I said, “You guys were doing it slow before, and this will slow you down even more, but you can still keep the beat. Plenty of time for each step.”
Time. Plenty of time. Start the record again but slow it down.
I pulled her toward me by our clasped hands. Let her go back. We both bent like people under water, and kicked to the left while the Glenn Miller Orchestra played bahhhhh… dahhh… dahhhh… bahhhh… dahhhh… daaaa… deee… dummmmmm. At that same slow speed, like a windup toy that’s almost unwound, she twirled to the left under my upraised hands.
“Stop!” I said, and she froze with her back to me and our hands still linked. “Now squeeze my right hand to remind me what comes next.”
She squeezed, then rotated smoothly back and all the way around to the right.
“Cool!” she said. “Now I’m supposed to go under, then you bring me back. And I flip over. That’s why we’re doing it on the grass, so if I mess it up I don’t break my neck.”
“I’ll leave that part up to you,” I said. “I’m too ancient to be flipping anything but hamburgers.”
Richie once more raised his hands to the sides of his face. “Wacka-wacka-wacka! Strange grown-up gets off another—”
“Beep-beep, Richie,” I said. That made him laugh. “Now you try it. And work out hand signals for any other moves that go beyond the jitterbug two-step they do in the local soda shop. That way even if you don’t win the talent show contest, you’ll look good.”
Richie took Beverly’s hands and tried it. In and out, side to side, around to the left, around to the right. Perfect. She slipped feet-first between Richie’s spread legs, supple as a fish, and then he brought her back. She finished with a showy flip that brought her to her feet again. Richie took her hands and they repeated the whole thing. It was even better the second time.
“We lose the beat on the under-and-out,” Richie complained.
“You won’t when the record’s playing at normal speed. Trust me.”
“I like it,” Beverly said. “It’s like having the whole thing under glass.” She did a little spin on the toes of her sneakers. “I feel like Loretta Young at the start of her show, when she comes in wearing a swirly dress.”
“They call me Arthur Murray, I’m from Miz-OOO-ri,” Richie said. He also looked pleased.
“I’m going to speed the record up,” I said. “Remember your signals. And keep time. It’s all about time.”
Glenn Miller played that old sweet song, and the kids danced. On the grass, their shadows danced beside them. Out… in… dip… kick… spin left… spin right… go under… pop out… and flip. They weren’t perfect this time, and they’d screw up the steps many times before they nailed them (if they ever did), but they weren’t bad.
Oh, to hell with that. They were beautiful. For the first time since I’d topped that rise on Route 7 and saw Derry hulking on the west bank of the Kenduskeag, I was happy. That was a good feeling to go on, so I walked away from them, giving myself the old advice as I went: don’t look back, never look back. How often do people tell themselves that after an experience that is exceptionally good (or exceptionally bad)? Often, I suppose. And the advice usually goes unheeded. Humans were built to look back; that’s why we have that swivel joint in our necks.
I went half a block, then turned around, thinking they would be staring at me. But they weren’t. They were still dancing. And that was good.
8
There was a Cities Service station a couple of blocks down on Kansas Street, and I went into the office to ask directions to Kossuth Street, pronounced Cossut. I could hear the whir of an air compressor and the tinny jangle of pop music from the garage bay, but the office was empty. That was fine with me, because I saw something useful next to the cash register: a wire stand filled with maps. The top pocket held a single city map that looked dirty and forgotten. On the front was a photo of an exceptionally ugly Paul Bunyan statue cast in plastic. Paul had his axe over his shoulder and was grinning up into the summer sun. Only Derry, I thought, would take a plastic statue of a mythical logger as its icon.
There was a newspaper dispenser just beyond the gas pumps. I took a copy of the Daily News as a prop, and flipped a nickel on top of the pile of papers to join the other coins scattered there. I don’t know if they’re more honest in 1958, but they’re a hell of a lot more trusting.
According to the map, Kossuth Street was on the Kansas Street side of town, and turned out to be just a pleasant fifteen-minute stroll from the gas station. I walked under elm trees that had yet to be touched by the blight that would take almost all of them by the seventies, trees that were still as green as they had been in July. Kids tore past me on bikes or played jacks in driveways. Little clusters of adults gathered at corner bus stops, marked by white stripes on telephone poles. Derry went about its business and I went about mine—just a fellow in a nondescript sport coat with his summer straw pushed back a little on his head, a fellow with a folded newspaper in one hand. He might be looking for a yard or garage sale; he might be checking for plummy real estate. Certainly he looked like he belonged here.
So I hoped.
Kossuth was a hedge-lined street of old-fashioned New England saltbox houses. Sprinklers twirled on lawns. Two boys ran past me, tossing a football back and forth. A woman with her hair bound up in a kerchief (and the inevitable cigarette dangling from her lower lip) was washing the family car and occasionally spraying the family dog, who backed away, barking. Kossuth Street looked like an exterior scene from some old fuzzy sitcom.
Two little girls were twirling a skip-rope while a third danced nimbly in and out, stutter-stepping effortlessly as she chanted: “Charlie Chaplin went to France! Just to watch the ladies dance! Salute to the Cap’un! Salute to the Queen! My old man drives a sub-ma-rine!” The skip-rope slap-slap-slapped on the pavement. I felt eyes on me. The woman in the kerchief had paused in her labors, the hose in one hand, a big soapy sponge in the other. She was watching me approach the skipping girls. I gave them a wide berth, and saw her go back to work.
You took a hell of a chance talking to those kids on Kansas Street, I thought. Only I didn’t believe it. Walking a little too close to the skip-rope girls… that would have been taking a hell of a chance. But Richie and Bev had been the right ones. I had known it almost as soon as I laid eyes on them, and they had known it, too. We had seen eye to eye.
Do we know you? the girl had asked. Bevvie-Bevvie, who lived on the levee.
Kossuth dead-ended at a big building called the West Side Recreation Hall. It was deserted, with a FOR SALE BY CITY sign on the crabgrassy lawn. Surely an object of interest for any self-respecting real estate hunter. Two houses down from it on the right, a little girl with carrot-colored hair and a faceful of freckles was riding a bicycle with training wheels up and down an asphalt driveway. She sang variations of the same phrase over and over as she rode: “Bing-bang, I saw the whole gang, ding-dang, I saw the whole gang, ring-rang, I saw the whole gang… ”
I walked toward the Rec, as though there was nothing in the world I wanted to see more, but from the corner of my eye I continued to track Li’l Carrot-Top. She was swaying from side to side on the bicycle seat, trying to find out how much she could get away with before toppling over. Based on her scabby shins, this probably wasn’t the first time she’d played the game. There was no name on the mailbox of her house, just the number 379.