11/22/63: A Novel (28 page)

“Ambulance,” Turcotte croaked. His eyes gleamed with what might have been tears. “Please, Amberson. Hurts bad.”

Ambulance. Good idea. And here’s something hilarious. I’d been in Derry—in
1958
—for almost two months, but I still plunged my hand into my right front pants pocket, where I always kept my cell phone when I wasn’t wearing a sport coat. My fingers found nothing there but some change and the keys to the Sunliner.

“Sorry, Turcotte. You were born in the wrong era for instant rescue.”

“What?”

According to the Bulova,
The New Adventures of Ellery Queen
was now being telecast to a waiting America. “Tough it out,” I said, and shoved through the hedge, the hand not holding the gun raised to protect my eyes from the stiff, raking branches.

I tripped over the sandbox in the middle of the Dunning backyard, fell full length, and found myself face-to-face with a blank-eyed doll wearing a tiara and nothing else. The revolver flew out of my hand. I went searching for it on my hands and knees, thinking I would never find it; this was the obdurate past’s final trick. A small one, compared to raging stomach flu and Bill Turcotte, but a good one. Then, just as I spotted it lying at the edge of a trapezoidal length of light thrown by the kitchen window, I heard a car coming down Kossuth Street. It was moving far faster than any reasonable
driver would have dared to travel on a street that was no doubt full of children wearing masks and carrying trick-or-treat bags. I knew who it was even before it screeched to a stop.

Inside 379, Doris Dunning was sitting on the couch with Troy while Ellen pranced around in her Indian princess costume, wild to get going. Troy had just told her that he would help eat the candy when she, Tugga, and Harry came back. Ellen was replying, “No, you won’t, dress up and get your own.” Everybody would laugh at that, even Harry, who was in the bathroom taking a last-minute whiz. Because Ellen was a real Lucille Ball who could make anybody laugh.

I snatched at the gun. It slipped through my sweat-slick fingers and landed in the grass again. My shin was howling where I’d barked it on the side of the sandbox. On the other side of the house, a car door slammed and rapid footsteps rattled on concrete. I remember thinking,
Bar the door, Mom, that’s not just your bad-tempered husband; that’s Derry itself coming up the walk.

I grabbed the gun, staggered upright, stumbled over my own stupid feet, almost went down again, found my balance, and ran for the back door. The cellar bulkhead was in my path. I detoured around it, convinced that if I put my weight on it, it would give way. The air itself seemed to have turned syrupy, as if it were also trying to slow me down.

Even if it kills me,
I thought.
Even if it kills me and Oswald goes through with it and millions die. Even then. Because this is
now
. This is
them.

The back door would be locked. I was so sure of this that I almost tumbled off the stoop when the knob turned and it swung outward. I stepped into a kitchen that still smelled of the pot roast Mrs. Dunning had cooked in her Hotpoint. The sink was stacked with dishes. There was a gravy boat on the counter; beside it, a platter of cold noodles. From the TV came a trembling violin soundtrack—what Christy used to call “murder music.” Very fitting. Lying on the counter was the rubber Frankenstein mask
Tugga meant to wear when he went out trick-or-treating. Next to it was a paper swag-bag with
TUGGA’S CANDY DO NOT TOUCH
printed on the side in black crayon.

In his theme, Harry had quoted his mother as saying, “Get out of here with that thing, you’re not suppose to be here.” What I heard her actually say as I ran across the linoleum toward the arch between the kitchen and the living room was, “Frank? What are you doing here?” Her voice began to rise. “What’s that? Why have you . . .
get out of here!
”

Then she screamed.

As I came through the arch, a child said: “Who are you? Why is my mom yelling? Is my daddy here?”

I turned my head and saw ten-year-old Harry Dunning standing in the door of a small water closet in the far corner of the kitchen. He was dressed in buckskin and carrying his air rifle in one hand. With the other he was pulling at his fly. Then Doris Dunning screamed again. The other two boys were yelling. There was a thud—a heavy, sickening sound—and the scream was cut off.

“No, Daddy, don’t, you’re HURRRTING her!”
Ellen shrieked.

