel. Such an upbringing almost negated such nice moral questions as who was working for the good and who was working for the bad; the important thing was not to let the bullies kick sand in your face. Not to be led by the nose.
Is that so? Carolyn asked, coolly amused. How fascinating. But let me be the first to let you in on a little secret, Ralph: that's crap. It was crap back before Glenn Miller disappeared over the horizon and it's crap now. The idea that a man's got to do what a man's got to do, now . . . there might be a little truth to that, even in this day and age. It's a long walk back to Eden in any case, isn't it, sweetheart?
Yes. A very long walk back to Eden.
'What are you smiling about, Ralph?'
He was saved the need to reply by the arrival of the waitress and a huge tray of food. He noticed for the first time that there was a button pinned to the frill of her apron. LIFE IS NOT A CHOICE, it read.
'Are you going to the rally at the Civic Center tonight?' Ralph asked her.
'I'll be there,' she said, setting her tray down on the unoccupied table next to theirs in order to free her hands. 'Outside. Carrying a sign. Walking roundy-round.'
'Are you a Friend of Life?' Lois asked as the waitress began to deal out omelets and side-dishes.
'Am I livin?' the waitress asked.
'Yes, you certainly appear to be,' Lois said politely.
'Well, I guess that makes me a Friend of Life, doesn't it? Killing something that could someday write a great poem or invent a drug that cures AIDS or cancer, in my book that's just flat wrong. So I'll wave my sign around and make sure the Norma Kamali feminists and Volvo liberals can see that the word on it is MURDER. They hate that word. They don't use it at their cocktail parties and fundraisers. You folks need ketchup?'
'No,' Ralph said. He could not take his eyes off her. A faint green glow had begun to spread around her - it almost seemed to come wisping up from her pores. The auras were coming back, cycling up to full brilliance.
''D I grow a second head or somethin while I wasn't lookin?' the waitress asked. She popped her gum and switched it to the other side of her mouth.
'I was staring, wasn't I?' Ralph asked. He felt blood heating his cheeks. 'Sorry.'
The waitress shrugged her beefy shoulders, setting the upper part of her aura into lazy, fascinating motion. 'I try not to get carried away with this stuff, you know? Most days I just do my job and keep my mouth shut. But I ain't no quitter, either. Do you know how long I've been marchin around in front of that brick slaughterin pen, on days hot enough to fry my butt and nights cold enough to freeze it off?'
Ralph and Lois shook their heads.
'Since 1984. Nine long years. You know what gets me the most about the choicers?'
'What?' Lois asked quietly.
'They're the same people who want to see guns outlawed so people won't shoot each other with them, the same ones who say the electric chair and the gas chamber are unconstitutional because they're cruel and unusual punishment. They say those things, then go out and support laws that allow doctors - doctors! - to stick vacuum tubes into women's wombs and pull their unborn sons and daughters to pieces. That's what gets me the most.'
The waitress said all this - it had the feel of a speech she had made many times before - without raising her voice or displaying the slightest outward sign of anger. Ralph only listened with half an ear; most of his attention was fixed on the pale green aura which surrounded her. Except it wasn't all pale green. A yellowish-black blotch revolved slowly over her lower right side like a dirty wagon wheel.
Her liver, Ralph thought. Something wrong with her liver.
'You wouldn't really want anything to happen to Susan Day, would you?' Lois asked, looking at the waitress with troubled eyes. 'You seem like a very nice person, and I'm sure you wouldn't want that.'
The waitress sighed through her nose, producing two jets of fine green mist. 'I ain't as nice as I look, hon. If God did something to her, I'd be the first wavin my hands around in the air and sayin "Thy will be done," believe me. But if you're talking about some nut, I guess that's different. Things like that drag us all down, put us on the same level as the people we're trying to stop. The nuts don't see it that way, though. They're the jokers in the deck.'
'Yes,' Ralph said. 'Jokers in the deck is just what they are.'
