"Never you mind," he said. "Give me my water, Mikey."
I did. He drank most of it and then got coughing. A passing nurse looked in and said: "do you need anything, Mr Hanlon?"
"New set of "testines," my dad said. "You got any handy, Rhoda?"
She smiled a nervous, doubtful smile and passed on. My dad handed the glass to me and I put it back on his table. "It's longer tellin than it is rememberin," he said. "You goan fill that glass up for me before you leave?"
"Sure, Daddy."
"This story goan give you nightmares, Mikey?"
I opened my mouth to lie, and then thought better of it. And I think now that if I had lied, he would have stopped right there. He was far gone by then, but maybe not that far gone.
"I guess so," I said.
That's not such a bad thing," he said to me. "In nightmares we can think the worst. That's what they're for, I guess."
He reached out his hand and I took it and we held hands while he finished.
"I looked around just in time to see Trev and Dick goin around the front of the building, and I chased after them, still trying to catch m'wind. There was maybe forty or fifty people out there, some of them cryin, some of them pukin, some of them screamin, some of them doing all three things at once, it seemed like. Others were layin on the grass, fainted dead away with the smoke. The door was shut, and we heard people screamin on the other side, screamin to let them out, out for the love of Jesus, they were burning up.
"It was the only door, except for the one that went out through the kitchen to where the garbage cans and things were, you see. To go in you pushed the door open. To go out you had to pull it.
"Some people had gotten out, and then they started to jam up at that door and push. The door got slammed shut. The ones in the back kept pushin forward to get away from the fire, and everybody got jammed up. The ones right up front were squashed. Wasn't no way they could get that door open against the weight of all those behind. So there they were, trapped, and the fire raged.
"It was Trev Dawson that made it so it was only eighty or so that died instead of a hundred or maybe two hundred, and what he got for his pains wasn't a medal but two years in the Rye stockade. See, right about then this big old cargo truck pulled up, and who should be behind the wheel but my old friend Sergeant Wilson, the fella who owned all the holes there on the base.
"He gets out and starts shoutin orders that didn't make much sense and which people couldn't hear anyway. Trev grabbed my arm and we run over to him. I'd lost all track of Dick Hallorann by then and didn't even see him until the next day.
"Sergeant, I have to use your truck!" Trev yells in his face.
"Get out of my way, nigger," Wilson says, and pushes him down. Then he starts yelling all that confused shit again. Wasn't nobody paying any attention to him, and he didn't go on for long anyway, because Trevor Dawson popped up like a jack-in-the-box and decked him.
"Trev could hit damned hard, and almost any other man would have stayed down, but that cracker had a hard head. He got up, blood pouring out of his mouth and nose, and he said, "I'm goan kill you for that." Well, Trev hit him in the belly just as hard as he could, and when he doubled over I put my hands together and pounded the back of his neck just as hard as 7 could. It was a cowardly thing to do, hitting a man from behind like that, but desperate times call for desperate measures. And I would be lyin, Mikey, if I didn't tell you that hitting that poormouth sonofabitch didn't give me a bit of pleasure.
"Down he went, just like a steer hit with a poleaxe. Trev run to the truck, fired it up, and drove it around so it was facin the front of the Black Spot, but to the left of the door. He th'owed it into first, popped the clutch on that cocksucker, and here he come!
"Look out there!" I shouted at that crowd of people standing around. "Ware that truck!"
"They scattered like quail, and for a wonder Trev didn't hit none of em. He hit the side of the building going maybe thirty, and cracked his face a good one on the steerin wheel of the truck. I seen the blood fly from his nose when he shook his head to clear it. He punched out reverse, backed up fifty yards, and come down on her again. WHAM! The Black Spot wasn't nothing but corrugated tin, and that second hit did her. The whole side of that oven fell in and the flames come roarin out. How anything could have still been alive in there I don't know, but there was. People are a lot tougher than you'd believe, Mikey, and if you don't believe it, just take a look at me, slidin off the skin of the world by my fingernails. That place was like a smelting furnace, it was a hell of flames and smoke, but people came running out in a regular torrent. There were so many that Trev didn't even dare back the truck up again for fear he would run over some of them. So he got out and ran back to me, leaving it where it was.
