It, Page 64

  "Yes, thanks," Ben said. He drew a deep, shuddery breath. "I'm very sorry about this."

  "I just hope it isn't food-poisoning," she said.

  "Wouldn't work," Mr. Brockhill said without looking up from de Vargas or removing his dead pipe from the corner of his mouth. "Device of pulp fiction. Bullet would tumble."

  And speaking again with no foreknowledge that he was going to speak, Ben said: "Slugs, not bullets. We realized almost right away that we couldn't make bullets. I mean, we were just kids. It was my idea to--"

  "Shhhh!" someone said again.

  Brockhill gave Ben a slightly startled look, seemed about to speak, then went back to the sketches.

  At the desk, Carole Danner handed him a small orange card with DERRY PUBLIC LIBRARY stamped across the top. Bemused, Ben realized it was the first adult library-card he had owned in his whole life. The one he'd had as a kid had been canary-yellow.

  "Are you sure you don't want to lie down, Mr. Hanscom?"

  "I'm feeling a little better, thanks."

  "Sure?"

  He managed a smile. "I'm sure."

  "You do look a little better," she said, but she said it doubtfully, as if understanding that this was the proper thing to say but not really believing it.

  Then she was holding a book under the microfilm gadget they used these days to record book-loans, and Ben felt a touch of almost hysterical amusement. It's the book I grabbed off the shelf when the clown started to do its Pickaninny Voice, he thought. She thought I wanted to borrow it. I've made my first withdrawal from the Derry Public Library in twenty-five years, and I don't even know what the book is. Furthermore, I don't care. Just let me out of here, okay? That'll be enough.

  "Thank you," he said, putting the book under his arm.

  "You're more than welcome, Mr. Hanscom. Are you sure you wouldn't like an aspirin?"

  "Quite sure," he said--and then hesitated. "You wouldn't by any chance know what happened to Mrs. Starrett, would you? Barbara Starrett? She used to be the head of the Children's Library."

  "She died," Carole Danner said. "Three years ago. It was a stroke, I understand. It was a great shame. She was relatively young ... fifty-eight or -nine, I think. Mr. Hanlon closed the library for the day."

  "Oh," Ben said, and felt a hollow place open in his heart. That's what happened when you got back to your used-to-be, as the song put it. The frosting on the cake was sweet, but the stuff underneath was bitter. People forgot you, or died on you, or lost their hair and teeth. In some cases you found that they had lost their minds. Oh it was great to be alive. Boy howdy.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "You liked her, didn't you?"

  "All the kids liked Mrs. Starrett," Ben said, and was alarmed to realize that tears were now very close.

  "Are you--"

  If she asks me if I'm all right one more time, I really am going to cry, I think. Or scream. Or something.

  He glanced at his watch and said, "I really have to run. Thanks for being so nice."

  "Have a nice day, Mr. Hanscom."

  Sure. Because tonight I die.

  He tipped a finger her way and started back across the floor. Mr. Brockhill glanced up at him once, sharply and suspiciously.

  He looked up at the landing which topped the lefthand staircase. The balloon still floated there, tied by its string to lacy wrought-iron. But now the printing on its side read: I KILLED BARBARA STARRETT!

  --PENNYWISE THE CLOWN

  He looked away, feeling the pulse in his throat starting to run again. He let himself out and was startled by sunlight--the clouds overhead were coming unravelled and a warm late-May sun was shafting down, making the grass look impossibly green and lush. Ben felt something start to lift from his heart. It seemed to him that he had left some insupportable burden behind in the library ... and then he looked down at the book he had inadvertently withdrawn and his teeth clamped together with sudden, painful force. It was Bulldozer, by Stephen W. Meader, one of the books he had withdrawn from the library on the day he had dived into the Barrens to get away from Henry Bowers and his friends.

  And speaking of Henry, the track of his engineer boot was still on the book's cover.

  Shaking, fumbling at the pages, he turned to the back. The library had gone over to a microfilm checkout system; he had seen that. But there was still a pocket in the back of this book with a card tucked into it. There was a name written on each line of the card followed by the librarian's return-date stamp. Looking at the card, Ben saw this:

  And, on the last line of the card, his own childish signature, written in heavy pencil-strokes:

  Stamped across this card, stamped across the book's fly-leaf, stamped across the thickness of the pages, stamped again and again in smeary red ink that looked like blood, was one word: CANCEL.

  "Oh dear God," Ben murmured. He did not know what else to say; that seemed to cover the entire situation. "Oh dear God, dear God."

