11/22/63 Кинг Стивен

Two stops further down the line, I exited the bus. I thanked the driver, who uttered a surly grunt in return. This, I was discovering, was what passed for courteous discourse in Derry, Maine. Unless, of course, you happened to know a few jokes about jigs stuck in an elevator or maybe the Polish navy.

I walked slowly back toward town, jogging two blocks out of my way to keep clear of Edna Price’s establishment, where those in residence gathered on the porch after supper just like folks in one of those Ray Bradbury stories about bucolic Greentown, Illinois. And did not Frank Dunning resemble one of those good folks? He did, he did. But there had been hidden horrors in Bradbury’s Greentown, too.

The nice man doesn’t live at home anymore, Richie-from-the-ditchie had said, and he’d had the straight dope on that one. The nice man lived in a rooming house where everybody seemed to think he was the cat’s ass.

By my estimation, Price’s Rooms was no more than five blocks west of 379 Kossuth Street, and maybe closer. Did Frank Dunning sit in his rented room after the other tenants had gone to bed, facing east like one of the faithful turning toward Qiblah? If so, did he do it with his hey-great-to-see-you smile on his face? I thought no. And were his eyes blue, or did they turn that cold and thoughtful gray? How did he explain leaving his hearth and home to the folks taking the evening air on Edna Price’s porch? Did he have a story, one where his wife was either a little bit cracked or an outright villain? I thought yes. And did people believe it? The answer to that one was easy. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking 1958, 1985, or 2011. In America, where surface has always passed for substance, people always believe guys like Frank Dunning.

4

On the following Tuesday, I rented an apartment advertised in the Derry News as “semi-furnished, in a good neighborhood,” and on Wednesday the seventeenth of September, Mr. George Amberson moved in. Goodbye, Derry Town House, hello Harris Avenue. I had been living in 1958 for over a week, and was beginning to feel comfortable there, if not exactly a native.

The semi-furnishings consisted of a bed (which came with a slightly stained mattress but no linen), a sofa, a kitchen table with one leg that needed to be shimmed so it didn’t teeter, and a single chair with a yellow plastic seat that made a weird smook sound as it reluctantly released its grip on the seat of one’s pants. There was a stove and a clattery fridge. In the kitchen pantry, I discovered the apartment’s air-conditioning unit: a GE fan with a frayed plug that looked absolutely lethal.

I felt that the apartment, which was directly beneath the flight path of planes landing at Derry Airport, was a bit overpriced at sixty-five dollars a month, but agreed to it because Mrs. Joplin, the landlady, was willing to overlook Mr. Amberson’s lack of references. It helped that he could offer three months’ rent in cash. She nevertheless insisted on copying the information from my driver’s license. If she found it strange that a real estate freelancer from Wisconsin was carrying a Maine license, she didn’t say so.

I was glad Al had given me lots of cash. Cash is so soothing to strangers.

It goes a lot farther in ’58, too. For only three hundred dollars, I was able to turn my semi-furnished apartment into one that was fully furnished. Ninety of the three hundred went for a secondhand RCA table-model television. That night I watched The Steve Allen Show in beautiful black-and-white, then turned it off and sat at the kitchen table, listening to a plane settle earthward in a roar of propellers. From my back pocket I took a Blue Horse notebook I’d bought in the Low Town drugstore (the one where shoplifting was not a kick, groove, or gasser). I turned to the first page and clicked out the tip of my equally new Parker ballpoint. I sat that way for maybe fifteen minutes—long enough for another plane to clatter earthward, seemingly so close that I almost expected to feel a thump as the wheels scraped the roof.

The page remained blank. So did my mind. Every time I tried to throw it into gear, the only coherent thought I could manage was the past doesn’t want to be changed.

Not helpful.

At last I got up, took the fan from its shelf in the pantry, and set it on the counter. I wasn’t sure it would work, but it did, and the hum of the motor was strangely soothing. Also, it masked the fridge’s annoying rumble.

When I sat down again, my mind was clearer, and this time a few words came.

OPTIONS

1. Tell police

2. Anonymous call to butcher (Say “I’m watching you, mf, if you do something I’ll tell”)

3. Frame butcher for something

4. Incapacitate butcher somehow

I stopped there. The fridge clicked off. There were no descending planes and no traffic on Harris Avenue. For the time being it was just me and my fan and my incomplete list. At last I wrote the final item:

5. Kill butcher

Then I crumpled it, opened the box of kitchen matches that sat beside the stove to light the burners and the oven, and scratched one. The fan promptly whiffed it out and I thought again how hard it was to change some things. I turned the fan off, lit another match, and touched it to the ball of notepaper. When it was blazing, I dropped it into the sink, waited for it to go out, then washed the ashes down the drain.

After that, Mr. George Amberson went to bed.

But he did not sleep for a long time.

5

When the last plane of the night skimmed over the rooftop at twelve-thirty, I was still awake and thinking of my list. Telling the police was out. It might work with Oswald, who would declare his undying love for Fidel Castro in both Dallas and New Orleans, but Dunning was a different matter. He was a well-liked and well-respected member of the community. Who was I? The new guy in a town that didn’t like outsiders. That afternoon, after coming out of the drugstore, I had once again seen No Suspenders and his crew outside the Sleepy Silver Dollar. I was wearing my workingman clothes, but they had given me that same flat-eyed who the fuck’re you look.

Even if I’d been living in Derry for eight years instead of eight days, just what would I say to the police, anyway? That I’d had a vision of Frank Dunning killing his family on Halloween night? That would certainly go over well.

I liked the idea of placing an anonymous call to the butcher himself a little better, but it was a scary option. Once I called Frank Dunning—either at work or at Edna Price’s, where he would no doubt be summoned to the communal phone in the parlor—I would have changed events. Such a call might stop him from killing his family, but I thought it just as likely it would have the opposite effect, tipping him over the precarious edge of sanity he must be walking behind the affable George Clooney smile. Instead of preventing the murders, I might only succeed in making them happen sooner. As it was, I knew where and when. If I warned him, all bets were off.

Frame him for something? It might work in a spy novel, but I wasn’t a CIA agent; I was a goddam English teacher.

