Part II

THE SECRET CITY

CHAPTER 11

The Derry of the Old Crocks was not the only secret city existing quietly within the place Ralph Roberts had always thought of as home; as a boy growing up in Mary Mead, where the various Old Cape housing developments stood today, Ralph had discovered there was, in addition to the Derry that belonged to the grownups, one that belonged strictly to the children. There were the abandoned hobo jungles near the railroad depot on Neibolt Street, where one could sometimes find tomato soup cans half-full of mulligatawny stew and bottles with a swallow or two of beer left in them; there was the alley behind the Aladdin Theater, where Bull Durham cigarettes were smoked and Black Cat firecrackers sometimes set off; there was the big old elm which overhung the river, where scores of boys and girls had learned to dive; there were the hundred (or perhaps it was closer to two hundred) tangled trails winding through the Barrens, an overgrown valley which slashed through the center of town like a badly healed scar.

These secret streets and highways in hiding were all below the adults’ plane of vision and were consequently overlooked by them… although there had been exceptions. One of them had been a cop named Aloysius Nell-Mr. Nell to generations of Derry children walked up toward the picnic area near and it was only now, as he the place where Harris Avenue became the Harris Avenue Extension, that it occurred to Ralph that Chris Nell was probably old Mr. Nell’s son… except that couldn’t be quite right, because the cop Ralph had first seen in the company of John Leydecker wasn’t old enough to be old Mr. Nell’s son. Grandson, more like it.

Ralph had become aware of a second secret city-one that belonged to the old folks-around the time he retired, but he hadn’t fully realized that he himself was a citizen of it until after Carol’s death.

What he had discovered then was a submerged geography eerily similar to the one he had known as a child, a place largely ignored by the hurry-to-work, hurry-to-play world which thumped and hustled all around it. The Derry of the Old Crocks overlapped yet a third secret city: the Derry of the Damned, a terrible place inhabited mostly by winos, runaways, and lunatics who could not be keptlocked up.

It was in the picnic area that Lafayette Chapin ha Ralph to one of life’s most important considerations… once you’d become a bona ride Old Crock, that was. This consideration had to do with one’s “real life.” The subject had come up while the two men were just getting to know one another. Ralph had asked Faye what he had done before he started coming out to the picnic area.

“Well, in my real life I was a carpenter n fancy cabinetmaker,” Chapin had replied, exposing his remaining teeth in a wide grin, “but all that ended almost ten year ago.” As if, Ralph remembered thinking, retirement was something like a vampire’s kiss, pulling those ’ who survived it into the world of the undead. And when you got right down to cases, was that really so far off the mark?

Now, with McGovern safely behind him (at least he hoped so), Ralph stepped through the screen of mixed oak and maple which shielded the picnic area from the Extension. He saw that eight or nine people had drifted in since his earlier walk, most with bag lunches or Coffee Pot sandwiches. The Eberlys and Zells were play I ing hearts with the greasy deck of Top Hole cards which was kept stashed in a knothole of a nearby oak; Faye and Doc Mulhare, a retired vet, were playing chess; a couple of kibbitzers wandered back and forth between the two games.

Games were what the picnic area was about-what most of the places in the

Derry of the Old Crocks were about-but Ralph thought the games were really just framework. What people actually came here for was to touch base, to report in, to confirm (if only to themselves) that they were still living some kind of life, real or otherwise.

Ralph sat on an empty bench near the Cyclone fence and traced one finger absently over the engraved carvings-names, initials, lots Of FUCK You’s-as he watched planes land at orderly two-minute intervals: a Cessna, a Piper, an Apache, a Twin Bonanza, the elevenforty-five Air Express out of Boston. He kept one ear cocked to the ebb and flow of conversation behind him. May Locher’s name was mentioned more than once. She had been known by several of these people, and the general opinion seemed to be Mrs. Perrine’s-that God had finally shown mercy and ended her suffering. Most of the talk today, however, concerned the impending visit of Susan Day.

As a rule, Politics wasn’t much of a conversational draw with the Old Crocks, who preferred a good bowel-cancer or stroke any day, but even out here the abortion issue exercised its singular ability to engage, inflame, and divide.

“She picked a bad town to come to, and the hell of it is, I doubt she knows it,” Doc Mulhare said, watching the chessboard with glum concentration as Faye Chapin blitzkrieged his king’s remaining defenders. “Things have a way of happening here. Remember the fire at the Black Spot, Faye?”

Faye grunted and captured the Doc’s remaining bishop.

“What I don’t understand is these cootie-bugs,” Lisa Zell said, picking up the front section of the News from the picnic table and slapping the photograph of the hooded figures marching in front of WomanCare. “It’s like they want to go back to the days when women gave themselves abortions with coathangers.”

“That’s what they do want,” Georgina Eberly said. “They figure if a woman’s scared enough of dying, she’ll have the baby. It never seems to cross their minds that a woman can be more scared of having a kid than using a coathanger to get rid of it.”

“What does being afraid have to do with it?” one of the kibbitzers-a shovel-faced oldster named Pedersen-asked truculently.

“Murder is murder whether the baby’s inside or outside, that’s the way I look at it. Even when they’re so small you need a microscope to see em, it’s still murder. Because they’d be kids if you let em alone.

“

“I guess that just about makes you Adolf Eichmann every time you jerk off,” Faye said, and moved his queen. “Check.”

“La-fayette Cha-pin!” Lisa Zell cried.

“Playin with yourself ain’t the same at all, Pedersen said, glowering.

“Oh no? Wasn’t there some guy in the Bible got cursed by God for hammerin the old haddock?” the other kibbitzer asked.

“You’re probably thinking of Onan,” said a voice from behind Ralph. He turned, startled, and saw Old Dor standing there. In one hand he held a paperback with a large number 5 on the cover. Where the hell did you come from? Ralph wondered. He could almost have sworn there had been no one standing behind him a minute or so before.

“Onan, Shmonan,” Pedersen said. “Those sperms aren’t the same as a baby-”

“No?” Faye asked. “Then why ain’t the Catholic Church sellin rubbers at Bingo games? Tell me that.”

“That’s just ignorant,” Pedersen said. “And if you don’t see-”

“But it wasn’t masturbation Onan was punished for,” Dorrance said in his high, penetrating old man’s voice. “He was punished for refusing to impregnate his brother’s widow, so his brother’s line could continue. There’s a poem, by Allen Ginsberg, I think-”

“Shut up, you old fool!” Pedersen yelled, and then glowered at Faye Chapin. “And if you don’t see that there’s a big difference between a man beating his meat and a woman flushing the baby God put in her belly down the toilet, you’re as big a fool as he is.”

“This is a disgusting conversation,” Lisa Zell said, sounding more fascinated than disgusted. Ralph looked over her shoulder and saw a section of chainlink fencing had been torn loose from its post and bent backward, probably by the kids who took this place over at night. That solved one mystery, anyway. He hadn’t noticed Dorrance because the old man hadn’t been in the picnic area at all; he’d been wandering around the airport grounds.