a wonderful snack; he He tried putting his feet in warm water. Lois bought him someonly wished he had discovered it earlier. thing called an All-Purpose Gel Wrap from a catalogue-you put it is around your neck and it was supposed to take care of your arthrit' as well as help you sleep (it did neither for Ralph, but he had only the mildest case of arthritis to begin with). Following a chance meeting with Trigger Vachon at the counter of Nicky's Lunch, he tried chamomile tea. "That cammy's a beaut," Trig told him. "You gonna sleep great, Ralphie." And Ralph did... right up until 2:58 a.m that was.
Those were the folk cures and homeopathic remedies he tried.
Ones he didn't included mega-vitamin packages which cost much more than Ralph could afford to spend on his fixed income, a yoga position called The Dreamer (as described by the postman, The Dreamer sounded to Ralph like a fine way to get a look at your own hemorrhoids), and marijuana. Ralph considered this last one very carefully before deciding it would very likely turn out to be an illegal version of the whiskey and the honeycomb and the chamomile tea.
Besides, if McGovern found out Ralph was smoking pot, he would never hear the end of it.
And through all these experiments a voice in his brain kept asking him if he really was going to have to get down to eye of newt and tongue of toad before he gave up and went to the doctor. That voice was not so much critical as genuinely curious. Ralph had become fairly curious himself.
On September 10th, the day of the first Friends of Life demonstration at WomanCare, Ralph decided that he would try something from the drugstore... but not the Rexall downtown where he'd gotten Carol's prescriptions filled. They knew him down there, knew him well, and he didn't want Paul Durgin, the Rexall druggist, to see him buying sleeping-pills. It was probably stupid-like going across town to buy rubbers-but that didn't change the way he felt.
He had never traded at the Rite Aid across from Strawford Park, so that was where he meant to go. And if the drugstore version of ewt's eye and toad's tongue didn't work, he really would go to the doctor.
Is that true, Ralph? Do you really mean it?
"I do," he said out loud as he walked slowly down Harris Avenue in the bright September sunshine. "Be damned if I'll put up with this much longer."
Big talk, Ralph, the voice replied skeptically.
Bill McGovern and Lois Chasse were standing outside the park, having what looked like an animated discussion. Bill looked Up, saw him, and motioned for him to come over. Ralph went, not liking the combination of their expressions: bright-eyed interest on McGovern's face, distress and worry on Lois's.
"Have you heard about the thing out at the hospital?" she asked as Ralph joined them.
"It wasn't at the hospital, and it wasn't a 'thing,"
"McGovern said testily. "It was a demonstration-that's what they called it, anyway and it was at WomanCare, which is actually behind the hospital.
They took a bunch of people to 'all-somewhere between six and two dozen, nobody really seems to know yet."
"One of them was Ed Deepneau!" Lois said breathlessly, and McGovern shot her a disgusted glance. He clearly believed that handling this piece of news had been his job.
"Ed!" Ralph said, startled. "Ed's in Fresh Harbor!"
"Wrong," McGovern said. The battered brown fedora he was wearing today gave him a slightly rakish look, like a newspaperman S the pondered if the Panama was still in a forties crime drama. Ralph was lost or had merely been retired for the fall. "Today he's once more j cooling his heels in our picturesque city all."
"What exactly happened?" as little But neither of them really knew. At that point the story was more than a rumor which had spread through the park like a cont in this tagious headcold, a rumor which was of particular interest part of town because Ed Deepneau's name was attached to it. Marie Callan had told Lois that there had been rock-throwing involved, I and that was why the demonstrators had been arrested. According to Stan Eberly, who had passed the story on to McGovern shortly before McGovern ran into Lois, someone-it might have been Ed, but it might well have been one of the others-had Maced a couple of doctors as they used the walkway between WomanCare and the back entrance to the hospital. This walkway was