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  The bride's maid of honor was her friend Simone Castonguay, 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 gonna live to a hunnert and fifty and never know a day of the rheumatiz or constipations!'

  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 funny little chill, but he wasn't quite sure why.

  '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 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.

  2

  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 ne'er-do-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: HD - ED 5-8-87.

  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 Jackson, the one where Ralph Roberts had once almost fainted, the wino never saw the approaching Green Line bus. The driver saw him, and 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.

  3

  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 want to spend the rest of the winter trying to housebreak a puppy, just say so. We'll find someone--'

  'Lois,' he said, giving his eyebrow what he hoped was that special ironic Bill McGovern lift, 'you're babbling.'

  'I am?'

  'You am. It's something you do when you're nervous, but you can stop being nervous right now. I'm crazy 'bout dis lady.' Nor was that an exaggeration; he fell in love with the black-and-tan beagle bitch almost at once.

  'What will you name her?' Lois asked. 'Any idea?'

  'Sure,' Ralph said. 'Rosalie.'

  4

  The next four years were, by and large, good ones for Helen and Nat Deepneau, as well. They lived frugally in an apartment on the east side of town for awhile, getting along on Helen's librarian's salary but not doing much more than that. The little Cape Cod up the street from Ralph's place had sold, but that money had gone to pay outstanding bills. Then, in June of 1994, Helen received an insurance windfall . . . only the wind that blew it her way was John Leydecker.

  The Great Eastern Insurance Company had originally refused to pay off on Ed Deepneau's life insurance policy, claiming he had taken his own life. Then, after a great deal of harrumphing and muttering under their corporate breath, they had offered a substantial settlement. They were persuaded to do this by a poker-buddy of John Leydecker's named Howard Hayman. When he wasn't playing lowball, five-card stud, and three-card draw, Hayman was a lawyer who enjoyed lunching on insurance companies.

  Leydecker had re-met Helen at Ralph and Lois's in February of 1994, had fallen head over heels in fascination with her ('It was never quite love,' he told Ralph and Lois later, 'which was probably just as well, considering how things turned out'), and had introduced her to Hayman because he thought the insurance company was trying to screw her. 'He was insane, not suicidal,' Leydecker said, and stuck to that long after Helen had handed him his hat and shown him the door.

  After being faced with a suit in which Howard Hayman threatened to make Great Eastern look like Snidely Whiplash tying Little Nell to the railroad tracks, Helen had received a check for seventy thousand dollars. In the late fall of 1994 she had used most of this money to buy a house on Harris Avenue, just three doors up from her old place and right across from Harriet Bennigan's.

  'I was never really happy on the east side,' she told Lois one day in November of that year. They were on their way back from the park, and Natalie had been sitting slumped and fast asleep in her stroller, her presence little more than a pink nose-tip and a fog of cold breath below a large ski-hat which Lois had knitted herself. 'I used to dream about Harris Avenue. Isn't that crazy?'

  'I don't think dreams are ever crazy,' Lois replied.

  Helen and John Leydecker dated for most of that summer, but neither Ralph nor Lois was particularly surprised when the courtship abruptly ended after Labor Day, or when Helen began to wear a discreet pink triangle pin on her prim, high-necked librarian's blouses. Perhaps they were not surprised because they were old enough to have seen ev
erything at least once, or perhaps on some deep level they were still glimpsing the auras which surround things, creating a bright gateway opening on a secret city of hidden meanings, concealed motives, and camouflaged agendas.

  5

  Ralph and Lois babysat Natalie frequently after Helen moved back to Harris Avenue, and they enjoyed these stints tremendously. Nat was the child their marriage might have produced if it had happened thirty years sooner, and the coldest, most overcast winter day warmed and brightened when Natalie came toddling in, looking like a midget version of the Goodyear blimp in her pink quilted snowsuit with the mittens hanging from the cuffs, and yelled exuberantly: 'Hi, Walf! Hi, Roliss! I come to bizzit you!'

