Welcome home Richie! 5 страница

'"I do," Lal says, "and I'll have all the ammo you could want, Mr —?"

'"Rader," Brady says. "Richard D. Rader, at your service."

'He stuck out his hand and Lal pumped it, grinning all the while. "Real pleased, Mr Rader "

'So then Bradley asked him what would be a good time for him and his friends to drop by and pick up the goods, and Lal Machen asked them right back how two in the afternoon sounded to them. They agreed that would be fine. Out they went. Lal watched them go. They met the two women and Gaudy on the sidewalk outside. Lal recognized Gaudy, too.

'So,' Mr Keene said, looking at me bright-eyed, 'what do you think Lal done then? Called the cops?'

'I guess he didn't,' I said, 'based on what happened. Me, I would have broken my leg getting to the telephone.'

'Well, maybe you would and maybe you wouldn't,' Mr Keene said with that same cynical, bright-eyed smile, and I shivered because I knew what he meant... and he knew I knew. Once something heavy begins to roll, it can't be stopped; it's simply going to roll until it finds a flat place long enough to wear away all of its forward motion. You can stand in front of that thing and get flattened... but that won't stop it, either.

'Maybe you would have and maybe you wouldn't,' Mr Keene repeated. 'But I can tell you what Lal Machen did. The rest of that day and all of the next, when someone he knew came in — some man — why, he would tell them that he knew who had been out in the woods around the Newport-Derry line shooting at deer and grouse and God knows what else with Kansas City typewriters. It was the Bradley Gang. He knew for a fact because he had recognized em. He'd tell em that Bradley and his men were coming back the next day around two to pick up the rest of their order. He'd tell them he'd promised Bradley all the ammunition he could want, and that was a promise he intended to keep.'

'How many?' I asked. I felt hypnotized by his glittering eye. Suddenly the dry smell of this back room — the smell of prescription drugs and powders, of Musterole and Vicks VapoRub and Robitussin cough syrup — suddenly all those smells seemed suffocating... but I could no more have left than I could kill myself by holding my breath.

'How many men did Lal pass the word to?' Mr Keene asked.

I nodded.

'Don't know for sure,' Mr Keene said. 'Didn't stand right there and take up sentry duty. All those he felt he could trust, I suppose.'

Those he could trust,' I mused. My voice was a little hoarse.

'Ayuh,' Mr Keene said. 'Derrymen, you know. Not that many of em raised cows.' He laughed at this old joke before going on. 'I came in around ten the day after the Bradleys first dropped in on Lal. He told me the story, then asked how he could help me. I'd only come in to see if my last roll of pictures had been developed — in those days Machen's handled all the Kodak films and cameras — but after I got my photos I also said I could use some ammo for my Winchester.

'"You gonna shoot some game, Norb?" Lal asks me, passing over the shells.

'"Might plug some varmints," I said, and we had us a chuckle over that.' Mr Keene laughed and slapped his skinny leg as if this was still the best joke he had ever heard. He leaned forward and tapped my knee. 'All I mean, son, is that the story got around all it needed to. Small towns, you know. If you tell the right people, what you need to pass along will get along... see what I mean? Like another licorice whip?'

I took one with numb fingers.

'Make you fat,' Mr Keene said, and cackled. He looked old then... infinitely old, with his bifocals slipping down the gaunt blade of his nose and the skin stretched too tight and thin across his cheeks to wrinkle.

The next day I brought my rifle into the store with me and Bob Tanner, who worked harder than any assistant I ever had after him, brought in his pop's shotgun. Around eleven that day Gregory Cole came in for a bicarb of soda and damned if he didn't have a Colt.45 jammed right in his belt.

'"Don't blow your balls off with that, Greg," I said.

'"I come out of the woods all the way from Milford for this and I got one fuck of a hangover," Greg says. "I guess I'll blow someone's balls off before the sun goes down."

'Around one -thirty, I put the little sign I had, BE BACK SOON, PLEASE BE PATIENT, in the door and took my rifle and walked out the back into Richard's Alley. I asked Bob Tanner if he wanted to come along and he said he'd better finish filling Mrs Emerson's prescription and he'd see me later. "Leave me a live one, Mr Keene," he said, but I allowed as how I couldn't promise nothing.

