SHOPLIFTING IS NOT A “KICK” OR A “GROOVE” OR A “GASSER”! SHOPLIFTING IS A CRIME, AND WE WILL PROSECUTE!
NORBERT KEENE
OWNER & MANAGER
And the thin, bespectacled man in the white smock who was looking out at me just about had to be Mr. Keene. His expression did not say Come on in, stranger, poke around and buy something, maybe have an ice cream soda. Those hard eyes and that turned-down mouth said Go away, there’s nothing here for the likes of you. Part of me thought I was making that up; most of me knew I wasn’t. As an experiment, I raised my hand in a hello gesture.
The man in the white smock did not raise his in return.
I realized that the canal I’d seen must run directly beneath this peculiar sunken downtown, and I was standing on top of it. I could feel hidden water in my feet, thrumming the sidewalk. It was a vaguely unpleasant feeling, as if this little piece of the world had gone soft.
A male mannequin wearing a tuxedo stood in the window of Derry Dress & Everyday. There was a monocle in one eye and a school pennant in one plaster hand. The pennant read DERRY TIGERS WILL SLAUGHTER BANGOR RAMS! Even though I was a fan of school spirit, this struck me as a little over the top. Beat the Bangor Rams, sure—but slaughter them?
Just a figure of speech, I told myself, and went in.
A clerk with a tape measure around his neck approached me. His duds were much nicer than mine, but the dim overhead bulbs made his complexion look yellow. I felt an absurd urge to ask, Can you sell me a nice summer straw hat, or should I just go fuck myself? Then he smiled, asked how he could help me, and everything seemed almost normal. He had the required item, and I took possession of it for a mere three dollars and seventy cents.
“A shame you’ll have such a short time to wear it before the weather turns cold,” he said.
I put the hat on and adjusted it in the mirror beside the counter. “Maybe we’ll get a good stretch of Indian summer.”
Gently and rather apologetically, he tilted the hat the other way. It was a matter of two inches or less, but I stopped looking like a clodhopper on a visit to the big city and started to look like… well… central Maine’s most debonair time-traveler. I thanked him.
“Not at all, Mr.—?”
“Amberson,” I said, and held out my hand. His grip was short, limp, and powdery with some sort of talcum. I restrained an urge to rub my hand on my sport coat after he released it.
“In Derry on business?”
“Yes. Are you from here yourself?”
“Lifelong resident,” he said, and sighed as if this were a burden. Based on my own first impressions, I guessed it might be. “What’s your game, Mr. Amberson, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Real estate. But while I’m here, I thought I’d look up an old Army buddy. His name is Dunning. I don’t recall his first name, we just used to call him Skip.” The Skip part was a fabrication, but it was true that I didn’t know the first name of Harry Dunning’s father. Harry had named his brothers and sister in his theme, but the man with the hammer had always been “my father” or “my dad.”
“I’m afraid I couldn’t help you there, sir.” Now he sounded distant. Business was done, and although the store was empty of other customers, he wanted me gone.
“Well, maybe you can with something else. What’s the best hotel in town?”
“That would be the Derry Town House. Just turn back to Kenduskeag Avenue, take your right, and go up Up-Mile Hill to Main Street. Look for the carriage lamps out front.”
“Up-Mile Hill?”
“That’s what we call it, yes sir. If there’s nothing else, I have several alterations to make out back.”
When I left, the light had begun to drain from the sky. One thing I remember vividly about the time I spent in Derry during September and October of 1958 was how evening always seemed to come early.
One storefront down from Derry Dress & Everyday was Machen’s Sporting Goods, where THE FALL GUN SALE was under way. Inside, I saw two men sighting hunting rifles while an elderly clerk with a string tie (and a stringy neck to go with it) looked on approvingly. The other side of Canal appeared to be lined with workingmen’s bars, the kind where you could get a beer and a shot for fifty cents and all the music on the Rock-Ola would be C & W. There was the Happy Nook, the Wishing Well (which the habitués called the Bucket of Blood, I later learned), Two Brothers, the Golden Spoke, and the Sleepy Silver Dollar.
Standing outside the latter, a quartet of bluecollar gents was taking the afternoon air and staring at my convertible. They were equipped with mugs of beer and cigarettes. Their faces were shaded beneath flat caps of tweed and cotton. Their feet were clad in the big no-color workboots my 2011 students called shitkickers. Three of the four were wearing suspenders. They watched me with no expression on their faces. I thought for a moment of the mongrel that had chased my car, snapping and drooling, then crossed the street.
“Gents,” I said. “What’s on tap in there?”
For a moment none of them answered. Just when I thought none of them would, the one sans suspenders said, “Bud and Mick, what else? You from away?”
“Wisconsin,” I said.
“Bully for you,” one of them muttered.
“Late in the year for tourists,” another said.
“I’m in town on business, but I thought I might look up an old service buddy while I’m here.” No response to this, unless one of the men dropping his cigarette butt onto the sidewalk and then putting it out with a snot-loogie the size of a small mussel could be termed an answer. Nevertheless, I pushed on. “Skip Dunning’s his name. Do any of you fellows know a Dunning?”
“Should hope to smile n kiss a pig,” No Suspenders said.
“I beg pardon?”
He rolled his eyes and turned down the corners of his mouth, the out-of-patience expression a man gives to a stupid person with no hope of ever being smart. “Derry’s full of Dunnings. Check the damn phone book.” He started inside. His posse followed. No Suspenders opened the door for them, then turned back to me. “What’s that Ford got in it?” Gut for got. “V-8?”
“Y-block.” Hoping I sounded as if I knew what it meant.
“Pretty good goer?”
“Not bad.”
“Then maybe you should climb in and go ’er right on up the hill. They got some nice joints there. These bars are for millies.” No Suspenders assessed me in a cold way I came to expect in Derry, but never got used to. “You’d get stared at. P’raps more, when the ’leven-to-seven lets out from Striar’s and Boutillier’s.”
“Thanks. That’s very kind of you.”
The cold assessment continued. “You don’t know much, do you?” he remarked, then went inside.
I walked back to my convertible. On that gray street, with the smell of industrial smokes in the air and the afternoon bleeding away to evening, downtown Derry looked only marginally more charming than a dead hooker in a church pew. I got in, engaged the clutch, started the engine, and felt a strong urge to just drive away. Drive back to Lisbon Falls, climb up through the rabbit-hole, and tell Al Templeton to find another boy. Only he couldn’t, could he? He was out of strength and almost out of time. I was, as the New England saying goes, the trapper’s last shot.
I drove up to Main Street, saw the carriage lamps (they came on for the night just as I spotted them), and pulled into the turnaround in front of the Derry Town House. Five minutes later, I was checked in. My time in Derry had begun.
