'Gimme, Bill!' Richie was saying, but Bill held the album a moment longer, staring fixedly at the woodcut, sure it would begin to move: the bowling pins (if that's what they were) which the funny fellow was juggling would rise and fall, rise and fall, the kids would laugh and applaud (except maybe they wouldn't all laugh and applaud; some of them might scream and run instead), the mule –team pulling the barge would move beyond the borders of the picture.
It didn't happen, and he passed the book on to Richie.
When the album came back to Mike he turned some more pages, hunting. 'Here,' he said. This one is from 1856, four years before Lincoln was elected President.'
The book went around again. This was a color picture — a sort of cartoon — which showed a bunch of drunks standing in front of a saloon while a fat politician with muttonchop whiskers declaimed from a board that had been set between two hogsheads. He held a foamy pitcher of beer in one hand. The board upon which he stood was considerably bowed with his weight. Some distance off, a group of bonneted women were looking at this show of mingled buffoonery and intemperance with disgust. The caption below the picture read: POLITICSIS THIRSTY WORK, SEZ SENATOR GARNER!
'Daddy says pictures like this were really popular for about twenty years before the Civil War,' Mike said. 'They called them "foolcards," and people used to send them to each other. They were like some of the jokes in Mad, I guess.'
'Suh-suh-satire,' Bill said.
'Yeah,' Mike said. 'But now look down in the corner of this one.'
The picture was like Mad in another way — it had as many details and little side-jokes as a big Mort Drucker panel in a Mad magazine movie take– o f f . T h e r e w a s a g r i n n i n g f a t m a n pouring a glass of beer down a spotted dog's throat. There was a woman who had fallen on her prat in a mudpuddle. There were two street urchins slyly sticking sulphur –headed matches into the soles of a prosperous –looking businessman's shoes, and a girl swinging from her heels in an elm tree so that her underpants showed. But despite this bewildering intaglio of detail, none of them really needed Mike to point the clown out. Dressed in a loud checked vest-busting drummer's suit, he was playing the shell-game with a bunch of drunken loggers.
He was winking at a lumber jack who had, to judge by the gape-mouthed look of surprise on his face, just picked the wrong nutshell. The drummer/clown was taking a coin from him.
'Him again,' Ben said. 'What . . . a hundred years later?'
'Just about,' Mike said. 'And here's one from 1891.'
It was a clipping from the front page of the Derry News. HUZZAH! the headline proclaimed exuberantly. IRONWORKS OPENS! Just below this: 'Town Turns Out for Gala Picnic.' The pictur e showed a woodcut of the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the Kitchener Ironworks; its style reminded Bill of the Currier and Ives prints his mother had in the dining room, although this was nowhere near as polished. A fellow tricked out in a morning coat and tophat was holding a large pair of open-jawed scissors above the Ironworks ribbon while a crowd of perhaps five hundred watched. Off to the left was a clown — their clown — turning a handspring for a group of children. The artist had caught him upside down, turning his smile into a scream.
He passed the book on quickly to Richie.
The next picture was a photograph under which Will Hanlon had written: 1933: Repeal in Derry. Although none of the boys knew much about either the Volstead Act or its repeal, the picture made the salient facts clear. The photo was of Wally's Spa down in Hell's Half-Acre. The place was almost literally filled to the rafters with men wearing open-collared white shirts, straw boaters, lumbermen's shirts, tee– shirts, banker's suits. All of them were holding glasses and bottles victoriously aloft. There were two big signs in the window. WELCOME BACK, JOHN BARLEYCORN! one read. The other said: FREE BEER TONIGHT. The clown, dressed like the biggest dandy you ever saw (white shoes, spats, gangster pants), had his foot on the running board of a Reo auto and was drinking champagne from a lady's high-heeled shoe.
'1945,' Mike said.
The Derry News again. The headline: JAPAN SURRENDERS — IT'S OVER! THANK GOD IT 'S OVER! A parade was snake-dancing its way along Main Street toward Up-Mile Hill. And there was the clown in the background, wearing his silver suit with the orange buttons, frozen in the matrix of dots that made up the grainy newsprint photo, seeming to suggest (at least to Bill) that nothing was over, no one had surrendered, nothing was won, nil was still the rule, zilch still the custom; seeming to suggest above all that all was still lost.
Bill felt cold and dry and scared.
Suddenly the dots in the picture disappeared and it began to move.
'That's what — ' Mike began.
'L-L-Look,' Bill said. The word dropped out of his mouth like a partially melted ice-cube. 'A-A –All of you luh-look at th-this!'
They crowded around.
'Oh my God,' Beverly whispered, awed.
'That's IT!' Richie nearly screamed, pounding Bill on the back in his excitement. He looked around at Eddie's white, drawn face and Stan Uris's frozen one. 'That's what we saw in George's room! That's exactly what we —
'Shhh,' Ben said. 'Listen.' And, almost sobbing: 'You can hear them — Christ, you can hear them in there.'
And in the silence that was only broken by the mild stir of the summer breeze, they all realized they could. The band was playing a martial marching tune, made faint and tinny by distance . . . or the passage of time . . . or whatever it was. The cheering of the crowd was like sounds that might come through on a badly tuned radio station. There were popping noises, also faint, like the muffled sound of snapping fingers.
'Firecrackers,' Beverly whispered, and rubbed at her eyes with hands that shook. 'Those are firecrackers, aren't they?'
No one answered. They watched the picture, their eyes eating up their faces.
The parade wiggled its way toward them, but just before the marchers reached the extreme foreground — at the point where it seemed they must march right out of the picture and into a world thirteen years later — they dropped from sight, as if on some kind of unknowable curve. The World War I soldiers first, their faces strangely old under their pie –plate helmets, with their sign which read THE DERRY VFW WELCOMES HOME OUR BRAVE BOYS, then the Boy Scouts, the Kiwanians, the Home Nursing Corps, the Derry Christian Marching Band, then the Derry World War II vets themselves, with the high-school band behind them. The crowd moved and shifted. Tickertape and confetti fluttered down from the second– and third –floor windows of the business buildings that lined the streets. The clown pranced along the sidelines, doing splits and cartwheels, miming a sniper, miming a salute. And Bill noticed for the first time that people were turning from him — but not as if they saw him, exactly; it was more as if they felt a draft or smelled something bad.
Only the children really saw him, and they shrank away.
Ben stretched his hand out to the picture, as Bill had done in George's room.
'Nuh-Nuh-Nuh-NO!' Bill cried.
'I think it's all right, Bill,' Ben said. 'Look.' And he laid his hand on the protective plastic over the picture for a moment and then took it back. 'But if you stripped off that cover — '
Beverly screamed. The clown had left off its antics when Ben withdrew his hand. It rushed toward them, its paint-bloody mouth gibbering and laughing. Bill winced ba ck but held onto the book all the same, thinking it would drop out of sight as the parade had done, and the marching band, and the Boy Scouts, and the Cadillac convertible carrying Miss Derry of 1945.