It (16 page)

He shuddered helplessly, as if he had gone outside without his rubbers and caught a terrible chill.

“Eddie,
please!
”

She was beginning to weep again. Tears were her final defense,
just as they had always been his mother's: the soft weapon which paralyzes, which turns kindness and tenderness into fatal chinks in one's armor.

Not that he'd ever worn much armor anyway—suits of armor did not seem to fit him very well.

Tears had been more than a defense for his mother; they had been a weapon. Myra had rarely used her own tears so cynically . . . but, cynically or not, he realized she was trying to use them that way now . . . and she was succeeding.

He couldn't let her. It would be too easy to think of how lonely it was going to be, sitting in a seat on that train as it barrelled north toward Boston through the darkness, his suitcase overhead and his tote-bag full of nostrums between his feet, the fear sitting on his chest like a rancid Vicks-pack. Too easy to let Myra take him upstairs and make love to him with aspirins and an alcohol-rub. And put him to bed, where they might or might not make a franker sort of love.

But he had promised.
Promised.

“Myra, listen to me,” he said, making his voice purposely dry, purposely matter-of-fact.

She looked at him with her wet, naked, terrified eyes.

He thought he would try now to explain—as best he could; he would tell her about how Mike Hanlon had called and told him that it had started again, and yes, he thought most of the others were coming.

But what came out of his mouth was much saner stuff.

“Go down to the office first thing in the morning. Talk to Phil. Tell him I had to take off and that you'll drive Pacino—”

“Eddie, I just
can't!
” she wailed. “He's a big star! If I get lost he'll shout at me, I know he will, he'll
shout,
they all do when the driver gets lost . . . and . . . and I'll cry . . . there could be an accident . . . there probably
will
be an accident . . . Eddie . . . Eddie, you have to stay home. . . .”

“For God's sake!
Stop it!
”

She recoiled from his voice, hurt; although Eddie gripped his aspirator, he would not use it. She would see that as a weakness, one she could use against him.
Dear God, if You are there, please believe me when I say I don't want to hurt Myra. I don't want to cut her, don't even want to bruise her. But I promised, we all promised, we swore in blood, please help me God because I have to do this. . . .

“I hate it when you shout at me, Eddie,” she whispered.

“Myra, I hate it when I have to,” he said, and she winced.
There you go, Eddie—you hurt her again. Why don't you just punch her around the room a few times? That would probably be kinder. And quicker.

Suddenly—probably it was the thought of punching someone around the room which caused the image to come—he saw the face of Henry Bowers. It was the first time he had thought of Bowers in years, and it did nothing for his peace of mind. Nothing at all.

He closed his eyes briefly, then opened them and said: “You won't get lost, and he won't shout at you. Mr. Pacino is very nice, very understanding.” He had never driven Pacino before in his life, but contented himself with knowing that at least the law of averages was on the side of this lie—according to popular myth most celebrities were shitheels, but Eddie had driven enough of them to know it usually wasn't true.

There were, of course, exceptions to the rule—and in most cases the exceptions were real monstrosities. He hoped fervently for Myra's sake that Pacino wasn't one of these.

“Is he?” she asked timidly.

“Yes. He is.”

“How do you know?”

“Demetrios drove him two or three times when he worked at Manhattan Limousine,” Eddie said glibly. “He said Mr. Pacino always tipped at least fifty dollars.”

“I wouldn't care if he only tipped me fifty cents, as long as he didn't
shout
at me.”

“Myra, it's all as easy as one-two-three. One, you make the pickup at the Saint Regis tomorrow at seven
P.M.
and take him over to the ABC Building. They're retaping the last act of this play Pacino's in—
American Buffalo,
I think it's called. Two, you take him back to the Saint Regis around eleven. Three, you go back to the garage, turn in the car, and sign the greensheet.”

“That's all?”

“That's all. You can do it standing on your head, Marty.” She usually giggled at this pet name, but now she only looked at him with a painful childlike solemnity.

