It

he said indifferently. ‘Besides, it happened in Derry, not in New York or Chicago. Th e place makes it news as much as what happened in the place, sonny. That’s why there are bigger headlines when an earthquake kills twelve people in Los Angeles than there are when one kills three thousand in some heathen country in the Mideast.’
Besid es, it happened in Derry.
I’ve heard it before, and I suppose if I continue to pursue this I’ll hear it again . . . and again . . . and again. They say it as if speaking patiently to a mental defective. They say it the way they would say Because of gravity if you asked them how come you stick to the ground when you walk. They say it as if it were a natural law any natural man should understand. And, of course, the worst of that is I do understand.
I had one more question for Norbert Keene.
‘Did you see anyone at all that day that you didn’t recognize once the shooting started?’
Mr Keene’s answer was quick enough to drop my blood temperature ten degrees — or so it felt. ‘The clown, you mean? How did you find out about him, sonny?’
‘Oh, I heard it somewhere,’ I said.
‘I only caught a glimpse of him. Once things got hot, I tended pretty much to my own knittin. I glanced around just once and saw him upstreet beyond them Swedes under the Bijou’s marquee,’ Mr Keene said. ‘He wasn’t wearing a clown suit or nothing like that. He was dressed in a pair of farmer’s biballs and a cotton shirt underneath. But his face was covered with that white grease-paint they use, and he had a big red clown smile painted on. Also had these tufts of fake hair, you know. Orange. Sorta comical.
‘Lal Machen never saw that fellow, but Biff did. Only Biff must have been confused, because he thought he saw him in one of the windows of an apartment over somewhere to the left, and once when I asked Jimmy Gordon — he wa s killed in Pearl Harbor, you know, went down with his ship, the California, I think it was — he said he saw the guy behind the War Memorial.’
Mr Keene shook his head, smiling a little.
‘It’s funny how people get during a thing like that, and even funnier what they remember after it’s all over. You can listen to sixteen different tales and no two of them will jibe together. Take the gun that clown fellow had, for instance — ‘
‘Gun?’ I asked. ‘He was shooting, too?’
‘Ayuh,’ Mr Keene said. The one glimpse I caught of him, it looked like he had a Winchester bolt-action, and it wasn’t until later that I figured out I must have thought that because that’s what I had. Biff Marlow thought he had a Remington, because that was what he had. And when I asked Jimmy about it, he said that guy was shooting an old Springfield, just like his. Funny, huh?’
‘Funny,’ I managed. ‘Mr Keene . . . didn’t any of you wonder what in hell a clown, especially one in farmer’s biballs, was doing there just then?’
‘Sure,’ Mr Keene said. ‘It wasn’t no big deal, you understand, but sure we wondered. Most of us figured it was somebody who wanted to attend the party but didn’t want to be recognized. A Town Council member, maybe. Horst Mueller, maybe, or even Trace Naugler, who was mayor back then. Or it could just have been a professional man who didn’t want to be recognized. A doctor or a lawyer. I wouldn’t ‘ve recognized my own father in a get-up like that.’
He laughed a little and I asked him what was funny.
‘There’s also a possibility that it was a real clown,’ he said. ‘Back in the twenties and thirties the county fair in Esty came a lot earlier than it does now, and it was set up and going full blast the week that the Bradley Gang met their end. There were clowns at the county fair. Maybe one of them heard we were going to have our own little carnival and rode down because he wanted to be in on it.
He smiled at me, dryly.
‘I’m about talked out,’ he said, ‘but I’ll tell you one more thing, since you ‘pear to be so interested and you listen so close. It was something Biff Marlow said about sixteen years later, when we were having a few beers up to Pilot’s in Bangor. Right out of a clear blue sky he said it. Said that clown was leanin out of the window so far that Biff couldn’t believe he wasn’t fallin out. It wasn’t just his head and shoulders and arms that was out; Biff said he was right out to the knees, hanging there in midair, shooting down at the cars the Bradleys had come in, with that big red grin on his face. «He was tricked out like a jackolantern that had got a bad scare,» was how Biff put it.’
‘Like he was floating,’ I said.
‘Ayuh,’ Mr Keene agreed. ‘And Biff said there was something else, something that bothered him for weeks afterward. One of those things you get right