It (70 page)

“Quaeque ipsa miserrima vidi,

Et quorum pars magna fui.”

—Virgil

“You don't fuck around with the infinite.”

—
Mean Streets

February 14th, 1985

Valentine's Day

Two more disappearances in the past week—both children. Just as I was beginning to relax. One of them a sixteen-year-old boy named Dennis Torrio, the other a girl of just five who was sledding in back of her house on West Broadway. The hysterical mother found her sled, one of those blue plastic flying saucers, but nothing else. There had been a fresh fall of snow the night before—four inches or so. No tracks but hers, Chief Rademacher said when I called him. He is becoming extremely annoyed with me, I think. Not anything that's going to keep me awake nights; I have worse things to do than that, don't I?

Asked him if I could see the police photos. He refused.

Asked him if her tracks led away toward any sort of drain or sewer grating. This was followed by a long period of silence. Then Rademacher said, “I'm beginning to wonder if maybe you shouldn't see a doctor, Hanlon. The head-peeper kind of doctor. The kid was snatched by her father. Don't you read the papers?”

“Was the Torrio boy snatched by his father?” I asked.

Another long pause.

“Give it a rest, Hanlon,” he said. “Give
me
a rest.”

He hung up.

Of course I read the papers—don't I put them out in the Reading Room of the Public Library each morning myself? The little girl, Laurie Ann Winterbarger, had been in the custody of her mother following an acrimonious divorce proceeding in the spring of 1982. The police are operating on the theory that Horst Winterbarger, who is supposedly working as a machinery maintenance man somewhere in Florida, drove up to Maine to snatch his daughter. They further theorize that he parked his car beside the house and called to his daughter, who then joined him—hence the lack of any tracks
other than the little girl's. They have less to say about the fact that the girl had not seen her father since she was two. Part of the deep bitterness which accompanied the Winterbargers' divorce came from Mrs. Winterbarger's allegations that on at least two occasions Horst Winterbarger had sexually molested the child. She asked the court to deny Winterbarger all visitation rights, a request the court granted in spite of Winterbarger's hot denials. Rademacher claims the court's decision, which had the effect of cutting Winterbarger off completely from his only child, may have pushed Winterbarger into taking his daughter. That at least has some dim plausibility, but ask yourself this: would little Laurie Ann have recognized him after three years and run to him when he called her? Rademacher says yes, even though she was two the last time she saw him. I don't think so. And her mother says Laurie Ann had been well trained about not approaching or talking to strangers, a lesson most Derry children learn early and well. Rademacher says he's got Florida State Police looking for Winterbarger and that his responsibility ends there.

“Matters of custody are more the province of the lawyers than that of the police,” this pompous, overweight asshole is quoted as saying in last Friday's Derry
News.

But the Torrio boy . . . that's something else. Wonderful home life. Played football for the Derry Tigers. Honor Roll student. Had gone through the Outward Bound Survival School in the summer of '84 and passed with flying colors. No history of drug use. Had a girlfriend that he was apparently head-over-heels about. Had everything to live for. Everything to stay in Derry for, at least for the next couple of years.

All the same, he's gone.

What happened to him? A sudden attack of wanderlust? A drunk driver who maybe hit him, killed him, and buried him? Or is he maybe still in Derry, is he maybe on the nightside of Derry, keeping company with folks like Betty Ripsom and Patrick Hockstetter and Eddie Corcoran and all the rest? Is it

(later)

I'm doing it again. Going over and over the same ground, doing nothing constructive, only cranking myself up to the screaming point. I jump when the iron stairs leading up to the stacks creak. I jump at shadows. I find myself wondering how I'd react if I was shelving books up there in the stacks, pushing my little rubber-wheeled trolley in front of me, and a hand reached from between two leaning rows of books, a groping hand. . . .

Had again a well-nigh insurmountable desire to begin calling them this afternoon. At one point I even got as far as dialing 404, the Atlanta area code, with Stanley Uris's number in front of me. Then I just held the phone against my ear, asking myself if I wanted to call them because I was really sure—one hundred percent
sure
—or simply because I'm now so badly spooked that I can't stand to be alone; that I have to talk to someone who knows (or
will
know) what it is I am spooked about.

