Insomnia (2 page)

He often paused to catch his second wind in a shady picnic area close to the airport’s service entrance. At night this place was a teenage drinking and makeout spot, alive with the sounds of rap coming from boombox radios, but during the days it was the more-or-less exclusive domain of a group Ralph’s friend Bill McGovern called the Harris Avenue Old Crocks. The Old Crocks gathered to play chess, to play gin, or just to shoot the shit. Ralph had known many of them for years (had, in fact, gone to grammar school with Stan Eberly), and was comfortable with them . . . as long as they didn’t get too nosy. Most didn’t. They were old-school Yankees, for the most part, raised to believe that what a man doesn’t choose to talk about is no one’s business but his own.

It was on one of these walks that he first became aware that something had gone very wrong with Ed Deepneau, his neighbor from up the street.

Ralph had walked much farther out the Harris Avenue Extension than usual that day, possibly because thunder-heads had blotted out the sun and a cool, if still sporadic, breeze had begun to blow. He had fallen into a kind of trance, not thinking of anything, not watching anything but the dusty toes of his sneakers, when the four forty-five United Airlines flight from Boston swooped low overhead, startling him back to where he was with the teeth-rattling whine of its jet engines.

He watched it cross above the old GS&WM railroad tracks and the Cyclone fence that marked the edge of the airport, watched it settle toward the runway, marked the blue puffs of smoke as its wheels touched down. Then he glanced at his watch, saw how late it was getting, and looked up with wide eyes at the orange roof of the Howard Johnson’s just up the road. He had been in a trance, all right; he had walked more than five miles without the slightest sense of time passing.

Carolyn’s time,
a voice deep inside his head muttered.

Yes, yes; Carolyn’s time. She would be back in the apartment, counting the minutes until she could have another Darvon Complex, and he was out on the far side of the airport . . . halfway to Newport, in fact.

Ralph looked up at the sky and for the first time really saw the bruise-purple thunderheads which were stacking up over the airport. They did not mean rain, not for sure, not yet, but if it
did
rain, he was almost surely going to be caught in it; there was nowhere to shelter between here and the little picnic area back by Runway 3, and there was nothing there but a ratty little gazebo that always smelled faintly of beer.

He took another look at the orange roof, then reached into his right-hand pocket and felt the little sheaf of bills held by the silver money-clip Carolyn had given him for his sixty-fifth. There was nothing to prevent him walking up to HoJo’s and calling a cab . . . except maybe for the thought of how the driver might look at him. Stupid old man, the eyes in the rear-view mirror might say. Stupid old man, walked a lot further than you should on a hot day. If you’d been swimming, you woulda drownded.

Paranoid, Ralph,
the voice in his head told him, and now its clucky, slightly patronizing tone reminded him of Bill McGovern.

Well, maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t. Either way, he thought he would chance the rain and walk back.

‘Let it hail, then,’ he said. ‘I don’t bruise that easy.’

Ralph began to walk slowly back toward town along the shoulder of the Extension, his old high-tops raising small, parched puffs of dust as he went. He could hear the first rumbles of thunder in the west, where the clouds were stacking up. The sun, although blotted out, was refusing to quit without a fight; it edged the thunderheads with bands of brilliant gold and shone through occasional rifts in the clouds like the fragmented beam of some huge movie-projector. Ralph found himself feeling glad he had decided to walk, in spite of the ache in his legs and the steady nagging pain in the small of his back.

One thing, at least,
he thought.
I’ll sleep tonight. I’ll sleep like a damn rock
.

The verge of the airport – acres of dead brown grass with the rusty railroad tracks sunk in them like the remains of some old wreck – was now on his left. Far in the distance beyond the Cyclone fence he could see the United 747, now the size of a child’s toy plane, taxiing toward the small terminal which United and Delta shared.

