C H A P T E R 1 1 6 страница

'Okay. See you later. . . chicken! '

The kid put one foot on the board and pushed off with the other. Once he was rolling he put the other foot on the board as well and went thundering down the street at what seemed to Bill a suicidal pace. But he rode as Bill had suspected he would: with lazy hipshot grace. Bill felt love for the boy, and exhilaration, and a desire to be the boy, along with an almost suffocating fear. The boy rode as if there were no such things as death or getting older. The boy seemed somehow eternal and ineluctable in his khaki Boy Scout shorts and scuffed sneakers, his ankles sockless and quite dirty, his hair flying back behind him.

Watch out, kid, you're not going to make the comer! Bill thought, alarmed, but the kid shot his hips to the left like a break-dancer, his toes revolved on the green Fiberglas board, and he zoomed effortlessly around the corner and onto Jackson Street, simply assuming no one would be there to get in his way. Kid, Bill thought, it won't always be that way.

He walked up to his old house but did not stop; he only slowed his walk down to an idler's pace. There were people on the lawn — a mother in a lawn chair, a sleeping baby in her arms, watching two kids, maybe ten and eight, play badminton in grass that was still wet from the rain earlier. The younger of the two, a boy, managed to hit the bird back over the net and the woman called, 'Good one, Scan! '

The house was the same dark-green color and the fanlight was still over the door, but his mother's flower-beds were gone. So, from what he could see, was the jungle-gym his father had built from scavenged pipes in the back yard. He remembered the day Georgie had fallen off the top and chipped a tooth. How he had screamed!

He saw these things (the ones there and the ones gone), and thought of walking over to the woman with the sleeping baby in her arms. He thought of saying Hello, my name is Bill Denbrough. I used to live here. And the woman saying, That's nice. What else could there be? Could he ask her if the face he had carved carefully in one of the attic beams — the face he and Georgie sometimes used to throw darts at — was still there? Could he ask her if her kids sometimes slept on the screened-in back porch when the summer nights were especially hot, talking together in low tones as they watched heat-lightning dance on the horizon? He supposed he might be able to ask some of those things, but he felt he would stutter quite badly if he tried to be charming. . . and did he really want to know the answers to any of those questions? After Georgie died it had become a cold house, and whatever he had come back to Derry for was not here.

So he went on to the corner and turned right, not looking back.

Soon he was on Kansas Street, headed back downtown. He paused for awhile at the fence which bordered the sidewalk, looking down into the Barrens. The fence was the same, rickety wood covered with fading whitewash, and the Barrens looked the same. . . wilder, if anything. The only differences he could see were that the dirty smudge of smoke which had always marked the town dump was gone (the dump had been replaced with a modern wastetreatment plant), and a long overpass marched across the tangled greenery now — the turnpike extension. Everything else was so similar that he might last have seen it the previous summer: weeds and bushes sloping down to that flat marshy area on the left and to dense copses of junky-scrubby trees on the right. He could see the stands of what they had called bamboo, the silvery-white stalks twelve and fourteen feet high. He remembered that Richie had once tried to smoke some of it, claiming it was like the stuff jazz musicians smoked and could get you high. All Richie had gotten was sick.

Bill could hear the trickle of water running in many small streams, could see the sun heliographing off the broader expanse of the Kenduskeag. And the smell was the same, even with the dump gone. The heavy perfume of growing things at the height of their spring strut did not quite mask the smell of waste and human offal. It was faint but unmistakable. A smell of corruption; a whiff of the underside.

That's where it ended before, and that's where it's going to end this time, Bill thought with a shiver. In there. . . under the city.

He stood awhile longer, convinced that he must see something — some manifestation — of the evil he had come back to Derry to fight. There was nothing. He heard water running, a springlike and vital sound that reminded him of the dam they had built down there. He could see trees and bushes ruffling in the faint breeze. There was nothing else. No sign. He walked on, dusting a faint whitewash stain from his hands as he went.

He kept heading downtown, half-remembering, half-dreaming, and here came another kid — this one a little girl of about ten in high-waisted corduroy pants and a faded red blouse. She was bouncing a ball with one hand and holding a babydoll by its blonde Arnel hair in the other.

