It (103 page)

“Maybe you would have and maybe you wouldn't,” Mr. Keene repeated. “But I can tell you what Lal Machen did. The rest of that day and all of the next, when someone he knew came in—some man—why, he would tell them that he knew who had been out in the woods around the Newport-Derry line shooting at deer and grouse and God knows what else with Kansas City typewriters. It was the Bradley Gang. He knew for a fact because he had recognized em. He'd tell em that Bradley and his men were coming back the next day around two to pick up the rest of their order. He'd tell them he'd promised Bradley all the ammunition he could want, and that was a promise he intended to keep.”

“How many?” I asked. I felt hypnotized by his glittering eye. Suddenly the dry smell of this back room—the smell of prescription drugs and powders, of Musterole and Vicks VapoRub and Robitussin cough syrup—suddenly all those smells seemed suffocating . . . but I could no more have left than I could kill myself by holding my breath.

“How many men did Lal pass the word to?” Mr. Keene asked.

I nodded.

“Don't know for sure,” Mr. Keene said. “Didn't stand right there and take up sentry duty. All those he felt he could trust, I suppose.”

“Those he could trust,” I mused. My voice was a little hoarse.

“Ayuh,” Mr. Keene said. “Derrymen, you know. Not that many of em raised cows.” He laughed at this old joke before going on.

“I came in around ten the day after the Bradleys first dropped in on Lal. He told me the story, then asked how he could help me. I'd only come in to see if my last roll of pictures had been developed—in those days Machen's handled all the Kodak films and cameras—but after I got my photos I also said I could use some ammo for my Winchester.

“ ‘You gonna shoot some game, Norb?' Lal asks me, passing over the shells.

“ ‘Might plug some varmints,' I said, and we had us a chuckle over that.” Mr. Keene laughed and slapped his skinny leg as if this was still the best joke he had ever heard. He leaned forward and tapped my knee. “All I mean, son, is that the story got around all it needed to. Small towns, you know. If you tell the right people, what you need to pass along will
get
along . . . see what I mean? Like another licorice whip?”

I took one with numb fingers.

“Make you fat,” Mr. Keene said, and cackled. He looked old then . . . infinitely old, with his bifocals slipping down the gaunt blade of his nose and the skin stretched too tight and thin across his cheeks to wrinkle.

“The next day I brought my rifle into the store with me and Bob Tanner, who worked harder than any assistant I ever had after him, brought in his pop's shotgun. Around eleven that day Gregory Cole came in for a bicarb of soda and damned if he didn't have a Colt .45 jammed right in his belt.

“ ‘Don't blow your balls off with that, Greg,' I said.

“ ‘I come out of the woods all the way from Milford for this and I got one
fuck
of a hangover,' Greg says. ‘I guess I'll blow
someone's
balls off before the sun goes down.'

“Around one-thirty, I put the little sign I had,
BE BACK SOON, PLEASE BE PATIENT
, in the door and took my rifle and walked out the back into Richard's Alley. I asked Bob Tanner if he wanted to come
along and he said he'd better finish filling Mrs. Emerson's prescription and he'd see me later. ‘Leave me a live one, Mr. Keene,' he said, but I allowed as how I couldn't promise nothing.

“There was hardly any traffic on Canal Street at all, either on foot or by car. Every now and then a delivery truck would pass, but that was about all. I saw Jake Pinnette cross over and he had a rifle in each hand. He met Andy Criss, and they walked over to one of the benches that used to stand where the War Memorial was—you know, where the Canal goes underground.

“Petie Vanness and Al Nell and Jimmy Gordon were all sitting on the courthouse steps, eating sandwiches and fruit out of their dinnerbuckets, trading with each other for stuff that looked better to them, the way kids do on the schoolyard. They was all armed. Jimmy Gordon had himself a World War I Springfield that looked bigger than he did.

“I see a kid go walking toward Up-Mile Hill—I think maybe it was Zack Denbrough, the father of your old buddy, the one who turned out to be a writer—and Kenny Borton says from the window of the Christian Science Reading Room, ‘You want to get out of here, kid; there's going to be shooting.' Zack took one look at his face and ran like hell.

