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CHAPTER 8
1
In the weeks before Halloween, Mr. George Amberson inspected almost every commercial-zoned piece
of property in Derry and the surrounding towns.
I knew better than to believe that I’d ever be accepted as a townie on short notice, but I wanted to
get the locals accustomed to the sight of my sporty red Sunliner convertible, just part of the scenery.
There goes that real estate fella, been here almost a month now. If he knows what he’s doin, there might be some
money in it for someone.
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 socalled
“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 longcollapsed
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