  He stood in the new sunlight, suddenly wondering what was happening to the others.

  2

  Eddie Kaspbrak Makes a Catch

  Eddie got off the bus at the comer of Kansas Street and Kossuth Lane. Kossuth was a street that ran a quarter of a mile downhill before dead-ending abruptly where the crumbling earth sloped into the Barrens. He had absolutely no idea why he had chosen this place to leave the bus; Kossuth Lane meant nothing to him, and he had known no one on this particular section of Kansas Street. But it seemed like the right place. That was all he knew, but at this point it seemed to be enough. Beverly had climbed off the bus with a little wave at one of the Lower Main Street stops. Mike had taken his car back to the library.

  Now, watching the small and somehow absurd Mercedes bus pull away, he wondered exactly what he was doing here, standing on an obscure street-corner in an obscure town nearly five hundred miles away from Myra, who was undoubtedly worried to tears about him. He felt an instant of almost painful vertigo, touched his jacket pocket, and remembered that he had left his Dramamine back at the Town House along with the rest of his pharmacopeia. He had aspirin, though. He would no more have gone out sans aspirin than he would have gone out sans pants. He chugged a couple dry and began to walk along Kansas Street, thinking vaguely that he might go to the Public Library or perhaps cross over to Costello Avenue. It was beginning to clear now, and he supposed he could even walk across to West Broadway and admire the old Victorian houses that stood there along the only two really handsome residential blocks in Derry. He used to do that sometimes when he was a kid--just walk along West Broadway, sort of casual, like he was on his way to somewhere else. There was the Muellers', near the corner of Witcham and West Broadway, a red house with turrets on either side and hedges in front. The Muellers had a gardener who always looked at Eddie with suspicious eyes until he had passed on his way.

  Then there was the Bowies' house, which was four down from the Muellers' on the same side--one of the reasons, he supposed, that Greta Bowie and Sally Mueller had been such great friends in grammar school. It was green-shingled and also had turrets ... but while the turrets on the Muellers' house were squared off, those on the Bowies' house were capped with funny cone-shaped things that looked to Eddie like squatty duncecaps. In the summer there was always lawn-furniture on the side lawn--a table with a sporty yellow umbrella over it, wicker chairs, a rope hammock stretched between two trees. There was always a croquet game set up out back, too. Eddie knew this although he had never been invited over to Greta's house to play croquet. Walking by casually (like he was on his way to somewhere else) Eddie would sometimes hear the click of the balls, laughter, groans as someone's ball was "sent away." Once he had seen Greta herself, a lemonade in one hand and her croquet mallet in the other, looking slim and pretty beyond the words of all the poets (even her sunburned shoulders seemed wonderfully pretty to Eddie Kaspbrak, who had at that time been nine), going after her ball, which had been "sent away"; it had ricocheted off a tree and had thus brought Greta into Eddie's view.

  He f
ell in love with her a little that day--her shining blonde hair falling to the shoulders of her culotte dress, which was a cool blue. She glanced around and for a moment he thought she had seen him, but that proved not to be so, because when he raised his hand in a timid hello, she did not raise hers in return but only whacked her ball back onto the rear lawn and then ran after it. He had walked on with no resentment at the unreturned hello (he genuinely believed she must not have see him) or at the fact that he had never been invited to attend one of the Saturday-afternoon croquet games: why would a beautiful girl like Greta Bowie want to invite a kid like him? He was thin-chested, asthmatic, and had the face of a drowned water-rat.

  Yeah, he thought, walking aimlessly back down Kansas Street, I should have gone over to West Broadway and looked at all those houses again... the Muellers', the Bowies', Dr. Hale's place, the Trackers'--

  His thoughts broke off abruptly at that last name, because--speak of the devil!--here he was, standing in front of Tracker Brothers' Truck Depot.

  "Still right here," Eddie said aloud, and laughed. "Son of a gun!"

  The house on West Broadway which belonged to Phil and Tony Tracker, a pair of life-long bachelors, was probably the loveliest of the large houses on that street, a spotlessly white mid-Victorian with green lawns and great beds of flowers that rioted (in a neatly landscaped way, of course) all the spring and summer long. Their driveway was freshly sealed each fall so that it always remained as black as a dark mirror, the slate shingles on the many slants of the roof were always a perfect mint green that almost exactly matched the lawn, and people sometimes stopped to take pictures of the mullioned windows, which were very old and quite remarkable.

  "Any two men who bother keeping a house so nice must be queers," Eddie's mother had once said in a disgruntled sort of way, and Eddie hadn't dared ask for clarification.

