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His eyes sharpened and he smiled a little. "You ain't never forgot that, have you, Mikey?"
"No, sir," I said, and although I hadn't thought about it in three years or better, I added what he sometimes said: "It hasn't ever escaped my mind."
"Well, I'll tell you now," he said. "Fifteen is old enough, I guess, and your mother ain't here to stop me. Besides, you ought to know. I think something like it could only have happened in Derry, and you need to know that, too. So you can beware. The conditions for such things have always seemed right here. You're careful, aren't you, Mikey?
"Yes, sir," I said.
"Good," he said, and his head dropped back on his pillow. "That's good." I thought he was going to drift off again-his eyes had slipped closed-but instead he began to talk.
"When I was at the army base here in '29 and '30," he said, "there was an NCO Club up there on the hill, where Derry Community College is now. It was right behind the PX, where you used to be able to get a pack of Lucky Strike Greens for seven cents. The NCO Club was only a big old quonset hut, but they had fixed it up nice inside-carpet on the floor, booths along the walls, a jukebox-and you could get soft drinks on the weekend... if you were white, that was. They would have bands in most Saturday nights, and it was quite a place to go. It was just pop over the bar, it being Prohibition, but we heard you could get stronger stuff if you wanted it... and if you had a little green star on your army card. That was like a secret sign they had. Home-brew beer mostly, but on weekends you could sometimes get stronger stuff. If you were white.
"Us Company E boys weren't allowed any place near it, of course. So we went on the town if we had a pass in the evening. In those days Derry was still something of a logging town and there were eight or ten bars, most of em down in a part of town they called Hell's Half-Acre. They wasn't speakeasies; that was too grand a name for em. Wasn't anybody in em spoke very easy, anyhow. They was what folks called "blind pigs," and that was about right, because most of the customers acted like pigs when they were in there and they was about blind when they turned em out. The Sheriff knew and the cops knew, but those places roared all night long, same as they'd done since the logging days in the 1890s. I suppose palms got greased, but maybe not as many or with so much as you might think; in Derry people have a way of looking the odier way. Some served hard stuff as well as beer, and by all accounts I ever heard, the stuff you could get in town was ten times as good as the rotgut whiskey and bathtub gin you could get at the white boys" NCO on Friday and Saturday nights. The downtown hooch came over the border from Canada in pulp trucks, and most of them bottles had what the labels said. The good stuff was expensive, but there was plenty of furnace-oil too, and it might hang you over but it didn't kill you, and if you did go blind, it didn't last. On any given night you'd have to duck your head when the bottles came flying by. There was Nan's, the Paradise, Wally's Spa, the Silver Dollar, and one bar, the Powderhorn, where you could sometimes get a whore. Oh, you could pick up a woman at any pig, you didn't even have to work at it that hard-there was a lot of them wanted to find out if a slice off n the rye loaf was any different-but to kids like me and Trevor Dawson and Carl Roone, my friends in those days, the thought of buying a whore-a white whore-that was something you had to sit down and consider."
As I've told you, he was heavily doped that night. I don't believe he would have said any of that stuff-not to his fifteen-year-old son-if he had not been.
"Well, it wasn't very long before a representative of the Town Council showed up, wanting to see Major Fuller. He said he wanted to talk about "some problems between the townspeople and the enlisted men" and "concerns of the electorate" and "questions of propriety," but what he really wanted Fuller to know was as clear as a windowpane. They didn't want no army niggers in their pigs, botherin white women and drinkin illegal hooch-at a bar where only white men was supposed to be standin and drinkin illegal hooch.
"All of which was a laugh, all right. The flower of white womanhood they were so worried about was mostly a bunch of barbags, and as far as getting in the way of the men...! Well, all I can say is that I never saw a member of the Derry Town Council down in the Silver Dollar, or in the Powderhorn. The men who drank in those dives were pulp-cutters in those big red-and-black-checked lumberman's jackets, scars and scabs all over their hands, some of em missing eyes or fingers, all of em missing most of then- teeth, all of em smellin like woodchips and sawdust and sap. They wore green flannel pants and green gumrubber boots and tracked snow across the floor until it was black with it. They smelled big, Mikey, and they walked big, and they talked big. They were big. I was in Wally's Spa one night when I saw a fella split his shirt right down one arm while he was armrassling this other fella. It didn't just rip-you probably think that's what I mean, but it ain't. Arm of that man's shirt damn near exploded-sort of blew off his arm, in rags. And everybody cheered and applauded and somebody slapped me on the back and said, "That's what you call an armrassler's fart, blackface."
