It, Page 79

  Bill had fallen into a "jungle-safari" fantasy, as he often did when walking through this part of the Barrens. The bamboo was high and white, limiting visibility to the path they had made through here. The earth was black and squelchy, with sodden patches that had to be avoided or jumped over if you didn't want to get mud in your shoes. The puddles of standing water had oddly flat rainbow colors. The air had a reeky smell that was half the dump and half rotting vegetation.

  Bill halted one turn away from the Kenduskeag and turned back to Richie. "T-T-Tiger up ahead, T-T-Tozier."

  Richie nodded and turned back to Beverly. "Tiger," he breathed.

  "Tiger," she told Ben.

  "Man-eater?" Ben asked, holding his breath to keep from panting.

  "There's blood all over him," Beverly said.

  "Man-eating tiger," Ben muttered to Stan, and he passed the news back to Eddie, whose thin face was hectic with excitement.

  They faded into the bamboo, leaving the path of black earth that looped through it magically bare. The tiger passed in front of them and all of them nearly saw it: heavy, perhaps four hundred pounds, its muscles moving with grace and power beneath the silk of its striped pelt. They nearly saw its green eyes, and the flecks of blood around its snout from the last batch of pygmy warriors it had eaten alive.

  The bamboo rattled faintly, a noise both musical and eerie, and then was still again. It might have been a breath of summer breeze ... or it might have been the passage of an African tiger on its way toward the Old Cape side of the Barrens.

  "Gone," Bill said. He let out a pent-up breath and stepped out onto the path again. The others followed suit.

  Richie was the only one who had come armed: he produced a cap-pistol with a friction-taped handgrip. "I could have had a clear shot at him if you'd moved, Big Bill," he said grimly. He pushed the bridge of his old glasses up on his nose with the muzzle of the gun.

  "There's Wuh-Wuh-Watusis around h-h-here," Bill said. "C-C-Can't rih-risk a shot. Y-You w-want them down on t-t-top of us?"

  "Oh," Richie said, convinced.

  Bill made a come-on gesture with his arm and they were back on the path again, which narrowed into a neck at the end of the bamboo patch. They stepped out onto the bank of the Kenduskeag, where a series of stepping-stones led across the river. Ben had shown them how to place them. You got a big rock and plopped it in the water, then you got a second and plopped it in the water while you were stepping on the first, then you got a third and plopped it in the water while you were stepping on the second, and so on until you were all the way across the river (which here, and at this time of year, was less than a foot deep and shaled with tawny sandbars) with your feet still dry. The trick was so simple it was damn near babyish, but none of them had seen it until Ben pointed it out. He was good at stuff like that, but when he showed you he never made you feel like a dummy.

  They went down the bank in single file and started across the dry backs of the rocks they had planted.

  "Bill!" Beverly called urgently.

  He froze at once, not looking back, arms held out. The water chuckled and rilled around him. "What?"

  "There's piranha fish in here! I saw them eat a whole cow two days ago. A minute after it fell in, there was nothing but bones. Don't fall off!"

  "Right," Bill said. "Be careful, men."

  They teetered their way across the rocks. A freight-train charged by on the railway embankment as Eddie Kaspbrak neared the halfway point, and the sudden blast of its airhorn caused him to jiggle on the edge of balance. He looked into the bright water and for one moment, between the sunflashes that darted arrows of light into his eyes, he actually saw the cruising piranhas. They were not part of the make-believe that went with Bill's jungle safari fantasy; he was quite sure of that. The fish he saw looked like oversized goldfish with the great ugly jaws of catfish or groupers. Sawteeth protruded between their thick lips and, like goldfish, they were orange. As orange as the fluffy pompoms you sometimes saw on the suits the clowns wore at the circus.

  They circled in the shallow water, gnashing.

  Eddie pinwheeled his arms. I'm going in, he thought. I'm going in and they'll eat me alive--

  Then Stanley Uris gripped his wrist firmly and brought him back to dead center.

  "Close call," Stan said. "If you fell in, your mother'd give you heck."

  Thoughts of his mother were, for once, the furthest things from Eddie's mind. The others had gained the far bank now and were counting cars on the freight. Eddie stared wildly into Stan's eyes, then looked into the water again. He saw a potato-chip bag go dancing by, but that was all. He looked up at Stan again.

