I heard this guy tried to save it. Doing the hero bit, you know. He jumped right in, but the baby was gone. Maybe he was wearing a jacket or something. When your clothes get wet, they drag you down. Eddie abruptly put his hand into his pocket and brought out a small brown glass bottle. He opened it, took out two white pills, and swallowed them dry. What were those? Beverly asked. Aspirin. Ive got a headache. He looked at her defensively, but Beverly said nothing more. Ben finished. After the incident of the baby (he himself, he said, had heard that it was actually a kid, a little girl of about three), the Town Council had voted to lock the Standpipe, both downstairs and up, and stop the daytrips and picnics on the gallery. It had remained locked from then until now. Oh, the caretaker came and went, and the maintenance men once in awhile, and once every season there were guided tours. Interested citizens could follow a lady from the Historical Society up the spiral of stairs to the gallery at the top, where they could ooh and aah over the view and snap Kodaks to show their friends. But the door to the inner sleeve was always locked now. Is it still full of water? Stan asked. I guess so, Ben said. Ive seen firetrucks filling up there during grassfire season. They hook a hose to the pipe at the bottom. Stanley was looking at the dryer again, watching the rags go around and around. The clump had broken up now, and some of them floated like parachutes. What did you see there? Bev asked him gently. For a moment it seemed he would not answer at all. Then he drew a deep, shuddering breath and said something that at first struck them all as being far from the point. They named it Memorial Park after the 23rd Maine in the Civil War. The Derry Blues, they were called. There used to be a statue, but it blew down during a storm in the forties. They didnt have money enough to fix the statue, so they put in a birdbath instead. A big stone birdbath. They were all looking at him. Stan swallowed. There was an audible click in his throat. I watch birds, you see. I have an album, a pair of ZeissIkon binoculars, and everything. He looked at Eddie. Do you have any more aspirins? Eddie handed him the bottle. Stan took two, hesitated, then took another. He gave the bottle back and swallowed the pills, one after another, grimacing. Then he went on with his story. 10 Stans encounter had happened on a rainy April evening two months ago. He had donned his slicker, put his birdbook and his binoculars in a waterproof sack with a drawstring at the top, and set out for Memorial Park. He and his father usually went out together, but his father had had to work over that night and had called specially at suppertime to talk to Stan. One of his customers at the agency, another birdwatcher, had spotted what he believed to be a male cardinalFringillidae Richmondenadrinking from the birdbath in Memorial Park, he told Stan. They liked to eat, drink, and bathe right around dusk. It was very rare to spot a cardinal this far north of Massachusetts. Would Stan like to go down there and see if he could collect it? He knew the weather was pretty foul, but ... Stan had been agreeable. His mother made him promise to keep the hood of his slicker up, but Stan would have done that anyway. He was a fastidious boy. There were never any fights about getting him to wear his rubbers or his snowpants in the winter. He walked the mile and a half to Memorial Park in a rain so fine and hesitant that it really wasnt even a drizzle; it was more like a constant hanging mist. The air was muted but somehow exciting just the same. In spite of the last dwindling piles of snow under bushes and in groves of trees (to Stan they looked like piles of dirty castoff pillowcases), there was a smell of new growth in the air. Looking at the branches of elms and maples and oaks against the leadwhite sky, Stan thought that their silhouettes looked mysteriously thicker. They would burst open in a week or two, unrolling leaves of a delicate, almost transparent green. The air smells green tonight, he thought, and smiled a little. He walked quickly because the light would be gone in an hour or even less. He was as fastidious about his sightings as he was about his dress and study habits, and unless there was enough light left for him to be absolutely sure, he would not allow himself to collect the cardinal even if he knew in his heart he had really seen it. He cut across Memorial Park on a diagonal. The Standpipe was a white bulking shape to his left. Stan barely glanced at it. He had no interest whatsoever in the Standpipe. Memorial Park was a rough rectangle which sloped downhill. The grass (white and dead at this time of year) was kept neatly cut in the summertime, and there were circular beds of flowers. There was no playground equipment, however. This was considered a grownups park. At the far end, the grade smoothed out before dropping abruptly down to Kansas Street and the Barrens beyond. The birdbath his father had mentioned stood on this flat area. It was a shallow stone dish set into a squat masonry pedestal that was really much too big for the humble function it fulfilled. Stans father had told him that, before the money ran out, they had intended to put the statue of the soldier back up here again. I like the birdbath better, Daddy, Stan said. Mr. Uris ruffled his hair. Me too, son, he said. More baths and less bullets, thats my motto. At the top of this pedestal a motto had been carved in the stone. Stanley read it but did not understand it; the only Latin he understood was the genus classifications of the birds in his book. Apparebat eidolon senex. Pliny the inscription read. Stan sat down on a bench, took his birdalbum out of the bag, and turned over to the picture of the cardinal one more time, going over it, familiarizing himself with the recognizable points. A male cardinal would be hard to mistake for something elseit was as red as a fireengine, if not so largebut Stan was a creature of habit and convention; these things comforted him and reinforced his sense of place and belonging in the world. So he gave the picture a good threeminute study before closing the book (the moisture in the air was making the corners of the pages turn up) and putting it back into the bag. He uncased his binoculars and put them to his eyes. There was no need to adjust the field of focus, because the last time he had used the glasses he had been sitting on this same bench and looking at that same birdbath. Fastidious boy, patient boy. He did not fidget. He did not get up and walk around or swing the binoculars here and there to see what else there might be to be seen. He sat still, field glasses trained on the birdbath, and the mist collected in fat drops on his yellow slicker. He was not bored. He was looking down into the equivalent of an avian conventionsite. Four brown sparrows sat there for awhile, dipping into the water with their beaks, flicking droplets casually back over their shoulders and onto their backs. Then a bluejay came hauling in like a cop breaking up a gaggle of loiterers. The jay was as big as a house in Stans glasses, his quarrelsome cries absurdly thin by comparison (after you looked through the binoculars steadily for awhile the magnified birds you saw began to seem not odd but perfectly correct). The sparrows flew off. The jay, now in charge, strutted, bathed, grew bored, departed. The sparrows returned, then flew off again as a pair of robins cruised in to bathe and (perhaps) to discuss matters of importance to the hollowboned set. Stans father had laughed at Stans hesitant suggestion that maybe birds talked, and he was sure his dad was right when he said birds werent smart