For a moment I could hear Richie saying
Batches? BATCHES? We doan need no stinkin' batches, senhorr!
in his Pancho Vanilla Voice, as clearly as if he were standing beside me . . . and I hung up the phone. Because when you want to see someone as badly as I wanted to see Richie—or any of them—at that moment, you just can't trust your own motivations. We lie best when we lie to ourselves. The fact is, I'm still not one hundred percent sure. If another body should turn up, I will call . . . but for now I must suppose that even such a pompous ass as Rademacher may be right. She
could
have remembered her father; there may have been pictures of him. And I suppose a really persuasive adult could talk a kid into coming to his car, no matter what that child had been taught.

There's another fear that haunts me. Rademacher suggested that I might be going crazy. I don't believe that, but if I call them now,
they
may think I'm crazy. Worse than that, what if they should not remember me at all?
Mike Hanlon? Who? I don't remember any Mike Hanlon. I don't remember you at all. What promise?

I feel that there will come a right time to call them . . . and when that time comes, I'll
know
that it's right. Their own circuits will open at the same time. It's as if there are two great wheels slowly coming
into some sort of powerful convergence with each other, myself and the rest of Derry on one, and all my childhood friends on the other.

When the time comes, they will hear the voice of the Turtle.

So I'll wait, and sooner or later I'll know. I don't believe it's a question anymore of calling them or not calling them.

Only a question of
when.

February 20th, 1985

The fire at the Black Spot.

“A perfect example of how the Chamber of Commerce will try to rewrite history, Mike,” old Albert Carson would have told me, probably cackling as he said it. “They'll try, and sometimes they almost succeed . . . but the old people remember how things really went. They always remember. And sometimes they'll tell you, if you ask them right.”

There are people who have lived in Derry for twenty years and don't know that there was once a “special” barracks for noncoms at the old Derry Army Air Corps Base, a barracks that was a good half a mile from the rest of the base—and in the middle of February, with the temperature standing right around zero and a forty-mile-an-hour wind howling across those flat runways and whopping the wind-chill factor down to something you could hardly believe, that extra half a mile became something that could give you frost-freeze or frostbite, or maybe even kill you.

The other seven barracks had oil heat, storm windows, and insulation. They were toasty and cozy. The “special” barracks, which housed the twenty-seven men of Company E, was heated by a balky old wood furnace. Supplies of wood for it were catch-as-catch-can. The only insulation was the deep bank of pine and spruce boughs the men laid around the outside. One of the men promoted a complete set of storm windows for the place one day, but the twenty-seven inmates of the “special” barracks were detailed up to Bangor that same day to help with some work at the base up there, and when they came back that night, tired and cold, all of those windows had been broken. Every one.

This was in 1930, when half of America's air force still consisted of
biplanes. In Washington, Billy Mitchell had been courtmartialed and demoted to flying a desk because his gadfly insistence on trying to build a more modern air force had finally irritated his elders enough for them to slap him down hard. Not long after, he would resign.

So there was precious little flying that went on at the Derry base, in spite of its three runways (one of which was actually paved). Most of the soldiering that went on there was of the make-work variety.

One of the Company E soldiers who returned to Derry after his service tour came to an end in 1937 was my dad. He told me this story:

“One day in the spring of 1930—this was about six months before the fire at the Black Spot—I was coming back with four of my buddies from a three-day pass we had spent down in Boston.

“When we come through the gate there was this big old boy standing just inside the checkpoint, leaning on a shovel and picking the seat of his suntans out of his ass. A sergeant from someplace down south. Carroty-red hair. Bad teeth. Pimples. Not much more than an ape without the body hair, if you know what I mean. There were a lot of them like that in the army during the Depression.

“So here we come, four young guys back from leave, all of us still feeling fine, and we could see in his eyes that he was just looking for something to bust us with. So we snapped him salutes as if he was General Black Jack Pershing himself. I guess we might have been all right, but it was one fine late-April day, sun shining down, and I had to shoot off my lip. ‘A good afternoon to you, Sergeant Wilson, sir,' said I, and he landed on me with both feet.