'There was hardly any traffic on Canal Street at all, either on foot or by car. Every now and then a delivery truck would pass, but that was about all. I saw Jake Pinnette cross over and he had a rifle in each hand. He met Andy Criss, and they walked over to one of the benches that used to stand where the War Memorial was — you know, where the Canal goes underground.

'Petie Vanness and Al Nell and Jimmy Gordon were all sitting on the courthouse steps, eating sandwiches and fruit out of their dinnerbuckets, trading with each other for stuff that looked better to them, the way kids do on the schoolyard. They was all armed. Jimmy Gordon had himself a World War I Springfield that looked bigger than he did.

'I see a kid go walking toward Up-Mile Hill — I think maybe it was Zack Denbrough, the father of your old buddy, the one who turned out to be a writer — and Kenny Borton says from the window of the Christian Science Reading Room, "You want to get out of here, kid; there's going to be shooting." Zack took one look at his face and ran like hell. There were men everywhere, men with guns, standing in doorways and sitting on steps and looking out of windows. Greg Cole was sitting in a doorway down the street with his.45 in his lap and about two dozen shells lined up beside him like toy sojers. Bruce Jagermeyer and that Swede, Olaf Theramenius, were standing underneath the marquee of the Bijou in the shade.'

Mr Keene looked at me, through me. His eyes were not sharp now; they were hazy with memory, soft as the eyes of a man only become when he is remembering one of the best times of his life — the first home run he ever hit, maybe, or the first trout he ever landed that was big enough to keep, or the first time he ever lay with a willing woman.

'I remember I heard the wind, sonny,' he said dreamily. 'I remember hearing the wind hearing the courthouse clock toll two. Bob Tanner came up behind me and I was so tightwired I almost blew his head off.

'He only nodded at me and crossed over to Vannock's Dry Goods, trailing his shadow out behind him.

'You would have thought that when it got to be two-ten and nothing happened, then twofifteen, then two-twenty, folks would have just up and left, wouldn't you? But it didn't happen that way at all. People just kept their place. Because — '

'Because you knew they were going to come, didn't you?' I asked. There was never any question at all.'

He beamed at me like a teacher pleased with a student's recital. That's right!' he said. 'We knew. No one had to talk about it, no one had to say, "Wellnow, let's wait until twenty past and if they don't show I've got to get back to work." Things just stayed quiet, and around twotwenty-five that afternoon these two cars, one red and one dark blue, started down Up-Mile Hill and came into the intersection. One of them was a Chevrolet and the other was a La Salle. The Conklin brothers, Patrick Caudy, and Marie Hauser were in the Chevrolet. The Bradleys, Malloy, and Kitty Donahue were in the La Salle.

They started through the intersection okay, and then Al Bradley slammed on the brakes of that La Salle so sudden that Caudy damn near ran into him. The street was too quiet and Bradley knew it. He wasn't nothing but an animal, but it doesn't take much to put up an animal's wind when it's been chased like a weasel in the corn for four years.

'He opened the door of the La Salle and stood up on the running board for a moment. He looked around, then he made a "go-back" gesture to Caudy with his hand. Caudy said "What, boss?" I heard that plain as day, the only thing I heard any of them say that day. There was a wink of sun, too, I remember that. It came off a compact mirror. The Hauser woman was powdering her nose.

That was when Lal Machen and his helper, Biff Marlow, came running out of Machen's store. "Put em up, Bradley, you're surrounded!" Lal shouts, and before Bradley could do more than turn his head, Lal started blasting. He was wild at first, but then he put one into Bradley's shoulder. The claret started to pour out of that hole right away. Bradley caught hold of the La Salle's doorpost and swung himself back into the car. He threw it into gear, and that's when everyone started to shoot.

'It was all over in four, maybe five minutes, but it seemed a whole hell of a lot longer while it was happening. Petie and Al and Jimmy Gordon just sat there on the courthouse steps and poured bullets into the back end of the Chevrolet. I saw Bob Tanner down on one knee, firing and working the bolt on that old rifle of his like a madman. Jagermeyer and Theramenius were shooting into the right side of the La Salle from under the theater marquee and Greg Cole stood in the gutter, holding that.45 automatic out in both hands, pulling the trigger just as fast as he could work it.

