It (102 page)

By one of those odd quirks of fate or coincidence which sometimes obtain (and which, in truth, obtained more frequently in Derry), Tom had taken a room at the Koala Inn on Outer Jackson Street and Audra had taken a room at the Holiday Inn; the two motels were side by side, their parking lots divided only by a raised concrete sidewalk. And as it so happened, Audra's rented Datsun and Tom's purchased LTD wagon were parked nose-to-nose, separated only by that walkway. Both slept now, Audra quietly on her side, Tom Rogan on his back, snoring so heavily that his swollen lips flapped.

Henry spent that day hiding—hiding in the puckies beside Route 9. Sometimes he slept. Sometimes he lay watching police cruisers slide by like hunting dogs. While the Losers ate lunch, Henry listened to voices from the moon.

And when dark fell, he went out to the verge of the road and stuck out his thumb.

After awhile, some fool came along and picked him up.

DERRY:

THE THIRD

INTERLUDE

“A bird came down the Walk—

He did not know I saw—

He bit an Angleworm in halves

And ate the fellow, raw”

—Emily Dickinson, “A Bird Came Down the Walk”

March 17th, 1985

The fire at the Black Spot happened in the late fall of 1930. So far as I am able to determine, that fire—the one my father barely escaped—ended the cycle of murder and disappearance which happened in the years 1929–30, just as the explosion at the Ironworks ended a cycle some twenty-five years before. It is as if a monstrous sacrifice is needed at the end of the cycle to quiet whatever terrible force it is which works here . . . to send It to sleep for another quarter-century or so.

But if such a sacrifice is needed to end each cycle, it seems that some similar event is needed to set each cycle in motion.

Which brings me to the Bradley Gang.

Their execution took place at the three-way intersection of Canal, Main, and Kansas—not far, in fact, from the place shown in the picture which began to move for Bill and Richie one day in June of 1958—some thirteen months before the fire at the Black Spot, in October of 1929 . . . not long before the stock-market crash.

As with the fire at the Black Spot, many Derry residents affect not to remember what happened that day. Or they were out of town, visiting relatives. Or they were napping that afternoon and never found out what had happened until they heard it on the radio news that night. Or they will simply look you full in the face and lie to you.

The police logs for that day indicate that Chief Sullivan was not even in town
(Sure I remember,
Aloysius Nell told me from a chair on the sun-terrace of the Paulson Nursing Home in Bangor.
That was my first year on the force, and I ought to remember. He was off in western Maine, bird-hunting. They'd been sheeted and carried off by the time he got back. Madder than a wet hen was Jim Sullivan),
but a picture in a reference book on gangsters called
Bloodletters and Badmen
shows a grinning man standing beside the bullet-riddled corpse of Al Bradley in the
morgue, and if that man is not Chief Sullivan, it is surely his twin brother.

It was from Mr. Keene that I finally got what I believe to be the true version of the story—Norbert Keene, who was the proprietor of the Center Street Drug Store from 1925 until 1975. He talked to me willingly enough, but, like Betty Ripsom's father, he made me turn off my tape-recorder before he would really unwind the tale—not that it mattered; I can hear his papery voice yet—another
a capella
singer in the damned choir that is this town.

“No reason not to tell you,” he said. “No one will print it, and no one would believe it even if they did.” He offered me an old-fashioned apothecary jar. “Licorice whip? As I remember, you were always partial to the red ones, Mikey.”

I took one.
“Was
Chief Sullivan there that day?”

Mr. Keene laughed and took a licorice whip for himself. “You wondered about that, did you?”

“I wondered,” I agreed, chewing a piece of the red licorice. I hadn't had one since I was a kid, shoving my pennies across the counter to a much younger and sprier Mr. Keene. It tasted just as fine as it had back then.

