“Great,” he told Ed. “I’m headed home. I make Carolyn her supper these days, and I’m running way late.”
He started to turn away. The heavyset man stopped him with an outstretched hand. “John Tandy,” he said.
He shook it. Ralph Roberts. Pleased to meet you.”
Tandy smiled. “Under the circumstances, I kinda doubt that… but I’m real glad you showed up when you did. For a few seconds there I really thought him and me was gonna tango.”
So did I, Ralph thought but didn’t say. He looked at Ed, his troubled eye taking in the unfamiliar tee-shirt clinging to Ed’s stalk-thin midriff and the white silk scarf with the Chinese-red figures embroidered on it. He didn’t entirely like the look in Ed’s eyes when they met his; Ed was perhaps not all the way back after all.
“Sure you’re okay?” Ralph asked him. He wanted to go, wanted to get back to Carolyn, and yet he was somehow reluctant. The feeling that this situation was about nine miles from right persisted.
“Yes, fine,” Ed said quickly, and gave him a big smile which did not reach his dark green eyes. They studied Ralph carefully, as if asking how much he had seen… and how much (hey hey Susan Day) he would remember later on.
The interior of Trigger Vachon’s truck smelled of clean, freshly pressed clothes, an aroma which for some reason always reminded Ralph of fresh bread. There was no passenger seat, so he stood with one hand wrapped around the doorhandle and the other gripping the edge of a Dandux laundry basket.
“Mandat look like some strange go-on back dere,” Trigger said, glancing into his outside mirror.
“You don’t know the half of it,” Ralph replied.
“I know the guy driving the rice-burner-Deepneau, his name is.
He got a pretty little wife, send stuff out sometime. Seem like a nice fella, enos usually.”
“He sure wasn’t himself today,” Ralph said.
“Had a bug up his ass, did he?”
“Had a whole damn ant-farm up there, I think.”
Trigger laughed hard at that, pounding the worn black plastic of the big steering wheel. “Whole damn ant-farm! Beauty! Beauty! I’m savin dat one, me!” Trigger wiped his streaming eyes with a handkerchief almost the size of a tablecloth. “Look to me like Mr. Deepneau come out dat airport service gate, him.”
“That’s right, he did.”
“You need a pass to use dat way,” Trigger said. “How Mr. D. get a pass, you tink?” Ralph thought it over, frowning, then shook his head. “I don’t know. It never even occurred to me. I’ll have to ask him next time I see him.”
“You do dat,” Trigger said. “And ask him how dem ants doing.” This stimulated a fresh throe of laughter, which in turn occasioned more flourishes of the comic opera handkerchief. As they turned off the Extension and onto Harris Avenue proper, the storm finally broke. There was no hail, but -the rain came in an extravagant summer flood, so heavy at first that Trigger had to slow his panel truck to a crawl. “Wow!” he said respectfully. “Dis remine me of the big storm back in ’85, when haffa downtown fell inna damn Canal! Member dat, Ralph?”
“Yes,” Ralph said. “Let’s hope it doesn’t happen again.”
“Nah,” Trigger said, grinning and peering past his extravagantly flapping windshield wipers, “dey got the drainage system all fixed up now. Beauty!” The combination of the cold rain and the warm cab caused the bottom half of the windshield to steam up. Without thinking, Ralph reached out a finger and drew a figure in the steam: “What’s dat?”
Trigger asked.
“I don’t really know. Looks Chinese, doesn’t it? It was on the scarf Ed Deepneau was wearing.”
“Look a little familiar to me,” Trigger said, glancing at it again. Then he snorted and flapped a hand. “Listen to me, wouldja? Only ting
I can say in Chinese is moo-goo-gal-pan! Ralph smiled, but didn’t seem to have a laugh in him. It was Carolyn. Now that he had remembered her, he couldn’t stop thinking about her-couldn’t stop imagining the windows open, and the curtains streaming like Edward Gorey ghost arms as the rain poured in. “You still live in dat two-storey across from the Red APple?”
“Yes.” Trigger pulled in to the curb, the wheels of the truck spraying up big fans of water. The rain was still pouring down in sheets. Lightning raced across the sky; thunder cracked.
“you better stay right here wit me for a little bit,” Trigger said.
“She let up in a minute or two.”
“I’ll be all right.” Ralph didn’t think anything could keep him in the truck a second longer, not even handcuffs. “Thanks, Trig.”
“Wait a sec! Let me give you a piece of plastic-you can puddit over your head like a rainhat!”
“No, that’s okay, no problem, thanks, I’ll just-”
There seemed to be no way of finishing whatever it was he was trying to say, and now what he felt was close to panic. He shoved the truck’s passenger door back on its track and jumped out, landing ankle-deep in the cold water racing down the gutter. He gave Trigger a final wave without looking back, then hurried up the walk to the house he and Carolyn shared with Bill McGovern, feeling in his pocket for his latchkey as he went. When he reached the perch steps he saw he wouldn’t need it-the door was standing ajar. Bill, who lived downstairs, often forgot to lock it, and Ralph would rather think it had been Bill than think that Carolyn had wandered out to look for him and been caught in the storm. That was a possibility Ralph did not even want to consider.
He hurried into the shadowy foyer, wincing as thunder banged deafeningly overhead, and crossed to the foot of the stairs. He paused there a moment, hand on the newel post of the bannister, listening to rain water drip from his soaked pants and shirt onto the hardwood floor. Then he started up, wanting to run but no longer able to find the next gear up from a fast walk. His heart was beating hard and fast in his chest, his soaked sneakers were clammy anchors dragging at his feet, and for some reason he kept seeing the way Ed Deepneau’s head had moved when he got out of his Datsun-those stiff, quick jabs that made him look like a rooster spoiling for a fight.
The third riser creaked loudly, as it always did, and the sound prmvoked hurried footsteps from above. They were no relief because they weren’t Carolyn’s, he knew that at once, and when Bill McGovern leaned over the rail, his face pale and worried beneath his Panama hat, Ralph wasn’t really surprised. All the-way back from the Extension he had felt that something was wrong, hadn’t he? Yes.
But under the circumstances, that hardly qualified as precognition.
When things reached a certain degree of wrongness, he was discovering, they could no longer be redeemed or turned around; they just kept going wronger and wronger. He supposed that on some level or other he’d always known that. What he had never suspected was how long that wrong road could be.
“Ralph!” Bill called down. “Thank God! Carolyn’s having… well, I guess it’s some sort of seizure. I just dialed 911, asked them to send an ambulance.”
Ralph discovered he could run up the rest of the stairs, after all.
She was lying half in and half out of the kitchen with her hair in her face. Ralph thought there was something particularly horrible about that; it looked sloppy, and if there was one thing Carolyn refused to be, it was sloppy. He knelt beside her and brushed the hair away from her eyes and forehead. The skin beneath his fingers felt as chilly as his feet inside his soaked sneakers.
I wanted to put her on the couch, but she’s too heavy for me,” Bill said nervously. He had taken off his Panama and was fiddling nervously with the band. “My back, you know-”
“I know, Bill, it’s okay,” Ralph said. He slid his arms under Carolyn and picked her up.
She did not feel heavy to him at all, but light-almost as light as a milkweed pod which is ready to burst open and disgorge its filaments into the wind. “Thank God you were here.”