“There were men everywhere, men with guns, standing in doorways and sitting on steps and looking out of windows. Greg Cole was sitting in a doorway down the street with his .45 in his lap and about two dozen shells lined up beside him like toy sojers. Bruce Jagermeyer and that Swede, Olaf Theramenius, were standing underneath the marquee of the Bijou in the shade.”

Mr. Keene looked at me, through me. His eyes were not sharp now; they were hazy with memory, soft as the eyes of a man only become when he is remembering one of the best times of his life—the first home run he ever hit, maybe, or the first trout he ever landed that was big enough to keep, or the first time he ever lay with a willing woman.

“I remember I heard the wind, sonny,” he said dreamily. “I remember hearing the wind and hearing the courthouse clock toll two. Bob Tanner came up behind me and I was so tight-wired I almost blew his head off.

“He only nodded at me and crossed over to Vannock's Dry Goods, trailing his shadow out behind him.

“You would have thought that when it got to be two-ten and nothing happened, then two-fifteen, then two-twenty, folks would have just up and left, wouldn't you? But it didn't happen that way at all. People just kept their place. Because—”

“Because you knew they were going to come, didn't you?” I asked. “There was never any question at all.”

He beamed at me like a teacher pleased with a student's recital. “That's right!” he said. “We knew. No one had to talk about it, no one had to say, ‘Wellnow, let's wait until twenty past and if they don't show I've got to get back to work.' Things just stayed quiet, and around two-twenty-five that afternoon these two cars, one red and one dark blue, started down Up-Mile Hill and came into the intersection. One of them was a Chevrolet and the other was a La Salle. The Conklin brothers, Patrick Caudy, and Marie Hauser were in the Chevrolet. The Bradleys, Malloy, and Kitty Donahue were in the La Salle.

“They started through the intersection okay, and then Al Bradley slammed on the brakes of that La Salle so sudden that Caudy damn near ran into him. The street was too quiet and Bradley knew it. He wasn't nothing but an animal, but it doesn't take much to put up an animal's wind when it's been chased like a weasel in the corn for four years.

“He opened the door of the La Salle and stood up on the running board for a moment. He looked around, then he made a ‘go-back' gesture to Caudy with his hand. Caudy said, ‘What, boss?' I heard that plain as day, the only thing I heard any of them say that day. There was a wink of sun, too, I remember that. It came off a compact mirror. The Hauser woman was powdering her nose.

“That was when Lal Machen and
his
helper, Biff Marlow, came running out of Machen's store. ‘Put em up, Bradley, you're surrounded!' Lal shouts, and before Bradley could do more than turn his head, Lal started blasting. He was wild at first, but then he put one into Bradley's shoulder. The claret started to pour out of that hole right away. Bradley caught hold of the La Salle's doorpost and swung himself back into the car. He threw it into gear, and that's when everyone started to shoot.

“It was all over in four, maybe five minutes, but it seemed a whole hell of a lot longer while it was happening. Petie and Al and Jimmy Gordon just sat there on the courthouse steps and poured bullets into the back end of the Chevrolet. I saw Bob Tanner down on one knee, firing and working the bolt on that old rifle of his like a madman. Jagermeyer and Theramenius were shooting into the right side of the La Salle from under the theater marquee and Greg Cole stood in the gutter, holding that .45 automatic out in both hands, pulling the trigger just as fast as he could work it.

“There must have been fifty, sixty men firing all at once. After it was all over Lal Machen dug thirty-six slugs out of the brick sides of his store. And that was three days later, after just about every-damn-body in town who wanted one for a souvenir had come down and dug one out with his penknife. When it was at its worst, it sounded like the Battle of the Marne. Windows were blown in by rifle-fire all around Machen's.

“Bradley got the La Salle around in a half-circle and he wasn't slow but by the time he'd done he was running on four flats. Both the headlights were blowed out, and the windscreen was gone. Creeping Jesus Malloy and George Bradley were each at a backseat window, firing pistols. I seen one bullet take Malloy high up in the neck and tear it wide open. He shot twice more and then collapsed out the window with his arms hanging down.

