It (43 page)

He turned right on Jackson Street, bypassing downtown, and then crossed to Main Street by way of Palmer Lane—and during his short ride down this little byway's one-block length he passed the house where he would live as an adult. He did not look at it; it was just a small two-story dwelling with a garage and a small lawn. It gave off no special vibration to the passing boy who would spend most of his adult life as its owner and only dweller.

At Main Street he turned right and rode up to Bassey Park, still wandering, simply riding and enjoying the stillness of the early day. Once inside the main gate he dismounted his bike, pushed down the kickstand, and walked toward the Canal. He was still, as far as he knew, impelled by nothing more than purest whim. Certainly it did not occur to him to think that his dreams of the night before
had anything to do with his current course; he did not even remember exactly what his dreams had been—only that one had followed another until he had awakened at five o'clock, sweaty but shivering, and with the idea that he ought to eat a fast breakfast and then take a bike-ride into town.

Here in Bassey there was a smell in the fog he didn't like: a sea-smell, salty and old. He had smelled it before, of course. In the early-morning fogs you could often smell the ocean in Derry, although the coast was forty miles away. But the smell this morning seemed thicker, more vital. Almost dangerous.

Something caught his eye. He bent down and picked up a cheap two-blade pocket knife. Someone had scratched the initials E.C. on the side. Mike looked at it thoughtfully for a moment or two and then pocketed it. Finders keepers, losers weepers.

He glanced around. Here, near where he had found the knife, was an overturned park bench. He righted it, setting its iron footings back into the holes they had made over a period of months or years. Beyond the bench he saw a matted place in the grass . . . and leading away from it, two grooves. The grass was springing back up, but those grooves were still fairly clear. They went in the direction of the Canal.

And there was blood.

(the bird remember the bird remember the)

But he did not want to remember the bird and so he pushed the thought away.
Dogfight, that's all. One of em must have hurt the other one pretty bad.
It was a convincing thought by which he was somehow not convinced. Thoughts of the bird kept wanting to come back—the one he had seen out at the Kitchener Ironworks, one Stan Uris never would have found in his bird-book.

Stop it. Just get out of here.

But instead of getting out he followed the grooves. As he did he made up a little story in his mind. It was a murder story. Here's this kid, out late, see. Out past the curfew. The killer gets him. And how does he get rid of the body? Drags it to the Canal and dumps it in, of course! Just like an
Alfred Hitchcock Presents!

The marks he was following
could
have been made by a dragging pair of shoes or sneakers, he supposed.

Mike shivered and looked around uncertainly. The story was somehow a little too real.

And suppose that it wasn't a man who did it but a monster. Like out of a horror comic or a horror book or a horror movie or

(a bad dream)

a fairytale or something.

He decided he didn't like the story. It was a stupid story. He tried to push it out of his mind but it wouldn't go. So what? Let it stay. It was dumb. Riding into town this morning had been dumb. Following these two matted grooves in the grass was dumb. His dad would have a lot of chores for him to do around the place today. He ought to get back and start in or when the hottest part of the afternoon rolled around he would be up the barn loft pitching hay. Yes, he ought to get back. And that's just what he was going to do.

Sure you are,
he thought.
Want to bet?

Instead of going back to his bike and getting on and riding home and starting his chores, he followed the grooves in the grass. There were more drops of drying blood here and there. Not much, though. Not as much as there had been in that matted place back there by the park bench he had set to rights.

Mike could hear the Canal now, running quiet. A moment later he saw the concrete edge materialize out of the fog.

Here was something else in the grass.
My goodness, it's certainly your day for finding things,
his mind said with dubious geniality, and then a gull screamed somewhere and Mike flinched, thinking again of the bird he had seen that day, that day just this spring.

Whatever that is in the grass, I don't even want to look at it.
And that was oh so very true, but here he was, already bending over it, hands planted just above his knees, to see what it was.

A tattered bit of cloth with a drop of blood on it.

The seagull screamed again. Mike stared at the bloody scrap of cloth and remembered what had happened to him in the spring.

Each year during April and May the Hanlon farm woke up from its winter doze.