enough to talkthat their brainpans were too smallbut by gosh they sure looked like they were talking. A new bird joined them. It was red. Stan hastily adjusted the field of focus on the binoculars a bit. Was it ...? No. It was a scarlet tanager, a good bird but not the cardinal he was looking for. It was joined by a flicker that was a frequent visitor to the Memorial Park birdbath. Stan recognized him by the tattered right wing. As always, he speculated on how that might have happeneda close call with some cat seemed the most likely explanation. Other birds came and went. Stan saw a grackle, as clumsy and ugly as a flying boxcar, a bluebird, another flicker. He was finally rewarded by a new birdnot the cardinal but a cowbird that looked vast and stupid in the eyepieces of the binoculars. He dropped them against his chest and fumbled the birdbook out of the bag again, hoping that the cowbird wouldnt fly away before he could confirm the sighting. He would have something to take home to his father, at least. And it was time to go. The light was fading fast. He felt cold and damp. He checked the book, then looked through the glasses again. It was still there, not bathing but only standing on the rim of the birdbath looking dumb. It was almost surely a cowbird. With no distinctive markingsat least none he could pick up at this distanceand in the fading light it was hard to be one hundred percent sure, but maybe he had just enough time and light for one more check. He looked at the picture in the book, studying it with a fierce frown of concentration, and then picked up the glasses again. He had only fixed them on the birdbath when a hollow rolling boom! sent the cowbirdif it had been a cowbirdwinging. Stan tried to follow it with the glasses, knowing how slim his chances were of picking it up again. He lost it and made a hissing sound of disgust between his teeth. Well, if it had come once it would perhaps come again. And it had only been a cowbird (probably a cowbird) after all, not a golden eagle or a great auk. Stan recased his binoculars and put away his birdalbum. Then he got up and looked around to see if he could tell what had been responsible for that sudden loud noise. It hadnt sounded like a gun or a car backfire. More like a door being thrown open in a spooky movie about castles and dungeons ... complete with hokey echo effects. He could see nothing. He got up and started toward the slope down to Kansas Street. The Standpipe was now on his right, a chalky white cylinder, phantomlike in the mist and the growing darkness. It seemed almost to ... to float. That was an odd thought. He supposed it must have come from his own headwhere else could a thought come from? but it somehow did not seem like his own thought at all. He looked at the Standpipe more closely, and then veered in that direction without even thinking about it. Windows circled the building at intervals, rising around it in a spiral that made Stan think of the barber pole in front of Mr. Aurlettes shop, where he and his dad got their haircuts. The bonewhite shingles bulged out over each of those dark windows like brows over eyes. Wonder how they did that, Stan thoughtnot with as much interest as Ben Hanscom would have felt, but with someand that was when he saw there was a much larger space of darkness at the foot of the Standpipea clear oblong in the circular base. He stopped, frowning, thinking that was a funny place for a window it was completely out of symmetry with the others. Then he realized it wasnt a window. It was a door. The noise I heard, he thought. It was that door, blowing open. He looked around. Early, gloomy dusk. White sky now fading to a dull dusky purple, mist thickening a bit more toward the steady rain which would fall most of the night. Dusk and mist and no wind at all. So ... if it hadnt blown open, had someone pushed it open? Why? And it looked like an awfully heavy door to slam open hard enough to make a noise like that boom. He supposed a very big person ... maybe ... Curious, Stan walked over for a closer look. The door was bigger than he had first supposedsix feet high and two feet thick, the boards which composed it bound with brass strips. Stan swung it halfclosed. It moved smoothly and easily on its hinges in spite of its size. It also moved silentlythere was not a single squeak. He had moved it to see how much damage it had done to the shingles, blasting open like that. There was no damage at all; not so much as a single mark. Weirdsville, as Richie would say. Well, it wasnt the door you heard, thats all, he thought. Maybe a jet from Loring boomed over Derry, or something. Door was probably open all al His foot struck something. Stan looked down and saw it was a padlock ... correction. It was the remains of a padlock. It had been burst wide open. It looked, in fact, as if someone had rammed the locks keyway full of gunpowder and then set a match to it. Flowers of metal, deadly sharp, stood out from the body of the lock in a stiff spray. Stan could see the layers of steel inside. The thick hasp hung askew by one bolt which had been yanked threequarters of the way out of the wood. The other three haspbolts lay on the wet grass. They had been twisted like pretzels. Frowning, Stan swung the door open again and peered inside. Narrow stairs led upward, circling around and out of sight. The outer wall of the staircase was bare wood supported by giant crossbeams which had been pegged together rather than nailed. To Stan some of the pegs looked thicker than his own upper arm. The inner wall was steel from which gigantic rivets swelled like boils. Is anyone here? Stan asked. There was no answer. He hesitated, then stepped inside so he could see up the narrow throat of the staircase a little better. Nothing. And it was Creep City in here. As Richie would also say. He turned to leave ... and heard music. It was faint, but still instantly recognizable. Calliope music. He cocked his head, listening, the frown on his face starting to dissolve a little. Calliope music, all right, the music of carnivals and county fairs. It conjured up trace memories which were as delightful as they were ephemeral popcorn, cotton candy, doughboys frying in hot grease, the chaindriven clatter of rides like the Wild Mouse, the Whip, the KoasterKups. Now the frown had become a tentative grin. Stan went up one step, then two more, head still cocked. He paused again. As if thinking about carnivals could actually create one; he could now actually smell the popcorn, the cotton candy, the doughboys ... and more! Peppers, chilidogs, cigarette smoke and sawdust. There was the sharp smell of white vinegar, the kind you could shake over your french fries through a hole in the tin cap. He could smell mustard, bright yellow and stinging hot, that you spread on your hotdog with a wooden paddle. This was amazing ... incredible ... irresistible. He took another step up and that was when he heard the rustling, eager footsteps above him, descending the stairs. He cocked his head again. The calliope music had gotten suddenly louder, as if to mask the sound of the footsteps. He could recognize the tune nowit was Camptown Races. Footsteps, yeah; but they werent exactly rustling footsteps, were they? They actually sounded kind of ... squishy, didnt they? The sound was like people walking in rubbers full of water. Camptown ladies sing dis song, doodah doodah (Squishsquish) Camptown Racetrack nine miles long, doodah doodah (Squishsloshcloser now) Ride around all night Ride around all day ... Now there were shadows bobbing on the wall above him. The terror leaped down Stans throat all at onceit was like swallowing something hot and horrible, bad medicine that suddenly galvanized