“Caudy tried to turn the Chevrolet and only ran into the back end of Bradley's La Salle. That was really the end of em right there, son. The Chevrolet's front bumper locked with the La Salle's back one and there went any chance they might have had to make a run for it.

“Joe Conklin got out of the back seat and just stood there in the middle of the intersection, a pistol in each hand, and started to pour it on. He was shooting at Jake Pinnette and Andy Criss. The two of them fell off the bench they'd been sitting on and landed in the grass, Andy Criss shouting ‘I'm killed! I'm killed!' over and over again, although he was never so much as touched; neither of them were.

“Joe Conklin, he had time to fire both his guns empty before anything so much as touched him. His coat flew back and his pants twitched like some woman you couldn't see was stitching on them. He was wearing a straw hat, and it flew off his head so you could see how he'd center-parted his hair. He had one of his guns under his
arm and was trying to reload the other when someone cut the legs out from under him and he went down. Kenny Borton claimed him later, but there was really no way to tell. Could have been anybody.

“Conklin's brother Cal came out after him soon's Joe fell and down he went like a ton of bricks with a hole in his head.

“Marie Hauser came out. Maybe she was trying to surrender, I dunno. She still had the compact she'd been using to powder her nose in her right hand. She was screaming, I believe, but by then it was hard to hear. Bullets was flying all around them. That compact mirror was blown right out of her hand. She started back to the car then but she took one in the hip. She made it somehow and managed to crawl inside again.

“Al Bradley revved the La Salle up just as high as it would go, and managed to get it moving again. He dragged the Chevrolet maybe ten feet before the bumper tore right off'n it.

“The boys poured lead into it. All the windows was busted. One of the mudguards was laying in the street. Malloy was dead hanging out the window, but both of the Bradley brothers were still alive. George was firing from the back seat. His woman was dead beside him with one of her eyes shot out.

“Al Bradley got to the big intersection, then his auto mounted the curb and stopped there. He got out from behind the wheel and started running up Canal Street. He was riddled.

“Patrick Caudy got out of the Chevrolet, looked as if he was going to surrender for a minute, then he grabbed a .38 from a cheater-holster under his armpit. He triggered it off maybe three times, just firing wild, and then his shirt blew back from his chest in flames. He slid down the side of the Chevy until he was sitting on the running board. He shot one more time, and so far as I know that was the only bullet that hit anyone; it ricocheted off something and then grazed across the back of Greg Cole's hand. Left a scar he used to show off when he was drunk until someone—Al Nell, maybe—took him aside and told him it might be a good idea to shut up about what happened to the Bradley Gang.

“The Hauser woman came out and that time wasn't any doubt she was trying to surrender—she had her hands up. Maybe no one really meant to kill her, but by then there was a crossfire and she walked right into it.

“George Bradley run as far as that bench by the War Memorial, then someone pulped the back of his head with a shotgun blast. He fell down dead with his pants full of piss. . . .”

Hardly aware I was doing it, I took a licorice whip from the jar.

“They went on pouring rounds into those cars for another minute or so before it began to taper off,” Mr. Keene said. “When men get their blood up, it doesn't go down easy. That was when I looked around and saw Sheriff Sullivan behind Nell and the others on the courthouse steps, putting rounds through that dead Chevy with a Remington pump. Don't let anyone tell you he wasn't there; Norbert Keene is sitting in front of you and telling you he was.

“By the time the firing stopped, those cars didn't look like cars at all anymore, just hunks of junk with glass around them. Men started to walk over to them. No one talked. All you could hear was the wind and feet gritting over broken glass. That's when the picture-taking started. And you ought to know this, sonny: when the picture-taking starts, the story is over.”

Mr. Keene rocked in his chair, his slippers bumping placidly on the floor, looking at me.

“There's nothing like that in the Derry
News,”
was all I could think of to say. The headline for that day had read
STATE POLICE, FBI GUN DOWN BRADLEY GANG IN PITCHED BATTLE
. With the subhead “Local Police Lend Support.”

“Course not,” Mr. Keene said, laughing delightedly. “I seen the publisher, Mack Laughlin, put two rounds into Joe Conklin himself.”

“Christ,” I muttered.

“Get enough licorice, sonny?”