Insomnia

Lois made them breakfast at sunset-splendidly puffy waffles, bacon, home fries. While she cooked, Ralph tried to flex that muscle buried deep in his mind-to create that sensation of blink, He couldn’t do it. When Lois tried, she was also unable, although Ralph could have sworn that just for a moment she flickered, and he could see the stove right through her.

“Just as well, she said, bringing their plates to the table.

“I suppose,” Ralph agreed, but he still felt as he would have if he had lost the ring Carolyn had given him instead of the one he had taken from Atropos-as if some small but essential object had gone rolling out of his life with a wink and a gleam. harder to believe what he did know. There was the scar between the elbow and wrist of his right arm, of course, but he even began to wonder if that wasn’t something he had acquired long ago, during those years of his life when there had been no white in his hair and he had still believed, deep in his heart, that old age was a myth, or a dream, or a thing reserved for people not as special as he was.

Following two more nights of sound, unbroken sleep, the auras had begun to fade, as well. By the following week they were gone, and Ralph began to wonder if perhaps the whole thing hadn’t been some strange dream. He knew that wasn’t so, but it became harder and Winding the Deathwatch Glancing over my shoulder I see its shape and so move forward, as someone in the woods at night might hear the sound of approaching feet and stop to listen; then, instead of silence he hears some creature trying to be silent.

What else can he do but run? Rushing blindly down the path, stumbling, struck in the face by sticks; the other ever closer, yet not really hurrying or out of breath, teasing its kill.

-Stephen Dobyns, “Pursuit”

If I had some wings, I’d fly you all around;

If I had some money, I’d buy you the goddam town;

If I had the strength, then maybe I coulda pulled you through;

If I had a lantern, I’d light the way for you, If I had a lantern, I’d light the way for you.

-Michael McDermott, “Lantern”

On January 2, 1994, Lois Chasse became Lois Roberts.

Her son, Harold, gave her away. Harold’s wife did not attend the ceremony; she was up in Bangor with what Ralph considered a highly suspect case of bronchitis. He kept his suspicions to himself, however, being far from disappointed at Jan Chasse’s failure to appear.

The groom’s best man was Detective John Leydecker, who still wore a cast on his right arm but otherwise showed no signs of the assignment which had nearly killed him. He had spent four days in a coma, but Leydecker knew how lucky he was; in addition to the State Trooper who had been standing beside him at the time of the explosion, six cops had died, two of them members of Leydecker’s handpicked team.

The bride’s maid of honor was her friend Simone Castonguav, and at the reception, the first toast was made by a fellow who liked to say he used to be Joe Wyze but was now older and Wyzer. Trigger Vachon delivered a fractured but heartfelt follow-up, concluding with the wish that “Dese two people go

When Ralph and Lois left the reception hall, their hair still full of rice thrown for the most part by Faye Chapin and the rest of the Harris Avenue Old Crocks, an old man with a book in his hand and a fine cloud of white hair floating around his head came walking up to them.

He had a wide smile on his face.

“Congratulations, Ralph,” he said. “Congratulations, Lois.”

“Thanks, Dor,” Ralph said.

“We missed you,” Lois told him. “Didn’t you get your invitation?

Faye said he’d give it to you.”

“Oh, he gave it to me. Yes, oh yes, he did, but I don’t go to those things if they’re inside. Too stuffy. Funerals are even worse.

Here, this is for you. I didn’t wrap it, because the arthritis is in my fingers too bad for stuff like that now.”

Ralph took it. It was a book of poems called Concurring Beasts.

The poet’s name, Stephen Dobyns, gave him a fu

4 “Thanks,” he told Dorrance.

“Not as good as some of his later work, but good. Dobyns is very good.”

“We’ll read them to each other on our honeymoon,” Lois said.

“That’s a good time to read poetry,” Dorrance said. “Maybe the best time. I’m sure you’ll be very happy together.”

He started off, then looked back.

“You did a great thing. The Long-Timers are very pleased.”

He walked away.

Lois looked at Ralph. “What was he talking about? Do you know?

“Ralph shook his head. He didn’t, not for sure, although he felt as if he should know. The scar on his arm had begun to tingle as it 7 sometimes did, a feeling which was almost like a deep-seated itch.

“Long-Timers,” she mused. “Maybe he meant us, Ralph-after all, we’re hardly spring chickens these days, are we?”

“That’s probably just what he did mean,” Ralph agreed, but he knew better… and her eyes said that, somewhere deep down, so did she.

On that same day, and just as Ralph and Lois were saying their I do’s, a certain wino with a bright green aura-one who actually did have an uncle in Dexter, although the uncle hadn’t seen this the’erdo-well nephew for five years or more-was tramping across Strawford Park, slitting his eyes against the formidable glare of sun on snow. He was looking for returnable cans and bottles. Enough to buy a pint of whiskey would be great, but a pint of Night Train wine would do.

Not far from the Portosan marked MEN, he saw a bright gleam of metal.

It was probably just the sun reflecting off a bottle-cap, but such things needed to be checked out. It might be a dime… although to the wino, it actually seemed to have a goldy sort of gleam. It"Holy Judas!” he cried, snatching up the wedding ring which lay mysteriously on top of the snow. It was a broad band, almost certainly gold. He tilted it to read the engraving on the inside:

A pint? Hell, no. This little baby was going to secure him a quart.

Several quarts. Possibly a week’s worth of quarts.

Hurrying across the intersection of Witcham and.fackson, the one where Ralph Roberts had once almost fainted, the wino never saw him put on his brakes, but the bus struck a patch of ice.

The wino never knew what hit him. At one moment he was debating between Old Crow and Old Grand-Dad; at the next he had passed into the darkness which awaits us all. The ring rolled down the gutter and disappeared into a sewer grate, and there it remained for a long, long time. But not forever. In Derry, things that disappear into the sewer system have a way-an often unpleasant one-of turning up.

Ralph and Lois didn’t live happily ever after.

There really are no evers in the Short-Time world, happy or otherwise, a fact which Clotho and Lachesis undoubtedly knew well.

They did live happily for quite some time, though. Neither of them liked to come right out and say these were the happiest years of all, because both remembered their first partners in marriage with love and affection, but in their hearts, both did consider them the happiest. Ralph wasn’t sure that autumn love was the richest love, but he came firmly to believe that it was the kindest, and the most fulfilling.

Our LoiS, he often said, and laughed. Lois pretended to be irritated at this, but pretending was all it ever was; she saw the look in his eyes when he said it.

On their first Christmas Morning as man and wife (they had moved into Lois’s tidy little house and put his own white rhino up for sale), Lois gave him a beagle puppy.” Do you like her?” she asked apprehensively.

“I almost didn’t get her, Dear Abby says you should never give pets as presents, but she looked so sweet in the petshop window… and so sad… if you don’t like her, or don’t 756 want to spend the rest of the winter trying to housebreak a puppy, just say so. We’ll find someone-”