5432852385743

cigarette on the floor, crushed it with his shoe, and rose from his seat. He walked easily up the aisle,
not using the grab-handles but swaying with the movements of the slowing bus. Some men don’t lose
the physical graces of their adolescence until relatively late in life. Dunning appeared to be one of
them. He would have made an excellent swing-dancer.
He clapped the bus driver on the shoulder and started telling him a joke. It was short, and most of
it was lost in the chuff of the airbrakes, but I caught the phrase three jigs stuck in an elevator and
decided it wasn’t one he’d have told to his Housedress Harem. The driver exploded with laughter,
then yanked the long chrome lever that opened the front doors. “See you Monday, Frank,” he said.
“If the creek don’t rise,” Dunning responded, then ran down the two steps and jumped across the
grass verge to the sidewalk. I could see muscles ripple under his shirt. What chance would a woman
and four children have against him? Not much was my first thought on the subject, but that was
wrong. The correct answer was none.
As the bus drew away, I saw Dunning mount the steps of the first building down from the corner
on Charity Avenue. There were eight or nine men and women sitting in rockers on the wide front
porch. Several of them greeted the butcher, who started shaking hands like a visiting politician. The
house was a three-story New England Victorian, with a sign hanging from the porch eave. I just had
time to read it:
EDNA PRICE ROOMS
BY THE WEEK OR THE MONTH
EFFICIENCY KITCHENS AVAILABLE
NO PETS!
Below this, hanging from the big sign on hooks, was a smaller orange sign reading NO
VACANCY.
Two stops further down the line, I exited the bus. I thanked the driver, who uttered a surly grunt
in return. This, I was discovering, was what passed for courteous discourse in Derry, Maine. Unless, of
course, you happened to know a few jokes about jigs stuck in an elevator or maybe the Polish navy.
I walked slowly back toward town, jogging two blocks out of my way to keep clear of Edna Price’s
establishment, where those in residence gathered on the porch after supper just like folks in one of
those Ray Bradbury stories about bucolic Greentown, Illinois. And did not Frank Dunning resemble
one of those good folks? He did, he did. But there had been hidden horrors in Bradbury’s Greentown,
too.
The nice man doesn’t live at home anymore, Richie-from-the-ditchie had said, and he’d had the straight
dope on that one. The nice man lived in a rooming house where everybody seemed to think he was the
cat’s ass.
By my estimation, Price’s Rooms was no more than five blocks west of 379 Kossuth Street, and
maybe closer. Did Frank Dunning sit in his rented room after the other tenants had gone to bed,
facing east like one of the faithful turning toward Qiblah? If so, did he do it with his hey-great-to-seeyou
smile on his face? I thought no. And were his eyes blue, or did they turn that cold and thoughtful
gray? How did he explain leaving his hearth and home to the folks taking the evening air on Edna
Price’s porch? Did he have a story, one where his wife was either a little bit cracked or an outright
villain? I thought yes. And did people believe it? The answer to that one was easy. It doesn’t matter if
you’re talking 1958, 1985, or 2011. In America, where surface has always passed for substance, people
always believe guys like Frank Dunning.