It (38 page)

You think too much, Bill.

No—that wasn't the problem. The problem was, he
imagined
too much.

He turned into Richard's Alley and came out on Center Street a few moments later, pedaling slowly, feeling the sweat on his back and in his hair. He dismounted Silver in front of the Center Street Drug Store and went inside.

Before George's death, Bill would have gotten the salient points across to Mr. Keene by speaking to him. The druggist was not exactly kind—or at least Bill had an idea he was not—but he was patient enough, and he did not tease or make fun. But now Bill's stutter was much worse, and he really was afraid something bad might happen to Eddie if he didn't move fast.

So when Mr. Keene said, “Hello, Billy Denbrough, can I help you?,” Bill took a folder advertising vitamins, turned it over, and wrote on the back:
Eddie Kaspbrak and I were playing in the Barrens. He's got a bad assmar attack, I mean he can hardly breath. Can you give me a refill on his asspirador?

He pushed this note across the glass-topped counter to Mr. Keene, who read it, looked at Bill's anxious blue eyes, and said, “Of course. Wait right here, and don't be handling anything you shouldn't.”

Bill shifted impatiently from one foot to the other while Mr. Keene was behind the rear counter. Although he was back there less
than five minutes, it seemed an age before he returned with one of Eddie's plastic squeeze-bottles. He handed it over to Bill, smiled, and said, “This should take care of the problem.”

“Th-th-th-thanks,” Bill said. “I don't h-have a-any m-m-muh-muh—”

“That's all right, son. Mrs. Kaspbrak has an account here. I'll just add this on. I'm sure she'll want to thank you for your kindness.”

Bill, much relieved, thanked Mr. Keene and left quickly. Mr. Keene came around the counter to watch him go. He saw Bill toss the aspirator into his bike-basket and mount clumsily.
Can he actually ride a bike that big?
Mr. Keene wondered.
I doubt it. I doubt it very much.
But the Denbrough kid somehow got it going without falling on his head, and pedaled slowly away. The bike, which looked to Mr. Keene like somebody's idea of a joke, wobbled madly from side to side. The aspirator rolled back and forth in the basket.

Mr. Keene grinned a little. If Bill had seen that grin, it might have gone a good way toward confirming his idea that Mr. Keene was not exactly one of the world's champion nice guys. It was sour, the grin of a man who has found much to wonder about but almost nothing to uplift in the human condition. Yes—he would add Eddie's asthma medication to Sonia Kaspbrak's bill, and as always she would be surprised—and suspicious rather than grateful—at how cheap the medication was. Other drugs were so
dear,
she said. Mrs. Kaspbrak, Mr. Keene knew, was one of those people who believed nothing cheap could do a person much good. He could really have soaked her for her son's HydrOx Mist, and there had been times when he had been tempted . . . but why should he make himself a party to the woman's foolishness? It wasn't as though he were going to starve.

Cheap? Oh my, yes. HydrOx Mist
(Administer as needed
typed neatly on the gummed label he pasted on each aspirator bottle) was wonderfully cheap, but even Mrs. Kaspbrak was willing to admit that it controlled her son's asthma quite well in spite of that fact. It was cheap because it was nothing but a combination of hydrogen and oxygen, with a dash of camphor added to give the mist a faint medicinal taste.

In other words, Eddie's asthma medicine was tapwater.

It took Bill longer to get back, because he was going uphill. In several places he had to dismount and push Silver. He simply didn't have the musclepower necessary to keep the bike going up more than mild slopes.

By the time he had stashed his bike and made his way back to the stream, it was ten past four. All sorts of black suppositions were crossing his mind. The Hanscom kid would have deserted, leaving Eddie to die. Or the bullies could have backtracked and beaten the shit out of both of them. Or . . . worst of all . . . the man whose business was murdering kids might have gotten one or both of them. As he had gotten George.

He knew there had been a great deal of gossip and speculation about that. Bill had a bad stutter, but he wasn't deaf—although people sometimes seemed to think he must be, since he spoke only when absolutely necessary. Some people felt that the murder of his brother wasn't related at all to the murders of Betty Ripsom, Cheryl Lamonica, Matthew Clements, and Veronica Grogan. Others claimed that George, Ripsom, and Lamonica had been killed by one man, and the other two were the work of a “copy-cat killer.” A third school of thought held that the boys had been killed by one man, the girls by another.