'There must have been fifty, sixty men firing all at once. After it was all over Lal Machen dug thirty-six slugs out of the brick sides of his store. And that was three days later, after just about every-damn-body in town who wanted one for a souvenir had come down and dug one out with his penknife. When it was at its worst, it sounded like the Battle of the Marne. Windows were blown in by rifle -fire all around Machen's.

'Bradley got the La Salle around in a half-circle and he wasn't slow but by the time he'd done he was running on four flats. Both the headlights were blowed out, and the windscreen was gone. Creeping Jesus Malloy and George Bradley were each at a backseat window, firing pistols. I seen one bullet take Malloy high up in the neck and tear it wide open. He shot twice more and then collapsed out the window with his arms hanging down.

'Gaudy tried to turn the Chevrolet and only ran into the back end of Bradley's La Salle. That was really the end of em right there, son. The Chevrolet's front bumper locked with the La Salle's back one and there went any chance they might have had to make a run for it.

'Joe Conklin got out of the back seat and just stood there in the middle of the intersectio n, a pistol in each hand, and started to pour it on. He was shooting at Jake Pinnette and Andy Criss. The two of them fell off the bench they'd been sitting on and landed in the grass, Andy Criss shouting "I'm killed! I'm killed!" over and over again, although he was never so much as touched; neither of them were.

'Joe Conklin, he had time to fire both his guns empty before anything so much as touched him. His coat flew back and his pants twitched like some woman you couldn't see was stitching on them. He was wearing a straw hat, and it flew off his head so you could see how he'd center-parted his hair. He had one of his guns under his arm and was trying to reload the other when someone cut the legs out from under him and he went down. Kenny Borton claimed him later, but there was really no way to tell. Could have been anybody.

'Conklin's brother Cal came out after him soon's Joe fell and down he went like a ton of bricks with a hole in his head.

'Marie Hauser came out. Maybe she was trying to sur render, I dunno. She still had the compact she'd been using to powder her nose in her right hand. She was screaming, I believe, but by then it was hard to hear. Bullets was flying all around them. That compact mirror was blown right out of her hand. She started back to the car then but she took one in the hip. She made it somehow and managed to crawl inside again.

'Al Bradley revved the La Salle up just as high as it would go, and managed to get it moving again. He dragged the Chevrolet maybe ten feet before the bumper tore right off 'n it.

'The boys poured lead into it. All the windows was busted. One of the mudguards was laying in the street. Malloy was dead hanging out the window, but both of the Bradley brothers were still alive. George was firing from the back seat. His woman was dead beside him with one of her eyes shot out.

'Al Bradley got to the big intersection, then his auto mounted the curb and stopped there. He got out from behind the wheel and started running up Canal Street. He was riddled.

'Patrick Gaudy got out of the Chevrolet, looked as if he was going to surrender for a minute, then he grabbed a.38 from a cheater-holster under his armpit. He triggered it off maybe three times, just firing wild, and then his shirt blew back fr om his chest in flames. He slid down the side of the Chevy until he was sitting on the running board. He shot one more time, and so far as I know that was the only bullet that hit anyone; it ricocheted off something and then grazed across the back of Greg Cole's hand. Left a scar he used to show off when he was drunk until someone — Al Nell, maybe — took him aside and told him it might be a good idea to shut up about what happened to the Bradley Gang.

'The Hauser woman came out and that time wasn't any doubt she was trying to surrender

— she had her hands up. Maybe no one really meant to kill her, but by then there was a crossfire and she walked right into it.

'George Bradley run as far as that bench by the War Memorial, then someone pulped the back of his head with a shotgun blast. He fell down dead with his pants full of piss... '

Hardly aware I was doing it, I took a licorice whip from the jar.

'They went on pouring rounds into those cars for another minute or so before it began to taper off,' Mr Keene said. 'When men get then: blood up, it doesn't go down easy. That was when I looked around and saw Sheriff Sullivan behind Nell and the others on the courthouse steps, putting rounds through that dead Chevy with a Remington pump. Don't let anyone tell you he wasn't there; Norbert Keene is sitting in front of you and telling you he was.

