It (78 page)

They all knew what Bill and Ben had been up to, but Bill had a peculiar sense that there had been no personal association of their names—Ben as an architect, himself as a writer—with people they had known as children until very, very recently. Beverly had paperback copies of
Joanna
and
The Black Rapids
in her purse, and asked
him if he would sign them. Bill did so, noticing as he did that both books were in mint condition—as if they had been purchased in the airport newsstand as she got off the plane.

In like fashion, Richie told Ben how much he had admired the BBC communications center in London . . . but there was a puzzled sort of light in his eyes, as if he could not quite reconcile that building with this man . . . or with the fat earnest boy who had showed them how to flood out half the Barrens with scrounged boards and a rusty car door.

Richie was a disc jockey in California. He told them he was known as the Man of a Thousand Voices and Bill groaned. “God, Richie, your Voices were always so
terrible.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere, mawster,” Richie replied loftily.

When Beverly asked him if he wore contacts now, Richie said in a low voice, “Come a little closer, bay-bee. Look in my eyes.” Beverly did, and exclaimed delightedly as Richie tilted his head a little so she could see the lower rims of the Hydromist soft lenses he wore.

“Is the library still the same?” Ben asked Mike Hanlon.

Mike took out his wallet and produced a snap of the library, taken from above. He did it with the proud air of a man producing snapshots of his kids when asked about his family. “Guy in a light plane took this,” he said, as the picture went from hand to hand. “I've been trying to get either the City Council or some well-heeled private donor to supply enough cash to get it blown up to mural size for the Children's Library. So far, no soap. But it's a good picture, huh?”

They all agreed that it was. Ben held it longest, looking at it fixedly. Finally he tapped the glass corridor which connected the two buildings. “Do you recognize this from anywhere else, Mike?”

Mike smiled. “It's your communications center,” he said, and all six of them burst out laughing.

The drinks came. They sat down.

That silence, sudden, awkward, and perplexing, fell again. They looked at each other.

“Well?” Beverly asked in her sweet, slightly husky voice. “What do we drink to?”

“To us,” Richie said suddenly. And now he wasn't smiling. His eyes caught Bill's and with a force so great he could barely deal with it, Bill remembered himself and Richie in the middle of Neibolt
Street, after the thing which might have been a clown or which might have been a werewolf had disappeared, embracing each other and weeping. When he picked up his glass, his hand was trembling, and some of his drink spilled on the napery.

Richie rose slowly to his feet, and one by one the others followed suit: Bill first, then Ben and Eddie, Beverly, and finally Mike Hanlon. “To us,” Richie said, and like Bill's hand, his voice trembled a little. “To the Losers' Club of 1958.”

“The Losers,” Beverly said, slightly amused.

“The Losers,” Eddie said. His face was pale and old behind his rimless glasses.

“The Losers,” Ben agreed. A faint and painful smile ghosted at the corners of his mouth.

“The Losers,” Mike Hanlon said softly.

“The Losers,” Bill finished.

Their glasses touched. They drank.

That silence fell again, and this time Richie did not break it. This time the silence seemed necessary.

They sat back down and Bill said, “So spill it, Mike. Tell us what's been happening here, and what we can do.”

“Eat first,” Mike said. “We'll talk afterward.”

So they ate . . . and they ate long and well. Like that old joke about the condemned man, Bill thought, but his own appetite was better than it had been in ages . . . since he was a kid, he was tempted to think. The food was not stunningly good, but it was far from bad, and there was a lot of it. The six of them began trading stuff back and forth—spareribs,
moo goo gai pan,
chicken wings that had been delicately braised, egg rolls, water chestnuts wrapped in bacon, strips of beef that had been threaded onto wooden skewers.

They began with
pu-pu
platters, and Richie made a childish but amusing business of broiling a little bit of everything over the flaming pot in the center of the platter he was sharing with Beverly—including half an egg roll and a few red kidney beans.
“Flambé
at my table, I love it,” he told Ben. “I'd eat shit on a shingle if it was
flambé
at my table.”

