Insomnia (9 page)

Ralph Roberts sat in the wing-chair where he had spent so many early-morning hours lately and waited for light and movement to invest the lifeless world below him. Finally the first human actor – Pete the paperboy – entered stage right, riding his Raleigh. He biked his way up the street, tossing rolled newspapers from the bag slung over his shoulder and hitting the porches he aimed at with a fair degree of accuracy.

Ralph watched him awhile, then heaved a sigh which felt as if it had come all the way from the basement, and got up to make tea.

‘I don’t remember
ever
reading about this shit in my horoscope,’he said hollowly, and then turned on the kitchen tap and began to fill the kettle.

That long Thursday morning and even longer Thursday afternoon taught Ralph Roberts a valuable lesson: not to sneer at three or four hours’ sleep a night simply because he had spent his entire life under the mistaken impression that he had a right to at least six and usually seven. It also served as a hideous preview: if things didn’t improve, he could look forward to feeling like this most of the time. Hell,
all
of the time. He went into the bedroom at ten o’clock and again at one, hoping for a little nap – even a catnap would do, and half an hour would be a life-saver – but he could not so much as drowse. He was miserably tired but not in the least bit sleepy.

Around three o’clock he decided to make himself a Lipton Cup-A-Soup. He filled the teakettle with fresh water, put it on to boil, and opened the cupboard over the counter where he kept condiments, spices, and various envelopes containing foods which only astronauts and old men actually seem to eat – powders to which the consumer need only add hot water.

He pushed cans and bottles around in aimless fashion and then simply stared into the cupboard for awhile, as if expecting the box of soup packets to magically appear in the space he had made. When they didn’t, he repeated the process, only this time moving things back to their original positions before staring in again with the look of distant perplexity which was becoming (Ralph, mercifully, did not know this) his dominant expression.

When the teakettle shrieked, he put it on one of the rear burners and went back to staring into the cupboard. It dawned on him – very, very slowly – that he must have drunk his last packet of Cup-A-Soup yesterday or the day before, although he could not for the life of him remember doing so.

‘That’s a surprise?’ he asked the boxes and bottles in the open cupboard. ‘I’m so tired I can’t remember my own name.’

Yes, I can,
he thought.
It’s Leon Redbone. So there!

It wasn’t much of a joke, but he felt a small smile – it felt as light as a feather – touch his lips. He stepped into the bathroom, combed his hair, and then went downstairs.
Here’s Audie Murphy, heading out into enemy territory in search of supplies,
he thought.
Primary target: one box of Lipton Chicken and Rice Cup-A-Soup packets. If locating and securing this target should prove impossible, I’ll divert to my secondary: Noodles ’n Beef. I know this is a risky mission, but—

‘– but I work best alone,’ he finished as he came out on the porch.

Old Mrs Perrine happened to be passing, and she favored Ralph with a sharp look but said nothing. He waited for her to get a little way up the sidewalk – he did not feel capable of conversation with anyone this afternoon, least of all Mrs Perrine, who at eighty-two could still have found stimulating and useful work among the Marines at Parris Island. He pretended to be examining the spider-plant which hung from the hook under the porch eave until she had reached what he deemed a safe distance, then crossed Harris Avenue to the Red Apple. Which was where the day’s real troubles began.

He entered the convenience store once again mulling over the spectacular failure of the delayed-sleep experiment and wondering if the advice in the library texts was no more than an uptown version of the folk remedies his acquaintances seemed so eager to press upon him. It was an unpleasant idea, but he thought his mind (or the force below his mind which was actually in charge of this slow torture) had sent him a message which was even more unpleasant:
You have a sleep-window, Ralph. It’s not as big as it once was, and it seems to be getting smaller with every passing week, but you better be grateful for what you’ve got, because a small window is better than no window at all. You see that now, don’t you?

‘Yes,’ Ralph mumbled as he walked down the center aisle to the bright red Cup-A-Soup boxes. ‘I see that very well.’

Sue, the afternoon counter-girl, laughed cheerfully. ‘You must have money in the bank, Ralph,’ she said.

‘Beg pardon?’ Ralph didn’t turn; he was inventorying the red boxes. Here was onion . . . split pea . . . the beef-and-noodles combo . . . but where the hell was the Chicken and Rice?