  In June of 1995, Helen bought a reconditioned Volvo. On the back she put a sticker which read A WOMAN NEEDS A MAN LIKE A FISH NEEDS A BICYCLE. This sentiment did not particularly surprise Ralph, either, but glimpsing that sticker always made him feel unhappy. He sometimes thought Ed's meanest legacy to his widow was summed up in its brittle, not-quite-funny sentiment, and when he saw it, Ralph often remembered how Ed had looked on that summer afternoon when he had walked up from the Red Apple Store to confront him. How Ed had been sitting, shirtless, in the spray thrown by the sprinkler. How there had been a drop of blood on one lens of his glasses. How he had leaned forward, looking at Ralph with his earnest, intelligent eyes, and said that once stupidity reached a certain level, it became hard to live with.

  And after that, stuff started to happen, Ralph would sometimes think. Just what stuff was something he could no longer remember, though, and probably that was just as well. But his lapse of memory (if that was what it was) did not change his belief that Helen had been cheated in some obscure fashion . . . that some bad-tempered fate had tied a can to her tail, and she didn't even know it.

  6

  A month after Helen bought her Volvo, Faye Chapin suffered a heart attack while drafting a preliminary list of seeds for that fall's Runway 3 Classic. He was taken to Derry Home Hospital, where he died seven hours later. Ralph visited him shortly before the end, and when he saw the numbers on the door - 315 - a fierce sense of deja vu washed over him. At first he thought it was because Carolyn had finished her last illness just up the hall, and then he remembered that Jimmy V had died in this very room. He and Lois had visited Jimmy just before the end, and Ralph thought Jimmy had recognized them both, although he couldn't be sure; his memories of the time when he had first begun to really notice Lois were mixed up and hazy in his mind. He supposed some of that was love, and probably some of it had to do with getting on in years, but probably most of it had been the insomnia - he'd gone through a really bad patch of that in the months after Carolyn's death, although it had eventually cured itself, as such things sometimes did. Still, it seemed to him that something ([hello woman hello man we've been waiting for you]) far out of the ordinary had happened in this room, and as he took Faye's dry, strengthless hand and smiled into Faye's frightened, confused eyes, a strange thought came to him: They're standing right over there in the corner and watching us.

  He looked over. There was no one at all in the corner, of course, but for a moment . . . for just a moment . . .

  7

  Life in the years between 1993 and 1998 went on as life in places like Derry always does: the buds of April became the brittle, blowing leaves of October; Christmas trees were brought into homes in mid-December and hauled off in the backs of Dumpsters with strands of tinsel still hanging sadly from their boughs during the first week of January; babies came in through the in door and old folks went out through the out door. Sometimes people in the prime of their lives went out through the out door, too.

  In Derry there were five years of haircuts and permanents, storms and senior proms, coffee and cigarettes, steak dinners at Parker's Cove and hotdogs at the Little League field. Girls and boys fell in love, drunks fell out of cars, short skirts fell out of favor. People reshingled their roofs and repaved their driveways. Old bums were voted out of office; new bums were voted in. It was life, often unsatisfying, frequently cruel, usually boring, sometimes beautiful, once in awhile exhilarating. The fundamental things continued to apply as time went by.

  In the early fall of 1996, Ralph became convinced he had colon cancer. He had begun to see more than trace amounts of blood in his stool, and when he finally went to see Dr Pickard (Dr Litchfield's cheerful, rumpled replacement), he did so with visions of hospital beds and chemotherapy IV-drips dancing bleakly in his head. Instead of cancer, the problem turned out to be a hemorrhoid which had, in Dr Pickard's memorable phrase, 'popped its top.' He wrote Ralph a prescription for suppositories, which Ralph took to the Rite Aid down the street. Joe Wyzer read it, then grinned cheerfully at Ralph. 'Lousy,' he said, 'but it beats the hell out of colon cancer, don't you think?'

  'The thought of colon cancer never crossed my mind,' Ralph replied stiffly.