'Hey! ' Bill said.

She looked up. 'What! '

'What's the best store in Derry? '

She thought about it. ' For me or for anyone? '

'For you, ' Bill said.

'Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes, ' she said with no hesitation whatsoever. 'I beg your pardon? ' Bill asked.

'You beg what?

'I mean, is that a store name? '

'Sure, ' she said, looking at Bill as though he might well be enfeebled. 'Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes. My mom says it's a junkshop, but I like it. They have old things. Like records you never heard of. Also postcards. It smells like a attic. I have to go home now.

Bye. '

She walked on, not looking back, bouncing her ball and holding her dolly by the hair.

'Hey! ' he shouted after her.

She looked back whimsically. 'I beg your whatchamacallit? '

The store! Where is it? '

She looked back over her shoulder and said, 'Just the way you're going. It's at the bottom of Up-Mile Hill. '

Bill felt that sense of the past folding in on itself, folding in on him. He hadn't meant to ask that little girl anything; the question had popped out of his mouth like a cork flying from the neck of a champagne bottle.

He descended Up-Mile Hill toward downtown. The warehouses and packing plants he remembered from childhood — gloomy brick buildings with duty windows from which titanic meaty smells issued — were mostly gone, although the Armour and the Star Beef meat-packing plants were still there. But Hemphill was gone and there was a drive-in bank and a bakery where Eagle Beef and Kosher Meats had been. And there, where the Tracker Brothers' Annex had stood, was a sign painted in oldfashioned letters which read, just as the girl with the doll had said, SECONDHAND ROSE, SECONDHAND CLOTHES. The red brick had been painted a yellow which had perhaps been jaunty ten or twelve years ago, but was now dingy — a color Audra called urine-yellow.

Bill walked slowly toward it, feeling that sense of dé jà vu settle over nun again. Later he told the others he knew what ghost he was going to see before he actually saw it.

The show-window of Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes was more than dingy; it was filthy. No Downcast antique shop this, with nifty little spool-beds and Hoosier cabinets and sets of Depression glassware highlighted by hidden spotlights; this was what his mother called with utter disdain 'a Yankee pawnshop. ' The items were strewn in rickrack profusion, heaped aimlessly here, there, and everywhere. Dresses slumped off coathangers. Guitars hung from their necks like executed criminals. There was a box of 45 rpm records — 10 c APIECE, the sign read. TWELVE FOR A BUCK. ANDREWS SISTERS, PERRY COMO, JIMMY ROGERS, OTHERS. There were kids' outfits and dreadful-looking shoes with a card in front of them which read SECONDS, BUT NOT BAD! $1. 00 A PAIR. There were two TVs that looked blind. A third was casting bleared images of The Brady Bunch out toward the street. A box of old paperbacks, most with stripped covers (2 FOR A QUARTER, 10 FOR A DOLLAR, more inside, SOME 'HOT') sat atop a large radio with a filthy white plastic case and a tuning dial as big as an alarm clock.

Bunches of plastic flowers sat in dirty vases on a chipped, gouged, dusty dining-room table. All of these things Bill saw as a chaotic background to the thing his eyes had fixed upon immediately. He stood staring at it with wide unbelieving eyes. Gooseflesh ran madly up and down his body. His forehead was hot, his hands cold, and for a moment it seemed that all the doors inside would swing wide and he would remember everything.

Silver was in the righthand window.

His kickstand was still gone and rust had flowered on the front and back fenders, but the oogah-horn was still there on the handlebars, its rubber bulb now glazed with cracks and age. The horn itself, which Bill had always kept neatly polished, was dull and pitted. The flat package carrier where Richie had often ridden double was still on the back fender, but it was bent now, hanging by a single bolt. At some point someone had covered the seat with imitation tiger-skin which was now rubbed and frayed to a point where the stripes were almost indistinguishable.

Silver.

Bill raised an absent hand to wipe away the tears that were running slowly down his cheeks. After he had done a better job with his handkerchief, he went inside.

The atmosphere of Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes was musty with age. It was, as the girl had said, a attic smell — but not a good smell, as some attic smells are. This was not the smell of linseed oil rubbed lovingly into the surface of old tables or of ancient plush and velvet. In here was a smell of rotting book-bindings, dirty vinyl cushions that had been halfcooked in the hot suns of summers past, dust, mouse-turds.