Ralph’s gaze was caught by another vehicle, this one a car, leaving the General Aviation terminal, which stood at this end of the airport. It was heading across the tarmac toward the small service entrance which gave on the Harris Avenue Extension. Ralph had watched a lot of vehicles come and go through that entrance just lately; it was only seventy yards or so from the picnic area where the Harris Avenue Old Crocks gathered. As the car approached the gate, Ralph recognized it as Ed and Helen Deepneau’s Datsun . . . and it was really moving.

Ralph stopped on the shoulder, unaware that his hands had curled into anxious fists as the small brown car bore down on the closed gate. You needed a key-card to open the gate from the outside; from the inside an electric-eye beam did the job. But the beam was set close to the gate, very close, and at the speed the Datsun was going . . .

At the last moment (or so it seemed to Ralph), the small brown car scrunched to a stop, the tires sending up puffs of blue smoke that made Ralph think of the 747 touching down, and the gate began to trundle slowly open on its track. Ralph’s fisted hands relaxed.

An arm emerged from the driver’s side window of the Datsun and began to wave up and down, apparently haranguing the gate, urging it to hurry it up. There was something so absurd about this that Ralph began to smile. The smile died before it had exposed even a gleam of teeth, however. The wind was still freshening from the west, where the thunderheads were, and it carried the screaming voice of the Datsun’s driver.

‘That can’t be Ed Deepneau,’ Ralph murmured. He began to walk again without realizing it. ‘
Can’t
be.’

Ed was a research chemist at the Hawking Laboratories research facility in Fresh Harbor, one of the kindest, most civil young men Ralph had ever met. Both he and Carolyn were very fond of Ed’s wife, Helen, and their new baby, Natalie, as well. A visit from Natalie was one of the few things with the power to lift Carolyn out of her own life these days, and, sensing this, Helen brought her over frequently. Ed never complained. There were men, he knew, who wouldn’t have cared to have the missus running to the old folks down the street every time the baby did some new and entrancing thing, especially when the granny-figure in the picture was ill. Ralph had an idea that Ed wouldn’t be able to tell someone to go to hell without suffering a sleepless night in consequence, but—

But it sure
sounded
like Ed. Even from two or three hundred yards away, it certainly
sounded
like him.

Now the driver of the Datsun was revving his engine like a kid in a muscle-car waiting for the light to turn green. Clouds of exhaust smoke farted up from the tailpipe. As soon as the gate had retracted enough to allow the Datsun passage, the car leaped forward, squirting through the gap with its engine roaring, and when it did, Ralph got a clear look at the driver. He was close enough now for there to be no doubt: it was Ed, all right.

The Datsun bounced along the short unpaved stretch of lane between the gate and the Harris Street Extension. A horn blared suddenly, and Ralph saw a blue Ford Ranger, heading west on the Extension, swerve to avoid the oncoming Datsun. The driver of the pickup saw the danger too late, and Ed apparently never saw it at all (it was only later that Ralph came to consider Ed might have rammed the Ranger on purpose). There was a brief scream of tires followed by the hollow bang of the Datsun’s fender driving into the Ford’s sidewall. The pickup was driven halfway across the yellow line. The Datsun’s hood crumpled, came unlatched, and popped up a little; headlight glass tinkled into the street. A moment later both vehicles were dead in the middle of the road, tangled together like some weird sculpture.

Ralph stood where he was for the time being, watching as oil spread beneath the Datsun’s front end. He had seen several road accidents in his almost-seventy years, most of them minor, one or two serious, and he was always stunned by how quickly they happened and how little drama there was. It wasn’t like in the movies, where the camera could slow things down, or on a videotape, where you could watch the car go off the cliff again and again if you so chose; there was usually just a series of converging blurs, followed by that quick and toneless combination of sounds: the cry of the tires, the hollow bang of metal crimping metal, the tinkle of glass. Then,
voilà – tout finis
.