3
By the time I got my new possessions unpacked (some of the remaining cash went into my wallet, the rest into the lining of my new valise) I was good and hungry, but before going down to dinner, I checked the telephone book. What I saw caused my heart to sink. Mr. No Suspenders might not have been very welcoming, but he was right about Dunnings selling cheap in Derry and the four or five surrounding hamlets that were also included in the directory. There was almost a full page of them. It wasn’t that surprising, because in small towns certain names seem to sprout like dandelions on a lawn in June. In my last five years teaching English at LHS, I must have had two dozen Starbirds and Lemkes, some of them siblings, most of them first, second, or third cousins. They intermarried and made more.
Before leaving for the past I should have taken time to call Harry Dunning and ask him his father’s first name—it would have been so simple. I surely would have, if I hadn’t been so utterly and completely gobsmacked by what Al had shown me, and what he was asking me to do. But, I thought, how hard can it be? It shouldn’t take Sherlock Holmes to find a family with kids named Troy, Arthur (alias Tugga), Ellen, and Harry.
With this thought to cheer me, I went down to the hotel restaurant and ordered a shore dinner, which came with clams and a lobster roughly the size of an outboard motor. I skipped dessert in favor of a beer in the bar. In the detective novels I read, bartenders were often excellent sources of information. Of course, if the one working the Town House stick was like the other people I’d met so far in this grim little burg, I wouldn’t get far.
He wasn’t. The man who left off his glass-polishing duties to serve me was young and stocky, with a cheery full moon of a face below his flattop haircut. “What can I get you, friend?”
The f-word sounded good to me, and I returned his smile with enthusiasm. “Miller Lite?”
He looked puzzled. “Never heard of that one, but I’ve got High Life.”
Of course he hadn’t heard of Miller Lite; it hadn’t been invented yet. “That would be fine. Guess I forgot I was on the East Coast there for a second.”
“Where you from?” He used a church key to whisk the top off a bottle, and set a frosted glass in front of me.
“Wisconsin, but I’ll be here for awhile.” Although we were alone, I lowered my voice. It seemed to inspire confidence. “Real estate stuff. Got to look around a little.”
He nodded respectfully and poured for me before I could. “Good luck to you. God knows there’s plenty for sale in these parts, and most of it going cheap. I’m getting out, myself. End of the month. Heading for a place with a little less edge to it.”
“It doesn’t seem all that welcoming,” I said, “but I thought that was just a Yankee thing. We’re friendlier in Wisconsin, and just to prove it, I’ll buy you a beer.”
“Never drink alcohol on the job, but I might have a Coke.”
“Go for it.”
“Thanks very much. It’s nice to have a gent on a slow night.” I watched as he made the Coke by pumping syrup into a glass, adding soda water, and then stirring. He took a sip and smacked his lips. “I like em sweet.”
Judging by the belly he was getting, I wasn’t surprised.
“That stuff about Yankees being stand-offy is bullshit, anyway,” he said. “I grew up in Fork Kent, and it’s the friendliest little town you’d ever want to visit. Why, when tourists get off the Boston and Maine up there, we just about kiss em hello. Went to bartending school there, then headed south to seek my fortune. This looked like a good place to start, and the pay’s not bad, but—” He looked around, saw no one, but still lowered his own voice. “You want the truth, Jackson? This town stinks.”
“I know what you mean. All those mills.”
“It’s a lot more than that. Look around. What do you see?”
I did as he asked. There was a fellow who looked like a salesman in the corner, drinking a whiskey sour, but that was it.
“Not much,” I said.
“That’s the way it is all through the week. The pay’s good because there’s no tips. The beerjoints downtown do a booming business, and we get some folks in on Friday and Saturday nights, but otherwise, that’s just about it. The carriage trade does its drinking at home, I guess.” He lowered his voice further. Soon he’d be whispering. “We had a bad summer here, my friend. Local folks keep it as quiet as they can—even the newspaper doesn’t play it up—but there was some nasty work. Murders. Half a dozen at least. Kids. Found one down in the Barrens just recently. Patrick Hockstetter, his name was. All decayed.”
“The Barrens?”
“It’s this swampy patch that runs right through the center of town. You probably saw it when you flew in.”
I’d been in a car, but I still knew what he was talking about.
The bartender’s eyes widened. “That’s not the real estate you’re interested in, is it?”
“Can’t say,” I told him. “If word got around, I’d be looking for a new job.”
“Understood, understood.” He drank half his Coke, then stifled a belch with the back of his hand. “But I hope it is. They ought to pave that goddam thing over. It’s nothing but stinkwater and mosquitoes. You’d be doing this town a favor. Sweeten it up a little bit.”
“Other kids found down there?” I asked. A serial child-murderer would explain a lot about the gloom I’d been feeling ever since I crossed the town line.
“Not that I know of, but people say that’s where some of the disappeared ones went, because that’s where all the big sewage pumping stations are. I’ve heard people say there are so many sewer pipes under Derry—most of em laid in the Great Depression—that nobody knows where all of em are. And you know how kids are.”
“Adventurous.”
He nodded emphatically. “Right with Eversharp. There’s people who say it was some vag who’s since moved on. Other folks say he was a local who dressed up like a clown to keep from being recognized. The first of the victims—this was last year, before I came—they found him at the intersection of Witcham and Jackson with his arm ripped clean off. Denbrough was his name, George Denbrough. Poor little tyke.” He gave me a meaningful look. “And he was found right next to one of those sewer drains. The ones that dump into the Barrens.”
“Christ.”
“Yeah.”
“I hear you using the past tense about all this stuff.”
I got ready to explain what I meant, but apparently this guy had been listening in English class as well as bartending school. “It seems to’ve stopped, knock on wood.” He rapped his knuckles on the bar. “Maybe whoever was doing it packed up and moved on. Or maybe the sonofabitch killed himself, sometimes they do that. That’d be good. But it wasn’t any homicidal maniac in a clown suit who killed the little Corcoran boy. The clown who did that murder was the kid’s own father, if you can believe it.”
That was close enough to why I was here to feel like fate rather than coincidence. I took a careful sip of my beer. “Is that so?”
“You bet it is. Dorsey Corcoran, that was the kid’s name. Only four years old, and you know what his goddam father did? Beat him to death with a recoilless hammer.”
A hammer. He did it with a hammer. I maintained my look of polite interest—at least I hope I did—but I felt gooseflesh go marching up my arms. “That’s awful.”
“Yeah, and not the wor—” He broke off and looked over my shoulder. “Get you another, sir?”
It was the businessman. “Not me,” he said, and handed over a dollar bill. “I’m going to bed, and tomorrow I’m blowing this pop-shop. I hope they remember how to order hardware in Waterville and Augusta, because they sure don’t here. Keep the change, son, buy yourself a DeSoto.” He plodded out with his head down.
“See? That’s a perfect example of what we get at this oasis.” The bartender looked sadly after his departing customer. “One drink, off to bed, and tomorrow it’s seeya later, alligator, after awhile, crocodile. If it keeps up, this burg’s gonna be a ghost town.” He stood up straight and tried to square his shoulders—an impossible task, because they were as round as the rest of him. “But who gives a rip? Come October first, I’m gone. Down the road. Happy trails to you, until we meet again.”
