“A shame you’ll have such a short time to wear it before the weather turns cold,” he said.

I put the hat on and adjusted it in the mirror beside the counter. “Maybe we’ll get a good stretch of Indian summer.”

Gently and rather apologetically, he tilted the hat the other way. It was a matter of two inches or less, but I stopped looking like a clodhopper on a visit to the big city and started to look like . . .

well . . . central Maine’s most debonair time-traveler. I thanked him.

“Not at all, Mr.—?”

“Amberson,” I said, and held out my hand. His grip was short, limp, and powdery with some sort of talcum. I restrained an urge to rub my hand on my sport coat after he released it.

“In Derry on business?”

“Yes. Are you from here yourself?”

“Lifelong resident,” he said, and sighed as if this were a burden. Based on my own first impressions, I guessed it might be. “What’s your game, Mr. Amberson, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Real estate. But while I’m here, I thought I’d look up an old Army buddy. His name is Dunning. I don’t recall his first name, we just used to call him Skip.” The Skip part was a fabrication, but it was true that I didn’t know the first name of Harry Dunning’s father. Harry had named his brothers and sister in his theme, but the man with the hammer had always been “my father” or “my dad.”

“I’m afraid I couldn’t help you there, sir.” Now he sounded distant. Business was done, and although the store was empty of other customers, he wanted me gone.

“Well, maybe you can with something else. What’s the best hotel in town?”

“That would be the Derry Town House. Just turn back to Kenduskeag Avenue, take your right, and go up Up-Mile Hill to Main Street. Look for the carriage lamps out front.”

“Up-Mile Hill?”

“That’s what we call it, yes sir. If there’s nothing else, I have several alterations to make out back.”

When I left, the light had begun to drain from the sky. One thing I remember vividly about the time I spent in Derry during September and October of 1958 was how evening always seemed to come early.

One storefront down from Derry Dress & Everyday was Machen’s Sporting Goods, where THE FALL GUN SALE was under way. Inside, I saw two men sighting hunting rifles while an elderly clerk with a string tie (and a stringy neck to go with it) looked on approvingly. The other side of Canal appeared to be lined with workingmen’s bars, the kind where you could get a beer and a shot for fifty cents and all the music on the Rock-Ola would be C & W. There was the Happy Nook, the Wishing Well (which the habitués called the Bucket of Blood, I later learned), Two Brothers, the Golden Spoke, and the Sleepy Silver Dollar.

Standing outside the latter, a quartet of bluecollar gents was taking the afternoon air and staring at my convertible. They were equipped with mugs of beer and cigarettes. Their faces were shaded beneath flat caps of tweed and cotton. Their feet were clad in the big no-color workboots my 2011 students called shitkickers. Three of the four were wearing suspenders. They watched me with no expression on their faces. I thought for a moment of the mongrel that had chased my car, snapping and drooling, then crossed the street.

“Gents,” I said. “What’s on tap in there?”

For a moment none of them answered. Just when I thought none of them would, the one sans suspenders said, “Bud and Mick, what else? You from away?”

“Wisconsin,” I said.

“Bully for you,” one of them muttered.

“Late in the year for tourists,” another said.

“I’m in town on business, but I thought I might look up an old service buddy while I’m here.” No response to this, unless one of the men dropping his cigarette butt onto the sidewalk and then putting it out with a snot-loogie the size of a small mussel could be termed an answer.

Nevertheless, I pushed on. “Skip Dunning’s his name. Do any of you fellows know a Dunning?”

“Should hope to smile n kiss a pig,” No Suspenders said.

“I beg pardon?”

He rolled his eyes and turned down the corners of his mouth, the out-of-patience expression a man gives to a stupid person with no hope of ever being smart. “Derry’s full of Dunnings. Check the damn phone book.” He started inside. His posse followed. No Suspenders opened the door for them, then turned back to me. “What’s that Ford got in it?” Gut for got. “V-8?”

“Y-block.” Hoping I sounded as if I knew what it meant.

“Pretty good goer?”

“Not bad.”

“Then maybe you should climb in and go ’er right on up the hill. They got some nice joints there. These bars are for millies.” No Suspenders assessed me in a cold way I came to expect in Derry, but never got used to. “You’d get stared at. P’raps more, when the ’leven-to-seven lets out from Striar’s and Boutillier’s.”

“Thanks. That’s very kind of you.”

The cold assessment continued. “You don’t know much, do you?” he remarked, then went inside.

I walked back to my convertible. On that gray street, with the smell of industrial smokes in the air and the afternoon bleeding away to evening, downtown Derry looked only marginally more charming than a dead hooker in a church pew. I got in, engaged the clutch, started the engine, and felt a strong urge to just drive away. Drive back to Lisbon Falls, climb up through the rabbit-hole, and tell Al Templeton to find another boy. Only he couldn’t, could he? He was out of strength and almost out of time. I was, as the New England saying goes, the trapper’s last shot.

I drove up to Main Street, saw the carriage lamps (they came on for the night just as I spotted them), and pulled into the turnaround in front of the Derry Town House. Five minutes later, I was checked in. My time in Derry had begun.

3

By the time I got my new possessions unpacked (some of the remaining cash went into my wallet, the rest into the lining of my new valise) I was good and hungry, but before going down to dinner, I checked the telephone book. What I saw caused my heart to sink. Mr. No Suspenders might not have been very welcoming, but he was right about Dunnings selling cheap in Derry and the four or five surrounding hamlets that were also included in the directory. There was almost a full page of them. It wasn’t that surprising, because in small towns certain names seem to sprout like dandelions on a lawn in June. In my last five years teaching English at LHS, I must have had two dozen Starbirds and Lemkes, some of them siblings, most of them first, second, or third cousins. They intermarried and made more.

Before leaving for the past I should have taken time to call Harry Dunning and ask him his father’s first name—it would have been so simple. I surely would have, if I hadn’t been so utterly and completely gobsmacked by what Al had shown me, and what he was asking me to do. But, I thought, how hard can it be? It shouldn’t take Sherlock Holmes to find a family with kids named Troy, Arthur (alias Tugga), Ellen, and Harry.