Chapter 6
The same chain-smoking cabbie picked me up the next morning, and when he dropped me off at Titus Chevron, the convertible was there.
I had expected this, but it was still a relief.
I was wearing a nondescript gray sport coat I’d bought off the rack at Mason’s Menswear.
My new ostrich wallet was safe in its inner pocket, and lined with five hundred dollars of Al’s cash.
Titus came over to me while I was admiring the Ford, wiping his hands on what looked like the same rag he’d been using on them yesterday.
“I slept on it, and I want it,” I said.
“That’s good,” he said, then assumed an air of regret.
“But I slept on it, too, Mr. Amberson, and I guess I told you a lie when I said there might be some room for dickerin. Do you know what my wife said this morning while we were eatin our pancakes n bacon? She said ‘Bill, you’d be a damn fool to let that Sunliner go for less’n three-fifty.
’ In fact, she said I was a damn fool for pricin it that low to start with. ”
I nodded as if I’d expected nothing else. “Okay,” I said.
He looked surprised.
“Here’s what I can do, Mr. Titus. I can write you a check for three hundred and fifty—good check, Hometown Trust, you can call them and see—or I can give you three hundred in cash right out of my wallet. Less paperwork if we do it like that. What do you say?”
He grinned, revealing teeth of startling whiteness. “I say they know how to drive a bargain out there in Wisconsin. If you make it three-twenty, I’ll put on a sticker and a fourteen-day plate and off you go.”
“Three-ten.”
“Aw, don’t make me squirm,” Titus said, but he wasn’t squirming; he was enjoying himself. “Add a fin onto that and we’ll call it a deal.”
I held out my hand. “Three hundred and fifteen works for me.”
“Yowza.” This time he shook with me, never minding the grease.
Then he pointed to the sales booth. Today the ponytailed cutie was reading Confidential.
“You’ll want to pay the young lady, who happens to be my daughter.
She’ll write up the sale. When you’re done, come around and I’ll put on that sticker. Throw in a tank of gas, too.”
Forty minutes later, behind the wheel of a 1954 Ford ragtop that now belonged to me, I was headed north toward Derry.
I learned on a standard, so that was no problem, but this was the first car I’d ever driven with the gearshift on the column.
It was weird at first, but once I got used to it (I would also have to get used to operating the headlight dimmer switch with my left foot), I liked it.
And Bill Titus had been right about second gear; in second, the Sunliner went like a bastid.
In Augusta, I stopped long enough to haul the top down.
In Waterville, I grabbed a fine meatloaf dinner that cost ninety-five cents, apple pie à la mode included.
It made the Fatburger look overpriced. I hummed along with the Skyliners, the Coasters, the Del Vikings, the Elegants.
The sun was warm, the breeze ruffled my new short haircut, and the turnpike (nicknamed “The Mile-A-Minute Highway,” according to the billboards) was pretty much all mine.
I seemed to have left my doubts of the night before sunk in the cow-tank along with my cell phone and futuristic change. I felt good.
Until I saw Derry.
2
There was something wrong with that town, and I think I knew it from the first.
I took Route 7 when The Mile-A-Minute Highway petered down to an asphalt-patched two-lane, and twenty miles or so north of Newport, I came over a rise and saw Derry hulking on the west bank of the Kenduskeag under a cloud of pollution from God knew how many paper and textile mills, all operating full bore.
There was an artery of green running through the center of town.
From a distance it looked like a scar. The town around that jagged greenbelt seemed to consist solely of sooty grays and blacks under a sky that had been stained urine yellow by the stuff billowing from all those smokestacks.
I drove past several produce stands where the people minding the counters (or just standing side o’ the road and gaping as I drove past) looked more like inbred hillbillies from Deliverance than Maine farmers.
As I passed the last of them, BOWERS ROADSIDE PRODUCE, a large mongrel raced out from behind several heaped baskets of tomatoes and chased me, drooling and snapping at the Sunliner’s rear tires.