I ran through the arch and stopped there with my mouth open. Based on Harry’s theme, I had always assumed that I’d have to stop a man swinging the sort of hammer guys kept in their toolboxes. That wasn’t what he had. What he had was a sledgehammer with a twenty-pound head, and he was handling it as if it were a toy. His sleeves were rolled up, and I could see the bulge of muscles that had been built up by twenty years of cutting meat and toting carcasses. Doris was on the living room rug. He had already broken her arm—the bone was sticking out through a rip in the sleeve of her dress—and dislocated her shoulder as well, from the look. Her face was pale and dazed. She was crawling across the rug in front of the TV with her hair hanging in her face. Dunning was slinging back
the hammer. This time he’d connect with her head, crushing her skull and sending her brains flying onto the couch cushions.

Ellen was a little dervish, trying to push him back out the door.
“Stop, Daddy, stop!”

He grabbed her by her hair and heaved her. She went reeling, feathers flying out of her headdress. She struck the rocking chair and knocked it over.

“Dunning!”
I shouted.
“Stop it!”

He looked at me with red, streaming eyes. He was drunk. He was crying. Snot hung from his nostrils and spit slicked his chin. His face was a cramp of rage, woe, and bewilderment.

“Who the fuck’re you?” he asked, then charged at me without waiting for an answer.

I pulled the trigger of the revolver, thinking,
This time it won’t fire, it’s a Derry gun and it won’t fire.

But it did. The bullet took him in the shoulder. A red rose bloomed on his white shirt. He twisted sideways with the impact, then came on again. He raised the sledge. The bloom on his shirt spread, but he didn’t seem to feel it.

I pulled the trigger again, but someone jostled me just as I did, and the bullet went high and wild. It was Harry.
“Stop it, Daddy!”
His voice was shrill.
“Stop or I’ll shoot you!”

Arthur “Tugga” Dunning was crawling toward me, toward the kitchen. Just as Harry fired his air rifle—
ka-chow!
—Dunning brought the sledge down on Tugga’s head. The boy’s face was obliterated in a sheet of blood. Bone fragments and clumps of hair leaped high in the air; droplets of blood spattered the overhead light fixture. Ellen and Mrs. Dunning were shrieking, shrieking.

I caught my balance and fired a third time. This one tore off Dunning’s right cheek all the way up to the ear, but it still didn’t stop him.
He’s not human
is what I thought then, and what I still think now. All I saw in his gushing eyes and gnashing mouth—he seemed to be chewing the air rather than breathing it—was a kind of blabbering emptiness.

“Who the fuck’re you?” he repeated, then: “You’re trespassing.”

He slung the sledge back and brought it around in a whistling horizontal arc. I bent at the knees, ducking as I did it, and although the twenty-pound head seemed to miss me entirely—I felt no pain, not then—a wave of heat flashed across the top of my head. The gun flew out of my hand, struck the wall, and bounced into the corner. Something warm was running down the side of my face. Did I understand he’d clipped me just enough to tear a six-inch-long gash in my scalp? That he’d missed either knocking me unconscious or outright killing me by maybe as little as an eighth of an inch? I can’t say. All of this happened in less than a minute; maybe it was only thirty seconds. Life turns on a dime, and when it does, it turns fast.

“Get out!”
I shouted at Troy.
“Take your sister and get out! Yell for help! Yell your head o—”

Dunning swung the sledge. I jumped back, and the head buried itself in the wall, smashing laths and sending a puff of plaster into the air to join the gunsmoke. The TV was still playing. Still violins, still murder music.

As Dunning struggled to pull his sledge out of the wall, something flew past me. It was the Daisy air rifle. Harry had thrown it. The barrel struck Frank Dunning in his torn-open cheek and he screamed with pain.

“You little bastard! I’ll kill you for that!”

Troy was carrying Ellen to the door.
So that’s all right,
I thought,
I changed things at least that much—

But before he could get her out, someone first filled the door and then came stumbling in, knocking Troy Dunning and the little girl to the floor. I barely had time to see this, because Frank had pulled the sledge free and was coming for me. I backed up, shoving Harry into the kitchen with one hand.

“Out the back door, son. Fast. I’ll hold him off until you—”

Frank Dunning shrieked and stiffened. All at once something was poking out through his chest. It was like a magic trick. The thing was so coated with blood it took a second for me to realize what it was: the point of a bayonet.

“That’s for my sister, you fuck,” Bill Turcotte rasped. “That’s for Clara.”

Dunning went down, feet in the living room, head in the archway between the living room and the kitchen. But not all the way down. The tip of the blade dug into the floor and held him up. One of his feet kicked a single time, then he was still. He looked like he’d died trying to do a push-up.

