not taking after you, Ralph, I'm trying to help you. To be your friend."
"That's not how it feels."
"Well, sometimes the truth hurts a little," McGovern said calmly.
"You need to at least consider the idea that your mind and body are trying to tell you something. Let me ask you a question-is this the only disturbing dream you've had lately?"
Ralph thought fleetingly of Carol, buried up to her neck in the sand and screaming about white-man tracks. Thought of the bugs which had flooded out of her head. "I haven't had any bad dreams lately," he said stiffly. "I suppose you don't believe that because it doesn't fit into the little scenario you've created."
"Ralph-"
"Let me ask you something. Do you really believe that my seeing those two men and May Locher turning up dead was just a coincidence?"
"Maybe not. Maybe your physical and emotional upset created conditions favorable to a brief but perfectly genuine psychic event."
Ralph was silenced.
"I believe such things do happen from time to time," McGovern said, standing up. "Probably sounds funny, coming from a rational old bird like me, but I do. I'm not out-and-out saying that is what happened here, but it could have been. What I am sure of is that the two men you think you saw did not in fact exist in the real world."
Ralph stood looking up at McGovern with his hands jammed deep into his pockets and clenched into fists so hard and tight they felt like rocks.
He could feel the muscles in his arms thrumming.
McGovern came down the porch steps and took him by the arm, gently, just above the elbow. "I only think-" Ralph pulled his arm away so sharply that McGovern grunted with surprise and stumbled a little on his feet. "I know what you think."
"You're not hearing what I-"
"Oh, I've heard plenty. More than enough. Believe me. And excuse me-I think I'm going for another walk.
I need to clear my head." He could feel dull hot blood pounding away in his cheeks and brow. He tried to throw his brain into some forward gear that would allow it to leave this senseless, impotent rage behind, and couldn't do it. He felt a lot as he had when he had awakened from the dream of Carolyn; his thoughts roared with terror and confusion, and as he started his legs moving, the sense he got was not one of walking but of falling, as he had fallen out of bed yesterday morning.
Still, he kept going. Sometimes that was all you could do.
"Ralph, you need to see a doctor!" McGovern called after him, and Ralph could no longer tell himself that he didn't hear a weird, shrewish pleasure in McGovern's voice. The concern which overlaid it was probably genuine enough but it was like sweet icing on a sour cake.
"Not a pharmacist, not a hypnotist, not an acupuncturist! You need to see your own family doctor!"
Yeah, the guy who buried my wife below the high-tide line he thought in a kind of mental scream. The guy who stuck her in sand up to her neck and then told her she didn't have to worry about drowning as long as she kept taking her Valium and Tylenol-3.
Aloud he said, "I need to take a walk! That's what I need and that's all I need." His heartbeat was now slamming into his temples like the short, hard blows of a sledgehammer, and it occurred to him that this was how strokes must happen; if he didn't control himself soon, he was apt to fall down with what his father had called a bad-temper apoplexy."
He could hear McGovern coming down the walk after him. Don't touch me, Bill, Ralph thought. Don't even put your hand on my shoulder, because I'm probably going to turn around and slug you if you do.
"I'm trying to help you, don't you see that?" McGovern shouted.
The mailman on the other side of the street had stopped again to watch them, and outside the Red Apple, Karl, the guy who worked mornings, and Sue, the young woman who worked afternoons, were gawking frankly across the street at them. Karl, he saw, had a bag of hamburger buns in one hand. It was really sort of amazing, the things you saw at a time like this... although not as amazing as some of the things he had already seen that morning.
The things -you thought you saw, Ralph, a traitor voice whispered softly from deep inside his head.