It (114 page)

The three of them stood there a moment longer, looking at each other solemnly, and then they went into the library.

“Sure an begorrah, it's that black feller again!” Richie cried in his Irish Cop Voice.

A week had passed; it was nearly mid-July and the underground clubhouse was almost finished.

“Top o the mornin to ye, Mr. O'Hanlon, sor! And a foine, foine day it promises to be, foine as pertaters a-growin, as me old mither used to—”

“So far as I know, noon is the top of the morning, Richie,” Ben said, popping up in the hole, “and noon was two hours ago.” He and Richie had been putting in shoring around the sides of the hole. Ben had taken off his sweatshirt because the day was hot and the work was hard. His tee-shirt was gray with sweat and stuck to his chest and pouch of a stomach. He seemed remarkably unselfconscious of the way he looked, but Mike guessed that if Ben heard Beverly coming, he would be inside that baggy sweatshirt again before you could say puppy love.

“Don't be so picky—you sound like Stan the Man,” Richie said. He had gotten out of the hole five minutes before because, he told Ben, it was time for a cigarette break.

“I thought you said you didn't have any cigarettes,” Ben had said.

“I don't,” Richie had replied, “but the principle remains the same.”

Mike had his father's photograph album under his arm. “Where is everybody?” he asked. He knew Bill had to be somewhere around, because he had left his own bike parked under the bridge near Silver.

“Bill and Eddie went down to the dump about half an hour ago to liberate some more boards,” Richie said. “Stanny and Bev went down to Reynolds Hardware to get hinges. I don't know what the frock Haystack's up to down there—up to down there, ha-ha, you get it?—but it's probably no good. Boy needs someone to keep an eye on him, you know. By the way, you owe us twenty-three cents if you still want to be in this club. Your share of the hinges.”

Mike switched the album from his right arm to his left and dug into his pocket. He counted out twenty-three cents (leaving a grand total of one dime in his own personal treasury) and handed it over to Richie. Then he walked over to the hole and looked in.

Except it really wasn't a hole anymore. The sides had been neatly squared off. Each side had been shored up. The boards were all mongrels, but Ben, Bill, and Stan had done a good job of sizing them with tools from Zack Denbrough's shop (and Bill had been at great pains to make sure every tool was returned every night, and in the same condition as when it was taken). Ben and Beverly had nailed cross-pieces between the supports. The hole still made Eddie a little nervous, but that was Eddie's nature. Piled carefully to one side were squares of sod which would later be glued to the top.

“I think you guys know what you're doing,” Mike said.

“Sure,” Ben said, and pointed to the album. “What you got?”

“My father's Derry album,” Mike said. “He collects old pictures and clippings about the town. It's his hobby. I was looking through it a couple of days ago—I told you I thought I'd seen that clown before. And I did. In here. So I brought it down.” He was too ashamed to add that he had not dared to ask his father's permission to do this. Afraid of the questions to which such a request might lead, he had taken it from the house like a thief while his father planted potatoes in the west field and his mother hung clothes in the back yard. “I thought you guys ought to take a look, too.”

“Well, let's see,” Richie said.

“I'd like to wait until everybody's here. It might be better.”

“Okay.” Richie was, in truth, not that anxious to look at more pictures of Derry, in this or any other album. Not after what had happened in Georgie's room. “You want to help me and Ben with the rest of the shoring?”

“You bet.” Mike put his father's album down carefully, far enough from the hole so it wouldn't be pelted with flying dirt, and took Ben's shovel.

“Dig right here,” Ben said, showing Mike the spot. “Go down about a foot. Then I'll set a board in and hold it flush against the side while you shovel the dirt back in.”

“Good plan, man,” Richie said sagely from where he sat on the edge of the excavation with his sneakers dangling down.

“What's wrong with
you?”
Mike asked.

“Got a bone in my leg,” Richie said comfortably.

“How's your project with Bill going?” Mike stopped long enough to strip off his shirt and then began to dig. It was hot down here, even in the Barrens. Crickets hummed sleepily like summer clocks in the brush.

“Well . . . not too bad,” Richie said, and Mike thought he flashed Ben a mildly warning look. “I guess.”

