Insomnia

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 sliver 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 shoulda 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.

What if it doesn’t just rain? Last summer it hailed so hard that one time in August it broke windows all over the east side.

“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 wreckwas 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 ’Oh. 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: “You son of a bitch fucker! You bastard eat my cock bur up hurry up and lick shit, you fucking asshole cuntlapper. Fuckling booger! Ratdick ringmeat Suckhole.”

“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 galph 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 ru

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 roadaccidents in his almost-seventy years, most of them minor, one or two serious, and he was always stu

There was even a kind of protocol for this sort of thing: How 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.