11/22/63

When people asked me what I was looking for, I’d give a wink and a smile. When people asked me how long I’d be staying, I told them it was hard to say. I learned the geography of the town, and I began to learn the verbal geography of 1958. I learned, for instance, that the war meant World War II; the conflict meant Korea. Both were over, and good riddance. People worried about Russia and the so-called “missile gap,” but not too much. People worried about juvenile delinquency, but not too much. There was a recession, but people had seen worse. When you bargained with someone, it was absolutely okay to say that you jewed em down (or got gypped). Penny candy included dots, wax lips, and niggerbabies. In the South, Jim Crow ruled. In Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev bellowed threats. In Washington, President Eisenhower droned good cheer.

I made a point of checking out the defunct Kitchener Ironworks not long after speaking with Chaz Frati. It was in a large overgrown stretch of empty to the north of town, and yes, it would be the perfect spot for a shopping mall once the extension of the Mile-A-Minute Highway reached it. But on the day I visited — leaving my car and walking when the road turned to axle-smashing rubble — it could have been the ruin of an ancient civilization: look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. Heaps of brick and rusty chunks of old machinery poked out of the high grass. In the middle was a long-collapsed ceramic smokestack, its sides blackened by soot, its huge bore full of darkness. If I’d lowered my head and hunched over, I could have walked into it, and I am not a short man.

I saw a lot of Derry in those weeks before Halloween, and I felt a lot of Derry. Longtime residents were pleasant to me, but — with one exception — never chummy. Chaz Frati was that exception, and in retrospect I guess his unprompted revelations should have struck me as odd, but I had a great many things on my mind, and Frati didn’t seem all that important. I thought, sometimes you just meet a friendly guy, that’s all, and let it go at that. Certainly I had no idea that a man named Bill Turcotte had put Frati up to it.

Bill Turcotte, aka No Suspenders.

2

Bevvie-from-the-levee had said she thought the bad times in Derry were over, but the more of it I saw (and the more I felt — that especially), the more I came to believe that Derry wasn’t like other places. Derry wasn’t right. At first I tried to tell myself that it was me, not the town. I was a man out of joint, a temporal bedouin, and any place would have felt a little strange to me, a little skewed — like the cities that seem so much like bad dreams in those strange Paul Bowles novels. This was persuasive at first, but as the days passed and I continued to explore my new environment, it became less so. I even began to question Beverly Marsh’s assertion that the bad times were over, and imagined (on nights when I couldn’t sleep, and there were quite a few of those) that she questioned it herself. Hadn’t I glimpsed a seed of doubt in her eyes? The look of someone who doesn’t quite believe but wants to? Maybe even needs to?

Something wrong, something bad.