A city bus came along and stopped across from the Center Street Market. Dunning got on. It came the rest of the way down the hill and pulled up at the movie-theater stop. I let the working joes go ahead of me, so I could watch how much money they put in the pole-mounted coin receptacle next to the driver’s seat. I felt like an alien in a science fiction movie, one who’s trying to masquerade as an earthling. It was stupid-I wanted to ride the city bus, not blow up the White House with a death-ray-but that didn’t change the feeling.
One of the guys who got on ahead of me flashed a canary-colored bus pass that made me think fleetingly of the Yellow Card Man. The others put fifteen cents into the coin receptacle, which clicked and dinged. I did the same, although it took me a bit longer because my dime was stuck to my sweaty palm. I thought I could feel every eye on me, but when I looked up, everyone was either reading the newspaper or staring vacantly out the windows. The interior of the bus was a fug of blue-gray smoke.
Frank Dunning was halfway down on the right, now wearing tailored gray slacks, a white shirt, and a dark blue tie. Natty. He was busy lighting a cigarette and didn’t look at me as I passed him and took a seat near the back. The bus groaned its way around the circuit of Low Town one-way streets, then mounted Up-Mile Hill on Witcham. Once we were in the west side residential area, riders began to get off. They were all men; presumably the women were back at home putting away their groceries or getting supper on the table. As the bus emptied and Frank Dunning went on sitting where he was, smoking his cigarette, I wondered if we were going to end up being the last two riders.
I needn’t have worried. When the bus angled toward the stop at the corner of Witcham Street and Charity Avenue (Derry also had Faith and Hope Avenues, I later learned), Dunning dropped his cigarette on the floor, crushed it with his shoe, and rose from his seat. He walked easily up the aisle, not using the grab-handles but swaying with the movements of the slowing bus. Some men don’t lose the physical graces of their adolescence until relatively late in life. Dunning appeared to be one of them. He would have made an excellent swing-dancer.
He clapped the bus driver on the shoulder and started telling him a joke. It was short, and most of it was lost in the chuff of the airbrakes, but I caught the phrase three jigs stuck in an elevator and decided it wasn’t one he’d have told to his Housedress Harem. The driver exploded with laughter, then yanked the long chrome lever that opened the front doors. “See you Monday, Frank,” he said.
“If the creek don’t rise,” Dunning responded, then ran down the two steps and jumped across the grass verge to the sidewalk. I could see muscles ripple under his shirt. What chance would a woman and four children have against him? Not much was my first thought on the subject, but that was wrong. The correct answer was none.
As the bus drew away, I saw Dunning mount the steps of the first building down from the corner on Charity Avenue. There were eight or nine men and women sitting in rockers on the wide front porch. Several of them greeted the butcher, who started shaking hands like a visiting politician. The house was a three-story New
England Victorian, with a sign hanging from the porch eave. I just had time to read it: EDNA PRICE ROOMS BY THE WEEK OR THE MONTH EFFICIENCY KITCHENS AVAILABLE NO PETS!
Below this, hanging from the big sign on hooks, was a smaller orange sign reading NO VACANCY.
Two stops further down the line, I exited the bus. I thanked the driver, who uttered a surly grunt in return. This, I was discovering, was what passed for courteous discourse in Derry, Maine. Unless, of course, you happened to know a few jokes about jigs stuck in an elevator or maybe the Polish navy.
I walked slowly back toward town, jogging two blocks out of my way to keep clear of Edna Price’s establishment, where those in residence gathered on the porch after supper just like folks in one of those Ray Bradbury stories about bucolic Greentown, Illinois. And did not Frank Dunning resemble one of those good folks? He did, he did. But there had been hidden horrors in Bradbury’s Greentown, too.
The nice man doesn’t live at home anymore, Richie-from-the-ditchie had said, and he’d had the straight dope on that one. The nice man lived in a rooming house where everybody seemed to think he was the cat’s ass.