“The father of this boy, Dorsey… he didn’t kill any of the others?”
“Naw, he was alibi’d up. I guess he was the kid’s stepfather, now that I think about it. Dicky Macklin. Johnny Keeson at the desk—he probably checked you in—told me he used to come in here and drink sometimes, until he got banned for trying to pick up a stewardess and getting nasty when she told him to go peddle his papers. After that I guess he did his drinking at the Spoke or the Bucket. They’ll have anybody in those places.”
He leaned over close enough for me to smell the Aqua Velva on his cheeks.
“You want to know the worst?”
I didn’t, but thought I ought to. So I nodded.
“There was also an older brother in that fucked-up family. Eddie. He disappeared last June. Just poof. Gone, no forwarding, if you dig what I’m saying. Some people think he ran off to get away from Macklin, but anybody with any sense knows he would have turned up in Portland or Castle Rock or Portsmouth if that was the case—no way a ten-year-old can stay out of sight for long. Take it from me, Eddie Corcoran got the hammer just like his little brother. Macklin just won’t own up to it.” He grinned, a sudden and sunny grin that made his moon face almost handsome. “Have I talked you out of buying real estate in Derry yet, mister?”
“That’s not up to me,” I said. I was flying on autopilot by then. Hadn’t I heard or read about a series of child-murders in this part of Maine? Or maybe watched it on TV, with only a quarter of my brain turned on while the rest of it was waiting for the sound of my problematic wife walking—or staggering—up to the house after another “girls’ night out”? I thought so, but the only thing I remembered for sure about Derry was that there was going to be a flood in the mid-eighties that would destroy half the town.
“It’s not?”
“No, I’m just the middleman.”
“Well, good luck to you. This town isn’t as bad as it was—last July, folks were strung as tight as Doris Day’s chastity belt—but it’s still a long way from right. I’m a friendly guy, and I like friendly people. I’m splitting.”
“Good luck to you, too,” I said, and dropped two dollars on the bar.
“Gee, sir, that’s way too much!”
“I always pay a surcharge for good conversation.” Actually, the surcharge was for a friendly face. The conversation had been disquieting.
“Well, thanks!” He beamed, then stuck out his hand. “I never introduced myself. Fred Toomey.”
“Nice to meet you, Fred. I’m George Amberson.” He had a good grip. No talcum powder.
“Want a piece of advice?”
“Sure.”
“While you’re in town, be careful about talking to kids. After last summer, a strange man talking to kids is apt to get a visit from the police if people see him doing it. Or he could take a beating. That sure wouldn’t be out of the question.”
“Even without the clown suit, huh?”
“Well, that’s the thing about dressing up in an outfit, isn’t it?” His smile was gone. Now he looked pale and grim. Like everyone else in Derry, in other words. “When you put on a clown suit and a rubber nose, nobody has any idea what you look like inside.”
4
I thought about that while the old-fashioned elevator creaked its way up to the third floor. It was true. And if the rest of what Fred Toomey had said was also true, would anybody be surprised if another father went to work on his family with a hammer? I thought not. I thought people would say it was just another case of Derry being Derry. And they might be right.
As I let myself into my room, I had an authentically horrible idea: suppose I changed things just enough in the next seven weeks so that Harry’s father killed Harry, too, instead of just leaving him with a limp and a partially fogged-over brain?
That won’t happen, I told myself. I won’t let it happen. Like Hillary Clinton said in 2008, I’m in it to win it.
Except, of course, she had lost.
5
I ate breakfast the following morning in the hotel’s Riverview Restaurant, which was deserted except for me and the hardware salesman from last night. He was buried in the local newspaper. When he left it on the table, I snagged it. I wasn’t interested in the front page, which was devoted to more saber-rattling in the Philippines (although I did wonder briefly if Lee Oswald was in the vicinity). What I wanted was the local section. In 2011, I’d been a reader of the Lewiston Sun Journal, and the last page of the B section was always headed “School Doin’s.” In it, proud parents could see their kids’ names in print if they had won an award, gone on a class trip, or been part of a community cleanup project. If the Derry Daily News had such a feature, it wasn’t impossible that I’d find one of the Dunning kids listed.
The last page of the News, however, contained only obituaries.
I tried the sports pages, and read about the weekend’s big upcoming football game: Derry Tigers versus Bangor Rams. Troy Dunning was fifteen, according to the janitor’s essay. A fifteen-year-old could easily be a part of the team, although probably not a starter.
I didn’t find his name, and although I read every word of a smaller story about the town’s Peewee Football team (the Tiger Cubs), I didn’t find Arthur “Tugga” Dunning, either.
I paid for my breakfast and went back up to my room with the borrowed newspaper under my arm, thinking that I made a lousy detective. After counting the Dunnings in the phone book (ninety-six), something else occurred to me: I had been hobbled, perhaps even crippled, by a pervasive internet society I had come to depend on and take for granted. How hard would it have been to locate the right Dunning family in 2011? Just plugging Tugga Dunning and Derry into my favorite search engine probably would have done the trick; hit enter and let Google, that twenty-first-century Big Brother, take care of the rest.
In the Derry of 1958, the most up-to-date computers were the size of small housing developments, and the local paper was no help. What did that leave? I remembered a sociology prof I’d had in college—a sarcastic old bastard—who used to say, When all else fails, give up and go to the library.
I went there.
6
Late that afternoon, hopes dashed (at least for the time being), I walked slowly up Up-Mile Hill, pausing briefly at the intersection of Jackson and Witcham to look at the sewer drain where a little boy named George Denbrough had lost his arm and his life (at least according to Fred Toomey). By the time I got to the top of the hill, my heart was pounding and I was puffing. It wasn’t being out of shape; it was the stench of the mills.
I was dispirited and a bit scared. It was true that I still had plenty of time to locate the right Dunning family, and I was confident I would—if calling all the Dunnings in the phone book was what it took, that was what I’d do, even at the risk of alerting Harry’s time bomb of a father—but I was starting to sense what Al had sensed: something working against me.
I walked along Kansas Street, so deep in thought that at first I didn’t realize there were no more houses on my right. The ground now dropped away steeply into that tangled green riot of swampy ground that Toomey had called the Barrens. Only a rickety white fence separated the sidewalk from the drop. I planted my hands on it, staring into the undisciplined growth below. I could see gleams of murky standing water, patches of reeds so tall they looked prehistoric, and snarls of billowing brambles. The trees would be stunted down there, fighting for sunlight. There would be poison ivy, litters of garbage, and quite likely the occasional hobo camp. There would also be paths only some of the local kids would know. The adventurous ones.
I stood and looked without seeing, aware but hardly registering the faint lilt of music—something with horns in it. I was thinking about how little I had accomplished this morning. You can change the past, Al had told me, but it’s not as easy as you might think.
