Phil Tracker

It come to me like—” He snapped his fingers. “Like out of thin air.” “You’re not making sense.” “That’s because you ain’t had twenty years of seeing men like Tony and Phil Tracker treat him like King Shit. Twenty years of seeing women bat their eyes at him like he was Frank Sinatra.

The Derry conversation names Tony and Phil Tracker among the local men in the father’s long history of humiliations.

Phil Tracker drove freight himself so the boys rarely saw him, but Tony Tracker, a man with huge slab arms and a gut to match, kept the books and the accounts, and Eddie (who never played—his mother would have killed him if she had heard he was playing baseball, racing around and getting dust in his delicate lungs, risking broken legs, concussions, and God alone knew what else) got used to seeing him.

Phil and Tony Tracker own the trucking lot used for baseball; Phil drives freight and Tony keeps the books.

Old Phil might have jackknifed a rig somewhere in New Hampshire or in the Hainesville Woods up north in Maine when the going was icy or maybe he had lost his brakes on some long hill south of Derry, heading into Haven in a driving springtime rain.

Eddie remembers Tony and Phil Tracker and considers whether Phil died driving freight; this Old Phil is the human truck driver, not the robot in VII.