Incapacitate butcher was next on the list. Okay, but how? Smack him with the Sunliner, maybe as he walked from Charity Avenue to Kossuth Street with a hammer in his hand and murder on his mind? Unless I had amazing luck, I’d be caught and jailed. There was this, too. Incapacitated people usually get better. He might try again once he did. As I lay there in the dark, I found that scenario all too plausible. Because the past didn’t like to be changed. It was obdurate.

The only sure way was to follow him, wait until he was alone, and then kill him. Keep it simple, stupid.

But there were problems with this, too. The biggest was that I didn’t know if I could go through with it. I thought I could in hot blood—to protect myself or another—but in cold blood? Even if I knew that my potential victim was going to kill his own wife and children if he weren’t stopped?

And… what if I did it and then got caught before I could escape to the future where I was Jake Epping instead of George Amberson? I’d be tried, found guilty, sent to Shawshank State Prison. And that was where I’d be on the day John F. Kennedy was killed in Dallas.

Even that wasn’t the absolute bottom of the matter. I got up, paced through the kitchen to my phone booth of a bathroom, went to the toilet, then sat on the seat with my forehead propped on the heels of my palms. I had assumed Harry’s essay was the truth. Al had, too. It probably was, because Harry was two or three degrees on the dim side of normal, and people like that are less liable to try passing off fantasies like the murder of an entire family as reality. Still…

Ninety-five percent probability isn’t a hundred, Al had said, and that was Oswald himself he’d been talking about. Just about the only person the killer could have been, once you set aside all the conspiracy babble, and yet Al still had those last lingering doubts.

It would have been easy to check out Harry’s story in the computer-friendly world of 2011, but I never had. And even if it was completely true, there might be crucial details he’d gotten wrong or not mentioned at all. Things that could trip me up. What if, instead of riding to the rescue like Sir Galahad, I only managed to get killed along with them? That would change the future in all sorts of interesting ways, but I wouldn’t be around to discover what they were.

A new idea popped into my head, one that was crazily attractive. I could station myself across from 379 Kossuth on Halloween night… and just watch. To make sure it really happened, yes, but also to note all the details the only living witness—a traumatized child—might have missed. Then I could drive back to Lisbon Falls, go up through the rabbit-hole, and immediately return to September 9 at 11:58 in the morning. I’d buy the Sunliner again and go to Derry again, this time loaded with information. It was true I’d already spent a fair amount of Al’s currency, but there was enough left to get by on.

The idea ran well out of the gate but stumbled before it even got to the first turn. The whole purpose of this trip had been to find out what effect saving the janitor’s family would have on the future, and if I let Frank Dunning go through with the murders, I wouldn’t know. And I was already faced with having to do this again, because there would be one of those resets when—if—I went back through the rabbit-hole to stop Oswald. Once was bad. Twice would be worse. Three times was unthinkable.

And one other thing. Harry Dunning’s family had already died once. Was I going to condemn them to die a second time? Even if each time was a reset and they didn’t know? And who was to say that on some deep level they didn’t?

The pain. The blood. Li’l Carrot-Top lying on the floor under the rocker. Harry trying to scare the lunatic off with a Daisy air gun: “Leave me alone, Daddy, or I’ll shoot you.”

I shuffled back through the kitchen, pausing to look at the chair with the yellow plastic seat. “I hate you, chair,” I told it, then went to bed again.

That time I fell asleep almost immediately. When I woke up the next morning, a nine-o’clock sun was shining in my as-yet-curtainless bedroom window, birds were twittering self-importantly, and I thought I knew what I had to do. Keep it simple, stupid.

6

At noon I put on my tie, set my straw hat at the correct rakish angle, and took myself down to Machen’s Sporting Goods, where THE FALL GUN SALE was still going on. I told the clerk I was interested in buying a handgun, because I was in the real estate business and occasionally I had to carry quite large amounts of cash. He showed me several, including a Colt .38 Police Special revolver. The price was $9.99. That seemed absurdly low until I remembered that, according to Al’s notes, the Italian mail-order rifle Oswald had used to change history had cost less than twenty.

“This is a fine piece of protection,” the clerk said, rolling out the barrel and giving it a spin: clickclickclickclick. “Dead accurate up to fifteen yards, guaranteed, and anyone stupid enough to try mugging you out of your cash is going to be a lot closer than that.”

“Sold.”

I braced for an examination of my scant paperwork, but had once again forgotten to take into account the relaxed and unterrified atmosphere of the America where I was now living. The way the deal worked was this: I paid my money and walked out with the gun. There was no paperwork and no waiting period. I didn’t even have to give my current address.

Oswald had wrapped his gun in a blanket and hidden it in the garage of the house where his wife was staying with a woman named Ruth Paine. But when I walked out of Machen’s with mine in my briefcase, I thought I knew how he must have felt: like a man with a powerful secret. A man who owned his own private tornado.

A guy who should have been at work in one of the mills was standing in the doorway of the Sleepy Silver Dollar, smoking a cigarette and reading the paper. Appearing to read the paper, at least. I couldn’t swear he was watching me, but then again I couldn’t swear he wasn’t.

It was No Suspenders.

7

That evening, I once more took up a position close to The Strand, where the marquee read OPENS TOMORROW! THUNDER ROAD (MITCHUM) & THE VIKINGS (DOUGLAS)! More BLAZING ACTION in the offing for Derry filmgoers.

Dunning once more crossed to the bus stop and climbed aboard. This time I didn’t follow. There was no need; I knew where he was going. I walked back to my new apartment, looking around every now and then for No Suspenders. There was no sign of him, and I told myself that seeing him across from the sporting goods store had just been a coincidence. Not a big one, either. The Sleepy was his joint of choice, after all. Because the Derry mills ran six days a week, the workers had rotating off-days. Thursday could have been one of this guy’s. Next week he might be hanging at the Sleepy on Friday. Or Tuesday.

The following evening I was once more at The Strand, pretending to study the poster for Thunder Road (Robert Mitchum Roars Down the Hottest Highway on Earth!), mostly because I had nowhere else to go; Halloween was still six weeks away, and I seemed to have entered the time-killing phase of our program. But this time instead of crossing to the bus stop, Frank Dunning walked down to the three-way intersection of Center, Kansas, and Witcham and stood there as if undecided. He was once more looking reet in dark slacks, white shirt, blue tie, and a sport coat in a light gray windowpane check. His hat was cocked back on his head. For a moment I thought he was going to head for the movies and check out the hottest highway on earth, in which case I would stroll casually away toward Canal Street. But he turned left, onto Witcham. I could hear him whistling. He was a good whistler.

