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.

6 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?”