It looked like a misbegotten bulldog. Before I lost sight of it, I saw a scrawny woman in overalls approach it and begin beating it with a piece of board.
This was the town where Harry Dunning had grown up, and I hated it from the first. No concrete reason; I just did.
The downtown shopping area, situated at the bottom of three steep hills, felt pitlike and claustrophobic.
My cherry-red Ford seemed like the brightest thing on the street, a distracting (and unwelcome, judging by most of the glances it was attracting) splash of color amid the black Plymouths, brown Chevrolets, and grimy delivery trucks.
Running through the center of town was a canal filled almost to the top of its moss-splotched concrete retaining walls with black water.
I found a parking space on Canal Street.
A nickel in the meter bought me an hour’s worth of shopping time.
I’d forgotten to buy a hat in Lisbon Falls, and two or three storefronts up I saw an outfit called Derry Dress most of me knew I wasn’t.
As an experiment, I raised my hand in a hello gesture.
The man in the white smock did not raise his in return.
I realized that the canal I’d seen must run directly beneath this peculiar sunken downtown, and I was standing on top of it. I could feel hidden water in my feet, thrumming the sidewalk. It was a vaguely unpleasant feeling, as if this little piece of the world had gone soft.
A male mannequin wearing a tuxedo stood in the window of Derry Dress & Everyday.
There was a monocle in one eye and a school pennant in one plaster hand.
The pennant read DERRY TIGERS WILL SLAUGHTER BANGOR RAMS!
Even though I was a fan of school spirit, this struck me as a little over the top.
Beat the Bangor Rams, sure—but slaughter them?
Just a figure of speech, I told myself, and went in.
A clerk with a tape measure around his neck approached me.
His duds were much nicer than mine, but the dim overhead bulbs made his complexion look yellow.
I felt an absurd urge to ask, Can you sell me a nice summer straw hat, or should I just go fuck myself?
Then he smiled, asked how he could help me, and everything seemed almost normal.
He had the required item, and I took possession of it for a mere three dollars and seventy cents.
“A shame you’ll have such a short time to wear it before the weather turns cold,” he said.
I put the hat on and adjusted it in the mirror beside the counter. “Maybe we’ll get a good stretch of Indian summer.”
Gently and rather apologetically, he tilted the hat the other way. It was a matter of two inches or less, but I stopped looking like a clodhopper on a visit to the big city and started to look like… well… central Maine’s most debonair time-traveler. I thanked him.
“Not at all, Mr.—?”
“Amberson,” I said, and held out my hand. His grip was short, limp, and powdery with some sort of talcum. I restrained an urge to rub my hand on my sport coat after he released it.
“In Derry on business?”
“Yes. Are you from here yourself?”
“Lifelong resident,” he said, and sighed as if this were a burden. Based on my own first impressions, I guessed it might be. “What’s your game, Mr. Amberson, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Real estate. But while I’m here, I thought I’d look up an old Army buddy.
His name is Dunning. I don’t recall his first name, we just used to call him Skip.
” The Skip part was a fabrication, but it was true that I didn’t know the first name of Harry Dunning’s father.
Harry had named his brothers and sister in his theme, but the man with the hammer had always been “my father” or “my dad.”
“I’m afraid I couldn’t help you there, sir.” Now he sounded distant. Business was done, and although the store was empty of other customers, he wanted me gone.
“Well, maybe you can with something else. What’s the best hotel in town?”
“That would be the Derry Town House. Just turn back to Kenduskeag Avenue, take your right, and go up Up-Mile Hill to Main Street. Look for the carriage lamps out front.”
“Up-Mile Hill?”
“That’s what we call it, yes sir. If there’s nothing else, I have several alterations to make out back.”
When I left, the light had begun to drain from the sky. One thing I remember vividly about the time I spent in Derry during September and October of 1958 was how evening always seemed to come early.