It (108 page)

But Victor didn't like to think of that.

What worried him, simply was this: Henry might go TOO FAR. Just what TOO FAR might be was something Victor didn't like to think of . . . but his uneasy heart had prompted the question just the same.

“We're gonna catch him and take him down to that coalpit,” Henry said. “I thought we'd put a couple of firecrackers in his shoes and see if he dances.”

“But not the M-80s, Henry, right?”

If Henry intended something like that Victor was going to take a powder. An M-80 in each shoe would blow that nigger's feet off, and that was
much
TOO FAR.

“I've got only four of those,” Henry said, not taking his eyes off Mike Hanlon's back. They had closed the distance to seventy-five yards now and he also spoke in a low voice. “You think I'd waste two of em on a fuckin nightfighter?”

“No, Henry. Course not.”

“We'll just put a couple of Black Cats in his loafers,” Henry said, “then strip him bareass and throw his clothes down into the Barrens. Maybe he'll catch poison ivy going after them.”

“We gotta roll im in the coal, too,” Belch said, his formerly dim eyes now glowing brightly. “Okay, Henry? Is that cool?”

“Cool as a moose,” Henry said in a casual way Victor didn't quite like. “We'll roll im in the coal, just like I rolled im in the mud that other time. And . . .” Henry grinned, showing teeth that were already beginning to rot at the age of twelve. “And I got something to tell him. I don't think he heard when I told im before.”

“What's that, Henry?” Peter asked. Peter Gordon was merely interested and excited. He came from one of Derry's “good families”; he lived on West Broadway and in two years he would be sent to prep school in Groton—or so he believed on that July 3rd. He was brighter than Vic Criss, but had not hung around long enough to understand how Henry was eroding.

“You'll find out,” Henry said. “Now shut up. We're gettin close.”

They were twenty-five yards behind Mike and Henry was just
opening his mouth to give the order to charge when Moose Sadler set off the first firecracker of the day. Moose had eaten three plates of baked beans the night before, and the fart was almost as loud as a shotgun blast.

Mike looked around. Henry saw his eyes widen.

“Get him!” Henry howled.

Mike froze for a moment; then he took off, running for his life.

The Losers wound their way through the bamboo in the Barrens in this order: Bill; Richie; Beverly behind Richie, walking slim and pretty in bluejeans and a white sleeveless blouse, zoris on her feet; then Ben, trying not to puff too loudly (although it was eighty-one that day, he was wearing one of his baggy sweatshirts); Stan; Eddie bringing up the rear, the snout of his aspirator poking out of his right front pants pocket.

Bill had fallen into a “jungle-safari” fantasy, as he often did when walking through this part of the Barrens. The bamboo was high and white, limiting visibility to the path they had made through here. The earth was black and squelchy, with sodden patches that had to be avoided or jumped over if you didn't want to get mud in your shoes. The puddles of standing water had oddly flat rainbow colors. The air had a reeky smell that was half the dump and half rotting vegetation.

Bill halted one turn away from the Kenduskeag and turned back to Richie. “T-T-Tiger up ahead, T-T-Tozier.”

Richie nodded and turned back to Beverly. “Tiger,” he breathed.

“Tiger,” she told Ben.

“Man-eater?” Ben asked, holding his breath to keep from panting.

“There's blood all over him,” Beverly said.

“Man-eating tiger,” Ben muttered to Stan, and he passed the news back to Eddie, whose thin face was hectic with excitement.

They faded into the bamboo, leaving the path of black earth that looped through it magically bare. The tiger passed in front of them and all of them nearly saw it: heavy, perhaps four hundred pounds, its muscles moving with grace and power beneath the silk of its striped
pelt. They nearly saw its green eyes, and the flecks of blood around its snout from the last batch of pygmy warriors it had eaten alive.

The bamboo rattled faintly, a noise both musical and eerie, and then was still again. It might have been a breath of summer breeze . . . or it might have been the passage of an African tiger on its way toward the Old Cape side of the Barrens.

“Gone,” Bill said. He let out a pent-up breath and stepped out onto the path again. The others followed suit.

Richie was the only one who had come armed: he produced a cap-pistol with a friction-taped handgrip. “I could have had a clear shot at him if you'd moved, Big Bill,” he said grimly. He pushed the bridge of his old glasses up on his nose with the muzzle of the gun.

