"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."
"Yeah," the cabbie conceded. "But just barely. Suckers tried to tear that down, too."
"For another bank?" Bill asked, a pan of him amused to find that another part of him stood aghast at the idea. He couldn't believe that anyone in his right mind would want to tear down that stately pleasure dome with its glittering glass chandelier, its sweeping right-and-left staircases which spiraled up to the balcony, and its mammoth curtain, which did not simply pull apart when the show started but which instead rose in magical folds and tucks and gathers, all underlit in fabulous shades of red and blue and yellow and green while pullies off stage ratcheted and groaned. Not the Aladdin, that shocked part of him cried out. How could they ever even think of tearing down the Aladdin for a BANK?
"Oh, ayup, a bank," the cabbie said. "You're fucking-A, pardon my French if you're a religious man. It was the First Merchants of Penobscot County had its eye on the "laddin. Wanted to pull it down and put up what they called a "complete banking mall." Got all the papers from the City Council, and the Aladdin was condemned. Then a bunch of folks formed a committee-folks that had lived here a long time-and they petitioned, and they marched, and they hollered, and finally they had a public City Council meeting about it, and Hanlon blew those suckers out." The cabbie sounded extremely satisfied.
"Hanlon?" Bill asked, startled. "Mike Hanlon?"
"Ayup," the cabbie said. He twisted around briefly to look at Bill, revealing a round, chapped face and horn-rimmed glasses with old specks of white paint on the bows. "Librarian. Black fella. You know him?"
"I did," Bill said, remembering how he had met Mike, back in July 1958. It had been Bowers and Huggins and Criss again... of course. Bowers and Huggins and Criss
(oh my)
at every turn, playing their own part, unwitting visegrips driving the seven of them together-tight, tighter, tightest. "We played together when we were kids. Before I moved away."
"Well, there you go," the cabbie said. "It's a small fucking world, pardon my-"
"-French if you're a religious man," Bill finished with him.
"There you go," the cabbie repeated comfortably, and they rode in silence for awhile before he said, "It's changed a lot, Derry has, but yeah, a lot of it's still here. The Town House, where I picked you up. The Standpipe in Memorial Park. You remember that place, mister? When we were kids, we used to think that place was haunted."
"I remember it," Bill said.
"Look, there's the hospital. You recognize it?"
They were passing the Derry Home Hospital on the right now. Behind it, the Penobscot flowed toward its meeting-place with the Kenduskeag. Under the rainy spring sky, the river was dull pewter. The hospital that Bill remembered-a white woodframe building with two wings, three stories high-was still there, but now it was surrounded, dwarfed, by a whole complex of buildings, maybe a dozen in all. He could see a parking-lot off to the left, and what looked like better than five hundred cars parked there.
"My God, that's not a hospital, that's a fucking college campus!" Bill exclaimed.
The cab-driver cackled. "Not bein a religious man, I'll pardon your French. Yeah, it's almost as big as the Eastern Maine up in Bangor now. They got radiation labs and a therapy center and six hundred rooms and their own laundry and God knows what else. The old hospital's still there, but it's all administration now."
Bill felt a queer doubling sensation in his mind, the sort of sensation he remembered getting the first time he watched a 3-D movie. Trying to bring together two images that didn't quite jibe. You could fool your eyes and your brain into doing that trick, he remembered, but you were apt to end up with a whopper of a headache... and he could feel his own headache coming on now. New Derry, fine. But the old Derry was still here, like the wooden Home Hospital building. The old Derry was mostly buried under all the new construction... but your eye was somehow dragged helplessly back to look at it... to look for it.
"The trainyard's probably gone, isn't it?" Bill asked.
The cabbie laughed again, delighted. "For someone who moved away when he was just a kid, you got a good memory, mister." Bill thought: You should have met me last week, my French-speaking friend. "It's all still out there, but it's nothing but ruins and rusty tracks now. The freights don't even stop no more. Fella wanted to buy the land and put up a whole roadside entertainment thing _ pitch "n putt, batting cages, driving ranges, mini golf, go-karts, little shack fulla video games, I don't know whatall-but there's some kind of big mixup about who owns the land now. I guess he'll get it eventually-he's a persistent fella-but right now it's in the courts."
"And the Canal," Bill murmured as they turned off Outer Center Street and onto Pasture Road-which, as Mike had said, was now marked with a green roadsign reading MALL ROAD. "The Canal's still here."
"Ayup," the cabbie said. "That'll always be here, I guess."
Now the Derry Mall was on Bill's left, and as they rolled past it, he felt that queer doubling sensation again. When they had been kids all of this had been a great long field full of rank grasses and gigantic nodding sunflowers which marked the northeastern end of the Barrens. Behind it, to the west, was the Old Cape low-income housing development. He could remember them exploring this field, being careful not to fall into the gaping cellarhold of the Kitchener Ironworks, which had exploded on Easter Sunday in the year 1906. The field had been full of relics and they had unearthed them with all the solemn interest of archaeologists exploring Egyptian ruins: bricks, dippers, chunks of iron with rusty bolts hanging from them, panes of glass, bottles full of unnamable gunk that smelled like the worst poison in the world. Something bad had happened near here, too, in the gravel-pit close to the dump, but he could not remember it yet. He could only remember a name, Patrick Humboldt, and that it had something to do with a refrigerator. And something about a bird that had chased Mike Hanlon. What...?
He shook his head. Fragments. Straws in the wind. That was all.
The field was gone now, as were the remains of the Ironworks. Bill remembered the great chimney of the Ironworks suddenly. Faced with tile, caked black with soot for the final ten feet of its length, it had lain in the high grass like a gigantic pipe. They had scrambled up somehow and had walked along it, arms held out like tightwire walkers, laughing-He shook his head, as if to dismiss the mirage of the mall, an ugly collection of buildings with signs that said SEARS and J. C. PENNEY and WOOLWORTH "s and CVS and YORK's STEAK HOUSE and WALDENBOOKS and dozens of others. Roads wove in and out of parking lots. The mall did not go away, because it was no mirage. The Kitchener Ironworks was gone, and the field that had grown up around its rums was likewise gone. The mall was the reality, not the memories.