I drove past several produce stands where the people minding the counters (or just standing side o’ the road and gaping as I drove past) looked more like inbred hillbillies fromDeliverancethan Maine farmers. As I passed the last of them, BOWERS ROADSIDE PRODUCE, a large mongrel raced out from behind several heaped baskets of tomatoes and chased me, drooling and snapping at the Sunliner’s rear tires. It looked like a misbegotten bulldog. Before I lost sight of it, I saw a scrawny woman in overalls approach it and begin beating it with a piece of board.
This was the town where Harry Dunning had grown up, and I hated it from the first. No concrete reason; I just did. The downtown shopping area, situated at the bottom of three steep hills, felt pitlike and claustrophobic. My cherry-red Ford seemed like the brightest thing on the street, a distracting (and unwelcome, judging by most of the glances it was attracting) splash of color amid the black Plymouths, brown Chevrolets, and grimy delivery trucks. Running through the center of town was a canal filled almost to the top of its moss-splotched concrete retaining walls with black water.
I found a parking space on Canal Street. A nickel in the meterbought me an hour’s worth of shopping time. I’d forgotten to buy a hat in Lisbon Falls, and two or three storefronts up I saw an outfit called Derry Dress & Everyday, Central Maine’s Most Debonair Haberdashery. I doubted there was much competition in that regard.
I had parked in front of the drugstore, and paused to examine the sign in the window. Somehow it sums up my feelings about Derry—the sour mistrust, the sense of barely withheld violence—better than anything else, although I was there for almost two months and (with the possible exception of a few people I happened to meet) disliked everything about it. The sign read:
SHOPLIFTING IS NOT A “KICK” OR A “GROOVE” OR A “GASSER”!
SHOPLIFTING IS ACRIME,AND WE WILL PROSECUTE!
NORBERT KEENE
OWNER & MANAGER
And the thin, bespectacled man in the white smock who was looking out at me just about had to be Mr. Keene. His expression did not sayCome on in, stranger, poke around and buy something, maybe have an ice cream soda.Those hard eyes and that turned-down mouth saidGo away, there’s nothing here for the likes of you.Part of me thought I was making that up; most of me knew I wasn’t. As an experiment, I raised my hand in a hello gesture.
The man in the white smock did not raise his in return.
I realized that the canal I’d seen must run directly beneath this peculiar sunken downtown, and I was standing on top of it. I could feel hidden water in my feet, thrumming the sidewalk. It was a vaguely unpleasant feeling, as if this little piece of the world had gone soft.
A male mannequin wearing a tuxedo stood in the window of Derry Dress & Everyday. There was a monocle in one eye and a school pennant in one plaster hand. The pennant read DERRY TIGERS WILL SLAUGHTER BANGOR RAMS! Even though I was a fan of school spirit, this struck me as a little over the top. Beat the Bangor Rams, sure—but slaughter them?
Just a figure of speech,I told myself, and went in.
A clerk with a tape measure around his neck approached me. His duds were much nicer than mine, but the dim overhead bulbs made his complexion look yellow. I felt an absurd urge to ask,Can you sell me a nice summer straw hat, or should I just go fuck myself?Then he smiled, asked how he could help me, and everything seemed almost normal. He had the required item, and I took possession of it for a mere three dollars and seventy cents.
“A shame you’ll have such a short time to wear it before the weather turns cold,” he said.
I put the hat on and adjusted it in the mirror beside the counter. “Maybe we’ll get a good stretch of Indian summer.”
Gently and rather apologetically, he tilted the hat the other way. It was a matter of two inches or less, but I stopped looking like a clodhopper on a visit to the big city and started to look like… well… central Maine’s most debonair time-traveler. I thanked him.
“Not at all, Mr.—?”
“Amberson,” I said, and held out my hand. His grip was short, limp, and powdery with some sort of talcum. I restrained an urge to rub my hand on my sport coat after he released it.
“In Derry on business?”
“Yes. Are you from here yourself?”
“Lifelong resident,” he said, and sighed as if this were a burden. Based on my own first impressions, I guessed it might be. “What’s your game, Mr. Amberson, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Real estate. But while I’m here, I thought I’d look up an old Army buddy. His name is Dunning. I don’t recall his first name, we just used to call him Skip.” The Skip part was a fabrication, but it was true that I didn’t know the first name of Harry Dunning’s father. Harry had named his brothers and sister in his theme, but the man with the hammer had always been “my father” or “my dad.”
“I’m afraid I couldn’t help you there, sir.” Now he sounded distant. Business was done, and although the store was empty of other customers, he wanted me gone.
“Well, maybe you can with something else. What’s the best hotel in town?”
“That would be the Derry Town House. Just turn back to Kenduskeag Avenue, take your right, and go up Up-Mile Hill to Main Street. Look for the carriage lamps out front.”
“Up-Mile Hill?”
“That’s what we call it, yes sir. If there’s nothing else, I have several alterations to make out back.”
When I left, the light had begun to drain from the sky. One thing I remember vividly about the time I spent in Derry during September and October of 1958 was how evening always seemed to come early.
One storefront down from Derry Dress & Everyday was Machen’s Sporting Goods, where THE FALL GUN SALE was under way. Inside, I saw two men sighting hunting rifles while an elderly clerk with a string tie (and a stringy neck to go with it) looked on approvingly. The other side of Canal appeared to be lined with workingmen’s bars, the kind where you could get a beer and a shot for fifty cents and all the music on the Rock-Ola would be C & W. There was the Happy Nook, the Wishing Well (which the habitués called the Bucket of Blood, I later learned), Two Brothers, the Golden Spoke, and the Sleepy Silver Dollar.
