C H A P T E R 8 4 страница

They ran toward the mouth of the alley. Victor Criss jumped in front of them. Bellowing, Ben lowered his head and rammed it into Victor's middle. 'Woof! ' Victor grunted, and sat down.

Belch grabbed a handful of Beverly's pony-tail and whipped her smartly against the Aladdin's brick wall. Beverly bounced off and ran down the a ey, rubbing her arm. Richie ran after her, grabbing a garbage-can lid on the way. Belch Huggins swung a fist almost the size of a Daisy ham at him. Richie pistoned out the galvanized steel lid. Belch's fist met it. There was a loud bonnngg! — a sound that was almost mellow. Richie felt the shock travel all the way up his arm to the shoulder. Belch screamed and began to hop up and down, holding his swelling hand.

'Yondah lies da tent of my faddah, ' Richie said confidentially, doing a very passable Tony Curtis Voice, and then ran after Ben and Beverly.

One of the boys at the mouth of the alley had caught Beverly. Ben was tussling with him. The other boy began to rabbit-punch Ben in the small of the back. Richie swung his foot. It connected with the rabbit-puncher's buttocks. The boy howled with pain. Richie grabbed Beverly's arm in one hand, Ben's in the other.

'Run! ' he shouted.

The boy Ben had been tussling with let go of Beverly and looped a punch at Richie. His ear exploded with momentary pain, then went numb and became very warm. A high whistling sound began to whine in his head. It sounded like the noise you were supposed to listen for when the school nurse put the earphones on you to test your hearing.

They ran down Center Street. People turned to look at them. Ben's large stomach pogoed up and down. Beverly's pony-tail bounced. Richie let go of Ben and held his glasses against his forehead with his left thumb so he wouldn't lose them. His head was still ringing and he believed his ear was going to swell, but he felt wonderful. He started laughing. Beverly joined him. Soon Ben was laughing, too.

They cut up Court Street and collapsed on a bench in front of the police station: at that moment it seemed the only place in Derry where they might possibly be safe. Beverly looped an arm around Ben's neck and Richie's. She gave them a furious hug.

'That was great! ' Her eyes sparkled. 'Did you see those guys? Did you see them? '

'I saw them, all right, ' Ben gasped. 'And I never want to see them again. '

This sent them off into another storm of hysterical laughter. Richie kept expecting Henry's gang to come around the corner onto Court Street and take after them again, police station or not. Still, he could not stop laughing. Beverly was right. It had been great.

'The Losers' Club Gets Off A Good One! ' Richie yelled exuberantly. 'Wacka-wackawacka! ' He cupped his hands around his mouth and put on his Ben Bernie Voice: 'YOW-za

YOW-za YOWZA, childrens! '

A cop poked his head out of an open second-floor window and shouted: 'You kids get out of here! Right now! Take a walk! '

Richie opened his mouth to say something brilliant — quite possibly in his brand-new Irish Cop Voice — and Ben kicked his foot. 'Shut up, Richie, ' he said, and promptly had trouble believing that he had said such a thing.

'Right, Richie, ' Bev said, looking at him fondly. 'Beep-beep. '

'Okay, ' Richie said. 'What do you guys want to do? Wanna go find Henry Bowers and ask him if he wants to work it out over a game of Monopoly? ' 'Bite your tongue, ' Bev said.

'Huh? What does that mean? '

'Never mind, ' Bev said. 'Some guys are so ignorant. '

Hesitantly, blushing furiously, Ben asked: 'Did that guy hurt your hair, Beverly? '

She smiled at him gently, and in that moment she became sure of something she had only guessed at before — that it had been Ben Hanscom who had sent her the postcard with the beautiful little haiku on it. 'No, it wasn't bad, ' she said. 'Let's go down in the Barrens, ' Richie proposed.

And so that was where they went. . . or where they escaped. Richie would think later that it set a pattern for the rest of the summer. The Barrens had become their place. Beverly, like Ben on the day of his first encounter with the big boys, had never been down there before.

She walked between Richie and Ben as the three of them moved single-file down the path. Her skirt twitched prettily, and looking at her, Ben was aware of waves of feeling, as powerful as stomach cramps. She was wearing her ankle bracelet. It flashed in the afternoon sun.