“Why don't you play your radio, Richie?” Ben asked. He slipped a board into the hole Mike had dug and held it there. Richie's transistor was hung by the strap in its accustomed place, on the thick branch of a nearby shrub.

“Batteries are worn out,” Richie said. “You had to have my last twenty-five cents for hinges, remember? Cruel, Haystack, very cruel. After all the things I've done for you. Besides, all I can get down here is WABI and they only play pansy rock.”

“Huh?” Mike asked.

“Haystack thinks Tommy Sands and Pat Boone sing rock and roll,” Richie said, “but that's because he's ill.
Elvis
sings rock and roll.
Ernie K. Doe
sings rock and roll.
Carl Perkins
sings rock and roll. Bobby Darin. Buddy Holly. ‘Ah-ow Peggy . . . my Peggy Suh-uh-oo . . . ' ”

“Please,
Richie,” Ben said.

“Also,” Mike said, leaning on his shovel, “there's Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Shep and the Limelights, La Verne Baker, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, the Coasters, the Isley Brothers, the Crests, the Chords, Stick McGhee—”

They were looking at him with such amazement that Mike laughed.

“You lost me after Little Richard,” Richie said. He liked Little Richard, but if he had a secret rock-and-roll hero that summer it was Jerry Lee Lewis. His mom had happened to come into the living room while Jerry Lee was performing on
American Bandstand.
This was at the point in his act where Jerry Lee actually climbed onto his piano and played it upside down with his hair hanging in his face. He had been singing “High School Confidential.” For a moment Richie believed his mom was going to faint. She didn't, but she was so traumatized by what she had seen that she talked at dinner that night
about sending Richie to one of those military-type camps for the rest of the summer. Now Richie shook his hair down over his eyes and began to sing: “Come on over baby all the cats are at the high school rockin—”

Ben began to stagger around the hole, grasping his large belly and pretending to puke. Mike held his nose, but he was laughing so hard tears squirted out of his eyes.

“What's wrong?” Richie demanded. “I mean, what
ails
you guys? That was
good!
I mean, that was really
good!”

“Oh man,” Mike said, and now he was laughing so hard he could barely talk. “That was priceless. I mean, that was really priceless.”

“Negroes have no taste,” Richie said. “I think it even says so in the Bible.”

“Yo mamma,” Mike said, laughing harder than ever. When Richie asked, with honest bewilderment, what
that
meant, Mike sat down with a thump and rocked back and forth, howling and holding his stomach.

“You probably think I'm jealous,” Richie said. “You probably think I
want
to be a Negro.”

Now Ben also fell down, laughing wildly. His whole body rippled and quaked alarmingly. His eyes bulged. “No more, Richie,” he managed. “I'm gonna shit my pants. I'm gonna d-d-die if you don't stuh-stop—”

“I
don't
want to be a Negro,” Richie said. “Who wants to wear pink pants and live in Boston and buy pizza by the slice? I want to be Jewish like Stan. I want to own a pawnshop and sell people switchblades and plastic dog-puke and used guitars.”

Ben and Mike were now actually screaming with laughter. Their laughter echoed through the green and jungly ravine that was the misnamed Barrens, causing birds to take wing and squirrels to freeze momentarily on limbs. It was a young sound, penetrating, lively, vital, unsophisticated, free. Almost every living thing within range of that sound reacted to it in some way, but the thing which had tumbled out of a wide concrete drain and into the upper Kenduskeag was not living. The previous afternoon there had been a sudden driving thunderstorm (the clubhouse-to-be had not been much affected—since digging operations had begun, Ben had covered the hole
carefully each evening with a ragged piece of tarpaulin Eddie had scrounged from behind Wally's Spa; it smelled painty but it did the job), and the stormdrains under Derry had run with violent water for two or three hours. It was that spate of water that had pushed this unpleasant baggage into the sun for the flies to find.

It was the body of a nine-year-old named Jimmy Cullum. Except for the nose, his face was gone. There was a churned and featureless mess where it had been. This raw meat was dotted with deep black marks that perhaps only Stan Uris would have recognized for what they were: pecks. Pecks made by a very large beak.

