Tracker Brothers' Truck Depot

Tracker Brothers' Truck Depot was a low brick structure on Kansas Street in Derry, its dirty-orange bricks crumbling in places and shading to sooty black at the footings. The building was surrounded by a waste of gravel on three sides, where long-distance haulers—Jimmy-Petes, Kenworths, and Rios—all painted with the words TRACKER BROS. DERRY NEWTON PROVIDENCE HARTFORD NEW YORK, sometimes stood in tangled profusion. The brothers kept their trucks out of the back lot as much as possible because they were both avid baseball fans and liked the children to come and play there. Phil Tracker drove freight himself and was rarely seen, but Tony Tracker, a large man with huge slab arms and a gut to match, kept the books and became a summer fixture, his voice as much a part of the game as Mel Allen's later became. He never called any of the boys by name—it was always "hey Red," "hey Blondie," "hey Four-Eyes," "hey Half-Pint"—and he never called a ball a ball; it was always a "bawl," and a bat was always an "ash-handle." The lot had no actual bases; four pieces of dirty canvas were kept under the loading bay, ceremonially taken out when enough kids had drifted in to play and just as ceremonially returned when evening fell. The only permanent feature was a twelve-foot-high chainlink fence at the back of the lot, rusty as dried blood, which framed the sky in droves of diamond shapes. Over the fence and down into the Barrens was home-run territory, called "The Automatic." Belch Huggins, comically big at twelve, hit two balls over that fence, the second of which lost its cover as it flew, the twine unravelling as it went, and what was left was smaller than a tennis ball. Tony Tracker, examining the remains, said, "That one would have been out of Yankee Stadium! Do you hear me? That one would have been out of fucking Yankee Stadium!" The depot was also where Eddie Kaspbrak, after his confrontation with Mr. Keene, was caught by Henry Bowers and his friends and had his arm broken. Eddie walked past the depot on his way home, and the memory of the baseball games there—of Belch's impossible home run, of Tony Tracker's voice yelling "Slide, Horsefoot!"—stayed with him. By 1985, the depot was dark and silent. Weeds grew up through the gravel, and there were no trucks in either side yard, only a single rusty box. A realtor's FOR SALE sign hung in the window. Eddie, returning to Derry as an adult, stood in front of the abandoned building and felt a sadness as if someone had died. The lot where the baseball games had been played was now overgrown with weeds and broken glass, the rutted basepaths gone. The only thing that was the same was the chainlink fence at the back, still framing the sky. As Eddie stood there, a phantom baseball came over the fence, and the leper—the same leper from under the porch at 29 Neibolt Street—appeared, wearing a New York Yankees uniform, and the dead Tony Tracker rose from the ground at home plate, his face a skull with blackened chunks of flesh, and said, "Don't matter how much you choke up on that ash-handle. Don't matter, Wheezy. We'll get you. You and your friends. We'll have a BAWL!" The depot thus serves as a site where the past erupts into the present, where the ordinary pleasures of childhood baseball are twisted into a grotesque reminder of the evil that has always haunted Derry.