5432852385743

and saw Derry hulking on the west bank of the Kenduskeag, I was happy. That was a good feeling to
go on, so I walked away from them, giving myself the old advice as I went: don’t look back, never look
back. How often do people tell themselves that after an experience that is exceptionally good (or
exceptionally bad)? Often, I suppose. And the advice usually goes unheeded. Humans were built to
look back; that’s why we have that swivel joint in our necks.
I went half a block, then turned around, thinking they would be staring at me. But they weren’t.
They were still dancing. And that was good.
8
There was a Cities Service station a couple of blocks down on Kansas Street, and I went into the office
to ask directions to Kossuth Street, pronounced Cossut. I could hear the whir of an air compressor and
the tinny jangle of pop music from the garage bay, but the office was empty. That was fine with me,
because I saw something useful next to the cash register: a wire stand filled with maps. The top pocket
held a single city map that looked dirty and forgotten. On the front was a photo of an exceptionally
ugly Paul Bunyan statue cast in plastic. Paul had his axe over his shoulder and was grinning up into
the summer sun. Only Derry, I thought, would take a plastic statue of a mythical logger as its icon.
There was a newspaper dispenser just beyond the gas pumps. I took a copy of the Daily News as a
prop, and flipped a nickel on top of the pile of papers to join the other coins scattered there. I don’t
know if they’re more honest in 1958, but they’re a hell of a lot more trusting.
According to the map, Kossuth Street was on the Kansas Street side of town, and turned out to be
just a pleasant fifteen-minute stroll from the gas station. I walked under elm trees that had yet to be
touched by the blight that would take almost all of them by the seventies, trees that were still as
green as they had been in July. Kids tore past me on bikes or played jacks in driveways. Little clusters
of adults gathered at corner bus stops, marked by white stripes on telephone poles. Derry went about
its business and I went about mine—just a fellow in a nondescript sport coat with his summer straw
pushed back a little on his head, a fellow with a folded newspaper in one hand. He might be looking
for a yard or garage sale; he might be checking for plummy real estate. Certainly he looked like he
belonged here.
So I hoped.
Kossuth was a hedge-lined street of old-fashioned New England saltbox houses. Sprinklers twirled
on lawns. Two boys ran past me, tossing a football back and forth. A woman with her hair bound up in
a kerchief (and the inevitable cigarette dangling from her lower lip) was washing the family car and
occasionally spraying the family dog, who backed away, barking. Kossuth Street looked like an
exterior scene from some old fuzzy sitcom.
Two little girls were twirling a skip-rope while a third danced nimbly in and out, stutter-stepping
effortlessly as she chanted: “Charlie Chaplin went to France! Just to watch the ladies dance! Salute to
the Cap’un! Salute to the Queen! My old man drives a sub-ma-rine!” The skip-rope slap-slap-slapped
on the pavement. I felt eyes on me. The woman in the kerchief had paused in her labors, the hose in
one hand, a big soapy sponge in the other. She was watching me approach the skipping girls. I gave
them a wide berth, and saw her go back to work.
You took a hell of a chance talking to those kids on Kansas Street, I thought. Only I didn’t believe it.
Walking a little too close to the skip-rope girls . . . that would have been taking a hell of a chance.
But Richie and Bev had been the right ones. I had known it almost as soon as I laid eyes on them, and
they had known it, too. We had seen eye to eye.
Do we know you? the girl had asked. Bevvie-Bevvie, who lived on the levee.