Shaken by your beauty
Shaken.”-
“Well I was born in my birthday suit
The doctor slapped my behind
He said “You gonna be special
You sweet little toot toot.”
CHAPTER 13
THE APOCALYPTIC ROCKFIGHT
1
Bill’s there first. He sits in one of the wing-back chairs just inside the Reading Room door watching as Mike deals with the library’s last few customers of the night-an old lady with a clutch of paperback gothics, a man with a huge historical tome on the Civil War, and a skinny kid waiting to check out a novel with a seven-day-rental sticker in an upper corner of its plastic cover. Bill sees with no sense of surprise or serendipity at all that it is his own latest novel. He feels that surprise is beyond him, serendipity a believed-in reality that has turned out to be only a dream after all.
A pretty girl, her tartan skirt held together with a big gold safety pin (Christ, I haven’t seen one of those in years, Bill thinks, are they coming back?), is feeding quarters into the Xerox machine and copying an off print with one eye on the big pendulum clock behind the checkout desk. The sounds are library-soft and library-comforting: the hush-squeak of soles and heels on the red-and-black linoleum of the floor; the steady lock and tick of the clock dropping off dry seconds; the catlike purr of the copying machine.
The boy takes his William Denbrough novel and goes to the girl at the copier just as she finishes and begins to square up her pages.
“You can just leave that off print on the desk, Mary,” Mike says. “I’ll put it away.”
She flashes a grateful smile. “Thanks, Mr Hanlon.”
“Goodnight. Goodnight, Billy. The two of you go right home.”
“The boogeyman will get you if you don’t… watch… out!” Billy, the skinny kid, chants, and slips a proprietary arm around the girl’s slim waist.
“Well, I don’t think he’d want a pair as ugly as you two,” Mike says, “but be careful, all the same.”
“We will, Mr Hanlon,” Mary replies, seriously enough, and punches the boy lightly on the shoulder. “Come on, ugly,” she says, and giggles. When she does this she is transformed from a pretty mildly desirable high-school junior into the coltish not-quite-gawky eleven-year-old that Beverly Marsh had been… and as they pass him Bill is shaken by her beauty… and he feels fear; he wants to go to the boy and tell him earnestly that he must go home by well-lighted streets and not look around if someone speaks.
You can’t be careful on a skateboard, mister, a phantom voice says inside his head, and Bill smiles a rueful grownup’s smile.
He watches the boy open the door for his girl. They go into the vestibule, moving closer together, and Bill would have bet the royalties of the book the boy named Billy is holding under his arm that he has stolen a kiss before opening the outer door for the girl. More fool you if you didn’t, Billy my man, he thinks. Now see her home safe. For Christ’s sake see her home safe!
Mike calls, “Be right with you, Big Bill. Just let me file this.” Bill nods and crosses his legs. The paper bag on his lap crackles a little. There’s a pint of bourbon inside and he reckons he has never wanted a drink so badly in his life as he does right now. Mike will be able to supply water, if not ice-and the way he feels right now, a very little water will be enough.
He thinks of Silver, leaning against the wall of Mike’s garage on Palmer Lane. And from that his thoughts progress naturally to the day they had met in the Barrens-all except Mike-and each had told his tale again: lepers under porches; mummies who walked on the ice; blood from drains and dead boys in the Standpipe and pictures that moved and werewolves that chased small boys down deserted streets.
They had gone deeper into the Barrens that day before the Fourth of July, he remembers now. It had been hot in town but cool in the tangled shade on the eastern bank of the Kenduskeag. He remembers one of those concrete cylinders not far away, humming to itself the way the Xerox machine had hummed for the pretty high-school girl just now. Bill remembers that, and how, when all the stories were done, the others had looked at him.
They had wanted him to tell them what they should do next, how they should proceed, and he simply didn’t know. The not knowing had filled him with a kind of desperation.
Looking at Mike’s shadow now, looming large on the darkly paneled wall in the reference room, a sudden sureness comes to him: he hadn’t known then because they hadn’t been complete when they met that July 3rd afternoon. The completion had come later, at the abandoned gravel-pit beyond the dump, where you could climb out of the Barrens easily on either side-Kansas Street or Merit Street. Right around, in fact, where the Interstate overpass was now. The gravel-pit had no name; it was old, its crumbly sides crabby with weeds and bushes. There had still been plenty of ammunition there-more than enough for an apocalyptic rockfight.