Everyone was screaming. The air stank of gunsmoke, plaster, and blood. Doris was lurching crookedly toward her dead son with her hair hanging in her face. I didn’t want her to see that—Tugga’s head had been split open all the way down to the jaw—but there was no way I could stop her.

“I’ll do better next time, Mrs. Dunning,” I croaked. “That’s a promise.”

There was blood all over my face; I had to wipe it out of my left eye in order to see on that side. Since I was still conscious, I thought I wasn’t hurt too badly, and I knew that scalp wounds bleed like a bitch. But I was a mess, and if there was ever going to be a next time, I had to get out of here this time, unseen and in a hurry.

But I had to talk to Turcotte before I left. Or at least try. He had collapsed against the wall by Dunning’s splayed feet. He was holding his chest and gasping. His face was corpse-white except for his lips, now as purple as those of a kid who has been gobbling huckleberries. I reached for his hand. He grasped it with panicky tightness, but there was a tiny glint of humor in his eyes.

“Who’s the chickenshit now, Amberson?”

“Not you,” I said. “You’re a hero.”

“Yeah,” he wheezed. “Just toss the fuckin medal in my coffin.”

Doris was cradling her dead son. Behind her, Troy was walking in circles with Ellen’s head pressed tight against his chest. He didn’t
look toward us, didn’t seem to realize we were there. The little girl was wailing.

“You’ll be okay,” I said. As if I knew. “Now listen, because this is important: forget my name.”

“What name? You never gave it.”

“Right. And . . . you know my car?”

“Ford.” He was losing his voice, but his eyes were still fixed on mine. “Nice one. Convert. Y-block engine. Fifty-four or—five.”

“You never saw it. That’s the most important thing of all, Turcotte. I need it to get downstate tonight and I’ll have to take the turnpike most of the way because I don’t know any of the other roads. If I can get down to central Maine, I’ll be free and clear. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

“Never saw your car,” he said, then winced. “Ah, fuck, don’t that
hurt.
”

I put my fingers on his stubble-prickly throat and felt his pulse. It was rapid and wildly uneven. In the distance I could hear wailing sirens. “You did the right thing.”

His eyes rolled. “Almost didn’t. I don’t know what I was thinkin of. I must have been crazy. Listen, buddy. If they do run you down, don’t tell em what I . . . you know, what I—”

“I never would. You took care of him, Turcotte. He was a mad dog and you put him down. Your sister would be proud.”

He smiled and closed his eyes.

I went into the bathroom, grabbed a towel, soaked it in the basin, and scrubbed my bloody face. I tossed the towel in the tub, grabbed two more, and stepped out into the kitchen.

The boy who had brought me here was standing on the faded linoleum by the stove and watching me. Although it had probably been six years since he’d sucked his thumb, he was sucking it now.
His eyes were wide and solemn, swimming with tears. Freckles of blood spattered his cheeks and brow. Here was a boy who had just experienced something that would no doubt traumatize him, but he was also a boy who would never grow up to become Hoptoad Harry. Or to write a theme that would make me cry.

“Who are you, mister?” he asked.

“Nobody.” I walked past him to the door. He deserved more than that, though. The sirens were closer now, but I turned back. “Your good angel,” I said. Then I slipped out the back door and into Halloween night of 1958.

I walked up Wyemore to Witcham, saw flashing blue lights heading for Kossuth Street, and kept on walking. Two blocks further into the residential district, I turned right on Gerard Avenue. People were standing out on the sidewalks, turned toward the sound of the sirens.

“Mister, do you know what happened?” a man asked me. He was holding the hand of a sneaker-wearing Snow White.

“I heard kids setting off cherry bombs,” I said. “Maybe they started a fire.” I kept walking and made sure to keep the left side of my face away from him, because there was a streetlight nearby and my scalp was still oozing blood.

Four blocks down, I turned back toward Witcham. This far south of Kossuth, Witcham Street was dark and quiet. All the available police cars were probably now at the scene. Good. I had almost reached the corner of Grove and Witcham when my knees turned to rubber. I looked around, saw no trick-or-treaters, and sat down on the curb. I couldn’t afford to stop, but I had to. I’d thrown up everything in my stomach, I hadn’t had anything to eat all day except for one lousy candybar (and couldn’t remember if I’d even managed to get all of that down before Turcotte jumped me), and I’d
just been through a violent interlude in which I had been wounded—how badly I still didn’t know. It was either stop now and let my body regroup or pass out on the sidewalk.