From the TV in the window the Brady Bunch cackled and whooped. Competing with them from somewhere in the back was the radio voice of a disc jockey identifying himself as 'your pal Bobby Russell' promising the new album by Prince to the caller who could give the name of the actor who had played Wally on Leave It to Beaver. Bill knew — it had been a kid named Tony Dow — but he didn't want the new Prince album. The radio was sitting on a high shelf amid a number of nineteenth-century portraits. Below it and them sat the proprietor, a man of perhaps forty who was wearing designer jeans and a fishnet tee-shirt. His hair was slicked back and he was thin to the point of emaciation. His feet were cocked up on his desk, which was piled high with ledgers and dominated by an old scrolled cash register. He was reading a paperback novel which Bill thought had never been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. It was called Construction Site Studs. On the floor in front of the desk was a barber pole, its stripe revolving up and up into infinity. Its frayed cord wound across the floor to a baseboard plug like a tired snake. The sign in front of it read: A DYEING BREED! $250.

When the bell over the door jingled, the man behind the desk marked his place with a matchbook cover and looked up. 'Help you? '

'Yes, ' Bill said, and opened his mouth to ask about the bike in the window. But before he could speak, his mind was suddenly filled with a single haunting sentence, words that drove away all other thought:

He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.

What in the name of God?

(thrusts)

'Looking for anything in particular? ' the proprietor asked. His voice was polite enough, but he was looking at Bill closely.

He's looking at me, Bill thought, amused in spite of his distress, as if he's got an idea I've been smoking some of that stuff that gets the jazz musicians high.

'Yes, I was ih-ih-interested ih-in — '

(his fists against the posts)

' — in that puh-puh-post — '

'The barber pole, you mean? ' The proprietor's eyes now showed Bill something which, even in his present confused state, he remembered and hated from his childhood: the anxiety of a man or woman who must listen to a stutterer, the urge to jump in quickly and finish the thought, thus shutting the poor bastard up. But I don't stutter! I beat it! I DON'T FUCKING STUTTER! I —

(and still insists)

The words were so clear in his mind that it seemed someone else must be speaking in there, that he was like a man possessed by demons in Biblical times — a man invaded by some presence from Outside. And yet he recognized the voice and knew it was his own. He felt sweat pop out warmly on his face.

'I could give you (he sees the ghosts)

a deal on that post, ' the proprietor was saying. 'Tell you the truth, I can't move it at twofifty. I'd give it to you for one-seventy-five, how's that? It's the only real antique in the place. '

(post)

'POLE, ' Bill almost screamed, and the proprietor recoiled a little. 'Not the pole I'm interested in. '

'Are you okay, mister? ' the proprietor asked. His solicitous tone belied the expression of hard wariness in his eyes, and Bill saw his left hand leave the desk. He knew, with a flash of something that was really more inductive reasoning than intuition that there was an open drawer below Bill's own sight-line, and that the proprietor had almost surely put his hand on a pistol of some type. He was maybe worried about robbery; more likely he was just worried. He was, after all, clearly gay, and this was the town where the local juveniles had given Adrian Mellon a terminal bath.

(he thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts) It drove out all thought; it was like being insane. Where had it come from?

(he thrusts)

Repeating and repeating.

With a sudden titanic effort, Bill attacked it. He did this by forcing his mind to translate the alien sentence into French. It was the same way he had beaten the stutter as a teenager. As the words marched across his field of thought, he changed them. . . and suddenly he felt the grip of the stutter loosen.

He realized that the proprietor had been saying something.

'P-P-Pardon me? '

'I said if you're going to have a fit, take it out on the street. I don't need shit like that in here. '

Bill drew in a deep breath.

'Let's start o-over, ' he said. 'Pretend I just came i-in. '

'Okay, ' the proprietor said, agreeably enough. 'You just came in. Now what? '

'The b-bike in the window, ' Bill said. 'How much do you want for the bike? '

'Take twenty bucks. ' He sounded easier now, but his left hand still hadn't come back into view. 'I think it was a Schwinn at one time, but it's a mongrel now. ' His eye measured Bill.

