11/22/63: A Novel (17 page)

Gently and rather apologetically, he tilted the hat the other way. It was a matter of two inches or less, but I stopped looking like a clodhopper on a visit to the big city and started to look like . . . well . . . central Maine’s most debonair time-traveler. I thanked him.

“Not at all, Mr.—?”

“Amberson,” I said, and held out my hand. His grip was short, limp, and powdery with some sort of talcum. I restrained an urge to rub my hand on my sport coat after he released it.

“In Derry on business?”

“Yes. Are you from here yourself?”

“Lifelong resident,” he said, and sighed as if this were a burden. Based on my own first impressions, I guessed it might be. “What’s your game, Mr. Amberson, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Real estate. But while I’m here, I thought I’d look up an old Army buddy. His name is Dunning. I don’t recall his first name, we just used to call him Skip.” The Skip part was a fabrication, but it was true that I didn’t know the first name of Harry Dunning’s father. Harry had named his brothers and sister in his theme, but the man with the hammer had always been “my father” or “my dad.”

“I’m afraid I couldn’t help you there, sir.” Now he sounded distant. Business was done, and although the store was empty of other customers, he wanted me gone.

“Well, maybe you can with something else. What’s the best hotel in town?”

“That would be the Derry Town House. Just turn back to Kenduskeag
Avenue, take your right, and go up Up-Mile Hill to Main Street. Look for the carriage lamps out front.”

“Up-Mile Hill?”

“That’s what we call it, yes sir. If there’s nothing else, I have several alterations to make out back.”

When I left, the light had begun to drain from the sky. One thing I remember vividly about the time I spent in Derry during September and October of 1958 was how evening always seemed to come early.

One storefront down from Derry Dress & Everyday was Machen’s Sporting Goods, where THE FALL GUN SALE was under way. Inside, I saw two men sighting hunting rifles while an elderly clerk with a string tie (and a stringy neck to go with it) looked on approvingly. The other side of Canal appeared to be lined with workingmen’s bars, the kind where you could get a beer and a shot for fifty cents and all the music on the Rock-Ola would be C & W. There was the Happy Nook, the Wishing Well (which the habitués called the Bucket of Blood, I later learned), Two Brothers, the Golden Spoke, and the Sleepy Silver Dollar.

Standing outside the latter, a quartet of bluecollar gents was taking the afternoon air and staring at my convertible. They were equipped with mugs of beer and cigarettes. Their faces were shaded beneath flat caps of tweed and cotton. Their feet were clad in the big no-color workboots my 2011 students called shitkickers. Three of the four were wearing suspenders. They watched me with no expression on their faces. I thought for a moment of the mongrel that had chased my car, snapping and drooling, then crossed the street.

“Gents,” I said. “What’s on tap in there?”

For a moment none of them answered. Just when I thought none
of them would, the one sans suspenders said, “Bud and Mick, what else? You from away?”

“Wisconsin,” I said.

“Bully for you,” one of them muttered.

“Late in the year for tourists,” another said.

“I’m in town on business, but I thought I might look up an old service buddy while I’m here.” No response to this, unless one of the men dropping his cigarette butt onto the sidewalk and then putting it out with a snot-loogie the size of a small mussel could be termed an answer. Nevertheless, I pushed on. “Skip Dunning’s his name. Do any of you fellows know a Dunning?”

“Should hope to smile n kiss a pig,” No Suspenders said.

“I beg pardon?”

He rolled his eyes and turned down the corners of his mouth, the out-of-patience expression a man gives to a stupid person with no hope of ever being smart. “Derry’s full of Dunnings. Check the damn phone book.” He started inside. His posse followed. No Suspenders opened the door for them, then turned back to me. “What’s that Ford got in it?”
Gut
for
got.
“V-8?”

“Y-block.” Hoping I sounded as if I knew what it meant.

“Pretty good goer?”

“Not bad.”

“Then maybe you should climb in and go ’er right on up the hill. They got some nice joints there. These bars are for millies.” No Suspenders assessed me in a cold way I came to expect in Derry, but never got used to. “You’d get stared at. P’raps more, when the ’leven-to-seven lets out from Striar’s and Boutillier’s.”

“Thanks. That’s very kind of you.”

The cold assessment continued. “You don’t know much, do you?” he remarked, then went inside.