  One day during the winter of 1997, Lois took it into her head to slide down her favorite hill in Strawford Park on Nat Deepneau's plastic flying-saucer sled. She went down 'faster'n a pig in a greased chute' (this was Don Veazie's phrase; he just happened to be there that day, watching the action) and crashed into the side of the Portosan marked WOMEN. She sprained her knee and twisted her back, and although Ralph knew he had no business doing so - it was unsympathetic to say the least - he laughed hilariously most of the way to the emergency room. The fact that Lois was also howling with laughter despite the pain did nothing to help Ralph regain control. He laughed until tears poured from his eyes and he thought he might have a stroke. She had just looked so goddamned Our Lois going down the hill on that thing, spinning around and around with her legs crossed like one of those yogis from the Mysterious East, and she had almost knocked the Portosan over when she hit it. She was completely recovered by the time spring rolled around, although that knee always ached on rainy nights and she did get tired of Don Veazie asking, almost every time he saw her, if she'd slid into any shithouses lately.

  8

  Just life, going on as it always does - which is to say mostly between the lines and outside the margins. It's what happens while we're making other plans, according to some sage or other, and if life was exceptionally good to Ralph Roberts during those years, it might have been because he had no other plans to make. He maintained friendships with Joe Wyzer and John Leydecker, but his best friend during those years was his wife. They went almost everywhere together, had no secrets, and fought so seldom one might just as well have said never. He also had Rosalie the beagle, the rocker that had once been Mr Chasse's and was now his, and almost daily visits from Natalie (who had begun calling them Ralph and Lois instead of Walf and Roliss, a change neither of them found to be an improvement). And he was healthy, which was maybe the best thing of all. It was just life, full of Short-Time rewards and setbacks, and Ralph lived it with enjoyment and serenity until mid-March of 1998, when he awoke one morning, glanced at the digital clock beside his bed, and saw it was 5:49 a.m.

  He lay quietly beside Lois, not wanting to disturb her by getting up, and wondering what had awakened him.

  You know what, Ralph.

  No I don't.

  Yes, you do. Listen.

  So he listened. He listened very carefully. And after awhile he began to hear it in the walls: the low, soft ticking of the deathwatch.

  9

  Ralph awoke at 5:47 the following morning, and at 5:44 the morning after that. His sleep was whittled away, minute by minute, as winter slowly loosened its grip on Derry and allowed spring to find its way back in. By May he was hearing the tick of the deathwatch everywhere, but understood it was all coming from one place and simply projecting itself, as a good ventriloquist can project his voice. Before, it had been coming from Carolyn. Now it was coming from him.

  He felt none of the terror that had gripped him when he'd been so sure he had developed cancer, and none of the desperation he vaguely remembered from his previous bout of insomnia. He tired more easily and began to find it m
ore difficult to concentrate and remember even simple things, but he accepted what was happening calmly.

  'Are you sleeping all right, Ralph?' Lois asked him one day. 'You're getting these big dark circles under your eyes.'

  'It's the dope I take,' Ralph said.

  'Very funny, you old poop.'

  He took her in his arms and hugged her. 'Don't worry about me, sweetheart - I'm getting all the sleep I need.'

  He awoke one morning a week later at 4:02 a.m. with a line of deep heat throbbing in his arm - throbbing in perfect sync with the sound of the deathwatch, which was, of course, nothing more or less than the beat of his own heart. But this new thing wasn't his heart, or at least Ralph didn't think it was; it felt as if an electric filament had been embedded in the flesh of his forearm.

  It's the scar, he thought, and then: No, it's the promise. The time of the promise is almost here.

  What promise, Ralph? What promise?

  He didn't know.

  10

  One day in early June, Helen and Nat blew in to visit and tell Ralph and Lois about the trip they had taken to Boston with 'Aunt Melanie,' a bank teller with whom Helen had become close friends. Helen and Aunt Melanie had gone to some sort of feminist convention while Natalie networked with about a billion new kids in the day-care center, and then Aunt Melanie had left to do some more feminist things in New York and Washington. Helen and Nat had stayed on in Boston for a couple of days, just sightseeing.

  'We went to see a movie cartoon,' Natalie said. 'It was about animals in the woods. They talked!' She pronounced this last word with Shakespearian grandiosity - talked.

  'Movies where animals talk are neat, aren't they?' Lois asked.

  'Yes! Also I got this new dress!'

  'And a very pretty dress it is,' Lois said.

  Helen was looking at Ralph. 'Are you okay, old chum? You look pale, and you haven't said boo.'