Mike would let himself know that spring had come again not when the first crocuses showed under his mom's kitchen windows
or when kids started bringing immies and croakers to school or even when the Washington Senators kicked off the baseball season (usually getting themselves shellacked in the process), but only when his father hollered for Mike to help him push their mongrel truck out of the barn. The front half was an old Model-A Ford car, the back end a pick-up truck with a tailgate which was the remainder of the old henhouse door. If the winter hadn't been too cold, the two of them could often get it going by pushing it down the driveway. The truck's cab had no doors; likewise there was no windshield. The seat was half of an old sofa that Will Hanlon had scrounged from the Derry dump. The stick-shift ended in a glass doorknob.

They would push it down the driveway, one on each side, and when it got rolling good, Will would jump in, turn on the switch, retard the spark, step down on the clutch, punch the shift into first gear with his big hand clamped over the doorknob. Then he would holler: “Put me over the hump!” He'd pop the clutch and the old Ford engine would cough, choke, chug, backfire . . . and sometimes actually start to run, rough at first, then smoothing out. Will would roar down the road toward Rhulin Farms, turn around in their driveway (if he had gone the other way, Henry Bowers's crazy father Butch probably would have blown his head off with a shotgun), and then roar back, the unmuffled engine blatting stridently while Mike jumped up and down with excitement, cheering, and his mom stood in the kitchen doorway, wiping her hands on a dishtowel and pretending a disgust she didn't really feel.

Other times the truck wouldn't roll-start and Mike would have to wait until his father came back from the barn, carrying the crank and muttering under his breath. Mike was quite sure that some of the words so muttered were swears, and he would be a little frightened of his daddy then. (It wasn't until much later, during one of those interminable visits to the hospital room where Will Hanlon lay dying, that he found out his father muttered because he was afraid of the crank: once it had kicked back viciously, flown out of its socket, and torn the side of his mouth open.)

“Stand back, Mikey,” he would say, slipping the crank into its socket at the base of the radiator. And when the A was finally running, he'd say that next year he was going to trade it for a Chevrolet,
but he never did. That old A-Ford hybrid was still in back of the home place, up to its axles and henhouse tailgate in weeds.

When it was running, and Mike was sitting in the passenger seat, smelling hot oil and blue exhaust, excited by the keen breeze that washed in through the glassless hole where the windshield had once been, he would think:
Spring's here again. We're all waking up.
And in his soul he would raise a silent cheer that shook the walls of that mostly cheerful room. He felt love for everything around him, and most of all for his dad, who would grin over at him and holler: “Hold on, Mikey! We gone wind this baby up! We gone make some birds run for cover!”

Then he would tear up the driveway, the A's rear wheels spitting back black dirt and gray clods of clay, both of them jouncing up and down on the sofa-seat inside the open cab, laughing like stark natural-born fools. Will would run the A through the high grass of the back field, which was kept for hay, toward either the south field (potatoes), the west field (corn and beans), or the east field (peas, squash, and pumpkins). As they went, birds would burst up out of the grass before the truck, squawking in terror. Once a partridge flew up, a magnificent bird as brown as late-autumn oaks, the explosive coughing whirr of its wings audible even over the pounding engine.

Those rides were Mike Hanlon's door into spring.

The year's work began with the rock harvest. Every day for a week they would take the A out and load the bed with rocks which might break a harrow-blade when the time came to turn the earth and plant. Sometimes the truck would get stuck in the mucky spring earth and Will would mutter darkly under his breath . . . more swears, Mike surmised. He knew some of the words and expressions; others, such as “son of a whore,” puzzled him. He had come across the word in the Bible, and so far as he could tell, a whore was a woman who came from a place called Babylon. He had once set out to ask his father, but the A had been in mud up to her coil-springs, there had been thunderclouds on his father's brow, and he had decided to wait for a better time. He ended up asking Richie Tozier later that year and Richie told him
his
father had told him a whore was a woman who got paid for having sex with men. “What's having sex?” Mike had asked, and Richie had wandered away holding his head.

On one occasion Mike had asked his father why, since they harvested rocks every April, there were always more of them the following April.