I walked back to my convertible. On that gray street, with the smell of industrial smokes in the air and the afternoon bleeding away to evening, downtown Derry looked only marginally more charming than a dead hooker in a church pew. I got in, engaged
the clutch, started the engine, and felt a strong urge to just drive away. Drive back to Lisbon Falls, climb up through the rabbit-hole, and tell Al Templeton to find another boy. Only he couldn’t, could he? He was out of strength and almost out of time. I was, as the New England saying goes, the trapper’s last shot.

I drove up to Main Street, saw the carriage lamps (they came on for the night just as I spotted them), and pulled into the turnaround in front of the Derry Town House. Five minutes later, I was checked in. My time in Derry had begun.

By the time I got my new possessions unpacked (some of the remaining cash went into my wallet, the rest into the lining of my new valise) I was good and hungry, but before going down to dinner, I checked the telephone book. What I saw caused my heart to sink. Mr. No Suspenders might not have been very welcoming, but he was right about Dunnings selling cheap in Derry and the four or five surrounding hamlets that were also included in the directory. There was almost a full page of them. It wasn’t that surprising, because in small towns certain names seem to sprout like dandelions on a lawn in June. In my last five years teaching English at LHS, I must have had two dozen Starbirds and Lemkes, some of them siblings, most of them first, second, or third cousins. They intermarried and made more.

Before leaving for the past I should have taken time to call Harry Dunning and ask him his father’s first name—it would have been so simple. I surely would have, if I hadn’t been so utterly and completely gobsmacked by what Al had shown me, and what he was asking me to do.
But,
I thought,
how hard can it be?
It shouldn’t take Sherlock Holmes to find a family with kids named Troy, Arthur (alias Tugga), Ellen, and Harry.

With this thought to cheer me, I went down to the hotel restaurant and ordered a shore dinner, which came with clams and a lobster
roughly the size of an outboard motor. I skipped dessert in favor of a beer in the bar. In the detective novels I read, bartenders were often excellent sources of information. Of course, if the one working the Town House stick was like the other people I’d met so far in this grim little burg, I wouldn’t get far.

He wasn’t. The man who left off his glass-polishing duties to serve me was young and stocky, with a cheery full moon of a face below his flattop haircut. “What can I get you, friend?”

The f-word sounded good to me, and I returned his smile with enthusiasm. “Miller Lite?”

He looked puzzled. “Never heard of that one, but I’ve got High Life.”

Of course he hadn’t heard of Miller Lite; it hadn’t been invented yet. “That would be fine. Guess I forgot I was on the East Coast there for a second.”

“Where you from?” He used a church key to whisk the top off a bottle, and set a frosted glass in front of me.

“Wisconsin, but I’ll be here for awhile.” Although we were alone, I lowered my voice. It seemed to inspire confidence. “Real estate stuff. Got to look around a little.”

He nodded respectfully and poured for me before I could. “Good luck to you. God knows there’s plenty for sale in these parts, and most of it going cheap. I’m getting out, myself. End of the month. Heading for a place with a little less edge to it.”

“It
doesn’t
seem all that welcoming,” I said, “but I thought that was just a Yankee thing. We’re friendlier in Wisconsin, and just to prove it, I’ll buy you a beer.”

“Never drink alcohol on the job, but I might have a Coke.”

“Go for it.”

“Thanks very much. It’s nice to have a gent on a slow night.” I watched as he made the Coke by pumping syrup into a glass, adding soda water, and then stirring. He took a sip and smacked his lips. “I like em sweet.”

Judging by the belly he was getting, I wasn’t surprised.

“That stuff about Yankees being stand-offy is bullshit, anyway,” he said. “I grew up in Fork Kent, and it’s the friendliest little town you’d ever want to visit. Why, when tourists get off the Boston and
Maine up there, we just about kiss em hello. Went to bartending school there, then headed south to seek my fortune. This looked like a good place to start, and the pay’s not bad, but—” He looked around, saw no one, but still lowered his own voice. “You want the truth, Jackson? This town stinks.”

“I know what you mean. All those mills.”

“It’s a lot more than that. Look around. What do you see?”

I did as he asked. There was a fellow who looked like a salesman in the corner, drinking a whiskey sour, but that was it.

“Not much,” I said.

