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Chaz saw me looking. “Frank knows how to make a party go, all right. You know where he works?
No, you’re new in town, I forgot. Center Street Market. He’s the head butcher. Also half-owner,
although he don’t advertise it. You know what? He’s half the reason that place stands up and makes a
profit. Draws the ladies like bees to honey.”
“Does he, now?”
“Yep, and the men like him, too. That’s not always the case. Fellas don’t always like a ladies’ man.”
That made me think of my ex-wife’s fierce Johnny Depp fixation.
“But it’s not like the old days when he’d drink with em until closin, then play poker with em down
at the freight depot until the crack of dawn. These days he’ll have one beer—maybe two—and then
he’s out the door. You watch.”
It was a behavior pattern I knew about firsthand from Christy’s sporadic efforts to control her
booze intake rather than stop altogether. It would work for awhile, but sooner or later she always went
off the deep end.
“Drinking problem?” I asked.
“Don’t know about that, but he’s sure got a temper problem.” He looked down at the tattoo on his
forearm. “Milly, you ever notice how many funny fellas have got a mean streak?”
Milly flipped her tail. Chaz looked at me solemnly. “See? The women always know.” He snuck a
Lobster Pickin’ and shot his eyes comically from side to side. He was a very amusing fellow, and it
never crossed my mind that he was anything other than what he claimed to be. But, as Chaz himself
had implied, I was a bit on the naïve side. Certainly for Derry. “Don’t tell Rabbi Snoresalot.”
“Your secret’s safe with me.”
By the way the men at the Tracker table were leaning toward Frank, he had launched into another
joke. He was the kind of man who talked a lot with his hands. They were big hands. It was easy to
imagine one of them holding the haft of a Craftsman hammer.
“He ripped and roared something terrible back in high school,” Chaz said. “You’re looking at a guy
who knows, because I went to the old County Consolidated with him. But I mostly kept out of his
way. Suspensions left and right. Always for fighting. He was supposed to go to the University of
Maine, but he got a girl pregnant and ended up getting married instead. After a year or two of it, she
collected the baby and scrammed. Probably a smart idea, the way he was then. Frankie was the kind of
guy, fighting the Germans or the Japs probably would have been good for im—get all that mad out,
you know. But he came up 4-F. I never heard why. Flat feet? Heart murmur? The high blood? No way
of telling. But you probably don’t want to hear all this old gossip.”
“I do,” I said. “It’s interesting.” It sure was. I’d come into The Lamplighter to wet my whistle and
had stumbled into a gold mine instead. “Have another Lobster Pickin’.”
“Twist my arm,” he said, and popped one into his mouth. He jerked a thumb at the mirror as he
chewed. “And why shouldn’t I? Just look at those guys back there—half of em Catholics and still
chowing up on burgers n BLTs n sausage subs. On Friday! Who can make sense of religion, cuz?”
“You got me,” I said. “I’m a lapsed Methodist. Guess Mr. Dunning never got that college
education, huh?”
“Nope, by the time his first wife done her midnight flit, he was gettin a graduate degree in cuttin
meat, and he was good at it. Got into some more trouble—and yeah, drinkin was somewhat involved
from what I heard, people gossip terrible, y’know, and a man who owns pawnshops hears it all—so Mr.
Vollander, him who owned the market back in those days, he sat down and had a Dutch uncle talk
with ole Frankie.” Chaz shook his head and picked another Pickin’. “If Benny Vollander had ever
known Frankie Dunning was gonna own half the place by the time that Korea shit was over, he
probably would have had a brain hemorrhage. Good thing we can’t see the future, isn’t it?”
“That would complicate things, all right.”