It, Page 77

  In Henry's ears, it was a constant litany: the nigger, the nigger, the nigger. Everything was the nigger's fault. The nigger had a nice white house with an upstairs and an oil furnace while Butch and his wife and his son lived in what was not much better than a tarpaper shack. When Butch couldn't make enough money farming and had to go to work in the woods for awhile, it was the nigger's fault. When their well went dry in 1956, it was the nigger's fault.

  Later that same year Henry, who was then ten years old, started to feed Mike's dog Mr. Chips old stewbones and bags of potato-chips. It got so Mr. Chips would wag his tail and come running when Henry called. When the dog was well used to Henry and Henry's treats, Henry one day fed him a pound of hamburger laced with insect poison. The bug-killer he found in the back shed; he had saved three weeks to buy the meat at Costello's.

  Mr. Chips ate half the poisoned meat and then stopped. "Go on, finish your treat, Niggerdog," Henry had said. Mr. Chips wagged his tail. Since Henry had called him this from the beginning, he believed it was his other name. When the pains started, Henry produced a piece of clothesline and tied Mr. Chips to a birch so he couldn't get away and run home. He then sat on a flat sunwarmed rock, put his chin in his palms, and watched the dog die. It took a good long time, but Henry considered it time well spent. At the end Mr. Chips began to convulse and a thin green foam ran from between his jaws.

  "How do you like that, Niggerdog?" Henry asked it, and it rolled its dying eyes up at the sound of Henry's voice and tried to wag its tail. "Did you like your lunch, you shitty mutt?"

  When the dog was dead, Henry removed the clothesline, went home, and told his father what he had done. Oscar Bowers was extremely crazy by that time; a year later his wife would leave him after he beat her nearly to death. Henry was likewise frightened of his father and felt a terrible hate for him sometimes, but he also loved him. And that afternoon, after he had told, he felt he had finally found the key to his father's affections, because his father had clapped him on the back (so hard that Henry almost fell over), taken him in the living room, and given him a beer. It was the first beer Henry had ever had, and for all the rest of his years he would associate that taste with positive emotions: victory and love.

  "Here's to a good job well done," Henry's crazy father had said. They clicked their brown bottles together and drank them down. So far as Henry knew, the niggers had never found out who killed their dog, but he supposed they had their suspicions. He hoped they did.

  The others in the Losers' Club knew Mike by sight--in a town where he was the only Negro child, it would have been strange if they had not--but that was all, because Mike didn't go to Derry Elementary School. His mother was a devout Baptist and Mike was therefore sent to the Neibolt Street Church School. In between geography, reading, and arithmetic there were Bible drills, lessons on such subjects as The Meaning of the Ten Commandments in a Godless World, and discussion-groups on how to handle everyday moral problems (if you saw a buddy shoplifting, for instance, or heard a teacher taking the name of God in vain).

  Mike thought the Church School was okay. There were times when he suspected, in a vague way, that he was missing some things--a wider communication with kids his own age perhaps--but he was willing to wait until high school for these things to happen. The prospect made him a little nervous because his skin was brown, but both his mother and father had been well treated in town as far as Mike could see, and Mike believed he would be treated well if he treated others the same way.

  The exception to this rule, of course, was Henry Bowers.

  Although he tried to show it as little as possible, Mike went in constant terror of Henry. In 1958 Mike was slim and well built, taller than Stan Uris but not quite as tall as Bill Denbrough. He was fast and agile, and that had saved him from several beatings at Henry's hands. And, of course, he went to a different school. Because of that and the age difference, their paths rarely coincided. Mike took pains to keep things that way. So the irony was this: although Henry hated Mike Hanlon more than any other kid in Derry, Mike had been the least hurt of any of them.

  Oh, he had taken his lumps. The spring after he had killed Mike's dog, Henry sprang out of the bushes one day while Mike was walking toward town to go to the library. It was late March, warm enough for bike-riding, but in those days Witcham Road turned to dirt just beyond the Bowers place, which meant that it was a quagmire of mud--no good for bikes.

  "Hello, nigger," Henry had said, emerging from the bushes, grinning.

  Mike backed off, eyes flicking warily right and left, watching for a chance to get away. He knew that if he could buttonhook around Henry, he could outdistance him. Henry was big and Henry was strong, but Henry was also slow.