  "Stan, I saw--"

  "What?"

  Eddie shook his head. "Nothing, I guess," he said. "I'm just a little

  (but they were there yes they were and they would have eaten me alive)

  jumpy. The tiger, I guess. Keep going."

  This western bank of the Kenduskeag--the Old Cape bank--was a quagmire of mud during rainy weather and the spring runoff, but there had been no heavy rain in Derry for two weeks or more and the bank had dried to an alien crack-glaze from which several of those cement cylinders poked, casting grim little shadows. About twenty yards farther down, a cement pipe jutted out over the Kenduskeag and spilled a steady thin stream of foul-looking brown water into the river.

  Ben said quietly, "It's creepy here," and the others nodded.

  Bill led them up the dry bank and back into the heavy shrubbery, where bugs whirred and chiggers chigged. Every now and then there would be a heavy ruffle of wings as a bird took off. Once a squirrel ran across their path, and about five minutes later, as they approached the low wrinkle of ridge that guarded the town dump's blind side, a large rat with a bit of cellophane caught in its whiskers trundled in front of Bill, passing along its own secret run through its own microcosmic wilderness.

  The smell of the dump was now clear and pungent; a black column of smoke rose in the sky. The ground, while still heavily overgrown except for their own narrow path, began to be strewn with litter. Bill had dubbed this "dump-dandruff," and Richie had been delighted; he had laughed almost until he cried. "You ought to write that down, Big Bill," he said. "That's really good."

  Papers caught on branches wavered and flapped like cut-rate pennants; here was a silver gleam of summer sun reflected from a clutch of tin cans lying at the bottom of a green and tangled hollow; there the hotter reflection of sunrays bouncing off a broken beer bottle. Beverly spied a babydoll, its plastic skin so brightly pink it looked almost boiled. She picked it up, then dropped it with a little cry as she saw the whitish-gray beetles squirming from beneath its moldy skirt and down its rotting legs. She rubbed her fingers on her jeans.

  They climbed to the top of the ridge and looked down into the dump.

  "Oh shit," Bill said, and jammed his hands into his pockets as the others gathered around him.

  They were burning the northern end today, but here, at their end, the dumpkeeper (he was, in fact, Armando Fazio, Mandy to his friends, and the bachelor brother of the Derry Elementary School janitor) was tinkering on the World War II D-9 'dozer he used to push the crap into piles for burning. His shirt was off, and the big portable radio sitting under the canvas parasol on the 'dozer's seat was putting out the Red Sox-Senators pregame festivities.

  "Can't go down there," Ben agreed. Mandy Fazio was not a bad guy, but when he saw kids in the dump he ran them off at once--because of the rats, because of the poison he regularly sowed to keep the rat population down, because of the potential for cuts, falls, and burns... but mostly because he believed a dump was no place for children to be. "Ain't you nice?" he would yell at the kids he spied who had been drawn to the dump with their .22s to plink away at bottles (or rats, or seagulls) or by the exotic fascination of "dump-picking": you might find a toy that still worked, a chair that could be mended for a clubhouse, or a junked TV with the picture-tube still intact--if you threw a rock through one of these there was a very s
atisfying explosion. "Ain't you kids nice?" Mandy would bellow (he bellowed not because he was angry but because he was deaf and wore no hearing-aid). "Dintchore folks teach you to be nice? Nice boys and girls don't play in the dump! Go to the park! Go to the liberry! Go down to Community House and play box-hockey! Be nice!"

  "Nope," Richie said. "Guess the dump's out."

  They all sat down for a few moments to watch Mandy work on his 'dozer, hoping he would give up and go away but not really believing he would: the presence of the radio suggested Mandy intended to stay all afternoon. It was enough to piss off the Pope, Bill thought. There was really no better place to come with firecrackers than the dump. You could put them under tin cans and then watch the cans fly into the air when the firecrackers went off, or you could light the fuses and drop them into bottles and then run like hell. The bottles didn't always break, but usually they did.

  "Wish we had some M-80s," Richie sighed, unaware of how soon one would be chucked at his head.