Bill believed they had all been killed by the same person . . . if it
was
a person. He sometimes wondered about that. As he sometimes wondered about his feelings concerning Derry this summer. Was it still the aftermath of George's death, the way his parents seemed to ignore him now, so lost in their grief over their younger son that they couldn't see the simple fact that Bill was still alive, and might be hurting himself? Those things combined with the other murders? The voices that sometimes seemed to speak in his head now, whispering to him (and surely they were not variations of his own voice, for these voices did not stutter—they were quiet, but they were sure), advising him to do certain things but not others? Was it those things which made Derry seem somehow different now? Somehow threatening, with unexplored streets that did not invite but seemed instead to yawn in a kind of ominous silence? That made some faces look secret and frightened?

He didn't know, but he believed—as he believed all the murders were the work of a single agency—that Derry really
had
changed, and that his brother's death had signalled the beginning of that change. The black suppositions in his head came from the lurking idea that anything could happen in Derry now.
Anything.

But when he came around the last bend, all looked cool. Ben Hanscom was still there, sitting beside Eddie. Eddie himself was sitting up now, his hands dangling in his lap, head bent, still wheezing. The sun had sunk low enough to project long green shadows across the stream.

“Boy, that was quick,” Ben said, standing up. “I didn't expect you for another half an hour.”

“I got a f-f-fast b-bike,” Bill said with some pride. For a moment the two of them looked at each other cautiously, warily. Then Ben smiled tentatively, and Bill smiled back. The kid was fat, but he seemed okay. And he had stayed put. That must have taken some guts, with Henry and his j.d. friends maybe still wandering around out there someplace.

Bill winked at Eddie, who was looking at him with dumb gratitude. “H-Here you g-go, E-E-E-Eddie.” He tossed him the aspirator. Eddie plunged it into his open mouth, triggered it, and gasped convulsively. Then he leaned back, eyes shut. Ben watched this with concern.

“Jeez! He's really got it bad, doesn't he?”

Bill nodded.

“I was scared there for awhile,” Ben said in a low voice. “I was wonderin what to do if he had a convulsion, or something. I kept tryin to remember the stuff they told us in that Red Cross assembly we had in April. All I could come up with was put a stick in his mouth so he wouldn't bite his tongue off.”

“I think that's for eh-eh-hepileptics.”

“Oh. Yeah, I guess you're right.”

“He w-won't have a c-c-convulsion, anyway,” Bill said. “That m-m-medicine will f-fix him right up. Luh-Luh-Look.”

Eddie's labored breathing had eased. He opened his eyes and looked up at them.

“Thanks, Bill,” he said. “That one was a real pisswah.”

“I guess it started when they creamed your nose, huh?” Ben asked.

Eddie laughed ruefully, stood up, and stuck the aspirator in his back pocket. “Wasn't even thinking about my nose. Was thinking about my mom.”

“Yeah? Really?” Ben sounded surprised, but his hand went to the rags of his sweatshirt and began fiddling there nervously.

“She's gonna take one look at the blood on my shirt and have me down to the Mergency Room at Derry Home in about five seconds.”

“Why?” Ben asked. “It stopped, didn't it? Gee, I remember this kid I was in kindergarten with, Scooter Morgan, and he got a bloody nose when he fell off the monkey bars. They took
him
to the Mergency Room, but only because it kept bleeding.”

“Yeah?” Bill asked, interested. “Did he d-d-die?”

“No, but he was out of school a week.”

“It doesn't matter if it stopped or not,” Eddie said gloomily. “She'll take me anyway. She'll think it's broken and I got pieces of bone sticking in my brain, or something.”

“C-C-Can you get bones in your buh-buh-
brain?
” Bill asked. This was turning into the most interesting conversation he'd had in weeks.

“I don't know. If you listen to my mother, you can get anything.” Eddie turned to Ben again. “She takes me down to the Mergency Room about once or twice a month. I hate that place. There was this orderly once? He told her they oughtta make her pay rent. She was really P.O.'d.”

