An hour later, while George’s mother was being sedated in the Emergency Room at Derry Home Hospital and while Stuttering Bill sat stunned and white and silent in his bed, listening to his father sob hoarsely in the parlor where his mother had been playing Fur Elise when George went out, the boat shot out through a concrete loophole like a bullet exiting the muzzle of a gun and ran at speed down a sluiceway and into an unnamed stream. When it joined the boiling, swollen Penobscot River twenty minutes later, the first rifts of blue had begun to show in the sky overhead. The storm was over.
The boat dipped and swayed and sometimes took on water, but it did not sink; the two brothers had waterproofed it well. I do not know where it finally fetched up, if ever it did; perhaps it reached the sea and sails there forever, like a magic boat in a fairytale. All I know is that it was still afloat and still running on the breast of the flood when it passed the incorporated town limits of Derry, Maine, and there it passes out of this tale forever.
Chapter 2
AFTER THE FESTIVAL (1984)
1
The reason Adrian was wearing the hat, his sobbing boyfriend would later tell the police, was because he had won it at the Pitch Til U Win stall on the Bassey Park fairgrounds just six days before his death. He was proud of it.
“He was wearing it because he loved this shitty little town!” the boyfriend, Don Hagarty, screamed at the cops.
“Now, now-there’s no need for that sort of language,” Officer Harold Gardener told Hagarty. Harold Gardener was one of Dave Gardener’s our sons. On the day his father had discovered the lifeless, one-armed body of George Denbrough, Harold Gardener had been five. On this day, almost twenty-seven years later, he was thirty-two and balding. Harold Gardener recognized the reality of Don Hagarty’s grief and pain, and at the same time found it impossible to take seriously. This man-if you want to call him a man-was wearing lipstick and satin pants so tight you could almost read the wrinkles in his cock. Grief or no grief, pain or no pain, he was, after all, just a queer. Like his friend, the late Adrian Mellon.
“Let’s go through it again,” Harold’s partner, Jeffrey Reeves, said. “The two of you came out of the Falcon and turned toward the Canal. Then what?”
“How many times do I have to tell you idiots?” Hagarty was still screaming. “They killed him! They pushed him over the side! Just another day in Macho City for them!” Don Hagarty began to cry.
“One more time,” Reeves repeated patiently. “You came out of the Falcon. Then what?”
2
In an interrogation room just down the hall, two Derry cops were speaking with Steve Dubay, seventeen; in the Clerk of Probate’s office upstairs, two more were questioning John “Webby” Garton, eighteen; and in the Chief of Police’s office on the fifth floor, Chief Andrew Rademacher and Assistant District Attorney Tom Boutillier were questioning fifteen-year-old Christopher Unwin. Unwin, who wore faded jeans, a grease-smeared tee-shirt, and blocky engineer boots, was weeping. Rademacher and Boutillier had taken him because they had quite accurately assessed him as the weak link in the chain.
“Let’s go through it again,” Boutillier said in this office just as Jeffrey Reeves was saying the same thing two floors down.
“We didn’t mean to kill him,” Unwin blubbered. “It was the hat. We couldn’t believe he was still wearing the hat after, you know, after what Webby said the first time. And I guess we wanted to scare him.”
“For what he said,” Chief Rademacher interjected.
“Yes.”
“To John Garton, on the afternoon of the 17th.”
“Yes, to Webby.” Unwin burst into fresh tears. “But we tried to save him when we saw he was in trouble… at least me and Stevie Dubay did… we didn’t mean to kill him!”
“Come on, Chris, don’t shit us,” Boutillier said. “You threw the little queer into the Canal.”
“Yes, but-”
“And the three of you came in to make a clean breast of things. Chief Rademacher and I appreciate that, don’t we, Andy?”
“You bet. It takes a man to own up to what he did, Chris.”
“So don’t fuck yourself up by lying now. You meant to throw him over the minute you saw him and his fag buddy coming out of the Falcon, didn’t you?”
“No!” Chris Unwin protested vehemently.
Boutillier took a pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket and stuck one in his mouth. He offered the pack to Unwin. “Cigarette?”
Unwin took one. Boutillier had to chase the tip with a match in order to give him a light because of the way Unwin’s mouth was trembling.
“But when you saw he was wearing the hat?” Rademacher asked.
Unwin dragged deep, lowered his head so that his greasy hair fell in his eyes, and jetted smoke from his nose, which was littered with blackheads.