"We stood there, watching it end. It hadn't been five minutes all told, but xxxit felt like forever. The last dozen or so that made it out were on fire. People grabbed em and started to roll em around on the ground, trying to put em out. Looking in, we could see other people trying to come, and we knew they wasn't never going to make it.
Trev grabbed my hand and I grabbed him back twice as hard. We stood there holding hands just like you and me are doing now, Mikey, him with his nose broke and blood running down his face and his eyes puffing shut, and we watched them people. They were the real ghosts we saw that night, nothing but shimmers shaped like men and women in that fire, walking toward the opening Trev had bashed with Sergeant Wilson's truck. Some of em had their arms held out, like they expected someone to save them. The others just walked, but they didn't seem to get nowhere. Their clo'es were blazin. Their faces were runnin. And one after another they just toppled over and you didn't see them no more.
"The last one was a woman. Her dress had burned off her and there she was in her slip. She was burnin like a candle. She seemed to look right at me at the end, and I seen her eyelids was on fire.
"When she fell down it was over. The whole place went up in a pillar of fire. By the time the base firetrucks and two more from the Main Street fire station got there, it was already burning itself out. That was the fire at the Black Spot, Mikey."
He drank the last of his water and handed me the glass to fill at the drinking fountain in the hall. "Goan piss the bed tonight I guess, Mikey."
I kissed his cheek and then went out into the hall to fill his glass. When I returned, he was drifting away again, his eyes glassy and contemplative. When I put the glass on the nighttable, he mumbled a thank-you I could barely understand. I looked at the Westclox on his table and saw it was almost eight. Time for me to go home.
I leaned over to kiss him goodbye... and instead heard myself whisper, "What did you see?"
His eyes, which were now slipping shut, barely turned toward the sound of my voice. He might have known it was me, or he might have believed he was hearing the voice of his own thoughts. "Hunk?"
"The thing you saw," I whispered. I didn't want to hear, but I had to hear. I was both hot and cold, my eyes burning, my hands freezing. But I had to hear. As I suppose Lot's wife had to turn back and look at the destruction of Sodom.
"Twas a bird," he said. "Right over the last of those runnin men. A hawk, maybe. What they call a kestrel. But it was big. Never told no one. Would have been locked up. That bird was maybe sixty feet from wingtip to wingtip. It was the size of a Japanese Zero. But I seen... seen its eyes... and I think... it seen me..."
His head slipped over to the side, toward the window, where the dark was coming.
"It swooped down and grabbed that last man up. Got him right by the sheet, it did xxxand I heard that bird's wings... The sound was like fire... and it hovered... and I thought, Birds can't hover... but this one could, because. because..."
He fell silent.
"Why, Daddy?" I whispered. "Why could it hover?"
"It didn't hover," he said.
I sat there in silence, thinking he had gone to sleep for sure this time. I had never been so afraid in my life... because four years before, I had seen that bird. Somehow, in some unimaginable way, I had nearly forgotten that nightmare. It was my father who brought it back.
"It didn't hover," he said. "It floated. It floated. There were big bunches of balloons tied to each wing, and it floated."
My father went to sleep.
March 1st, 1985
It's come again. I know that now. I'll wait, but in my heart I know it. I'm not sure I can stand it. As a kid I was able to deal with it, but it's different with kids. In some fundamental way it's different.
I wrote all of that last night in a kind of frenzy-not that I could have gone home anyway. Derry has been blanketed in a thick glaze of ice, and although the sun is out this morning, nothing is moving.
I wrote until long after three this morning, pushing the pen faster and faster, trying to get it all out. I had forgotten about seeing the giant bird when I was eleven. It was my father's story that brought it back... and I never forgot it again. Not any of it. In a way, I suppose it was his final gift to me. A terrible gift, you would say, but wonderful in its way.
I slept right where I was, my head in my arms, my notebook and pen on the table in front of me. I woke up this morning with a numb ass and an aching back, but feeling free, somehow... purged of that old story.
And then I saw that I had had company in the night, as I slept.
The tracks, drying to faint muddy impressions, led from the front door of the library (which I locked; I always lock it) to the desk where I slept.
There were no tracks leading away.