What was that music? Something cheery, with a little jump to it. It made me think of Christy, back in the early days, when I was besotted with her. When we were besotted with each other. Bah-dah-dah… bah-dah-da-dee-dum… Glenn Miller, maybe?
I had gone to the library hoping to get a look at the census records. The last national one would have taken place eight years ago, in 1950, and would have shown three of the four Dunning kids: Troy, Arthur, and Harold. Only Ellen, who would be seven at the time of the murders, hadn’t been around to be counted in 1950. There would be an address. It was true the family might have moved in the intervening eight years, but if so, one of the neighbors would be able to tell me where they’d gone. It was a small city.
Only the census records weren’t there. The librarian, a pleasant woman named Mrs. Starrett, told me that in her opinion those records certainly belonged in the library, but the town council had for some reason decided they belonged in City Hall. They’d been moved there in 1954, she said.
“That doesn’t sound good,” I told her, smiling. “You know what they say—you can’t fight City Hall.”
Mrs. Starrett didn’t return the smile. She was helpful, even charming, but she had the same watchful reserve as everyone else I’d met in this queer place—Fred Toomey being the exception that proved the rule. “Don’t be silly, Mr. Amberson. There’s nothing private about the United States Census. You march right over there and tell the city clerk that Regina Starrett sent you. Her name is Marcia Guay. She’ll help you out. Although they probably stored them in the basement, which is not where they ought to be. It’s damp, and I shouldn’t be surprised if there are mice. If you have any trouble—any trouble at all—you come back and see me.”
So I went to City Hall, where a poster in the foyer said PARENTS, REMIND YOUR CHILDREN NOT TO TALK TO STRANGERS AND TO ALWAYS PLAY WITH FRIENDS. Several people were lined up at the various windows. (Most of them smoking. Of course.) Marcia Guay greeted me with an embarrassed smile. Mrs. Starrett had called ahead on my behalf, and had been suitably horrified when Miss Guay told her what she now told me: the 1950 census records were gone, along with almost all of the other documents that had been stored in the City Hall basement.
“We had terrible rains last year,” she said. “They went on for a whole week. The canal overflowed, and everything down in the Low Town—that’s what the oldtimers call the city center, Mr. Amberson—everything in the Low Town flooded. Our basement looked like the Grand Canal in Venice for almost a month. Mrs. Starrett was right, those records never should have been moved, and no one seems to know why they were or who authorized it. I’m awfully sorry.”
It was impossible not to feel what Al had felt while trying to save Carolyn Poulin: that I was inside a kind of prison with flexible walls. Was I supposed to hang around the local schools, hoping to spot a boy who looked like the sixty-years-plus janitor who had just retired? Look for a seven-year-old girl who kept her classmates in stitches? Wait to hear some kid yell, Hey Tugga, wait up?
Right. A newcomer hanging around the schools in a town where the first thing you saw at City Hall was a poster warning parents about stranger-danger. If there was such a thing as flying directly into the radar, that would be it.
One thing was for sure—I had to get out of the Derry Town House. At 1958 prices I could well afford to stay there for weeks, but that might cause talk. I decided to look through the classified ads and find myself a room I could rent by the month. I turned back toward the Low Town, then stopped.
Bah-dah-dah… bah-dah-da-dee-dum…
That was Glenn Miller. It was “In the Mood,” a tune I had reason to know well. Curious, I walked toward the sound of the music.
7
There was a little picnic area at the end of the rickety fence between the Kansas Street sidewalk and the drop into the Barrens. It contained a stone barbecue and two picnic tables with a rusty trash barrel standing between them. A portable phonograph was parked on one of the picnic tables. A big black 78-rpm record spun on the turntable.
On the grass, a gangly boy in tape-mended glasses and an absolutely gorgeous redheaded girl were dancing. At LHS we called the incoming freshmen “tweenagers,” and that’s what these kids were, if that. But they were dancing with grown-up grace. Not jitterbugging, either; they were swing-dancing. I was charmed, but I was also… what? Scared? A little bit, maybe. I was scared for almost all the time I spent in Derry. But it was something else, too, something bigger. A kind of awe, as if I had gripped the rim of some vast understanding. Or peered (through a glass darkly, you understand) into the actual clockwork of the universe.
Because, you see, I had met Christy at a swing-dancing class in Lewiston, and this was one of the tunes we had learned to. Later—in our best year, six months before the marriage and six months after—we had danced in competitions, once taking fourth prize (also known as “first also-ran,” according to Christy) in the New England Swing-Dancing Competition. Our tune was a slightly slowed-down dance-mix version of KC and the Sunshine Band’s “Boogie Shoes.”
This isn’t a coincidence, I thought, watching them. The boy was wearing blue jeans and a crew-neck shirt; she had on a white blouse with the tails hanging down over faded red clamdiggers. That amazing hair was pulled back in the same impudently cute ponytail Christy had always worn when we danced competitively. Along with her bobby sox and vintage poodle skirt, of course.
This cannot be a coincidence.
They were doing a Lindy variation I knew as the Hellzapoppin. It’s supposed to be a fast dance—lightning-fast, if you have the physical stamina and grace to bring it off—but they were dancing it slow because they were still learning their steps. I could see inside every move. I knew them all, although I hadn’t actually danced any of them in five years or more. Come together, both hands clasped. He stoops a little and kicks with his left foot while she does the same, both of them twisting at the waist so that they appear to be going in opposite directions. Move apart, hands still clasped, then she twirls, first to the left and then to the right—
But they goofed up the return spin and she went sprawling on the grass. “Jesus, Richie, you never get that right! Gah, you’re hopeless!” She was laughing, though. She flopped on her back and stared up at the sky.
“I’se sorry, Miss Scawlett!” the boy cried in a screechy pickaninny voice that would have gone over like a lead balloon in the politically correct twenty-first century. “I’se just a clodhoppin country boy, but I intends to learn dis-yere dance if it kills me!”
“I’m the one it’s likely to kill,” she said. “Start the record again before I lose my—” Then they both saw me.
It was a strange moment. There was a veil in Derry—I came to know that veil so well I could almost see it. The locals were on one side; people from away (like Fred Toomey, like me) were on the other. Sometimes the locals came out from behind it, as Mrs. Starrett the librarian had when expressing her irritation about the misplaced census records, but if you asked too many questions—and certainly if you startled them—they retreated behind it again.
Yet I had startled these kids, and they didn’t retreat behind the veil. Instead of closing up, their faces remained wide open, full of curiosity and interest.
“Sorry, sorry,” I said. “Didn’t mean to surprise you. I heard the music and then I saw you lindy-hopping.”
“Trying to lindy-hop, is what you mean,” the boy said. He helped the girl to her feet. He made a bow. “Richie Tozier, at your service. My friends all say ‘Richie-Richie, he live in a ditchie,’ but what do they know?”