“Yeah,” he said, almost too softly to be heard.
Boutillier leaned forward, brown eyes gleaming. His face was predatory but his voice was gentle. “What, Chris?”
“I said yes. I guess so. To throw him in. But not to kill him.” He looked up at them, face frantic and miserable and still unable to comprehend the stupendous changes which had taken place in his life since he left the house to take in the last night of Derry’s Canal Days Festival with two of his buddies at seven-thirty the previous evening. “Not to kill him!” he repeated. “And that guy under the bridge… I still don’t know who he was.”
“What guy was that?” Rademacher asked, but without much interest. They had heard this part before as well, and neither of them believed it-sooner or later men accused of murder almost always drag out that mysterious other guy. Boutillier even had a name for it: he called it the “One-Armed Man Syndrome,” after that old TV series The Fugitive.
“The guy in the clown suit,” Chris Unwin said, and shivered. “The guy with the balloons.”
3
The Canal Days Festival, which ran from July 15th to July 21st, had been a rousing success, most Derry residents agreed: a great thing for the city’s morale, image… and pocketbook. The week- long festival was pegged to mark the centenary of the opening of the Canal which ran through the middle of downtown. It had been the Canal which had fully opened Derry to the lumber trade in the years 1884 to 1910; it had been the Canal which had birthed Derry’s boom years.
The town was spruced up from east to west and north to south. Potholes which some residents swore hadn’t been patched for ten years or more were neatly filled with hottop and rolled smooth. The town buildings were refurbished on the inside, repainted on the outside. The worst of the graffiti in Bassey Park-much of it coolly logical anti-gay statements such as KILL ALL QUEERS and AIDS FROM GOD YOU HELLHOUND HOMOS!!-was sanded off the benches and wooden walls of the little covered walkway over the Canal known as the Kissing Bridge.
A Canal Days Museum was installed in three empty store-fronts downtown, and filled with exhibits by Michael Hanlon, a local librarian and amateur historian. The town’s oldest families loaned freely of their almost priceless treasures, and during the week of the festival nearly forty thousand visitors paid a quarter each to look at eating-house menus from the 1890s, loggers” bitts, axes, and peaveys from the 1880s, children’s toys from the 1920s, and over two thousand photographs and nine reels of movie film of life as it had been in Derry over the last hundred years.
The museum was sponsored by the Derry Ladies” Society, which vetoed some of Hanlon’s proposed exhibits (such as the notorious tramp-chair from the 1930s) and photographs (such as those of the Bradley Gang after the notorious shoot-out). But all agreed it was a great success, and no one really wanted to see those gory old things anyway. It was so much better to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative, as the old song said.
There was a huge striped refreshment tent in Derry Park, and band concerts there every night. In Bassey Park there was a carnival with rides by Smokey’s Greater Shows and games run by local townfolk. A special tram-car circled the historic sections of the town every hour on the hour and ended up at this gaudy and amiable money-machine.
It was here that Adrian Mellon won the hat which would get him killed, the paper top-hat with the flower and the band which said I? DERRY!
4
“I’m tired,” John “Webby” Garton said. Like his two friends, he was dressed in unconscious imitation of Bruce Springsteen, although if asked he would probably call Springsteen a wimp or a fagola and would instead profess admiration for such “bitchin” heavy-metal groups as Def Leppard, Twisted Sister, or Judas Priest. The sleeves of his plain blue tee-shirt were torn off, showing his heavily muscled arms. His thick brown hair fell over one eye-this touch was more John Cougar Mellencamp than Springsteen. There were blue tattoos on his arms-arcane symbols which looked as if they had been drawn by a child. “I don’t want to talk no more.”
“Just tell us about Tuesday afternoon at the fair,” Paul Hughes said. Hughes was tired and shocked and dismayed by this whole sordid business. He thought again and again that it was as if Derry Canal Days ended with one final event which everyone had somehow known about but which no one had quite dared to put down on the Daily Program of Events. If they had, it would have looked like this:
Saturday, 9:00 P.M.: Final band concert featuring the Derry High School Band and the Barber Shop Mello-Men.
Saturday, 10:00 P.M.: Giant fireworks show.
Saturday, 10:35 P.M.: Ritual sacrifice of Adrian Mellon officially ends Canal Days.
“Fuck the fair,” Webby replied.
