Standing outside the latter, a quartet of bluecollar gents was taking the afternoon air and staring at my convertible. They were equipped with mugs of beer and cigarettes. Their faces were shaded beneath flat caps of tweed and cotton. Their feet were clad in the big no-color workboots my 2011 students called shitkickers. Three of the four were wearing suspenders. They watched me with no expression on their faces. I thought for a moment of the mongrel that had chased my car, snapping and drooling, then crossed the street.
“Gents,” I said. “What’s on tap in there?”
For a moment none of them answered. Just when I thoughtnone of them would, the one sans suspenders said, “Bud and Mick, what else? You from away?”
“Wisconsin,” I said.
“Bully for you,” one of them muttered.
“Late in the year for tourists,” another said.
“I’m in town on business, but I thought I might look up an old service buddy while I’m here.” No response to this, unless one of the men dropping his cigarette butt onto the sidewalk and then putting it out with a snot-loogie the size of a small mussel could be termed an answer. Nevertheless, I pushed on. “Skip Dunning’s his name. Do any of you fellows know a Dunning?”
“Should hope to smile n kiss a pig,” No Suspenders said.
“I beg pardon?”
He rolled his eyes and turned down the corners of his mouth, the out-of-patience expression a man gives to a stupid person with no hope of ever being smart. “Derry’s full of Dunnings. Check the damn phone book.” He started inside. His posse followed. No Suspenders opened the door for them, then turned back to me. “What’s that Ford got in it?”Gutforgot.“V-8?”
“Y-block.” Hoping I sounded as if I knew what it meant.
“Pretty good goer?”
“Not bad.”
“Then maybe you should climb in and go ’er right on up the hill. They got some nice joints there. These bars are for millies.” No Suspenders assessed me in a cold way I came to expect in Derry, but never got used to. “You’d get stared at. P’raps more, when the ’leven-to-seven lets out from Striar’s and Boutillier’s.”
“Thanks. That’s very kind of you.”
The cold assessment continued. “You don’t know much, do you?” he remarked, then went inside.
I walked back to my convertible. On that gray street, with the smell of industrial smokes in the air and the afternoon bleeding away to evening, downtown Derry looked only marginally more charming than a dead hooker in a church pew. I got in, engagedthe clutch, started the engine, and felt a strong urge to just drive away. Drive back to Lisbon Falls, climb up through the rabbit-hole, and tell Al Templeton to find another boy. Only he couldn’t, could he? He was out of strength and almost out of time. I was, as the New England saying goes, the trapper’s last shot.
I drove up to Main Street, saw the carriage lamps (they came on for the night just as I spotted them), and pulled into the turnaround in front of the Derry Town House. Five minutes later, I was checked in. My time in Derry had begun.
3
By the time I got my new possessions unpacked (some of the remaining cash went into my wallet, the rest into the lining of my new valise) I was good and hungry, but before going down to dinner, I checked the telephone book. What I saw caused my heart to sink. Mr. No Suspenders might not have been very welcoming, but he was right about Dunnings selling cheap in Derry and the four or five surrounding hamlets that were also included in the directory. There was almost a full page of them. It wasn’t that surprising, because in small towns certain names seem to sprout like dandelions on a lawn in June. In my last five years teaching English at LHS, I must have had two dozen Starbirds and Lemkes, some of them siblings, most of them first, second, or third cousins. They intermarried and made more.
Before leaving for the past I should have taken time to call Harry Dunning and ask him his father’s first name—it would have been so simple. I surely would have, if I hadn’t been so utterly and completely gobsmacked by what Al had shown me, and what he was asking me to do.But,I thought,how hard can it be?It shouldn’t take Sherlock Holmes to find a family with kids named Troy, Arthur (alias Tugga), Ellen, and Harry.
With this thought to cheer me, I went down to the hotel restaurant and ordered a shore dinner, which came with clams and alobster roughly the size of an outboard motor. I skipped dessert in favor of a beer in the bar. In the detective novels I read, bartenders were often excellent sources of information. Of course, if the one working the Town House stick was like the other people I’d met so far in this grim little burg, I wouldn’t get far.
He wasn’t. The man who left off his glass-polishing duties to serve me was young and stocky, with a cheery full moon of a face below his flattop haircut. “What can I get you, friend?”
The f-word sounded good to me, and I returned his smile with enthusiasm. “Miller Lite?”
He looked puzzled. “Never heard of that one, but I’ve got High Life.”
Of course he hadn’t heard of Miller Lite; it hadn’t been invented yet. “That would be fine. Guess I forgot I was on the East Coast there for a second.”
“Where you from?” He used a church key to whisk the top off a bottle, and set a frosted glass in front of me.
“Wisconsin, but I’ll be here for awhile.” Although we were alone, I lowered my voice. It seemed to inspire confidence. “Real estate stuff. Got to look around a little.”
He nodded respectfully and poured for me before I could. “Good luck to you. God knows there’s plenty for sale in these parts, and most of it going cheap. I’m getting out, myself. End of the month. Heading for a place with a little less edge to it.”
“Itdoesn’tseem all that welcoming,” I said, “but I thought that was just a Yankee thing. We’re friendlier in Wisconsin, and just to prove it, I’ll buy you a beer.”