“Nice to meet you,” I said. “George Amberson.” And then—it just popped out—“My friends all say ‘Georgie-Georgie, he wash his clothes in a Norgie,’ but they don’t know anything, either.”
The girl collapsed on one of the picnic table benches, giggling. The boy raised his hands in the air and bugled: “Strange grown-up gets off a good one! Wacka-wacka-wacka! Dee-lightful! Ed McMahon, what have we got for this wonderful fella? Well, Johnny, today’s prizes on Who Do You Trust are a complete set of Encyclopaedia Britannica and an Electrolux vacuum cleaner to suck em up wi—”
“Beep-beep, Richie,” the girl said. She was wiping the corners of her eyes.
This caused an unfortunate reversion to the screeching pickaninny voice. “I’se sorry, Miss Scawlett, don’t be whuppin on me! I’se still got scabs from de las’ time!”
“Who are you, Miss?” I asked.
“Bevvie-Bevvie, I live on the levee,” she said, and started giggling again. “Sorry—Richie’s a fool, but I have no excuse. Beverly Marsh. You’re not from around here, are you?”
A thing everybody seemed to know immediately. “Nope, and you two don’t seem like you are, either. You’re the first two Derry-ites I’ve met who don’t seem… grumpy.”
“Yowza, it’s a grumpy-ass town,” Richie said, and took the tone arm off the record. It had been bumping on the final groove over and over.
“I understand folks’re particularly worried about the children,” I said. “Notice I’m keeping my distance. You guys on grass, me on sidewalk.”
“They weren’t all that worried when the murders were going on,” Richie grumbled. “You know about the murders?”
I nodded. “I’m staying at the Town House. Someone who works there told me.”
“Yeah, now that they’re over, people are all concerned about the kids.” He sat down next to Bevvie who lived on the levee. “But when they were going on, you didn’t hear jack spit.”
“Richie,” she said. “Beep-beep.”
This time the boy tried on a really atrocious Humphrey Bogart imitation. “Well it’s true, schweetheart. And you know it’s true.”
“All that’s over,” Bevvie told me. She was as earnest as a Chamber of Commerce booster. “They just don’t know it yet.”
“They meaning the townspeople or just grown-ups in general?”
She shrugged as if to say what’s the difference.
“But you do know.”
“As a matter of fact, we do,” Richie said. He looked at me challengingly, but behind his mended glasses, that glint of maniacal humor was still in his eyes. I had an idea it never completely left them.
I stepped onto the grass. Neither child fled, screaming. In fact, Beverly shoved over on the bench (elbowing Richie so he would do the same) and made room for me. They were either very brave or very stupid, and they didn’t look stupid.
Then the girl said something that flabbergasted me. “Do I know you? Do we know you?”
Before I could answer, Richie spoke up. “No, it’s not that. It’s… I dunno. Do you want something, Mr. Amberson? Is that it?”
“Actually, I do. Some information. But how did you know that? And how do you know I’m not dangerous?”
They looked at each other, and something passed between them. It was impossible to know just what, yet I felt sure of two things: they had sensed an otherness about me that went way beyond just being a stranger in town… but, unlike the Yellow Card Man, they weren’t afraid of it. Quite the opposite; they were fascinated by it. I thought those two attractive, fearless kids could have told some stories if they wanted to. I’ve always remained curious about what those stories might have been.
“You’re just not,” Richie said, and when he looked to the girl, she nodded agreement.
“And you’re sure that the… the bad times… are over?”
“Mostly,” Beverly said. “Things’ll get better. In Derry I think the bad times are over, Mr. Amberson—it’s a hard place in a lot of ways.”
“Suppose I told you—just hypothetically—that there was one more bad thing on the horizon? Something like what happened to a little boy named Dorsey Corcoran.”
They winced as if I had pinched a place where the nerves lay close to the surface. Beverly turned to Richie and whispered in his ear. I’m not positive about what she said, it was quick and low, but it might have been That wasn’t the clown. Then she looked back at me.
“What bad thing? Like when Dorsey’s father—”
“Never mind. You don’t have to know.” It was time to jump. These were the ones. I didn’t know how I knew it, but I did. “Do you know some kids named Dunning?” I ticked them off on my fingers. “Troy, Arthur, Harry, and Ellen. Only Arthur’s also called—”
“Tugga,” Beverly said matter-of-factly. “Sure we know him, he goes to our school. We’re practicing the Lindy for the school talent show, it’s just before Thanksgiving—”
“Miss Scawlett, she b’leeve in gittin an early start on de practicin,” Richie said.
Beverly Marsh took no notice. “Tugga’s signed up for the show, too. He’s going to lip-synch to ‘Splish Splash.’” She rolled her eyes. She was good at that.
“Where does he live? Do you know?”
They knew, all right, but neither of them said. And if I didn’t give them a little more, they wouldn’t. I could see that in their faces.
“Suppose I told you there’s a good chance Tugga’s never going to be in the talent show unless somebody watches out for him? His brothers and his sister, too? Would you believe a thing like that?”
The kids looked at each other again, conversing with their eyes. It went on a long time—ten seconds, maybe. It was the sort of long gaze that lovers indulge in, but these tweenagers couldn’t be lovers. Friends, though, for sure. Close friends who’d been through something together.
“Tugga and his family live on Cossut Street,” Richie said finally. That’s what it sounded like, anyway.
“Cossut?”
“That’s how people around here say it,” Beverly told me. “K-O-S-S-U-T-H. Cossut.”
“Got it.” Now the only question was how much these kids were going to blab about our weird conversation on the edge of the Barrens.
Beverly was looking at me with earnest, troubled eyes. “But Mr. Amberson, I’ve met Tugga’s dad. He works at the Center Street Market. He’s a nice man. Always smiling. He—”
“The nice man doesn’t live at home anymore,” Richie interrupted. “His wife kicked im out.”
She turned to him, eyes wide. “Tug told you that?”
“Nope. Ben Hanscom. Tug told him.”
“He’s still a nice man,” Beverly said in a small voice. “Always joking around and stuff but never touchy-grabby.”
“Clowns joke around a lot, too,” I said. They both jumped, as if I had pinched that vulnerable bundle of nerves again. “That doesn’t make them nice.”
“We know,” Beverly whispered. She was looking at her hands. Then she raised her eyes to me. “Do you know about the Turtle?” She said turtle in a way that made it sound like a proper noun.
I thought of saying I know about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and didn’t. It was decades too early for Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michelangelo. So I just shook my head.
She looked doubtfully at Richie. He looked at me, then back at her. “But he’s good. I’m pretty sure he’s good.” She touched my wrist. Her fingers were cold. “Mr. Dunning’s a nice man. And just because he doesn’t live at home anymore doesn’t mean he isn’t.”
That hit home. My wife had left me, but not because I wasn’t nice. “I know that.” I stood up. “I’m going to be around Derry for a little while, and it would be good not to attract too much attention. Can you two keep quiet about this? I know it’s a lot to ask, but—”
They looked at each other and burst into laughter.