There was no need to follow him; he wasn’t going to commit any hammer murders on the nineteenth of September. But I was curious, and I had nothing better to do. He went into a bar and grill called The Lamplighter, not as upper-crust as the one at the Town House, but nowhere near as grotty as the ones on Canal. In every small city there are one or two borderland joints where bluecollar and whitecollar workers meet as equals, and this looked like that kind of place. Usually the menu features some local delicacy that makes outsiders scratch their head in puzzlement. The Lamplighter’s specialty seemed to be something called Fried Lobster Pickin’s.

I passed the wide front windows, lounging rather than walking, and saw Dunning greet his way across the room. He shook hands; he patted cheeks; he took one man’s hat and scaled it to a guy standing at the Bowl Mor machine, who caught it deftly and to general hilarity. A nice man. Always joking around. Laugh-and-the-whole-world-laughs-with-you type of thing.

I saw him sit down at a table close to the Bowl Mor and almost walked on. But I was thirsty. A beer would go down fine just about now, and The Lamplighter’s bar was all the way across a crowded room from the large table where Dunning was sitting with the all-male group he had joined. He wouldn’t see me, but I could keep an eye on him in the mirror. Not that I was apt to see anything too startling.

Besides, if I was going to be here for another six weeks, it was time to start belonging here. So I turned around and entered the sounds of cheerful voices, slightly inebriated laughter, and Dean Martin singing “That’s Amore.” Waitresses circulated with steins of beer and heaped platters of what had to be Fried Lobster Pickin’s. And there were rising rafters of blue smoke, of course.

In 1958, there’s always smoke.

8

“See you glancin at that table back there,” a voice said at my elbow. I had been at The Lamplighter long enough to have ordered my second beer and a “junior platter” of Lobster Pickin’s. I figured if I didn’t at least try them, I’d always wonder.

I looked around and saw a small man with slicked-back hair, a round face, and lively black eyes. He looked like a cheerful chipmunk. He grinned at me and stuck out a child-sized hand. On his forearm, a bare-breasted mermaid flapped her flippy tail and winked one eye. “Charles Frati. But you can call me Chaz. Everyone does.”

I shook. “George Amberson, but you can call me George. Everyone does that, too.”

He laughed. So did I. It’s considered bad form to laugh at your own jokes (especially when they’re teensy ones), but some people are so engaging they never have to laugh alone. Chaz Frati was one of those. The waitress brought him a beer, and he raised it. “Here’s to you, George.”

“I’ll drink to that,” I said, and clicked the rim of my glass against his.

“Anybody you know?” he asked, looking at the big rear table in the backbar mirror.

“Nope.” I wiped foam from my upper lip. “They just seem to be having more fun than anybody else in the place, that’s all.”

Chaz smiled. “That’s Tony Tracker’s table. Might as well have his name engraved on it. Tony and his brother Phil own a freight-hauling company. They also own more acres in this town—and the towns around it—than Carter has liver pills. Phil don’t show up here much, he’s mostly on the road, but Tony don’t miss many Friday or Saturday nights. Has lots of friends, too. They always have a good time, but nobody makes a party go like Frankie Dunning. He’s the guy tellin jokes. Everybody likes old Tones, but they love Frankie.”

“You sound like you know them all.”

“For years. Know most of the people in Derry, but I don’t know you.”

“That’s because I just got here. I’m in real estate.”

“Business real estate, I take it.”

“You take it right.” The waitress deposited my Lobster Pickin’s and hustled away. The heap on the platter looked like roadkill, but it smelled terrific and tasted better. Probably a billion grams of cholesterol in every bite, but in 1958, nobody worries about that, which is restful. “Help me with this,” I said.

“Nope, they’re all yours. You out of Boston? New York?”

I shrugged and he laughed.

“Playin it cagey, huh? Don’t blame you, cuz. Loose lips sink ships. But I have a pretty good idea what you’re up to.”

I paused with a forkful of Lobster Pickin’s halfway to my mouth. It was warm in The Lamplighter, but I felt suddenly chilly. “Is that so?”

He leaned close. I could smell Vitalis on his slicked-back hair and Sen-Sen on his breath. “If I said ‘possible mall site,’ would that be a bingo?”

I felt a gust of relief. The idea that I was in Derry looking for a place to put a shopping mall had never crossed my mind, but it was a good one. I dropped Chaz Frati a wink. “Can’t say.”

“No, no, course you couldn’t. Business is as business does, I always say. We’ll drop the subject. But if you’d ever consider letting one of the local yokels in on a good thing, I’d love to listen. And just to show you that my heart is in the right place, I’ll give you a little tip. If you haven’t checked out the old Kitchener Ironworks yet, you ought to. Perfect spot. And malls? Do you know what malls are, my son?”

“The wave of the future,” I said.

He pointed a finger at me like a gun and winked. I laughed again, just couldn’t help it. Part of it was the simple relief of finding out that not every grown-up in Derry had forgotten how to be friendly to a stranger. “Hole in one.”

“And who owns the land the old Kitchener Ironworks sits on, Chaz? The Tracker brothers, I suppose?”

“I said they own most of the land around here, not all of it.” He looked down at the mermaid. “Milly, should I tell George who owns that prime business-zoned real estate only two miles from the center of this metropolis?”

Milly wagged her scaly tail and jiggled her teacup breasts. Chaz Frati didn’t clench his hand into a fist to make this happen; the muscles in his forearm seemed to move on their own. It was a good trick. I wondered if he also pulled rabbits out of hats.

“All right, dear.” He looked up at me again. “Actually, that would be yours truly. I buy the best and let the Tracker brothers have the rest. Business is as business does. May I give you my card, George?”

“Absolutely.”

He did. The card simply said CHARLES “CHAZ” FRATI BUY SELL TRADE. I tucked it into my shirt pocket.

“If you know all those people and they know you, why aren’t you over there instead of sitting at the bar with the new kid on the block?” I asked.

He looked surprised, then amused all over again. “Was you born in a trunk and then threw off a train, cuz?”

“Just new in town. Haven’t learned the ropes. Don’t hold it against me.”