“And probably has,” Bill remarked. Beverly laughed so hard at this she had to spit a mouthful of food into her napkin.

“Oh God, I think I'm gonna ralph,” Richie said in an eerily exact
imitation of Don Pardo, and Beverly laughed harder, blushing a bright red.

“Stop it, Richie,” she said. “I'm warning you.”

“The warning is taken,” Richie said. “Eat well, dear.”

Rose herself brought them their dessert—a great mound of baked Alaska which she ignited at the head of the table, where Mike sat.

“More
flambé
at my table,” Richie said in the voice of a man who has died and gone to heaven. “This may be the best meal I've ever eaten in my life.”

“But of course,” Rose said demurely.

“If I blow that out, do I get my wish?” he asked her.

“At Jade of the Orient, all wishes are granted, sir.”

Richie's smile faltered suddenly. “I applaud the sentiment,” he said, “but you know, I really doubt the veracity.”

They almost demolished the baked Alaska. As Bill sat back, his belly straining the waistband of his pants, he happened to notice the glasses on the table. There seemed to be hundreds of them. He grinned a little, realizing that he himself had sunk two martinis before the meal and God knew how many bottles of Kirin beer with it. The others had done about as well. In their state, fried chunks of bowling pin would probably have tasted okay. And yet he didn't feel drunk.

“I haven't eaten like that since I was a kid,” Ben said. They looked at him and a faint flush of color tinged his cheeks. “I mean it literally. That may be the biggest meal I've eaten since I was a sophomore in high school.”

“You went on a diet?” Eddie asked.

“Yeah,” Ben said. “I did. The Ben Hanscom Freedom Diet.”

“What got you going?” Richie asked.

“You don't want to hear all that ancient history. . . .” Ben shifted uncomfortably.

“I don't know about the rest of them,” Bill said, “but I do. Come on, Ben. Give. What turned Haystack Calhoun into the magazine model we see before us today?”

Richie snorted a little. “Haystack, right. I'd forgotten that.”

“It's not much of a story,” Ben said. “No story at all, really. After that summer—after 1958—we stayed in Derry another two years. Then my mom lost her job and we ended up moving to Nebraska, because she had a sister there who offered to take us in until my mother
got on her feet again. It wasn't so great. Her sister, my aunt Jean, was a miserly bitch who had to keep telling you what your place in the great scheme of things was, how lucky we were that my mom had a sister who could give us charity, how lucky we were not to be on welfare, all that sort of thing. I was so fat I disgusted her. She couldn't leave it alone. ‘Ben, you ought to get more exercise. Ben, you'll have a heart attack before you're forty if you don't lose weight. Ben, with little children starving in the world, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.' ” He paused for a moment and sipped some water.

“The thing was, she
also
trotted the starving children out if I didn't clean my plate.”

Richie laughed and nodded.

“Anyway, the country was just pulling out of a recession and my mother was almost a year finding steady work. By the time we moved out of Aunt Jean's place in La Vista and got our own in Omaha, I'd put on about ninety pounds over when you guys knew me. I think I put on most of it just to spite my Aunt Jean.”

Eddie whistled. “That would have put you at about—”

“At about two hundred and ten,” Ben said gravely. “Anyway, I was going to East Side High School in Omaha, and the phys ed periods were . . . well, pretty bad. The other kids called me Jugs. That ought to give you the idea.

“The ragging went on for about seven months, and then one day, while we were getting dressed in the locker room after the period, two or three of the guys started to . . . to kind of slap my gut. They called it ‘fat-paddling.' Pretty soon two or three others got in on it. Then four or five more. Pretty soon it was all of them, chasing me around the locker room and up the hall, whacking my gut, my butt, my back, my legs. I got scared and started to scream. That made the rest of them laugh like crazy.

“You know,” he said, looking down and carefully rearranging his silverware, “that's the last time I can remember thinking of Henry Bowers until Mike called me two days ago. The kid who started it was a farmboy with these big old hands, and while they were chasing after me I remember thinking that Henry had come back. I think—no, I
know—
that's when I panicked.