you like electricity. It was the shadows that did it. He saw them only for a moment. He had just that small bit of time to observe that there were two of them, that they were slumped, and somehow unnatural. He had only that moment because the light in here was fading, fading too fast, and as he turned, the heavy Standpipe door swung ponderously shut behind him. Stanley ran back down the stairs (somehow he had climbed more than a dozen, although he could only remember climbing two, three at most), very much afraid now. It was too dark in here to see anything. He could hear his own breathing, he could hear the calliope tootling away somewhere above him (whats a calliope doing up there in the dark? whos playing it?) and he could hear those wet footsteps. Approaching him now. Getting closer. He hit the door with his hands splayed out in front of him, hit it hard enough to send sparkly tingles of pain all the way up to his elbows. It had swung so easily before ... and now it would not move at all. No ... that was not quite true. At first it had moved just a bit, just enough for him to see a mocking strip of gray light running vertically down its left side. Then gone again. As if someone was on the other side of it, holding the door closed. Panting, terrified, Stan pushed against the door with all of his strength. He could feel the brass bindings digging into his hands. Nothing. He whirled around, now pressing his back and his splayed hands against the door. He could feel sweat, oily and hot, running down his forehead. The calliope music had gotten louder yet. It drifted and echoed down the spiral staircase. There was nothing cheery about it now. It had changed. It had become a dirge. It screamed like wind and water, and in his minds eye Stan saw a county fair at the end of autumn, wind and rain blowing up a deserted midway, pennons flapping, tents bulging, falling over, wheeling away like canvas bats. He saw empty rides standing against the sky like scaffolds; the wind drummed and hooted in the weird angles of their struts. He suddenly understood that death was in this place with him, that death was coming for him out of the dark and he could not run. A sudden rush of water spilled down the stairs. Now it was not popcorn and doughboys and cotton candy he smelled but wet decay, the stench of dead pork which has exploded in a fury of maggots in a place hidden away from the sun. Whos here? he screamed in a high, trembling voice. He was answered by a low, bubbling voice that seemed choked with mud and old water. The dead ones, Stanley. Were the dead ones. We sank, but now we float ... and youll float, too. He could feel water washing around his feet. He cringed back against the door in an agony of fear. They were very close now. He could feel their nearness. He could smell them. Something was digging into his hip as he struck the door again and again in a mindless, useless effort to get away. Were dead, but sometimes we clown around a little, Stanley. Sometimes we It was his birdbook. Without thinking, Stan grabbed for it. It was stuck in his slicker pocket and wouldnt come out. One of them was down now; he could hear it shuffling across the little stone areaway where he had come in. It would reach for him in a moment, and he would feel its cold flesh. He gave one more tremendous yank, and the birdbook was in his hands. He held it in front of him like a puny shield, not thinking of what he was doing, but suddenly sure that this was right. Robins! he screamed into the darkness, and for a moment the thing approaching (it was surely less than five steps away now) hesitatedhe was almost sure it did. And for a moment hadnt he felt some give in the door against which he was now cringing? But he wasnt cringing anymore. He was standing up straight in the darkness. When had that happened? No time to wonder. Stan licked his dry lips and began to chant Robins! Gray egrets! Loons! Scarlet tanagers! Grackles! Hammerhead woodpeckers! Redheaded woodpeckers! Chickadees! Wrens! Peli The door opened with a protesting scream and Stan took a giant step backward into thin misty air. He fell sprawling on the dead grass. He had bent the birdbook nearly in half, and later that night he would see the clear impressions of his fingers sunken into its cover, as if it had been bound in PlayDoh instead of hard pressboard. He didnt try to get up but began to dig in with his heels instead, his butt grooving through the slick grass. His lips were pulled back over his teeth. Inside that dim oblong he could see two sets of legs below the diagonal shadowline thrown by the door, which now stood halfopen. He could see jeans that had decayed to a purplishblack. Orange threads lay plastered limply against the seams, and water dripped from the cuffs to puddle around shoes that had mostly rotted away, revealing swelled, purple toes within. Their hands lay limply at their sides, too long, too waxywhite. Depending from each finger was a small orange pompom. Holding his bent birdbook in front of him, his face wet with drizzle, sweat, and tears, Stan whispered in a husky monotone Chickenhawks ... grosbeaks ... hummingbirds ... albatrosses ... kiwis ... One of those hands turned over, showing a palm from which endless water had eroded all the lines, leaving something as idiotsmooth as the hand of a departmentstore dummy. One finger unrolled ... then rolled up again. The pompom bounced and dangled, dangled and bounced. It was beckoning him. Stan Uris, who would die in a bathtub with crosses slashed into his forearms twentyseven years later, got to his knees, then to his feet, then ran. He ran across Kansas Street without looking either way for traffic and paused, panting, on the far sidewalk, to look back. From this angle he couldnt see the door in the base of the Standpipe; only the Standpipe itself, thick and yet somehow graceful, standing in the murk. They were dead, Stan whispered to himself, shocked. He wheeled suddenly and ran for home. 11 The dryer had stopped. So had Stan. The three others only looked at him for a long moment. His skin was nearly as gray as the April evening of which he had just told them. Wow, Ben said at last. He let out his breath in a ragged, whistling sigh. Its true, Stan said in a low voice. I swear to God it is. I believe you, Beverly said. After what happened at my house, Id believe anything. She got up suddenly, almost knocking over her chair, and went to the dryer. She began to pull out the rags one by one, folding them. Her back was turned, but Ben suspected she was crying. He wanted to go to her and lacked the courage. We gotta talk to Bill about this, Eddie said. Bill will know what to do. Do? Stan said, turning to look at him. What do you mean, do? Eddie looked at him, uncomfortable. Well ... I dont want to do anything, Stan said. He was looking at Eddie with such a hard, fierce stare that Eddie squirmed in his chair. I want to forget about it. Thats all I want to do. Not that easy, Beverly said quietly, turning around. Ben had been right the hot sunlight slanting in through the Washaterias dirty windows reflected off bright lines of tears on her cheeks. Its not just us. I heard Ronnie Grogan. And the little boy I heard first ... I think maybe it was that little Clements kid. The one who disappeared off his trike. So what? Stan said defiantly. So what if it gets more? she asked. What if it gets more kids? His eyes, a hot brown, locked with her blue ones, answering the question without speaking So what if it does? But Beverly did not look down or away and at last Stan dropped his own eyes ... perhaps only because she was still crying, but perhaps because her concern somehow made her stronger. Eddies right, she said. We ought to talk to