'Big bike. You could ride it yourself. '

Thinking of the kid's green skateboard, Bill said, 'I think my bike-riding days are o-o-over. '

The proprietor shrugged. His left hand finally came up again. 'Got a boy? '

'Y-Yes. '

'How old is he? '

'Eh-Eh-Eleven. '

'Big bike for an eleven-year-old. '

'Will you take a traveller's check? '

'Long as it's no more than ten bucks over the amount of the purchase. '

'I can give you a twenty, ' Bill said. 'Mind if I make a phone call? '

'Not if it's local. '

'It is. '

'Be my guest. '

Bill called the Derry Public Library. Mike was there. 'Where are you, Bill? ' he asked, and then immediately: 'Are you all right? ' 'I'm fine. Have you seen any of the others? '

'No. We'll see them tonight. ' There was a brief pause. That is, I presume. What can I do you for, Big Bill? '

'I'm buying a bike, ' Bill said calmly. 'I wondered if I could wheel it up to your house. Do you have a garage or something I could store it in? ' There was silence.

'Mike? Are you — '

'I'm here, ' Mike said. 'Is it Silver? '

Bill looked at the proprietor. He was reading his book again. . . or maybe just looking at it and listening carefully.

'Yes, ' he said.

'Where are you? '

'It's called Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes. '

'All right, ' Mike said. 'My place is 61 Palmer Lane. You'd want to go up

MainStreet — '

'I can find it. '

'All right, I'll meet you there. Want some supper? '

'That would be nice. Can you get off work? '

'No problem. Carole will cover for me. ' Mike hesitated again. 'She said that a fellow was in about an hour before I got back here. Said he left looking like a ghost. I got her to describe him. It was Ben. '

'You sure? '

'Yeah. And the bike. That's part of it, too, isn't it? '

'Shouldn't wonder, ' Bill said, keeping an eye on the proprietor, who still appeared to be absorbed in his book.

'I'll see you at my place, ' Mike said. 'Number 61. Don't forget. '

'I won't. Thank you, Mike. ' 'God bless, Big Bill. '

Bill hung up. The proprietor promptly closed his book again. 'Got you some storage space, my friend? '

'Yeah. ' Bill took out his traveller's checks and signed his name to a twenty. The proprietor examined the two signatures with a care that, in less distracted mental circumstances, Bill would have found rather insulting.

At last the proprietor scribbled a bill of sale and popped the traveller's check into his old cash register. He got up, put his hands on the small of his back and stretched, then walked to the front of the store. He picked his way around the heaps of junk and almost-junk merchandise with an absent delicacy Bill found fascinating.

He lifted the bike, swung it around, and rolled it to the edge of the display space. Bill laid hold of the handlebars to help him, and as he did another shudder whipped through him.

Silver. Again. It was Silver in his hands and

(he thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts) he had to force the thought away because it made him feel faint and strange.

'That back tire's a little soft, ' the proprietor said (it was, in fact, as flat as a pancake). The front tire was up, but so bald the cord was showing through in places.

'No problem, ' Bill said.

'You can handle it from here? '

(I used to be able to handle it just fine; now I don't know)

'I guess so, ' Bill said. 'Thanks. '

'Sure. And if you want to talk about that barber pole, come back. '

The proprietor held the door for him. Bill walked the bike out, turned left, and started toward Main Street. People glanced with amusement and curiosity at the man with the bald head pushing the huge bike with the flat rear tire and the oogah-horn protruding over the rusty bike-basket, but Bill hardly noticed them. He was marvelling at how well his grownup hands still fitted the rubber handgrips, was remembering how he had always meant to knot some thin strips of plastic, different colors, into the holes in each grip so they would flutter in the wind. He had never gotten around to that.

He stopped at the corner of Center and Main, outside of Mr Paperback. He leaned the bike against the building long enough to strip off his sportcoat. Pushing a bike with a flat tire was hard work, and the afternoon had come off hot. He tossed the coat into the basket and went on.

Chain's rusty, he thought. Whoever had it didn't take very good care of

(him) it.

