11/22/63: A Novel (20 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.