“Thanks, Dor,” Ralph said.
“We missed you,” Lois told him. “Didn’t you get your invitation?
Faye said he’d give it to you.”
“Oh, he gave it to me. Yes, oh yes, he did, but I don’t go to those things if they’re inside. Too stuffy. Funerals are even worse.
Here, this is for you. I didn’t wrap it, because the arthritis is in my fingers too bad for stuff like that now.”
Ralph took it. It was a book of poems called Concurring Beasts.
The poet’s name, Stephen Dobyns, gave him a funny little chill, but he wasn’t quite sure why.
4 “Thanks,” he told Dorrance.
“Not as good as some of his later work, but good. Dobyns is very good.”
“We’ll read them to each other on our honeymoon,” Lois said.
“That’s a good time to read poetry,” Dorrance said. “Maybe the best time. I’m sure you’ll be very happy together.”
He started off, then looked back.
“You did a great thing. The Long-Timers are very pleased.”
He walked away.
Lois looked at Ralph. “What was he talking about? Do you know?
“Ralph shook his head. He didn’t, not for sure, although he felt as if he should know. The scar on his arm had begun to tingle as it 7 sometimes did, a feeling which was almost like a deep-seated itch.
“Long-Timers,” she mused. “Maybe he meant us, Ralph-after all, we’re hardly spring chickens these days, are we?”
“That’s probably just what he did mean,” Ralph agreed, but he knew better… and her eyes said that, somewhere deep down, so did she.
On that same day, and just as Ralph and Lois were saying their I do’s, a certain wino with a bright green aura-one who actually did have an uncle in Dexter, although the uncle hadn’t seen this the’erdo-well nephew for five years or more-was tramping across Strawford Park, slitting his eyes against the formidable glare of sun on snow. He was looking for returnable cans and bottles. Enough to buy a pint of whiskey would be great, but a pint of Night Train wine would do.
Not far from the Portosan marked MEN, he saw a bright gleam of metal.
It was probably just the sun reflecting off a bottle-cap, but such things needed to be checked out. It might be a dime… although to the wino, it actually seemed to have a goldy sort of gleam. It"Holy Judas!” he cried, snatching up the wedding ring which lay mysteriously on top of the snow. It was a broad band, almost certainly gold. He tilted it to read the engraving on the inside:
A pint? Hell, no. This little baby was going to secure him a quart.
Several quarts. Possibly a week’s worth of quarts.
Hurrying across the intersection of Witcham and.fackson, the one where Ralph Roberts had once almost fainted, the wino never saw him put on his brakes, but the bus struck a patch of ice.
The wino never knew what hit him. At one moment he was debating between Old Crow and Old Grand-Dad; at the next he had passed into the darkness which awaits us all. The ring rolled down the gutter and disappeared into a sewer grate, and there it remained for a long, long time. But not forever. In Derry, things that disappear into the sewer system have a way-an often unpleasant one-of turning up.
Ralph and Lois didn’t live happily ever after.
There really are no evers in the Short-Time world, happy or otherwise, a fact which Clotho and Lachesis undoubtedly knew well.
They did live happily for quite some time, though. Neither of them liked to come right out and say these were the happiest years of all, because both remembered their first partners in marriage with love and affection, but in their hearts, both did consider them the happiest. Ralph wasn’t sure that autumn love was the richest love, but he came firmly to believe that it was the kindest, and the most fulfilling.
Our LoiS, he often said, and laughed. Lois pretended to be irritated at this, but pretending was all it ever was; she saw the look in his eyes when he said it.
On their first Christmas Morning as man and wife (they had moved into Lois’s tidy little house and put his own white rhino up for sale), Lois gave him a beagle puppy.” Do you like her?” she asked apprehensively.
“I almost didn’t get her, Dear Abby says you should never give pets as presents, but she looked so sweet in the petshop window… and so sad… if you don’t like her, or don’t 756 want to spend the rest of the winter trying to housebreak a puppy, just say so. We’ll find someone-”
“Lois,” he said, giving his eyebrow what he hoped was that that special Bill McGovern lift, you’re babbling.”
“I am?”
“You am. It’s something you do when you’re nervous, but you can stop being nervous right now. I’m crazy ’bout dis lady.” Nor was that an exaggeration; he fell in love with the black-and-tan beagle bitch almost at once.
“What will you name her?” Lois asked. “Any idea?”
“Sure,” Ralph said. “Rosalie.”
The next four years were happy ones for Helen and Nat Deepneau, as well.
They lived frugally in an apartment on the east side of town for awhile, getting along on Helen’s librarian’s salary but not doing much more than that. The little Cape Cod up the street from Ralph’s place had sold, but that money had gone to pay outstanding bills. Then, in June of 1994, Helen received an insurance windfall… only the wind that blew it her way was fohn Leydecker.
The Great Eastern Insurance Company had originally refused to pay off on Ed Deepneau’s life insurance policy, claiming he had taken his own life. Then, after a great deal of harrumphing and muttering under their corporate breath, they had offered a substantial settlement.
They were persuaded to do this by a poker-buddy of John Leydecker’s named Howard Hayman. When he wasn’t playing lowball, five-card stud, and three-card draw, Hayman was a laxvyer who employed lunching on insurance companies.
Leydecker had re-met Helen at Ralph and Lois’s in February of 1994, had fallen head over heels in fascination with her (“It was never quite love,” he told Ralph and Lois later, “which was probably just as well, considering how things turned out”), and had introduced her to Hayman because he thought the insurance company was trying to screw her. “He was not suicidal,” Leydecker said, and stuck to that long after Helen had handed him his hat and shown him the door.
After being faced with a suit in which Howard Hayman threatened to make Great Eastern look like Snidely Whiplash tying Little a Nell to the railroad tracks, Helen had received a check for seventy thousand dollars. In the late fall of 1994 she had used most of this money to build a house on Harris Avenue, just three doors up from her old place and right across from Harriet Bennigan’s.
“I was never really happy on the east side,” she told Lois one day in November of that year. They were on their way back from the park, and Natalie had been sitting slumped and fast asleep in her stroller, her presence little more than a p k os 1 in n e-tip and a fog of cold breath below a large ski-hat which Lois had knitted herself. “I used to dream about Harris Avenue. Isn’t that crazy?”
“I don’t think dreams are ever crazy,” Lois replied.
Helen and John Leydecker dated for most of that summer, but neither Ralph nor Lois was particularly surprised when the courtship abruptly ended after Labor Day, or when Helen began to wear a discreet pink triangle pin on her prim, high-necked librarian’s blouses.
Perhaps they were not surprised because they were old enough to have seen everything at least once, or perhaps on some deep level they were still glimpsing the auras which surround thinls.
I creating a bright gateway opening on a secret city of hidden meanings, concealed motives, and camouflaged agendas.
Ralph and Lois babysat Natalie frequently after Helen moved back to Harris Avenue, and they enjoyed these stints tremendously. Nat was the child their marriage might have produced if it had happened thirty years sooner, and the coldest, most overcast winter day warmed and brightened when Natalie came toddling in, looking like a midget version of the Goodyear blimp in her pink quilted snowsuit with the mittens hanging from the cuffs, and yelled exuberantly: “Hi, I miss! I come to bizzit you!”