'I guess I really don't want anything bad to happen to that woman,' the waitress said, 'but something could. It really could. And the way I look at it, if something does, she's got no one to blame but herself. She's running with the wolves . . . and women who run with wolves shouldn't go acting too surprised if they get bitten.'
5
Ralph wasn't sure how much he would want to eat after that, but his appetite turned out to have survived the waitress's views on abortion and Susan Day quite nicely. The auras helped; food had never tasted this good to him, not even as a teenager, when he'd eaten five and even six meals a day, if he could get them.
Lois matched him bite for bite, at least for awhile. At last she pushed the remains of her home fries and her last two strips of bacon aside. Ralph plugged gamely on down the home stretch alone. He wrapped the last bite of toast around the last bit of sausage, pushed it into his mouth, swallowed, and sat back in his chair with a vast sigh.
'Your aura has gone two shades darker, Ralph. I don't know if that means you finally got enough to eat or that you're going to die of indigestion.'
'Could be both,' he said. 'You see them again too, huh?'
She nodded.
'You know something?' he asked. 'Of all the things in the world, the one I'd like most right now is a nap.' Yes indeed. Now that he was warm and fed, the last four months of largely sleepless nights seemed to have fallen on him like a bag filled with sashweights. His eyelids felt as if they had been dipped in cement.
'I think that would be a bad idea right now,' Lois said, sounding alarmed. 'A very bad idea.'
'I suppose so,' Ralph agreed.
Lois started to raise her hand for the check, then lowered it again. 'What about calling your policeman friend? Leydecker, isn't that his name? Could he help us? Would he?'
Ralph considered this as carefully as his muzzy head would allow, then reluctantly shook his head. 'I don't quite dare try it. What could we tell him that wouldn't get us committed? And that's only part of the problem. If he did get involved . . . but in the wrong way . . . he might make things worse instead of better.'
'Okay.' Lois waved to the waitress. 'We're going to ride out there with all the windows open, and we're going to stop at the Dunkin' Donuts out in the Old Cape for giant economy-sized coffees. My treat.'
Ralph smiled. It felt large and dopey and disconnected on his face - almost a drunken smile. 'Yes,
ma'am.'
When the waitress came over and slid their check face-down in front of him, Ralph noticed that the button reading LIFE IS NOT A CHOICE was no longer pinned to the frill of her apron.
'Listen,' she said with an earnestness Ralph found almost painfully touching,'I'm sorry if I offended you folks. You came in for breakfast, not a lecture.'
'You didn't offend us,' Ralph said. He glanced across the table at Lois, who nodded agreement.
The waitress smiled briefly. 'Thanks for saying so, but I still kinda zoomed on you. Any other day I wouldn'ta, but we're having our own rally this afternoon at four, and I'm introducing Mr Dalton. They told me I could have three minutes, and I guess that's about what I gave you.'
'That's all right,' Lois said, and patted her hand. 'Really.'
The waitress's smile was warmer and more genuine this time, but as she started to turn away, Ralph saw Lois's pleasant expression falter. She was looking at the yellow-black blob floating just above the waitress's right hip.
Ralph pulled out the pen he kept clipped to his breast pocket, turned over his paper placemat, and printed quickly on the back. When he was done, he took out his wallet and placed a five-dollar bill carefully below what he had written. When the waitress reached for the tip, she would hardly be able to avoid seeing the message.
He picked up the check and flapped it at Lois. 'Our first real date and I guess it'll have to be dutch,' he said. 'I'm three bucks short if I leave her the five. Please tell me you're not broke.'
'Who, the poker queen of Ludlow Grange? Don't be seely, dollink.' She handed him a helter-skelter fistful of bills from her purse. While he sorted through them for what he needed, she read what he had written on the placemat:
Madam:
You are suffering from reduced liver function and should see your doctor immediately. And I strongly advise you to stay away from the Civic Center tonight.