  The Truck Depot was the exact opposite of the Tracker house on West Broadway. It was a low brick structure; the bricks were old and crumbling in places, their dirty-orange hue shading to a sooty black at the building's footings. The windows were uniformly filthy except for a small circular place on one of the lower panes of the starter's office. This one pane had been kept spotlessly clean by kids before Eddie and those who came after, because the starter kept a Playboy calendar over his desk. No boy came to play scratch baseball in the back lot without first stopping to wipe at the glass with his ball-glove and examine that month's pinup.

  The depot was surrounded by a waste of gravel on three sides. Long-distance haulers--Jimmy-Petes and Kenworths and Rios--all painted with the words TRACKER BROS. DERRY NEWTON PROVIDENCE HARTFORD NEW YORK, sometimes stood here in tangled disordered profusion. Sometimes they were put together and sometimes there were just cabs or body-boxes, standing silent on their rear wheels and support-struts.

  The brothers kept their trucks out of the lot at the back of the building as much as they could, because they were both avid baseball fans and liked the kids to come and play. Phil Tracker drove freight himself so the boys rarely saw him, but Tony Tracker, a man with huge slab arms and a gut to match, kept the books and the accounts, and Eddie (who never played--his mother would have killed him if she had heard he was playing baseball, racing around and getting dust in his delicate lungs, risking broken legs, concussions, and God alone knew what else) got used to seeing him. He was a summer fixture, his voice as much a part of the game to Eddie then as Mel Allen's later became: Tony Tracker, large but somehow ghostlike, his white shirt glimmering as summer dusk drew down and fireflies began to loom the air with their lace of lights, yelling: "You got to get under that bawl before you can catch it, Red! ... You took your eye off'n the bawl, Half-Pint! You can't hit the goddam thing, if you ain't looking at it! ... Slide, Horsefoot! You get the soles of them Keds in that second-baseman's face, he ain't never goan tag you out!"

  Never called any of them by name, Eddie remembered. It was always hey Red, hey Blondie, hey Four-Eyes, hey Half-Pint. It was never a ball, it was always a bawl. It was never a bat, it was always something Tony Tracker called an "ash-handle," as in "You ain't never goan hit that bawl if you don't choke up on the ash-handle, Horsefoot."

  Grinning, Eddie walked a little closer ... and then the grin faded. The long brick building where orders had been processed, trucks repaired, and goods stored on a short-term basis was now dark and silent. Weeds were growing up through the gravel, and there were no trucks in either side yard ... only a single box, its sides rusty and dull.

  Getting closer still, he saw that there was a realtor's FOR SALE sign in the window.

  Tracker's out of business, he thought, and was surprised at the sadness the thought carried with it ... as if someone had died. He was glad now he hadn't walked over to West Broadway. If Tracker Brothers could have gone under--Tracker Brothers, which had seemed eternal--what might have happened on that street he had liked so much to walk down as a kid? He realized uneasily that he didn't want to know. He didn't want to see Greta Bowie with gray in her hair, her hips and legs thickened with much sitting and much eating and much drinking; it was better--safer--to just stay away.

  That's what we all should have done, just stayed away. We've got no business here. Coming back to where you grew up is like doing some crazy yoga trick, putting your feet in your own mouth and somehow swallowing yourself so there's nothing left; it can't be done, and any sane person ought to be fucking glad it can't ... what do you suppose happened to Tony and Phil Tracker, anyway?

  A heart attack for Tony, perhaps; he had been carrying maybe seventy-five extra pounds of meat on his bones. You had to watch out for what your heart might be up to. The poets might romance about broken hearts and Barry Manilow sing about them, and that was fine by Eddie (he and Myra had every album Barry Manilow had ever recorded), but he himself preferred a good solid EKG every year. Sure, Tony's heart had probably given it up as a bad job. And Phil? Bad luck on the highway maybe. Eddie, who made his living behind the wheel himself (or had; these days he only drove the celebs and spent the rest of his time driving a desk), knew about bad luck on the highway. Old Phil might have jackknifed a rig somewhere in New Hampshire or in the Hainesville Woods up north in Maine when the going was icy or maybe he had lost his brakes on some long hill south of Derry, heading into Haven in a driving springtime rain. Those things or any of the others you heard in those shitkicking country songs about truck-drivers who wore Stetson hats and had cheating on their minds. Driving a desk was sometimes lonely, but Eddie had been in the driver's seat himself more than once, his aspirator riding there with him on the dashboard, its trigger reflected ghostly in the windshield (and a bucketload of pills in the glove compartment), and he knew that real loneliness was a smeary red: the color of the taillights of the car ahead of you reflected on wet hottop in a driving rain.