  "Gonna make me a tarbaby," Henry said, advancing on the smaller boy. "You're not black enough, but I'll fix that."

  Mike cut his eyes to the left and twitched his body in that direction. Henry took the bait and broke that way--too fast and too far to pull himself back. Reversing with a sweet and natural speed, Mike took off to the right (in high school he would make the varsity football team as a tailback his sophomore year, and was only kept from breaking the school's all-time scoring record by a broken leg halfway through his senior season). He would have made it easily past Henry but for the mud. It was greasy, and Mike slipped to his knees. Before he could get up, Henry was upon him.

  "Niggerniggernigger!" Henry cried in a kind of religious ecstasy as he rolled Mike over. Mud went up the back of Mike's shirt and down the back of his pants. He could feel it squoozing into his shoes. But he did not begin to cry until Henry slathered mud across his face, plugging up both of his nostrils.

  "Now you're black!" Henry had screamed gleefully, rubbing mud in Mike's hair. "Now you're REEEELY black!" He ripped up Mike's poplin jacket and the tee-shirt beneath and slammed a poultice of mud down over the boy's bellybutton. "Now you're as black as midnight in a MINESHAFT!" Henry screamed triumphantly, and slammed mudplugs into both of Mike's ears. Then he stood back, muddy hands hooked into his belt, and yelled: "I killed your dog, black boy!" But Mike did not hear this because of the mud in his ears and his own terrified sobs.

  Henry kicked a final sticky clot of mud onto Mike and then turned and walked home, not looking back. A few moments later, Mike got up and did the same, still weeping.

  His mother was of course furious; she wanted Will Hanlon to call Chief Borton and have him out to the Bowers house before the sun went down. "He's been after Mikey before," Mike heard her say. He was sitting in the bathtub and his parents were in the kitchen. This was his second tub of water; the first had turned black almost the moment he had stepped into it and sat down. In her fury, his mother had lapsed into a thick Texas patois Mike could barely understand. "You put the law on him, Will Hanlon! Both the dog and the pup! You law em, hear me?"

  Will heard, but did not do as his wife asked. Eventually, when she cooled down (by then it was that night and Mike two hours asleep), he refreshed her on the facts of life. Chief Borton was not Sheriff Sullivan. If Borton had been sheriff when the incident of the poisoned chickens occurred, Will would never have gotten his two hundred dollars and would have had to be content with that state of affairs. Some men would stand behind you and some men wouldn't; Borton was of the latter type. He was, in fact, a jellyfish.

  "Mike has had trouble with that kid before, yes," he told Jessica. "But he hasn't had much because he's careful around Henry Bowers. This will serve to make him more careful."

  "You mean you're just going to let it go?"

  "Bowers has told his son stories about his dealings with me, I guess," Will said, "and his son hates the three of us because of them, and because his father has also told him that hating niggers is what men are supposed to do. It all comes back to that. I can't change the fact that our son is a Negro any more than I can sit here and tell you that Henry Bowers is going to be the last one to take after him because his skin's brown. He's going to have to deal with it all the rest of his life, as I have dealt wit
h it, and you have dealt with it. Why, right there in that Christian school you were bound he was going to go to the teacher told them blacks weren't as good as whites because Noah's son Ham looked at his father while he was drunk and naked and Noah's other two boys cast their eyes aside. That's why the sons of Ham were condemned to always be hewers of wood and drawers of water, she said. And Mikey said she was lookin right at him while she told that story to them."

  Jessica looked at her husband, mute and miserable. Two tears fell, one from each eye, and tracked slowly down her face. "Isn't there ever any getting away from it?"

  His reply was kind but implacable; it was a time when wives believed their husbands, and Jessica had no reason to doubt her Will.

  "No. There is no getting away from the word nigger, not now, not in the world we've been given to live in, you and me. Country niggers from Maine are still niggers. I have thought, times, that the reason I came back to Derry was that there is no better place to remember that. But I'll have a talk with the boy."

  The next day he called Mike out of the barn. Will sat on the yoke of his harrow and patted a place next to him for Mike.

  "You want to stay out of that Henry Bowers's way," he said.

  Mike nodded.

  "His father is crazy."

