DERRY: THE SECOND INTERLUDE

 

“Quaeque ipsa miserrima vidi,

Et quorum pars magna fui.”

–Virgil

 

 

“You don’t fuck around with the infinite.”

–Mean Streets

 

 

February 14th, 1985

Valentine’s Day

 

Two more disappearances in the past week-both children. Just as I was beginning to relax. One of them a sixteen-year-old boy named Dennis Torrio, the other a girl of just five who was out sledding in back of her house on West Broadway. The hysterical mother found her sled, one of those blue plastic flying saucers, but nothing else. There had been a fresh fall of snow the night before-four inches or so. No tracks but hers, Chief Rademacher said when I called him. He is becoming extremely annoyed with me, I think. Not anything that’s going to keep me awake nights; I have worse things to do than that, don’t I?

Asked him if I could see the police photos. He refused.

Asked him if her tracks led away toward any sort of drain or sewer grating. This was followed by a long period of silence. Then Rademacher said, “I’m beginning to wonder if maybe you shouldn’t see a doctor, Hanlon. The head-peeper kind of doctor. The kid was snatched by her father. Don’t you read the papers?”

“Was the Torrio boy snatched by his father?” I asked..

Another long pause.

“Give it a rest, Hanlon,” he said. “Give me a rest.”

He hung up.

Of course I read the papers-don’t I put them out in the Reading Room of the Public Library each morning myself? The little girl, Laurie Ann Winterbarger, had been in the custody of her mother following an acrimonious divorce proceeding in the spring of 1982. The police are operating on the theory that Horst Winterbarger, who is supposedly working as a machinery maintenance man somewhere in Florida, drove up to Maine to snatch his daughter. They further theorize that he parked his car beside the house and called to his daughter, who then joined him-hence the lack of any tracks other than the little girl’s. They have less to say about the fact that the girl had not seen her father since she was two. Part of the deep bitterness which accompanied the Winterbargers” divorce came from Mrs Winterbarger’s allegations that on at least two occasions Horst Winterbarger had sexually molested the child. She asked the court to deny Winterbarger all visitation rights, a request the court granted in spite of Winterbarger’s hot denials. Rademacher claims the court’s decision, which had the effect of cutting Winterbarger off completely from his only child, may have pushed Winterbarger into taking his daughter. That at least has some dun plausibility, but ask yourself this: would little Laurie Ann have recognized him after three years and run to him when he called her? Rademacher says yes, even though she was two the last time she saw him. I don’t think so. And her mother says Laurie Ann had been well trained about not approaching or talking to strangers, a lesson most Derry children learn early and well. Rademacher says he’s got Florida State Police looking for Winterbarger and that his responsibility ends there.

“Matters of custody are more the province of the lawyers than that of the police,” this pompous, overweight asshole is quoted as saying in last Friday’s Derry News.

But the Torrio boy… that’s something else. Wonderful home life. Played football for the Derry Tigers. Honor Roll student. Had gone through the Outward Bound Survival School in the summer of ’84 and passed with flying colors. No history of drug use. Had a girlfriend that he was apparently head-over-heels about. Had everything to live for. Everything to stay in Derry for, at least for the next couple of years.

All the same, he’s gone.

What happened to him? A sudden attack of wanderlust? A drunk driver who maybe hit him, killed him, and buried him? Or is he maybe still in Derry, is he maybe on the nightside of Derry, keeping company with folks like Betty Ripsom and Patrick Hockstetter and Eddie Corcoran and all the rest? Is it

(later)

I’m doing it again. Going over and over the same ground, doing nothing constructive, only cranking myself up to the screaming point. I jump when the iron stairs leading up to the stacks creak. I jump at shadows. I find myself wondering how I’d react if I was shelving books up therein the stacks, pushing my little rubber-wheeled trolley in front of me, and a hand reached from between two leaning rows of books, a groping hand…

Had again a well-nigh insurmountable desire to begin calling them this afternoon. At one point I even got as far as dialing 404, the Atlanta area code, with Stanley Uris’s number in front of me. Then I just held the phone against my ear, asking myself if I wanted to call them because I was really sure-one hundred percent sure-or simply because I’m now so badly spooked that I can’t stand to be alone; that I have to talk to someone who knows (or will know) what it is I am spooked about.

For a moment I could hear Richie saying Batches? BATCHES? We doan need no stinkin” batches, senhorr! in his Pancho Vanilla Voice, as clearly as if he were standing beside me… and I hung up the phone. Because when you want to see someone as badly as I wanted to see Richie-or any of them-at that moment, you just can’t trust your own motivations. We lie best when we lie to ourselves. The fact is, I’m still not one hundred percent sure. If another body should turn up, I will call… but for now I must suppose that even such a pompous ass as Rademacher may be right. She could have remembered her father; there may have been pictures of him. And I suppose a really persuasive adult could talk a kid into coming to his car, no matter what that child had been taught.

There’s another fear that haunts me. Rademacher suggested that I might be going crazy. I don’t believe that, but if I call them now, they may think I’m crazy. Worse than that, what if they should not remember me at all? Mike Hanlon? Who? I don’t remember any Mike Hanlon. I don’t remember you at all. What promise?

I feel that there will come a right time to call them… and when that time comes, I’ll know that it’s right. Their own circuits will open at the same time. It’s as if there are two great wheels slowly coming into some sort of powerful convergence with each other, myself and the rest of Derry on one, and all my childhood friends on the other.

When the time comes, they will hear the voice of the Turtle.

So I’ll wait, and sooner or later I’ll know. I don’t believe it’s a question anymore of calling them or not calling them.

Only a question of when.

February 20th, 1985

The fire at the Black Spot.

“A perfect example of how the Chamber of Commerce will try to rewrite history, Mike,” old Albert Carson would have told me, probably cackling as he said it. “They’ll try, and sometimes they almost succeed… but the old people remember how things really went. They always remember. And sometimes they’ll tell you, if you ask them right.”

There are people who have lived in Derry for twenty years and don’t know that there was once a “special” barracks for noncoms at the old Derry Army Air Corps Base, a barracks that was a good half a mile from the rest of the base-and in the middle of February, with the temperature standing right around zero and a forty-mile-an-hour wind howling across those flat runways and whopping the wind-chill factor down to something you could hardly believe, that extra half a mile became something that could give you frost-freeze or frostbite, or maybe even kill you.

The other seven barracks had oil heat, storm windows, and insulation. They were toasty and cozy. The “special” barracks, which housed the twenty-seven men of Company E, was heated by a balky old wood furnace. Supplies of wood for it were catch-as-catch-can. The only insulation was the deep bank of pine and spruce boughs the men laid around the outside. One of the men promoted a complete set of storm windows for the place one day, but the twenty-seven inmates of the “special” barracks were detailed up to Bangor that same day to help with some work at the base up there, and when they came back that night, tired and cold, all of those windows had been broken. Every one.

This was in 1930, when half of America’s air force still consisted of biplanes. In Washington, Billy Mitchell had been courtmartialed and demoted to flying a desk because his gadfly insistence on trying to build a more modern air force had finally irritated his elders enough for them to slap him down hard. Not long after, he would resign.

So there was precious little flying that went on at the Derry base, in spite of its three runways (one of which was actually paved). Most of the soldiering that went on there was of the make-work variety.

One of the Company E soldiers who returned to Derry after his service tour

came to an end in 1937 was my dad. He told me this story:

“One day in the spring of 1930-this was about six months before the fire at the Black Spot-I was coming back with four of my buddies from a three-day pass we had spent down in Boston.

“When we come through the gate there was this big old boy standing just inside the checkpoint, leaning on a shovel and picking the seat of his suntans out of his ass. A sergeant from someplace down south. Carroty-red hair. Bad teeth. Pimples. Not much more than an ape without the body hair, if you know what I mean. There were a lot of them like that in the army during the Depression.

“So here we come, four young guys back from leave, all of us still feeling fine, and we could see in his eyes that he was just looking for something to bust us with. So we snapped him salutes as if he was General Black Jack Pershing himself. I guess we might have been all right, but it was one fine late-April day, sun shining down, and I had to shoot off my lip. “A good afternoon to you, Sergeant Wilson, sir,” said I, and he landed on me with both feet.

““Did I give you any permission to speak to me?” he asks.

“Nawsir,” I say.

“He looks around at the rest of them-Trevor Dawson, Carl Roone, and Henry Whitsun, who was killed in the fire that fall-and he says to them, “This here smart nigger is in hack with me. If the rest of you jigaboos don’t want to join him in one hardworking dirty bitch of an afternoon, you get over to your barracks, stow your gear, and get your asses over to the OD. You understand?”

