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At first that didn’t compute. Then it did. The little man with the mermaid on his forearm and the
cheerful chipmunk face. Only that face hadn’t looked so cheerful when Frank Dunning had clapped
him on the back and told him to keep his nose clean, because it was too long to get dirty. Before that,
while Frank was still telling jokes at the Tracker brothers’ bullshit table at the back of The
Lamplighter, Chaz Frati had filled me in about Dunning’s bad temper . . . which, thanks to the
janitor’s essay, was no news to me. He got a girl pregnant. After a year or two, she collected the baby and
scrammed.
“Is somethin comin through on the radio waves, Commander Cody? Looks like it might be.”
“Frank Dunning’s first wife was your sister.”
“Well there. The man says the secret woid and wins a hunnert dollars.”
“Mr. Frati said she took the baby and ran out on him. Because she got enough of him turning ugly
when he drank.”
“Yeah, that’s what he told you, and that’s what most people in town believe—what Chazzy
believes, for all I know—but I know better. Clara n me was always close. Growin up it was me for her
and her for me. You probably don’t know about a thing like that, you strike me as a mighty cold fish,
but that’s how it was.”
I thought about that one good year I’d had with Christy—six months before the marriage and six
months after. “Not that cold. I know what you’re talking about.”
He was rubbing at himself again, although I don’t think he was aware of it: belly to chest, chest to
throat, back down to the chest again. His face was paler than ever. I wondered what he’d had for lunch,
but didn’t think I’d have to wonder for long; soon I’d be able to see for myself.
“Yeah? Then maybe you’d think it’s a little funny that she never wrote me after her n Mikey got
settled somewhere. Not so much as a postcard. Me, I think it’s a lot more than funny. Because she
woulda. She knew how I felt about her. And she knew how much I loved that kiddo. She was twenty
and Mikey was sixteen months old when that joke-tellin cuntwipe reported em missin. That was the
summer of ’38. She’d be forty now, and my nephew’d be twenty-one. Old enough to fuckin vote. And
you want to tell me she’d never write a single line to the brother who kep Nosey Royce from stickin
his wrinkled old meat inside her back when we was kids? Or to ask for a little money to help her get
set up in Boston or New Haven or wherever? Mister, I would have—”
He winced, made a little urk-ulp sound I was very familiar with, and staggered back against the
garage wall.
“You need to sit down,” I said. “You’re sick.”
“I never get sick. I ain’t even had a cold since I was in sixth grade.”
If so, that bug would blitzkrieg him like the Germans rolling into Warsaw.
“It’s stomach flu, Turcotte. I was up all night with it. Mr. Keene at the drugstore says it’s going
around.”
“That narrow-ass ole lady don’t know nothin. I’m fine.” He gave his greasy clumps of hair a toss to
show me how fine he was. His face was paler than ever. The hand holding the Japanese bayonet was
shaking the way mine had until noon today. “Do you want to hear this or not?”
“Sure.” I snuck a glance at my watch. It was ten past six. The time that had been dragging so
slowly was now speeding up. Where was Frank Dunning right now? Still at the market? I thought
not. I thought he had left early today, maybe saying he was going to take his kids trick-or-treating.
Only that wasn’t the plan. He was in a bar somewhere, and not The Lamplighter. That was where he
went for a single beer, two at the most. Which he could handle, although—if my wife was a fair
example, and I thought she was—he would always leave dry-mouthed, with his brain raging for more.
No, when he felt the need to really take a bath in the stuff, he’d want to do it in one of Derry’s
down-and-dirty bars: the Spoke, the Sleepy, the Bucket. Maybe even one of the absolute dives that