“There's Wuh-Wuh-Watusis around h-h-here,” Bill said. “C-C-Can't rih-risk a shot. Y-You w-want them down on t-t-top of us?”

“Oh,” Richie said, convinced.

Bill made a come-on gesture with his arm and they were back on the path again, which narrowed into a neck at the end of the bamboo patch. They stepped out onto the bank of the Kenduskeag, where a series of stepping-stones led across the river. Ben had shown them how to place them. You got a big rock and plopped it in the water, then you got a second and plopped it in the water while you were stepping on the first, then you got a third and plopped it in the water while you were stepping on the second, and so on until you were all the way across the river (which here, and at this time of year, was less than a foot deep and shaled with tawny sandbars) with your feet still dry. The trick was so simple it was damn near babyish, but none of them had seen it until Ben pointed it out. He was good at stuff like that, but when he showed you he never made you feel like a dummy.

They went down the bank in single file and started across the dry backs of the rocks they had planted.

“Bill!” Beverly called urgently.

He froze at once, not looking back, arms held out. The water chuckled and rilled around him. “What?”

“There's piranha fish in here! I saw them eat a whole cow two days ago. A minute after it fell in, there was nothing but bones. Don't fall off!”

“Right,” Bill said. “Be careful, men.”

They teetered their way across the rocks. A freight-train charged by on the railway embankment as Eddie Kaspbrak neared the halfway point, and the sudden blast of its airhorn caused him to jiggle on the edge of balance. He looked into the bright water and for one moment, between the sunflashes that darted arrows of light into his eyes, he actually
saw
the cruising piranhas. They were not part of the make-believe that went with Bill's jungle safari fantasy; he was quite sure of that. The fish he saw looked like oversized goldfish with the great ugly jaws of catfish or groupers. Sawteeth protruded between their thick lips and, like goldfish, they were orange. As orange as the fluffy pompoms you sometimes saw on the suits the clowns wore at the circus.

They circled in the shallow water, gnashing.

Eddie pinwheeled his arms.
I'm going in,
he thought.
I'm going in and they'll eat me alive—

Then Stanley Uris gripped his wrist firmly and brought him back to dead center.

“Close call,” Stan said. “If you fell in, your mother'd give you heck.”

Thoughts of his mother were, for once, the furthest things from Eddie's mind. The others had gained the far bank now and were counting cars on the freight. Eddie stared wildly into Stan's eyes, then looked into the water again. He saw a potato-chip bag go dancing by, but that was all. He looked up at Stan again.

“Stan, I saw—”

“What?”

Eddie shook his head. “Nothing, I guess,” he said. “I'm just a little

(but they were there yes they were and they would have eaten me alive)

jumpy. The tiger, I guess. Keep going.”

This western bank of the Kenduskeag—the Old Cape bank—was a quagmire of mud during rainy weather and the spring runoff, but there had been no heavy rain in Derry for two weeks or more and the bank had dried to an alien crack-glaze from which several of those cement cylinders poked, casting grim little shadows. About twenty yards farther down, a cement pipe jutted out over the Kenduskeag and spilled a steady thin stream of foul-looking brown water into the river.

Ben said quietly, “It's creepy here,” and the others nodded.

Bill led them up the dry bank and back into the heavy shrubbery, where bugs whirred and chiggers chigged. Every now and then there would be a heavy ruffle of wings as a bird took off. Once a squirrel ran across their path, and about five minutes later, as they approached the low wrinkle of ridge that guarded the town dump's blind side, a large rat with a bit of cellophane caught in its whiskers trundled in front of Bill, passing along its own secret run through its own microcosmic wilderness.

The smell of the dump was now clear and pungent; a black column of smoke rose in the sky. The ground, while still heavily overgrown except for their own narrow path, began to be strewn with litter. Bill had dubbed this “dump-dandruff,” and Richie had been delighted; he had laughed almost until he cried. “You ought to write that down, Big Bill,” he said. “That's really good.”

Papers caught on branches wavered and flapped like cut-rate pennants; here was a silver gleam of summer sun reflected from a clutch of tin cans lying at the bottom of a green and tangled hollow; there the hotter reflection of sun-rays bouncing off a broken beer bottle. Beverly spied a babydoll, its plastic skin so brightly pink it looked almost boiled. She picked it up, then dropped it with a little cry as she saw the whitish-gray beetles squirming from beneath its moldy skirt and down its rotting legs. She rubbed her fingers on her jeans.

