of the kitchen cabinet beside the sink, then shrugged into his old gray leather jacket. He would go up to the picnic area near the airport and see if he could find a game of chess.
Lacking that, maybe a few rounds of cribbage.
He paused in the kitchen doorway, looking fixedly at the flowers, trying to make that sizzling green mist come. Nothing happened.
But it was there. You saw it,-Natalie did, too.
But had she? Had she really? Babies were always goggling at stuff, everything amazed them, so how could he know for sure?
"I just do," he said to the empty apartment. Correct. The green mist rising from the stems of the flowers had been there, all the auras had been there, and...
"And they're still there," he said, and did not know if he should be relieved or appalled by the firmness he heard in his own voice, For right now, why don't you try being neither, sweetheart.p His thought, Carolyn's voice, good advice.
Ralph locked up his apartment and went out into the Derry of the Old Crocks, looking for a game of chess.
Part I LITTLE BALD DOCTORS CHAPTER 7
When Ralph came walking up Harris Avenue to his apartment on October 2nd, with a c(puple of recycled Elmer Kelton Westerns from Back Pages in one hand, he saw that someone was sitting on the perch steps with his own book. The visitor wasn't reading, however; he was watching with dreamy intensity as the warm wind which had been blowing all day harvested the yellow and gold leaves from the oaks and the three surviving elms across the street.
Ralph came closer, observing the thin white hair flying around the skull of the man on the porch, and the way all his bulk seemed to have run into his belly, hips, and bottom. That wide center section, coupled with the scrawny neck, narrow chest, and spindly legs clad in old green flannel pants, gave him the look of a man wearing an inner tube beneath his clothes. Even from a hundred and fifty yards away, there was really no question about who the visitor was: Dorrance Marstellar.
Sighing, Ralph walked the rest of the way up to his building.
Dorrance, seemingly hypnotized by the bright falling leaves, did not look around until Ralph's shadow dropped across him. Then he turned, craned his neck, and smiled his sweet, strangely vulnerable smile.
Faye Chapin, Don Veazie, and some of the other old-timers who hung out at the picnic area up by Runway 3 (they would retire to the Jackson Street Billiard Emporium once Indian summer broke and the weather turned cold) saw that smile as just another indicator that Old Dor, poetry books or no poetry books, was essentially brainless. Don Veazie, nobody's idea of Mr. Sensitivity, had fallen into the habit of calling Dorrance Old Chief Dumbhead, and Faye had once told Ralph that he, Faye, wasn't in the least surprised that Old Dor had lived to the age of half-past ninety. "People who don't have any furniture on their upper storey always live the longest," he had explained to Ralph earlier that year. "They don't have anything to worry about. That keeps their blood-pressure down and they ain't so likely to blow a valve or throw a rod."
Ralph, however, was not so sure. The sweetness in Dorrance's smile did not make the old man look empty-headed to him; it made him look somehow ethereal and knowing at the same time... sort of like a small-town Merlin. Nonetheless, he could have done without a visit from Dor today; this morning he had set a new record, waking at 1:58 a.m and he was exhausted. He only wanted to sit in his own living room, drink coffee, and try to read one of the Westerns he had picked up downtown. Maybe later on he would take another stab at napping.
"Hullo," Dorrance said. The book he was holding was a paperback-Cemetery Nights, by a man named Stephen Dobyns.
"Hello, Dor," he said. "Good book?"
Dorrance looked down at the book as if he'd forgotten he had one, then smiled and nodded. "Yes, very good. He writes poems that are like stories. I don't always like that, but sometimes I do."
"That's good. Listen, Dor, it's great to see you, but the walk up the hill kind of tired me out, so maybe we could visit another t-"
"Oh, that's all right," Dorrance said, standing up. There was a faint cinnamony smell about him that always made Ralph think of Egyptian mummies kept behind red