'Pretty stupid, I know,' Ralph said.
She kissed the tip of his nose. 'Trying to help other people is never stupid.'
'Thanks. She won't believe it, though. She'll think we were pissed off about her button and her little speech in spite of what we said. That what I wrote is just our weird way of trying to get our own back on her.'
'Maybe there's a way to convince her otherwise.'
Lois fixed the waitress - who was standing hipshot by the kitchen pass-through and talking to the short-order cook while she drank a cup of coffee - with a look of dark concentration. As she did, Ralph saw Lois's normal blue-gray aura deepen in color and draw inward, becoming a kind of body-hugging capsule.
He wasn't exactly sure what was going on . . . but he could feel it. The hairs on the back of his neck stood at attention; his forearms broke out in gooseflesh. She's powering up, he thought, flipping all the switches, turning on all the turbines, and doing it on behalf of a woman she never saw before and will probably never see again.
After a moment the waitress felt it, too. She turned to look at them as if she had heard her name called. Lois smiled casually and twiddled her fingers in a small wave, but when she spoke to Ralph, her voice was trembling with effort. 'I've almost . . . almost got it.'
'Almost got what?'
'I don't know. Whatever it is I need. It'll come in a second. Her name is Zoe, with two dots over the e. Go pay the check. Distract her. Try to keep her from looking at me. It makes it harder.'
He did as she asked and was fairly successful in spite of the way Zoe kept trying to look over his shoulder at Lois. The first time she attempted to ring the check into the register, Zoe came up with a total of $234.20. She cleared the numbers with an impatient poke of her finger, and when she looked up at Ralph, her face was pale and her eyes were upset.
'What's with your wife?' she asked Ralph. 'I apologized, didn't I? So why does she keep looking at me like that?'
Ralph knew Zoe couldn't see Lois, because he was all but tap-dancing in an effort to keep his body between the two of them, but he also knew she was right - Lois was staring.
He attempted to smile. 'I don't know what--'
The waitress jumped and shot a startled, irritated glance back at the short-order cook. 'Quit banging those pots around!' she shouted, although the only thing Ralph had heard from the kitchen was a radio playing elevator-music. Zoe looked back at Ralph. 'Christ, it sounds like Vietnam back there. Now if you could just tell your wife it's not polite to--'
'To stare? She's not. She's really not.' Ralph stood aside. Lois had gone to the door and was looking out at the street with her back to them. 'See?'
Zoe didn't reply for several seconds, although she kept looking at Lois. At last she turned back to Ralph. 'Sure. I see. Now why don't you and her just make yourselves scarce?'
'All right - still friends?'
'Whatever you want,' Zoe said, but she wouldn't look at him.
When Ralph rejoined Lois, he saw that her aura had gone back to its former, more diffuse state, but it was much brighter than it had been.
'Still tired, Lois?' he asked her softly.
'No. As a matter of fact, I feel fine now. Let's go.'
He started to open the door for her, then stopped. 'Got my pen?'
'Gee, no - I guess it's still on the table.'
Ralph went over to pick it up. Below his note, Lois had added a PS in rolling Palmer-method script:
In 1989 you had a baby and gave him up for adoption. Saint Anne's, in Providence, RI. Go and see your doctor before it's too late, Zoe. No joke. No trick. We know what we're talking about.
'Oh boy,' Ralph said as he rejoined her. 'That's going to scare the bejesus out of her.'
'If she gets to her doctor before her liver goes belly-up, I don't care.'
He nodded and they went out.
6
'Did you get that stuff about her kid when you dipped into her aura?' Ralph asked as they crossed the leaf-strewn parking lot.
Lois nodded. Beyond the lot, the entire east side of Derry was shimmering with bright, kaleidoscopic light. It was coming back hard now, very hard, that secret light cycling up and up. Ralph reached out and put his hand on the side of his car. Touching it was like tasting a slick, licorice-flavored cough-drop.