Bill. Then maybe to the Police Chief Right, Stan said. If he was trying to sound contemptuous, it didnt work. His voice came out sounding only tired. Dead kids in the Standpipe. Blood that only kids can see, not grownups. Clowns walking on the Canal. Balloons that blow against the wind. Mummies. Lepers under porches. Chief Bortonll laugh his bum off ... and then stick us in the loonybin. If we all went to him, Ben said, troubled. If we all went together . . . Sure, Stan said. Right. Tell me more, Haystack. Write me a book. He got up and went to the window, hands in pockets, looking angry and upset and scared. He stared out for a moment, shoulders stiff and rejecting beneath his neat shirt. Without turning back to them he repeated Write me a frigging book! No, Ben said quietly, Bills going to write the books. Stan wheeled back, surprised, and the others looked at him. There was a shocked look on Ben Hanscoms face, as if he had suddenly and unexpectedly slapped himself. Bev folded the last of the rags. Birds, Eddie said. What? Bev and Ben said together. Eddie was looking at Stan. You got out by yelling birds names at them? Maybe, Stan said reluctantly. Or maybe the door was just stuck and finally popped open. Without you leaning on it? Bev asked. Stan shrugged. It was not a sullen shrug; it only said he didnt know. I think it was the birds you shouted at them, Eddie said. But why? In the movies you hold up a cross . . . ... or say the Lords Prayer . . . Ben added. ... or the Twentythird Psalm, Beverly put in. I know the Twentythird Psalm, Stan said angrily, but I wouldnt do so good with the old crucifix business. Im Jewish, remember? They looked away from him, embarrassed, either for his having been born that way or for their having forgotten it. Birds, Eddie said again. Jesus! Then he glanced guiltily at Stan again, but Stan was looking moodily across the street at the Bangor Hydro office. Bill will know what to do, Ben said suddenly, as if finally agreeing with Bev and Eddie. Betcha anything. Betcha any amount of money. Look, Stan said, looking at all of them earnestly. Thats okay. We can talk to Bill about it if you want. But thats where things stop for me. You can call me a chicken, or yellow, I dont care. Im not a chicken, I dont think. Its just that those things in the Standpipe . . . If you werent afraid of something like that, youd have to be crazy, Stan, Beverly said softly. Yeah, I was scared, but thats not the problem, Stan said hotly. Its not even what Im talking about. Dont you see They were looking at him expectantly, their eyes both troubled and faintly hopeful, but Stan found he could not explain how he felt. The words had run out. There was a brick of feeling inside him, almost choking him, and he could not get it out of his throat. Neat as he was, sure as he was, he was still only an elevenyearold boy who had that year finished the fourth grade. He wanted to tell them that there were worse things than being frightened. You could be frightened by things like almost having a car hit you while you were riding your bike or, before the Salk vaccine, getting polio. You could be frightened of that crazyman Khrushchev or of drowning if you went out over your head. You could be frightened of all those things and still function. But those things in the Standpipe ... He wanted to tell them that those dead boys who had lurched and shambled their way down the spiral staircase had done something worse than frighten him they had offended him. Offended, yes. It was the only word he could think of, and if he used it they would laughthey liked him, he knew that, and they had accepted him as one of them, but they would still laugh. All the same, there were things that were not supposed to be. They offended any sane persons sense of order, they offended the central idea that God had given the earth a final tilt on its axis so that twilight would only last about twelve minutes at the equator and linger for an hour or more up where the Eskimos built their icecube houses, that He had done that and He then had said, in effect Okay, if you can figure out the tilt, you can figure out any damn thing you choose. Because even light has weight, and when the note of a trainwhistle suddenly drops its the Doppler effect and when an airplane breaks the sound barrier that bang isnt the applause of the angels or the flatulence of demons but only air collapsing back into place. I gave you the tilt and then I sat back about halfway up the auditorium to watch the show. I got nothing else to say, except that two and two makes four, the lights in the sky are stars, if theres blood grownups can see it as well as kids, and dead boys stay dead. You can live with fear, I think, Stan would have said if he could. Maybe not forever, but for a long, long time. Its offense you maybe cant live with, because it opens up a crack inside your thinking, and if you look down into it you see there are live things down there, and they have little yellow eyes that dont blink, and theres a stink down in that dark, and after awhile you think maybe theres a whole other universe down there, a universe where a square moon rises in the sky, and the stars laugh in cold voices, and some of the triangles have four sides, and some have five, and some of them have five raised to the fifth power of sides. In this universe there might grow roses which sing. Everything leads to everything, he would have told them if he could. Go to your church and listen to your stories about Jesus walking on the water, but if I saw a guy doing that Id scream and scream and scream. Because it wouldnt look like a miracle to me. It would look like an offense. Because he could say none of these things, he just reiterated Being scared isnt the problem. I just dont want to be involved in something that will land me in the nuthatch. Will you at least go with us to talk to him? Bev asked. Listen to what he says? Sure, Stan said, and then laughed. Maybe I ought to bring my birdbook. They all laughed then, and it was a little easier. 12 Beverly left them outside the KleenKloze and took the rags back home by herself. The apartment was still empty. She put them under the kitchen sink and closed the cupboard. She stood up and looked down toward the bathroom. Im not going down there, she thought. Im going to watch Bandstand on TV. See if I cant learn how to do the Dog. So she went into the living room and turned on the TV and five minutes later she turned it off while Dick Clark was showing how much oil just one StriDex medicated pad could take off the face of your average teenager (If you think you can get clean with just soap and water, Dick said, holding the dirty pad up to the glassy eye of the camera so that every teenager in America could get a good look, you ought to take a good look at this). She went back to the kitchen cupboard over the sink, where her father kept his tools. Among them was a pocket tape, the kind that runs out a long yellow tongue of inches. She folded this into one cold hand and went down to the bathroom. It was sparkling clean, silent. Somewhere, far distant, it seemed, she could hear Mrs. Doyon yelling for her boy Jim to get in out of the road, right now. She went to the bathroom basin and looked down into the dark eye of the drain. She stood there for some time, her legs as cold as marble inside her jeans, her nipples feeling sharp enough and hard enough to cut paper, her lips dead dry. She waited for the voices. No voices came. A little shuddery sigh came from her, and she began to feed the thin steel tape into the drain. It went down smoothlylike a sword into the gullet of a county fair sideshow performer. Six inches, eight inches, ten. It stopped, bound up in the elbowbend under the sink, Beverly supposed. She wiggled it, pushing gently at the same time, and eventually the tape began to feed into the drain again. Sixteen inches now, then two feet, then three. She watched the yellow tape slipping out of the chromedsteel case, which had been worn black on the sides by her fathers big hand. In her minds eye she saw it sliding through the black bore of the pipe, picking up some muck, scraping away flakes of rust. Down there where the sun never shines and the night never stops, she thought. She imagined the head of the tape, with its small steel buttplate no bigger than a fingernail, sliding farther and farther into the darkness, and part of her mind screamed What are you doing? She did not ignore that voice ... but she seemed helpless to heed it. She saw the end of the tape going straight down now, descending into the cellar. She saw it striking the sewage pipe . . .