“Well, they got going, and Wilson hollers, “Doubletime, you fuckers! Lemme see the soles of your eighty-fucking-nines!”

“So they doubletimed off, and Wilson took me over to one of the equipment sheds and he got me a spade. He took me out into the big field that used to be just about where the Northeast Airlines Airbus terminal stands today. And he looks at me, kind of grinning, and he points at the ground and he says, “You see that hole there, nigger?”

“There was no hole there, but I figured it was best for me to agree with whatever he said, so I looked down at the ground where he was pointing and said I sure did see it. So then he busted me one in the nose and knocked me over and there I was on the ground with blood running down over the last fresh shirt I had.

“You don’t see it because some bigmouth jig bastard filled it up!” he shouted at me, and he had two big blotches of color on his cheeks. But he was grinning, too, and you could tell he was enjoying himself. “So what you do, Mr A Good Afternoon To You, what you do is you get the dirt out of my hole. Doubletime!”

“So I dug for most two hours, and pretty soon I was in that hole up to my chin. The last couple of feet was clay, and by the time I finished I was standing in water up to my ankles and my shoes were soaked right through.

“Get out of there, Hanlon,” Sergeant Wilson said. He was sitting there on the grass, smoking a cigarette. He didn’t offer me any help. I was dirt and muck from top to bottom, not to mention the blood drying on the blouse of my suntans. He stood up and walked over. He pointed at the hole.

“What do you see there, nigger?” he asked me.

“Your hole, Sergeant Wilson,” says I.

“Yeah, well, I decided I don’t want it,” he says. “I don’t want no hole dug by a nigger. Put my dirt back in, Private Hanlon.”

“So I filled it back in and by the time I was done the sun was going down and it was getting cold. He comes over and looks at it after I finished patting down the last of the dirt with the flat of the spade.

“Now what do you see there, nigger?” he asks.

“Bunch of dirt, sir,” I said, and he hit me again. My God, Mikey, I came this close to just bouncing up off “n the ground and splitting his head open with the edge of that shovel. But if I’d done that, I never would have looked at the sky again, except through a set of bars. Still, there were times when I almost think it would have been worth it. I managed to hold my peace somehow, though.

“That ain’t a bunch of dirt, you stupid coontail night-fighter!” he screams at me, the spit flying off’n his lips. “That’s MY HOLE, and you best get the dirt out of it right now! Doubletime!”

“So I dug the dirt out of his hole and then I filled it in again, and then he asks me why I went and filled in his hole just when he was getting ready to take a crap in it. So I dug it out again and he drops his pants and hangs his skinny-shanks cracker redneck ass over the hole and he grins up at me while he’s doing his business and says, “How you doin, Hanlon?”

“I am doing just fine, sir,” I says right back, because I had decided I wasn’t going to give up until I fell unconscious or dropped dead. I had my dander up.

“Well, I aim to fix that,” he says. “To start with, you better just fill that hole in, Private Hanlon. And I want to see some life. You’re slowin down.”

“So I got her filled in again and I could see by the way he was grinning that he was only warming up. But just then this friend of his came humping across the field with a gas lantern and told him there’d been a surprise inspection and Wilson was in hack for having missed it. My friends covered for me and I was okay, but Wilson’s friends-if that’s what he called them-couldn’t be bothered.

“He let me go then, and I waited to see if his name would go up on the Punishment Roster the next day, but it never did. I guess he must have just told the Loot he missed the inspection because he was teaching a smartmouth nigger who it was owned all the holes at the Derry army base-those that had already been dug and those that hadn’t been. They probably gave him a medal instead of potatoes to peel. And that’s how things were for Company E here in Derry.”

It was right around 1958 that my father told me the story, and I guess he was pushing fifty, although my mother was only forty or so. I asked him if that was the way Derry was, why had he come back?

“Well, I was only sixteen when I joined the army, Mikey,” he said. “Lied about my age to get in. Wasn’t my idea, either. My mother told me to do it. I was big, and that’s the only reason the lie stuck, I guess. I was born and grew up in Burgaw, North Carolina, and the only time we saw meat was right after the tobacco was in, or sometimes in the winter if my father shot a coon or a possum. The only good thing I remember about Burgaw is possum pie with hoecakes spread around her just as pretty as you could want.

“So when my dad died in an accident with some farm machinery, my ma said she was going to take Philly Loubird up to Corinth, where she had people. Philly Loubird was the baby of the family.”

“You mean my Uncle Phil?” I asked, smiling to think of anybody calling him Philly Loubird. He was a lawyer in Tucson, Arizona, and had been on the City Council there for six years. When I was a kid, I thought Uncle Phil was rich. For a black man in 1958, I suppose he was. He made twenty thousand dollars a year.

“That’s who I mean,” my dad said. “But in those days he was just a twelve-year-old kid who wore a ricepaper sailor hat and mended biballs and had no shoes. He was the youngest, I was the second youngest. All the others were gone-two dead, two married, one in jail. That was Howard. He never was any good.

“You are goan join the army,” your gramma Shirley told me. “I dunno if they start paying you right away or not, but once they do, you’re goan send me a lotment every month. I hate to send you away, son, but if you don’t take care of me and Philly, I don’t know what’s going to become of us.” She gave me my birth certificate to show the recruiter and I seen she fixed the year on it somehow to make me eighteen.

“So I went to the courthouse where the army recruiter was and asked about joining up. He showed me the papers and the line where I could make my mark. “I kin write my name,” I said, and he laughed like he didn’t believe me.

“Well then, you go on and write it, black boy,” he says.

“Hang on a minute,” I says back. “I want to ast you a couple of questions.”

“Fire away then,” he says. “I can answer anything you can ask.”

“’do they have meat twice a week in the army?” I asked. “My mamma says they do, but she is powerful set on me joining up.”

“’No, they don’t have it twice a week,” he says.

“Well, that’s about what I thought,” I says, thinking that the man surely does seem like a booger but at least he’s an honest booger.

“Then he says, “They got it ever night,” making me wonder how I ever could have thought he was honest.

“You must think I’m a pure-d fool,” I says.

“’You got that right, nigger,” he says.

“Well, if I join up, I got to do something for my mamma and Philly Loubird,” I says. “Mamma says it’s a lotment.”

“That’s this here,” he says, and taps the allotment form. “Now what else

is on your mind?”

“Well,” says I, “what about trainin to be an officer?”

“He threw his head back when I said that and laughed until I thought he was gonna choke on his own spit. Then he says, “Son, the day they got nigger officers in this man’s army will be the day you see the bleedin Jesus Christ doing the Charleston at Birdland. Now you sign or you don’t sign. I’m out of patience. Also, you’re stinkin the place up.”

“So I signed, and watched him staple the allotment form to my muster-sheet, and then he give me the oath, and then I was a soldier. I was thinking that they’d send me up to New Jersey, where the army was building bridges on account of there being no wars to fight. Instead, I got Derry, Maine, and Company E.”

He sighed and shifted in his chair, a big man with white hair that curled close to his skull. At that time we had one of the bigger farms in Derry, and probably the best roadside produce stand south of Bangor. The three of us worked hard, and my father had to hire on extra help during harvesting time, and we made out.

He said: “I came back because I’d seen the South and I’d seen the North, and there was the same hate in both places. It wasn’t Sergeant Wilson that convinced me of that. He was nothing but a Georgia cracker, and he took the South with him wherever he went. He didn’t have to be south of the Mason-Dixon line to hate niggers. He just did. No, it was the fire at the Black Spot that convinced me of that. You know, Mikey, in a way…”

He glanced over at my mother, who was knitting. She hadn’t looked up, but I knew she was listening closely, and my father knew it too, I think.

“In a way it was the fire made me a man. There was sixty people killed in that fire, eighteen of them from Company E. There really wasn’t any company left when that fire was over. Henry Whitsun… Stork Anson… Alan Snopes… Everett McCaslin… Horton Sartoris… all my friends, all dead in that fire. And that fire wasn’t set by old Sarge Wilson and his grits-and-cornpone friends. It was set by the Derry branch of the Maine Legion of White Decency. Some of the kids you go to school with, son, their fathers struck the matches that lit the Black Spot on fire. And I’m not talking about the poor kids, neither.”

“Why, Daddy? Why did they?”

“Well, part of it was just Derry,” my father said, frowning. He lit his pipe slowly and shook out the wooden match. “I don’t know why it happened here; I can’t explain it, but at the same time I ain’t surprised by it.

