It (105 page)

He glanced at Beverly and looked away quickly from the calm trust in her eyes. Looking at Beverly made him feel funny in the pit of his stomach. Fluttery.

“We cuh-can't go to the p-p-police,” he said at last. His voice sounded harsh to his own ears, too loud. “We c-ca-han't g-go to our puh-huh-harents, either. Unless . . .” He looked hopefully at Richie. “What a-a-about your m-mom and d-dad, four-eyes? They suh-heem p-pretty reh-reh-regular.”

“My good man,” Richie said in his Toodles the Butler Voice, “you obviously have no understahnding whatsoevah of my mater and pater. They—”

“Talk American, Richie,” Eddie said from his spot by Ben. He was sitting by Ben for the simple reason that Ben provided enough shade for Eddie to sit in. His face looked small and pinched and worried—an old man's face. His aspirator was in his right hand.

“They'd think I was ready for Juniper Hill,” Richie said. He was wearing an old pair of glasses today. The day before a friend of Henry Bowers's named Gard Jagermeyer had come up behind Richie as Richie left the Derry Ice Cream Bar with a pistachio cone. “Tag, you're it!” this Jagermeyer, who outweighed Richie by forty pounds or so, screamed, and slammed Richie full in the back with both hands laced together. Richie flew into the gutter, losing his glasses and his ice-cream cone. The left lens of his glasses had shattered, and his mother was furious with him about it, lending very little credence to Richie's explanations.

“All I know is that it was a lot of fooling around,” she had said. “Honestly, Richie, do you think there's a glasses-tree somewhere and we can just pull off a new pair of spectacles for you whenever you break the old pair?”

“But Mom, this kid pushed me, he came up behind me, this big kid, and pushed me—” Richie was by then near tears. This failure to make his mother understand hurt much worse than being slammed into the gutter by Gard Jagermeyer, who was so stupid they hadn't even bothered to send him to summer-school.

“I don't want to hear any more about it,” Maggie Tozier said flatly. “But the next time you see your father come in looking whipped after
working late three nights in a row, you think a little bit, Richie. You think about it.”

“But Mom—”

“No more, I said.” Her voice was curt and final—worse, it was near tears. She left the room then and the TV went on much too loud. Richie had been left alone sitting miserably at the kitchen table.

It was this memory that caused Richie to shake his head again. “My folks are okay, but they'd never believe something like this.”

“W-What a-a-about other kih-kids?”

And they looked around, Bill would remember years later, as if for someone who wasn't there.

“Who?” Stan asked doubtfully. “I can't think of anyone else I trust.”

“Just the suh-suh-same . . .” Bill said in a troubled voice, and a little silence fell among them while Bill thought about what to say next.

If asked, Ben Hanscom would have told you that Henry Bowers hated him more than any of the others in the Losers' Club, because of what had happened that day when he and Henry had shot the chutes down into the Barrens from Kansas Street, because of what had happened the day he and Richie and Beverly escaped from the Aladdin, but most of all because, by not allowing Henry to copy during examinations, he had caused Henry to be sent to summer-school and incur the wrath of his father, the reputedly insane Butch Bowers.

If asked, Richie Tozier would have told you Henry hated
him
more than any of the others, because of the day he had fooled Henry and his two other musketeers in Freese's.

Stan Uris would have told you that Henry hated
him
most of all because he was a Jew (when Stan had been in the third grade and Henry the fifth, Henry had once washed Stan's face with snow until it bled and he was screaming hysterically with pain and fear).

Bill Denbrough believed that Henry hated him the most because he was skinny, because he stuttered, and because he liked to dress well (“L-L-Look at the f-f-f-fucking puh-puh-
PANSY!”
Henry had
cried when the Derry School had had Careers Day in April and Bill had come wearing a tie; before the day was over, the tie had been ripped off and flung into a tree halfway down Charter Street).

He
did
hate all four of them, but the boy in Derry who was number one on Henry's personal Hate Parade was not in the Losers' Club at all on that July 3rd; he was a black boy named Michael Hanlon, who lived a quarter of a mile down the road from the shirttail Bowers farm.