They crossed the arm of the Kenduskeag the boys had dammed up (the stream divided about seventy yards farther up along its course and became one again about two hundred yards farther on toward town), using stepping-stones downstream of the place where the dam had been, found another path, and eventually came out on the bank of the stream's eastern fork, which was much wider than the other. It sparkled in the afternoon light. To his left, Ben could see two of those concrete cylinders with the manhole covers on top. Below them, jutting out over the stream, were large concrete pipes. Thin streams of muddy water poured over the lips of these outflow pipes and into the Kenduskeag. Someone takes a crap uptown and here's where it comes out, Ben thought, remembering Mr Nell's explanation of Derry's drainage system. He felt a dull sort of helpless anger. Once there had probably been fish in this river. Now your chances of catching a trout wouldn't be so hot. Your chances of catching a used wad of toilet paper would be better.

'It's so beautiful here, ' Bev sighed.

'Yeah, not bad, ' Richie agreed. 'The blackflies are gone and there's enough of a breeze to keep the mosquitoes away. ' He looked at her hopefully. 'Got any cigarettes? ' 'No, ' she said. 'I had a couple but I smoked them yesterday. ' 'Too bad, ' Richie said.

There was the blast of an air-horn and they all watched as a long freight rumbled across the embankment on the far side of the Barrens and toward the trainyards. Jeez, if it was a passenger train they'd have a great view, Richie thought. First the poor-folks' houses of the Old Cape, then the bamboo swamps on the other side of the Kenduskeag, and finally, before leaving the Barrens, the smoldering gravel-pit that was the town dump.

For just a moment he found himself thinking about Eddie's story again — the leper under the abandoned house on Neibolt Street. He pushed it out of his mind and turned to Ben.

'So what was your best part, Haystack? '

'Huh? ' Ben turned to him guiltily. As Bev looked out across the Kenduskeag, lost in thoughts of her own, he had been looking at her profile. . . and at the bruise on her cheekbone.

'Of the movies, Dumbo. What was your best part? '

'I liked it when Dr Frankenstein started tossing the bodies to the crocodiles under his house, ' Ben said. That was my best part. '

'That was gross, ' Beverly said, and shivered. 'I hate things like that. Crocodiles and piranhas and sharks. '

'Yeah? What's piranhas? ' Richie asked, immediately interested.

'Little tiny fish, ' Beverly said. 'And they've got all these little tiny teeth, but they're wicked sharp. And if you go into a river where they are, they eat you right down to the bone. '

'Wow! '

'I saw this movie once and these natives wanted to cross a river but the footbridge was down, ' she said. 'So they put a cow in the water on a rope, and crossed while the piranhas were eating the cow. When they pulled it out, the cow was nothing but a skeleton. I had nightmares for a week. '

'Man, I wish I had some of those fish, ' Richie said happily. 'I'd put em in Henry Bowers' bathtub. '

Ben began to giggle. 'I don't think he takes baths. '

'I don't know about that, but I do know we better watch out for those guys, ' Beverly said. Her ringers touched the bruise on her cheek. 'My dad went up the side of my head day before yesterday for breaking a pile of dishes. One a week is enough. '

There was a moment of silence that might have been awkward but was not. Richie broke it by saying his best part was when the Teenage Werewolf got the evil hypnotist. They talked about the movies — and other horror movies they had seen, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents on TV — for an hour or more. Bev spotted daisies growing on the riverbank and picked one. She held it first under Richie's chin and then under Ben's chin to see if they liked butter. She said they both did. As she held the flower under their chins, each was conscious of her light touch on their shoulders and the clean scent of her hair. Her face was close to Ben's only for a moment or two, but that night he dreamed of how her eyes had looked during that brief endless span of time.

Conversation was fading a little when they heard the crackling sounds of people approaching along the path. The three of them turned quickly toward the sound and Richie was suddenly, acutely aware that the river was at their backs. There was no place to run.

The voices drew closer. They got to their feet, Richie and Ben moving a little in front of

Beverly without even thinking about it.

The screen of bushes at the end of the path shook — and suddenly Bill Denbrough emerged. Another kid was with him, a fellow Richie knew a little bit. His name was Bradley something, and he had a terrible lisp. Probably went up to Bangor with Bill for that speechtherapy thing, Richie thought.

'Big Bill! ' he said, and then in the Voice of Toodles: 'We are glad to see you, Mr Denbrough, mawster. '

Bill looked at them and grinned — and a peculiar certainty stole over Richie as Bill looked from him to Ben to Beverly and then back to Bradley Whatever-His-Name-Was. Beverly was a part of them. Bill's eyes said so. Bradley What's-His-Name was not. He might stay for awhile today, might even come down to the Barrens again — no one would tell him no, so sorry, the Losers' Club membership is full, we already have our speech-impediment member

— but he was not part of it. He was not part of them.