“That’s the way it is all through the week. The pay’s good because there’s no tips. The beerjoints downtown do a booming business, and we get some folks in on Friday and Saturday nights, but otherwise, that’s just about it. The carriage trade does its drinking at home, I guess.” He lowered his voice further. Soon he’d be whispering. “We had a bad summer here, my friend. Local folks keep it as quiet as they can—even the newspaper doesn’t play it up—but there was some nasty work. Murders. Half a dozen at least. Kids. Found one down in the Barrens just recently. Patrick Hockstetter, his name was. All decayed.”

“The Barrens?”

“It’s this swampy patch that runs right through the center of town. You probably saw it when you flew in.”

I’d been in a car, but I still knew what he was talking about.

The bartender’s eyes widened. “That’s not the real estate you’re interested in, is it?”

“Can’t say,” I told him. “If word got around, I’d be looking for a new job.”

“Understood, understood.” He drank half his Coke, then stifled a belch with the back of his hand. “But I hope it is. They ought to pave that goddam thing over. It’s nothing but stinkwater and mosquitoes. You’d be doing this town a favor. Sweeten it up a little bit.”

“Other kids found down there?” I asked. A serial child-murderer
would explain a lot about the gloom I’d been feeling ever since I crossed the town line.

“Not that I know of, but people say that’s where some of the disappeared ones went, because that’s where all the big sewage pumping stations are. I’ve heard people say there are so many sewer pipes under Derry—most of em laid in the Great Depression—that nobody knows where all of em are. And you know how kids are.”

“Adventurous.”

He nodded emphatically. “Right with Eversharp. There’s people who say it was some vag who’s since moved on. Other folks say he was a local who dressed up like a clown to keep from being recognized. The first of the victims—this was last year, before I came—they found him at the intersection of Witcham and Jackson with his arm ripped clean off. Denbrough was his name, George Denbrough. Poor little tyke.” He gave me a meaningful look. “And he was found right next to one of those sewer drains. The ones that dump into the Barrens.”

“Christ.”

“Yeah.”

“I hear you using the past tense about all this stuff.”

I got ready to explain what I meant, but apparently this guy had been listening in English class as well as bartending school. “It seems to’ve stopped, knock on wood.” He rapped his knuckles on the bar. “Maybe whoever was doing it packed up and moved on. Or maybe the sonofabitch killed himself, sometimes they do that. That’d be good. But it wasn’t any homicidal maniac in a clown suit who killed the little Corcoran boy. The clown who did
that
murder was the kid’s own father, if you can believe it.”

That was close enough to why I was here to feel like fate rather than coincidence. I took a careful sip of my beer. “Is that so?”

“You bet it is. Dorsey Corcoran, that was the kid’s name. Only four years old, and you know what his goddam father did? Beat him to death with a recoilless hammer.”

A hammer. He did it with a hammer.
I maintained my look of polite interest—at least I hope I did—but I felt gooseflesh go
marching up my arms. “That’s awful.”

“Yeah, and not the wor—” He broke off and looked over my shoulder. “Get you another, sir?”

It was the businessman. “Not me,” he said, and handed over a dollar bill. “I’m going to bed, and tomorrow I’m blowing this pop-shop. I hope they remember how to order hardware in Waterville and Augusta, because they sure don’t here. Keep the change, son, buy yourself a DeSoto.” He plodded out with his head down.

“See? That’s a perfect example of what we get at this oasis.” The bartender looked sadly after his departing customer. “One drink, off to bed, and tomorrow it’s seeya later, alligator, after awhile, crocodile. If it keeps up, this burg’s gonna be a ghost town.” He stood up straight and tried to square his shoulders—an impossible task, because they were as round as the rest of him. “But who gives a rip? Come October first, I’m gone. Down the road. Happy trails to you, until we meet again.”

“The father of this boy, Dorsey . . . he didn’t kill any of the others?”

“Naw, he was alibi’d up. I guess he was the kid’s stepfather, now that I think about it. Dicky Macklin. Johnny Keeson at the desk—he probably checked you in—told me he used to come in here and drink sometimes, until he got banned for trying to pick up a stewardess and getting nasty when she told him to go peddle his papers. After that I guess he did his drinking at the Spoke or the Bucket. They’ll have anybody in those places.”