Henry's father, who was every bit as crazy as he was reputed to be, was Oscar “Butch” Bowers. Butch Bowers associated his financial, physical, and mental decline with the Hanlon family in general and with Mike's father in particular. Will Hanlon, he was fond of telling his few friends and his son, had had him thrown in the county jail when all of his, Hanlon's, chickens died. “So's he could get the insurance money, don't you know,” Butch would say, eying his audience with all the baleful interrupt-if-you-dare pugnacity of Captain Billy Bones in the Admiral Benbow. “He got some of his friends to lie him up, and that's why I had to sell my Merc'ry.”

“Who lied him up, Daddy?” Henry had asked when he was eight, burning at the injustice that had been done to his father. He thought to himself that when he was a grownup he would find liar-uppers and coat them with honey and stake them out over anthills, like in some of those Western movies they showed at the Bijou Theater on Saturday afternoons.

And because his son was a tireless listener (although, if asked, Butch would have maintained that was only as it should be), Bowers Senior filled his son's ears with a litany of hate and hard luck. He explained to his son that while all niggers were stupid, some were cunning as well—and down deep they all hated white men and wanted to plow a white woman's furrow. Maybe it wasn't just the insurance money after all, Butch said; maybe Hanlon had decided to lay the blame for the dead chickens at his door because Butch had the next produce stand down the road. He done it, anyway, and that was just as sure as shit sticks to a blanket. He done it and then got a bunch of white nigger bleeding hearts from town to lie him up and threaten Butch with state prison if he didn't pay that nigger off. “And why not?” Butch would ask his round-eyed dirty-necked silent son. “Why
not?
I
was just a man who fought the Japs for his country. There was lots of guys like us, but
he
was the only nigger in the county.”

The chicken business had been followed by one unlucky incident after another—his Deere tractor had blown a rod; his good harrow got busted in the north field; he got a boil on his neck which became infected, had to be lanced, then became infected again and had to be removed surgically; the nigger started using his foully gotten money to undercut Butch's prices so they lost custom.

In Henry's ears, it was a constant litany: the nigger, the nigger, the nigger. Everything was the nigger's fault. The nigger had a nice white house with an upstairs and an oil furnace while Butch and his wife and his son lived in what was not much better than a tarpaper shack. When Butch couldn't make enough money farming and had to go to work in the woods for awhile, it was the nigger's fault. When their well went dry in 1956, it was the nigger's fault.

Later that same year Henry, who was then ten years old, started to feed Mike's dog Mr. Chips old stewbones and bags of potato-chips. It got so Mr. Chips would wag his tail and come running when Henry called. When the dog was well used to Henry and Henry's treats, Henry one day fed him a pound of hamburger laced with insect poison. The bug-killer he found in the back shed; he had saved three weeks to buy the meat at Costello's.

Mr. Chips ate half the poisoned meat and then stopped. “Go on, finish your treat, Niggerdog,” Henry had said. Mr. Chips wagged his tail. Since Henry had called him this from the beginning, he believed it was his other name. When the pains started, Henry produced a piece of clothesline and tied Mr. Chips to a birch so he couldn't get away and run home. He then sat on a flat sunwarmed rock, put his chin in his palms, and watched the dog die. It took a good long time, but Henry considered it time well spent. At the end Mr. Chips began to convulse and a thin green foam ran from between his jaws.

“How do you like that, Niggerdog?” Henry asked it, and it rolled its dying eyes up at the sound of Henry's voice and tried to wag its tail. “Did you like your lunch, you shitty mutt?”

When the dog was dead, Henry removed the clothesline, went home, and told his father what he had done. Oscar Bowers was
extremely
crazy by that time; a year later his wife would leave him after
he beat her nearly to death. Henry was likewise frightened of his father and felt a terrible hate for him sometimes, but he also loved him. And that afternoon, after he had told, he felt he had finally found the key to his father's affections, because his father had clapped him on the back (so hard that Henry almost fell over), taken him in the living room, and given him a beer. It was the first beer Henry had ever had, and for all the rest of his years he would associate that taste with positive emotions: victory and love.

“Here's to a good job well done,” Henry's crazy father had said. They clicked their brown bottles together and drank them down. So far as Henry knew, the niggers had never found out who killed their dog, but he supposed they had their suspicions. He hoped they did.