They climbed to the top of the ridge and looked down into the dump.

“Oh shit,” Bill said, and jammed his hands into his pockets as the others gathered around him.

They were burning the northern end today, but here, at their end, the dumpkeeper (he was, in fact, Armando Fazio, Mandy to his friends, and the bachelor brother of the Derry Elementary School janitor) was tinkering on the World War II D-9 'dozer he used to push the crap into piles for burning. His shirt was off, and the big portable radio sitting under the canvas parasol on the 'dozer's seat was putting out the Red Sox–Senators pregame festivities.

“Can't go down there,” Ben agreed. Mandy Fazio was not a bad guy, but when he saw kids in the dump he ran them off at once—because of the rats, because of the poison he regularly sowed to keep the rat population down, because of the potential for cuts, falls, and burns . . . but mostly because he believed a dump was no place for
children to be. “Ain't you nice?” he would yell at the kids he spied who had been drawn to the dump with their .22s to plink away at bottles (or rats, or seagulls) or by the exotic fascination of “dump-picking”: you might find a toy that still worked, a chair that could be mended for a clubhouse, or a junked TV with the picture-tube still intact—if you threw a rock through one of these there was a very satisfying explosion. “Ain't you kids
nice?”
Mandy would bellow (he bellowed not because he was angry but because he was deaf and wore no hearing-aid). “Dintchore folks teach you to be nice? Nice boys and girls don't play in the dump! Go to the park! Go to the liberry! Go down to Community House and play box-hockey! Be
nice!”

“Nope,” Richie said. “Guess the dump's out.”

They all sat down for a few moments to watch Mandy work on his 'dozer, hoping he would give up and go away but not really believing he would: the presence of the radio suggested Mandy intended to stay all afternoon. It was enough to piss off the Pope, Bill thought. There was really no better place to come with firecrackers than the dump. You could put them under tin cans and then watch the cans fly into the air when the firecrackers went off, or you could light the fuses and drop them into bottles and then run like hell. The bottles didn't always break, but usually they did.

“Wish we had some M-80s,” Richie sighed, unaware of how soon one would be chucked at his head.

“My mother says people ought to be happy with what they have,” Eddie said so solemnly that they all laughed.

When the laughter died away, they all looked toward Bill again.

Bill thought about it and then said, “I nuh-know a p-place. There's an old gruh-gruh-gravel-pit at the end of the Buh-Barrens by the t-t-trainyards—”

“Yeah!” Stan said, getting to his feet. “I know that place! You're a genius, Bill!”

“They'll really echo there,” Beverly agreed.

“Well, let's go,” Richie said.

The six of them, one shy of the magic number, walked along the brow of the hill which circled the dump. Mandy Fazio glanced up once and saw them silhouetted against the blue sky like Indians out on a raiding party. He thought about hollering at them—the Barrens
was no place for kids—and then he turned back to his work instead. At least they weren't in his dump.

Mike Hanlon ran past the Church School without pausing and pelted straight up Neibolt Street toward the Derry trainyards. There was a janitor at NCS, but Mr. Gendron was very old and even deafer than Mandy Fazio. Also, he liked to spend most of his summer days asleep in the basement by the summer-silent boiler, stretched out in a battered old reclining chair with the Derry
News
in his lap. Mike would still be pounding on the door and shouting for the old man to let him in when Henry Bowers came up behind him and tore his freaking head off.

So Mike just ran.

But not blindly; he was trying to pace himself, trying to control his breathing, not yet going all out. Henry, Belch, and Moose Sadler presented no problems; even relatively fresh they ran like wounded buffalo. Victor Criss and Peter Gordon, however, were much faster. As Mike passed the house where Bill and Richie had seen the clown—or the werewolf—he snapped a glance back and was alarmed to see that Peter Gordon had almost closed the distance. Peter was grinning cheerfully—a steeplechase grin, a full-out polo grin, a pip-pip-jolly-good-show grin, and Mike thought:
I wonder if he'd grin that way if he knew what's going to happen if they catch me. . . . Does he think they're just going to say “Tag, you're it,” and run away?