the Red Apple side of the street. DERRY MEDICAL SERVICES was printed across the rear doers in large white letters.
"Hi, Bill," Ralph said, and dropped into his own chair. The rocker where Lois Chasse always sat when she came over stood between them. A little twilight breeze had sprung up, delightfully cool after the heat of the afternoon, and the empty rocker moved lazily back and forth at its whim.
"Hi," McGovern said, glancing over at Ralph. He started to look away, then did a double take. "Man, you better start pinning up the bags under your eyes. You're going to be stepping on them pretty soon if you don't." Ralph thought this was supposed to come out sounding like one of the caustic little bons mots for which McGovern was famous along the street, but the look in his eyes was one of genuine concern.
"It's been a bitch of a day," he said. He told McGovern about Helen's call, editing out the things he thought she might be uncomfortable with McGovern's knowing. Bill had never been one of her favorite people.
"Glad she's okay," McGovern said. "I'll tell you something, Ralph-you impressed me today, marching up the street that way, like Gary Cooper in High Noon. Maybe it was insane, but it was also pretty cool." He paused. "To tell the truth, I was a little in awe of YOU."
This was the second time in fifteen minutes that someone had come Close to calling Ralph a hero. It made him uncomfortable.
"I was too mad at him to realize how dumb I was being until later.
Where you been, Bill? I tried to call you a little while ago."
"I took a walk out to the Extension," McGovern said. "Trying to cool my engine off a little, I guess. I've felt headachey and sick to my stomach ever since Johnny Leydecker and that other one took Ed away-" Ralph nodded. "Me, too."
"Really?" McGOvern looked surprised, and a little skeptical.
"Really," Ralph said with a faint smile.
"Anyway, Faye Chapin was at the picnic area where those old lags usually hang out during the hot weather, and he coaxed me 'Into a game of chess. What a piece of work that guy is, Ralph-he thinks he's the reincarnation of Ruy Loper, but he plays chess more like Soupy Sales... and he never shuts up."
"Faye's all right, though," Ralph said quietly.
McGovern seemed not to have heard him. "And that creepy Dorrance Marstellar was out there," he went on. "If we're old, he's a fossil.
He just stands there by the fence between the picnic area and the airport with a book of poetry in his hands, watching the planes take off and land. Does he really read those books he carries around, do you think, or are they just props?"
"Good question," Ralph said, but he was thinking about the word McGovern had employed to describe Dorrance-creepy. It wasn't one he would have used himself, but there could be no doubt that old Dor was one of life's originals. He wasn't senile (at least Ralph didn't think he was); it was more as if the few things he said were the product of a mind that was slightly skewed and perceptions that were slightly bent.
He remembered that Dorrance had been there that day last summer when Ed ran into the guy in the pickup truck. At the time he',] thought that Dorrance's arrival had added the final screwy touch to the festivities. And Dorrance had said something funny. Ralph tried to recall what it was and couldn't.
McGovern was gazing back up the street, where a whistling young man in a gray coverall had just come out of the house in front of which the Medical Services step-van was parked. This young man, looking all of twenty-four and as if he hadn't needed a single medical service in his entire life, was rolling a dolly with a long green tank strapped to it, "That's the empty," McGovern said. "You missed them taking in the full one."
A second young man, also dressed in a coverall, stepped out through the front door of the small house, which combined yellow paint and deep pink trim in an unfortunate manner. He stood on the stoop for a moment, hand on the doorknob, apparently speaking to someone inside.
Then he pulled the door shut and ran lithely down the walk. He was in time to help his colleague lift the dolly, with the tank still strapped to it, into the back of the van.