and even as she saw it, the tape bound up again. She wiggled it again, and the tape, thin enough to be limber, made a faint eerie sound that reminded her a little bit of the way a saw sounds when you bend it back and forth across your legs. She could see its tip wiggling against the bottom of this wider pipe, which would have a baked ceramic surface. She could see it bending ... and then she was able to push it forward again. She ran out six feet. Seven. Nine And suddenly the tape began to run through her hands by itself, as if something down there was pulling the other end. Not just pulling it running with it. She stared at the flowing tape, her eyes wide, her mouth a sagging O of fearfear, yes, but no surprise. Hadnt she known? Hadnt she known something like this was going to happen? The tape ran out to its final stop. Eighteen feet; an even six yards. A soft chuckle came wafting out of the drain, followed by a low whisper that was almost reproachful Beverly, Beverly, Beverly . . . you cant fight us . . . youll die if you try . . . die if you try . . . die if you try . . . Beverly . . . Beverly . . . Beverly. . . lylyly . . . Something clicked inside the tapemeasures housing, and it suddenly began to run rapidly back into its case, the numbers and hashmarks blurring by. Near the endthe last five or six feetthe yellow became a dark, dripping red and she screamed and dropped it on the floor as if the tape had suddenly turned into a live snake. Fresh blood trickled over the clean white porcelain of the basin and back down into the drains wide eye. She bent, sobbing now, her fear a freezing weight in her stomach, and picked the tape up. She tweezed it between the thumb and first finger of her right hand and, holding it in front of her, took it into the kitchen. As she walked, blood dripped from the tape onto the faded linoleum of the hall and the kitchen. She steadied herself by thinking of what her father would say to herwhat he would do to herif he found that she had gotten his measuring tape all bloody. Of course, he wouldnt be able to see the blood, but it helped to think that. She took one of the clean ragsstill as warm as fresh bread from the dryerand went back into the bathroom. Before she began to clean, she put the hard rubber plug in the drain, closing that eye. The blood was fresh, and it cleaned up easily. She went up her own trail, wiping away the dimesized drops on the linoleum, then rinsing the rag, wringing it out, and putting it aside. She got a second rag and used it to clean her fathers measuring tape. The blood was thick, viscous. In two places there were clots of the stuff, black and spongy. Although the blood only went back five or six feet, she cleaned the entire length of the tape, removing from it all traces of pipemuck. That done, she put it back into the cupboard over the sink and took the two stained rags out in back of the apartment. Mrs. Doyon was yelling at Jim again. Her voice was clear, almost belllike in the still hot late afternoon. In the back yard, which was mostly bare dirt, weeds, and clotheslines, there was a rusty incinerator. Beverly threw the rags into it, then sat down on the back steps. Tears came suddenly, with surprising violence, and this time she made no effort to hold them back. She put her arms on her knees, her head in her arms, and wept while Mrs. Doyon called for Jim to come out of that road, did he want to get hit by a car and be killed? DERRY THE SECOND INTERLUDE Quaeque ipsa miserrima vidi, Et quorum pars magna fui. Virgil You dont fuck around with the infinite. Mean Streets February 14th, 1985 Valentines Day Two more disappearances in the past weekboth children. Just as I was beginning to relax. One of them a sixteenyearold boy named Dennis Torrio, the other a girl of just five who was 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 beforefour 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 thats going to keep me awake nights; I have worse things to do than that, dont 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, Im beginning to wonder if maybe you shouldnt see a doctor, Hanlon. The headpeeper kind of doctor. The kid was snatched by her father. Dont 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 papersdont 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 himhence the lack of any tracks other than the little girls. 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. Winterbargers 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 Winterbargers hot denials. Rademacher claims the courts 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 dim 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 dont 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 hes 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 Fridays Derry News. But the Torrio boy... thats 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 headoverheels about. Had everything to live for. Everything to stay in Derry for, at least for the next couple of years. All the same, hes 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) Im 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 Id react if I was shelving books up there in the stacks, pushing my little rubberwheeled trolley in front of me, and a hand reached from between two leaning rows of books, a groping hand.... Had again a wellnigh 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 Uriss 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 sureone hundred percent sureor simply because Im now so badly spooked that I cant 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 Richieor any of themat that moment, you just cant trust your own motivations. We lie best when we lie to ourselves. The fact is, Im 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. Theres another fear that haunts me. Rademacher suggested that I might be going crazy. I dont believe that, but if I call them now, they may think Im crazy. Worse than that, what if they should not remember me at all? Mike Hanlon? Who? I dont remember any Mike Hanlon. I dont remember you at all. What promise? I feel that there will come a right time to call them... and when that time comes, Ill know that its right. Their own circuits will open at the same time. Its 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 Ill wait, and sooner or later Ill know. I dont believe its 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. Theyll try, and sometimes they almost succeed... but the old people remember how things really went. They always remember. And sometimes theyll tell you, if you ask them right. There are people who have lived in Derry for twenty years and dont 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 baseand in the middle of February, with the temperature standing right around zero and a fortymileanhour wind howling across those flat runways and whopping the windchill factor down to something you could hardly believe, that extra half a mile became something that could give you frostfreeze 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 twentyseven men of Company E, was heated by a balky old wood furnace. Supplies of wood for it were catchascatchcan. 