Insomnia (6 page)

Maybe you need to get more exercise,
he thought.
Do some walking, like you used to last summer. After all, you’ve been leading a pretty sedentary life – get up, eat toast, read a book, watch some TV, get a sandwich across the street in the Red Apple for lunch, potter around in the garden a little, maybe go to the library or visit with Helen and the baby if they happen to be out, eat supper, maybe sit on the porch and visit with McGovern or Lois Chasse for a while. Then what? Read a little more, watch a little more TV, wash up, go to bed. Sedentary
. Boring.
No wonder you wake up early.

Except that was crap. His life
sounded
sedentary, yes, no doubt, but it really wasn’t. The garden was a good example. What he did out there was never going to win him any prizes, but it was a hell of a long way from ‘pottering around’. Most afternoons he weeded until sweat made a dark tree-shape down the back of his shirt and spread damp circles at his armpits, and he was often trembling with exhaustion by the time he let himself go back inside. ‘Punishment’ probably would have been closer to the mark than ‘pottering’, but punishment for what? Waking up before dawn?

Ralph didn’t know and didn’t care. Working in the garden filled up a large piece of the afternoon, it took his mind off things he didn’t really care to think of, and that was enough to justify the aching muscles and the occasional flights of black spots in front of his eyes. He began his extended visits to the garden shortly after the Fourth of July and continued all through August, long after the early crops had been harvested and the later ones had been hopelessly stunted by the lack of rain.

‘You ought to quit that,’ Bill McGovern told him one night as they sat on the porch, drinking lemonade. This was in mid-August, and Ralph had begun to wake up around three-thirty each morning. ‘It’s got to be hazardous to your health. Worse, you look like a lunatic.’

‘Maybe I
am
a lunatic,’ Ralph responded shortly, and either his tone or the look in his eyes must have been convincing, because McGovern changed the subject.

He did begin walking again – nothing like the Marathons of ’92, but he managed two miles a day if it wasn’t raining. His usual route took him down the perversely named Up-Mile Hill, to the Derry Public Library, and then on to Back Pages, a used bookstore and newsstand on the corner of Witcham and Main.

Back Pages stood next to a jumbled junkatorium called Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes, and as he passed this store one day during the August of his discontent, Ralph saw a new poster among the announcements of outdated bean suppers and ancient church socials, placed so it covered roughly half of a yellowing
PAT BUCHANAN FOR PRESIDENT
placard.

The woman in the two photographs at the top of the poster was a pretty blonde in her late thirties or early forties, but the style of the photos – unsmiling full face on the left, unsmiling profile on the right, plain white background in both – was unsettling enough to stop Ralph in his tracks. The photos made the woman look as if she belonged on a post office wall or in a TV docudrama . . . and that, the poster’s printed matter made clear, was no accident.

The photos were what stopped him, but it was the woman’s name that held him.

WANTED FOR MURDER
SUSAN EDWINA DAY

was printed across the top in big black letters. And below the simulated mug-shots, in red:

STAY OUT OF OUR CITY!

There was a small line of print at the very bottom of the poster. Ralph’s close vision had deteriorated quite a bit since Carolyn’s death – gone to hell in a handbasket might actually have been a more accurate way of putting it – and he had to lean forward until his brow was pressed against the dirty show window of Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes before he could decipher it:

Far down in his mind a voice whispered:
Hey, hey, Susan Day! How many kids did you kill today?

Susan Day, Ralph recalled, was a political activist from either New York or Washington, the sort of fast-speaking woman who regularly drove taxi-drivers, barbers, and hardhat construction workers into foaming frenzies. Why that particular little jangle of doggerel had come into his mind, however, he couldn’t say; it was tagged to some memory that wouldn’t quite come. Maybe his tired old brains were just cross-referencing that sixties Vietnam protest chant, the one which had gone
Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?

No, that’s not it,
he thought.
Close, but no cigar. It was
—

Just before his mind could cough up Ed Deepneau’s name and face, a voice spoke from almost beside him. ‘Earth to Ralph, earth to Ralph, come in, Ralphie-baby!’

