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seeing the Falcon shut up forever—he would have been delighted to drive Dubay home himself. He would, in fact, have been delighted to hold Dubay’s arms while Dubay’s stepfather beat the creep to oatmeal. Avarino did not like gays, but this did not mean he believed they should be tortured and murdered. Mellon had beensavaged. When they brought him up from under the Canal bridge, his eyes had been open, bulging with terror. And this guy here had absolutely no idea of what he had helped do.
    â€œWe didn’t mean to hurt im,” Steve repeated. This was his fallback position when he became even slightly confused.
    â€œThat’s why you want to get out front with us,” Avarino said earnestly. “Get the true facts of the matter out in front, and this maybe won’t amount to a pisshole in the snow. Isn’t that right, Barney?”
    â€œAs rain,” Morrison agreed.
    â€œOne more time, what do you say?” Avarino coaxed.
    â€œWell . . .” Steve said, and then, slowly, began to talk.
7
    When the Falcon was opened in 1973, Elmer Curtie thought his clientele would consist mostly of bus-riders—the terminal next door serviced three different lines: Trailways, Greyhound, and Aroostook County. What he failed to realize was how many of the passengers who ride buses are women or families with small children in tow. Many of the others kept their bottles in brown bags and never got off the bus at all. Those who did were usually soldiers or sailors who wanted no more than a quick beer or two—you couldn’t very well go on a bender during a ten-minute rest-stop.
    Curtie had begun to realize some of these home truths by 1977, but by then it was too late: he was up to his tits in bills and there was no way that he could see out of the red ink. The idea of burning the place down for the insurance occurred to him, but unless he hired a professional to torch it, he supposed he would be caught . . . and he had no idea where professional arsonists hung out, anyway.
    He decided in February of that year that he would give it until July 4th; if things didn’t look as if they were turning around by then, he would simply walk next door, get on ’hound, and see how things looked down in Florida.
    But in the next five months, an amazing quiet sort of prosperity came to the bar, which was painted black and gold inside and decorated with stuffed birds (Elmer Curtie’s brother had been an amateur taxidermist who specialized in birds, and Elmer had inherited thestuff when he died). Suddenly, instead of drawing sixty beers and pouring maybe twenty drinks a night, Elmer was drawing eighty beers and pouring a hundred drinks . . . a hundred and twenty . . . sometimes a hundred and sixty.
    His clientele was young, polite, almost exclusively male. Many of them dressed outrageously, but those were years when outrageous dress was still almost the norm, and Elmer Curtie did not realize that his patrons were just about almost exclusively gay until 1981 or so. If Derry residents had heard him say this, they would have laughed and said that Elmer Curtie must think they had all been born yesterday—but his claim was perfectly true. Like the man with the cheating wife, he was practically the last to know . . . and by the time he did, he didn’t care. The bar was making money, and while there were four other bars in Derry which turned a profit, the Falcon was the only one where rambunctious patrons did not regularly demolish the whole place. There were no women to fight over, for one thing, and these men, fags or not, seemed to have learned a secret of getting along with each other which their heterosexual counterparts did not know.
    Once he became aware of the sexual preference of his regulars, he seemed to hear lurid stories about the Falcon everywhere—these stories had been circulating for years, but until ’81 Curtie simply hadn’t