The others in the Losers' Club knew Mike by sight—in a town where he was the only Negro child, it would have been strange if they had not—but that was all, because Mike didn't go to Derry Elementary School. His mother was a devout Baptist and Mike was therefore sent to the Neibolt Street Church School. In between geography, reading, and arithmetic there were Bible drills, lessons on such subjects as The Meaning of the Ten Commandments in a Godless World, and discussion-groups on how to handle everyday moral problems (if you saw a buddy shoplifting, for instance, or heard a teacher taking the name of God in vain).

Mike thought the Church School was okay. There were times when he suspected, in a vague way, that he was missing some things—a wider communication with kids his own age perhaps—but he was willing to wait until high school for these things to happen. The prospect made him a little nervous because his skin was brown, but both his mother and father had been well treated in town as far as Mike could see, and Mike believed he would be treated well if he treated others the same way.

The exception to this rule, of course, was Henry Bowers.

Although he tried to show it as little as possible, Mike went in constant terror of Henry. In 1958 Mike was slim and well built, taller than Stan Uris but not quite as tall as Bill Denbrough. He was fast and agile, and that had saved him from several beatings at Henry's hands. And, of course, he went to a different school. Because of that and the age difference, their paths rarely coincided. Mike took pains
to keep things that way. So the irony was this: although Henry hated Mike Hanlon more than any other kid in Derry, Mike had been the least hurt of any of them.

Oh, he had taken his lumps. The spring after he had killed Mike's dog, Henry sprang out of the bushes one day while Mike was walking toward town to go to the library. It was late March, warm enough for bike-riding, but in those days Witcham Road turned to dirt just beyond the Bowers place, which meant that it was a quagmire of mud—no good for bikes.

“Hello, nigger,” Henry had said, emerging from the bushes, grinning.

Mike backed off, eyes flicking warily right and left, watching for a chance to get away. He knew that if he could buttonhook around Henry, he could outdistance him. Henry was big and Henry was strong, but Henry was also slow.

“Gonna make me a tarbaby,” Henry said, advancing on the smaller boy. “You're not black enough, but I'll fix that.”

Mike cut his eyes to the left and twitched his body in that direction. Henry took the bait and broke that way—too fast and too far to pull himself back. Reversing with a sweet and natural speed, Mike took off to the right (in high school he would make the varsity football team as a tailback his sophomore year, and was only kept from breaking the school's all-time scoring record by a broken leg halfway through his senior season). He would have made it easily past Henry but for the mud. It was greasy, and Mike slipped to his knees. Before he could get up, Henry was upon him.

“Niggerniggernigger!”
Henry cried in a kind of religious ecstasy as he rolled Mike over. Mud went up the back of Mike's shirt and down the back of his pants. He could feel it squoozing into his shoes. But he did not begin to cry until Henry slathered mud across his face, plugging up both of his nostrils.

“Now
you're black!” Henry had screamed gleefully, rubbing mud in Mike's hair. “Now you're
REEEELY
black!” He ripped up Mike's poplin jacket and the tee-shirt beneath and slammed a poultice of mud down over the boy's bellybutton. “Now you're as black as
midnight
in a
MINE-SHAFT!”
Henry screamed triumphantly, and slammed mudplugs into both of Mike's ears. Then he stood back,
muddy hands hooked into his belt, and yelled:
“I killed your dog, black boy!”
But Mike did not hear this because of the mud in his ears and his own terrified sobs.

Henry kicked a final sticky clot of mud onto Mike and then turned and walked home, not looking back. A few moments later, Mike got up and did the same, still weeping.

His mother was of course furious; she wanted Will Hanlon to call Chief Borton and have him out to the Bowers house before the sun went down. “He's been after Mikey before,” Mike heard her say. He was sitting in the bathtub and his parents were in the kitchen. This was his second tub of water; the first had turned black almost the moment he had stepped into it and sat down. In her fury, his mother had lapsed into a thick Texas
patois
Mike could barely understand. “You put the law on him, Will Hanlon! Both the dog and the pup! You
law
em, hear me?”