Roused out of his thoughts, Ralph turned toward the voice. He was both shocked and amused to find he had almost been asleep on his feet.
Christ,
he thought,
you never know how important sleep is until you miss a little. Then all the floors start to tilt and all the corners on things start to round off
.

It was Hamilton Davenport, the proprietor of Back Pages, who had spoken to him. He was stocking the library cart he kept in front of his shop with brightly jacketed paperbacks. His old corncob pipe – to Ralph it always looked like the stack of a model steamship – jutted from the corner of his mouth, sending little puffs of blue smoke into the hot, bright air. Winston Smith, his old gray tomcat, sat in the open doorway of the shop with his tail curled around his paws. He looked at Ralph with yellow-eyed indifference, as if to say,
You think you know old, my friend? I’m here to testify you don’t know
dick
about getting old
.

‘Sheesh, Ralph,’ Davenport said. ‘I must have called your name at least three times.’

‘I guess I was woolgathering,’ Ralph said. He stepped past the library cart, leaned in the doorway (Winston Smith held his place with regal indifference), and grabbed the two papers he bought every day: a Boston
Globe
and a
USA Today
. The Derry
News
came right to the house, courtesy of Pete the paperboy. Ralph sometimes told people that he was sure one of the three papers was comic relief, but he had never been able to make up his mind which one it was. ‘I haven’t—’

He broke off as Ed Deepneau’s face came into his mind. It was Ed he’d heard that nasty little chant from, last summer, out by the airport, and it really wasn’t any wonder it had taken him a little while to retrieve the memory. Ed Deepneau was the last person in the world from whom you’d expect to hear something like that.

‘Ralphie?’ Davenport said. ‘You just shut down on me.’

Ralph blinked. ‘Oh, sorry. I haven’t been sleeping very well, that’s what I started to say.’

‘Bummer . . . but there are worse problems. Just drink a glass of warm milk and listen to some quiet music half an hour before bed.’

Ralph had begun to discover this summer that everyone in America apparently had a pet remedy for insomnia, some bit of bedtime magic that had been handed down through the generations like the family Bible.

‘Bach’s good, also Beethoven, and William Ackerman ain’t bad. But the real trick’ – Davenport raised one finger impressively to emphasize this – ‘is
not to get up from your chair
during that half hour. Not for anything. Don’t answer the phone, don’t wind up the dog and put out the alarm-clock, don’t decide to brush your teeth . . .
nothing
! Then, when you
do
go to bed . . . bam! Out like a light!’

‘What if you’re sitting there in your favorite easy-chair and all at once you realize you have a call of nature?’ Ralph asked. ‘These things can come on pretty suddenly when you get to be my age.’

‘Do it in your pants,’ Davenport said promptly, and burst out laughing. Ralph smiled, but it had a dutiful feel. His insomnia was rapidly losing whatever marginal humor value it might once have had. ‘In your
pants
!’ Ham chortled. He slapped the library cart and wagged his head back and forth.

Ralph happened to glance down at the cat. Winston Smith looked blandly back at him, and to Ralph his calm yellow gaze seemed to say,
Yes, that’s right, he’s a fool, but he’s my fool
.

‘Not bad, huh? Hamilton Davenport, master of the snappy comeback. Do it in your . . .’ He snorted laughter, shook his head, then took the two dollar bills Ralph was holding out. He slipped them into the pocket of his short red apron and came out with some change. ‘That about right?’

‘You bet. Thanks, Ham.’

‘Uh-huh. And all joking aside, try the music. It really works. Mellows out your brain-waves, or something.’

‘I will.’ And the devil of it was, he probably would, as he had already tried Mrs Rapaport’s lemon and hot water recipe, and Shawna McClure’s advice on how to clear his mind by slowing his respiration and concentrating on the word
cool
(except when Shawna said it, the word came out
cuhhhh-ooooooooooool
). When you were trying to deal with a slow but relentless erosion of your good sleep-time, any folk remedy started to look good.

Ralph began to turn away, then turned back. ‘What’s with that poster next door?’

Ham Davenport wrinkled his nose. ‘Dan Dalton’s place? I don’t look in there at all, if I can help it. Screws up my appetite. Has he got something new and disgusting in the window?’

