“I guessed that the first time I saw them together on the TV news,” Ralph said, Gretchen got up, gathered the coffee cups, took them over to the sink, and began to rinse them. “I’ve been active in the women’s movement for thirteen years now, and I’ve seen a lot of crazy shit, but I’ve never seen anything like this. He’s got these dopes believing that women in Derry are undergoing involuntary abortions, that half of them haven’t even realized they’re pregnant before the Centurions come in the night and take their babies.”
“Has he told them about the incinerator over in Newport?” Ralph asked. “The one that’s really a baby crematorium?”
Gretchen turned from the sink, her eyes wide. “How did -I,o I know about that?”
“Oh, I got the lowdown from Ed himself, up close and in person.
Starting in July of ’92.” He hesitated for just a moment, then gave them an account of the day he had met Ed out by the airport, and how Ed had accused the man in the pickup of hauling dead babies in the barrels marked WEED-co. Helen listened silently, her eyes growing steadily wider and rounder. “He was going on about the same stuff on the day he beat you up,” Ralph finished, “but he’d embellished it considerably by then.”
“That probably explains why he’s fixated on you,” Gretchen said, “but in a very real sense, the why doesn’t matter. The fact is, he’s given his nuttier friends a list of these so-called Centurions. We don’t know everyone who’s on it, but I am, and Helen is, and Susan Day, of course… and you.” Why me? Ralph almost asked, then recognized it as another pointless question. Maybe Ed had targeted him because he had called the cops after Ed had beaten Helen; more likely it had happened for no understandable reason at all. Ralph remembered reading somewhere that David Berkowitz-also known as the Son of Sam-claimed to have killed on some occasions under instructions from his dog.
“What do you expect them to try?” Ralph asked. “Armed assault, like in a Chuck Norris movie?”
He smiled, but Gretchen did not answer it. “The thing is, we don’t know what they might try,” she said. “The most likely answer is nothing at all. Then again, Ed or one of the others might take it into his head to try and push you out your own kitchen window. The spray is basically nothing but watered-down teargas. A little insurance policy, that’s all.”
“Insurance,” he said thoughtfully.
“You’re in very select company,” Helen said with a wan smile.
“The only other male Centurion on their list-that we know about, anyway-is Mayor Cohen.”
“Did you give him one of these?” Ralph asked, picking up the aerosol can. It looked no more dangerous than the free samples of shaving cream he got in the mail from time to time.
“We didn’t need to,” Gretchen said. She looked at her watch again. Helen saw the gesture and stood up with the sleeping baby in her armg-.
“He’s got a license to carry a concealed weapon.”
“How would you know a thing like that?” Ralph asked.
“We checked the files at City Hall,” she said, and grinned. “Gun permits are a matter of public record.”
“Oh.” A thought occurred to him. “What about Ed? Did you check on him? Does he have one?”
“Nope,” she said. “But guys like Ed don’t necessarily apply for weapons permits once they get past a certain point… you know that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Ralph replied, also getting up. “I suppose I do. What about you guys? Are you watching out?”
“You bet, Daddy-o. You bet we are.”
He nodded, but wasn’t entirely satisfied. There was a faintly patronizing tone in her voice that he didn’t like, as if the very question were a silly one. But it wasn’t silly, and if she didn’t know that, she and her friends could be in trouble down the line. Bad trouble.
“I hope so,” he said. “I really do. Can I carry Nat downstairs for you, Helen?”
“Better not-you’d wake her.” She looked at him gravely.
“Would you carry that spray for me, Ralph? I can’t stand the thought of you being hurt just because you tried to help me and he’s got some crazy bee in his bonnet.”
“I’ll think about it very seriously. Will that do?”
“I guess it will have to.” She looked at him closely, her eyes searching his face. “You look much better than the last time I saw you-you’re sleeping again, aren’t you?”
He grinned. “Well, to tell you the truth, I’m still having my problems, but I must be getting better, because people keep telling me that.”
She stood on tiptoe and kissed the corner of his mouth. “We’ll be in touch, won’t we? I mean, we’ll stay in touch.”
“I’ll do my part if you’ll do yours, sweetie.”
She smiled. “You can count on that, Ralph-you’re the nicest male
Centurion I know.”
They all laughed at that, so hard that Natalie woke up and looked around at them in sleepy surprise.
After he had seen the women off (I’M PREJUDICED, AND I VOTE!
read the sticker on the rear bumper of Gretchen Tillbury’s Accord fastback), Ralph climbed slowly up to the second floor again.
Weariness dragged at his heels like invisible weights. once in the kitchen he looked first at the vase of flowers, trying to see that strange and gorgeous green mist rising from the stems. Nothing. Then he picked up the aerosol and re-examined the cartoon on the side of the can.
One Menaced Woman, heroically warding off her attacker; one Bad Man, complete with eye-mask and slouch hat. No shades of gray here; just a case of go ahead, punk, make my day.
It occurred to Ralph that Ed’s madness was catching. There were women all over Derry-Gretchen Tillbury and his own sweet Helen among them-walking around with these little spray-cans in their purses, and all the cans really said the same thing: I’m afraid. The bad men in the masks and the slouch hats have arrived in Derry and I’m arra id.
Ralph wanted no part of it. Standing on tiptoe, he put the can of Bodyguard on top of the kitchen cabinet beside the sink, then shrugged into his old gray leather jacket. He would go up to the picnic area near the airport and see if he could find a game of chess.
Lacking that, maybe a few rounds of cribbage.
He paused in the kitchen doorway, looking fixedly at the flowers, trying to make that sizzling green mist come. Nothing happened.
But it was there. You saw it,-Natalie did, too.
But had she? Had she really? Babies were always goggling at stuff, everything amazed them, so how could he know for sure?
“I just do,” he said to the empty apartment. Correct. The green mist rising from the stems of the flowers had been there, all the auras had been there, and…
“And they’re still there,” he said, and did not know if he should be relieved or appalled by the firmness he heard in his own voice, For right now, why don’t you try being neither, sweetheart.p His thought, Carolyn’s voice, good advice.
Ralph locked up his apartment and went out into the Derry of the Old Crocks, looking for a game of chess.
CHAPTER 7
When Ralph came walking up Harris Avenue to his apartment on October 2nd, with a c(puple of recycled Elmer Kelton Westerns from Back Pages in one hand, he saw that someone was sitting on the perch steps with his own book. The visitor wasn’t reading, however; he was watching with dreamy intensity as the warm wind which had been blowing all day harvested the yellow and gold leaves from the oaks and the three surviving elms across the street.
Ralph came closer, observing the thin white hair flying around the skull of the man on the porch, and the way all his bulk seemed to have run into his belly, hips, and bottom. That wide center section, coupled with the scrawny neck, narrow chest, and spindly legs clad in old green flannel pants, gave him the look of a man wearing an inner tube beneath his clothes. Even from a hundred and fifty yards away, there was really no question about who the visitor was: Dorrance Marstellar.