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