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 twentyseven 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 Americas 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 makework 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 1930this was about six months before the fire at the Black SpotI was coming back with four of my buddies from a threeday 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. Carrotyred 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 lateApril 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 themTrevor Dawson, Carl Roone, and Henry Whitsun, who was killed in the fire that falland he says to them, This here smart nigger is in hack with me. If the rest of you jigaboos dont 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 O.D. You understand? Well, they got going, and Wilson hollers, Doubletime, you fuckers! Lemme see the soles of your eightyfuckingnines! 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 dont 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 didnt 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 dont want it, he says. I dont 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 offn the ground and splitting his head open with the edge of that shovel. But if Id 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 aint a bunch of dirt, you stupid coontail nightfighter! he screams at me, the spit flying offn his lips. Thats 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 skinnyshanks cracker redneck ass over the hole and he grins up at me while hes doing his business and says, How you doin, Hanlon? I am doing just fine, sir, I says right back, because I had decided I wasnt 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. Youre 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 thered been a surprise inspection and Wilson was in hack for having missed it. My friends covered for me and I was okay, but Wilsons friendsif thats what he called themcouldnt 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 basethose that had already been dug and those that hadnt been. They probably gave him a medal instead of potatoes to peel. And thats 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. Wasnt my idea, either. My mother told me to do it. I was big, and thats 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. Thats who I mean, my dad said. But in those days he was just a twelveyearold 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 gonetwo 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, youre goan send me a lotment every month. I hate to send you away, son, but if you dont take care of me and Philly, I dont know whats 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 didnt 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 dont have it twice a week, he says. Well, thats about what I thought, I says, thinking that the man surely does seem like a booger but at least hes 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 Im a pured 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 its a lotment. Thats 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 mans army will be the day you see the bleedin Jesus Christ doing the Charleston at Birdland. Now you sign or you dont sign. Im out of patience. Also, youre stinkin the place up. So I signed, and watched him staple the allotment form to my mustersheet, and then he give me the oath, and then I was a soldier. I was thinking that theyd 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 Id seen the South and Id seen the North, and there was the same hate in both places. It wasnt 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 didnt have to be south of the MasonDixon 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 hadnt 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 wasnt 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 wasnt set by old Sarge Wilson and his gritsandcornpone 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 Im 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 dont know why it happened here; I cant explain it, but at the same time I aint 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 hatenotes 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 dont even know there was such a thing. I think it might be because most of the histories have been written by Northerners and theyre ashamed. It was most poplar in the big cities and the manufacturin areas. New York, New Jersey, Detroit, Baltimore, Boston, Portsmouththey 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 Lewistonthis was around the same time as the fire at the Black Spotbut they werent worried about niggers raping white women or taking jobs that should have belonged to white men, because there werent 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. Its 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 richmans 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 jazzband... and a bunch of niggerlovers. What did it matter? Will, my mother said softly. Thats enough. No, I said. I want to hear! Its 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 dont think youll understand it, because Im not sure I understand it myself. What happened that night at the Black Spot, bad as it was... I dont 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 dont 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. Its because of that soil. It seems that bad things, hurtful things, do right well in the soil of this town. Ive thought so again and again over the years. I dont 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 hes just as white as vanilla ice cream, but I feel like hes my brother. Id die for Dewey if he asked me to, and although no man really knows another mans heart, I think hed 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 all 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 its 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 didnt look that way often. Mostly he was a smiling man. Thats no story for a boy, he said. Another time, Mikey. When weve 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 fathers 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 twentythree years. I can remember my grief for himit 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 others 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? Isnt it possible that, even thirty or forty years after the death of a child or a brother or a sister, one may halfwaken, 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 fathers 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 peachpits 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 longago 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 wouldnt fire and rifles that sometimes exploded in their hands when the bullets did fire. The navy had torpedoes that usually didnt go where they were aimed and didnt 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 wouldnt run because cockroaches had eaten the rubber hoses and the fanbelts. So my fathers life was saved (including, of course, the part of him that became Your Obdt Servant Michael Hanlon) by a combination of bureaucratic porkbarrelling folderol and defective equipment. The grenade only halfexploded 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 didnt 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 bombcasings. 