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his father’s gearshift. I’d jerk awake, settle back, drift . . . and see the little man with the unzipped fly
sticking the muzzle of his hideout gun in his ear. Is this what you want, Linda? One final burst of
petulance before the big sleep. And I’d start awake again. Next time it was men in a black sedan
throwing a gasoline bomb through the front window of my place on Sunset Point: Eduardo Gutierrez
attempting to get rid of his Yanqui from Yankeeland. Why? Because he didn’t like to lose big, that
was all. For him, that was enough.
Finally I gave up and sat down by the window, where the hotel air-conditioner was rattling gamely
away. In Maine the night would be crisp enough to start bringing color to the trees, but here in Dallas
it was still seventy-five at two-thirty in the morning. And humid.
“Dallas, Derry,” I said as I looked down into the silent ditch of Commerce Street. The brick cube of
the Book Depository wasn’t visible, but it was close by. Walking distance.
“Derry, Dallas.”
Each name comprised of two syllables that broke on the double letter like a stick of kindling over a
bent knee. I couldn’t stay here. Another thirty months in Big D would send me crazy. How long
would it be before I started seeing graffiti like I WILL KILL MY MOTHER SOON? Or glimpsed a
juju Jesus floating down the Trinity River? Fort Worth might be better, but Fort Worth was still too
close.
Why do I have to stay in either?
This thought came to me shortly after 3:00 A.M., and with the force of a revelation. I had a fine car
—a car I’d sort of fallen in love with, to tell you the truth—and there was no shortage of good fast
roads in central Texas, many of them recently built. By the turn of the twenty-first century, they
would probably be choked with traffic, but in 1960 they were almost eerily deserted. There were speed
limits, but they weren’t enforced. In Texas, even the state cops were believers in the gospel of put the
pedal to the metal and let er bellow.
I could move out from beneath the suffocating shadow I felt over this city. I could find a place that
was smaller and less daunting, a place that didn’t feel so filled with hate and violence. In broad
daylight I could tell myself I was imagining those things, but not in the ditch of the morning. There
were undoubtedly good people in Dallas, thousands upon thousands of them, the great majority, but
that underchord was there, and sometimes it broke out. As it had outside the Desert Rose.
Bevvie-from-the-levee had said that In Derry I think the bad times are over. I wasn’t convinced about
Derry, and I felt the same way about Dallas, even with its worst day still over three years away.
“I’ll commute,” I said. “George wants a nice quiet place to work on his book, but since the book is
about a city—a haunted city—he really has to commute, doesn’t he? To get material.”
It was no wonder it took me almost two months to think of this; life’s simplest answers are often
the easiest to overlook. I went back to bed and fell asleep almost at once.
14
The next day I drove south out of Dallas on Highway 77. An hour and a half took me into Denholm
County. I turned west onto State Road 109 mostly because I liked the billboard marking the
intersection. It showcased a heroic young football player wearing a gold helmet, black jersey, and gold
leggings. DENHOLM LIONS, the billboard proclaimed. 3-TIME DISTRICT CHAMPS! STATE
CHAMPIONSHIP BOUND IN 1960! “WE’VE GOT JIM POWER!”
Whatever that is, I thought. But of course every high school has its secret signs and signals; it’s
what makes kids feel like they’re on the inside.
Five miles up Highway 109, I came to the town of Jodie. POP. 1280, the sign said. WELCOME,