DERRY: THE THIRD INTERLUDE

 

“A bird came down the Walk-

He did not know I saw-

He bit an Angleworm in halves

And ate the fellow, raw”

–Emily Dickinson, “A Bird Came Down the Walk

 

 

March 17th, 1985

 

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

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

Which brings me to the Bradley Gang.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I nodded.

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

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

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

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

“How did Machen know that?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Holy shit!” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

“I do,” Lal says, “and I’ll have all the ammo you could want, Mr-?”

“Rader,” Brady says. “Richard D. Rader, at your service.”

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

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

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

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

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

“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 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.

“Gaudy 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 Gaudy 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 then: 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?”

“I got enough,” I said. I licked my lips. “Mr Keene, how could a thing of that… that magnitude… be covered up?”

“Wasn’t no cover-up,” he said, looking honestly surprised. “It was just that no one talked about it much. And really, who cared? It wasn’t President and Mrs Hoover that went down that day. It was no worse than shooting mad dogs that would kill you with a bite if you give them half a chance.”

“But the women?”

“Couple of whores,” he said indifferently. “Besides, it happened in Derry, not in New York or Chicago. The place makes it news as much as what happened in the place, sonny. That’s why there are bigger headlines when an earthquake kills twelve people in Los Angeles than there are when one kills three thousand in some heathen country in the Mideast.”

Besides, it happened in Derry.

I’ve heard it before, and I suppose if I continue to pursue this I’ll hear it again… and again… and again. They say it as if speaking patiently to a mental defective. They say it the way they would say Because of gravity if you asked them how come you stick to the ground when you walk. They say it as if it were a natural law any natural man should understand. And, of course, the worst of that is I do understand.

I had one more question for Norbert Keene.

“Did you see anyone at all that day that you didn’t recognize once the shooting started?”

Mr Keene’s answer was quick enough to drop my blood temperature ten degrees-or so it felt. “The clown, you mean? How did you find out about him, sonny?”

“Oh, I heard it somewhere,” I said.

“I only caught a glimpse of him. Once things got hot, I tended pretty much to my own knittin. I glanced around just once and saw him upstreet beyond them Swedes under the Bijou’s marquee,” Mr Keene said. “He wasn’t wearing a clown suit or nothing like that. He was dressed in a pair of farmer’s biballs and a cotton shirt underneath. But his face was covered with that white grease-paint they use, and he had a big red clown smile painted on. Also had these tufts of fake hair, you know. Orange. Sorta comical.

“Lal Machen never saw that fellow, but Biff did. Only Biff must have been confused, because he thought he saw him in one of the windows of an apartment over somewhere to the left, and once when I asked Jimmy Gordon-he was killed in Pearl Harbor, you know, went down with his ship, the California, I think it was-he said he saw the guy behind the War Memorial.”

Mr Keene shook his head, smiling a little.

“It’s funny how people get during a thing like that, and even funnier what they remember after it’s all over. You can listen to sixteen different tales and no two of them will jibe together. Take the gun that clown fellow had, for instance-”

“Gun?” I asked. “He was shooting, too?”

“Ayuh,” Mr Keene said. The one glimpse I caught of him, it looked like he had a Winchester bolt-action, and it wasn’t until later that I figured out I must have thought that because that’s what I had. Biff Marlow thought he had a Remington, because that was what he had. And when I asked Jimmy about it, he said that guy was shooting an old Springfield, just like his. Funny, huh?”

“Funny,” I managed. “Mr Keene… didn’t any of you wonder what in hell a clown, especially one in farmer’s biballs, was doing there just then?”

“Sure,” Mr Keene said. “It wasn’t no big deal, you understand, but sure we wondered. Most of us figured it was somebody who wanted to attend the party but didn’t want to be recognized. A Town Council member, maybe. Horst Mueller, maybe, or even Trace Naugler, who was mayor back then. Or it could just have been a professional man who didn’t want to be recognized. A doctor or a lawyer. I wouldn’t “ve recognized my own father in a get-up like that.”

He laughed a little and I asked him what was funny.

“There’s also a possibility that it was a real clown,” he said. “Back in the twenties and thirties the county fair in Esty came a lot earlier than it does now, and it was set up and going full blast the week that the Bradley Gang met their end. There were clowns at the county fair. Maybe one of them heard we were going to have our own little carnival and rode down because he wanted to be in on it.

He smiled at me, dryly.

“I’m about talked out,” he said, “but I’ll tell you one more thing, since you “pear to be so interested and you listen so close. It was something Biff Marlow said about sixteen years later, when we were having a few beers up to Pilot’s in Bangor. Right out of a clear blue sky he said it. Said that clown was leanin out of the window so far that Biff couldn’t believe he wasn’t fallin out. It wasn’t just his head and shoulders and arms that was out; Biff said he was right out to the knees, hanging there in midair, shooting down at the cars the Bradleys had come in, with that big red grin on his face. “He was tricked out like a jackolantern that had got a bad scare,” was how Biff put it.”

“Like he was floating,” I said.

“Ayuh,” Mr Keene agreed. “And Biff said there was something else, something that bothered him for weeks afterward. One of those things you get right on the tip of your tongue but won’t quite come off, or something that lights on your skin like a mosquito or a noseeum. He said he finally figured out what it was one night when he had to get up and tap a kidney. He stood there whizzing into the bowl, thinking of nothing in particular, when it come to him all at once that it was two-twenty-five in the afternoon when the shooting started and the sun was out but that clown didn’t cast any shadow. No shadow at all.”

 

Part 4

JULY OF 1958

 

“You lethargic, waiting upon me,

waiting for the fire

and I attendant upon you,

shaken by your beauty

Shaken by your beauty

Shaken.”-

William Carlos Williams, Paterson

 

 

“Well I was born in my birthday suit

The doctor slapped my behind

He said “You gonna be special

You sweet little toot toot.”

–Sidney Simien, “My Toot Toot”

 

CHAPTER 13

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