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 him 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 evilbut 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 tenyear mortgage, and they settled down. We had some problems at first, my father said another time. There were people who didnt want Negroes in the neighborhood. We knew it was going to be that wayI hadnt forgotten about the Black Spotand 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 werent 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 Sheriffthere wasnt any police chief in those days, Derry wasnt quite big enough for such a thinggot to work on the matter and he worked hard. Thats what I mean, Mikey, when I say there is good here as well as bad. It didnt make any difference to that man Sullivan that my 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? Ill give you three guesses, and the first two dont count! I dont 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, thats who! The father of the kid you say is the biggest bully at your school. The fathers a turd and the sons a little fart. There are kids at school who say Henrys father is crazy, I told him. I think I was in the fourth grade at that timefar 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 Ive ever heard, I heard first from the lips of Henry Bowers, between grades one and four. Well, Ill 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 putup job and they were all just a bunch of niggerlovers. 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 cant swear its 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, Its time for you to shut your mouth and do some listening, Butch. That black guy, he dont want to press charges. He dont 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 dont shine, and Sheriff Sullivan, he tells Butch They got a lime pit down at the Shank, Butch, and they tell me after youve 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 niggers chickens. I know that,  Sullivan says. Then what the Christ are we chinnin about? Butch asks him. You better wake up, Butch. They wont 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 Butchs 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 musterout 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. Hed bought an old prewar Ford to replace the Merc, and I had my pickup. 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 hoss, I told him. You cant talk to me that way, nigger, he said, and he was damn near to blubbering between bein mad and bein scared. You cant talk to no white man that way, not a jig like you. Well, Id had enough of the whole thing, Mikey. And I knew if I didnt scare him off for good right then Id never be shed of him. There wasnt 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 Im gunning for you. I may come gunning for your wife and your brat and your nocount 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 workingmans head in broad daylight by the side of the road. Yeah, the world must be going to a campmeeting hell when something like that can happen, I agreed. But that dont 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 Ive got no proof that was Bowerss doing. Chippy might have just got a poison bait or something. Since that day weve been pretty much left alone to make our way, and when I look back on it, there aint much I regret. Weve had a good life here, and if there are nights when I dream about that fire, well, there isnt nobody that can live a natural life without having a few bad dreams. February 28th, 1985 Its 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 havent gotten to it yet. Its 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. Its 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 dont. Maybe in the end its the voice that tells the stories more than the stories themselves that matters. Its his voice that I remember, certainly my fathers 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 placeone thats in none of the Ives interviews nor in any of the poor histories of this place... nor on any of my own tapes. My fathers voice. Now its ten oclock, 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 glassedin corridor which leads to the Childrens Library. I can hear other sounds, toostealthy 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 Ive finally found my way to my fathers 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 wouldnt 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 visitswatching him shrink and shrivel, watching the painlines 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 Id be afraid to look behind me because the clown might be there... or the werewolf... or Bens mummy... or my bird. But I was mostly afraid that no matter what shape It took, It would have my fathers cancerraddled 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 sweatyhaired and out of breath and my mother would say, Why do you want to ride so fast, Mikey? Youll make yourself sick. And Id say, I wanted to get back in time to help you with the chores, and shed 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, Id 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 somethinganything!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 wouldnt 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. Theyd 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 him 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 aint never forgot that, have you, Mikey? No, sir, I said, and although I hadnt thought about it in three years or better, I added what he sometimes said It hasnt ever escaped my mind. Well, Ill tell you now, he said. Fifteen is old enough, I guess, and your mother aint 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. Youre careful, arent you, Mikey? Yes, sir, I said. Good, he said, and his head dropped back on his pillow. Thats good. I thought he was going to drift off againhis eyes had slipped closedbut 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 insidecarpet on the floor, booths along the walls, a jukeboxand 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. Homebrew beer mostly, but on weekends you could sometimes get stronger stuff. If you were white. Us Company E boys werent 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 Hells HalfAcre. They wasnt speakeasies; that was too grand a name for em. Wasnt 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 theyd 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 other 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 furnaceoil too, and it might hang you over but it didnt kill you, and if you did go blind, it didnt last. On any given night youd have to duck your head when the bottles came flying by. There was Nans, the Paradise, Wallys 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 didnt even have to work at it that hardthere was a lot of them wanted to find out if a slice offn the rye loaf was any differentbut to kids like me and Trevor Dawson and Carl Roone, my friends in those days, the thought of buying a whorea white whorethat was something you had to sit down and consider. As Ive told you, he was heavily doped that night. I dont believe he would have said any of that stuffnot to his fifteenyearold sonif he had not been. Well, it wasnt 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 didnt 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 pulpcutters in those big redandblackchecked lumbermans jackets, scars and scabs all over their hands, some of em missing eyes or fingers, all of em missing most of their 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 Wallys Spa one night when I saw a fella split his shirt right down one arm while he was armrassling this other fella. It didnt just ripyou probably think thats what I mean, but it aint. Arm of that mans shirt damn near explodedsort of blew off his arm, in rags. And everybody cheered and applauded and somebody slapped me on the back and said, Thats what you call an armrasslers fart, blackface. What Im 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 hadnt wanted us there, they would have thrown us out on our asses. But the fact of it was, Mikey, they didnt seem to give much of a toot one way or the other. One of em took me aside one nighthe was six foot, which was damn big for those days, and he was dead drunk, and he smelled as high as a basket of monthold peaches. If hed 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? Thats right, I says. Commen a 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 couldnt 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! pais lvres! 