When she could speak, Beverly said: “We can keep a secret.”
I nodded. “I’m sure you can. Kept a few this summer, I bet.”
They didn’t reply to this.
I cocked a thumb at the Barrens. “Ever play down there?”
“Once,” Richie said. “Not anymore.” He stood up and brushed off the seat of his blue jeans. “It’s been nice talking to you, Mr. Amberson. Don’t take any wooden Indians.” He hesitated. “And be careful in Derry. It’s better now, but I don’t think it’s ever gonna be, you know, completely right.”
“Thanks. Thank you both. Maybe someday the Dunning family will have something to thank you for, too, but if things go the way I hope they will—”
“—they’ll never know a thing,” Beverly finished for me.
“Exactly.” Then, remembering something Fred Toomey had said: “Right with Eversharp. You two take care of yourselves.”
“We will,” Beverly said, then began to giggle again. “Keep washing those clothes in your Norgie, Georgie.”
I skimmed a salute off the brim of my new summer straw and started to walk away. Then I had an idea and turned back to them. “Does that phonograph play at thirty-three and a third?”
“Like for LPs?” Richie asked. “Naw. Our hi-fi at home does, but Bevvie’s is just a baby one that runs on batteries.”
“Watch what you call my record player, Tozier,” Beverly said. “I saved up for it.” Then, to me: “It just plays seventy-eights and forty-fives. Only I lost the plastic thingie for the hole in the forty-fives, so now it only plays seventy-eights.”
“Forty-five rpm should do,” I said. “Start the record again, but play it at that speed.” Slowing down the tempo while getting the hang of swing-dance steps was something Christy and I had learned in our classes.
“Crazy, daddy,” Richie said. He switched the speed-control lever beside the turntable and started the record again. This time it sounded like everyone in Glenn Miller’s band had swallowed Quaaludes.
“Okay.” I held out my hands to Beverly. “You watch, Richie.”
She took my hands with complete trust, looking up at me with wide blue amused eyes. I wondered where she was and who she was in 2011. If she was even alive. Supposing she was, would she remember that a strange man who asked strange questions had once danced with her to a draggy version of “In the Mood” on a sunny September afternoon?
I said, “You guys were doing it slow before, and this will slow you down even more, but you can still keep the beat. Plenty of time for each step.”
Time. Plenty of time. Start the record again but slow it down.
I pulled her toward me by our clasped hands. Let her go back. We both bent like people under water, and kicked to the left while the Glenn Miller Orchestra played bahhhhh… dahhh… dahhhh… bahhhh… dahhhh… daaaa… deee… dummmmmm. At that same slow speed, like a windup toy that’s almost unwound, she twirled to the left under my upraised hands.
“Stop!” I said, and she froze with her back to me and our hands still linked. “Now squeeze my right hand to remind me what comes next.”
She squeezed, then rotated smoothly back and all the way around to the right.
“Cool!” she said. “Now I’m supposed to go under, then you bring me back. And I flip over. That’s why we’re doing it on the grass, so if I mess it up I don’t break my neck.”
“I’ll leave that part up to you,” I said. “I’m too ancient to be flipping anything but hamburgers.”
Richie once more raised his hands to the sides of his face. “Wacka-wacka-wacka! Strange grown-up gets off another—”
“Beep-beep, Richie,” I said. That made him laugh. “Now you try it. And work out hand signals for any other moves that go beyond the jitterbug two-step they do in the local soda shop. That way even if you don’t win the talent show contest, you’ll look good.”
Richie took Beverly’s hands and tried it. In and out, side to side, around to the left, around to the right. Perfect. She slipped feet-first between Richie’s spread legs, supple as a fish, and then he brought her back. She finished with a showy flip that brought her to her feet again. Richie took her hands and they repeated the whole thing. It was even better the second time.
“We lose the beat on the under-and-out,” Richie complained.
“You won’t when the record’s playing at normal speed. Trust me.”
“I like it,” Beverly said. “It’s like having the whole thing under glass.” She did a little spin on the toes of her sneakers. “I feel like Loretta Young at the start of her show, when she comes in wearing a swirly dress.”
“They call me Arthur Murray, I’m from Miz-OOO-ri,” Richie said. He also looked pleased.
“I’m going to speed the record up,” I said. “Remember your signals. And keep time. It’s all about time.”
Glenn Miller played that old sweet song, and the kids danced. On the grass, their shadows danced beside them. Out… in… dip… kick… spin left… spin right… go under… pop out… and flip. They weren’t perfect this time, and they’d screw up the steps many times before they nailed them (if they ever did), but they weren’t bad.
Oh, to hell with that. They were beautiful. For the first time since I’d topped that rise on Route 7 and saw Derry hulking on the west bank of the Kenduskeag, I was happy. That was a good feeling to go on, so I walked away from them, giving myself the old advice as I went: don’t look back, never look back. How often do people tell themselves that after an experience that is exceptionally good (or exceptionally bad)? Often, I suppose. And the advice usually goes unheeded. Humans were built to look back; that’s why we have that swivel joint in our necks.
I went half a block, then turned around, thinking they would be staring at me. But they weren’t. They were still dancing. And that was good.
8
There was a Cities Service station a couple of blocks down on Kansas Street, and I went into the office to ask directions to Kossuth Street, pronounced Cossut. I could hear the whir of an air compressor and the tinny jangle of pop music from the garage bay, but the office was empty. That was fine with me, because I saw something useful next to the cash register: a wire stand filled with maps. The top pocket held a single city map that looked dirty and forgotten. On the front was a photo of an exceptionally ugly Paul Bunyan statue cast in plastic. Paul had his axe over his shoulder and was grinning up into the summer sun. Only Derry, I thought, would take a plastic statue of a mythical logger as its icon.
There was a newspaper dispenser just beyond the gas pumps. I took a copy of the Daily News as a prop, and flipped a nickel on top of the pile of papers to join the other coins scattered there. I don’t know if they’re more honest in 1958, but they’re a hell of a lot more trusting.
According to the map, Kossuth Street was on the Kansas Street side of town, and turned out to be just a pleasant fifteen-minute stroll from the gas station. I walked under elm trees that had yet to be touched by the blight that would take almost all of them by the seventies, trees that were still as green as they had been in July. Kids tore past me on bikes or played jacks in driveways. Little clusters of adults gathered at corner bus stops, marked by white stripes on telephone poles. Derry went about its business and I went about mine—just a fellow in a nondescript sport coat with his summer straw pushed back a little on his head, a fellow with a folded newspaper in one hand. He might be looking for a yard or garage sale; he might be checking for plummy real estate. Certainly he looked like he belonged here.
So I hoped.
Kossuth was a hedge-lined street of old-fashioned New England saltbox houses. Sprinklers twirled on lawns. Two boys ran past me, tossing a football back and forth. A woman with her hair bound up in a kerchief (and the inevitable cigarette dangling from her lower lip) was washing the family car and occasionally spraying the family dog, who backed away, barking. Kossuth Street looked like an exterior scene from some old fuzzy sitcom.