"What I'm telling you is that if the men who used those blind pigs on Friday and Saturday nights when they come out of the woods to drink whiskey and fuck women instead of knotholes greased up with lard, if those men hadn't wanted us there, they would have thrown us out on our asses. But the fact of it was, Mikey, they didn't seem to give much of a toot one way or the other.
"One of em took me aside one night-he was six foot, which was damn big for those days, and he was dead drunk, and he smelled as high as a basket of month-old peaches. If he'd stepped out of his clothes, I think they would have stood up alone. He looks at me and says, "Mister, I gonna ast you sumpin, me. Are you be a Negro?"
"That's right," I says.
"'Commen" ca va!" he says in the Saint John Valley French that sounds almost like Cajun talk, and grins so big I saw all four of his teeth. "I knew you was, me! Hey! I seen one in a book once! Had the same-" and he couldn't think how to say what was on his mind, so he reaches out and flaps at my mouth.
"Big lips," I says.
"Yeah, yeah!" he says, laughin like a kid. "Beeg leeps! Epais levres! Beeg leeps! Gonna buy you a beer, me!"
"Buy away," I says, not wanting to get on his bad side.
"He laughed at that too and clapped me on the back-almost knocking me on my face-and pushed his way up to the plankwood bar where there must have been seventy men and maybe fifteen women lined up. "I need two beers fore I tear this dump apart!" he yells at the bartender, who was a big lug with a broken nose named Romeo Dupree. "One for me and one pour I'homme avec les epais levres!" And they all laughed like hell at that, but not in a mean way, Mikey.
"So he gets the beers and gives me mine and he says, "What's your name? I don't want to call you Beeg Leeps, me. Don't sound good."
"William Hanlon," I says.
"Well, here's to you, Weelyum Anlon," he says.
"No, here's you," I says. "You're the first white man who ever bought me a drink." Which was true.
"So we drank those beers down and then we had two more and he says, "You sure you're a Negro? Except for them epais leeps, you look just like a white man with brown skin to me."
My father got to laughing at this, and so did I. He laughed so hard his stomach started to hurt him, and he held it, grimacing, his eyes turned up, his upper plate biting down on his lower lip.
"You want me to ring for the nurse, Daddy?" I asked, alarmed.
"No... no. I'm goan be okay. The worst thing of this, Mikey, is that you can't even laugh anymore when you feel like it. Which is damn seldom."
He fell silent for a few moments, and I realize now that that was the only time we came close to talking about what was killing him. Maybe it would have been better-better for both of us-if we had done more.
He took a sip of water and then went on.
"Anyway, it wasn't the few women who travelled the pigs, and it wasn't the lumberjacks that made up their main custom who wanted us out. It was those five old men on the Town Council who were really offended, them and the dozen or so men that stood behind them-Derry's old line, you know. None of them had ever stepped a foot inside of the Paradise or Wally's Spa, they did their boozing at the country club which then stood over on Derry Heights, but they wanted to make sure that none of those barbags or peavey-swingers got polluted by the blacks of Company E.
"So Major Fuller says, "I never wanted them here in the first place. I keep thinking it's an oversight and they'll get sent back down south or maybe to New Jersey."
"That's not my problem," this old fart tells him. Mueller, I think his name was-"
"Sally Mueller's father?" I asked, startled. Sally Mueller was in the same high-school class with me.
My father grinned a sour, crooked little grin. "No, this would have been her uncle. Sally Mueller's dad was off in college somewhere then. But if he'd been in Derry, he would have been there, I guess, standing with his brother. And in case you're wondering how true this part of the story is, all I can tell you is that the conversation was repeated to me by Trevor Dawson, who was swabbing the floors over there in officers" country that day and heard it all.
"Where the government sends the black boys is your problem, not mine," Mueller tells Major Fuller. "My problem is where you're letting them go on Friday and Saturday nights. If they go on whooping it up downtown, there's going to be trouble. We've got the Legion in this town, you know."
"Well, but I am in a bit of a tight here, Mr Mueller," he says. "I can't let them drink over at the NCO Club. Not only is it against the regulations for the Negroes to drink with the whites, they couldn't anyway. It's an NCO club, don't you see? Every one of those black boys is a bucky-tail private.