“Never would. They do business with me because I own half this town’s motor courts, both downtown movie theaters and the drive-in, one of the banks, and all of the pawnshops in eastern and central Maine. But they don’t eat with me or drink with me or invite me into their homes or their country club because I’m a member of the Tribe.”

“You lost me.”

“I’m a Jew, cuz.”

He saw my expression and grinned. “You didn’t know. Even when I wouldn’t eat any of your lobster, you didn’t know. I’m touched.”

“I’m just trying to figure out why it should make a difference,” I said.

He laughed as though this were the best joke he’d heard all year. “Then you was born under a cabbage leaf instead of in a trunk.”

In the mirror, Frank Dunning was talking. Tony Tracker and his friends were listening with big grins on their faces. When they exploded into bull roars of laughter, I wondered if it had been the one about the three jigs stuck in the elevator or maybe something even more amusing and satiric—three Yids on a golf course, maybe.

Chaz saw me looking. “Frank knows how to make a party go, all right. You know where he works? No, you’re new in town, I forgot. Center Street Market. He’s the head butcher. Also half-owner, although he don’t advertise it. You know what? He’s half the reason that place stands up and makes a profit. Draws the ladies like bees to honey.”

“Does he, now?”

“Yep, and the men like him, too. That’s not always the case. Fellas don’t always like a ladies’ man.”

That made me think of my ex-wife’s fierce Johnny Depp fixation.

“But it’s not like the old days when he’d drink with em until closin, then play poker with em down at the freight depot until the crack of dawn. These days he’ll have one beer—maybe two—and then he’s out the door. You watch.”

It was a behavior pattern I knew about firsthand from Christy’s sporadic efforts to control her booze intake rather than stop altogether. It would work for awhile, but sooner or later she always went off the deep end.

“Drinking problem?” I asked.

“Don’t know about that, but he’s sure got a temper problem.” He looked down at the tattoo on his forearm. “Milly, you ever notice how many funny fellas have got a mean streak?”

Milly flipped her tail. Chaz looked at me solemnly. “See? The women always know.” He snuck a Lobster Pickin’ and shot his eyes comically from side to side. He was a very amusing fellow, and it never crossed my mind that he was anything other than what he claimed to be. But, as Chaz himself had implied, I was a bit on the nave side. Certainly for Derry. “Don’t tell Rabbi Snoresalot.”

“Your secret’s safe with me.”

By the way the men at the Tracker table were leaning toward Frank, he had launched into another joke. He was the kind of man who talked a lot with his hands. They were big hands. It was easy to imagine one of them holding the haft of a Craftsman hammer.

“He ripped and roared something terrible back in high school,” Chaz said. “You’re looking at a guy who knows, because I went to the old County Consolidated with him. But I mostly kept out of his way. Suspensions left and right. Always for fighting. He was supposed to go to the University of Maine, but he got a girl pregnant and ended up getting married instead. After a year or two of it, she collected the baby and scrammed. Probably a smart idea, the way he was then. Frankie was the kind of guy, fighting the Germans or the Japs probably would have been good for im—get all that mad out, you know. But he came up 4-F. I never heard why. Flat feet? Heart murmur? The high blood? No way of telling. But you probably don’t want to hear all this old gossip.”

“I do,” I said. “It’s interesting.” It sure was. I’d come into The Lamplighter to wet my whistle and had stumbled into a gold mine instead. “Have another Lobster Pickin’.”

“Twist my arm,” he said, and popped one into his mouth. He jerked a thumb at the mirror as he chewed. “And why shouldn’t I? Just look at those guys back there—half of em Catholics and still chowing up on burgers n BLTs n sausage subs. On Friday! Who can make sense of religion, cuz?”

“You got me,” I said. “I’m a lapsed Methodist. Guess Mr. Dunning never got that college education, huh?”

“Nope, by the time his first wife done her midnight flit, he was gettin a graduate degree in cuttin meat, and he was good at it. Got into some more trouble—and yeah, drinkin was somewhat involved from what I heard, people gossip terrible, y’know, and a man who owns pawnshops hears it all—so Mr. Vollander, him who owned the market back in those days, he sat down and had a Dutch uncle talk with ole Frankie.” Chaz shook his head and picked another Pickin’. “If Benny Vollander had ever known Frankie Dunning was gonna own half the place by the time that Korea shit was over, he probably would have had a brain hemorrhage. Good thing we can’t see the future, isn’t it?”

“That would complicate things, all right.”

Chaz was warming to his story, and when I told the waitress to bring another couple of beers, he didn’t tell her no.

“Benny Vollander said Frankie was the best ’prentice butcher he’d ever had, but if he got in any more trouble with the cops—fightin if anyone farted sideways, in other words—he’d have to let him go. A word to the wise is sufficient, they say, and Frankie straightened up. Divorced that first wife of his on grounds of desertion after she was gone a year or two, then remarried not long after. The war was goin full steam by then and he could have had his pick of the ladies—he has that charm, you know, and most of the competition was overseas, anyway—but he settled on Doris McKinney. Lovely girl she was.”

“And still is, I’m sure.”

“Absolutely, cuz. Pretty as a picture. They’ve got three or four kids. Nice family.” Chaz leaned close again. “But Frankie still loses his temper now and then, and he must have lost it at her last spring, because she turned up at church with bruises on her face and a week later he was out the door. He’s living in a rooming house as close as he could get to the old homestead. Hopin she’ll take him back, I imagine. And sooner or later, she will. He’s got that charming way of—whoops, lookie there, what’d I tell you? He’s a gone cat”

Dunning was getting up. The other men were bellowing for him to sit back down, but he was shaking his head and pointing to his watch. He tipped the last swallow of his beer down his throat, then bent and kissed one man’s bald head. This brought a room-shaking roar of approval and Dunning surfed on it toward the door.

He slapped Chaz on the back as he went by and said, “Keep that nose clean, Chazzy—it’s too long to get dirty.”

Then he was gone. Chaz looked at me. He was giving me the cheerful chipmunk grin, but his eyes weren’t smiling. “Ain’t he a card?”

“Sure,” I said.