This thought led to a sudden, irrational fear. For a moment he felt the way you did when you suddenly realized you had swum out too far and the water was over your head. There was an intuitive flash: We're being drawn into something. Being picked and chosen. None of this is accidental. Are we all here yet?

Then the intuition fell into a meaningless jumble of thought — like the smash of a glass pane on a stone floor. Besides, it didn't matter. Bill was here, and Bill would take care; Bill would not let things get out of control. He was the tallest of them, and surely the most handsome. Richie only had to look sideways at Bev's eyes, fixed on Bill, and then farther, to Ben's eyes, fixed knowingly and unhappily on Bev's face, to know that. Bill was also the strongest of them — and not just physically. There was a good deal more to it than that, but since Richie did not know either the word charisma or the full meaning of the word magnetism., he only felt that Bill's strength ran deep and might manifest itself in many ways, some of them probably unexpected. And Richie suspected if Beverly fell for him, or 'got a crush on him, ' or whatever they called it, Ben would not be jealous (like he would, Richie thought, if she got a crush on me); he would accept it as nothing but natural. And there was something else: Bill was good. It was stupid to think such a thing (he did not, in fact, precisely think it; he felt it), but there it was. Goodness and strength seemed to radiate from Bill. He was like a knight in an old movie, a movie that was corny but still had the power to make you cry and cheer and clap at the end. Strong and good. And five years later, after his memories of what had happened in Derry both during and before that summer had begun to fade rapidly, it occurred to a Richie Tozier in his mid-teens that John Kennedy reminded him of Stuttering

Bill.

Who? His mind would respond.

He would look up, faintly puzzled, and shake his head. Some guy I used to know, he would think, and would dismiss vague unease by pushing his glasses up on his nose and turning to his homework again. Some guy I used to know a long time ago.

Bill Denbrough put his hands on his hips, smiled sunnily, and said: 'Wuh-wuh-well, h-here we a-a-are. . . now wuh-wuh-wuh-what are w-we d-d-doing? ' 'Got any cigarettes? ' Richie asked hopefully.

Five days later, as June drew toward its end, Bill told Richie that he wanted to go down to Neibolt Street and investigate under the porch where Eddie had seen the leper.

They had just arrived back at Richie's house, and Bill was walking Silver. He had ridden Richie double most of the way home, an exhilarating speed-trip across Derry, but he had been careful to let Richie dismount a block away from his house. If Richie's mother saw Bill riding Richie double she'd have a bird.

Silver's wire basket was full of play six-shooters, two of them Bill's, three of them Richie's. They had been down in the Barrens for most of the afternoon, playing guns. Beverly Marsh had shown up around three o'clock, wearing faded jeans and toting a very old Daisy air rifle that had lost most of its pop — when you pulled its tape-wrapped trigger, it uttered a wheeze that sounded to Richie more like someone sitting on a very old Whoopee Cushion than a rifleshot. Her specialty was Japanese-sniper. She was very good at climbing trees and shooting the unwary as they passed below. The bruise on her cheekbone had faded to a faint yellow.

'What did you say? ' Richie asked. He was shocked. . . but also a little intrigued.

'I w-w-want to take a l-look under that puh-puh-porch, ' Bill said. His voice was stubborn but he wouldn't look at Richie. There was a hard spot of flush high on each of his cheekbones. They had arrived in front of Richie's house. Maggie Tozier was on the porch, reading a book. She waved to them and called, 'Hi, boys! Want some iced tea? '

'We'll be right there, Mom, ' Richie said, and then to Bill: 'There isn't going to be anything there. He probably just saw a hobo and got all bent out of shape, for God's sake. You know

Eddie. '

'Y-Yeah, I nun-know E-E-Eddie. B-But ruh-remem-member the pi-pi-picture in the aalbum? '

Richie shifted his feet, uncomfortable. Bill raised his right hand. The Band-Aids were gone now, but Richie could see circlets of healing scab on Bill's first three fingers.