“The Legion of White Decency was the Northerners” version of the Ku Klux Klan, you see. They marched in the same white sheets, they burned the same crosses, they wrote the same hate-notes to black folks they felt were getting above their station or taking jobs that were meant for white men. In churches where the preachers talked about black equality, they sometimes planted charges of dynamite. Most of the history books talk more about the KKK than they do about the Legion of White Decency, and a lot of people don’t even know there was such a thing. I think it might be because most of the histories have been written by Northerners and they’re ashamed.

“It was most pop’lar in the big cities and the manufacturin areas. New York, New Jersey, Detroit, Baltimore, Boston, Portsmouth-they all had their chapters. They tried to organize in Maine, but Derry was the only place they had any real success. Oh, for awhile there was a pretty good chapter in Lewiston-this was around the same time as the fire at the Black Spot-but they weren’t worried about niggers raping white women or taking jobs that should have belonged to white men, because there weren’t any niggers to speak of up here. In Lewiston they were worried about tramps and hobos and that something called “the bonus army” would join up with something they called “the Communist riffraff army,” by which they meant any man who was out of work. The Legion of Decency used to send these fellows out of town just as fast as they came in. Sometimes they stuffed poison ivy down the backs of their pants. Sometimes they set their shirts on fire.

“Well, the Legion was pretty much done up here after the fire at the Black Spot. Things got out of hand, you see. The way things seem to do in this town, sometimes.”

He paused, puffing.

“It’s like the Legion of White Decency was just another seed, Mikey, and it found some earth that nourished it well here. It was a regular rich-man’s club. And after the fire, they all just laid away their sheets and lied each other up and it was papered over.” Now there was a kind of vicious contempt in his voice that made my mother look up, frowning. “After all, who got killed? Eighteen army niggers, fourteen or fifteen town niggers, four members of a nigger jazz-band… and a bunch of nigger-lovers. What did it matter?”

“Will,” my mother said softly. That’s enough.”

“No,” I said. “I want to hear!”

“It’s getting to be your bedtime, Mikey,” he said, ruffling my hair with his big, hard hand. “I just want to tell you one thing more, and I don’t think you’ll understand it, because I’m not sure I understand it myself. What happened that night at the Black Spot, bad as it was… I don’t really think it happened because we was black. Not even because the Spot was close behind West Broadway, where the rich whites in Derry lived then and still live today. I don’t think that the Legion of White Decency happened to get along so well here because they hated black people and bums more in Derry than they did in Portland or Lewiston or Brunswick. It’s because of that soil. It seems that bad things, hurtful things, do right well in the soil of this town. I’ve thought so again and again over the years. I don’t know why it should be… but it is.

“But there are good folks here too, and there were good folks here then. When the funerals were held afterward, thousands of people turned out, and they turned out for the blacks as well as the whites. Businesses closed up for most of a week. The hospitals treated the hurt ones free of charge. There were food baskets and letters of condolence that were honestly meant. And there were helping hands held out. I met my friend Dewey Conroy during that time, and you know he’s just as white as vanilla ice cream, but I feel like he’s my brother. I’d die for Dewey if he asked me to, and although no man really knows another man’s heart, I think he’d die for me if it came to that.

“Anyway, the army sent away those of us that were left after that fire, like they were ashamed… and I guess they were. I ended up down at Fort Hood, and I stayed there for six years. I met your mother there, and we were married in Galveston, at her folks” house. But ail through the years between, Derry never escaped my mind. And after the war, I brought your mom back here. And we had you. And here we are, not three miles from where the Black Spot stood in 1930. And I think it’s your bedtime, Mr Man.”

“I want to hear about the fire!” I yelled. “Tell me about it, Daddy!”

And he looked at me in that frowning way that always shut me up… maybe because he didn’t look that way often. Mostly he was a smiling man. “That’s no story for a boy,” he said. “Another time, Mikey. When we’ve both walked around a few more years.”

As it turned out, we both walked around another four years before I heard the story of what happened at the Black Spot that night, and by then my father’s walking days were all done. He told me from the hospital bed where he lay, full of dope, dozing in and out of reality as the cancer worked away inside of his intestines, eating him up.

February 26th, 1985

I got reading over what I had written last in this notebook and surprised myself by bursting into tears over my father, who has now been dead for twenty-three years. I can remember my grief for him-it lasted for almost two years. Then when I graduated from high school in 1965 and my mother looked at me and said, “How proud your father would have been!,” we cried in each other’s arms and I thought that was the end, that we had finished the job of burying him with those late tears. But who knows how long a grief may last? Isn’t it possible that, even thirty or forty years after the death of a child or a brother or a sister, one may half-waken, thinking of that person with that same lost emptiness, that feeling of places which may never be filled… perhaps not even in death?

He left the army in 1937 with a disability pension. By that year, my father’s army had become a good deal more warlike; anyone with half an eye, he told me once, could see by then that soon all the guns would be coming out of storage again. He had risen to the rank of sergeant in the interim, and he had lost most of his left foot when a new recruit who was so scared he was almost shitting peach-pits pulled the pin on a hand grenade and then dropped it instead of throwing it. It rolled over to my father and exploded with a sound that was, he said, like a cough in the middle of the night.

A lot of the ordnance those long-ago soldiers had to train with was either defective or had sat so long in almost forgotten supply depots that it was impotent. They had bullets that wouldn’t fire and rifles that sometimes exploded in their hands when the bullets did fire. The navy had torpedoes that usually didn’t go where they were aimed and didn’t explode when they did. The Army Air Corps and the Navy Air Arm had planes whose wings fell off if they landed hard, and at Pensacola in 1939, I have read, a supply officer discovered a whole fleet of government trucks that wouldn’t run because cockroaches had eaten the rubber hoses and the fanbelts.

So my father’s life was saved (including, of course, the part of him that became Your Ob’dt Servant Michael Hanlon) by a combination of bureaucratic porkbarrelling folderol and defective equipment. The grenade only half-exploded and he just lost part of one foot instead of everything from the breastbone on down.

Because of the disability money he was able to marry my mother a year earlier than he had planned. They didn’t come to Derry at once; they moved to Houston, where they did war work until 1945. My father was a foreman in a factory that made bomb-casings. My mother was a Rosie the Riveter. But as he told me that night when I was eleven, the thought of Derry “never escaped his mind.” And now I wonder if that blind thing might not have been at work even then,-drawing nun back so I could take my place in that circle in the Barrens that August evening. If the wheels of the universe are in true, then good always compensates for evil-but good can be awful as well.

My father had a subscription to the Derry News. He kept his eye on the ads announcing land for sale. They had saved up a good bit of money. At last he saw a farm for sale that looked like a good proposition… on paper, at least. The two of them rode up from Texas on a Trailways bus, looked at it, and bought it the same day. The First Merchants of Penobscot County issued my father a ten-year mortgage, and they settled down.

“We had some problems at first,” my father said another time. “There were people who didn’t want Negroes in the neighborhood. We knew it was going to be that way-I hadn’t forgotten about the Black Spot-and we just hunkered down to wait it out. Kids would go by and throw rocks or beer cans. I must have replaced twenty windows that first year. And some of them weren’t just kids, either. One day when we got up, there was a swastika painted on the side of the chickenhouse and all the chickens were dead. Someone had poisoned their feed. Those were the last chickens I ever tried to keep.

“But the County Sheriff-there wasn’t any police chief in those days, Derry wasn’t quite big enough for such a thing-got to work on the matter and he worked hard. That’s what I mean, Mikey, when I say there is good here as well as bad. It didn’t make any difference to that man Sullivan that rny skin was brown and my hair was kinky. He come out half a dozen times, he talked to people, and finally he found out who done it. And who do you think it was? I’ll give you three guesses, and the first two don’t count!”

“I don’t know,” I said.

My father laughed until tears spouted out of his eyes. He took a big white handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped them away. “Why, it was Butch Bowers, that’s who! The father of the kid you say is the biggest bully at your school. The father’s a turd and the son’s a little fart.”

There are kids at school who say Henry’s father is crazy,” I told him. I think I was in the fourth grade at that time-far enough along to have had my can righteously kicked by Henry Bowers more than once, anyway… and now that I think about it, most of the pejorative terms for “black” or “Negro” I’ve ever heard, I heard first from the lips of Henry Bowers, between grades one and four.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” he said, “the idea that Butch Bowers is crazy might not be far wrong. People said he was never right after he come back from the Pacific. He was in the Marines over there. Anyway, the Sheriff took him into custody and Butch was hollering that it was a put-up job and they were all just a bunch of nigger-lovers. Oh, he was gonna sue everybody. I guess he had a list that would have stretched from here to Witcham Street. I doubt if he had a single pair of underdrawers that was whole in the seat, but he was going to sue me, Sheriff Sullivan, the Town of Derry, the County of Penobscot, and God alone knows who else.