“ ‘Did I give you any permission to speak to me?' he asks.

“ ‘Nawsir,' I say.

“He looks around at the rest of them—Trevor Dawson, Carl Roone, and Henry Whitsun, who was killed in the fire that fall—and he says to them, ‘This here smart nigger is in hack with me. If the rest of you jigaboos don't want to join him in one hardworking dirty bitch of an afternoon, you get over to your barracks, stow your gear, and get your asses over to the O.D. You understand?'

“Well, they got going, and Wilson hollers, ‘Doubletime, you fuckers! Lemme see the soles of your eighty-fucking-nines!'

“So they doubletimed off, and Wilson took me over to one of the equipment sheds and he got me a spade. He took me out into the
big field that used to be just about where the Northeast Airlines Airbus terminal stands today. And he looks at me, kind of grinning, and he points at the ground and he says, ‘You see that hole there, nigger?'

“There was no hole there, but I figured it was best for me to agree with whatever he said, so I looked down at the ground where he was pointing and said I sure did see it. So then he busted me one in the nose and knocked me over and there I was on the ground with blood running down over the last fresh shirt I had.

“ ‘You don't see it because some bigmouth jig bastard filled it up!' he shouted at me, and he had two big blotches of color on his cheeks. But he was grinning, too, and you could tell he was enjoying himself. ‘So what you do, Mr. A Good Afternoon To You, what you do is you get the dirt out of my hole. Doubletime!'

“So I dug for most two hours, and pretty soon I was in that hole up to my chin. The last couple of feet was clay, and by the time I finished I was standing in water up to my ankles and my shoes were soaked right through.

“ ‘Get out of there, Hanlon,' Sergeant Wilson said. He was sitting there on the grass, smoking a cigarette. He didn't offer me any help. I was dirt and muck from top to bottom, not to mention the blood drying on the blouse of my suntans. He stood up and walked over. He pointed at the hole.

“ ‘What do you see there, nigger?' he asked me.

“ ‘Your hole, Sergeant Wilson,' says I.

“ ‘Yeah, well, I decided I don't want it,' he says. ‘I don't want no hole dug by a nigger. Put my dirt back in, Private Hanlon.'

“So I filled it back in and by the time I was done the sun was going down and it was getting cold. He comes over and looks at it after I finished patting down the last of the dirt with the flat of the spade.

“ ‘Now what do you see there, nigger?' he asks.

“ ‘Bunch of dirt, sir,' I said, and he hit me again. My God, Mikey, I came this close to just bouncing up off'n the ground and splitting his head open with the edge of that shovel. But if I'd done that, I never would have looked at the sky again, except through a set of bars. Still, there were times when I almost think it would have been worth it. I managed to hold my peace somehow, though.

“ ‘That ain't a bunch of dirt, you stupid coontail nightfighter!' he
screams at me, the spit flying off'n his lips. ‘That's
MY HOLE,
and you best get the dirt out of it right now! Doubletime!'

“So I dug the dirt out of his hole and then I filled it in again, and then he asks me why I went and filled in his hole just when he was getting ready to take a crap in it. So I dug it out again and he drops his pants and hangs his skinny-shanks cracker redneck ass over the hole and he grins up at me while he's doing his business and says, ‘How you doin, Hanlon?'

“ ‘I am doing just fine, sir,' I says right back, because I had decided I wasn't going to give up until I fell unconscious or dropped dead. I had my dander up.

“ ‘Well, I aim to fix that,' he says. ‘To start with, you better just fill that hole in, Private Hanlon. And I want to see some life. You're slowin down.'

“So I got her filled in again and I could see by the way he was grinning that he was only warming up. But just then this friend of his came humping across the field with a gas lantern and told him there'd been a surprise inspection and Wilson was in hack for having missed it. My friends covered for me and I was okay, but Wilson's friends—if that's what he called them—couldn't be bothered.