  "My mother says people ought to be happy with what they have," Eddie said so solemnly that they all laughed.

  When the laughter died away, they all looked toward Bill again.

  Bill thought about it and then said, "I nuh-know a p-place. There's an old gruh-gruh-gravelpit at the end of the Buh-Barrens by the t-t-trainyards--"

  "Yeah!" Stan said, getting to his feet. "I know that place! You're a genius, Bill!"

  "They'll really echo there," Beverly agreed.

  "Well, let's go," Richie said.

  The six of them, one shy of the magic number, walked along the brow of the hill which circled the dump. Mandy Fazio glanced up once and saw them silhouetted against the blue sky like Indians out on a raiding party. He thought about hollering at them--the Barrens was no place for kids--and then he turned back to his work instead. At least they weren't in his dump.

  7

  Mike Hanlon ran past the Church School without pausing and pelted straight up Neibolt Street toward the Derry trainyards. There was a janitor at NCS, but Mr. Gendron was very old and even deafer than Mandy Fazio. Also, he liked to spend most of his summer days asleep in the basement by the summer-silent boiler, stretched out in a battered old reclining chair with the Derry News in his lap. Mike would still be pounding on the door and shouting for the old man to let him in when Henry Bowers came up behind him and tore his freaking head off.

  So Mike just ran.

  But not blindly; he was trying to pace himself, trying to control his breathing, not yet going all out. Henry, Belch, and Moose Sadler presented no problems; even relatively fresh they ran like wounded buffalo. Victor Criss and Peter Gordon, however, were much faster. As Mike passed the house where Bill and Richie had seen the clown--or the werewolf--he snapped a glance back and was alarmed to see that Peter Gordon had almost closed the distance. Peter was grinning cheerfully--a steeplechase grin, a full-out polo grin, a pip-pip-jolly-good-show grin, and Mike thought: Iwonder if he'd grin that way if he knew what's going to happen if they catch me.... Does he think they're just going to say "Tag, you're it," and run away?

  As the trainyard gate with its sign--PRIVATE PROPERTY KEEP OUT VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED--loomed up, Mike was forced to let himself out to the limit. There was no pain--his breathing was rapid yet still controlled--but he knew everything was going to start hurting if he had to keep this pace up for long.

  The gate was standing halfway open. He snapped a second look back and saw that he'd pulled away from Peter again. Victor was perhaps ten paces behind Peter, the others now forty or fifty yards back. Even in that quick glance Mike could see the black anger on Henry's face.

  He skittered through the opening, whirled, and slammed the gate closed. He heard the click as it latched. A moment later Peter Gordon slammed into the chainlink, and a moment after that, Victor Criss ran up beside him. Peter's smile was gone; a sulky, balked look had replaced it. He grabbed for the latch, but of course there was none: the latch was on the inside.

  Incredibly, he said: "Come on, kid, open the gate. That's not fair."

  "What's your idea of fair?" Mike asked, panting. "Five against one?"

  "Fair-up," Peter repeated, as if he had not heard Mike at all.

  Mike looked at Victor, saw the troubled look in Victor's eyes. He started to speak, but that was when the others pulled up to the gate.

  "Open up, nigger!" Henry bawled. He began to shake the chainlink with such ferocity that Peter looked at him, startled. "Open up! Open up right now!"

  "I won't," Mike said quietly.

  "Open up!" Belch shouted. "Open up, ya fuckin jigaboo!"

  Mike backed away from the gate, his heart beating heavily in his chest. He couldn't remember ever being quite this scared, quite this upset. They lined their side of the gate, shouting at him, calling him names for nigger he had never dreamed existed--nightfighter, Ubangi, spade, blackberry, junglebunny, others. He was barely aware that Henry was taking something from his pocket, that he had popped a wooden match alight with his thumbnail--and then a round red something came over the fence and he flinched instinctively away as the cherry-bomb exploded to his left, kicking up dust.

  The bang silenced them all for a moment--Mike stared unbelievingly at them through the fence, and they stared back. Peter Gordon looked utterly shocked, and even Belch looked stunned.

