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He’s a nice man. Always joking around and stuff.
But the nice man had cold eyes. When interacting with his fascinated lady-harem, they had been
blue. But when he turned his attention to me—however briefly—I could have sworn that they turned
gray, the color of water beneath a sky from which snow will soon fall.
3
The market closed at 6:00 P.M., and when I left with my few items, it was only twenty past five. There
was a U-Needa-Lunch on Witcham Street, just around the corner. I ordered a hamburger, a fountain
Coke, and a piece of chocolate pie. The pie was excellent—real chocolate, real cream. It filled my
mouth the way Frank Anicetti’s root beer had. I dawdled as long as I could, then strolled down to the
canal, where there were some benches. There was also a sightline—narrow but adequate—to the
Center Street Market. I was full but ate one of my oranges anyway, casting bits of peel over the
cement embankment and watching the water carry them away.
Promptly at six, the lights in the market’s big front windows went out. By quarter past, the last of
the ladies had exited, toting their carry-alls either up Up-Mile Hill or clustering at one of those
phone poles with the painted white stripe. A bus marked ROUNDABOUT ONE FARE came along
and scooped them up. At quarter to seven, the market employees began leaving. The last two to exit
were Mr. Currie, the manager, and Dunning. They shook hands and parted, Currie going up the alley
between the market and the shoe store next to it, probably to get his car, and Dunning to the bus stop.
By then there were only two other people there and I didn’t want to join them. Thanks to the oneway
traffic pattern in the Low Town, I didn’t have to. I walked to another white-painted pole, this one
handy to The Strand (where the current double feature was Machine-Gun Kelly and Reform School Girl;
the marquee promised BLAZING ACTION), and waited with some working joes who were talking
about possible World Series matchups. I could have told them plenty about that, but kept my mouth
shut.
A city bus came along and stopped across from the Center Street Market. Dunning got on. It came
the rest of the way down the hill and pulled up at the movie-theater stop. I let the working joes go
ahead of me, so I could watch how much money they put in the pole-mounted coin receptacle next to
the driver’s seat. I felt like an alien in a science fiction movie, one who’s trying to masquerade as an
earthling. It was stupid—I wanted to ride the city bus, not blow up the White House with a deathray—but
that didn’t change the feeling.
One of the guys who got on ahead of me flashed a canary-colored bus pass that made me think
fleetingly of the Yellow Card Man. The others put fifteen cents into the coin receptacle, which clicked
and dinged. I did the same, although it took me a bit longer because my dime was stuck to my sweaty
palm. I thought I could feel every eye on me, but when I looked up, everyone was either reading the
newspaper or staring vacantly out the windows. The interior of the bus was a fug of blue-gray smoke.
Frank Dunning was halfway down on the right, now wearing tailored gray slacks, a white shirt, and
a dark blue tie. Natty. He was busy lighting a cigarette and didn’t look at me as I passed him and
took a seat near the back. The bus groaned its way around the circuit of Low Town one-way streets,
then mounted Up-Mile Hill on Witcham. Once we were in the west side residential area, riders began
to get off. They were all men; presumably the women were back at home putting away their groceries
or getting supper on the table. As the bus emptied and Frank Dunning went on sitting where he was,
smoking his cigarette, I wondered if we were going to end up being the last two riders.
I needn’t have worried. When the bus angled toward the stop at the corner of Witcham Street and
Charity Avenue (Derry also had Faith and Hope Avenues, I later learned), Dunning dropped his