‘My mom always said people who talk to themselves have
Oh my God!
’

For a moment Ralph thought she had simply made a statement a little too complex for his tired mind to immediately grasp, something about how people who talked to themselves had found God, and then she screamed. He had hunkered down to check the boxes on the bottom shelf, and the scream shot him to his feet so hard and fast that his knees popped. He wheeled toward the front of the store, bumping the top shelf of the soup display with his elbow and knocking half a dozen red boxes into the aisle.

‘Sue? What’s wrong?’

Sue paid no attention. She was looking out through the door with her fisted hands pressed against her lips and her brown eyes huge above them. ‘God, look at the blood!’ she cried in a choked voice.

Ralph turned further, knocking a few more Lipton boxes into the aisle, and looked through the Red Apple’s dirty show window. What he saw drew a gasp from him, and it took him a space of seconds – five, maybe – to realize that the bloody, beaten woman staggering toward the Red Apple was Helen Deepneau. Ralph had always thought Helen the prettiest woman on the west side of town, but there was nothing pretty about her today. One of her eyes was puffed shut; there was a gash at her left temple that was soon going to be lost in the gaudy swelling of a fresh bruise; her puffy lips and her cheeks were covered with blood. The blood had come from her nose, which was still leaking. She wove through the Red Apple’s little parking lot toward the door like a drunk, her one good eye seeming to see nothing; it simply stared.

More frightening than the way she looked was the way she was handling Natalie. She had the squalling, frightened baby slung casually on one hip, carrying her as she might have carried her books to high school ten or twelve years before.

‘
Oh Jesus, she’s gonna drop the kid!
’ Sue screamed, but although she was ten steps closer to the door than he was, she made no move – simply stood where she was with her hands pressed to her mouth and her eyes gobbling up her face.

Ralph didn’t feel tired anymore. He sprinted up the aisle, tore open the door, and ran outside. He was just in time to catch Helen by the shoulders as she banged a hip against the ice cabinet – mercifully not the hip with Natalie on it – and went veering off in a new direction.

‘Helen!’ he yelled. ‘Jesus, Helen, what happened?’

‘Hun?’ she asked, her voice dully curious, totally unlike the voice of the lively young woman who sometimes accompanied him to the movies and moaned over Mel Gibson. Her good eye rolled toward him and he saw that same dull curiosity in it, a look that said she didn’t know who she was, let alone where she was, or what had happened, or when. ‘Hun? Ral? Wha?’

The baby slipped. Ralph let go of Helen, grabbed for Natalie, and managed to snag one of her jumper straps. Nat screamed, waved her hands, and stared at him with huge dark-blue eyes. He got his other hand between Nat’s legs an instant before the strap he was holding tore free. For a moment the howling baby balanced on his hand like a gymnast on a balance beam, and Ralph could feel the damp bulge of her diapers through the overall she was wearing. Then he slipped his other hand around her back and hoisted her up against his chest. His heart was pounding hard, and even with the baby safe in his arms he kept seeing her slip away, kept seeing her head with its cap of fine hair slamming against the butt-littered pavement with a sickening crack.

‘Hum? Ar? Ral?’ Helen asked. She saw Natalie in Ralph’s arms, and some of the dullness went out of her good eye. She raised her hands toward the child, and in Ralph’s arms, Natalie mimicked the gesture with her own chubby hands. Then Helen staggered, struck the side of the building, and reeled backward a step. One foot tangled in the other (Ralph saw splatters of blood on her small white sneakers, and it was amazing how bright everything was all of a sudden; the color had come back into the world, at least temporarily), and she would have fallen if Sue hadn’t picked that moment to finally venture out. Instead of going down, Helen landed against the opening door and just leaned there, like a drunk against a lamppost.

‘Ral?’ The expression in her eyes was a little sharper now, and Ralph saw it wasn’t so much curiosity as incredulity. She drew in a deep breath and made an effort to force intelligible words past her swelled lips. ‘Gih. Gih me my bay-ee.
Bay
-be. Gih me . . . Nah-lie.’