9

I’m one of those people who doesn’t really know what he thinks until he writes it down, so I spent most of that weekend making notes about what I’d seen in Derry, what I’d done, and what I planned to do. They expanded into an explanation of how I’d gotten to Derry in the first place, and by Sunday I realized that I’d started a job that was too big for a pocket notebook and ballpoint pen. On Monday I went out and bought a portable typewriter. My intention had been to go to the local business supply store, but then I saw Chaz Frati’s card on the kitchen table, and went there instead. It was on East Side Drive, a pawnshop almost as big as a department store. The three gold balls were over the door, as was traditional, but there was something else, as well: a plaster mermaid flapping her flippy tail and winking one eye. This one, being out in public, was wearing a bra top. Frati himself was not in evidence, but I got a terrific Smith-Corona for twelve dollars. I told the clerk to tell Mr. Frati that George the real estate guy had been in.

“Happy to do it, sir. Would you like to leave your card?”

Shit. I’d have to have some of those printed… which meant a visit to Derry Business Supply after all. “Left them in my other suit coat,” I said, “but I think he’ll remember me. We had a drink at The Lamplighter.”

That afternoon I began expanding my notes.

10

I got used to the planes coming in for a landing directly over my head. I arranged for newspaper and milk delivery: thick glass bottles brought right to your doorstep. Like the root beer Frank Anicetti had served me on my first jaunt into 1958, the milk tasted incredibly full and rich. The cream was even better. I didn’t know if artificial creamers had been invented yet, and had no intention of finding out. Not with this stuff around.

The days slipped by. I read Al Templeton’s notes on Oswald until I could have quoted long passages by heart. I visited the library and read about the murders and the disappearances that had plagued Derry in 1957 and 1958. I looked for stories about Frank Dunning and his famous bad temper, but found none; if he had ever been arrested, the story hadn’t made it into the newspaper’s Police Beat column, which was good-sized on most days and usually expanded to a full page on Mondays, when it contained a full summary of the weekend’s didoes (most of which happened after the bars closed). The only story I found about the janitor’s father concerned a 1955 charity drive. The Center Street Market had contributed ten percent of their profits that fall to the Red Cross, to help out after hurricanes Connie and Diane slammed into the East Coast, killing two hundred and causing extensive flood damage in New England. There was a picture of Harry’s father handing an oversized check to the regional head of the Red Cross. Dunning was flashing that movie-star smile.

I made no more shopping trips to the Center Street Market, but on two weekends—the last in September and the first in October—I followed Derry’s favorite butcher after he finished his half-day Saturday stint behind the meat counter. I rented nondescript Hertz Chevrolets from the airport for this chore. The Sunliner, I felt, was a little too conspicuous for shadowing.

On the first Saturday afternoon, he went to a Brewer flea market in a Pontiac he kept in a downtown pay-by-the-month garage and rarely used during the workweek. On the following Sunday, he drove to his house on Kossuth Street, collected his kids, and took them to a Disney double feature at the Aladdin. Even at a distance, Troy, the eldest, looked bored out of his mind both going into the theater and coming out.

Dunning didn’t enter the house for either the pickup or the drop-off. He honked for the kids when he arrived and let them off at the curb when they came back, watching until all four were inside. He didn’t drive off immediately even then, only sat behind the wheel of the idling Bonneville, smoking a cigarette. Maybe hoping the lovely Doris might want to come out and talk. When he was sure she wouldn’t, he used a neighbor’s driveway to turn around in and sped off, squealing his tires hard enough to send up little splurts of blue smoke.

I slumped in the seat of my rental, but I needn’t have bothered. He never looked in my direction as he passed, and when he was a good distance down Witcham Street, I followed along after. He returned his car to the garage where he kept it, went to The Lamplighter for a single beer at the nearly deserted bar, then trudged back to Edna Price’s rooms on Charity Avenue with his head down.

The following Saturday, October fourth, he collected his kids and took them to the football game at the University of Maine in Orono, some thirty miles away. I parked on Stillwater Avenue and waited for the game to be over. On the way back they stopped at the Ninety-Fiver for dinner. I parked at the far end of the parking lot and waited for them to come out, reflecting that the life of a private eye must be a boring one, no matter what the movies would have us believe.

When Dunning delivered his children back home, dusk was creeping over Kossuth Street. Troy had clearly enjoyed football more than the adventures of Cinderella; he exited his father’s Pontiac grinning and waving a Black Bears pennant. Tugga and Harry also had pennants and also seemed energized. Ellen, not so much. She was fast asleep. Dunning carried her to the door of the house in his arms. This time Mrs. Dunning made a brief appearance—just long enough to take the little girl into her own arms.

Dunning said something to Doris. Her reply didn’t seem to please him. The distance was too great to read his expression, but he was wagging a finger at her as he spoke. She listened, shook her head, turned, and went inside. He stood there a moment or two, then took off his hat and slapped it against his leg.

All interesting—and instructive of the relationship—but no help otherwise. Not what I was looking for.

I got that the following day. I had decided to make only two reconnaissance passes that Sunday, feeling that, even in a dark brown rental unit that almost faded into the landscape, more would be risking notice. I saw nothing on the first one and figured he was probably in for the day, and why not? The weather had turned gray and drizzly. He was probably watching sports on TV with the rest of the boarders, all of them smoking up a storm in the parlor.

But I was wrong. Just as I turned onto Witcham for my second pass, I saw him walking toward downtown, today dressed in blue jeans, a windbreaker, and a wide-brimmed waterproof hat. I drove past him and parked on Main Street about a block up from the garage he used. Twenty minutes later I was following him out of town to the west. Traffic was light, and I kept well back.

His destination turned out to be Longview Cemetery, two miles past the Derry Drive-In. He stopped at a flower stand across from it, and as I drove by, I saw him buying two baskets of fall flowers from an old lady who held a big black umbrella over both of them during the transaction. I watched in my rearview mirror as he put the flowers on the passenger seat of his car, got back in, and drove up the cemetery’s access road.

I turned around and drove back to Longview. This was taking a risk, but I had to chance it, because this looked good. The parking lot was empty except for two pickups loaded with groundkeeping equipment under tarps and a dinged-up old payloader that looked like war surplus. No sign of Dunning’s Pontiac. I drove across the lot toward the gravel lane leading into the cemetery itself, which was huge, sprawling over as many as a dozen hilly acres.