'Yeah, but — '

'Luh-luh-histen to me-me, ' Bill said. He began to speak very slowly, holding Richie's eyes with his own. Once more he related the similarities between Ben's story and Eddie's. . . and tied those to what they had seen in the picture that moved. He suggested again that the clown had murdered the boys and girls who had been found dead in Berry since the previous December. 'A-And muh-muh-haybe not just t-thein, ' Bill finished. 'W-What about a-a-all the o-ones who d-disappeared? W-What about E-E-Eddie Cuh-Cuh-Corcoran? '

'Shit, his stepfather scared him off, ' Richie said. 'Don't you read the papers? '

'W-well, m-maybe he d-d-did, and m-maybe he d-d-didn't, ' Bill said. 'I knew him a -llihlittle bit, t-too, and I nuh-nuh-know his d-dad b-b-beat him. And I a-also k-know he u-u-used to stay out n-nuh-hights s-sometimes to g-get aw-way from h-h-him. '

'So maybe the clown got him while he was staying away, ' Richie said thoughtfully. 'Is that it? '

Bill nodded.

'What do you want, then? Its autograph? '

'If the cluh-cluh-cluh-hown killed the o-o-others, then h-he k-k-killed Juh-Georgie, ' Bill said. His eyes caught Richie's. They were like slate — hard, uncompromising, unforgiving. 'I w-want to k-k-kill it. '

'Jesus Christ, ' Richie said, frightened. 'How are you going to do that? '

'Muh-my d-dad's got a pih-pih-pistol, ' Bill said. A little spittle flew from his lips but Richie barely noticed. 'H-He doesn't nuh-know I know, but I d-d-do. It's on the top sh-shelf in his cluh-cluh-hoset. '

That's great if it's a man, ' Richie said, 'and if we can find him sitting on a pile of kids' bones — '

'I poured the tea, boys! ' Richie's mom called cheerily. 'Better come and get it! '

'Right there, Mom! ' Richie called again, offering a big, false smile. It disappeared immediately as he turned back to Bill. 'Because I wouldn't shoot a guy just because he was wearing a clown suit, Billy. You're my best friend, but I wouldn't do it and I wouldn't let you do it if I could stop you. '

'Wh-what i-if there r-really w-was a p-pile of buh-buh-bones? '

Richie licked his lips and said nothing for a moment. Then he asked Bill, 'What are you going to do if it's not a man, Billy? What if it really is some kind of monster? What fi there really are such things? Ben Hanscom said it was the mummy and the balloons were floating against the wind and it didn't cast a shadow. The picture in Georgie's album. . . either we imagined that or it was magic, and I gotta tell you, man, I don't think we just imagined it. Your fingers sure didn't imagine it, did they? ' Bill shook his head.

'So what are we going to do if it's not a man, Billy? '

'Th-then wuh-wuh-we'll have to f-figure suh-homething e-else out. '

'Oh yeah, ' Richie said. 'I can see it. After you shoot it four or five times and it keeps comin at us like the Teenage Werewolf in that movie me and Ben and Bev saw, you can try your Bullseye on it. And if the Bullseye doesn't work, I'll throw some of my sneezing powder at it. And if it keeps on coming after that we'll just call time and say, " Hey now, hold on. This ain't getting it, Mr Monster. Look, I got to read up on it at the library. I'll be back. Pawdon me. " Is that what you're going to say, Big Bill? '

He looked at his friend, his head thudding rapidly. Part of him wanted Bill to press on with his idea to check under the porch of that old house, but another part wanted — desperately wanted — Bill to give the idea up. In some ways all of this was like having stepped into one of those Saturday-afternoon horror movies at the Aladdin, but in another way — a crucial way — it wasn't like that at all. Because this wasn't safe like a movie, where you knew everything would turn out all right and even if it didn't it was no skin off your ass. The picture in Georgie's room hadn't been like a movie. He had thought he was forgetting that, but apparently he had been fooling himself because now he could see those cuts whirling up

Billy's fingers. If he hadn't pulled Bill back —

Incredibly, Bill was grinning. Actually grinning. 'Y-Y-You wuh-wanted m-me to take yyou to luh-luh-look at a p-picture, ' he said. 'N-Now I w-want to t-take you to l-look at a hhouse. Tit for t-tat. '

'You got no tits, ' Richie said, and they both burst out laughing.

'T-Tomorrow muh-muh-morning, ' Bill said, as if it had been resolved.

'And if it's a monster? ' Richie asked, holding Bill's eyes. 'If your dad's gun doesn't stop it, Big Bill? If it just keeps coming? '

'Wuh-wuh-we'll thuh-thuh-think of suh-homething else, ' Bill said again. 'We'll h-h-have to. ' He threw back his head and laughed like a loon. After a moment Richie joined him. It was impossible not to.

They walked up the crazy-paving to Richie's porch together. Maggie had set out huge glasses of iced tea with mint-sprigs in them and a plate of vanilla wafers.