“As to what happened next… well, I can’t swear it’s true, but this is how I heard it from Dewey Conroy. Dewey said the Sheriff went in to see Butch at the jail up in Bangor. And Sheriff Sullivan says, “It’s time for you to shut your mouth and do some listening, Butch. That black guy, he don’t want to press charges. He don’t want to send you to Shawshank, he just wants the worth of his chickens. He figures two hundred dollars would do her.”

“Butch tells the Sheriff he can put his two hundred dollars where the sun don’t shine, and Sheriff Sullivan, he tells Butch: “They got a lime pit down at the Shank, Butch, and they tell me after you’ve been workin there about two years, your tongue goes as green as a lime Popsicle. Now you pick. Two years peelin lime or two hundred dollars. What do you think?”

“No jury in Maine will convict me,” Butch says, “not for killing a nigger’s chickens.”

“I know that,” Sullivan says.

“Then what the Christ are we chinnin about?” Butch asts him.

“You better wake up, Butch. They won’t put you away for the chickens, but they will put you away for the swastiker you painted on the door after you killed em.”

“Well, Dewey said Butch’s mouth just kind of dropped open, and Sullivan went away to let him think about it. About three days later Butch told his brother, the one that froze to death couple of years after while out hunting drunk, to sell his new Mercury, which Butch had bought with his muster-out pay and was mighty sweet on. So I got my two hundred dollars and Butch swore he was going to burn me out. He went around telling all his friends that. So I caught up with him one afternoon. He’d bought an old pre-war Ford to replace the Merc, and I had my pick-up. I cut him off out on Witcham Street by the trainyards and got out with my Winchester rifle.

“Any fires out my way and you got one bad black man gunning for you, old boss,” I told him.

“You can’t talk to me that way, nigger,” he said, and he was damn near to blubbering between being mad and being scared. “You can’t talk to no white man that way, not a jig like you.”

“Well, I’d had enough of the whole thing, Mikey. And I knew if I didn’t scare him off for good right then I’d never be shed of him. There wasn’t nobody around. I reached in that Ford with one hand and caught him by the hair of the head. I put the stock of my rifle against the buckle of my belt and got the muzzle right up under his chin. I said, “The next time you call me a nigger or a jig, your brains are going to be dripping off the domelight of your car. And you believe me, Butch: any fires out my way and I’m gunning for you. I may come gunning for your wife and your brat and your no-count brother as well. I have had enough.”

“Then he did start to cry, and I never saw an uglier sight in my life. “Look what things has come to here,” he says, “when a nih… when a jih… when a feller can put a gun to a workingman’s head in broad daylight by the side of the road.”

“Yeah, the world must be going to a camp-meeting hell when something like that can happen,” I agreed. “But that don’t matter now. All that matters now is, do we have an understanding here or do you want to see if you can learn how to breathe through your forehead?”

“He allowed as how we had an understanding, and that was the last bit of trouble I ever had with Butch Bowers, except for maybe when your dog Mr Chips died, and I’ve got no proof that was Bowers’s doing. Chippy might have just got a poison bait or something.

“Since that day we’ve been pretty much left alone to make our way, and when I look back on it, there ain’t much I regret. We’ve had a good life here, and if there are nights when I dream about that fire, well, there isn’t nobody that can live a natural life without having a few bad dreams.”

February 28th, 1985

It’s been days since I sat down to write the story of the fire at the Black Spot as my father told it to me, and I haven’t gotten to it yet. It’s in The Lord of the Rings, I think, where one of the characters says that “way leads on to way’; that you could start at a path leading nowhere more fantastic than from your own front steps to the sidewalk, and from there you could go… well, anywhere at all. It’s the same way with stories. One leads to the next, to the next, and to the next; maybe they go in the direction you wanted to go, but maybe they don’t. Maybe in the end it’s the voice that tells the stories more than the stories themselves that matters.

It’s his voice that I remember, certainly: my father’s voice, low and slow, how he would chuckle sometimes or laugh outright. The pauses to light his pipe or to blow his nose or to go and get a can of Narragansett (Nasty Gansett, he called it) from the icebox. That voice, which is for me somehow the voice of all voices, the voice of all years, the ultimate voice of this place-one that’s in none of the Ives interviews nor in any of the poor histories of this place… nor on any of ray own tapes.

My father’s voice.

Now it’s ten o’clock, the library closed an hour ago, and a proper old jeezer is starting to crank up outside. I can hear tiny spicules of sleet striking the windows in here and in the glassed-in corridor which leads to the Children’s Library. I can hear other sounds, too-stealthy creaks and bumps outside the circle of light where I sit, writing on the lined yellow pages of a legal pad. Just the sounds of an old building settling, I tell myself… but I wonder. As I wonder if somewhere out in this storm there is a clown selling balloons tonight.

Well… never mind. I think I’ve finally found my way to my father’s final story. I heard it in his hospital room no more than six weeks before he died.

I went to see him with my mother every afternoon after school, and alone every evening. My mother had to stay home and do the chores then, but she insisted that I go. I rode my bike. She wouldn’t let me hook rides, not even four years after the murders had ended.

That was a hard six weeks for a boy who was only fifteen. I loved my father, but I came to hate those evening visits-watching him shrink and shrivel, watching the pain-lines spread and deepen on his face. Sometimes he would cry, although he tried not to. And going home it would be getting dark and I would think back to the summer of ’58, and I’d be afraid to look behind me because the clown might be there… or the werewolf… or Ben’s mummy… or my bird. But I was mostly afraid that no matter what shape It took, It would have my father’s cancer-raddled face. So I would pedal as fast as I could no matter how hard my heart thundered in my chest and come in flushed and sweaty-haired and out of breath and my mother would say, “Why do you want to ride so fast, Mikey? You’ll make yourself sick” And I’d say, “I wanted to get back in time to help you with the chores,” and she’d give me a hug and a kiss and tell me I was a good boy.

As time went on, it got so I could hardly think of things to talk about with him anymore. Riding into town, I’d rack my brain for subjects of conversation, dreading the moment when both of us would run out of things to say. His dying scared me and enraged me, but it embarrassed me, too; it seemed to me then and it seems to me now that when a man or woman goes it should be a quick thing. The cancer was doing more than killing him. It was degrading him, demeaning him.

We never spoke of the cancer, and in some of those silences I thought that we must speak of it, that there would be nothing else and we would be stuck with it like kids caught without a place to sit in a game of musical chairs when the piano stops, and I would become almost frantic, trying to think of something-anything!-to say so that we would not have to acknowledge the thing which was now destroying my daddy, who had once taken Butch Bowers by the hair and jammed his rifle into the shelf of his chin and demanded of Butch to be left alone. We would be forced to speak of it, and if we were I would cry. I wouldn’t be able to help it. And at fifteen, I think the thought of crying in front of my father scared and distressed me more than anything else.

It was during one of those interminable, scary pauses that I asked him again about the fire at the Black Spot. They’d filled him full of dope that evening because the pain was very bad, and he had been drifting in and out of consciousness, sometimes speaking clearly, sometimes speaking in that exotic language I think of as Sleepmud. Sometimes I knew he was talking to me, but at other times he seemed to have me confused with his brother Phil. I asked hull about the Black Spot for no real reason; it had just jumped into my mind and I seized on it.

His eyes sharpened and he smiled a little. “You ain’t never forgot that, have you, Mikey?”

“No, sir,” I said, and although I hadn’t thought about it in three years or better, I added what he sometimes said: “It hasn’t ever escaped my mind.”

“Well, I’ll tell you now,” he said. “Fifteen is old enough, I guess, and your mother ain’t here to stop me. Besides, you ought to know. I think something like it could only have happened in Derry, and you need to know that, too. So you can beware. The conditions for such things have always seemed right here. You’re careful, aren’t you, Mikey?

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Good,” he said, and his head dropped back on his pillow. “That’s good.” I thought he was going to drift off again-his eyes had slipped closed-but instead he began to talk.