"That's not my problem either. I simply trust you will take care of the matter. Responsibility accompanies rank." And off he goes.
"Well, Fuller solved the problem. The Derry Army Base was a damn big patch of land in those days, although there wasn't a hell of a lot on it. Better than a hundred acres, all told. Going north, it ended right behind West Broadway, where a sort of greenbelt was planted. Where Memorial Park is now, that was where the Black Spot stood.
"It was just an old requisition shed in early 1930, when all of this happened, but Major Fuller mustered in Company E and told us it was going to be "our" club. Acted like he was Daddy Warbucks or something, and maybe he even felt that way, giving a bunch of black privates their own place, even if it was nothing but a shed. Then he added, like it was nothing, that the pigs downtown were off-limits to us.
"There was a lot of bitterness about it, but what could we do? We had no real power. It was this young fellow, a Pfc. named Dick Hallorann who was a mess-cook, who suggested that maybe we could fix it up pretty nice if we really tried.
"So we did. We really tried. And we made out pretty well, all things considered. The first time a bunch of us went in there to look it over, we were pretty depressed. It was dark and smelly, full of old tools and boxes of papers that had gone moldy. There was only two little windows and no lectricity. The floor was dirt. Carl Roone laughed in a kind of bitter way, I remember that, and said, "The ole Maje, he a real prince, ain't he? Give us our own club. Sho!"
"And George Brannock, who was also killed in the fire that fall, he said: "Yeah, it's a hell of a black spot, all right." And the name just stuck.
"Hallorann got us going, though... Hallorann and Carl and me. I guess God will forgive us for what we did, though-cause He knows we had no idea how it would turn out.
"After awhile the rest of the fellows pitched in. With most of Derry off-limits, there wasn't much else we could do. We hammered and nailed and cleaned. Trev Dawson was a pretty good jackleg carpenter, and he showed us how to cut some more windows along the side, and damned if Alan Snopes didn't come up with panes of glass for them that were different colors-sort of a cross between carnival glass and the sort you see in church windows.
"Where'd you get this?" I asked him. Alan was the oldest of us; he was about forty-two, old enough so that most of us called him Pop Snopes.
"He stuck a Camel in his mouth and tipped me a wink. "Midnight Requisitions," he says, and would say no more.
"So the place come along pretty good, and by the middle of the summer we was using it. Trev Dawson and some of the others had partitioned off the back quarter of the building and got a little kitchen set up in there, not much more than a grill and a couple of deep-fryers, so that you could get a hamburg and some french fries, if you wanted. There was a bar down one side, but it was just meant for sodas and drinks like Virgin Marys-shit, we knew our place. Hadn't we been taught it? If we wanted to drink hard, we'd do it in the dark.
"The floor was still dirt, but we kept it oiled down nice. Trev and Pop Snopes ran in a lectric line-more Midnight Requisitions, I imagine. By July, you could go in there any Saturday night and sit down and have a cola and a hamburger-or a slaw-dog. It was nice. It never really got finished-we was still working on it when the fire burned it down. It got to be a kind of hobby... or a way of thumbing our noses at Fuller and Mueller and the Town Council. But I guess we knew it was ours when Ev McCaslin and I put up a sign one Friday night that said THE BLACK SPOT, and just below that, COMPANY E AND GUESTS. Like we were exclusive, you know!
"It got looking nice enough that the white boys started to grumble about it, and next thing you know, the white boys" NCO was looking finer than ever. They was adding on a special lounge and a little cafeteria. It was like they wanted to race. But that was one race that we didn't want to run."
My dad smiled at me from his hospital bed.
"We were young, except for Snopesy, but we weren't entirely foolish. We knew that the white boys let you race against them, but if it starts to look like you are getting ahead, why, somebody just breaks your legs so you can't run as fast. We had what we wanted, and that was enough. But then... something happened." He fell silent, frowning.
"What was that, Daddy?"
"We found out that we had a pretty decent jazz-band among us," he said slowly. "Martin Devereaux, who was a corporal, played drums. Ace Stevenson played cornet. Pop Snopes played a pretty decent barrelhouse piano. He wasn't great, but he wasn't no slouch, either. There was another fellow who played clarinet, and George Brannock played the saxophone. There were others of us who sat in from time to time, playing guitar or harmonica or juiceharp or even just a comb with waxed paper over it.