EPILOGUE
BILL DENBROUGH BEATS THE DEVIL-II
“I knew the bride when she used to do the Pony,
I knew the bride when she used to do the Stroll.
I knew the bride when she used to wanna party,
I knew the bride when she used to rock and roll.”
“You can’t be careful on a skateboard man”
1
Noon of a summer day.
Bill stood naked in Mike Hanlon’s bedroom, looking at his lean body in the mirror on the door. His bald head gleamed in the light which fell through the window and cast his shadow along the floor and up the wall. His chest was hairless, his thighs and shanks skinny but overlaid with ropes of muscle. Still, he thought, it’s an adult’s body we got here, no question about that. There’s the pot belly that comes with a few too many good steaks, a few too many bottles of Kirin beer, a few too many poolside lunches where you had the Reuben or the French dip instead of the diet plate. Your seat’s dropped, too, Bill old buddy. You can still serve an ace if you’re not too hung over and if your eye’s in, but you can’t hustle after the old Dunlop the way you could when you were seventeen. You got love handles and your balls are starting to get that middle-aged dangly look. There’s lines on your face that weren’t there when you were seventeen… Hell, they weren’t there on your first author photo, the one where you tried so hard to look as if you knew something… anything. You’re too old for what you’ve got in mind, Billy-boy. You’ll kill both of you.
He put on his underpants.
If we’d believed that, we never could have… have done whatever it was we did.
Because he didn’t really remember what it was they had done, or what had happened to turn Audra into a catatonic wreck. He only knew what he was supposed to do now, and he knew that if he didn’t do it now, he would forget that, too. Audra was sitting downstairs in Mike’s easy chair, her hair hanging lankly to her shoulders, staring with rapt attention at the TV, which was currently showing Dialing for Dollars. She didn’t speak and would only move if you led her.
This is different. You’re just too old, man. Believe it.
I won’t.
Then die here in Derry. Big fucking deal.
He put on athletic socks, the one pair of jeans he had brought, the tank top he’d bought at the Shirt Shack in Bangor the day before. The tank was bright orange. Across the front it said WHERE THE HELL IS DERRY, MAINE? He sat down on Mike’s bed-the one he had shared for the last week of nights with his warm but corpse-like wife-and put on his sneakers… a pair of Keds, which he had also bought yesterday in Bangor.
He stood up and looked at himself in the mirror again. He saw a man pressing middle age dressed up in a kid’s clothes.
You look ludicrous.
What kid doesn’t?
You’re no kid. Give this up!
“Fuck, let’s rock and roll a little,” Bill said softly, and left the room.
2
In the dreams he will have in later years, he is always leaving Derry alone, at sunset. The town is deserted; everyone has left. The Theological Seminary and the Victorian houses on West Broadway brood black against a lurid sky, every summer sunset you ever saw rolled up into one.
He can hear his footfalls echoing back as they rap along the concrete. The only other sound is water rushing hollowly through the stormdrains
3
He rolled Silver out into the driveway, put him on the kickstand, and checked the tires again. The front one was okay but the back one felt a little mushy. He got the bike pump that Mike had bought and firmed it up. When he put the pump back, he checked the playing cards and the clothespins. The bike’s wheels still made those exciting machine-gun sounds Bill remembered from his boyhood. Good deal.
You’ve gone crazy.
Maybe. We’ll see.
He went back into Mike’s garage again, got the 3-in-l, and oiled the chain and sprocket. Then he stood up, looked at Silver, and gave the bulb of the oogah-horn a light, experimental squeeze. It sounded good. He nodded and went into the house.
4
and he sees all those places again, intact, as they were then: the hulking brick fort of Derry Elementary, the Kissing Bridge with its complex intaglio of initials, high-school sweethearts ready to crack the world open with their passion who had grown up to become insurance agents and car salesmen and waitresses and beauticians; he sees the statue of Paul Bunyan against that bleeding sunset sky and the leaning white fence which ran along the Kansas Street sidewalk at the edge of the Barrens. He sees them as they were, as they always will be in some part of his mind… and his heart breaks with love and honor.
Leaving, leaving Derry, he thinks. We are leaving Derry, and if this was a story it would be the last half-dozen pages or so; get ready to put this one up on the shelf and forget it. The sun’s going down and there’s no sound but my footfalls and the water in the drains. This is the time of
5
Dialing for Dollars had given way to Wheel of Fortune. Audra sat passively
in front of it, her eyes never leaving the set. Her demeanor did not change
when Bill snapped the TV off.
“Audra,” he said, going to her and taking her hand. “Come on.”
She didn’t move. Her hand lay in his, warm wax. Bill took her other hand from the arm of Mike’s chair and pulled her to her feet. He had dressed her that morning much as he had dressed himself-she was wearing Levis and a blue shell top. She would have looked quite lovely if not for her wide-eyed vacant stare.
“Cuh-come on,” he said again, and led her through the door, into Mike’s kitchen and, eventually, outside. She came willingly enough… although she would have plunged off the back porch stoop and gone sprawling in the dirt if Bill had not put an arm around her waist and guided her down the steps.
He led her over to where Silver stood heeled over on his kick-stand in the bright summer noonlight. Audra stood beside the bike, looking serenely at the side of Mike’s garage.
“Get on, Audra.”
She didn’t move. Patiently, Bill worked at getting her to swing one of her long legs over the carrier mounted on Silver’s back fender. At last she stood there with the package carrier between her legs, not quite touching her crotch. Bill pressed his hand lightly to the top of her head and Audra sat down.
He swung onto Silver’s saddle and put up the kickstand with his heel. He prepared to reach behind him for Audra’s hands and draw them around his middle, but before he could do it they crept around him of their own accord, like small dazed mice.
He looked down at them, his heart beating faster, seeming to pump in his throat as much as in his chest. It was the first independent action Audra had taken all week, so far as he knew… the first independent action she had taken since It happened… whatever It had been.