'Yuh-you w-w-want t-t-to? '

'Well, no, ' Richie said. 'But I will. '

Bill clapped him on the back, hard, and that seemed to make the fear bearable — although Richie was suddenly sure (and he was not wrong) that sleep would be long coming that night. 'You boys looked like you were having a serious discussion out there, ' Mrs Tozier said, sitting down with her book in one hand and a glass of iced tea in the other. She ol oked at the boys expectantly.

'Aw, Denbrough's got this crazy idea the Red Sox are going to finish in the first division, ' Richie said.

'M-Me and my d-d-d-d-dad th-think t-they got a sh-shot at t-third, ' Bill said, and slipped his iced tea. T-This is veh-veh-very go-good, Muh-Mrs Tozier. ' Thank you, Bill. '

'The year the Sox finish in the first division will be the year you stop stuttering, mush mouth, ' Richie said.

'Richie! ' Mrs Tozier screamed, shocked. She nearly dropped her glass of iced tea. But both Richie and Bill Denbrough were laughing hysterically, totally cracked up. She looked from her son to Bill and back to her son again, touched by wonder that was mostly simple perplexity but partly a fear so thin and sharp that it found its way deep into her inner heart and vibrated there like a tuning-fork made of clear ice.

I don't understand either of them, she thought. Where they go, what they do, what they want. . . or what will become of them. Sometimes, oh sometimes their eyes are wild, and sometimes I'm afraid for them and sometimes I'm afraid of them. . .

She found herself thinking, not for the first time, that it would have been nice if she and Went could have had a girl as well, a pretty blonde girl that she could have dressed in skirts and matching bows and black patent-leather shoes on Sundays. A pretty little girl who would ask to bake cupcakes after school and who would want dolls instead of books on ventriloquism and Revell models of cars that went fast.

A pretty little girl she could have understood.

'Did you get it? ' Richie asked anxiously.

They were walking their bikes up Kansas Street beside the Barrens at ten o'clock the next morning. The sky was a dull gray. Rain had been forecast for that afternoon. Richie hadn't gotten to sleep until after midnight and he thought Denbrough looked as if he had spent a fairly restless night himself; ole Big Bill was toting a matched set of Samsonite bags, one under each eye.

'I g-got it, ' Bill said. He patted the green duffel coat he was wearing.

'Lemme see, ' Richie said, fascinated.

'Not now, ' Bill said, and then grinned. 'Someone eh-eh-else might see, too. But l-l-look what else I bruh-brought. ' He reached behind him, under the coat, and brought his Bullseye slingshot out of his back pocket.

'Oh shit, we're in trouble, ' Richie said, beginning to laugh.

Bill pretended to be hurt. 'Ih-Ih-It was y-your idea, T-T-Tozier. '

Bill had gotten the custom aluminum slingshot for his birthday the year before. It had been Zack's compromise between the. 22 Bill had wanted and his mother's adamant refusal to even consider giving a boy Bill's age a firearm. The instruction booklet said a slingshot could be a fine hunting weapon, once you learned to use it. 'In the right hands, your Bullseye Slingshot is as deadly and effective as a good ash bow or a high-powered firearm, ' the booklet proclaimed. With such virtues dutifully extolled, the booklet went on to warn that a slingshot could be dangerous; the owner should no more aim one of the twenty ball-bearing slugs which came with it at a person than he would aim a loaded pistol at a person.

Bill wasn't very good at it yet (and guessed privately he probably never would be), but he thought the booklet's caution was merited — the slingshot's thick elastic had a hard pull, and when you hit a tin can with it, it made one hell of a hole.

'You doin any better with it, Big Bill? ' Richie asked.

'A luh-luh-little, ' Bill said. This was only partly true. After much study of the pictures in the booklet (which were labelled figs, as in fig 1, fig 2, and so on) and enough practice in Derry Park to lame his arm, he had gotten so he could hit the paper target which had also come with the slingshot maybe three times out of every ten tries. And once he had gotten a bullseye. Almost.

Richie pulled the sling back by the cup, twanged it, then handed it back. He said nothing but privately doubted if it would count for as much as Zack Denbrough's pistol when it came to killing monsters.

'Yeah? ' he said. 'You brought your slingshot, okay, big deal. That's nothing. Look what I brought, Denbrough. ' And from his own jacket he hauled out a packet with a cartoon picture on it of a bald man saying Ah-CHOO! as his cheeks puffed out like Dizzy Gillespie's. DR

WACKY'S SNEEZING POWDER, the packet said. IT'S A LAFF RIOT!