Whatever it was, it came to me in the night, left its talisman... and then simply disappeared.
Tied to my reading lamp was a single balloon. Filled with helium, it floated in a morning sunray which slanted in through one of the high windows.
On it was a picture of my face, the eyes gone, blood running down from the ragged sockets, a scream distorting the mouth on the balloon's thin and bulging rubber skin.
I looked at it and I screamed. The scream echoed through the library, echoing back, vibrating from the circular iron staircase leading to the stacks.
The balloon burst with a bang.
Part 3 GROWNUPS
"The descent made up of despairs and without accomplishment realizes a new awakening: which is a reversal of despair. For what we cannot accomplish, what is denied to love, what we have lost in the anticipation-a descent follows, endless and indestructible."
-William Carlos Williams, Paterson
"Don't it make you wanta go home, now?
Don't it make you wanta go home?
All God's children get weary when they roam,
Don't it make you wanta go home?"
-Joe South
Chapter 10 THE REUNION
1
BILL DENBROUGH GETS A CAB
The telephone was ringing, bringing him up and out of a sleep too deep for dreams. He groped for it without opening his eyes, without coming more than halfway awake. If it had stopped ringing just then he would have slipped back down into sleep without a hitch; he would have done it as simply and easily as he had once slipped down the snow-covered hills in McCarron Park on his Flexible Flyer. You ran with the sled, threw yourself onto it, and down you went-seemingly at the speed of sound. You couldn't do that as a grownup; it racked the hell out of your balls.
His fingers walked over the telephone's dial, slipped off, climbed it again. He had a dim premonition that it would be Mike Hanlon, Mike Hanlon calling from Derry, telling him he had to come back, telling him he had to remember, telling him they had made a promise, Stan Uris had cut their palms with a sliver of Coke bottle and they had made a promise-
Except all of that had already happened.
He had gotten in late yesterday afternoon-just before 6 P.M... actually. He supposed that, if he had been the last call on Mike's list, all of them must have gotten in at varying times; some might even have spent most of the day here. He himself had seen none of them, felt no urge to see any of them. He had simply checked in, gone up to his room, ordered a meal from room service which he found he could not eat once it was laid out before him, and then had tumbled into bed and slept dreamlessly until now.
Bill cracked one eye open and fumbled for the telephone's handset. It fell off onto the table and he groped for it, opening his other eye. He felt totally blank inside his head, totally unplugged, running on batteries.
He finally managed to scoop up the phone. He got up on one elbow and put it against his ear. "Hello?"
"Bill?" It was Mike Hanlon's voice-he'd had at least that much right. Last week he didn't remember Mike at all, and now a single word was enough to identify him. It was rather marvellous... but in an ominous way.
"Yeah, Mike."
"Woke you up, huh?"
"Yeah, you did. That's okay." On the wall above the TV was an abysmal painting of lobstermen in yellow slickers and rainhats pulling lobster traps. Looking at it, Bill remembered where he was: the Derry Town House on Upper Main Street. Half a mile farther up and across the street was Bassey Park... the Kissing Bridge... the Canal. "What time is it, Mike?"
"Quarter of ten."
"What day?"
"The 30th." Mike sounded a little amused.
"Yeah. "Kay."
"I've arranged a little reunion," Mike said. He sounded diffident now.
"Yeah?" Bill swung his legs out of bed. They all came?"
"All but Stan Uris," Mike said. Now there was something in his voice that Bill couldn't read. "Bev was the last one. She got in late last evening."
"Why do you say the last one, Mike? Stan might show up today."
"Bill, Stan's dead."
"What? How? Did his plane-"
"Nothing like that," Mike said. "Look, if it's all the same to you, I think it ought to wait until we get together. It would be better if I could tell all of you at the same time."
"It has to do with this?"
"Yes, I think so." Mike paused briefly. "I'm sure it does."
Bill felt the familiar weight of dread settle around his heart again-was it something you could get used to so quickly, then? Or had it been something he had carried all along, simply unfelt and unthought-of, like the inevitable fact of his own death?
He reached for his cigarettes, lit one, and blew out the match with the first
drag.
"None of them got together, yesterday?"
"No-I don't believe so.'
"And you haven't seen any of us yet?"