'I don't think I took very much of her . . . her stuff,' Lois said, 'but it was as if I swallowed all of her.'
Ralph remembered something he'd read in a science magazine not long ago. 'If every cell in our bodies contains a complete blueprint of how we're made,' he said, 'why shouldn't every bit of a person's aura contain a complete blueprint of what we are?'
'That doesn't sound very scientific, Ralph.'
'I suppose not.'
She squeezed his arm and grinned up at him. 'It does sound about right, though.'
He grinned back at her.
'You need to take some more, too,' she told him. 'It still feels wrong to me - like stealing - but if you don't, I think you're going to pass right out on your feet.'
'As soon as I can. Right now all I want to do is get out to High Ridge.' Yet once he got behind the wheel, his hand faltered away from the ignition key almost as soon as he touched it.
'Ralph? What is it?'
'Nothing . . . everything. I can't drive like this. I'll wrap us around a telephone pole or drive us into some-body's living room.'
He looked up at the sky and saw one of those huge birds, this one transparent, roosting atop a satellite dish on the roof of an apartment house across the way. A thin, lemon-colored haze drifted up from its folded prehistoric wings.
Are you seeing it? a part of his mind asked doubtfully. Are you sure of that, Ralph? Are you really, really sure?
I'm seeing it, all right. Fortunately or unfortunately, I'm seeing it all . . . but if there was ever a right time to see such things, this isn't it.
He concentrated, and felt that interior blink happen deep within his mind. The bird faded away like a ghost-image on a TV screen. The warmly glowing palette of colors spread out across the morning lost their vibrancy. He went on perceiv
ing that other part of the world long enough to see the colors run into one another, creating the bright gray-blue haze which he'd begun seeing on the day he'd gone into Day Break, Sun Down for coffee and pie with Joe Wyzer - and then that was gone, too. Ralph felt an almost crushing need to curl up, pillow his head on his arm, and go to sleep. He began taking long, slow breaths instead, pulling each one a little deeper into his lungs, and then turned the ignition key. The engine roared into life, accompanied by that clacking sound. It was much louder now.
'What's that?' Lois asked.
'I don't know,' Ralph said, but he thought he did - either a tie-rod or a piston. In either case they would be in trouble if it let go. At last the sound began to diminish, and Ralph dropped the transmission into Drive. 'Just poke me hard if you see me starting to nod off, Lois.'
'You can count on it,' she said. 'Now let's go.'
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
* * *
1
The Dunkin' Donuts on Newport Avenue was a jolly pink sugarchurch in a drab neighborhood of tract houses. Most had been built in a single year, 1946, and were now crumbling. This was Derry's Old Cape, where elderly cars with wired-up mufflers and cracked windshields wore bumper stickers saying things like DON'T BLAME ME I VOTED FOR PEROT and ALL THE WAY WITH THE NRA, where no house was complete without at least one Fisher-Price Big Wheel trike standing on the listless lawn, where girls were stepping dynamite at sixteen and all too often dull-eyed, fat-bottomed mothers of three at twenty-four.
Two boys on fluorescent bikes with extravagant ape-hanger handlebars were doing wheelies in the parking lot, weaving in and out of each other's paths with a dexterity that suggested a solid background in video gaming and possible high-paying futures as air-traffic controllers . . . if they managed to stay away from coke and car accidents, that was. Both wore their hats backward. Ralph wondered briefly why they weren't in school on a Friday morning, or at least on the way, and decided he didn't care. Probably they didn't, either.
Suddenly the two bikes, which had been avoiding each other easily up until then, crashed together. Both boys fell to the pavement, then got to their feet almost immediately. Ralph was relieved to see neither was hurt; their auras did not even flicker.
'Goddam wet end!' the one in the Nirvana tee-shirt yelled indignantly at his friend. He was perhaps eleven. 'What the hell's the matter with you? You ride a bike like old people fuck!'