“They chased me up the hall past the lockers where the guys who played sports kept their stuff. I was naked and red as a lobster. I'd
lost any sense of dignity or . . . or of myself, I guess you'd say. Where myself was. I was screaming for help. And here they came after me, screaming
‘Fat-paddling! Fat-paddling! Fat-paddling!'
There was a bench—”

“Ben, you don't have to put yourself through this,” Beverly said suddenly. Her face had gone ashy-pale. She toyed with her waterglass, and almost spilled it.

“Let him finish,” Bill said.

Ben looked at him for a moment and then nodded. “There was a bench at the end of the corridor. I fell over it and hit my head. They were all around me in another minute or two, and then this voice said: ‘Okay. That's enough. You guys go change up.'

“It was Coach, standing there in the doorway, wearing his blue sweatpants with the white stripe up the sides and his white tee-shirt. There was no way of telling how long he'd been standing there. They all looked at him, some of them grinning, some of them guilty, some of them just looking sort of vacant. They went away. And I burst into tears.

“Coach just stood there in the doorway leading back to the gym, watching me, watching this naked fat boy with his skin all red from the fat-paddling, watching this fat kid crying on the floor.

“And finally he said, ‘Benny, why don't you just fucking shut up?'

“It shocked me so much to hear a teacher use that word that I did. I looked up at him, and he came over and sat down on the bench I'd fallen over. He leaned over me, and the whistle around his neck swung out and bonked me on the forehead. For a second I thought he was going to kiss me or something, and I shrank back from him, but what he did was grab one of my tits in each hand and squeeze. Then he took his hands away and rubbed them on his pants like he'd touched something dirty.

“ ‘You think I'm going to comfort you?' he asked me. ‘I'm not. You disgust them and you disgust me as well. We got different reasons, but that's because they're kids and I'm not. They don't know why you disgust them. I do know. It's because I see you burying the good body God gave you in a great big mess of fat. It's a lot of stupid self-indulgence, and it makes me want to puke. Now listen to me, Benny, because this is the only time I'm going to say it to you. I got a football team to coach, and basketball, and track, and somewhere
in between I've got swimming team. So I'll just say it once. You're fat up here.' And he tapped my forehead right where his damned whistle had bonked me. ‘That's where everybody's fat. You put what's between your ears on a diet and you're going to lose weight. But guys like you never do.' ”

“What a
bastard!”
Beverly said indignantly.

“Yeah,” Ben said, grinning. “But he didn't
know
he was a bastard, that's how dumb he was. He'd probably seen Jack Webb in that movie
The D.I.
about sixty times, and he actually thought he was doing me a favor. And as it turned out, he was. Because I thought of something right then. I thought . . .”

He looked away, frowning—and Bill had the strangest feeling that he knew what Ben was going to say before he said it.

“I told you that the last time I can remember thinking of Henry Bowers was when the other boys were chasing after me and fat-paddling. Well, when the Coach was getting up to go, that was the last time I really thought of what we'd done in the summer of '58. I thought—”

He hesitated again, looking at each of them in turn, seeming to search their faces. He went on carefully.

“I thought of how
good
we were together. I thought of what we did and how we did it, and all at once it hit me that if Coach had to face anything like that, his hair would probably have turned white all at once and his heart would have stopped dead in his chest like an old watch. It wasn't fair, of course, but he hadn't been fair to me. What happened was simple enough—”

“You got mad,” Bill said.

Ben smiled. “Yeah, that's right,” he said. “I called, ‘Coach!'

“He turned around and looked at me. ‘You say you coach track?' I asked him.

“ ‘That's right,' he said. ‘Not that it's anything to you.'

“ ‘You listen to me, you stupid stone-brained son of a bitch,' I said, and his mouth dropped open and his eyes bugged out. ‘I'll be out there for the track team in March. What do you think about that?'