In the cemetery proper, smaller lanes split off from the main one. Groundfog was rising up from the dips and valleys, and the drizzle was thickening into rain. Not a good day for visiting the dear departed, all in all, and Dunning had the place to himself. His Pontiac, parked halfway up a hill on one of the feeder lanes, was easy to spot. He was placing the flower baskets before two side-by-side graves. His parents’, I assumed, but I didn’t really care. I turned my car around and left him to it.

By the time I got back to my Harris Avenue apartment, that fall’s first hard rain was pounding the city. Downtown, the canal would be roaring, and the peculiar thrumming that came up through the concrete in the Low Town would be more noticeable than ever. Indian summer seemed to be over. I didn’t care about that, either. I opened my notebook, flipped almost to the end before I found a blank page, and wrote October 5^th, 3:45 PM, Dunning to Longview Cem, puts flowers on parents’ (?) graves. Rain.

I had what I wanted.

CHAPTER 8

1

In the weeks before Halloween, Mr. George Amberson inspected almost every commercial-zoned piece of property in Derry and the surrounding towns.

I knew better than to believe that I’d ever be accepted as a townie on short notice, but I wanted to get the locals accustomed to the sight of my sporty red Sunliner convertible, just part of the scenery. There goes that real estate fella, been here almost a month now. If he knows what he’s doin, there might be some money in it for someone.

When people asked me what I was looking for, I’d give a wink and a smile. When people asked me how long I’d be staying, I told them it was hard to say. I learned the geography of the town, and I began to learn the verbal geography of 1958. I learned, for instance, that the war meant World War II; the conflict meant Korea. Both were over, and good riddance. People worried about Russia and the so-called “missile gap,” but not too much. People worried about juvenile delinquency, but not too much. There was a recession, but people had seen worse. When you bargained with someone, it was absolutely okay to say that you jewed em down (or got gypped). Penny candy included dots, wax lips, and niggerbabies. In the South, Jim Crow ruled. In Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev bellowed threats. In Washington, President Eisenhower droned good cheer.

I made a point of checking out the defunct Kitchener Ironworks not long after speaking with Chaz Frati. It was in a large overgrown stretch of empty to the north of town, and yes, it would be the perfect spot for a shopping mall once the extension of the Mile-A-Minute Highway reached it. But on the day I visited—leaving my car and walking when the road turned to axle-smashing rubble—it could have been the ruin of an ancient civilization: look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. Heaps of brick and rusty chunks of old machinery poked out of the high grass. In the middle was a long-collapsed ceramic smokestack, its sides blackened by soot, its huge bore full of darkness. If I’d lowered my head and hunched over, I could have walked into it, and I am not a short man.

I saw a lot of Derry in those weeks before Halloween, and I felt a lot of Derry. Longtime residents were pleasant to me, but—with one exception—never chummy. Chaz Frati was that exception, and in retrospect I guess his unprompted revelations should have struck me as odd, but I had a great many things on my mind, and Frati didn’t seem all that important. I thought, sometimes you just meet a friendly guy, that’s all, and let it go at that. Certainly I had no idea that a man named Bill Turcotte had put Frati up to it.

Bill Turcotte, aka No Suspenders.

2

Bevvie-from-the-levee had said she thought the bad times in Derry were over, but the more of it I saw (and the more I felt—that especially), the more I came to believe that Derry wasn’t like other places. Derry wasn’t right. At first I tried to tell myself that it was me, not the town. I was a man out of joint, a temporal bedouin, and any place would have felt a little strange to me, a little skewed—like the cities that seem so much like bad dreams in those strange Paul Bowles novels. This was persuasive at first, but as the days passed and I continued to explore my new environment, it became less so. I even began to question Beverly Marsh’s assertion that the bad times were over, and imagined (on nights when I couldn’t sleep, and there were quite a few of those) that she questioned it herself. Hadn’t I glimpsed a seed of doubt in her eyes? The look of someone who doesn’t quite believe but wants to? Maybe even needs to?

Something wrong, something bad.

Certain empty houses that seemed to stare like the faces of people suffering from terrible mental illness. An empty barn on the outskirts of town, the hayloft door swinging slowly open and closed on rusty hinges, first disclosing darkness, then hiding it, then disclosing it again. A splintered fence on Kossuth Street, just a block away from the house where Mrs. Dunning and her children lived. To me that fence looked as if something—or someone—had been hurled through it and into the Barrens below. An empty playground with the roundy-round slowly spinning even though there were no kids to push it and no appreciable wind to turn it. It screamed on its hidden bearings as it moved. One day I saw a roughly carved Jesus go floating down the canal and into the tunnel that ran beneath Canal Street. It was three feet long. The teeth peeped from lips parted in a snarling grin. A crown of thorns, jauntily askew, circled the forehead; bloody tears had been painted below the thing’s weird white eyes. It looked like a juju fetish. On the so-called Kissing Bridge in Bassey Park, amid the declarations of school spirit and undying love, someone had carved the words I WILL KILL MY MOTHER SOON, and below it someone had added: NOT SOON ENOUGH SHES FULL OF DISEEZE. One afternoon while walking on the east side of the Barrens, I heard a terrible squealing and looked up to see the silhouette of a thin man standing on the GS & WM railroad trestle not far away. A stick rose and fell in his hand. He was beating something. The squealing stopped and I thought, It was a dog and he’s finished with it. He took it out there on a rope leash and beat it until it was dead. There was no way I could have known such a thing, of course… and yet I did. I was sure then, and I am now.

Something wrong.

Something bad.

Do any of those things bear on the story I’m telling? The story of the janitor’s father, and of Lee Harvey Oswald (he of the smirky little I-know-a-secret smile and gray eyes that would never quite meet yours)? I don’t know for sure, but I can tell you one more thing: there was something inside that fallen chimney at the Kitchener Ironworks. I don’t know what and I don’t want to know, but at the mouth of the thing I saw a heap of gnawed bones and a tiny chewed collar with a bell on it. A collar that had surely belonged to some child’s beloved kitten. And from inside the pipe—deep in that oversized bore—something moved and shuffled.

Come in and see, that something seemed to whisper in my head. Never mind all the rest of it, Jake—come in and see. Come in and visit. Time doesn’t matter in here; in here, time just floats away. You know you want to, you know you’re curious. Maybe it’s even another rabbit-hole. Another portal.

