Salem's Lot

and Kitty the Klown.’

‘And you came back here to write a book,’ she marveled.

Ben didn’t reply at once. Miss Coogan was opening cartons of cigarettes and filling the display rack by the cash register. The pharmacist, Mr Labree, was puttering around behind the high drug counter like a frosty ghost. The Air Force kid was standing by the door to the bus, waiting for the driver to come back from the bathroom.

‘Yes,’ Ben said. He turned and looked at her, full in the face, for the first time. She had a very pretty face, with candid blue eyes and a high, clear, tanned forehead. ‘Is this town your childhood?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

He nodded. ‘Then you know. I was a kid in ‘salem’s Lot and it’s haunted for me. When I came back, I almost drove right by because I was afraid it would be different.’

‘Things don’t change here,’ she said. ‘Not very much.’

‘I used to play war with the Gardener kids down in the Marshes. Pirates out by Royal’s Pond. Capture-the-flag and hide-and-go-seek in the park. My mom and I knocked around some pretty hard places after I left Aunt Cindy. She killed herself when I was fourteen, but most of the magic dust had rubbed off me long before that. What there was of it was here, and it’s still here. The town hasn’t changed that much. Looking out on Jointner Avenue is like looking through a thin pane of ice-like the one you can pick off the top of the town cistern in November if you knock it around the edges first-looking through that at your childhood. It’s wavy and misty and in some places it trails off into nothing, but most of it is still all there.’

He stopped, amazed. He had made a speech.

‘You talk just like your books,’ she said, awed.

He laughed. ‘I never said anything like that before. Not out loud.’

‘What did you do after your mother… after she died?’

‘Knocked around,’ he said briefly. ‘Eat your ice cream.’

She did.

‘Some things have changed,’ she said after a while. ‘Mr Spencer died. Do you remember him?’

‘Sure. Every Thursday night Aunt Cindy came into town to do her shopping at Crossen’s store and she’d send me in here to have a root beer. That was when it was on draft, real Rochester root beer. She’d give me a handkerchief with a nickel wrapped up in it.’

‘They were a dime when I came along. Do you remember what he always used to say?’

Ben hunched forward, twisted one hand into an arthritic claw, and turned one corner of his mouth down in a paralytic twist. ‘Your bladder,’ he whispered. ‘Those rut beers will destroy your bladder, bucko.’

Her laughter pealed upward toward the slowly rotating fan over their heads. Miss Coogan looked up suspiciously. ‘That’s perfect! Except he used to call me lassie.’

They looked at each other, delighted.

‘Say, would you like to go to a movie tonight?’ he asked.

‘I’d love to.’

‘What’s closest?’

She giggled. ‘The Cinex in Portland, actually. Where the lobby is decorated with the deathless paintings of Susan Norton.’

‘Where else? What kind of movies do you like?’

‘Something exciting with a car chase in it.’

‘Okay. Do you remember the Nordica? That was right here in town.’

‘Sure. It closed in 1968. 1 used to go on double dates there when I was in high school. We threw popcorn boxes at the screen when the movies were bad.’ She giggled. ‘They usually were.’

‘They used to have those old Republic serials,’ he said. ‘Rocket Man. The Return of Rocket Man. Crash Callahan and the Voodoo Death God.’

‘That was before my time.’

‘Whatever happened to it?’

‘That’s Larry Crockett’s real estate office now,’ she said. ‘The drive-in over in Cumberland killed it, I guess. That and TV.’

They were silent for a moment, thinking their own thoughts. The Greyhound clock showed 10:45 A.M.

They said in chorus: ‘Say, do you remember-’

They looked at each other, and this time Miss Coogan looked up at both of them when the laughter rang out. Even Mr Labree looked over.

They talked for another fifteen minutes, until Susan told him reluctantly that she had errands to run but yes, she could be ready at seven-thirty. When they went different ways, they both marveled over the easy, natural, coincidental impingement of their lives.

Ben strolled back down Jointner Avenue, pausing at the corner of Brock Street to look casually up at the Marsten House. He remembered that the great forest fire of 1951 had burned almost to its very yard before the wind had changed.

He thought: Maybe it should have burned. Maybe that would have been better.