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He’s a nice man. Always joking around and stuff.
But the nice man had cold eyes. When interacting with his fascinated lady-harem, they had been blue. But when he turned his attention to me—however briefly—I could have sworn that they turned gray, the color of water beneath a sky from which snow will soon fall.
3
The market closed at 6:00 P.M., and when I left with my few items, it was only twenty past five. There was a U-Needa-Lunch on Witcham Street, just around the corner. I ordered a hamburger, a fountain Coke, and a piece of chocolate pie. The pie was excellent—real chocolate, real cream. It filled my mouth the way Frank Anicetti’s root beer had. I dawdled as long as I could, then strolled down to the canal, where there were some benches. There was also a sightline—narrow but adequate
—to the Center Street Market. I was full but ate one of my oranges anyway, casting bits of peel over the cement embankment and watching the water carry them away.
Promptly at six, the lights in the market’s big front windows went out. By quarter past, the last of the ladies had exited, toting their carry-alls either up Up-Mile Hill or clustering at one of those phone poles with the painted white stripe. A bus marked ROUNDABOUT ONE FARE came along and scooped them up. At quarter to seven, the market employees began leaving. The last two to exit were Mr. Currie, the manager, and Du
By then there were only two other people there and I didn’t want to join them. Thanks to the one-way traffic pattern in the Low Town, I didn’t have to. I walked to another white-painted pole, this one handy to The Strand (where the current double feature was Machine-Gun Kelly and Reform School Girl; the marquee promised BLAZING ACTION), and waited with some working joes who were talking about possible World Series matchups. I could have told them plenty about that, but kept my mouth shut.
A city bus came along and stopped across from the Center Street Market. Du
One of the guys who got on ahead of me flashed a canary-colored bus pass that made me think fleetingly of the Yellow Card Man. The others put fifteen cents into the coin receptacle, which clicked and dinged. I did the same, although it took me a bit longer because my dime was stuck to my sweaty palm. I thought I could feel every eye on me, but when I looked up, everyone was either reading the newspaper or staring vacantly out the windows. The interior of the bus was a fug of blue-gray smoke.
Frank Du
I needn’t have worried. When the bus angled toward the stop at the corner of Witcham Street and Charity Avenue (Derry also had Faith and Hope Avenues, I later learned), Du
He clapped the bus driver on the shoulder and started telling him a joke. It was short, and most of it was lost in the chuff of the airbrakes, but I caught the phrase three jigs stuck in an elevator and decided it wasn’t one he’d have told to his Housedress Harem. The driver exploded with laughter, then yanked the long chrome lever that opened the front doors. “See you Monday, Frank,” he said.
“If the creek don’t rise,” Du
As the bus drew away, I saw Du
The house was a three-story New England Victorian, with a sign hanging from the porch eave. I just had time to read it:
EDNA PRICE ROOMS
BY THE WEEK OR THE MONTH
EFFICIENCY KITCHENS AVAILABLE
NO PETS!
Below this, hanging from the big sign on hooks, was a smaller orange sign reading NO
VACANCY.
Two stops further down the line, I exited the bus. I thanked the driver, who uttered a surly grunt in return. This, I was discovering, was what passed for courteous discourse in Derry, Maine.
Unless, of course, you happened to know a few jokes about jigs stuck in an elevator or maybe the Polish navy.
I walked slowly back toward town, jogging two blocks out of my way to keep clear of Edna Price’s establishment, where those in residence gathered on the porch after supper just like folks in one of those Ray Bradbury stories about bucolic Greentown, Illinois. And did not Frank Du
The nice man doesn’t live at home anymore, Richie-from-the-ditchie had said, and he’d had the straight dope on that one. The nice man lived in a rooming house where everybody seemed to think he was the cat’s ass.
By my estimation, Price’s Rooms was no more than five blocks west of 379 Kossuth Street, and maybe closer. Did Frank Du