  "Oh shit the time goes by," Eddie Kaspbrak said in a sighing sort of whisper, and was not even aware that he had spoken aloud.

  Feeling both mellow and unhappy--a state more common to him than he ever would have believed--Eddie skirted the building, Gucci loafers crunching in the gravel, to look at the lot where the baseball games had been played when he was a kid--when, it seemed, ninety percent of the world had been made up of kids.

  The lot wasn't much changed, but a look was enough to convince him beyond doubt that the games had stopped--a tradition that had simply died out at some point in the years between, for reasons of its own.

  In 1958 the diamond shape of the infield had been defined not by limed basepaths but in ruts made by running feet. They had no actual bases, those boys who had played baseball here (boys who were all older than the Losers, although Eddie remembered now that Stan Uris had sometimes played; his batting was only fair, but in the outfield he could run fast and he had the reflexes of an angel), but four pieces of dirty canvas were always kept under the loading-bay behind the long brick building, to be ceremonially taken out when enough kids had drifted into the back lot to play ball, and just as ceremonially returned when the sha
des of evening had fallen thickly enough to end further play.

  Standing here now, Eddie could see no trace of those rutted basepaths. Weeds had grown up through the gravel in patchy profusion. Broken soda and beer bottles twinkled here and there; in the old days, such shards of broken glass had been religiously removed. The only thing that was the same was the chainlink fence at the back of the lot, twelve feet high and as rusty as dried blood. It framed the sky in droves of diamond shapes.

  That was home-run territory, Eddie thought, standing bemused with his hands in his pockets at the place where home plate had been twenty-seven years ago. Over the fence and down into the Barrens. They used to call it The Automatic. He laughed out loud and then looked around nervously, as if it were a ghost who had laughed out loud instead of a guy in sixty-dollar slacks, a guy as solid as ... well, as solid as ... as...

  Get off it, Eds, Richie's voice seemed to whisper. You ain't solid at all, and in the last few years the chucks have been few and far between. Right?

  "Yeah, right," Eddie said in a low voice, and kicked a few loose stones away in a rattle.

  In truth, he had only seen two balls go over the fence at the back of the lot behind Tracker Brothers, both of them hit by the same kid: Belch Huggins. Belch had been almost comically big, already six feet tall at twelve, weighing maybe a hundred and seventy. He had gotten his nickname because he was able to articulate belches of amazing length and loudness--at his best, he sounded like a cross between a bullfrog and a cicada. Sometimes he would pat a hand rapidly across his open mouth while belching, emitting a sound like a hoarse Indian.

  Belch had been big and not really fat, Eddie remembered now, but it was as if God had never really intended for a boy of twelve to attain such remarkable size; if he had not died that summer, he might have grown to six-six or better, and might have learned along the way how to maneuver his outsized body through a world of smaller denizens. He might even, Eddie thought, have learned gentleness. But at twelve he had been both clumsy and mean, not retarded but almost seeming so because all his body's actions seemed so amazingly graceless and lunging. He had none of Stanley's built-in rhythms; it was as if Belch's body did not talk to his brain at all but existed in its own cosmos of slow thunder. Eddie could remember the evening a long, slow fly ball had been hit directly to Belch's position in the outfield--Belch didn't even have to move. He stood looking up, raised his glove in an almost aimless punching gesture, and instead of settling into his glove, the ball had struck him squarely on top of the head, producing a hollow bonk! sound. It was as if the ball had been dropped from three stories up onto the roof of a Ford sedan. It bounced up a good four feet and came down neatly into Belch's glove. An unfortunate kid named Owen Phillips had laughed at that bonking sound. Belch had walked over to him and had kicked his ass so hard that the Phillips kid had run screaming for home with a hole in the seat of his pants. No one else laughed ... at least not on the outside. Eddie supposed that if Richie Tozier had been there, he wouldn't have been able to help it, and Belch probably would have put him in the hospital. Belch was similarly slow at the plate. He was easy to strike out, and if he hit a grounder even the most fumble-fingered infielders had no trouble throwing him out at first. But when he got all of one, it went a long, long way. The two balls Eddie had seen Belch hit over the fence had both been wonders. The first had never been recovered, although more than a dozen boys had tramped back and forth over the steeply slanting slope which plunged down into the Barrens, looking for it.