“When I was at the army base here in ’29 and ’30,” he said, “there was an NCO Club up there on the hill, where Derry Community College is now. It was right behind the PX, where you used to be able to get a pack of Lucky Strike Greens for seven cents. The NCO Club was only a big old quonset hut, but they had fixed it up nice inside-carpet on the floor, booths along the walls, a jukebox-and you could get soft drinks on the weekend… if you were white, that was. They would have bands in most Saturday nights, and it was quite a place to go. It was just pop over the bar, it being Prohibition, but we heard you could get stronger stuff if you wanted it… and if you had a little green star on your army card. That was like a secret sign they had. Home-brew beer mostly, but on weekends you could sometimes get stronger stuff. If you were white.

“Us Company E boys weren’t allowed any place near it, of course. So we went on the town if we had a pass in the evening. In those days Derry was still something of a logging town and there were eight or ten bars, most of em down in a part of town they called Hell’s Half-Acre. They wasn’t speakeasies; that was too grand a name for em. Wasn’t anybody in em spoke very easy, anyhow. They was what folks called “blind pigs,” and that was about right, because most of the customers acted like pigs when they were in there and they was about blind when they turned em out. The Sheriff knew and the cops knew, but those places roared all night long, same as they’d done since the logging days in the 1890s. I suppose palms got greased, but maybe not as many or with so much as you might think; in Derry people have a way of looking the odier way. Some served hard stuff as well as beer, and by all accounts I ever heard, the stuff you could get in town was ten times as good as the rotgut whiskey and bathtub gin you could get at the white boys” NCO on Friday and Saturday nights. The downtown hooch came over the border from Canada in pulp trucks, and most of them bottles had what the labels said. The good stuff was expensive, but there was plenty of furnace-oil too, and it might hang you over but it didn’t kill you, and if you did go blind, it didn’t last. On any given night you’d have to duck your head when the bottles came flying by. There was Nan’s, the Paradise, Wally’s Spa, the Silver Dollar, and one bar, the Powderhorn, where you could sometimes get a whore. Oh, you could pick up a woman at any pig, you didn’t even have to work at it that hard-there was a lot of them wanted to find out if a slice off n the rye loaf was any different-but to kids like me and Trevor Dawson and Carl Roone, my friends in those days, the thought of buying a whore-a white whore-that was something you had to sit down and consider.”

As I’ve told you, he was heavily doped that night. I don’t believe he would have said any of that stuff-not to his fifteen-year-old son-if he had not been.

“Well, it wasn’t very long before a representative of the Town Council showed up, wanting to see Major Fuller. He said he wanted to talk about “some problems between the townspeople and the enlisted men” and “concerns of the electorate” and “questions of propriety,” but what he really wanted Fuller to know was as clear as a windowpane. They didn’t want no army niggers in their pigs, botherin white women and drinkin illegal hooch-at a bar where only white men was supposed to be standin and drinkin illegal hooch.

“All of which was a laugh, all right. The flower of white womanhood they were so worried about was mostly a bunch of barbags, and as far as getting in the way of the men…! Well, all I can say is that I never saw a member of the Derry Town Council down in the Silver Dollar, or in the Powderhorn. The men who drank in those dives were pulp-cutters in those big red-and-black-checked lumberman’s jackets, scars and scabs all over their hands, some of em missing eyes or fingers, all of em missing most of then- teeth, all of em smellin like woodchips and sawdust and sap. They wore green flannel pants and green gumrubber boots and tracked snow across the floor until it was black with it. They smelled big, Mikey, and they walked big, and they talked big. They were big. I was in Wally’s Spa one night when I saw a fella split his shirt right down one arm while he was armrassling this other fella. It didn’t just rip-you probably think that’s what I mean, but it ain’t. Arm of that man’s shirt damn near exploded-sort of blew off his arm, in rags. And everybody cheered and applauded and somebody slapped me on the back and said, “That’s what you call an armrassler’s fart, blackface.”

“What I’m telling you is that if the men who used those blind pigs on Friday and Saturday nights when they come out of the woods to drink whiskey and fuck women instead of knotholes greased up with lard, if those men hadn’t wanted us there, they would have thrown us out on our asses. But the fact of it was, Mikey, they didn’t seem to give much of a toot one way or the other.

“One of em took me aside one night-he was six foot, which was damn big for those days, and he was dead drunk, and he smelled as high as a basket of month-old peaches. If he’d stepped out of his clothes, I think they would have stood up alone. He looks at me and says, “Mister, I gonna ast you sumpin, me. Are you be a Negro?”

“That’s right,” I says.

“’Commen” ca va!” he says in the Saint John Valley French that sounds almost like Cajun talk, and grins so big I saw all four of his teeth. “I knew you was, me! Hey! I seen one in a book once! Had the same-” and he couldn’t think how to say what was on his mind, so he reaches out and flaps at my mouth.

“Big lips,” I says.

“Yeah, yeah!” he says, laughin like a kid. “Beeg leeps! Epais levres! Beeg leeps! Gonna buy you a beer, me!”

“Buy away,” I says, not wanting to get on his bad side.

“He laughed at that too and clapped me on the back-almost knocking me on my face-and pushed his way up to the plankwood bar where there must have been seventy men and maybe fifteen women lined up. “I need two beers fore I tear this dump apart!” he yells at the bartender, who was a big lug with a broken nose named Romeo Dupree. “One for me and one pour I’homme avec les epais levres!” And they all laughed like hell at that, but not in a mean way, Mikey.

“So he gets the beers and gives me mine and he says, “What’s your name? I don’t want to call you Beeg Leeps, me. Don’t sound good.”

“William Hanlon,” I says.

“Well, here’s to you, Weelyum Anlon,” he says.

“No, here’s you,” I says. “You’re the first white man who ever bought me a drink.” Which was true.

“So we drank those beers down and then we had two more and he says, “You sure you’re a Negro? Except for them epais leeps, you look just like a white man with brown skin to me.”

My father got to laughing at this, and so did I. He laughed so hard his stomach started to hurt him, and he held it, grimacing, his eyes turned up, his upper plate biting down on his lower lip.

“You want me to ring for the nurse, Daddy?” I asked, alarmed.

“No… no. I’m goan be okay. The worst thing of this, Mikey, is that you can’t even laugh anymore when you feel like it. Which is damn seldom.”

He fell silent for a few moments, and I realize now that that was the only time we came close to talking about what was killing him. Maybe it would have been better-better for both of us-if we had done more.

He took a sip of water and then went on.

“Anyway, it wasn’t the few women who travelled the pigs, and it wasn’t the lumberjacks that made up their main custom who wanted us out. It was those five old men on the Town Council who were really offended, them and the dozen or so men that stood behind them-Derry’s old line, you know. None of them had ever stepped a foot inside of the Paradise or Wally’s Spa, they did their boozing at the country club which then stood over on Derry Heights, but they wanted to make sure that none of those barbags or peavey-swingers got polluted by the blacks of Company E.

“So Major Fuller says, “I never wanted them here in the first place. I keep thinking it’s an oversight and they’ll get sent back down south or maybe to New Jersey.”

“That’s not my problem,” this old fart tells him. Mueller, I think his name was-”

“Sally Mueller’s father?” I asked, startled. Sally Mueller was in the same high-school class with me.

My father grinned a sour, crooked little grin. “No, this would have been her uncle. Sally Mueller’s dad was off in college somewhere then. But if he’d been in Derry, he would have been there, I guess, standing with his brother. And in case you’re wondering how true this part of the story is, all I can tell you is that the conversation was repeated to me by Trevor Dawson, who was swabbing the floors over there in officers” country that day and heard it all.

“Where the government sends the black boys is your problem, not mine,” Mueller tells Major Fuller. “My problem is where you’re letting them go on Friday and Saturday nights. If they go on whooping it up downtown, there’s going to be trouble. We’ve got the Legion in this town, you know.”

“Well, but I am in a bit of a tight here, Mr Mueller,” he says. “I can’t let them drink over at the NCO Club. Not only is it against the regulations for the Negroes to drink with the whites, they couldn’t anyway. It’s an NCO club, don’t you see? Every one of those black boys is a bucky-tail private.

“That’s not my problem either. I simply trust you will take care of the matter. Responsibility accompanies rank.” And off he goes.

“Well, Fuller solved the problem. The Derry Army Base was a damn big patch of land in those days, although there wasn’t a hell of a lot on it. Better than a hundred acres, all told. Going north, it ended right behind West Broadway, where a sort of greenbelt was planted. Where Memorial Park is now, that was where the Black Spot stood.

“It was just an old requisition shed in early 1930, when all of this happened, but Major Fuller mustered in Company E and told us it was going to be “our” club. Acted like he was Daddy Warbucks or something, and maybe he even felt that way, giving a bunch of black privates their own place, even if it was nothing but a shed. Then he added, like it was nothing, that the pigs downtown were off-limits to us.