But before that, on the bank of the Kenduskeag, he hadn’t been sure what to say-what did they want him to say? What did he want to say? He remembers looking from one face to the next-Ben’s; Bev’s; Eddie’s; Stan’s; Richie’s. And he remembers music. Little Richard. “Whomp-bomp-a-lomp-bomp… ” Music. Low. And darts of light in his eyes. He remembers the darts of light because.
2
Richie had hung his transistor radio over the lowermost branch of the tree he was leaning against. Although they were in the shade, the sun bounced off the surface of the Kenduskeag, onto the radio’s chrome facing, and from there into Bill’s eyes.
T-Take that th-hing d-d-d-own, Ruh-Ruh-Richie,” Bill said. “It’s gonna bun-blind m-m-me.”
“Sure, Big Bill,” Richie said at once, with no smartmouth at all, and removed the radio from the branch. He also turned it off, and Bill wished he hadn’t done that; it made the silence, broken only by the rippling water and the vague hum of the sewage-pumping machinery, seem very loud. Their eyes watched him and he wanted to tell them to look somewhere else, what did they think he was, a freak?
But of course he couldn’t do that, because all they were doing was waiting for him to tell them what to do now. They had come by dreadful knowledge, and they needed him to tell them what to do with it. Why me! he wanted to shout at them, but of course he knew that, too. It was because, like it or not, he had been tapped for the position. Because he was the idea-man, because he had lost a brother to whatever it was, but most of all because he had become, in some obscure way he would never completely understand, Big Bill.
He glanced at Beverly and looked away quickly from the calm trust in her eyes. Looking at Beverly made him feel funny in the pit of his stomach. Fluttery.
“We cuh-can’t go to the p-p-police,” he said at last. His voice sounded harsh to his own ears, too loud. “We c-ca-han’t g-go to our puh-huh-harents, either. Unless… ” He looked hopefully at Richie. “What a-a-about your m-mom and d-dad, four-eyes? They suh-heem p-pretty reh-reh-regular.”
“My good man,” Richie said in his Toodles the Butler Voice, “you obviously have no understahnding whatsoevah of my mater and pater. They-”
“Talk American, Richie,” Eddie said from his spot by Ben. He was sitting by Ben for the simple reason that Ben provided enough shade for Eddie to sit in. His face looked small and pinched and worried-an old man’s face. His aspirator was in his right hand.
“They’d think I was ready for Juniper Hill,” Richie said. He was wearing an old pair of glasses today. The day before a friend of Henry Bowers’s named Card Jagermeyer had come up behind Richie as Richie left the Derry Ice Cream Bar with a pistachio cone. “Tag, you’re it!” this Jagermeyer, who outweighed Richie by forty pounds or so, screamed, and slammed Richie full in the back with both hands laced together. Richie flew into the gutter, losing his glasses and his ice-cream cone. The left lens of his glasses had shattered, and his mother was furious with him about it, lending very little credence to Richie’s explanations.
“All I know is that it was a lot of fooling around,” she had said. “Honestly, Richie, do you think there’s a glasses-tree somewhere and we can just pull off a new pair of spectacles for you whenever you break the old pair?”
“But Mom, this kid pushed me, he came up behind me, this big kid, and pushed me-” Richie was by then near tears. This failure to make his mother understand hurt much worse than being slammed into the gutter by Card Jagermeyer, who was so stupid they hadn’t even bothered to send him to summer-school.
“I don’t want to hear any more about it,” Maggie Tozier said flatly. “But the next time you see your father come in looking whipped after working late three nights in a row, you think a little bit, Richie. You think about it.”
“But Mom-”
“No more, I said.” Her voice was curt and final-worse, it was near tears. She left the room then and the TV went on much too loud. Richie had been left alone sitting miserably at the kitchen table.
It was this memory that caused Richie to shake his head again. “My folks are okay, but they’d never believe something like this.”
“W-What a-a-about other kih-kids?”
And they looked around, Bill would remember years later, as if for someone who wasn’t there.
“Who?” Stan asked doubtfully. “I can’t think of anyone else I trust.”
“Just the suh-suh-same… ” Bill said in a troubled voice, and a little silence fell among them while Bill thought about what to say next.
3
