Tony Tracker

Tony Tracker was the co-owner, with his brother Phil, of Tracker Brothers' Truck Depot, a low brick building surrounded by gravel lots on the outskirts of Derry's downtown. The brothers were avid baseball fans, and they allowed the local boys to use the back lot for pickup games, a tradition that defined summer afternoons for a generation of Derry children. Tony Tracker was a large man with a gut to match, and he was a constant, ghostlike presence during these games, his white shirt glimmering in the summer dusk. He never called any of the boys by their names, instead using nicknames like "Red," "Blondie," "Four-Eyes," "Half-Pint," and "Horsefoot." His voice, a fixture of the season, would yell corrections and encouragement: "You got to get under that bawl before you can catch it, Red!" or "Slide, Horsefoot! You get the soles of them Keds in that second-baseman's face, he ain't never goan tag you out!" He never called a baseball a "ball," always a "bawl," and a bat was always an "ash-handle." For Eddie Kaspbrak, who was not allowed to play, Tony Tracker's voice was as much a part of the game as Mel Allen's would be later on the radio.

The Depot and the Games

The Tracker Brothers' Truck Depot was the opposite of the brothers' beautiful Victorian house on West Broadway. It was a low brick structure, its dirty-orange bricks crumbling and sooty. The surrounding gravel waste was often filled with long-distance haulers painted with the words "TRACKER BROS. DERRY NEWTON PROVIDENCE HARTFORD NEW YORK." The brothers kept the back lot clear for the kids, and Tony Tracker, who handled the books, was a summer fixture. The boys used four pieces of dirty canvas as bases, kept under the loading bay and ceremonially taken out each day. The lot was defined by ruts made by running feet, not limed basepaths. Eddie Kaspbrak remembered seeing only two balls ever hit over the chainlink fence at the back of the lot, both by Belch Huggins. The second time, Belch hit a pitch so hard that the cover came off the ball, which continued to unravel as it sailed over the fence. Tony Tracker, amazed, cried out, "That one would have been out of Yankee Stadium! Do you hear me? That one would have been out of fucking Yankee Stadium!"

The Decline and Death

By the time Eddie Kaspbrak returned to Derry in 1985, the Tracker Brothers' Truck Depot was dark and silent. Weeds grew through the gravel, and a single rusty box stood in the yard. A realtor's FOR SALE sign was in the window. The business had gone under, and the lot where the baseball games had been played was overgrown. Eddie speculated that Tony Tracker had likely died of a heart attack, carrying too much weight. The tradition of the games had simply died out. Later that night, as Eddie walked through Derry, the memory of the depot triggered a horrifying vision. The ground bulged as if a gigantic gopher was tunneling beneath it, and a grotesque, decaying figure of Tony Tracker, his face a skull with blackened flesh, erupted from the earth at home plate. "Don't matter how much you choke up on that ash-handle," the apparition said in a gritty, grinding voice. "Don't matter, Wheezy. We'll get you. You and your friends. We'll have a BAWL!" The vision was a manifestation of the town's evil, corrupting even the memory of a benign figure from the past.