He stopped for a moment, frowning, trying to remember just what had happened to Silver. Had he sold it? Given it away? Lost it, perhaps? He couldn't remember. Instead, that idiotic sentence

(his fists against the posts and still insists)

resurfaced, as strange and out of place as an easy chair on a battlefield, a record-player in a fireplace, a row of pencils protruding from a cement sidewalk.

Bill shook his head. The sentence broke up and dispersed like smoke. He pushed Silver on to Mike's place.

Mike Hanlon Makes a Connection

But first he made supper — hamburgers with sauteed mushrooms and onions and a spinach salad. They had finished working on Silver by then and were more than ready to eat.

The house was a neat little Cape Cod, white with green trim. Mike had just been arriving when Bill pushed Silver up Palmer Lane. He was behind the wheel of an old Ford with rusty rocker panels and a cracked rear window, and Bill remembered the fact Mike had so quietly pointed out: the six members of the Losers' Club who left Derry had quit being losers. Mike had stayed behind and was still behind.

Bill rolled Silver into Mike's garage, which was floored with oiled dirt and was every bit as neat as the house proved to be. Tools hung from pegs, and the lights, shielded with tin cones, looked like the lights which hang over pool tables. Bill leaned the bike against the wall. The two of them looked at it without speaking for a bit, hands in pockets.

'It's Silver, all right, ' Mike said at last. 'I thought you might have been wrong. But it's him.

What are you going to do with him? '

'Fucked if I know. Have you got a bicycle pump? '

'Yeah. I think I've got a tire-patching kit, too. Are those tubeless tires? '

'They always were. ' Bill bent down to look at the flat tire. 'Yeah. Tubeless. '

'Getting ready to ride it again? '

'Of c-course not, ' Bill said sharply. 'I just don't like to see it si-hi-hitting there on a flat. '

'Whatever you say, Big Bill. You're the boss. '

Bill looked around sharply at that, but Mike had gone to the garage's back wall and was taking down a tire-pump. He got a tin tire-patching kit from one of the cabinets and handed it to Bill, who looked at it curiously. It was as he remembered such things from his childhood: a small tin box of about the same size and shape as those kept by men who roll their own cigarettes, except the top was bright and pebbled — you used it for roughing the rubber around the hole before you put on the patch. The box looked brand-new, and there was a Woolco price sticker on it that said $7. 23. It seemed to him that when he was a kid such a kit had gone for about a buck-twenty-five.

'You didn't just have this hanging around, ' Bill said. It wasn't a question.

'No, ' Mike agreed. 'I bought it last week. Out at the mall, as a matter of fact. ' 'You've got a bike of your own? ' 'No, ' Mike said, meeting his eyes.

'You just happened to buy this kit. '

'Just got the urge, ' Mike agreed, his eyes still on Bill's. 'Woke up thinking it might come in handy. The thought kept coming back all day. So. . . I got the kit. And here you are to use it. ' 'Here I am to use it, ' Bill agreed. 'But like they say on the soaps, what does it all mean, dear? '

'Ask the others, ' Mike said. 'Tonight. '

'Will they all be there, do you think? '

'I don't know, Big Bill. ' He paused and added: 'I think there's a chance that all of them won't be. One or two of them may decide to just creep out of town. Or. . . 'He shrugged.

'What do we do if that happens? '

'I don't know. ' Mike pointed to the tire-patching kit. 'I paid seven bucks for that thing. Are you going to do something with it or just look at it? '

Bill took his sportcoat out of the basket and hung it carefully on an unoccupied wallpeg. Then he turned Silver upside down so that he rested on his seat and began to carefully rotate the rear tire. He didn't like the rusty way the axle squeaked, and remembered the almost silent click of the ball-bearings in the kid's skateboard. A little 3-in-1 oil would fix that right up, he thought.

Wouldn't hurt to oil the chain, either. It's rusty as hell. . . And playing cards. It needs playing cards on the spokes. Mike would have cards, I bet. The good ones. Bikes, with the celluloid coating that made them so stiff and so slippery that the first time you tried to shuffle them they always sprayed all over the floor. Playing cards, sure, and clothespins to hold them — He stopped, suddenly cold.

What in the name of Jesus are you thinking of? 'Something wrong, Bill? ' Mike asked softly.