‘I
guess
it’s new – it’s not as yellow as the rest of them, and there’s a notable lack of flydirt on it. Looks like a wanted poster, only it’s Susan Day in the photos.’

‘Susan Day on a – son of a bitch!’ He cast a dark and humorless look at the shop next door.

‘What is she, President of the National Organization of Women, or something?’

‘Ex-President and co-founder of Sisters in Arms. Author of
My Mother’s Shadow
and
Lilies of the Valley
– that one’s a study of battered women and why so many of them refuse to blow the whistle on the men that batter them. She won a Pulitzer Prize for it. Susie Day’s one of the three or four most politically influential women in America right now, and she can really write as well as think. That clown
knows
I’ve got one of her petitions sitting right by my cash register.’

‘What petitions?’

‘We’re trying to get her up here to speak,’ Davenport said. ‘You know the right-to-lifers tried to firebomb WomanCare last Christmas, right?’

Ralph cast his mind cautiously back into the black pit he’d been living in at the end of 1992 and said, ‘Well, I remember that the cops caught some guy in the hospital’s long-term parking lot with a can of gasoline, but I didn’t know—’

‘That was Charlie Pickering. He’s a member of Daily Bread, one of the right-to-life groups that keep the pickets marching out there,’ Davenport said. ‘They put him up to it, too – take my word. This year they’re not bothering with gasoline, though; they’re going to try to get the City Council to change the zoning regulations and squeeze WomanCare right out of existence. They just might do it, too. You know Derry, Ralph – it’s not exactly a hotbed of liberalism.’

‘No,’ Ralph said with a wan smile. ‘It’s never been that. And WomanCare
is
an abortion clinic, isn’t it?’

Davenport gave him an out-of-patience look and jerked his head in the direction of Secondhand Rose. ‘That’s what assholes like
him
call it,’ he said, ‘only they like to use the word
mill
instead of
clinic
. They ignore all the other stuff WomanCare does.’ To Ralph, Davenport had begun to sound a little like the TV announcer who hawked run-free pantyhose during the Sunday afternoon movie. ‘They’re involved in family counselling, they deal with spouse and child abuse, and they run a shelter for abused women over by the Newport town line. They have a rape crisis center at the in-town building by the hospital, and a twenty-four-hour hotline for women who’ve been raped or beaten. In short, they stand for all the things that make Marlboro Men like Dalton shit bullets.’

‘But they
do
perform abortions,’ Ralph said. ‘That’s what the pickets are about, right?’

There had been sign-carrying demonstrators in front of the low-slung, unobtrusive brick building that housed WomanCare for years, it seemed to Ralph. They always looked too pale to him, too intense, too skinny or too fat, too utterly sure that God was on their side. The signs they carried said things like
THE UNBORN HAVE RIGHTS, TOO
and
LIFE, WHAT A BEAUTIFUL CHOICE
and that old standby,
ABORTION IS MURDER
! On several occasions women using the clinic – which was near Derry Home but not actually associated with it, Ralph thought – had been spat upon.

‘Yeah, they perform abortions,’ Ham said. ‘You got a problem with that?’

Ralph thought of all the years he and Carolyn had tried to have a baby – years that had produced nothing but several false alarms and a single messy five-months miscarriage – and shrugged. Suddenly the day seemed too hot and his legs too tired. The thought of his return journey – the Up-Mile Hill leg of it in particular – hung in the back of his mind like something strung from a line of fish-hooks. ‘Christ, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I just wish people didn’t have to get so . . . so shrill.’

Davenport grunted, walked over to his neighbor’s display window, and peered at the bogus wanted poster. While he was looking at it, a tall, pallid man with a goatee – the absolute antithesis of the Marlboro Man, Ralph would have said – materialized from the gloomy depths of Secondhand Rose like a vaudeville spook that has gotten a bit mouldy around the edges. He saw what Davenport was looking at, and a tiny disdainful smile dimpled the corners of his mouth. Ralph thought it was the kind of smile that could cost a man a couple of teeth, or a broken nose. Especially on a dog-hot day like this one.