“You're too young to remember when Bobby Thomson hit his home run for the Giants in the play-off game in 1951,” Mr. Keene said. “You wouldn't have been but four years old. Well! They ran an article about that game in the newspaper a few years after, and it seemed like just about a million folks from New York claimed they were there in the ballpark that day.” Mr. Keene gummed his licorice whip and a little dark drool ran down from the corner of his mouth. He wiped it off fastidiously with his handkerchief. We were sitting in the office behind the drugstore, because although Norbert Keene was eighty-five and retired ten years, he still did the books for his grandson.

“Just the opposite when it comes to the Bradley Gang!” Keene exclaimed. He was smiling, but it was not a pleasant smile—it was cynical, coldly reminiscent. “There was maybe twenty thousand people who lived in downtown Derry back then. Main Street and Canal Street had both been paved for four years, but Kansas Street was still dirt. Raised dust in the summer and turned into a boghole every
March and November. They used to oil Up-Mile Hill every June and every Fourth of July the Mayor would talk about how they were going to pave Kansas Street, but it never happened until 1942. It . . . but what was I saying?”

“Twenty thousand people who lived right downtown,” I prompted.

“Oh. Ayuh. Well, of those twenty thousand, there's probably half that have passed away since, maybe even more—fifty years is a long time. And people have a funny way of dying young in Derry. Perhaps it is the air. But of those left, I don't think you'd find more than a dozen who'd say they were in town the day the Bradley Gang went to Tophet. Butch Rowden over at the meat market would fess up to it, I guess—he keeps a picture of one of the cars they had up on the wall where he cuts meat. Looking at that picture you'd hardly know it was a car. Charlotte Littlefield would tell you a thing or two, if you could get on her good side; she teaches over to the high school, and although I reckon she must not have been more than ten or twelve at the time I bet she remembers plenty. Carl Snow . . . Aubrey Stacey . . . Eben Stampnell . . . and that old geezer who paints those funny pictures and drinks all night at Wally's—Pickman, I think his name is—they'd remember. They were all there. . . .”

He trailed off vaguely, looking at the licorice whip in his hand. I thought of prodding him and decided not to.

At last he said, “Most of the others would lie about it, the way people lied and said they were there when Bobby Thomson hit his homer, that's all I mean. But people lied about being at that ballgame because they wished they had been there. People would lie to you about being in Derry that day because they wish they
hadn't
been. Do you understand me, sonny?”

I nodded.

“You sure you want to hear the rest of this?” Mr. Keene asked me. “You're looking a bit peaked, Mr. Mikey.”

“I don't,” I said, “but I think I better, all the same.”

“Okay,” Mr. Keene said mildly. It was my day for memories; as he offered me the apothecary jar with the licorice whips in it, I suddenly remembered a radio program my mother and dad used to listen to when I was just a little kid:
Mr. Keene, Tracer of Lost Persons.

“Sheriff was there that day, all right. He was s'posed to go
bird-hunting, but he changed his mind damn quick when Lal Machen came in and told him that he was expecting Al Bradley that very afternoon.”

“How did Machen know that?” I asked.

“Well, that's an instructive tale in itself,” Mr. Keene said, and the cynical smile creased his face again. “Bradley wasn't never Public Enemy Number One on the FBI's hit parade, but they had wanted him—since 1928 or so. To show they could cut the mustard, I guess. Al Bradley and his brother George hit six or seven banks across the Midwest and then kidnapped a banker for ransom. The ransom was paid—thirty thousand dollars, a big sum for those days—but they killed the banker anyway.

“By then the Midwest had gotten a little toasty for the gangs that ran there, so Al and George and their litter of ratlings run northeast, up this way. They rented themselves a big farmhouse just over the town line in Newport, not far from where the Rhulin Farms are today.

“That was in the dog-days of '29, maybe July, maybe August, maybe even early September . . . I don't know for sure just when. There were eight of em—Al Bradley, George Bradley, Joe Conklin and
his
brother Cal, an Irishman named Arthur Malloy who was called ‘Creeping Jesus' Malloy because he was nearsighted but wouldn't put on his specs unless he absolutely had to, and Patrick Caudy, a young fellow from Chicago who was said to be kill-crazy but as handsome as Adonis. There were also two women with them: Kitty Donahue, George Bradley's common-law wife, and Marie Hauser, who belonged to Caudy but sometimes got passed around, according to the stories we all heard later.