Maybe it was, but I don’t think so. I think it was Derry in there—everything that was wrong with it, everything that was askew, hiding in that pipe. Hibernating. Letting people believe the bad times were over, waiting for them to relax and forget there had ever been bad times at all.

I left in a hurry, and to that part of Derry I never went back.

3

One day in the second week of October—by then the oaks and elms on Kossuth Street were a riot of gold and red—I once more visited the defunct West Side Rec. No self-respecting real estate bounty hunter would fail to fully investigate the possibilities of such a prime site, and I asked several people on the street what it was like inside (the door was padlocked, of course) and when it had closed.

One of the people I spoke to was Doris Dunning. Pretty as a picture, Chaz Frati had said. A generally meaningless clich, but true in this case. The years had put fine lines around her eyes and deeper ones at the corners of her mouth, but she had exquisite skin and a terrific full-breasted figure (in 1958, the heyday of Jayne Mansfield, full breasts are considered attractive rather than embarrassing). We spoke on the stoop. To invite me in with the house empty and the kids at school would have been improper and no doubt the subject of neighborly gossip, especially with her husband “living out.” She had a dustrag in one hand and a cigarette in the other. There was a bottle of furniture polish poking out of her apron pocket. Like most folks in Derry, she was polite but distant.

Yes, she said, when it was still up and running, West Side Rec had been a fine facility for the kiddos. It was so nice to have a place like that close by where they could go after school and race around to their hearts’ content. She could see the playground and the basketball court from her kitchen window, and it was very sad to see them empty. She said she thought the Rec had been closed in a round of budget cuts, but the way her eyes shifted and her mouth tucked in suggested something else to me: that it had been closed during the round of child-murders and disappearances. Budget concerns might have been secondary.

I thanked her and handed her one of my recently printed business cards. She took it, gave me a distracted smile, and closed the door. It was a gentle close, not a slam, but I heard a rattle from behind it and knew she was putting on the chain.

I thought the Rec might do for my purposes when Halloween came, although I didn’t completely love it. I anticipated no problems getting inside, and one of the front windows would give me a fine view of the street. Dunning might come in his car rather than on foot, but I knew what it looked like. It would be after dark, according to Harry’s essay, but there were streetlights.

Of course, that visibility thing cut both ways. Unless he was totally fixated on what he’d come to do, Dunning would almost certainly see me running at him. I had the pistol, but it was only dead accurate up to fifteen yards. I’d need to be even closer before I dared risk a shot, because on Halloween night, Kossuth Street was sure to be alive with pint-sized ghosts and goblins. Yet I couldn’t wait until he actually got in the house before breaking cover, because according to the essay, Doris Dunning’s estranged husband had gone to work right away. By the time Harry came out of the bathroom, all of them were down and all but Ellen were dead. If I waited, I was apt to see what Harry had seen: his mother’s brains soaking into the couch.

I hadn’t traveled across more than half a century to save just one of them. And so what if he saw me coming? I was the man with the gun, he was the man with the hammer—probably filched from the tool drawer at his boardinghouse. If he ran at me, that would be good. I’d be like a rodeo clown, distracting the bull. I’d caper and yell until he got in range, then put two in his chest.

Assuming I was able to pull the trigger, that was.

And assuming the gun worked. I’d test-fired it in a gravel pit on the outskirts of town, and it seemed fine… but the past is obdurate.

It doesn’t want to change.

4

Upon further consideration, I thought there might be an even better location for my Halloween-night stakeout. I’d need a little luck, but maybe not too much. God knows there’s plenty for sale in these parts, bartender Fred Toomey had said on my first night in Derry. My explorations had borne that out. In the wake of the murders (and the big flood of ’57, don’t forget that), it seemed that half the town was for sale. In a less standoffish burg, a supposed real-estate buyer like myself probably would have been given a key to the city and a wild weekend with Miss Derry by now.

One street I hadn’t checked out was Wyemore Lane, a block south of Kossuth Street. That meant the Wyemore backyards would abut on Kossuth backyards. It couldn’t hurt to check.

Though 206 Wyemore, the house directly behind the Dunnings’, was occupied, the one next to it on the left—202—looked like an answered prayer. The gray paint was fresh and the shingles were new, but the shutters were closed up tight. On the freshly raked lawn was a yellow-and-green sign I’d seen all over town: FOR SALE BY DERRY HOME REAL ESTATE SPECIALISTS. This one invited me to call Specialist Keith Haney and discuss financing. I had no intention of doing that, but I parked my Sunliner in the newly asphalted driveway (someone was going all-out to sell this one) and walked into the backyard, head up, shoulders back, big as Billy-be-damned. I had discovered many things while exploring my new environment, and one of them was that if you acted like you belonged in a certain place, people thought you did.

The backyard was nicely mowed, the leaves raked away to showcase the velvety green. A push lawnmower had been stored under the garage overhang with a swatch of green tarpaulin tucked neatly over the rotary blades. Beside the cellar bulkhead was a doghouse with a sign on it that showed Keith Haney at his don’t-miss-a-trick best: YOUR POOCH BELONGS HERE. Inside was a pile of unused leaf-bags with a garden trowel and a pair of hedge clippers to hold them down. In 2011, the tools would have been locked away; in 1958, someone had taken care to see they were out of the rain and called it good. I was sure the house was locked, but that was okay. I had no interest in breaking and entering.

At the far end of 202 Wyemore’s backyard was a hedge about six feet tall. Not quite as tall as I was, in other words, and although it was luxuriant, a man could force his way through easily enough if he didn’t mind a few scratches. Best of all, when I walked down to the far right corner, which was behind the garage, I was able to look on a diagonal into the backyard of the Dunning house. I saw two bicycles. One was a boy’s Schwinn, leaning on its kickstnd. The other, lying on its side like a dead pony, was Ellen Dunning’s. There was no mistaking the training wheels.

There was also a litter of toys. One of them was Harry Dunning’s Daisy air rifle.

5

If you’ve ever acted in an amateur stage company—or directed student theatricals, which I had several times while at LHS—you’ll know what the days leading up to Halloween were like for me. At first, rehearsals have a lazy feel. There’s improvisation, joking, horseplay, and a good deal of flirting as sexual polarities are established. If someone flubs a line or misses a cue in those early rehearsals, it’s an occasion for laughter. If an actor shows up fifteen minutes late, he or she might get a mild reprimand, but probably nothing more.