“There was a lot of bitterness about it, but what could we do? We had no real power. It was this young fellow, a Pfc. named Dick Hallorann who was a mess-cook, who suggested that maybe we could fix it up pretty nice if we really tried.

“So we did. We really tried. And we made out pretty well, all things considered. The first time a bunch of us went in there to look it over, we were pretty depressed. It was dark and smelly, full of old tools and boxes of papers that had gone moldy. There was only two little windows and no lectricity. The floor was dirt. Carl Roone laughed in a kind of bitter way, I remember that, and said, “The ole Maje, he a real prince, ain’t he? Give us our own club. Sho!”

“And George Brannock, who was also killed in the fire that fall, he said: “Yeah, it’s a hell of a black spot, all right.” And the name just stuck.

“Hallorann got us going, though… Hallorann and Carl and me. I guess God will forgive us for what we did, though-cause He knows we had no idea how it would turn out.

“After awhile the rest of the fellows pitched in. With most of Derry off-limits, there wasn’t much else we could do. We hammered and nailed and cleaned. Trev Dawson was a pretty good jackleg carpenter, and he showed us how to cut some more windows along the side, and damned if Alan Snopes didn’t come up with panes of glass for them that were different colors-sort of a cross between carnival glass and the sort you see in church windows.

“Where’d you get this?” I asked him. Alan was the oldest of us; he was about forty-two, old enough so that most of us called him Pop Snopes.

“He stuck a Camel in his mouth and tipped me a wink. “Midnight Requisitions,” he says, and would say no more.

“So the place come along pretty good, and by the middle of the summer we was using it. Trev Dawson and some of the others had partitioned off the back quarter of the building and got a little kitchen set up in there, not much more than a grill and a couple of deep-fryers, so that you could get a hamburg and some french fries, if you wanted. There was a bar down one side, but it was just meant for sodas and drinks like Virgin Marys-shit, we knew our place. Hadn’t we been taught it? If we wanted to drink hard, we’d do it in the dark.

“The floor was still dirt, but we kept it oiled down nice. Trev and Pop Snopes ran in a lectric line-more Midnight Requisitions, I imagine. By July, you could go in there any Saturday night and sit down and have a cola and a hamburger-or a slaw-dog. It was nice. It never really got finished-we was still working on it when the fire burned it down. It got to be a kind of hobby… or a way of thumbing our noses at Fuller and Mueller and the Town Council. But I guess we knew it was ours when Ev McCaslin and I put up a sign one Friday night that said THE BLACK SPOT, and just below that, COMPANY E AND GUESTS. Like we were exclusive, you know!

“It got looking nice enough that the white boys started to grumble about it, and next thing you know, the white boys” NCO was looking finer than ever. They was adding on a special lounge and a little cafeteria. It was like they wanted to race. But that was one race that we didn’t want to run.”

My dad smiled at me from his hospital bed.

“We were young, except for Snopesy, but we weren’t entirely foolish. We knew that the white boys let you race against them, but if it starts to look like you are getting ahead, why, somebody just breaks your legs so you can’t run as fast. We had what we wanted, and that was enough. But then… something happened.” He fell silent, frowning.

“What was that, Daddy?”

“We found out that we had a pretty decent jazz-band among us,” he said slowly. “Martin Devereaux, who was a corporal, played drums. Ace Stevenson played cornet. Pop Snopes played a pretty decent barrelhouse piano. He wasn’t great, but he wasn’t no slouch, either. There was another fellow who played clarinet, and George Brannock played the saxophone. There were others of us who sat in from time to time, playing guitar or harmonica or juiceharp or even just a comb with waxed paper over it.

“This didn’t all happen at once, you understand, but by the end of that August, there was a pretty hot little Dixieland combo playing Friday and Saturday nights at the Black Spot. They got better and better as the fall drew on, and while they were never great-I don’t want to give you that idea-they played in a way that was different… hotter somehow… it… ” He waved his skinny hand above the bedclothes.

“They played bodacious,” I suggested, grinning.

“That’s right!” he exclaimed, grinning back. “You got it! They played bodacious Dixieland. And the next thing you know, people from town started to show up at our club. Even some of the white soldiers from the base. It got so the place was getting crowded a right smart every weekend. That didn’t happen all at once, either. At first those white faces looked like sprinkles of salt in a pepper-pot, but more and more of them turned up as time went on.

“When those white people showed up, that’s when we forgot to be careful. They were bringin in their own booze in brown bags, most of it the finest high-tension stuff there is-made the stuff you could get in the pigs downtown look like soda pop. Country-club booze is what I mean, Mikey. Rich people’s booze. Chivas. Glenfiddich. The kind of champagne they served to first-class passengers on ocean liners. “Champers,” some of em called it, same as we used to call ugly-minded mules back home. We should have found a way to stop it, but we didn’t know how. They was town! Hell, they was white!

“And, like I said, we were young and proud of what we’d done. And we underestimated how bad things might get. We all knew that Mueller and his friends must have known what was going on, but I don’t think any of us realized that it was drivin em crazy-and I mean what I say: crazy. There they were in their grand old Victorian houses on West Broadway not a quarter of a mile away from where we were, listening to things like “Aunt Hagar’s Blues” and “Diggin My Potatoes.” That was bad. Knowing that their young people were there too, whooping it up right cheek by jowl with the blacks, that must have been ever so much worse. Because it wasn’t just the lumberjacks and the barbags that were turning up as September came into October. It got to be kind of a thing in town. Young folks would come to drink and to dance to that no-name jazz-band until one in the morning came and shut us down. They didn’t just come from Derry, either. They come from Bangor and Newport and Haven and Cleaves Mills and Old Town and all the little burgs around these parts. You could see fraternity boys from the University of Maine at Orono cutting capers with their sorority girlfriends, and when the band learned how to play a ragtime version of” “The Maine Stein Song,” they just about ripped the roof off. Of course, it was an enlisted-men’s club-technically, at least-and off-limits to civilians who didn’t have an invitation. But in fact, Mikey, we just opened the door at seven and let her stand open until one. By the middle of October it got so that any time you went out on the dancefloor you were standing hip to hip with six other people. There wasn’t no room to dance, so you had to just sort of stand there and wiggle… but if anyone minded, I never heard him let on. By midnight it was like an empty freight-car rocking and reeling on an express run.”

He paused, took another drink of water, and then went on. His eyes were bright now.

“Well, well. Fuller would have put an end to it sooner or later. If it had been sooner, a lot less people would have died. All you had to do was send in MPs and have them confiscate all the bottles of liquor that people had brought in with them. That would have been good enough-just what he wanted, in fact. It would have shut us down good and proper. There would have been court-martials and the stockade in Rye for some of us and transfers for all the rest. But Fuller was slow. I think he was afraid of the same thing some of us was afraid of-that some of the townies would be mad. Mueller hadn’t been back to see him, and I think Major Fuller must have been scared to go downtown and see Mueller. He talked big, Fuller did, but he had all the spine of a jellyfish.

“So instead of the thing ending in some put-up way that would have at least left all those that burned up that night still alive, the Legion of Decency ended it. They came in their white sheets early that November and cooked themselves a barbecue.”

He fell silent again, not sipping at his water this time, only looking moodily into the far corner of his room while outside a bell dinged softly somewhere and a nurse passed the open doorway, the soles of her shoes squeaking on the linoleum. I could hear a TV someplace, a radio someplace else. I remember that I could hear the wind blowing outside, snuffling up the side of the building. And although it was August, the wind made a cold sound. It knew nothing of Cain’s Hundred on the television, or the Four Seasons singing “Walk Like a Man” on the radio.

“Some of them came through that greenbelt between the base and West Broadway,” he resumed at last. “They must have met at someone’s house over there, maybe in the basement, to get their sheets on and to make the torches that they used.

“I’ve heard that others came right onto the base by Ridgeline Road, which was the main way onto the base back then. I heard-I won’t say where-that they came in a brand-new Packard automobile, dressed in their white sheets with their white goblin-hats on their laps and torches on the floor. The torches were Louisville Sluggers with big hunks of burlap snugged down over the fat parts with red rubber gaskets, the kind ladies use when they put up preserves. There was a booth where Ridgeline Road branched off Witcham Road and came onto the base, and the OD passed that Packard right along.

“It was Saturday night and the joint was jumping, going round and round. There might have been two hundred people there, maybe three. And here came these white men, six or eight in their bottle-green Packard, and more coining through the trees between the base and the fancy houses on West Broadway. They wasn’t young, not many of them, and sometimes I wonder how many cases of angina and bleeding ulcers there were the next day. I hope there was a lot. Those dirty sneaking murdering bastards.