'Nothing. ' His fingers touched something small and round and hard. He got his nails under it and pulled. A small tack came out of the tire. 'Here's the cuh-cuh-culprit, ' he said, and it rose in his mind again, strange, unbidden, and powerful: He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts. But this time the voice, his voice, was followed by his mother's voice, saying: Try again, Billy. You almost had it that time. And Andy Devine as Guy Madison's sidekick Jingles yelling, Hey, Wild Bill, wait for me!

He shivered.

(the posts)

He shook his head. I couldn't say that without stuttering even now, he thought, and for just a moment he felt that he was on the edge of understanding it all.

Then it was gone.

He opened the tire-patching kit and went to work. It took a long time to get it just right. Mike leaned against the wall in a bar of late-afternoon sun, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up and his tie yanked down, whistling a tune which Bill finally identified as 'She Blinded Me with Science. '

While he waited for the tire cement to set, Bill had — just for something to do, he told himself — oiled Silver's chain, sprocket, and axles. It didn't make the bike look any better, but when he spun the tires he found that the squeak was gone, and that was satisfying. Silver never would have won any beauty-contests anyway. His one virtue was that he could go like a blue streak.

By that tune, five-thirty in the afternoon, he had nearly forgotten Mike was there; he had become completely absorbed in small yet utterly satisfying acts of maintenance. He screwed the nozzle of the pump onto the rear tire's valve and watched the tire fatten, shooting for the right pressure by guess and by gosh. He was pleased to see that the patch was holding nicely.

When he thought he had it right, he unscrewed the pump-nozzle and was about to turn Silver over when he heard the rapid snap-flutter of playing cards behind him. He whirled, almost knocking Silver over.

Mike was standing there with a deck of blue-backed Bicycle playing cards in one hand.

'Want these? '

Bill let out a long, shaky sigh. 'You've got clothespins, too, I suppose? ' Mike took four from the flap pocket of his shirt and held them out. 'Just happened to have them around, I suh-huppose? ' 'Yeah, something like that, ' Mike said.

Bill took the cards and tried to shuffle them. His hands shook and the cards sprayed out of his hands. They went everywhere. , . but only two landed face-up. Bill looked at them, then up at Mike. Mike's gaze was frozen on the littered playing cards. His lips had pulled back from his teeth.

The two up cards were both the ace of spades.

'That's impossible, ' Mike said. 'I just opened that deck. Look. ' He pointed at the swill-can just inside the garage door and Bill saw the cellophane wrapper, 'How can one deck of cards have two aces of spades? '

Bill bent down and picked them up. 'How can you spray a deck of cards all over the floor and have only two of them land face up? ' he asked. 'That's an even better que — '

He turned the aces over, looked, and then showed them to Mike. One of them was a blueback, the other a redback.

'Holy Christ, Mikey, what have you got us into? '

'What are you going to do with those? ' Mike asked in a numb voice.

'Why, put them on, ' Bill said, and suddenly he began to laugh. 'That's what I'm supposed to do, isn't it? If there are certain preconditions for the use of magic, those preconditions will inevitably arrange themselves. Right? '

Mike didn't reply. He watched as Bill went to Silver's rear wheel and attached the playing cards. His hands were still shaking and it took awhile, but he finally got it done, drew in one tight breath, held it, and spun the rear wheel. The playing cards machine-gunned loudly against the spokes in the garage's silence.

'Come on, ' Mike said softly. 'Come on in, Big Bill. I'll make us some chow. '

They had scoffed the burgers and now sat smoking, watching dark begin to unfold from dusk in Mike's back yard. Bill took out his wallet, found someone's business card, and wrote upon it the sentence that had plagued him ever since he had seen Silver in the window of Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes. He showed it to Mike, who read it carefully, lips pursed.

'Does it mean anything to you? ' Bill asked.

'" He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts. " ' He nodded. 'Yes, I know what that is. '

'Well then, tell me. Or are you going to give me some more cuh-cuh-crap about figuring it out for myself? '

'No, ' Mike said, 'in this case I think it's okay to tell you. The phrase goes back to English times. It's a tongue-twister that became a speech exercise for lispers and stutterers. Your mother kept trying to get you to say it that summer. The summer of 1958. You used to go around mumbling it to yourself. '

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