look like. He decided that was a question to which he didn't really want an answer. just as Orange Boy climbed on top of Green Boy and began to pummel him in earnest, Sue came out of the store and hollered at them to quit fighting in the damned parking lot.
Orange Boy dismounted reluctantly. The combatants rose to their feet, looking at each other warily. Then Green Boy, trying to appear nonchalant, turned and went into the store. Only his quick glance back over his shoulder to make sure his opponent was not pursuing spoiled the effect.
The spectators were either following Green Boy into the store for their post-practice supplies or clustered around Orange Boy, congratulating him. Above them, unseen, that virulent red-purple toadstool was breaking up like a cloudbank before a strong wind.
Pieces of it tattered, unravelled, and disappeared.
The street is a carnival of energy, Ralph thought. The,juice thrown off by those two guys during the ninety seconds they were mixing it up looked like enough to light Derry for a week, and if a person could tap the energy the watchers generated-the energy inside that mushroom cloud-one could probably light the whole state of Maine for a month. Can you imagine what it would be like to enter the world of auras in Times Square at two minutes to midnight on New Year's Eve?
He couldn't and didn't want to. He suspected he had glimpsed the leading edge of a force so huge and so vital that it made all the nuclear weapons created since 1945 seem about as powerful as a child's cap-pistol fired into an empty peach can.
Enough force to destroy the universe, perhaps... or to create a new one.
Ralph went upstairs, dumped a can of beans into one pot and a couple of hotdogs into another, and walked impatiently back and forth through the flat, snapping his fingers and occasionally running his fingers through his hair, as he waited for this impromptu bachelor's supper to cook. The bone-deep weariness which had hung on him like invisible weights ever since midsummer was, for the time being, at least, entirely gone; he felt filled with manic, antic energy, absolutely stuffed with it. He supposed this was why people liked Benzedrine and cocaine, only he had an idea that this was a much better high, that when it departed it would not leave him feeling plundered and mistreated, more used than user.
Ralph Roberts, unaware that the hair his fingers were combing through had grown thicker, and that threads of black were visible in it for the first time in five years, jive-toured his apartment, walking on the balls of his feet, first humming and then singing an old rockand-roll tune from the early sixties: "Hey, pretty bay-bee, you can't sit down... you gotta slop, bop, slip, slop, flip top alll about...
The beans were bubbling in their pot, the hotdogs boiling in theirs-only it looked to Ralph almost as if they were dancing in there, doing the Bristol Stomp to the old Dovells tune. Still singing at the top of his lungs ("When you hear the hippie with the backbeat, you can't sit down"), Ralph cut the hotdogs into the beans, dumped in half a pint of ketchup, added some chili sauce, then stirred everything vigorously together and headed for the door. He carried his supper, still in the pot, in one hand. He ran down the stairs as nimbly as a kid who's running late on the first day of school.
He hooked a baggy old cardigan sweater-McGovern's, but what the hell-out of the front hall closet, and then went back out on the porch.
The auras were gone, but Ralph wasn't dismayed; for the time being he was more interested in the smell of food. He couldn't remember the last time he'd felt as flat-out hungry as he did at that moment. He sat on the top step with his long thighs and bony knees sticking out on either side of him, looking decidedly Ichabod Craneish, and began to eat. The first few bites burned his lips and tongue, but instead of being deterred, Ralph ate faster, almost gobbling.
He paused with half the pot of beans and franks consumed. The animal in his stomach hadn't gone back to sleep-not yet-but it had been pacified a bit. Ralph belched unselfconsciously and looked out at Harris Avenue with a feeling of contentment he hadn't known in years.
Under the current circumstances, that feeling made no sense at all, but that didn't change it