“The Packard parked on the hill and flashed its lights twice. About four men got out of it and joined the rest. Some had those two-gallon tins of gasoline that you could buy at service stations back in those days. All of them had torches. One of em stayed behind the wheel of that Packard. Mueller had a Packard, you know. Yes he did. A green one.

They got together at the back of the Black Spot and doused their torches with gas. Maybe they only meant to scare us. I’ve heard it the other way, but I’ve heard it that way, too. I’d rather believe that’s how they meant it, because I ain’t got feeling mean enough even yet to want to believe the worst.

“It could have been that the gas dripped down to the handles of some of those torches and when they lit them, why, those holding them panicked and threw them any whichway just to get rid of them. Whatever, that black November night was suddenly blazing with torches. Some was holding em up and waving em around, little flaming pieces of burlap falling off n the tops of em. Some of them were laughing. But like I say, some of the others up and threw em through the back windows, into what was our kitchen. The place was burning merry hell in a minute and a half.

“The men outside, they were all wearing their peaky white hoods by then. Some of them were chanting “Come out, niggers! Come out, niggers! Come out, niggers!” Maybe some of them were chanting to scare us, but I like to believe most of em were trying to warn us-same way as I like to believe that maybe those torches going into the kitchen the way they did was an accident.

“Either way, it didn’t much matter. The band was playing louder’n a factory whistle. Everybody was whooping it up and having a good time. Nobody inside knew anything was wrong until Gerry McCrew, who was playing assistant cook that night, opened the door to the kitchen and damn near got blowtorched. Flames shot out ten feet and burned his messjacket right off. Burned most of his hair off as well.

“I was sitting about halfway down the east wall with Trev Dawson and Dick Hallorann when it happened, and at first I had an idea the gas stove had exploded. I’d no more than got on my feet when I was knocked down by people headed for the door. About two dozen of em went marchin right up my back, an I guess that was the only time during the whole thing when I really felt scared. I could hear people screamin and tellin each other they had to get out, the place was on fire. But every time I tried to get up, someone footed me right back down again. Someone landed his big shoe square on the back of my head and I saw stars. My nose mashed on that oiled floor and I snuffled up dirt and began to cough and sneeze at the same time. Someone else stepped on the small of my back. I felt a lady’s high heel slam down between the cheeks of my butt, and son, I never want another half-ass enema like that one. If the seat of my khakis had ripped, I believe I’d be bleedin down there to this day.

“It sounds funny now, but I damn near died in that stampede. I was whopped, whapped, stomped, walked on, and kicked in so many places I couldn’t walk “tall the next day. I was screaming and none of those people topside heard me or paid any mind.

“It was Trev saved me. I seen this big brown hand in front of me and I grabbed it like a drownin man grabs a life preserver. I grabbed and he hauled and up I came. Someone’s foot got me in the side of my neck right here-”

He massaged that area where the jaw turns up toward the ear, and I nodded.

“-and it hurt so bad that I guess I blacked out for a minute. But I never let go of Trev’s hand, and he never let go of mine. I got to my feet, finally, just as the wall we’d put up between the kitchen and the hall fell over. It made a noise like-floomp-the noise a puddle of gasoline makes when you light it. I saw it go over in a big bundle of sparks, and I saw the people running to get out of its way as it fell. Some of em made it. Some didn’t. One of our fellas-I think it might have been Hort Sartoris-was buried under it, and for just one second I seen his hand underneath all those blazing coals, openin and closin. There was a white girl, surely no more than twenty, and the back of her dress went up. She was with a college boy and I heard her screamin at him, beggin him to help her. He took just about two swipes at it and then ran away with the others. She stood there screamin as her dress went up on her.

It was like hell out where the kitchen had been. The flames was so bright you couldn’t look at them. The heat was bakin hot, Mikey, roastin hot. You could feel your skin going shiny. You could feel the hairs in your nose gettin crispy.

“We gotta break outta here!” Trev yells, and starts to drag me along the wall. “Come on!”

Then Dick Hallorann catches hold of him. He couldn’t have been no more than nineteen, and his eyes was as big as bil’ard balls, but he kept his head better than we did. He saved our lives. “Not that way!” he yells. “This way!” And he pointed back toward the bandstand… toward the fire, you know.

“You’re crazy!” Trevor screamed back. He had a big bull voice, but you could barely hear him over the thunder of the fire and the screaming people. “Die if you want to, but me and Willy are gettin” out!”

“He still had me by the hand and he started to haul me toward the door again, although there were so many people around it by then you couldn’t see it at all. I would have gone with him. I was so shell-shocked I didn’t know what end was up. All I knew was that I didn’t want to be baked like a human turkey.

“Dick grabbed Trev by the hair of the head just as hard as he could, and when Trev turned back, Dick slapped his face. I remember seeing Trev’s head bounce off.the wall and thinking Dick had gone crazy. Then he was hollerin in Trev’s face, “You go that way and you goan die! They jammed up against that door, nigger!”

“You don’t know that!” Trev screamed back at him, and then there was this loud BANG\ like a firecracker, only what it was, it was the heat exploding Marty Devereaux’s bass drum. The fire was runnin along the beams overhead and the oil on the floor was catchin.

“I know it!” Dick screams back. “I know it!”

“He grabbed my other hand, and for a minute there I felt like the rope in a tug-o-war game. Then Trev took a good look at the door and went Dick’s way. Dick got us down to a window and grabbed a chair to bust it out, but before he could swing it, the heat blew it out for him. Then he grabbed Trev Dawson by the back of his pants and hauled him up. “Climb!” he shouts. “Climb, motherfucker!” And Trev went, head up and tail over the dashboard.

“He boosted me next, and I went up. I grabbed the sides of the window and hauled. I had a good crop of blisters all over my palms the next day: that wood was already smokin. I come out headfirst, and if Trev hadn’t grabbed me I mighta broke my neck.

“We turned back around, and it was like something from the worst nightmare you ever had, Mikey. That window was just a yellow, blazin square of light. Flames was shoo tin up through that tin roof in a dozen places. We could hear people screamin inside.

“I saw two brown hands waving around in front of the fire-Dick’s hands. Trev Dawson made me a step with his own hands and I reached through that window and grabbed Dick. When I took his weight my gut went against the side of the building, and it was like having your belly against a stove that’s just starting to get real good and hot. Dick’s face came up and for a few seconds I didn’t think we was going to be able to get him. He’d taken a right smart of smoke, and he was close to passing out. His lips had cracked open. The back of his shirt was smoldering.

“And then I damn near let go, because I could smell the people burning inside. I’ve heard people say that smell is like barbecuing pork ribs, but it ain’t like that. It’s more like what happens sometimes after they geld hosses. They build a big fire and throw all that shit into it and when the fire gets hot enough you can hear them hossballs poppin like chestnuts, and that’s what people smell like when they start to cook right inside their clo’es. I could smell that and I knew I couldn’t take it for long so I gave one more great big yank, and out came Dick. He lost one of his shoes.

“I tumbled off Trev’s hands and went down. Dick come down on top of me, and I’m here to tell you that nigger’s head was hard. I lost most of my breath and just laid there on the dirt for a few seconds, rolling around and holding my bellyguts.

“Presently I was able to get to my knees, then to my feet. And I seen these shapes running off toward the greenbelt. At first I thought they were ghosts, and then I seen shoes. By then it was so bright around the Black Spot it was like daylight. I seen shoes and understood it was men wearin sheets. One of them had fallen a little bit behind the others and I saw…”

He trailed off, licking his lips.

“What did you see, Daddy?” I asked.

“Never you mind,” he said. “Give me my water, Mikey.”

I did. He drank most of it and then got coughing. A passing nurse looked in and said: “do you need anything, Mr Hanlon?”

“New set of “testines,” my dad said. “You got any handy, Rhoda?”

She smiled a nervous, doubtful smile and passed on. My dad handed the glass to me and I put it back on his table. “It’s longer tellin than it is rememberin,” he said. “You goan fill that glass up for me before you leave?”

“Sure, Daddy.”

“This story goan give you nightmares, Mikey?”

I opened my mouth to lie, and then thought better of it. And I think now that if I had lied, he would have stopped right there. He was far gone by then, but maybe not that far gone.

“I guess so,” I said.

That’s not such a bad thing,” he said to me. “In nightmares we can think the worst. That’s what they’re for, I guess.”

