She looked at him helplessly, but made no attempt to stop him again. Instead she began to cry. “Foolish old man!” she whispered.
“Foolish, willful old man!”
“Yes, I suppose,” he said, and lifted her chin. “But I’m a foolish, willful old man of my word. Come with me. I’d like that.”
“All right, Ralph.” She could hardly hear her own voice, and her skin was as cold as clay. Her aura had gone almost completely red.
“What is it? What’s going to happen to her?”
“She’s going to be hit by a green Ford sedan. Unless I take her place, she’s going to be splashed all over Harris Avenue… and Helen’s going to see it happen.”
As they walked up the hill toward the Red Apple (at first Lois kept falling behind, then trotting to catch up, but she quit when she saw she could not slow him with such a simple trick), Ralph told her what little more he could. She had some memory of being under the lightning-struck tree out by the Extension-a memory she had believed, at least until this morning, to be the memory of a dreambut of course she hadn’t been there during Ralph’s final confrontation with Atropos.
Ralph told her of it now-of the random death Atropos intended Natalie to suffer if Ralph continued standing in the way of his plans.
He told her of how he’d extracted a promise from Clotho and Lachesis that Atropos might in this case be overruled, and Nat saved.
“I have an idea that… the decision was made… very near the top of this crazy building… this Tower… they kept talking about.
Maybe… at the very top.” He was panting out the words and his heart was beating more rapidly than ever, but he thought most of that could be attributed to the fast walk and the torrid day; his fear had subsided somewhat. Talking to Lois had done that much.
Now he could see the Red Apple. Mrs. Perrine was at the bus stop half a block farther up, standing straight as a general reviewing troops. Her net shopping bag hung over her arm. There was a bus shelter nearby, and it was shady inside, but Mrs. Perrine stolidly ignored its existence. Even in the dazzling sunlight he could see that her aura was the same West Point gray as it had been on that October evening in 1993. Of Helen and Nat there was as yet no sign.
“Of course I knew who he was, “Esther Perrine later tells the reporter from the Derry News. “Do I look incompetent to you, young man?
Or senile? I’ve known Ralph Roberts for over twenty years. A good man. Not cut from the same cloth as his first wife, of course-Carolynn was a Satterttaite, from the Bangor Satter aites-but a very fine all, just the same. I recognized the driver of that green Ford auto, too, right away. Pete Sullivan delivered my paper for six years, and he did a good job. The new one, the Morrison boy, always throws it in the flowerbeds or up on the porch roof Pete was driving with his mother, on his learner’s permit, I understand. I hope he won’t take on too much about what happened, for he’s a good lad, and it really wasn’t his fault. I saw the whole thing, and I’ll take my oath on it.
“I suppose you think I’m rambling. Don’t bother denying it,-I can read your face just like it was your own newspaper, Never mind, though-I’ve said most of what I have to say. I knew it was Ralph right away, but here’s something you’ll get wrong even if you Put it in your story… which you probably won’t. He came from nowhere to save that little girl.
Esther Perrine fixes the respectfully silent young reporter with a formidable glance-fixes him as a lepidopterist might fix a butterfly on a pin after administering the chloroform.
“I don’t mean it was like he came from nowhere, young man, although I bet that’s what you’ll print.” She leans toward the reporter, her eyes never leaving his face, and says it again. “He came from nowhere to save that little girl Do you follow me?
From nowhere.”
The accident made the front page of the following day’s Derry News.
Esther Perrine was sufficiently colorful in her remarks to warrant a sidebar of her own, and staff photographer Tom Matthews got a picture to go with it that made her look like Ma load in The Grapes Of Wrath.
The headline of the sidebar read: “IT WAS LIKE HE CAME FROM NOWHERE,” WITNESS TO THE TRAGEDY SAYS.
When she read it, Mrs. Perrine was not at all surprised.
“in the end I got what I wanted,” Ralph said, “but only because Clotho and Lachesis-and whoever it is they work for on the upper levels-were desperate to stop Ed.”
“Upper levels? What, upper levels? What building?”
“Never mind. You’ve forgotten, but remembering wouldn’t change anything. The point is just this, Lois: they didn’t want to stop Ed because thousands of people would have died if he’d hit the Civic Center dead-on. They wanted to stop him because there was one person whose life needed to be preserved at any cost… in their reckoning, any"way. When I was finally able to make them see that I felt the same about my kid as they did about theirs, arrangements were made.”
“That’s when they cut you, wasn’t it? And when you made the promise.
The one you used to talk about in your sleep.”
He shot her a wide-eyed, startled, and heartbreakingly boyish glance.
She only looked back.
“Yes,” he said, and wiped his forehead. “I guess so.” The air lay in his lungs like metal shavings. “A life for a life, that was the dealNatalie’s in exchange for mine. And-” [Hell.” Quit trying to wiggle away. Quit it, Rover, or I’ll kick your asshole square.”
Ralph broke off at the sound of that shrill, hectoring, horridly familiar voice-a voice no human being on Harris Avenue but him could hear-and looked across the street.
“Ralph? What-”
“Shhh! right hedge in front of the He pulled her back against the Applebaums’ summer house. He wasn’t doing anything so polite as perspiring now; his whole body was crawling with a stinking sweat as heavy as engine oil, and he could feel every gland in his body dumping a hot load into his blood. His underwear was trying to crawl up into the crack of his ass and disappear. His tongue tasted like a blown fuse.
Lois followed the direction of his gaze. “Rosalie!” she cried.
“Rosalie, you bad dogi What are you doing over there?”
The black-and-tan beagle she had given Ralph on their first Christmas was across the street, standing (except cringing was actually the word for what she was doing) on the sidewalk in front of the house where Helen and Nat had lived until Ed had popped his wig.
For the first time in the years they’d had her, the beagle reminded Lois of Rosalie #1. Rosalie #2 appeared to be all alone over there, but that did not allay Lois’s sudden terror.
Oh, what have I done? she thought. What have I done?
“Rosalie!” she screamed. “Rosalie, get over here!” The dog heard, Lois could see that she did, but she didn’t move.
“Ralph? What’s happening over there?”
“Shhhh!” he said again, and then, just a little farther up the street, unstated Lois saw something which stopped her breath Her last, hope that all this was happening only in Ralph’s head, that it was a kind of flashback to their previous experience, disappeared, because now their dog had company.
Holding a skip-rope looped over her right arm, six-year-old Nat Deepneau came to the end of her walk and looked down the street toward a house she didn’t remember ever living in, toward a lawn where her shirtless father, an undesignated player named Ed Deepneau, had once sat among intersecting rainbows, listening to the Jefferson Airplane as a single spot of blood dried on his John Lennon spectacles. Natalie looked down the street and smiled happily at Rosalie, who was panting and watching her with miserable, frightened eyes.
Atropos doesn’t see me, Ralph thought. He’s concentrating on Rosie… and on Natalie, of course… and he doesn’t see me.
Everything had come around with a sort of hideous perfection.