Water rilled over Jimmy Cullum's muddy chino pants. His white hands floated like dead fish. They had also been pecked, although not as badly. His paisley shirt ballooned out and collapsed back, ballooned out and collapsed back, like a bladder.

Bill and Eddie, loaded down with boards scrounged from the dump, crossed the Kenduskeag by stepping-stones less than forty yards from the body. They heard Richie, Ben, and Mike laughing, smiled a little themselves, and hurried past the unseen ruin of Jimmy Cullum to see what was so funny.

They were
still
laughing as Bill and Eddie came into the clearing, sweating under their load of lumber. Even Eddie, usually as pale as cheese, had some color in his face. They dropped the new boards on the almost depleted supply-pile. Ben climbed out of the hole to inspect them.

“Good deal!” he said. “Wow! Great!”

Bill collapsed to the ground. “Can I h-have my heart a-a-attack now or do I h-have to wuh-wait until luh-hater?”

“Have it later,” Ben said absently. He had brought a few tools of his own down to the Barrens and was now going over the new boards carefully, pounding out nails and removing screws. He tossed one aside because it was splintered. Rapping on another returned a dull punky sound in at least three places, and he also tossed that one aside. Eddie sat on a pile of dirt, watching him. He took a honk on his aspi
rator as Ben pulled a rusty nail from a board with the claw end of his hammer. The nail squealed like some small unpleasant animal that had been stepped on and didn't like it.

“You can get tetanus if you cut yourself on a rusty nail,” Eddie informed Ben.

“Yeah?” Richie said. “What's titnuss? Sounds like a woman's disease.”

“You're a bird,” Eddie said. “It's
tetanus,
not
titnuss,
and it means lockjaw. There's these special microbes that grow in rust, see, and if you cut yourself they can get inside your body and, um, fuck up your nerves.” Eddie went an even darker red and took another fast honk on his aspirator.

“Lockjaw, Jesus,” Richie said, impressed. “That sounds mean.”

“You bet. First your jaw locks up so tight you can't open your mouth, not even to eat. They have to cut a hole in your cheek and feed you liquids through a tube.”

“Oh man,” Mike said, standing up in the hole. His eyes were wide, the corneas very white in his brown face. “For sure?”

“My mom told me,” Eddie said. “Then your throat locks up and you can't eat anymore and you starve to death.”

They contemplated this horror in silence.

“There's no cure,” Eddie amplified.

More silence.

“So,” Eddie said briskly, “I always watch out for rusty nails and shit like that. I had to have a tetanus shot once and it really hurt.”

“So why'd you go to the dump with Bill and bring all this crap back?” Richie asked.

Eddie glanced briefly at Bill, who was looking into the clubhouse, and there was all the love and hero-worship in that gaze needed to answer such a question but Eddie said softly, “Some stuff has to be done even if there
is
a risk. That's the first important thing I ever found out I didn't find out from my mother.”

A further silence, not quite uncomfortable, followed. Then Ben went back to pounding out rusty nails, and after awhile Mike Hanlon joined him.

Richie's transistor, robbed of its voice (at least until Richie's allowance came in or he found a lawn to mow), swung from its low branch in a mild breeze. Bill had time to reflect upon how odd all this was,
how odd and how perfect, that they should all be here this summer. There were kids he knew visiting relatives. Kids he knew who were off on vacations at Disneyland in California or on Cape Cod or, in the case of one chum, an unimaginably distant-sounding place with the queer but somehow evocative name of Gstaad. There were kids at church camp, kids at Scout camp, kids at rich-kid camps where you could learn to swim and play golf, camps where you learned to say “Hey, good one!” instead of “Fuck you!” when your opponent got a killer serve past you at tennis; kids whose parents had simply taken them AWAY. Bill could understand that. He knew some kids who wanted to go AWAY, frightened by the boogeyman stalking Derry this summer, but suspected there were more parents frightened by that boogeyman. People who had planned to take their vacations at home suddenly decided to go AWAY

(Gstaad? was that in Sweden? Argentina? Spain?)