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. May I be 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 an 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.
“Did I grow a second head or something while I wasn’t looking?”
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, lion. 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.”
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 outing to stop at there with all the windows open, and we’re go’ the Dunkin’ Donuts out in the Old Cape for giant economy-sized coffees. My treat.”