8
By one of those odd quirks of fate or coincidence which sometimes obtain (and which, in truth, obtained more frequently in Derry), Tom had taken a room at the Koala Inn on Outer Jackson Street and Audra had taken a room at the Holiday Inn; the two motels were side by side, their parking lots divided only by a raised concrete sidewalk. And as it so happened, Audra's rented Datsun and Tom's purchased LTD wagon were parked nose-to-nose, separated only by that walkway. Both slept now, Audra quietly on her side, Tom Rogan on his back, snoring so heavily that his swollen lips flapped.
9
Henry spent that day hiding - hiding in the puckies beside Route 9. Sometimes he slept. Sometimes he lay watching police cruisers slide by like hunting dogs. While the Losers ate lunch, Henry listened to voices from the moon.
And when dark fell, he went out to the verge of the road and stuck out his thumb.
After awhile, some fool came along and picked him up.
DERRY: THE THIRD INTERLUDE
'A bird came down the Walk -
He did not know I saw -
He bit an Angleworm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw'
- Emily Dickinson,
'A Bird Came Down the Walk
March 17th, 1985
The fire at the Black Spot happened in the late fall of 1930. So far as I am able to determine, that fire - the one my father barely escaped - ended the cycle of murder and disappearance which happened in the years 1929-30, just as the explosion at the Ironworks ended a cycle some twenty-five years before. It is as if a monstrous sacrifice is needed at the end of the cycle to quiet whatever terrible force it is which works here . . . to send It to sleep for another quarter-century or so.
But if such a sacrifice is needed to end each cycle, it seems that some similar event is needed to set each cycle in motion.
Which brings me to the Bradley Gang.
Their execution took place at the three-way intersection of Canal, Main, and Kansas - not far, in fact, from the place shown in the picture which began to move for Bill and Richie one day in June of 1958 - some thirteen months before the fire at the Black Spot, in October of 1929 . . . not long before the stock-market crash.
As with the fire at the Black Spot, many Derry residents affect not to remember what happened that day. Or they were out of town, visiting relatives. Or they were napping that afternoon and never found out what had happened until they heard it on the radio news that night. Or they will simply look you full in the face and lie to you.
The police logs for that day indicate that Chief Sullivan was not even in town (Sure I remember, Aloysius Nell told me from a chair on the sun-terrace of the Paulson Nursing Home in Bangor. That was my first year on the force, and I ought to remember. He was off in western Maine, bird-hunting. They'd been sheeted and carried off by the time he got back. Madder than a wet hen was Jim Sullivan), but a picture in a reference book on gangsters called Bloodletters and Badmen shows a grinning man standing beside the bullet-riddled corpse of Al Bradley in the morgue, and if that man is not Chief Sullivan, it is surely his twin brother.
It was from Mr Keene that I finally got what I believe to be the true version of the story - Norbert Keene, who was the proprietor of the Center Street Drug Store from 1925 until 1975. He talked to me willingly enough, but, like Betty Ripsom's father, he made me turn off my tape-recorder before he would really unwind the tale - not that it mattered; I can hear his papery voice yet - another a capella singer in the damned choir that is this town.
'No reason not to tell you,' he said. 'No one will print it, and no one would believe it even if they did.' He offered me an old-fashioned apothecary jar. 'Licorice whip? As I remember, you were always partial to the red ones, Mikey.'
I took one. 'Was Chief Sullivan there that day?'
Mr Keene laughed and took a licorice whip for himself. 'You wondered about that, did you?'
'I wondered,' I agreed, chewing a piece of the red licorice. I hadn't had one since I was a kid, shoving my pennies across the counter to a much younger and sprier Mr Keene. It tasted just as fine as it had back then.
'You're too young to remember when Bobby Thomson hit his home run for the Giants in the play-off game in 1951,' Mr Keene said. 'You wouldn't have been but four years old. Well! They ran an article about that game in the newspaper a few years after, and it seemed like just about a million folks from New York claimed they were there in the ballpark that day.' Mr Keene gummed his licorice whip and a little dark drool ran down from the corner of his mouth. He wiped it off fastidiously with his handkerchief. We were sitting in the office behind the drugstore, because although Norbert Keene was eighty-five and retired ten years, he still did the books for his grandson.
'Just the opposite when it comes to the Bradley Gang!' Keene exclaimed. He was smiling, but it was not a pleasant smile - it was cynical, coldly reminiscent. 'There was maybe twenty thousand people who lived in downtown Derry back then. Main Street and Canal Street had both been paved for four years, but Kansas Street was still dirt. Raised dust in the summer and turned into a boghole every March and November. They used to oil Up-Mile Hill every June and every Fourth of July the Mayor would talk about how they were going to pave Kansas Street, but it never happened until 1942. It . . . but what was I saying?'
'Twenty thousand people who lived right downtown,' I prompted.
'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.