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 backalmost knocking me on my faceand 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 lhomme avec les pais lvres! 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, Whats your name? I dont want to call you Beeg Leeps, me. Dont sound good. William Hanlon, I says. Well, heres to you, Weelyum Anlon, he says. No, heres to you, I says. Youre 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 youre a Negro? Except for them pais 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. Im goan be okay. The worst thing of this, Mikey, is that you cant 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 betterbetter for both of usif we had done more. He took a sip of water and then went on. Anyway, it wasnt the few women who travelled the pigs, and it wasnt 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 themDerrys old line, you know. None of them had ever stepped a foot inside of the Paradise or Wallys 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 peaveyswingers got polluted by the blacks of Company E. So Major Fuller says, I never wanted them here in the first place. I keep thinking its an oversight and theyll get sent back down south or maybe to New Jersey. Thats not my problem, this old fart tells him. Mueller, I think his name was Sally Muellers father? I asked, startled. Sally Mueller was in the same highschool class with me. My father grinned a sour, crooked little grin. No, this would have been her uncle. Sally Muellers dad was off in college somewhere then. But if hed been in Derry, he would have been there, I guess, standing with his brother. And in case youre 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 youre letting them go on Friday and Saturday nights. If they go on whooping it up downtown, theres going to be trouble. Weve got the Legion in this town, you know. Well, but I am in a bit of a tight here, Mr. Mueller, he says. I cant let them drink over at the NCO Club. Not only is it against the regulations for the Negroes to drink with the whites, they couldnt anyway. Its an NCO club, dont you see? Every one of those black boys is a buckytail private. Thats 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 wasnt 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 offlimits 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 messcook, 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, aint he? Give us our own club. Sho! And George Brannock, who was also killed in the fire that fall, he said Yeah, its 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, thoughcause He knows we had no idea how it would turn out. After awhile the rest of the fellows pitched in. With most of Derry offlimits, there wasnt 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 didnt come up with panes of glass for them that were different colorssort of a cross between carnival glass and the sort you see in church windows. Whered you get this? I asked him. Alan was the oldest of us; he was about fortytwo, 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 deepfryers, 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 Marysshit, we knew our place. Hadnt we been taught it? If we wanted to drink hard, wed 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 linemore Midnight Requisitions, I imagine. By July, you could go in there any Saturday night and sit down and have a cola and a hamburgeror a slawdog. It was nice. It never really got finishedwe 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 didnt want to run. My dad smiled at me from his hospital bed. We were young, except for Snopesy, but we werent 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 cant 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 jazzband 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 wasnt great, but he wasnt 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 didnt 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 greatI dont want to give you that ideathey played in a way that was different... hotter somehow . . . it . . . He waved his skinny hand above the bedclothes. They played bodacious, I suggested, grinning. Thats 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 didnt happen all at once, either. At first those white faces looked like sprinkles of salt in a pepperpot, but more and more of them turned up as time went on. When those white people showed up, thats when we forgot to be careful. They were bringin in their own booze in brown bags, most of it the finest hightension stuff there ismade the stuff you could get in the pigs downtown look like soda pop. Countryclub booze is what I mean, Mikey. Rich peoples booze. Chivas. Glenfiddich. The kind of champagne they served to firstclass passengers on ocean liners. Champers, some of em called it, same as we used to call uglyminded mules back home. We should have found a way to stop it, but we didnt know how. They was town! Hell, they was white! And, like I said, we were young and proud of what wed 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 dont think any of us realized that it was drivin em crazyand 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 Hagars 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 wasnt 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 noname jazzband until one in the morning came and shut us down. They didnt 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 enlistedmens clubtechnically, at leastand offlimits to civilians who didnt 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 wasnt 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 freightcar 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 he 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 enoughjust what he wanted, in fact. It would have shut us down good and proper. There would have been courtmartials 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 ofthat some of the townies would be mad. Mueller hadnt 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 putup 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 Cains 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 someones house over there, maybe in the basement, to get their sheets on and to make the torches that they used. Ive heard that others came right onto the base by Ridgeline Road, which was the main way onto the base back then. I heardI wont say wherethat they came in a brandnew Packard automobile, dressed in their white sheets with their white goblinhats 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 O.D. 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 bottlegreen Packard, and more coming through the trees between the base and the fancy houses on West Broadway. They wasnt 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 twogallon tins of gasoline that you could buy at service stations back in those days. All of them had torches.