“What if he wants to go out to dinner instead of back to the hotel? Or for drinks? Or for dancing?”

“I don't think he will, but if he does, you take him. If it looks like he's going to party all night, you can call Phil Thomas on the radio-phone after midnight. By then he'll have a driver free to relieve you. I'd never stick you with something like this in the first place if I had a driver who was free, but I got two guys out sick, Demetrios on vacation, and everyone else booked up solid. You'll be snug in your own bed by one in the morning, Marty—one in the morning at the very, very latest. I apple-solutely guarantee it.”

She didn't laugh at apple-solutely, either.

He cleared his throat and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. Instantly the ghost-mom whispered:
Don't sit that way, Eddie. It's bad for your posture, and it cramps your lungs. You have very delicate lungs.

He sat up straight again, hardly aware he was doing it.

“This better be the only time I have to drive,” she nearly moaned. “I've turned into such a
horse
in the last two years, and my uniforms look so
bad
now.”

“It's the only time, I swear.”

“Who called you, Eddie?”

As if on cue, lights swept across the wall; a horn honked once as the cab turned into the driveway. He felt a surge of relief. They had spent the fifteen minutes talking about Pacino instead of Derry and Mike Hanlon and Henry Bowers, and that was good. Good for Myra, and good for him as well. He did not want to spend any time thinking or talking about those things until he had to.

Eddie stood up. “It's my cab.”

She got up so fast she tripped over the hem of her own nightgown and fell forward. Eddie caught her, but for a moment the issue was in grave doubt: she outweighed him by a hundred pounds.

And she was beginning to blubber again.

“Eddie, you
have
to tell me!”

“I can't. There's no time.”

“You never kept anything from me before, Eddie,” she wept.

“And I'm not now. Not really. I don't remember it all. At least, not yet. The man who called was—is—an old friend. He—”

“You'll get sick,” she said desperately, following him as he walked toward the front hall again. “I know you will. Let me come, Eddie, please, I'll take care of you, Pacino can get a cab or something, it won't kill him, what do you say, okay?” Her voice was rising, becoming
frantic, and to Eddie's horror she began to look more and more like his mother, his mother as she had looked in the last months before she died: old and fat and crazy. “I'll rub your back and see that you get your pills. . . . I . . . I'll help you. . . . I won't talk if you don't want me to but you can tell me everything. . . . Eddie . . .
Eddie, please don't go! Eddie, please! Pleeeeeease!”

He was striding down the hall to the front door now, walking blind, head down, moving as a man moves against a high wind. He was wheezing again. When he picked up the bags each of them seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. He could feel her plump pink hands on him, touching, exploring, pulling with helpless desire but no real strength, trying to seduce him with her sweet tears of concern, trying to draw him back.

I'm not going to make it!
he thought desperately. The asthma was worse now, worse than it had been since he was a kid. He reached for the doorknob but it seemed to be receding from him, receding into the blackness of outer space.

“If you stay I'll make you a sour-cream coffee-cake,” she babbled. “We'll have popcorn. . . . I'll make your favorite turkey dinner. . . . I'll make it for breakfast tomorrow morning if you want . . . I'll start right now . . . and giblet gravy
. . . . Eddie please I'm scared you're scaring me so bad!”

She grabbed his collar and pulled him backward, like a beefy cop putting the grab on a suspicious fellow who is trying to flee. With a final fading effort, Eddie kept going . . . and when he was at the absolute end of his strength and ability to resist, he felt her grip trail away.

She gave one final wail.

His fingers closed around the doorknob—how blessedly cool it was! He pulled the door open and saw a Checker cab sitting out there, an ambassador from the land of sanity. The night was clear. The stars were bright and lucid.

He turned back to Myra, whistling and wheezing. “You need to understand that this isn't something I
want
to do,” he said. “If I had a choice—any choice at all—I wouldn't go. Please understand that, Marty. I'm going but I'll be coming back.”

