an ominous way.
“Yeah, Mike.”
“Woke you up, huh?”
“Yeah, you did. That’s okay.” On the wall above the TV was an abysmal painting of lobstermen in yellow slickers and rainhats pulling lobster traps. Looking at it, Bill remembered where he was: the Derry Town House on Upper Main Street. Half a mile farther up and across the street was Bassey Park… the Kissing Bridge… the Canal. “What time is it, Mike?”
“Quarter of ten.”
“What day?”
“The 30th.” Mike sounded a little amused.
“Yeah. “Kay.”
“I’ve arranged a little reunion,” Mike said. He sounded diffident now.
“Yeah?” Bill swung his legs out of bed. They all came?”
“All but Stan Uris,” Mike said. Now there was something in his voice that Bill couldn’t read. “Bev was the last one. She got in late last evening.”
“Why do you say the last one, Mike? Stan might show up today.”
“Bill, Stan’s dead.”
“What? How? Did his plane-”
“Nothing like that,” Mike said. “Look, if it’s all the same to you, I think it ought to wait until we get together. It would be better if I could tell all of you at the same time.”
“It has to do with this?”
“Yes, I think so.” Mike paused briefly. “I’m sure it does.”
Bill felt the familiar weight of dread settle around his heart again-was it something you could get used to so quickly, then? Or had it been something he had carried all along, simply unfelt and unthought-of, like the inevitable fact of his own death?
He reached for his cigarettes, lit one, and blew out the match with the first
drag.
“None of them got together, yesterday?”
“No-I don’t believe so.’
“And you haven’t seen any of us yet?”
“No-just talked to you on the phone.”
“Okay,” he said. “Where’s the reunion?”
“You remember where the old Ironworks used to be?
“Pasture Road, sure.”
“You’re behind the times, old chum. That’s Mall Road these days. We’ve got the third-biggest shopping mall in the state out there. Forty-eight Different Merchants Under One Roof for Your Shopping Convenience.”
“Sounds really A-A-American, all right.”
“Bill?”
“What?”
“You all right?”
“Yes.” But his heart was beating too fast, the tip of his cigarette jittering a tiny bit. He had stuttered. Mike had heard it.
There was a moment of silence and then Mike said, “Just out past the mall, there’s a restaurant called Jade of the Orient. They have private rooms for parties. I arranged for one of them yesterday. We can have it the whole afternoon, if we want it.”
“You think this might take that long?”
“I just don’t know.”
“A cab will know how to get there?”
“Sure.”
“All right,” Bill said. He wrote the name of the restaurant down on the pad by the phone. “Why there?”
“Because it’s new, I guess,” Mike said slowly. “It seemed like… I don’t know…”
“Neutral ground?” Bill suggested.
“Yes. I guess that’s it.”
“Food any good?”
“I don’t know,” Mike said. “How’s your appetite?”
Bill chuffed out smoke and half-laughed, half-coughed. “It ain’t so good, ole pal.”
“Yeah,” Mike said. “I hear you.”
“Noon?”
“More like one, I guess. We’ll let Beverly catch a few more z’s.”
Bill snuffed the cigarette. “she married?”
Mike hesitated again. “We’ll catch up on everything,” he said.
“Just like when you go back to your high-school reunion ten years later, huh?” Bill said. “You get to see who got fat, who got bald, who got k-kids.”
“I wish it was like that,” Mike said.
“Yeah. Me too, Mikey. Me too.”
He hung up the phone, took a long shower, and ordered a breakfast that he didn’t want and which he only picked at. No; his appetite was really not much good at all.
Bill dialed the Big Yellow Cab Company and asked to be picked up at quarter of one, thinking that fifteen minutes would be plenty of time to get him out to Pasture Road (he found himself totally unable to think of it as Mall Road, even when he actually saw the mall), but he had underestimated the lunch-hour traffic-flow… and how much Derry had grown.
In 1958 it had been a big town, not much more. There were maybe thirty thousand people inside the Derry incorporated city limits and maybe another seven thousand beyond that in the surrounding burgs.
Now it had become a city-a very small city by London or New Yorkstandards, but doing just fine by Maine standards, where Portland, the state’s largest, could boast barely three hundred thousand.
