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heard them. The most enthusiastic tellers of these tales, he came to realize, were men who wouldn’t be dragged into the Falcon with a chainfall for fear all the muscles would go out of their wrists, or something. Yet they seemed privy to all sorts of information.
    According to the stories, you could go in there any night and see men close-dancing, rubbing their cocks together right out on the dancefloor; men french-kissing at the bar; men getting blowjobs in the bathrooms. There was supposedly a room out back where you went if you wanted to spend a little time on the Tower of Power—there was a big old fellow in a Nazi uniform back there who kept his arm greased most of the way to the shoulder and who would be happy to take care of you.
    In fact, none of these things were true. When folks with a thirst did come in from the bus station for a beer or a highball, they sensed nothing out of the ordinary in the Falcon at all—there were a lot of guys, sure, but that was no different than thousands of workingmen’sbars all across the country. The clientele was gay, but gay was not a synonym for stupid. If they wanted a little outrageousness, they went to Portland. If they wanted a lot of outrageousness—Ramrod-style outrageousness or Peck’s Big Boy-style outrageousness—they went down to New York or Boston. Derry was small, Derry was provincial, and Derry’s small gay community understood the shadow under which it existed quite well.
    Don Hagarty had been coming into the Falcon for two or three years on the night in March of 1984 when he first showed up with Adrian Mellon. Before then, Hagarty had been the sort who plays the field, rarely showing up with the same escort half a dozen times. But by late April it had become obvious even to Elmer Curtie, who cared very little about such things, that Hagarty and Mellon had a steady thing going.
    Hagarty was a draftsman with an engineering firm in Bangor. Adrian Mellon was a freelance writer who published anywhere and everywhere he could—airline magazines, confession magazines, regional magazines, Sunday supplements, sex-letter magazines. He had been working on a novel, but maybe that wasn’t serious—he had been working on it since his third year of college, and that had been twelve years ago.
    He had come to Derry to write a piece about the Canal—he was on assignment from New England Byways, a glossy bi-monthly that was published in Concord. Adrian Mellon had taken the assignment because he could squeeze Byways for three weeks’ worth of expense money, including a nice room at the Derry Town House, and gather all the material he needed for the piece in maybe five days. During the other two weeks he could gather enough material for maybe four other regional pieces.
    But during that three-week period he met Don Hagarty, and instead of going back to Portland when his three weeks on the cuff were over, he found himself a small apartment on Kossuth Lane. He lived there for only six weeks. Then he moved in with Don Hagarty.
8
    That summer, Hagarty told Harold Gardener and Jeff Reeves, was the happiest summer of his life—he should have been on the lookout, he said; he should have known that God only puts a rug under guys like him in order to jerk it out from under their feet.
    The only shadow, he said, was Adrian’s extravagantly partisan reaction to Derry. He had a tee-shirt which said MAINE AIN’T BAD BUT DERRY’S GREAT ! He had a Derry Tigers high-school jacket. And of course there was the hat. He claimed to find the atmosphere vital and creatively invigorating. Perhaps there was something to this: he had taken his languishing novel out of the trunk for the first time in nearly a year.
    â€œWas he really working on it, then?” Gardener asked Hagarty, not really caring but wanting to keep Hagarty primed.
    â€œYes—he was busting pages. He said it might be a terrible novel, but it was no longer going to be a