“Well, in my real life I was a carpenter n fancy cabinetmaker,” Chapin had replied, exposing his remaining teeth in a wide grin, “but all that ended almost ten year ago.” As if, Ralph remembered thinking, retirement was something like a vampire’s kiss, pulling those ’ who survived it into the world of the undead. And when you got right down to cases, was that really so far off the mark?
Now, with McGovern safely behind him (at least he hoped so), Ralph stepped through the screen of mixed oak and maple which shielded the picnic area from the Extension. He saw that eight or nine people had drifted in since his earlier walk, most with bag lunches or Coffee Pot sandwiches. The Eberlys and Zells were play I ing hearts with the greasy deck of Top Hole cards which was kept stashed in a knothole of a nearby oak; Faye and Doc Mulhare, a retired vet, were playing chess; a couple of kibbitzers wandered back and forth between the two games.
Games were what the picnic area was about-what most of the places in the
Derry of the Old Crocks were about-but Ralph thought the games were really just framework. What people actually came here for was to touch base, to report in, to confirm (if only to themselves) that they were still living some kind of life, real or otherwise.
Ralph sat on an empty bench near the Cyclone fence and traced one finger absently over the engraved carvings-names, initials, lots Of FUCK You’s-as he watched planes land at orderly two-minute intervals: a Cessna, a Piper, an Apache, a Twin Bonanza, the elevenforty-five Air Express out of Boston. He kept one ear cocked to the ebb and flow of conversation behind him. May Locher’s name was mentioned more than once. She had been known by several of these people, and the general opinion seemed to be Mrs. Perrine’s-that God had finally shown mercy and ended her suffering. Most of the talk today, however, concerned the impending visit of Susan Day.
As a rule, Politics wasn’t much of a conversational draw with the Old Crocks, who preferred a good bowel-cancer or stroke any day, but even out here the abortion issue exercised its singular ability to engage, inflame, and divide.
“She picked a bad town to come to, and the hell of it is, I doubt she knows it,” Doc Mulhare said, watching the chessboard with glum concentration as Faye Chapin blitzkrieged his king’s remaining defenders. “Things have a way of happening here. Remember the fire at the Black Spot, Faye?”
Faye grunted and captured the Doc’s remaining bishop.
“What I don’t understand is these cootie-bugs,” Lisa Zell said, picking up the front section of the News from the picnic table and slapping the photograph of the hooded figures marching in front of WomanCare. “It’s like they want to go back to the days when women gave themselves abortions with coathangers.”
“That’s what they do want,” Georgina Eberly said. “They figure if a woman’s scared enough of dying, she’ll have the baby. It never seems to cross their minds that a woman can be more scared of having a kid than using a coathanger to get rid of it.”
“What does being afraid have to do with it?” one of the kibbitzers-a shovel-faced oldster named Pedersen-asked truculently.
“Murder is murder whether the baby’s inside or outside, that’s the way I look at it. Even when they’re so small you need a microscope to see em, it’s still murder. Because they’d be kids if you let em alone.
“
“I guess that just about makes you Adolf Eichmann every time you jerk off,” Faye said, and moved his queen. “Check.”
“La-fayette Cha-pin!” Lisa Zell cried.
“Playin with yourself ain’t the same at all, Pedersen said, glowering.
“Oh no? Wasn’t there some guy in the Bible got cursed by God for hammerin the old haddock?” the other kibbitzer asked.
“You’re probably thinking of Onan,” said a voice from behind Ralph. He turned, startled, and saw Old Dor standing there. In one hand he held a paperback with a large number 5 on the cover. Where the hell did you come from? Ralph wondered. He could almost have sworn there had been no one standing behind him a minute or so before.
“Onan, Shmonan,” Pedersen said. “Those sperms aren’t the same as a baby-”
“No?” Faye asked. “Then why ain’t the Catholic Church sellin rubbers at Bingo games? Tell me that.”
“That’s just ignorant,” Pedersen said. “And if you don’t see-”
“But it wasn’t masturbation Onan was punished for,” Dorrance said in his high, penetrating old man’s voice. “He was punished for refusing to impregnate his brother’s widow, so his brother’s line could continue. There’s a poem, by Allen Ginsberg, I think-”
“Shut up, you old fool!” Pedersen yelled, and then glowered at Faye Chapin. “And if you don’t see that there’s a big difference between a man beating his meat and a woman flushing the baby God put in her belly down the toilet, you’re as big a fool as he is.”
“This is a disgusting conversation,” Lisa Zell said, sounding more fascinated than disgusted. Ralph looked over her shoulder and saw a section of chainlink fencing had been torn loose from its post and bent backward, probably by the kids who took this place over at night. That solved one mystery, anyway. He hadn’t noticed Dorrance because the old man hadn’t been in the picnic area at all; he’d been wandering around the airport grounds.
It occurred to Ralph that this was his chance to grab Dorrance and maybe get some answers out of him… except that Ralph would likely end up more confused than ever. Old Dor was too much like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland-more smile than substance.
“Big difference, huh?” Faye was asking Pedersen.
“Yeah!” Red patches glowered in Pedersen’s chapped cheeks.
Doc Mulhare shifted uneasily on his seat.
“Look, let’s just forget it and finish the game, Faye, all right?”
Faye took no notice; his attention was still fixed on Pedersen.
“Maybe you ought to think again about all the little spermies that died in the palm of your hand every time you sat on the toilet seat thinking about how nice it’d be to have Marilyn Monroe cop your-” Pedersen reached out and slapped the remaining chess-pieces off the board. Doc Mulhare winced backward, mouth trembling, eyes wide and frightened behind pink-rimmed glasses which had been mended in two places with electrical tape.
“Yeah, good! “Faye shouted. “That’s a very reasonable fuckin argument, you geek! “Pedersen raised his fists in an exaggerated John
L. Sullivan pose.
“Want to do something about it?” he asked. “Come on, let’s go!”
Faye got slowly to his feet. He stood easily a foot taller than the shovel-faced Pedersen and outweighed him by at least sixty pounds.
Ralph could hardly believe what he was seeing. And if the poison had seeped this far, what about the rest of the city? It seemed to him that Doc Mulhare was right; Susan Day must not have the slightest idea of how bad an idea bringing her act to Derry really was. In some ways-in a lot of ways, actually-Derry wasn’t like other places.
He was moving before he was consciously aware of what he meant to do, and he was relieved to see Stan Eberly doing the same thing.
They exchanged a glance as they approached the two men standing nose to nose, and Stan nodded slightly. Ralph slipped an arm around Faye’s shoulders a bare second before Stan gripped Pedersen’s upper left arm.
“You ain’t doing none of that,” Stan said, speaking directly into one of Pedersen’s tufted ears. “We’ll end up taking the both of you over to Derry Home with heart-attacks, and you don’t need another one of those, Harley-you had two already. Or is it three?”
“I ain’t letting him make jokes about wimmin murderin babies!”
Pedersen said, and Ralph saw there were tears rolling down the man’s cheeks. “My wife died having our second daughter! Sepsis carried her off back in ’46! So I ain’t having that talk about murderin babies!