Omaha

Omaha, Nebraska, is the adult home of Ben Hanscom, the once-fat boy from Derry who became a celebrated architect. The city serves as the backdrop for Ben's quiet, prosperous life—his farm in Hemingford Home, his weekly visits to the Red Wheel bar, and his sudden, violent departure after receiving Mike Hanlon's phone call in May 1985. Omaha is not merely a setting; it is the place where Ben's carefully constructed adult identity is shattered by the return of childhood memory, and from which he launches his final journey back to Derry.

Ben Hanscom's Nebraska Life

Ben Hanscom lives on a farm in Junkins, near the tiny town of Hemingford Home, Nebraska, about an hour west of Omaha. He owns a Learjet and a private landing strip on his property, and his primary vehicle is an aging 1968 Cadillac convertible with vanity plates reading "BEN'S CADDY." His weekly routine is rigid: every Friday night he visits the Red Wheel, a roadhouse on the edge of Hemingford Home, for two beers; every Saturday night he comes for four or five. He always leaves the same five-dollar tip under his beer stein. The bartender, Ricky Lee, considers Ben his favorite customer, not only for the regular tips but for his company—a rarity in a honky-tonk where talk comes cheap. Ben's Nebraska life is one of deliberate, almost ritualistic simplicity, a stark contrast to his international career.

The Call and the Collapse

On the night of May 28th, 1985, Ben receives a phone call from Mike Hanlon. The call shatters his carefully maintained composure. He arrives at the Red Wheel on a weeknight for the first time, looking pale and distracted. Ricky Lee observes that Ben's hair is graying—something he had never noticed before—and that his eyes look twenty years older than the rest of his face. Ben orders a stein of Wild Turkey whiskey, a drink so large that Ricky Lee thinks he will need to call a funeral home. Ben then demonstrates a trick he learned from Peruvian Indians: he squeezes lemon juice into his nostrils to numb the pain of the alcohol, then drinks a third of the stein in one go. He tells Ricky Lee about his childhood in Derry, about being fat, about Henry Bowers carving the letter "H" into his stomach with a Buck knife. He gives Ricky Lee three silver dollars—1921, 1923, and 1924—for his children, explaining that there used to be four, but he gave one to Stuttering Bill and the others long ago.

The Departure

After draining the stein, Ben tells Ricky Lee he is flying home—not driving the plane himself, but taking United Airlines. He leaves the Red Wheel, and Ricky Lee, watching him go, is struck by a terrifying resemblance to a local drunk who had hanged himself years before. Ben's final words to Ricky Lee are a meditation on the cost of memory: "All I've ever gotten and all I have now is somehow due to what we did then, and you pay for what you get in this world." He slips out into the Nebraska night, and Ricky Lee, watching his taillights dwindle down Highway 63, knows he will never see Ben Hanscom again. Ben boards United Airlines flight 41 from Omaha to Chicago, where he will connect to a flight to Maine. During the turbulent flight, a stewardess mistakes his vacant, staring eyes for those of a dead man. Ben, lost in memory, thinks of the dam he built with his friends in the Barrens, and feels himself being "digested by his own past." Omaha, the city of his adult success, becomes the place from which he finally, irrevocably, leaves.