“They made one bad assumption when they got up here, sonny—they got the idea they were so far away from Indiana that they were safe.

“They laid low for awhile, and then got bored and decided they wanted to go hunting. They had plenty of firepower but they were a bit low on ammunition. So they all came into Derry on the seventh of October in two cars. Patrick Caudy took the women around shopping while the other men went into Machen's Sporting Goods. Kitty Donahue bought a dress in Freese's, and she died in it two days later.

“Lal Machen waited on the men himself. He died in 1959. Too
fat, he was. Always too fat. But there wasn't nothing wrong with his eyes, and he knew it was Al Bradley the minute he walked in, he said. He thought he recognized some of the others, but he wasn't sure of Malloy until he put on his specs to look at a display of knives in a glass case.

“Al Bradley walked up to him and said, ‘We'd like to buy some ammunition.'

“ ‘Well,' Lal Machen says, ‘you come to the right place.'

“Bradley handed him a paper and Lal read it over. The paper has been lost, at least so far as I know, but Lal said it would have turned your blood cold. They wanted five hundred rounds of .38-caliber ammunition, eight hundred rounds of .45-caliber, sixty rounds of .50-caliber, which they don't even make anymore, shotgun shells loaded both with buck and bird, and a thousand rounds each of .22 short- and long-rifle. Plus—get this—sixteen thousand rounds of .45 machine-gun bullets.”

“Holy
shit!”
I said.

Mr. Keene smiled that cynical smile again and offered me the apothecary jar. At first I shook my head and then I took another whip.

“ ‘This here is quite a shopping-list, boys,' Lal says.

“ ‘Come on, Al,' Creeping Jesus Malloy says. ‘I told you we wasn't going to get it in a hick town like this. Let's go on up to Bangor. They won't have nothing there either, but I can use a ride.'

“ ‘Now hold your horses,' Lal says, just as cool as a cucumber. ‘This here is one hell of a good order and I wouldn't want to lose it to that Jew up Bangor. I can give you the .22s right now, also the bird and half the buck. I can give you a hundred rounds each of the .38- and .45-caliber, too. I could have the rest for you . . . ' And here Lal sort of half-closed his eyes and tapped his chin, as if calculating it out. ‘. . . by day after tomorrow. How'd that be?'

“Bradley grinned like he'd split his head around the back and said it sounded just as fine as paint. Cal Conklin said he'd still like to go on up to Bangor, but he was outvoted. ‘Now, if you're not sure you can make good on this order, you ought to say so right now,' Al Bradley says to Lal, ‘because I'm a pretty fine fellow but when I get mad you don't want to get into a pissing contest with me. You follow?'

“ ‘I do,' Lal says, ‘and I'll have all the ammo you could want, Mr.—?'

“ ‘Rader,' Bradley says. ‘Richard D. Rader, at your service.'

“He stuck out his hand and Lal pumped it, grinning all the while. ‘Real pleased, Mr. Rader.'

“So then Bradley asked him what would be a good time for him and his friends to drop by and pick up the goods, and Lal Machen asked them right back how two in the afternoon sounded to them. They agreed that would be fine. Out they went. Lal watched them go. They met the two women and Caudy on the sidewalk outside. Lal recognized Caudy, too.

“So,” Mr. Keene said, looking at me bright-eyed, “what do you think Lal done then? Called the cops?”

“I guess he didn't,” I said, “based on what happened. Me, I would have broken my leg getting to the telephone.”

“Well, maybe you would and maybe you wouldn't,” Mr. Keene said with that same cynical, bright-eyed smile, and I shivered because I knew what he meant . . . and he knew I knew. Once something heavy begins to roll, it can't be stopped; it's simply going to roll until it finds a flat place long enough to wear away all of its forward motion. You can stand in front of that thing and get flattened . . . but that won't stop it, either.