Two little girls were twirling a skip-rope while a third danced nimbly in and out, stutter-stepping effortlessly as she chanted: “Charlie Chaplin went to France! Just to watch the ladies dance! Salute to the Cap’un! Salute to the Queen! My old man drives a sub-ma-rine!” The skip-rope slap-slap-slapped on the pavement. I felt eyes on me. The woman in the kerchief had paused in her labors, the hose in one hand, a big soapy sponge in the other. She was watching me approach the skipping girls. I gave them a wide berth, and saw her go back to work.
You took a hell of a chance talking to those kids on Kansas Street, I thought. Only I didn’t believe it. Walking a little too close to the skip-rope girls… that would have been taking a hell of a chance. But Richie and Bev had been the right ones. I had known it almost as soon as I laid eyes on them, and they had known it, too. We had seen eye to eye.
Do we know you? the girl had asked. Bevvie-Bevvie, who lived on the levee.
Kossuth dead-ended at a big building called the West Side Recreation Hall. It was deserted, with a FOR SALE BY CITY sign on the crabgrassy lawn. Surely an object of interest for any self-respecting real estate hunter. Two houses down from it on the right, a little girl with carrot-colored hair and a faceful of freckles was riding a bicycle with training wheels up and down an asphalt driveway. She sang variations of the same phrase over and over as she rode: “Bing-bang, I saw the whole gang, ding-dang, I saw the whole gang, ring-rang, I saw the whole gang… ”
I walked toward the Rec, as though there was nothing in the world I wanted to see more, but from the corner of my eye I continued to track Li’l Carrot-Top. She was swaying from side to side on the bicycle seat, trying to find out how much she could get away with before toppling over. Based on her scabby shins, this probably wasn’t the first time she’d played the game. There was no name on the mailbox of her house, just the number 379.
I walked to the FOR SALE sign and jotted information down on my newspaper. Then I turned around and headed back the way I’d come. As I passed 379 Kossuth (on the far side of the street, and pretending to be absorbed in my paper), a woman came out on the stoop. A boy was with her. He was munching something wrapped in a napkin, and in his free hand he was holding the Daisy air rifle with which, not so long from now, he would try to scare off his rampaging father.
“Ellen!” the woman called. “Get off that thing before you fall off! Come in and get a cookie.”
Ellen Dunning dismounted, dropped her bike on its side in the driveway, and ran into the house, bugling: “Sing-sang, I saw the whole gang!” at the top of her considerable lungs. Her hair, a shade of red far more unfortunate than Beverly Marsh’s, bounced like bedsprings in revolt.
The boy, who’d grow up to write a painfully composed essay that would bring me to tears, followed her. The boy who was going to be the only surviving member of his family.
Unless I changed it. And now that I had seen them, real people living their real lives, there seemed to be no other choice.
CHAPTER 7
1
How should I tell you about my seven weeks in Derry? How to explain the way I came to hate and fear it?
It wasn’t because it kept secrets (although it did), and it wasn’t because terrible crimes, some of them still unsolved, had happened there (although they had). All that’s over, the girl named Beverly had said, the boy named Richie had agreed, and I came to believe that, too… although I also came to believe the shadow never completely left that city with its odd sunken downtown.
It was a sense of impending failure that made me hate it. And that feeling of being in a prison with elastic walls. If I wanted to leave, it would let me go (willingly!), but if I stayed, it would squeeze me tighter. It would squeeze me until I couldn’t breathe. And—here’s the bad part—leaving wasn’t an option, because now I had seen Harry before the limp and before the trusting but slightly dazed smile. I had seen him before he became Hoptoad Harry, hoppin down the av-a-new.
I had seen his sister, too. Now she was more than just a name in a painstakingly written essay, a faceless little girl who loved to pick flowers and put them in vases. Sometimes I lay awake thinking of how she planned to go trick-or-treating as Princess Summerfall Winterspring. Unless I did something, that was never going to happen. There was a coffin waiting for her after a long and fruitless struggle for life. There was a coffin waiting for her mother, whose first name I still didn’t know. And for Troy. And for Arthur, known as Tugga.
If I let that happen, I didn’t see how I could live with myself. So I stayed, but it wasn’t easy. And every time I thought of putting myself through this again, in Dallas, my mind threatened to freeze up. At least, I told myself, Dallas wouldn’t be like Derry. Because no place on earth could be like Derry.
How should I tell you, then?
In my life as a teacher, I used to hammer away at the idea of simplicity. In both fiction and nonfiction, there’s only one question and one answer. What happened? the reader asks. This is what happened, the writer responds. This… and this… and this, too. Keep it simple. It’s the only sure way home.
So I’ll try, although you must always keep in mind that in Derry, reality is a thin skim of ice over a deep lake of dark water. But still:
What happened?
This happened. And this. And this, too.
2
On Friday, my second full day in Derry, I went down to the Center Street Market. I waited until five in the afternoon, because I thought that was when the place would be busiest—Friday’s payday, after all, and for a lot of people (by which I mean wives; one of the rules of life in 1958 is Men Don’t Buy Groceries) that meant shopping day. Lots of shoppers would make it easier for me to blend in. To help in that regard, I went to W. T. Grant’s and supplemented my wardrobe with some chinos and blue workshirts. Remembering No Suspenders and his buddies outside the Sleepy Silver Dollar, I also bought a pair of Wolverine workboots. On my way to the market, I kicked them repeatedly against the curbing until the toes were scuffed.
The place was every bit as busy as I’d hoped, with a line at all three cash registers and the aisles full of women pushing shopping carts. The few men I saw only had baskets, so that was what I took. I put a bag of apples in mine (dirt cheap), and a bag of oranges (almost as expensive as 2011 oranges). Beneath my feet, the oiled wooden floor creaked.
What exactly did Mr. Dunning do in the Center Street Market? Bevvie-on-the-levee hadn’t said. He wasn’t the manager; a glance into the glassed-in booth just beyond the produce section showed a white-haired gentleman who could have claimed Ellen Dunning as a granddaughter, perhaps, but not as a daughter. And the sign on his desk said MR. CURRIE.
As I walked along the back of the store, past the dairy case (I was amused by a sign reading HAVE YOU TRIED “YOGHURT?” IF NOT YOU WILL LOVE IT WHEN YOU DO), I began to hear laughter. Female laughter of the immediately identifiable oh-you-rascal variety. I turned into the far aisle and saw a covey of women, dressed in much the same style as the ladies in the Kennebec Fruit, clustered around the meat counter. THE BUTCHERY, read the handmade wooden sign hanging down on decorative chrome chains. HOME-STYLE CUTS. And, at the bottom: FRANK DUNNING, HEAD BUTCHER.
Sometimes life coughs up coincidences no writer of fiction would dare copy.