Then opening night begins to seem like an actual possibility instead of a foolish dream. Improv falls away. So does the horseplay, and although the jokes remain, the laughter that greets them has a nervous energy that was missing before. Flubbed lines and missed cues begin to seem exasperating rather than amusing. An actor arriving late for rehearsal once the sets are up and opening night is only days away is apt to get a serious reaming from the director.

The big night comes. The actors put on their costumes and makeup. Some are outright terrified; all feel not quite prepared. Soon they will have to face a roomful of people who have come to see them strut their stuff. What seemed distant in the days of bare-stage blocking has come after all. And before the curtain goes up, some Hamlet, Willy Loman, or Blanche DuBois will have to rush into the nearest bathroom and be sick. It never fails.

Trust me on the sickness part. I know.

6

In the small hours of Halloween morning, I found myself not in Derry but on the ocean. A stormy ocean. I was clinging to the rail of a large vessel—a yacht, I think—that was on the verge of foundering. Rain driven by a howling gale was sheeting into my face. Huge waves, black at their bases and a curdled, foamy green on top, rushed toward me. The yacht rose, twisted, then plummeted down again with a wild corkscrewing motion.

I woke from this dream with my heart pounding and my hands still curled from trying to hold onto the rail my brain had dreamed up. Only it wasn’t just my brain, because the bed was still going up and down. My stomach seemed to have come unmoored from the muscles that were supposed to hold it in place.

At such moments, the body is almost always wiser than the brain. I threw back the covers and sprinted for the bathroom, kicking over the hateful yellow chair as I sped through the kitchen. My toes would be sore later, but right then I barely felt it. I tried to lock my throat shut, but only partially succeeded. I could hear a weird sound seeping through it and into my mouth. Ulk-ulk-urp-ulk was what it sounded like. My stomach was the yacht, first rising and then taking those horrible corkscrew drops. I fell on my knees in front of the toilet and threw up my dinner. Next came lunch and yesterday’s breakfast: oh God, ham and eggs. At the thought of all that shining grease, I retched again. There was a pause, and then what felt like everything I’d eaten for the last week left the building.

Just as I began to hope it was over, my bowels gave a terrible liquid wrench. I stumbled to my feet, batted down the toilet ring, and managed to sit before everything fell out in a watery splat.

But no. Not everything, not yet. My stomach took another giddy heave just as my bowels went to work again. There was only one thing to do, and I did it: leaned forward and vomited into the sink.

It went on like that until noon of Halloween day. By then both of my ejection-ports were producing nothing but watery gruel. Each time I threw up, each time my bowels cramped, I thought the same thing: The past does not want to be changed. The past is obdurate.

But when Frank Dunning arrived tonight, I meant to be there. Even if I was still heaving and shitting graywater, I meant to be there. Even if it killed me, I meant to be there.

7

Mr. Norbert Keene, proprietor of the Center Street Drug, was behind the counter when I came in on that Friday afternoon. The wooden paddle-fan over his head lifted what remained of his hair in a wavery dance: cobwebs in a summer breeze. Just looking at that made my abused stomach give another warning lurch. He was skinny inside his white cotton smock—almost emaciated—and when he saw me coming, his pale lips creased in a smile.

“You look a little under the weather, my friend.”

“Kaopectate,” I said in a hoarse voice that didn’t sound like my own. “Do you have it?” Wondering if it had even been invented yet.

“Are we suffering a little touch of the bug?” The overhead light caught in the lenses of his small rimless spectacles and skated around when he moved his head. Like butter across a skillet, I thought, and at that my stomach gave another lunge. “It’s been going around town. You’re in for a nasty twenty-four hours, I’m afraid. Probably a germ, but you may have used a public convenience and forgotten to wash your hands. So many people are lazy about th—”

“Do you have Kaopectate or not?”

“Of course. Second aisle.”

“Continence pants—what about those?”

The thin-lipped grin spread out. Continence pants are funny, of course they are. Unless, of course, you’re the one who needs them. “Fifth aisle. Although if you stay close to home, you won’t need them. Based on your pallor, sir… and the way you’re sweating… it might be wiser to do that.”

“Thanks,” I said, and imagined socking him square in the mouth and knocking his dentures down his throat. Suck on a little Polident, pal.

I shopped slowly, not wanting to joggle my liquefied guts any more than necessary. Got the Kaopectate (Large Economy Size? check), then the continence pants (Adult Large? check). The pants were in Ostomy Supplies, between the enema bags and brooding yellow coils of plastic hose whose function I didn’t want to know about. There were also adult diapers, but at those I balked. If necessary, I would stuff the continence pants with dish towels. This struck me as funny, and despite my misery I had to struggle not to laugh. Laughing in my current delicate state might bring on disaster.

As if sensing my distress, the skeletal druggist rang up my items in slow motion. I paid him, holding out a five-dollar bill with a hand that was shaking appreciably.

“Anything else?”

“Just one thing. I’m miserable, you can see I’m miserable, so why the hell are you grinning at me?”

Mr. Keene took a step backward, the smile falling from his lips. “I assure you, I wasn’t grinning. I certainly hope you feel better.”

My bowels cramped. I staggered a little, grabbing the paper bag with my stuff inside it and holding onto the counter with my free hand. “Do you have a bathroom?”

The smile reappeared. “Not for customers, I’m afraid. Why not try one of the… the establishments across the street?”

“You’re quite the bastard, aren’t you? The perfect goddam Derry citizen.”

He stiffened, then turned away and stalked into the nether regions where his pills, powders, and syrups were kept.

I walked slowly past the soda fountain and out the door. I felt like a man made of glass. The day was cool, no more than forty-five degrees, but the sun felt hot on my skin. And sticky. My bowels cramped again. I stood stock-still for a moment with my head down, one foot on the sidewalk and one in the gutter. The cramp passed. I crossed the street without looking for traffic, and someone honked at me. I restrained myself from flipping the bird at the honker, but only because I had enough trouble. I couldn’t risk getting into a fight; I was in one already.

The cramp struck again, a double knife to the lower gut. I broke into a run. The Sleepy Silver Dollar was closest, so that was the door I jerked open, hustling my unhappy body into semidarkness and the yeasty smell of beer. On the jukebox, Conway Twitty was moaning that it was only make-believe. I wished he were right.