  They're ascared of him now, Mike thought suddenly, and a new voice spoke inside of him, perhaps for the first time, a voice that was disturbingly adult. They're ascared, but that won't stop them. You got to get away, Mikey, or something's going to happen. Not all of them will want it to happen, maybe--notVictor and maybe not Peter Gordon--butit will happen anyway because Henry will make it happen. So get away. Get away fast.

  He backed up another two or three steps and then Henry Bowers said: "I was the one killed your dog, nigger."

  Mike froze, feeling as if he had been hit in the belly with a bowling ball. He stared into Henry Bowers's eyes and understood that Henry was telling the simple truth: he had killed Mr. Chips.

  That moment of understanding seemed nearly eternal to Mike--looking into Henry's crazed sweat-ringed eyes and his rage-blackened face, it seemed to him that he understood a great many things for the first time, and the fact that Henry was far crazier than Mike had ever dreamed was only the least of them. He realized above all that the world was not kind, and it was more this than the news itself that forced the cry from him: "You honky chickenshit bastard!"

  Henry uttered a shriek of rage and attacked the fence, monkeying his way toward the top with a brute strength that was terrifying. Mike paused a moment longer, wanting to see if that adult voice that had spoken inside had been a true voice, and yes, it had been true: after the slightest hesitation, the others spread out and also began to climb.

  Mike turned and ran again, sprinting across the trainyards, his shadow trailing squat at his feet. The freight which the Losers had seen crossing the Barrens was long gone now, and there was no sound but Mike's own breathing in his ears and the musical jingle of chainlink as Henry and the others climbed the fence.

  Mike ran across one triple set of tracks, his sneakers kicking back cinders as he ran across the space between. He stumbled crossing the second set of tracks, and felt pain flare briefly in his ankle. He got up and ran on again. He heard a thud as Henry jumped down from the top of the fence behind him. "Here I come for your ass, nigger!" Henry bawled.

  Mike's reasoning self had decided that the Barrens were his only chance now. If he could get down there he could hide in the tangles of underbrush, in the bamboo... or, if things became really desperate, he could climb into one of the drainpipes and wait it out.

  He could do those things, maybe... but there was a hot spark of fury in his chest that had nothing to do with his reasoning self. He could understand Henry chasing after him when he got the chance, but Mr. Chips? ... killing Mr. Chips? My DOG wasn't a nigger, you cheapshit bastard, Mike thought as he ran, and the bewildered anger grew.

  Now he heard anot
her voice, this one his father's. I don't want you to make a career out of running away... 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....

  Mike had been running a straight line across the trainyards toward the storage quonsets. Beyond them another chainlink fence divided the trainyards from the Barrens. He had been planning to scale that fence and jump over to the other side. Instead he veered hard right, toward the gravelpit.

  This gravelpit had been used as a coalpit until 1935 or so--it had been a stoking-point for the trains which ran through the Derry yards. Then the diesels came, and the electrics. For a number of years after the coal was gone (much of the remainder stolen by people with coal-fired furnaces) a local contractor had dug gravel there, but he went bust in 1955 and since then the pit had been deserted. A spur railroad line still ran in a loop up to the pit and then back toward the switching-yards, but the tracks were dull with rust, and ragweed grew up between the rotting ties. These same weeds grew in the pit itself, vying for space with goldenrod and nodding sunflowers. Amid the vegetation there was still plenty of slag coal--the stuff people had once called "clinkers."

  As Mike ran toward this place, he took his shirt off. He reached the rim of the pit and looked back. Henry was coming across the tracks, his buddies spread out around him. That was okay, maybe.

  Moving as quickly as he could, using his shirt for a bindle, Mike picked up half a dozen handfuls of hard clinkers. Then he ran back toward the fence, swinging his shirt by the arms. Instead of climbing the fence when he reached it, he turned so his back was against it. He dumped the coal out of his shirt, stooped, and picked up a couple of chunks.

  Henry didn't see the coal; he only saw that he had the nigger trapped against the fence. He sprinted toward him, yelling.

  "This is for my dog, you bastard!" Mike cried, unaware that he had begun to cry. He threw one of the chunks of coal overhand. It flew in a hard direct line. It struck Henry's forehead with a loud bonk! and then rebounded into the air. Henry stumbled to his knees. His hands went to his head. Blood seeped through his fingers at once, like a magician's surprise.