'By the time the firing stopped, those cars didn't look like cars at all anymore, just hunks of junk with glass around them. Men started to walk over to them. No one talked. All you could hear was the wind and feet gritting over broken glass. That's when the picture-taking started. And you ought to know this, sonny: when the picture-taking starts, the story is over.'

Mr Keene rocked in his chair, his slippers bumping placidly on the floor, looking at me.

'There's nothing like that in the Derry News,' was all I could think of to say. The headline for that day had read STATE POLICE, FBI GUN DOWN BRADLEY GANG IN PITCHED BATTLE. With the subhead 'Local Police Lend Support.'

'Course not,' Mr Keene said, laughing delightedly. 'I seen the publisher, Mack Laughlin, put two rounds into Joe Conklin himself.'

'Christ,' I muttered.

'Get enough licorice, sonny?'

'I got enough,' I said. I licked my lips. 'Mr Keene, how could a thing of that... that magnitude... be covered up?'

'Wasn't no cover-up,' he said, looking honestly surprised. 'It was just that no one talked about it much. And really, who cared? It wasn't President and Mrs Hoover that went down that day. It was no worse than shooting mad dogs that would kill you with a bite if you give them half a chance.'

'But the women?'

'Couple of whores,' he said indifferently. 'Besides, it happened in Derry, not in New York or Chicago. The place makes it news as much as what happened in the place, sonny. That's why there are bigger headlines when an earthquake kills twelve people in Los Angeles than there are when one kills three thousand in some heathen country in the Mideast.'

Besides, it happened in Derry.

I've heard it before, and I suppose if I continue to pursue this I'll hear it again... and again

... and again. They say it as if speaking patiently to a mental defective. They say it the way they would say Because of gravity if you asked them how come you stick to the ground when you walk. They say it as if it were a natural law any natural man should understand. And, of course, the worst of that is I do understand.

I had one more question for Norbert Keene.

'Did you see anyone at all that day that you didn't recognize once the shooting started?'

Mr Keene's answer was quick enough to drop my blood temperature ten degrees — or so it felt. 'The clown, you mean? How did you find out about him, sonny?'

'Oh, I heard it somewhere,' I said.

'I only caught a glimpse of him. Once things got hot, I tended pretty much to my own knittin. I glanced around just once and saw him upstreet beyond them Swedes under the Bijou's marquee,' Mr Keene said. 'He wasn't wearing a clown suit or nothing like that. He was dressed in a pair of farmer's biballs and a cotton shirt underneath. But his face was covered with that white grease-paint they use, and he had a big red clown smile painted on. Also had these tufts of fake hair, you know. Orange. Sorta comical.

'Lal Machen never saw that fellow, but Biff did. Only Biff must have been confused, because he thought he saw him in one of the windows of an apartment over somewhere to the left, and once when I asked Jimmy Gordon — he was killed in Pearl Harbor, you know, went down with his ship, the California, I think it was — he said he saw the guy behind the War Memorial.'

Mr Keene shook his head, smiling a little.

'It's funny how people get during a thing like that, and even funnier what they remember after it's all over. You can listen to sixteen different tales and no two of them will jibe together. Take the gun that clown fellow had, for instance — '

'Gun?' I asked. 'He was shooting, too?'

'Ayuh,' Mr Keene said. The one glimpse I caught of him, it looked like he had a Winchester bolt-action, and it wasn't until later that I figured out I must have thought that because that's what I had. Biff Marlow thought he had a Remington, because that was what he had. And when I asked Jimmy about it, he said that guy was shooting an old Springfield, just like his. Funny, huh?'

'Funny,' I managed. 'Mr Keene... didn't any of you wonder what in hell a clown, especially one in farmer's biballs, was doing there just then?'

'Sure,' Mr Keene said. 'It wasn't no big deal, you understand, but sure we wondered. Most of us figured it was somebody who wanted to attend the party but didn't want to be recognized. A Town Council member, maybe. Horst Mueller, maybe, or even Trace Naugler, who was mayor back then. Or it could just have been a professional man who didn't want to be recognized. A doctor or a lawyer. I wouldn't 've recognized my own father in a get-up like that.'

He laughed a little and I asked him what was funny.