  Mike nodded again. He had heard as much around town. His few glimpses of Mr. Bowers had reinforced the notion.

  "I don't mean just a little crazy," Will said, lighting a home-rolled Bugler cigarette and looking at his son. "He's about three steps away from the boobyhatch. He came back from the war that way."

  "I think Henry's crazy too," Mike said. His voice was low but firm, and that strengthened Will's heart ... although he was, even after a checkered life whose incidents had included almost being burned alive in a juryrigged speakeasy called the Black Spot, unable to believe a kid like Henry could be crazy.

  "Well, he's listened to his father too much, but that is only natural," Will said. Yet on this his son was closer to the truth. Henry Bowers, either because of his constant association with his father or because of something else--some interior thing--was indeed slowly but surely going crazy.

  "I don't want you to make a career out of running away," his father said, "but because you're a Negro, you're apt to be put upon a good deal. Do you know what I mean?"

  "Yes, Daddy," Mike said, thinking of Bob Gautier at school, who had tried to explain to Mike that nigger could not be a bad word, because his father used it all the time. In fact, Bob told Mike earnestly, it was a good word. When a fighter on the Friday Night Fights took a bad beating and managed to stay on his feet, his daddy said, "His head is as hard as a nigger's," and when someone was really putting out at his work (which, for Mr. Gautier, was Star Beef in town), his daddy said, "That man works like a nigger." "And my daddy is just as much a Christian as your daddy," Bob had finished. Mike remembered that, looking at Bob Gautier's white earnest pinched face, surrounded by the mangy fur of his handmedown snowsuit-hood, he had felt not anger but a terrible sadness that made him feel like crying. He had seen honesty and good intent in Bob's face, but what he had felt was loneliness, distance, a great whistling emptiness between himself and the other boy.

  "I see that you do know what I mean," Will said, and ruffled his son's hair. "And what it all comes down to is that you have to be careful where you take your stand. You have to ask yourself if Henry Bowers is worth the trouble. Is he?"

  "No," Mike said. "No, I don't think so." It would be yet awhile before he changed his mind; July 3rd, 1958, in fact.

  4

  While Henry Bowers, Victor Criss, Belch Huggins, Peter Gordon, and a half-retarded high-school boy named Steve Sadler (known as Moose, after the character in the Archie comics) were chasing a winded Mike Hanlon through the trainyard and toward the Barrens about half a mile away, Bill and the rest of the Losers' Club were still sitting on the bank of the Kenduskeag, pondering their nightmare problem.

  "I nuh-know w-where ih-ih-it is, I think," Bill said, finally breaking the silence.

  "The sewers," Stan said, and they all jumped at a sudden, harsh rattling noise. Eddie smiled guiltily as he lowered his aspirator back into his lap.

  Bill nodded. "I wuh-wuh-was a-asking my fuh-father about the suh-sewers a f-few nuh-hi-hights a-a-ago."

  "All of this area was originally marsh," Zack told his son, "and the town fathers managed to put what's downtown these days in the very worst part of it. The section of the Canal that runs under Center and Main and comes out in Bassey Park is really nothing but a drain that happens to hold the Kenduskeag. Most of the year those drains are almost empty, but they're important when the spring runoff comes or when there are floods..." He paused here, perhaps thinking that it had been during the flood of the previous autumn that he had lost his younger son. "... because of the pumps," he finished.

  "Puh-puh-pumps?" Bill asked, turning his head a little without even thinking about it. When he stuttered over the plosive sounds, spittle flew from his lips.

  "The drainage pumps," his father said. "They're in the Barrens. Concrete sleeves that stick about three feet out of the ground--"

  "Buh-Buh-Ben H-H-H-Hanscom calls them Muh-Morlock h-holes," Bill said, grinning.

  Zack grinned back... but it was a shadow of his old grin. They were in Zack's workshop, where he was turning chair-dowels without much interest. "Sump-pumps is all they really are, kiddo," he said. "They sit in cylinders about ten feet deep, and they pump the sewage and the runoff along when the slope of the land levels out or angles up a little. It's old machinery, and the city should have some new pumps, but the Council always pleads poverty when the item comes up on the agenda at budget meetings. If I had a quarter for every time I've been down there, up to my knees in crap, rewiring one of those motors... but you don't want to hear all this, Bill. Why don't you go watch TV? I think Sugarfoot's on tonight."

