Right. A newcomer hanging around the schools in a town where the first thing you saw at City Hall was a poster warning parents about stranger-danger. If there was such a thing as flying directly into the radar, that would be it.
One thing was for sure—I had to get out of the Derry Town House. At 1958 prices I could well afford to stay there for weeks, but that might cause talk. I decided to look through the classified ads and find myself a room I could rent by the month. I turned back toward the Low Town, then stopped.
Bah-dah-dah… bah-dah-da-dee-dum…
That was Glenn Miller. It was “In the Mood,” a tune I had reason to know well. Curious, I walked toward the sound of the music.
7
There was a little picnic area at the end of the rickety fence between the Kansas Street sidewalk and the drop into the Barrens. It contained a stone barbecue and two picnic tables with a rusty trash barrel standing between them. A portable phonograph was parked on one of the picnic tables. A big black 78-rpm record spun on the turntable.
On the grass, a gangly boy in tape-mended glasses and an absolutely gorgeous redheaded girl were dancing. At LHS we called the incoming freshmen “tweenagers,” and that’s what these kids were, if that. But they were dancing with grown-up grace. Not jitterbugging, either; they were swing-dancing. I was charmed, but I was also… what? Scared? A little bit, maybe. I was scared for almost all the time I spent in Derry. But it was something else, too, something bigger. A kind of awe, as if I had gripped the rim of some vast understanding. Or peered (through a glass darkly, you understand) into the actual clockwork of the universe.
Because, you see, I had met Christy at a swing-dancing class in Lewiston, and this was one of the tunes we had learned to. Later—in our best year, six months before the marriage and six months after—we had danced in competitions, once taking fourth prize (also known as “first also-ran,” according to Christy) in the New England Swing-Dancing Competition. Our tune was a slightly slowed-down dance-mix version of KC and the Sunshine Band’s “Boogie Shoes.”
This isn’t a coincidence, I thought, watching them. The boy was wearing blue jeans and a crew-neck shirt; she had on a white blouse with the tails hanging down over faded red clamdiggers. That amazing hair was pulled back in the same impudently cute ponytail Christy had always worn when we danced competitively. Along with her bobby sox and vintage poodle skirt, of course.
This cannot be a coincidence.
They were doing a Lindy variation I knew as the Hellzapoppin. It’s supposed to be a fast dance—lightning-fast, if you have the physical stamina and grace to bring it off—but they were dancing it slow because they were still learning their steps. I could see inside every move. I knew them all, although I hadn’t actually danced any of them in five years or more. Come together, both hands clasped. He stoops a little and kicks with his left foot while she does the same, both of them twisting at the waist so that they appear to be going in opposite directions. Move apart, hands still clasped, then she twirls, first to the left and then to the right—
But they goofed up the return spin and she went sprawling on the grass. “Jesus, Richie, you never get that right! Gah, you’re hopeless!” She was laughing, though. She flopped on her back and stared up at the sky.
“I’se sorry, Miss Scawlett!” the boy cried in a screechy pickaninny voice that would have gone over like a lead balloon in the politically correct twenty-first century. “I’se just a clodhoppin country boy, but I intends to learn dis-yere dance if it kills me!”
“I’m the one it’s likely to kill,” she said. “Start the record again before I lose my—” Then they both saw me.
It was a strange moment. There was a veil in Derry—I came to know that veil so well I could almost see it. The locals were on one side; people from away (like Fred Toomey, like me) were on the other. Sometimes the locals came out from behind it, as Mrs. Starrett the librarian had when expressing her irritation about the misplaced census records, but if you asked too many questions—and certainly if you startled them—they retreated behind it again.
Yet I had startled these kids, and they didn’t retreat behind the veil. Instead of closing up, their faces remained wide open, full of curiosity and interest.
“Sorry, sorry,” I said. “Didn’t mean to surprise you. I heard the music and then I saw you lindy-hopping.”
“Trying to lindy-hop, is what you mean,” the boy said. He helped the girl to her feet. He made a bow. “Richie Tozier, at your service. My friends all say ‘Richie-Richie, he live in a ditchie,’ but what do they know?”
“Nice to meet you,” I said. “George Amberson.” And then—it just popped out—“My friends all say ‘Georgie-Georgie, he wash his clothes in a Norgie,’ but they don’t know anything, either.”
The girl collapsed on one of the picnic table benches, giggling. The boy raised his hands in the air and bugled: “Strange grown-up gets off a good one! Wacka-wacka-wacka! Dee-lightful! Ed McMahon, what have we got for this wonderful fella? Well, Johnny, today’s prizes on Who Do You Trust are a complete set of Encyclopaedia Britannica and an Electrolux vacuum cleaner to suck em up wi—”
“Beep-beep, Richie,” the girl said. She was wiping the corners of her eyes.
This caused an unfortunate reversion to the screeching pickaninny voice. “I’se sorry, Miss Scawlett, don’t be whuppin on me! I’se still got scabs from de las’ time!”
“Who are you, Miss?” I asked.
“Bevvie-Bevvie, I live on the levee,” she said, and started giggling again. “Sorry—Richie’s a fool, but I have no excuse. Beverly Marsh. You’re not from around here, are you?”
A thing everybody seemed to know immediately. “Nope, and you two don’t seem like you are, either. You’re the first two Derry-ites I’ve met who don’t seem… grumpy.”
“Yowza, it’s a grumpy-ass town,” Richie said, and took the tone arm off the record. It had been bumping on the final groove over and over.
“I understand folks’re particularly worried about the children,” I said. “Notice I’m keeping my distance. You guys on grass, me on sidewalk.”
“They weren’t all that worried when the murders were going on,” Richie grumbled. “You know about the murders?”
I nodded. “I’m staying at the Town House. Someone who works there told me.”
“Yeah, now that they’re over, people are all concerned about the kids.” He sat down next to Bevvie who lived on the levee. “But when they were going on, you didn’t hear jack spit.”
“Richie,” she said. “Beep-beep.”
This time the boy tried on a really atrocious Humphrey Bogart imitation. “Well it’s true, schweetheart. And you know it’s true.”
“All that’s over,” Bevvie told me. She was as earnest as a Chamber of Commerce booster. “They just don’t know it yet.”
“They meaning the townspeople or just grown-ups in general?”
She shrugged as if to say what’s the difference.
“But you do know.”
“As a matter of fact, we do,” Richie said. He looked at me challengingly, but behind his mended glasses, that glint of maniacal humor was still in his eyes. I had an idea it never completely left them.