Oh but that felt like a lie.

“When? How long?”

“A week. Or maybe ten days. Surely no longer than that.”

“A week!” she screamed, clutching at her bosom like a diva in a bad opera. “A week! Ten days! Please, Eddie!
Pleeeeeee
—”

“Marty, stop. Okay? Just stop.”

For a wonder, she did: stopped and stood looking at him with her wet, bruised eyes, not angry at him, only terrified for him and, coincidentally, for herself. And for perhaps the first time in all the years he had known her, he felt that he could love her safely. Was that part of the going away? He supposed it was. No . . . you could flush the
supposed.
He
knew
it was. Already he felt like something living in the wrong end of a telescope.

But it was maybe all right. Was that what he meant? That he had finally decided it was all right to love her? That it was all right even though she looked like his mother when his mother had been younger and even though she ate brownies in bed while watching
Hardcastle and Mc Cormick
or
Falcon Crest
and the crumbs always got on his side and even though she wasn't all that bright and even though she understood and condoned his remedies in the medicine cabinet because she kept her own in the refrigerator?

Or was it . . .

Could it be that . . .

These other ideas were all things he had considered in one way or another, at one time or another, during his oddly entwined lives as a son and a lover and a husband; now, on the point of leaving home for what felt like the absolutely last time, a new possibility came to him, and startled wonder brushed him like the wing of some large bird.

Could it be that Myra was even
more
frightened than he was?

Could it be that his mother had been?

Another Derry memory came shooting up from his subconscious like a balefully fizzing firework. There had been a shoe store downtown on Center Street. The Shoeboat. His mother had taken him there one day—he thought he could have been no more than five or six—and told him to sit still and be good while she got a pair of white pumps for a wedding. So he sat still and was good while his mother talked with Mr. Gardener, who was one of the shoe-clerks, but he was only five (or maybe six), and after his mother had rejected the third pair of white pumps Mr. Gardener showed her, Eddie got bored and walked over to the far corner to look at something he had
spotted there. At first he thought it was just a big crate standing on end. When he got closer he decided it was some kind of desk. But it sure was the kookiest desk he had ever seen. It was so narrow! It was made of bright polished wood with lots of curvy inlaid lines and carved doojiggers in it. Also, there was a little flight of three stairs leading up to it, and he had never seen a desk with
stairs.
When he got right up to it, he saw that there was a slot at the bottom of the desk-thing, a button on one side, and on top of it—entrancing!—was something that looked exactly like Captain Video's Spacescope.

Eddie walked around to the other side and there was a sign. He must have been at least six, because he had been able to read it, softly whispering each word aloud:

DO YOUR SHOES FIT RIGHT?

CHECK AND SEE!

He went back around, climbed the three steps to the little platform, and then stuck his foot into the slot at the bottom of the shoe-checker.
Did
his shoes
fit right?
Eddie didn't know, but he was wild to
check and see.
He socked his face into the rubber faceguard and thumbed the button. Green light flooded his eyes. Eddie gasped. He could see a foot floating inside a shoe filled with green smoke. He wiggled his toes, and the toes he was looking at wiggled right back—they were his, all right, just as he had suspected. And then he realized it was not just his toes he could see; he could see his
bones,
too! The bones in his
foot!
He crossed his great toe over his second toe (as if sneakily warding off the consequences of telling a lie) and the eldritch bones in the scope made an X that was not white but goblin-green. He could see—

Then his mother shrieked, a rising sound of panic that cut through the quiet shoe store like a runaway reaper-blade, like a firebell, like doom on horseback. He jerked his startled, dismayed face out of the viewer and saw her pelting toward him across the store in her stocking feet, her dress flying out behind her. She knocked a chair over and one of those shoe-measuring things that always tickled his feet went flying. Her bosom heaved. Her mouth was a scarlet O of horror. Faces turned to follow her progress.