They had been standing at the dumping-off place near sunset on the last day of that year's rock harvest. A beaten dirt track, not quite serious enough to be called a road, led from the bottom of the west field to this gully near the bank of the Kenduskeag. The gully was a jumbled wasteland of rocks that had been dragged off Will's land through the years.

Looking down at this badlands, which he had made first alone and then with the help of his son (somewhere under the rocks, he knew, were the rotting remains of the stumps he had yanked out one at a time before any of the fields could be tilled), Will had lighted a cigarette and said, “My daddy used to tell me that God loved rocks, houseflies, weeds, and poor people above all the rest of His creations, and that's why He made so many of them.”

“But every year it's like they come back.”

“Yeah, I think they do,” Will said. “That's the only way I know to explain it.”

A loon cried from the far side of the Kenduskeag in a dusky sunset that had turned the water a deep orange-red. It was a lonely sound, so lonely that it made Mike's tired arms tighten with gooseflesh.

“I love you, Daddy,” he said suddenly, feeling his love so strongly that tears stung his eyes.

“Why, I love you too, Mikey,” his father said, and hugged him tight in his strong arms. Mike felt the rough fabric of his father's flannel shirt against his cheek. “Now what do you say we go on back? We got just time to get a bath each before the good woman puts supper on the table.”

“Ayuh,” Mike said.

“Ayuh yourself,” Will Hanlon said, and they both laughed, feeling tired but feeling good, arms and legs worked but not overworked, their hands rock-roughened but not hurting too bad.

Spring's here,
Mike thought that night, drowsing off in his room while his mother and father watched
The Honeymooners
in the other room.
Spring's here again, thank You God, thank You very much.
And turning to sleep, sinking down, he had heard the loon call again, the
distance of its marshes blending into the desire of his dreams. Spring was a busy time, but it was a good time.

Following the rock harvest, Will would park the A in the high grass back of the house and drive the tractor out of the barn. There would be harrowing then, his father driving the tractor, Mike either riding behind and holding on to the iron seat or walking alongside, picking up any rocks they had missed and throwing them aside. Then came planting, and following the planting came summer's work: hoeing . . . hoeing . . . hoeing. His mother would refurbish Larry, Moe, and Curly, their three scarecrows, and Mike would help his father put mooseblowers on top of each straw-filled head. A mooseblower was a can with both ends cut off. You tied a length of heavily waxed and rosined string tightly across the middle of the can and when the wind blew through it a wonderfully spooky sound resulted—a kind of whining croak. Crop-eating birds decided soon enough that Larry, Moe, and Curly were no threats, but the mooseblowers always frightened them off.

Starting in July, there was picking as well as hoeing—peas and radishes first, then the lettuce and the tomatoes that had been started in the shed-boxes, then the corn and beans in August, more corn and beans in September, then the pumpkins and the squash. Somewhere in the midst of all that came the new potatoes, and then, as the days shortened and the air sharpened, he and his dad would take in the mooseblowers (and sometime during the winter they would disappear; it seemed they had to make new ones each spring). The day after, Will would call Norman Sadler (who was as dumb as his son Moose but infinitely more goodhearted), and Normie would come over with his potato-digger.

For the next three weeks all of them would work picking potatoes. In addition to the family, Will would hire three or four high-school boys to help pick, paying them a quarter a barrel. The A-Ford would cruise slowly up and down the rows of the south field, the biggest field, always in low gear, the tailgate down, the back filled with barrels, each marked with the name of the person picking into it, and at the end of the day Will would open his old creased wallet and pay each of the pickers cash money. Mike was paid, and so was his mother; that money was theirs, and Will Hanlon never once asked either of them
what they did with it. Mike had been given a five-percent interest in the farm when he was five years old—old enough, Will had told him then, to hold a hoe and to tell the difference between witchgrass and pea-plants. Each year he had been given another one percent, and each year, on the day after Thanksgiving, Will would compute the farm's profits and deduct Mike's share . . . but Mike never saw any of
that
money. It went into his college account and was to be touched under absolutely no other circumstances.