As the cab moved slowly down Main Street (we’re over the Canal now, Bill thought; can’t see it, but it’s down there, running in the dark) and then turned up Center, his first thought was predictable enough: how much had changed. But the predictable thought was accompanied by a deep dismay that he never would have expected. He remembered his childhood here as a fearful, nervous time… not only because of the summer of ’58, when the seven of them had faced the terror, but because of George’s death, the deep dream his parents seemed to have fallen into following that death, the constant ragging about his stutter, Bowers and Huggins and Criss constantly on the prod for them after the rockfight in the Barrens
(Bowers and Huggins and Criss, oh my! Bowers and Huggins and Criss, oh my!)
and just a feeling that Derry was cold, that Derry was hard, that Derry didn’t much give a shit if any of them lived or died, and certainly not if they triumphed over Pennywise the Clown. Derry folk had lived with Pennywise in all his guises for a long time… and maybe, in some mad way, they had even come to understand him. To like him, need him. Love him? Maybe. Yes, maybe that too.
So why this dismay?
Perhaps only because it seemed such dull change, somehow. Or perhaps because Derry seemed to have lost its essential face for him.
The Bijou Theater was gone, replaced with a parking lot (BY PERMIT ONLY, the sign over the ramp announced; VIOLATORS SUBJECT TO TOW). The Shoeboat and Bailley’s Lunch, which had stood next to it, were also gone. They had been replaced by a branch of the Northern National Bank. A digital readout jutted from the front of the bland cinderblock structure, showing the time and the temperature-the latter in both degrees Fahrenheit and degrees Celsius. The Center Street Drug, lair of Mr Keene and the place where Bill had gotten Eddie his asthma medicine that day, was also gone. Richard’s Alley had become some strange hybrid called a “mini-mall.” Looking inside as the cab idled at a stoplight, Bill could see a record shop, a natural-foods store, and a toys-and-games shop which was featuring a clearance sale on ALL DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS SUPPLIES.
The cab pulled forward with a jerk. “Gonna take awhile,” the driver said. “I wish all these goddam banks would stagger their lunch-hours. Pardon my French if you’re a religious man.”
“That’s all right,” Bill said. It was overcast outside, and now a few splatters of rain hit the cab’s windshield. The radio muttered about an escaped mental patient from somewhere who was supposed to be very dangerous, and then began muttering about the Red Sox who weren’t. Showers early, then clearing. When Barry Manilow began moaning about Mandy, who came and who gave without taking, the cabbie snapped the radio off. Bill asked, “When did they go up?”
“What? The banks?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Oh, late sixties, early seb’nies, most of em,” the cabbie said. He was a big man with a thick neck. He wore a red-and-black-checked hunter’s jacket. A fluorescent-orange cap was jammed down squarely on his head. It was smudged with engine-oil. “They got this urban-renewal money. Reb “nue Sharin, they call it. So how they shared it was rip down everythin. And the banks come in. I guess that was all that could afford to come in. Hell of a note, ain’t it? Urban renewal, says they. Shit for dinner, says I. Pardon my French if you’re a religious man. There was a lot of talk about how they was gonna revitalize the downtown. Ayup, they revitalized it just fine. Tore down most the old stores and put up a lot of banks and parking lots. And you know you still can’t find a fucking slot to park your car in. Ought to string the whole City Council up by their cocks. Except for that Polock woman that’s on it. String her up by her tits. On second thought, it don’t seem like she’s got any. Flat as a fuckin board. Pardon my French if you’re a religious man.”
“I am,” Bill said, grinning.
“Then get outta my cab and go to fucking church,” the cabbie said, and they both burst out laughing.
“You lived here long?” Bill asked.
“My whole life. Born in Derry Home Hospital, and they’ll bury my fuckin remains out in Mount Hope Cemetery.”
“Good deal,” Bill said.
“Yeah, right,” the cabbie said. He hawked, rolled down his window, and spat an extremely large yellow-green lunger into the rainy air. His attitude, contradictory but somehow attractive-almost piquant-was one of glum good cheer. “Guy who catches that won’t have to buy no fuckin chewing gum for a week. Pardon my French if you’re a religious man.”
“It hasn’t all changed,” Bill said. The depressing promenade of banks and parking lots was slipping behind them as they climbed Center Street. Over the hill and past the First National, they began to pick up some speed. “The Aladdin’s still there.”