“Wow,” Ben said. He thought Eddie's mother must be really weird. He was unconscious of the fact that now both of his hands were fiddling in the remains of his sweatshirt. “Why don't you just say no? Say something like ‘Hey Ma, I feel all right, I just want to stay home and watch
Sea Hunt.'
Like that.”

“Awww,” Eddie said uncomfortably, and said no more.

“You're Ben H-H-H-Hanscom, r-right?” Bill asked.

“Yeah. You're Bill Denbrough.”

“Yuh-Yes. And this is Eh-Eh-Eh-heh-Eh-Eh—”

“Eddie Kaspbrak,” Eddie said. “I hate it when you stutter my name, Bill. You sound like Elmer Fudd.”

“Suh-horry.”

“Well, I'm pleased to meet you both,” Ben said. It came out sounding prissy and a little lame. A silence fell amid the three of them. It was not an entirely uncomfortable silence. In it they became friends.

“Why were those guys chasing you?” Eddie asked at last.

“They're a-a-always chuh-hasing s-someone,” Bill said. “I h-hate those fuckers.”

Ben was silent a moment—mostly in admiration—before Bill's use of what Ben's mother sometimes called The Really Bad Word. Ben had never said The Really Bad Word out loud in his whole life, although he had written it (in extremely small letters) on a telephone pole the Halloween before last.

“Bowers ended up sitting next to me during the exams,” Ben said at last. “He wanted to copy off my paper. I wouldn't let him.”

“You must want to die young, kid,” Eddie said admiringly.

Stuttering Bill burst out laughing. Ben looked at him sharply, decided he wasn't being laughed
at,
exactly (it was hard to say
how
he knew it, but he did), and grinned.

“I guess I must,” he said. “Anyway, he's got to take summer-school, and he and those other two guys were laying for me, and that's what happened.”

“Y-You look like t-t-they kuh-hilled you,” Bill said.

“I fell down here from Kansas Street. Down the side of the hill.” He looked at Eddie. “I'll probably see you in the Mergency Room, now that I think about it. When my mom gets a look at my clothes, she'll
put
me there.”

Both Bill and Eddie burst out laughing this time, and Ben joined them. It hurt his stomach to laugh but he laughed anyway, shrilly and a little hysterically. Finally he had to sit down on the bank, and the plopping sound his butt made when it hit the dirt got him going all over again. He liked the way his laughter sounded with theirs. It was a sound he had never heard before: not mingled laughter—he had heard that lots of times—but mingled laughter of which his own was a part.

He looked up at Bill Denbrough, their eyes met, and that was all it took to get both of them laughing again.

Bill hitched up his pants, flipped up the collar of his shirt, and began to slouch around in a kind of moody, hoody strut. His voice dropped down low' and he said, “I'm gonna killya, kid. Don't gimme no crap. I'm dumb but I'm big. I can crack walnuts with my forehead. I can piss vinegar and shit cement. My name's Honeybunch Bowers and I'm the boss prick round dese-yere Derry parts.”

Eddie had collapsed to the stream-bank now and was rolling
around, clutching his stomach and howling. Ben was doubled up, head between his knees, tears spouting from his eyes, snot hanging from his nose in long white runners, laughing like a hyena.

Bill sat down with them, and little by little the three of them quieted.

“There's one really good thing about it,” Eddie said presently. “If Bowers is in summer school, we won't see him much down here.”

“You play in the Barrens a lot?” Ben asked. It was an idea that never would have crossed his own mind in a thousand years—not with the reputation the Barrens had—but now that he was down here, it didn't seem bad at all. In fact, this stretch of the low bank was very pleasant as the afternoon made its slow way toward dusk.

“S-S-Sure. It's n-neat. M-Mostly n-nobody b-buh-bothers u-us down h-here. We guh-guh-hoof off a lot. B-B-Bowers and those uh-other g-guys don't come d-down here eh-eh-anyway.”

“You and Eddie?”

“Ruh-Ruh-Ruh—” Bill shook his head. His face knotted up like a wet dishrag when he stuttered, Ben noticed, and suddenly an odd thought occurred to him: Bill hadn't stuttered at all when he was mocking the way Henry Bowers talked.
“Richie!”
Bill exclaimed now, paused a moment, and then went on. “Richie T-Tozier usually c-comes down, too. But h-him and his d-dad were going to clean out their ah-ah-ah—”