There was even a kind of protocol for this sort of thing: How One Should Behave When Involved in a Low-Speed Collision. Of course there was, Ralph mused. There were probably a dozen two-bit collisions in Derry every day, and maybe twice that number in the wintertime, when there was snow and the roads got slippery. You got out, you met your opposite number at the point where the two vehicles had come together (and where, quite often, they were still entwined), you looked, you shook your heads. Sometimes – often, actually – this phase of the encounter was marked with angry words: fault was assigned (often rashly), driving skills impugned, legal action threatened. Ralph supposed what the drivers were really trying to say without coming right out and saying it was,
Listen, fool, you scared the living hell out of me!

The final step in this unhappy little dance was the Exchange of the Sacred Insurance Screeds, and it was at this point that the drivers usually began to get control of their galloping emotions . . . always assuming that no one had been hurt, as appeared to be the case here. Sometimes the drivers involved even finished up by shaking hands.

Ralph prepared to watch all this from his vantage point less than a hundred and fifty yards away, but as soon as the driver’s door of the Datsun opened he understood that things were going to go differently here – that the accident was maybe not over but still happening. It certainly did not seem that anyone was going to shake at the end of
these
festivities.

The door did not
swing
open; it
flew
open. Ed Deepneau leaped out, then simply stood stock-still beside his car, his slim shoulders squared against a background of deepening clouds. He was wearing faded jeans and a tee-shirt, and Ralph realized he had never seen Ed in a shirt that didn’t button up the front. And there was something around his neck: a long white something. A scarf? It
looked
like a scarf, but why would anyone be wearing a scarf on a day as hot as this one had been?

Ed stood beside his wounded car for a moment, seeming to look in every direction but the right one. The fierce little pokes of his narrow head reminded Ralph of the way roosters studied their barnyard turf, looking for invaders and interlopers. Something about that similarity made Ralph feel uneasy. He had never seen Ed look that way before, and he supposed that was part of it, but it wasn’t
all
of it. The truth of the matter was simply this: he had never seen
anyone
look exactly like that.

Thunder rumbled in the west, louder now. And closer.

The man getting out of the Ranger would have made two of Ed Deepneau, possibly three. His vast, deep belly hung over the rolled waistband of his green chino work-pants; there were sweatstains the size of dinner-plates under the arms of his open-throated white shirt. He tipped back the bill of the West Side Gardeners gimme-cap he was wearing to get a better look at the man who had broadsided him. His heavy-jowled face was dead pale except for bright patches of color like rouge high on his cheekbones, and Ralph thought:
There’s a man who’s a prime candidate for a heart attack. If I was closer I bet I’d be able to see the creases in his earlobes
.

‘Hey!’ the heavyset guy yelled at Ed. The voice coming out of that broad chest and deep gut was absurdly thin, almost reedy. ‘Where’d you get your license? Fuckin Sears n Roebuck?’

Ed’s wandering, jabbing head swung immediately toward the sound of the big man’s voice – seemed almost to home in, like a jet guided by radar – and Ralph got his first good look at Ed’s eyes. He felt a bolt of alarm light up in his chest and suddenly began to run toward the accident. Ed, meanwhile, had started toward the man in the sweat-soaked white shirt and gimme-cap. He was walking in a stiff-legged, high-shouldered strut that was nothing at all like his usual easygoing amble.

‘Ed!’ Ralph shouted, but the freshening breeze – cold now with the promise of rain – seemed to snatch the words away before they could even get out of his mouth. Certainly Ed never turned. Ralph made himself run faster, the ache in his legs and the throbbing in the small of his back forgotten. It was murder he had seen in Ed Deepneau’s wide, unblinking eyes. He had absolutely no previous experience upon which to base such an assessment, but he didn’t think you could mistake such a naked glare; it was the look fighting cocks must wear when they launch themselves at each other, spurs up and slashing. ‘Ed! Hey, Ed, hold up! It’s Ralph!’

Not so much as a glance around, although Ralph was now so close that Ed must have heard, wind or no wind. Certainly the heavyset man glanced around, and Ralph could see both fear and uncertainty in his look. Then Heavyset turned back to Ed and raised his hands placatingly.