He reached out his hand and I took it and we held hands while he finished.

“I looked around just in time to see Trev and Dick goin around the front of the building, and I chased after them, still trying to catch m’wind. There was maybe forty or fifty people out there, some of them cryin, some of them pukin, some of them screamin, some of them doing all three things at once, it seemed like. Others were layin on the grass, fainted dead away with the smoke. The door was shut, and we heard people screamin on the other side, screamin to let them out, out for the love of Jesus, they were burning up.

“It was the only door, except for the one that went out through the kitchen to where the garbage cans and things were, you see. To go in you pushed the door open. To go out you had to pull it.

“Some people had gotten out, and then they started to jam up at that door and push. The door got slammed shut. The ones in the back kept pushin forward to get away from the fire, and everybody got jammed up. The ones right up front were squashed. Wasn’t no way they could get that door open against the weight of all those behind. So there they were, trapped, and the fire raged.

“It was Trev Dawson that made it so it was only eighty or so that died instead of a hundred or maybe two hundred, and what he got for his pains wasn’t a medal but two years in the Rye stockade. See, right about then this big old cargo truck pulled up, and who should be behind the wheel but my old friend Sergeant Wilson, the fella who owned all the holes there on the base.

“He gets out and starts shoutin orders that didn’t make much sense and which people couldn’t hear anyway. Trev grabbed my arm and we run over to him. I’d lost all track of Dick Hallorann by then and didn’t even see him until the next day.

“Sergeant, I have to use your truck!” Trev yells in his face.

“Get out of my way, nigger,” Wilson says, and pushes him down. Then he starts yelling all that confused shit again. Wasn’t nobody paying any attention to him, and he didn’t go on for long anyway, because Trevor Dawson popped up like a jack-in-the-box and decked him.

“Trev could hit damned hard, and almost any other man would have stayed down, but that cracker had a hard head. He got up, blood pouring out of his mouth and nose, and he said, “I’m goan kill you for that.” Well, Trev hit him in the belly just as hard as he could, and when he doubled over I put my hands together and pounded the back of his neck just as hard as 7 could. It was a cowardly thing to do, hitting a man from behind like that, but desperate times call for desperate measures. And I would be lyin, Mikey, if I didn’t tell you that hitting that poormouth sonofabitch didn’t give me a bit of pleasure.

“Down he went, just like a steer hit with a poleaxe. Trev run to the truck, fired it up, and drove it around so it was facin the front of the Black Spot, but to the left of the door. He th’owed it into first, popped the clutch on that cocksucker, and here he come!

“Look out there!” I shouted at that crowd of people standing around. “Ware that truck!”

“They scattered like quail, and for a wonder Trev didn’t hit none of em. He hit the side of the building going maybe thirty, and cracked his face a good one on the steerin wheel of the truck. I seen the blood fly from his nose when he shook his head to clear it. He punched out reverse, backed up fifty yards, and come down on her again. WHAM! The Black Spot wasn’t nothing but corrugated tin, and that second hit did her. The whole side of that oven fell in and the flames come roarin out. How anything could have still been alive in there I don’t know, but there was. People are a lot tougher than you’d believe, Mikey, and if you don’t believe it, just take a look at me, slidin off the skin of the world by my fingernails. That place was like a smelting furnace, it was a hell of flames and smoke, but people came running out in a regular torrent. There were so many that Trev didn’t even dare back the truck up again for fear he would run over some of them. So he got out and ran back to me, leaving it where it was.

“We stood there, watching it end. It hadn’t been five minutes all told, but xxxit felt like forever. The last dozen or so that made it out were on fire. People grabbed em and started to roll em around on the ground, trying to put em out. Looking in, we could see other people trying to come, and we knew they wasn’t never going to make it.

Trev grabbed my hand and I grabbed him back twice as hard. We stood there holding hands just like you and me are doing now, Mikey, him with his nose broke and blood running down his face and his eyes puffing shut, and we watched them people. They were the real ghosts we saw that night, nothing but shimmers shaped like men and women in that fire, walking toward the opening Trev had bashed with Sergeant Wilson’s truck. Some of em had their arms held out, like they expected someone to save them. The others just walked, but they didn’t seem to get nowhere. Their clo’es were blazin. Their faces were runnin. And one after another they just toppled over and you didn’t see them no more.

“The last one was a woman. Her dress had burned off her and there she was in her slip. She was burnin like a candle. She seemed to look right at me at the end, and I seen her eyelids was on fire.

“When she fell down it was over. The whole place went up in a pillar of fire. By the time the base firetrucks and two more from the Main Street fire station got there, it was already burning itself out. That was the fire at the Black Spot, Mikey.”

He drank the last of his water and handed me the glass to fill at the drinking fountain in the hall. “Goan piss the bed tonight I guess, Mikey.”

I kissed his cheek and then went out into the hall to fill his glass. When I returned, he was drifting away again, his eyes glassy and contemplative. When I put the glass on the nighttable, he mumbled a thank-you I could barely understand. I looked at the Westclox on his table and saw it was almost eight. Time for me to go home.

I leaned over to kiss him goodbye… and instead heard myself whisper, “What did you see?”

His eyes, which were now slipping shut, barely turned toward the sound of my voice. He might have known it was me, or he might have believed he was hearing the voice of his own thoughts. “Hunk?”

“The thing you saw,” I whispered. I didn’t want to hear, but I had to hear. I was both hot and cold, my eyes burning, my hands freezing. But I had to hear. As I suppose Lot’s wife had to turn back and look at the destruction of Sodom.

“Twas a bird,” he said. “Right over the last of those runnin men. A hawk, maybe. What they call a kestrel. But it was big. Never told no one. Would have been locked up. That bird was maybe sixty feet from wingtip to wingtip. It was the size of a Japanese Zero. But I seen… seen its eyes… and I think… it seen me…”

His head slipped over to the side, toward the window, where the dark was coming.

“It swooped down and grabbed that last man up. Got him right by the sheet, it did xxxand I heard that bird’s wings… The sound was like fire… and it hovered… and I thought, Birds can’t hover… but this one could, because. because…”

He fell silent.

“Why, Daddy?” I whispered. “Why could it hover?”

“It didn’t hover,” he said.

I sat there in silence, thinking he had gone to sleep for sure this time. I had never been so afraid in my life… because four years before, I had seen that bird. Somehow, in some unimaginable way, I had nearly forgotten that nightmare. It was my father who brought it back.

“It didn’t hover,” he said. “It floated. It floated. There were big bunches of balloons tied to each wing, and it floated.”

My father went to sleep.

March 1st, 1985

It’s come again. I know that now. I’ll wait, but in my heart I know it. I’m not sure I can stand it. As a kid I was able to deal with it, but it’s different with kids. In some fundamental way it’s different.

I wrote all of that last night in a kind of frenzy-not that I could have gone home anyway. Derry has been blanketed in a thick glaze of ice, and although the sun is out this morning, nothing is moving.

I wrote until long after three this morning, pushing the pen faster and faster, trying to get it all out. I had forgotten about seeing the giant bird when I was eleven. It was my father’s story that brought it back… and I never forgot it again. Not any of it. In a way, I suppose it was his final gift to me. A terrible gift, you would say, but wonderful in its way.

I slept right where I was, my head in my arms, my notebook and pen on the table in front of me. I woke up this morning with a numb ass and an aching back, but feeling free, somehow… purged of that old story.

And then I saw that I had had company in the night, as I slept.

The tracks, drying to faint muddy impressions, led from the front door of the library (which I locked; I always lock it) to the desk where I slept.

There were no tracks leading away.

Whatever it was, it came to me in the night, left its talisman… and then simply disappeared.

Tied to my reading lamp was a single balloon. Filled with helium, it floated in a morning sunray which slanted in through one of the high windows.

On it was a picture of my face, the eyes gone, blood running down from the ragged sockets, a scream distorting the mouth on the balloon’s thin and bulging rubber skin.

I looked at it and I screamed. The scream echoed through the library, echoing back, vibrating from the circular iron staircase leading to the stacks.

The balloon burst with a bang.

 

PART 3

GROWNUPS

 

“The descent made up of despairs and without accomplishment realizes a new awakening: which is a reversal of despair. For what we cannot accomplish, what is denied to love, what we have lost in the anticipation-a descent follows, endless and indestructible.”

–William Carlos Williams, Paterson

 

 

“Don’t it make you wanta go home, now?

Don’t it make you wanta go home?

All God’s children get weary when they roam,

Don’t it make you wanta go home?”

–Joe South

 

Chapter 10

THE REUNION

 

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