old man, the eyes in the rear-view mirror might say. Stupid old man, walked a lot further than you should 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 west 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 wreck – was 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 job. 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! Hurry up! Hurry up and lick shit, you fucking asshole cuntlapper! Fucking 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 Ralph 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 running to the old folks down the street every time the baby did some new and entrancing thing, especially when the granny-figure in the picture was ill. Ralph had an idea that Ed wouldn’t be able to tell someone to go to hell