'There's also a possibility that it was a real clown,' he said. 'Back in the twenties and thirties the county fair in Esty came a lot earlier than it does now, and it was set up and going full blast the week that the Bradley Gang met their end. There were clowns at the county fair. Maybe one of them heard we were going to have our own little carnival and rode down because he wanted to be in on it.

He smiled at me, dryly.

'I'm about talked out,' he said, 'but I'll tell you one more thing, since you 'pear to be so interested and you listen so close. It was something Biff Marlow said about sixteen years later, when we were having a few beers up to Pilot's in Bangor. Right out of a clear blue sky he said it. Said that clown was leanin out of the window so far that Biff couldn't believe he wasn't fallin out. It wasn't just his head and shoulders and arms that was out; Biff said he was right out to the knees, hanging there in midair, shooting down at the cars the Bradleys had come in, with that big red grin on his face. "He was tricked out like a jackolantern that had got a bad scare," was how Biff put it.'

'Like he was floating,' I said.

'Ayuh,' Mr Keene agreed. 'And Biff said there was something else, something that bothered him for weeks afterward. One of those things you get right on the tip of your tongue but won't quite come off, or something that lights on your skin like a mosquito or a noseeum. He said he finally figured out what it was one night when he had to get up and tap a kidney. He stood there whizzing into the bowl, thinking of nothing in particular, when it come to him all at once that it was two-twenty-five in the afternoon when the shooting started and the sun was out but that clown didn't cast any shadow. No shadow at all.'

'You lethargic, waiting upon me, waiting for the fire and I

attendant upon you, shaken by your beauty

Shaken by your beauty

Shaken.'

— William Carlos Williams,

Paterson

'Well I was born in my birthday suit

The doctor slapped my behind

He said "You gonna be special

You sweet little toot toot."'

— Sidney Simien,

'My Toot Toot'

C H A P T E R 1 3

The Apocalyptic Rockfight

Bill's there first. He sits in one of the wing-back chairs just inside the Reading Room door watching as Mike deals with the library's last few customers of the night — an old lady with a clutch of paperback gothics, a man with a huge historical tome on the Civil War, and a skinny kid waiting to check out a novel with a seven-day-rental sticker in an upper corner of its plastic cover. Bill sees with no sense of surprise or serendipity at all that it is his own latest novel. He feels that surprise is beyond him, serendipity a believed-in reality that has turned out to be only a dream after all.

A pretty girl, her tartan skirt held together with a big gold safety pin (Christ, I haven't seen one of those in years, Bill thinks, are they coming back?), is feeding quarters into the Xerox machine and copying an off print with one eye on the big pendulum clock behind the checkout desk. The sounds are library-soft and library-comforting: the hush-squeak of soles and heels on the red-and-black linoleum of the floor; the steady lock and tick of the clock dropping off dry seconds; the catlike purr of the copying machine.

The boy takes his William Denbrough novel and goes to the girl at the copier just as she finishes and begins to square up her pages.

'You can just leave that off print on the desk, Mary,' Mike says. 'I'll put it away.'

She flashes a grateful smile. 'Thanks, Mr Hanlon.'

'Goodnight. Goodnight, Billy. The two of you go right home.'

'The boogeyman will get you if you don't... watch... out!' Billy, the skinny kid, chants, and slips a proprietary arm around the girl's slim waist.

'Well, I don't think he'd want a pair as ugly as you two,' Mike says, 'but be careful, all the same.'

'We will, Mr Hanlon,' Mary replies, seriously enough, and punches the boy lightly on the shoulder. 'Come on, ugly,' she says, and giggles. When she does this she is transformed from a pretty mildly desirable high-school junior into the coltish not-quite-gawky eleven-year-old that Beverly Marsh had been... and as they pass him Bill is shaken by her beauty... and he feels fear; he wants to go to the boy and tell him earnestly that he must go home by well- lighted streets and not look around if someone speaks.

You can't be careful on a skateboard, mister, a phantom voice says inside his head, and Bill smiles a rueful grownup's smile.