‘Not just yet, Helen,’ Ralph said. ‘You’re not too steady on your feet right now.’

Sue was still on the other side of the door, holding it so Helen wouldn’t fall. The girl’s cheeks and forehead were ashy pale, her eyes filled with tears.

‘Get out here,’ Ralph told her. ‘Hold her up.’

‘I can’t!’ she blubbered. ‘She’s all bluh-bluh-
bloody
!’

‘Oh for God’s sake, quit it! It’s Helen! Helen Deepneau from up the street!’

And although Sue must have known that, actually hearing the name seemed to turn the trick. She slipped around the open door, and when Helen staggered backward again, Sue curled an arm around her shoulders and braced her firmly. That expression of incredulous surprise remained on Helen’s face. Ralph found it harder and harder to look at. It made him feel sick to his stomach.

‘Ralph? What happened? Was it an accident?’

He turned his head and saw Bill McGovern standing at the edge of the parking lot. He was wearing one of his natty blue shirts with the iron’s creases still in the sleeves and holding one of his long-fingered, oddly delicate hands up to shade his eyes. He looked strange, somehow naked that way, but Ralph had no time to think about why; too much was happening.

‘It was no accident,’ he said. ‘She’s been beaten up. Here, take the kid.’

He held Natalie out to McGovern, who at first shrank back and then took the baby. Natalie immediately began to shriek again. McGovern, looking like someone who has just been handed an overfilled airsick bag, held her out at arm’s length with her feet dangling. Behind him a small crowd was beginning to gather, many of them teenage kids in baseball uniforms on their way home from an afternoon game at the field around the corner. They were staring at Helen’s puffed and bloody face with an unpleasant avidity, and Ralph found himself thinking of the Bible story about the time Noah had gotten drunk – the good sons who had looked away from the naked old man lying in his tent, the bad one who had looked . . .

Gently, he replaced Sue’s arm with his own. Helen’s good eye rolled back to him. She said his name more clearly this time, more positively, and the gratitude Ralph heard in her blurry voice made him feel like crying.

‘Sue – take the baby. Bill doesn’t have a clue.’

She did, folding Nat gently and expertly into her arms. McGovern gave her a grateful smile, and Ralph suddenly realized what was wrong with the way he looked. McGovern wasn’t wearing the Panama hat which seemed as much a part of him (in the summertime, at least) as the wen on the bridge of his nose.

‘Hey, mister, what happened?’ one of the baseball kids asked.

‘Nothing that’s any of your business,’ Ralph said.

‘Looks like she went a few rounds with Riddick Bowe.’

‘Nah, Tyson,’ one of the other baseball kids said, and incredibly, there was laughter.

‘Get out of here!’ Ralph shouted at them, suddenly furious. ‘Go peddle your papers! Mind your business!’

They shuffled back a few steps, but no one left. It was blood they were looking at, and not on a movie screen.

‘Helen, can you walk?’

‘Yeff,’ she said. ‘Fink . . .
Think
so.’

He led her carefully around the open door and into the Red Apple. She moved slowly, shuffling from foot to foot like an old woman. The smell of sweat and spent adrenaline was baking out of her pores in a sour reek, and Ralph felt his stomach turn over again. It wasn’t the smell, not really; it was the effort to reconcile this Helen with the pert and pleasantly sexy woman he had spoken to yesterday while she worked in her flower-beds.

Ralph suddenly remembered something else about yesterday. Helen had been wearing blue shorts, cut quite high, and he had noticed a couple of bruises on her legs – a large yellow blotch far up on the left thigh, a fresher, darker smudge on the right calf.

He walked Helen toward the little office area behind the cash register. He glanced up into the convex anti-theft mirror mounted in the corner and saw McGovern holding the door for Sue.

‘Lock the door,’ he said over his shoulder.

‘Gee, Ralph, I’m not supposed to—’

‘Just for a couple of minutes,’ Ralph said. ‘Please.’

‘Well . . . okay. I guess.’

Ralph heard the snick of the bolt being turned as he eased Helen into the hard plastic contour chair behind the littery desk. He picked up the telephone and punched the button marked 911. Before the phone could ring on the other end, a blood-streaked hand reached out and pushed down the gray disconnect button.