The two of them stared at each other for a long moment and then broke up, screaming with laughter and pounding each other on the back.

'W-W-We're pruh-prepared for a-a-anything, ' Bill said finally, still giggling and wiping his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket.

'Your face and my ass, Stuttering Bill, ' Richie said.

'I th-th-thought it wuh-was the uh-uh-other way a-around, ' Bill said. 'Now listen. W-We're g-gonna st-ha-hash y-your b-b-bike down in the B-Barrens. W-Where I puh-put Silver when we play. Y-You ride d-d-double b-behind me, in c-case w-we have to make a quih-hick g-ggetaway. '

Richie nodded, feeling no urge to argue. His twenty-two-inch Raleigh (he sometimes whammed his kneecaps on the handlebars when he was pedaling fast) looked like a pygmy bike next to the scrawny, gantry like edifice that was Silver. He knew that Bill was stronger and Silver was faster.

They got to the little bridge and Bill helped Richie stow his bike underneath. Then they sat down, and, with the occasional rumble of traffic passing over their heads, Bill unzipped his duffel and took out his father's pistol.

'Y-You be goddam c-c-careful, ' Bill said, handing it over after Richie had whistled his frank approval. 'Th-There's n-no s-s-safety on a pih-pihstol like that. '

'Is it loaded? ' Richie asked, awed. The pistol, an SSPK-Walther that Zack Denbrough had picked up during the Occupation, seemed unbelievably heavy.

'N-Not y-yet, ' Bill said. He patted his pocket. 'I g-g-got some buh-buh-buh-bullets in h-hhere. But my d-d-dad s-says s-sometimes you l-look a-and th-then, i-if the g-g-g-gun ththinks y-you're not being c-c-careful, it l-loads ih-ih-itself. S-so it can sh-sh-hoot you. ' His face uttered a strange smile which said that, while he didn't believe anything so silly, he believed it completely.

Richie understood. There was a caged deadliness in the thing that he had never sensed in his dad's. 22, . 30-. 30, or even the shotgun (although there was something about the shotgun, wasn't there? — something about the way it leaned, mute and oily, in the corner of the garage closet; as if it might say I could be mean if I wanted to; plenty mean, you bet if it could speak). But this pistol, this Walther. . . it was as if it had been made for the express purpose of shooting people. With a chill Richie realized that was why it had been made. What else could you do with a pistol? Use it to light your cigarettes?

He turned the muzzle toward him, being careful to keep his hands far away from the trigger. One look into the Walther's black lidless eye made him understand Bill's peculiar smile perfectly. He remembered his father saying, If you remember there is no such thing as an unloaded gun, you'll be okay with firearms all your life, Richie. He handed the gun back to

Bill, glad to be rid of it.

Bill stowed it in his duffel coat again. Suddenly the house on Neibolt Street seemed less frightening to Richie. . . but the possibility that blood might actually be spilled — that seemed much stronger.

He looked at Bill, perhaps meaning to appeal this idea again, but he saw Bill's face, read it, and only said, 'You ready? '

As always, when Bill finally pulled his second foot up from the ground, Richie felt sure that they would crash, splitting their silly skulls on unyielding cement. The big bike wavered crazily from side to side. The cards clothespinned to the fender-struts stopped firing single shots and started machine-gunning. The bike's drunken wavers became more pronounced. Richie closed his eyes and waited for the inevitable.

Then Bill bellowed, 'Hi-yo Silver, AWWAYYYYY! '

The bike picked up more speed and finally stopped that seasick side-to-side wavering. Richie loosened his deathgrip on Bill's middle and held the front of the package carrier over the rear wheel instead. Bill crossed Kansas Street on a slant, raced down sidestreets at an ever-quickening pace, heading for Witcham as if racing down a set of geographical steps. They came bulleting out of Strapham Street and onto Witcham at an exorbitant rate of speed. Bill laid Silver damn near over on his side and bellowed 'Hi-yo Silver! ' again.

'Ride it, Big Bill! ' Richie screamed, so scared he was nearly creaming his jeans but laughing wildly all the same. 'Stand on this baby! '

Bill suited the action to the word, getting up and leaning over the handlebars and pumping the pedals at a lunatic rate. Looking at Bill's back, which was amazingly broad for a boy of eleven-going-on-twelve, watching it work under the duffel coat, the shoulders slanting first one way and then the other as he shifted his weight from one pedal to the other, Richie suddenly became sure that they were invulnerable. . . they would live forever and ever. Well

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