  "I d-d-do wuh-want to h-hear it," Bill said, and not only because he had come to the conclusion that there was something terrible under Derry someplace.

  "Why do you want to hear about a bunch of sewer-pumps?" Zack asked.

  "Skuh-skuh-hool ruh-report," Bill said wildly.

  "School's out."

  "N-N-Next year."

  "Well, it's a pretty dull subject," Zack said. "Teacher'll probably give you an F for putting him to sleep. Look, here's the Kenduskeag"--he drew a straight line in the light fall of sawdust on the table in which his bandsaw was embedded--"and here's the Barrens. Now, because downtown's lower than the residential areas--Kansas Street, say, or the Old Cape, or West Broadway--most of the downtown waste has to be pumped into the river. The waste from the houses flows down to the Barrens pretty much on its own. You see?"

  "Y-Y-Yes," Bill said, drawing a little closer to his father to look at the lines, close enough so that his shoulder was against his father's arm.

  "Someday they'll put a stop to pumping raw sewage into the river and that'll be an end to the whole business. But for now, we've got those pumps in the... what did your buddy call em?"

  "Morlock holes," Bill said, with not a trace of a stutter; neither he nor his father noticed.

  "Yeah. That's what the pumps in the Morlock holes are for, anyway, and they work pretty well except when there's too much rain and the streams overflow. Because, although the gravity drains and the sewers with the pumps were meant to be separate systems, they actually crisscross all over the place. See?" He drew a series of "X"s radiating out from the line which represented the Kenduskeag, and Bill nodded. "Well, the only thing you need to know about water draining is that it will go wherever it can. When it gets high, it starts to fill up the drains as well as the sewers. When the water in the drains gets high enough to reach those pumps, it shorts them out. Makes trouble for me, because I have to fix them."

  "Dad, h-how big are the suh-sewers and drains?"

  "You mean, what's the bore on them?"

  Bill nodded.

  "The main sewers are maybe six feet in diameter. The secondarie
s, from the residential areas, are three or four, I guess. Some of them might be a little bigger. And believe me when I tell you this, Billy, and you can tell your friends: you never want to go into one of those pipes, not in a game, not on a dare, not for any reason."

  "Why?"

  "A dozen different town governments have built on them since 1885 or so. During the Depression the WPA put in a whole secondary drain system and a tertiary sewer system; there was lots of money for public works back then. But the fellow who bossed those projects got killed in World War II, and about five years later the Water Department found out that the system blueprints were mostly gone. That's about nine pounds of blues that just disappeared sometime between 1937 and 1950. My point is that nobody knows where all the damned sewers and drains go, or why.

  "When they work, nobody cares. When they don't, there's three or four sad sacks from Derry Water who have to try and find out which pump went flooey or where the plug-up is. And when they go down there, they damn well pack a lunch. It's dark and it's smelly and there are rats. Those are all good reasons to stay out, but the best reason is that you could get lost. It's happened before."

  Lost under Derry. Lost in the sewers. Lost in the dark. There was something so dismal and chilling about the idea that Bill was momentarily silenced. Then he said, "But haven't they ever suh-suh-hent people down to map--"

  "I ought to finish these dowels," Zack said abruptly, turning his back and pulling away. "Go on in and see what's on TV."

  "B-B-But Dah-Dah-Dad--"

  "Go on, Bill," Zack said, and Bill could feel the coldness again. That coldness made suppers a kind of torture as his father leafed through electrical journals (he hoped for a promotion the following year), as his mother read one of her endless British mysteries: Marsh, Sayers, Innes, Allingham. Eating in that coldness robbed food of its taste; it was like eating frozen dinners that had never seen the inside of an oven. Sometimes, after, he would go up to his room and lie on his bed, holding his griping stomach, and think: He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts. He thought of that more and more since Georgie had died, although his mother had taught him the phrase two years before. It had taken on a talismanic cast in his mind: the day he could walk up to his mother and simply speak that phrase without tripping or stuttering, looking her right in the eye as he spoke it, the coldness would break apart; her eyes would light up and she would hug him and say, "Wonderful, Billy! What a good boy! What a good boy!"