He watches the boy open the door for his girl. They go into the vestibule, moving closer together, and Bill would have bet the royalties of the book the boy named Billy is holding under his arm that he has stolen a kiss before opening the outer door for the girl. More fool you if you didn't, Billy my man, he thinks. Now see her home safe. For Christ's sake see her home safe!

Mike calls, 'Be right with you, Big Bill. Just let me file this.' Bill nods and crosses his legs. The paper bag on his lap crackles a little. There's a pint of bourbon inside and he reckons he has never wanted a drink so badly in his life as he does right now. Mike will be able to supply water, if not ice — and the way he feels right now, a very little water will be enough. He thinks of Silver, leaning against the wall of Mike's garage on Palmer Lane. And from that his thoughts progress naturally to the day they had met in the Barrens — all except Mike

— and each had told his tale again: lepers under porches; mummies who walked on the ice; blood from drains and dead boys in the Standpipe and pictures that moved and werewolves that chased small boys down deserted streets.

They had gone deeper into the Barrens that day before the Fourth of July, he remembers now. It had been hot in town but cool in the tangled shade on the eastern bank of the Kenduskeag. He remembers one of those concrete cylinders not far away, humming to itself the way the Xerox machine had hummed for the pretty high-school girl just now. Bill remembers that, and how, when all the stories were done, the others had looked at him. They had wanted him to tell them what they should do next, how they should proceed, and he simply didn't know. The not knowing had filled him with a kind of desperation. Looking at Mike's shadow now, looming large on the darkly paneled wall in the reference room, a sudden sureness comes to him: he hadn't known then because they hadn't been complete when they met that July 3rd afternoon. The completion had come later, at the abandoned gravel-pit beyond the dump, where you could climb out of the Barrens easily on either side — Kansas Street or Merit Street. Right around, in fact, where the Interstate overpass was now. The gravel-pit had no name; it was old, its crumbly sides crabby with weeds and bushes. There had still been plenty of ammunition there — more than enough for an apocalyptic rockfight.

But before that, on the bank of the Kenduskeag, he hadn't been sure what to say — what did they want him to say? What did he want to say? He remembers looking from one face to the next — Ben's; Bev's; Eddie's; Stan's; Richie's. And he remembers music. Little Richard. 'Whomp-bomp-a-lomp-bomp... ' Music. Low. And darts of light in his eyes. He remembers the darts of light because.

Richie had hung his transistor radio over the lowermost branch of the tree he was leaning against. Although they were in the shade, the sun bounced off the surface of the Kenduskeag, onto the radio's chrome facing, and from there into Bill's eyes.

T-Take that th-hing d-d-d-own, Ruh-Ruh-Richie,' Bill said. 'It's gonna bun-blind m-m-me.'

'Sure, Big Bill,' Richie said at once, with no smartmouth at all, and removed the radio from the branch. He also turned it off, and Bill wished he hadn't done that; it made the silence, broken only by the rippling water and the vague hum of the sewage -pumping machinery, seem very loud. Their eyes watched him and he wanted to tell them to look somewhere else, what did they think he was, a freak?

But of course he couldn't do that, because all they were doing was waiting for him to tell them what to do now. They had come by dreadful knowledge, and they needed him to tell them what to do with it. Why me! he wanted to shout at them, but of course he knew that, too. It was because, like it or not, he had been tapped for the position. Because he was the ideaman, because he had lost a brother to whatever it was, but most of all because he had become, in some obscure way he would never completely understand, Big Bill.

He glanced at Beverly and looked away quickly from the calm trust in her eyes. Looking at Beverly made him feel funny in the pit of his stomach. Fluttery.

'We cuh-can't go to the p-p-police,' he said at last. His voice sounded harsh to his own ears, too loud. 'We c-ca-han't g-go to our puh-huh-harents, either. Unless... ' He looked hopefully at Richie. 'What a-a-about your m-mom and d-dad, four-eyes? They suh-heem p-pretty rehreh-regular.'

'My good man,' Richie said in his Toodles the Butler Voice, 'you obviously have no understahnding whatsoevah of my mater and pater. They — '

'Talk American, Richie,' Eddie said from his spot by Ben. He was sitting by Ben for the simple reason that Ben provided enough shade for Eddie to sit in. His face looked small and pinched and worried — an old man's face. His aspirator was in his right hand.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-26