It was Frank Dunning who was making the ladies laugh. The resemblance to the janitor who had taken my GED English course was close enough to be eerie. He was Harry to the life, except this version’s hair was almost completely black instead of almost all gray, and the sweet, slightly puzzled smile had been replaced by a raffish, razzle-dazzle grin. It was no wonder the ladies were all aflutter. Even Bevvie-on-the-levee thought he was the cat’s meow, and why not? She might only be twelve or thirteen, but she was female, and Frank Dunning was a charmer. He knew it, too. There had to be reasons for the flowers of Derry womanhood to spend their husbands’ paychecks at the downtown market instead of at the slightly cheaper A&P, and one of them was right here. Mr. Dunning was handsome, Mr. Dunning wore spandy-clean clean whites (slightly bloodstained at the cuffs, but he was a butcher, after all), Mr. Dunning wore a stylish white hat that looked like a cross between a chef’s toque and an artist’s beret. It hung down to just above one eyebrow. A fashion statement, by God.
All in all, Mr. Frank Dunning, with his rosy, clean-shaven cheeks and his immaculately barbered black hair, was God’s gift to the Little Woman. As I strolled toward him, he tied off a package of meat with a length of string drawn from a roll on a spindle beside his scale and wrote the price on it with a flourish of his black marker. He handed it to a lady of about fifty summers who was wearing a housedress with big pink roses blooming on it, seamed nylons, and a schoolgirl blush.
“There you are, Mrs. Levesque, one pound of German bologna, sliced thin.” He leaned confidentially over the counter, close enough so that Mrs. Levesque (and the other ladies) would be able to whiff on the entrancing aroma of his cologne. Was it Aqua Velva, Fred Toomey’s brand? I thought not. I thought a fascinator like Frank Dunning would go for something a little more expensive. “Do you know the problem with German bologna?”
“No,” she said, dragging it out a little so it became Noo-oo. The other ladies twittered in anticipation.
Dunning’s eyes flicked briefly to me and saw nothing to interest him. When he looked back at Mrs. Levesque, they once more picked up their patented twinkle.
“An hour after you eat some, you’re hungry for power.”
I’m not sure all the ladies got it, but they all shrieked with appreciation. Dunning sent Mrs. Levesque happily on her way, and as I passed out of hearing, he was turning his attention to a Mrs. Bowie. Who would, I was sure, be equally happy to receive it.
He’s a nice man. Always joking around and stuff.
But the nice man had cold eyes. When interacting with his fascinated lady-harem, they had been blue. But when he turned his attention to me—however briefly—I could have sworn that they turned gray, the color of water beneath a sky from which snow will soon fall.
3
The market closed at 6:00 P.M., and when I left with my few items, it was only twenty past five. There was a U-Needa-Lunch on Witcham Street, just around the corner. I ordered a hamburger, a fountain Coke, and a piece of chocolate pie. The pie was excellent—real chocolate, real cream. It filled my mouth the way Frank Anicetti’s root beer had. I dawdled as long as I could, then strolled down to the canal, where there were some benches. There was also a sightline—narrow but adequate—to the Center Street Market. I was full but ate one of my oranges anyway, casting bits of peel over the cement embankment and watching the water carry them away.
Promptly at six, the lights in the market’s big front windows went out. By quarter past, the last of the ladies had exited, toting their carry-alls either up Up-Mile Hill or clustering at one of those phone poles with the painted white stripe. A bus marked ROUNDABOUT ONE FARE came along and scooped them up. At quarter to seven, the market employees began leaving. The last two to exit were Mr. Currie, the manager, and Dunning. They shook hands and parted, Currie going up the alley between the market and the shoe store next to it, probably to get his car, and Dunning to the bus stop.
By then there were only two other people there and I didn’t want to join them. Thanks to the one-way traffic pattern in the Low Town, I didn’t have to. I walked to another white-painted pole, this one handy to The Strand (where the current double feature was Machine-Gun Kelly and Reform School Girl; the marquee promised BLAZING ACTION), and waited with some working joes who were talking about possible World Series matchups. I could have told them plenty about that, but kept my mouth shut.
A city bus came along and stopped across from the Center Street Market. Dunning got on. It came the rest of the way down the hill and pulled up at the movie-theater stop. I let the working joes go ahead of me, so I could watch how much money they put in the pole-mounted coin receptacle next to the driver’s seat. I felt like an alien in a science fiction movie, one who’s trying to masquerade as an earthling. It was stupid—I wanted to ride the city bus, not blow up the White House with a death-ray—but that didn’t change the feeling.
One of the guys who got on ahead of me flashed a canary-colored bus pass that made me think fleetingly of the Yellow Card Man. The others put fifteen cents into the coin receptacle, which clicked and dinged. I did the same, although it took me a bit longer because my dime was stuck to my sweaty palm. I thought I could feel every eye on me, but when I looked up, everyone was either reading the newspaper or staring vacantly out the windows. The interior of the bus was a fug of blue-gray smoke.
Frank Dunning was halfway down on the right, now wearing tailored gray slacks, a white shirt, and a dark blue tie. Natty. He was busy lighting a cigarette and didn’t look at me as I passed him and took a seat near the back. The bus groaned its way around the circuit of Low Town one-way streets, then mounted Up-Mile Hill on Witcham. Once we were in the west side residential area, riders began to get off. They were all men; presumably the women were back at home putting away their groceries or getting supper on the table. As the bus emptied and Frank Dunning went on sitting where he was, smoking his cigarette, I wondered if we were going to end up being the last two riders.
I needn’t have worried. When the bus angled toward the stop at the corner of Witcham Street and Charity Avenue (Derry also had Faith and Hope Avenues, I later learned), Dunning dropped his cigarette on the floor, crushed it with his shoe, and rose from his seat. He walked easily up the aisle, not using the grab-handles but swaying with the movements of the slowing bus. Some men don’t lose the physical graces of their adolescence until relatively late in life. Dunning appeared to be one of them. He would have made an excellent swing-dancer.
He clapped the bus driver on the shoulder and started telling him a joke. It was short, and most of it was lost in the chuff of the airbrakes, but I caught the phrase three jigs stuck in an elevator and decided it wasn’t one he’d have told to his Housedress Harem. The driver exploded with laughter, then yanked the long chrome lever that opened the front doors. “See you Monday, Frank,” he said.
“If the creek don’t rise,” Dunning responded, then ran down the two steps and jumped across the grass verge to the sidewalk. I could see muscles ripple under his shirt. What chance would a woman and four children have against him? Not much was my first thought on the subject, but that was wrong. The correct answer was none.
As the bus drew away, I saw Dunning mount the steps of the first building down from the corner on Charity Avenue. There were eight or nine men and women sitting in rockers on the wide front porch. Several of them greeted the butcher, who started shaking hands like a visiting politician. The house was a three-story New England Victorian, with a sign hanging from the porch eave. I just had time to read it:
EDNA PRICE ROOMS
BY THE WEEK OR THE MONTH